On Computers

I asked my diary: “Should I marry?” It answered me quickly with the pros and cons. What’s amazing is that it didn’t parrot my own words back to me. Instead, it offered interesting insights, delivered in its own style, inspired by the 38,000 words I wrote covering a four-year period. All I had to do was feed the diary into Google’s “NotebookLM.” NotebookLM is an artificially intelligent friend who absorbs everything you throw at it, then answers your questions based on what it learned. A YouTube tutorial called “How to Use NotebookLM,” by Tiago Forte describes the process step by step. Forte is a productivity expert with 263,000 subscribers.  He writes copious notes on every book he reads, amassing a vast collection. Using NotebookLM, […]

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Filed under: AI, Google, Internuts, photos, scanners, tech support | Comments Off on GENIE IN A NOTEBOOK ANSWERS YOUR QUESTIONS

“This morning it took about four minutes to download the newspaper,” a reader wrote. “Usually, it’s only seconds.” Neither of us could figure it out, so he called his internet service, Xfinity. They said the problem was his wiring. But why, he wondered, would his download speed be 20 Mbps one day and 500 Mbps the next? After a runaround, he gave up on Xfinity and signed up for AT&T’s fiber optics service. He’s very happy with it. I like AT&T too. But I switched to Xfinity last summer when I found an unbeatable deal: internet service for $5 a month and cell service for $15 a month. But I had a heck of a time getting Xfinity to acknowledge […]

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Filed under: apps, crytpocurrency, Google, phones, scanners, shopping | Comments Off on BOOSTING YOUR INTERNET SPEED

Our new Epson “FastFoto” scanner sucked in photos so fast it made us laugh. Put a stack in, and the photos jump through the scanner like they’ve been shot out of a cannon. Typical speed is one a second. Then we asked ourselves the big question: Why get a photo scanner when ScanMyPhotos.com will do it for you?  For instance, they’ll currently scan a thousand 4- by-6-inch photos for $50. No muss, no fuss. So here’s why your own scanner might be more useful: A scanned photo, sent by email or shared on Facebook, is often a spur of the moment thing. Reach your hand into an old collection, pull out a stack and put them in the FastFoto scanner. […]

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Filed under: apps, scanners, social networks, text messaging | Comments Off on ONE REAL FAST PHOTO SCANNER

If your college textbook is available online, it’s probably a lot cheaper than the printed version. In fact, scanning books to put them online for sale sounds like a good business. Unfortunately, an advanced scanner costs $20,000, and of course there are copyright problems.

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Filed under: books, scanners | Comments Off on THE END OF PRINTED TEXTBOOKS?

“Turboscan” was suggested by a doctor who reads our column. He said it’s good for scanning a document with your camera phone and it worked well in our tests. It’s $3 for Android or iPhone. It lets you take multi-page scans. Crop the results and you can combine three similar shots to get better resolution. When satisfied, tap the app to email the document as a PDF.

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Filed under: apps, scanners | Comments Off on USING YOUR CAMERA TO SCAN DOCUMENTS

Joy’s 96 year-old friend Ida had a real estate document that needed faxing. Joy’s scanner didn’t work, so what to do? Well, she took a picture of Ida’s document and emailed it.

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Filed under: how-to, scanners | Comments Off on FASTER THAN FAXING

A $500 scanner sounds like $400 too much. But the “NeatConnect” is so useful we’re going to buy it. This is our ultimate test for any product: can you sell it to us?

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Filed under: business, scanners, small business | Comments Off on SAVE IT AND STORE IT

The “doxie one” is a portable scanner that needs no computer. Push a button and your piece of paper is digitized and saved to an SD memory card. The device sells for $149 and it can also save the scan directly to the web. The “doxie go” sells for $50 more and runs on a battery.

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Filed under: electronics, gadgets, ocr, scanners | Comments Off on JUST SCAN IT

Ever wish your computer’s mouse was also a scanner? LG is introducing one.

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Filed under: gadgets, mouse, scanners | Comments Off on SCANNER MOUSE

Want to digitize your comic books, textbooks and rare books without breaking their backs? Plustek has come out with the OpticBook 3800. We found it offered for $250-$280 on the web.

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Filed under: electronics, scanners | Comments Off on BOOK SCANNER