On Computers

If you’re like me, you hate to pay Microsoft $70 a year for Office 365. But you can get a nearly equivalent version for much less, and it’s a one-time-only payment. Go to StackSocial.com and search for “Microsoft Office 2019.” It’s identical to Office 365, except you don’t get Microsoft Teams or updates. Besides Word, Excel, and Powerpoint, it includes Notes, OneNote, Publisher and Access. Its $25 price was expiring in 40 hours when I looked, but new deals arrive almost daily. When I checked, Windows 11 was $20, down from $199. Lifetime subscriptions to Babbel and Rosetta Stone, the language-learning programs, were more than 50 percent off. There were also discounts on gift cards, gadgets and toys. But some […]

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Filed under: facebook, Microsoft, phones | Comments Off on DEALS ON MICROSOFT OFFICE AND BEYOND

I just pasted 63,226 words into a search bar and got a great summary in a flash. In 14 sentences, Claude AI listed all the major events and themes of a book I edited called “A Woman from Iran.” “This is a revolution!” the author said. “A book that took me so long to write can be summarized in less than one minute by AI.” I agree. Claude AI is amazing. ChatGPT 3 can only understand 3000 words at once, and ChatGPT 4 can only understand 25,000, but the latest version of Claude can understand 70,000. To use it, go to the website Claude.ai and type or paste anything you want into the search box, then ask for a summary, […]

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Filed under: AI, Amazon, apps, Internuts, Microsoft, web, word processing | Comments Off on A NEW AI

Scammers are now adding hoaxes to legitimate text messages. It’s getting easier to be fooled. Recently, a friend of mine got a legitimate text about her furniture delivery. It asked her to choose a date. When none of the dates worked for her, she wrote down the number listed in the text, to get more options. What made it suspicious? She couldn’t just tap it to initiate a call like you normally can on a cell phone. And the guy who answered said: “How old are you?” When she said “70,” he said, “You sound so young, like you’re 30.” Then he added: “I’ll need your credit card number.” “Why should I give you that?” she asked, before hanging up. […]

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Filed under: environment, Internuts, Microsoft, photos, spam, text messaging, word processing | Comments Off on FAKE TEXTS LURK INSIDE REAL ONES

Every time Joy tests a product on Bob’s computer, something goes out of whack. Recently, she used Windows “recovery options” to restore it. Uh oh. Suddenly, the bookmarks bar in Chrome was too tiny to read. Initially, Bob tried to enlarge it, simply by holding down the “Ctrl” key and pressing the plus sign. This did not work. Everything got bigger except the bookmarks bar. Then he figured out the fix. First, right-click the main screen. Choose “display settings.” In the search bar, type “font.” When it comes up, select “make text bigger.” From there, you can drag a slider to increase the size of most text. You can also select “make everything bigger.” We chose 150 percent bigger. When […]

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Filed under: games, Google, Internuts, Microsoft, music, photos, web | Comments Off on SEEING ALL

Our friend Olga called us from the Dominican Republic, using the free app, “WhatsApp.” It’s a great way for travelers to avoid having to buy a local SIM card for their phone, or face expensive roaming charges. But we’ve often wondered what other advantages WhatsApp has, considering all the alternatives, including Skype. One big one is simplicity. Because WhatsApp is owned by Facebook, you automatically see Facebook friends who use it. With Skype, you must know the person’s user name. Our friend Olga didn’t use her last name so she was particularly hard to find on Skype, but easy to find on WhatsApp. However, call quality on Skype is usually better. You can use either one for a video chat, […]

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Filed under: Amazon, apps, batteries, career, cheap calls, Microsoft, numbers, word processing | Comments Off on WHAT’S APP, DOC?

Over the holidays we visited with an Italian who sells automated chicken coops. It’s an odd business but somebody has to do it. But what we thought was really odd was in the basement of his home in suburban Chicago, he had six terabyte disk drives linked together in what the techies call a daisy chain. That means they can all act as one continuous drive as the contents are fed along the pipeline. He uses them to store information for his business, and, oh yeah, movies. Terabyte drives have become common now; most new computers come with disk drives of one or two of these monster storage capacities. How monster are they? Well, a terabyte is a thousand gigabytes. […]

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Filed under: business, crytpocurrency, Internuts, Microsoft, storage | Comments Off on DOUBLING UP

We now know people who are married, or about to be, to mates they met online; it’s becoming normal. But if any of these meets make you nervous, you can make preliminary checks. A friend of ours turned down a match from an online dating service because the guy had “too many relationships.” Truthfinder.com told her. The scope of the information was amazing. TruthFinder not only knew how many online relationships the guy had, but how many business filings he’d made with the government (they were for McDonald’s franchises), what his house was worth, how much he paid for his mortgage, and so on. The service, which charges $28 for a one-time search, or $23 if you go monthly, also […]

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Filed under: gadgets, health, Internuts, Microsoft, social networks, Windows | Comments Off on TRUTH FINDER

Ever watch a video of an artist drawing? These quickly-drawn cartoons are used in ads and training videos. We got one for fun. It cost $5. Our interest began when a reader asked for our recommendation on “whiteboard animation software.” That would be software that creates cartoon videos. “PowToon” and many others are free, but we weren’t sure about the art part. That’s when we turned to artists on Fiverr. There are hundreds and most are super cheap. Fiverr.com is a marketplace for people who sell services in dozens of fields at surprisingly low prices. Wouldn’t it be fun, we thought, to have a video clip for our history club? We’re doing “history of fashion” and a plain PowerPoint presentation […]

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Filed under: apps, art, business, Microsoft, word processing | Comments Off on WORTH FIVE BUCKS

Topics this week: Free word processors and dictation, smart shopping, pinpointing your location, annoying ads.

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Filed under: Microsoft, shopping, TV, web, word processing | Comments Off on A WORD TO THE FRUGAL

Several years ago, one of our friends announced he’d had it with Windows. He went out and bought two Macbooks, one for himself, one for his wife. We’re slow but we’re starting to see his point. Feeling the same exasperation, we recently turned to a Macbook Air we’d had in the closet since 2012.The relief was instant. Websites loaded immediately. Joy didn’t have to do four yoga poses before pictures came in. Normally, when our main Windows computer gets screwy, we set it back to its factory defaults. You can do that with the Recovery option in “Settings” or “Control Panel.” Once you do that, it  feels brand new again. Unfortunately, it is brand new again — all the programs […]

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Filed under: Apple, Mac, Microsoft, Windows | Comments Off on JUMPING OUT OF WINDOWS