PARTY PRINTER

I remember when my sister used a stand-alone photo printer to print photos at her son’s birthday party so the guests could take them home immediately. Now you can get one that’s as small as your cell phone. The Canon “Ivy Mini Photo Printer for Smartphones” is the best pocket-sized printer for parties, according to an extensive review by TheVerge.com. Kids love the photo stickers it prints, and adults may appreciate having new faces to stick on their refrigerator. On Amazon, the printer is $99, but I saw the same ones on eBay, brand new, for $55. The prints are about the size of credit cards, two-by-three inches. You don’t have to use their peel-and-stick backing; just peel it off […]

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TRYING OUT ANDROID 12

What if smiling at your phone triggered a slew of actions? It can do that in Android 12, coming in September. To try it out now, do a web search on “Android beta,” then click to enroll. The list of eligible phones includes the Pixel 3 on up, as well as OnePlus, Xiaomi and a few others, but not Samsung, Motorola, or LG.  I tried smiling, opening my mouth, and looking right and left to trigger an action. The first few times were OK, then my phone went berserk. Just looking at it set off a mad dash through flashing menus. I could barely tap fast enough to regain normalcy. Despite the facial fiasco, I’m enjoying Android 12. For starters, […]

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SLEEP TRACKER KEEPS ME UP ALL NIGHT

My first night with Amazon’s $65 “Halo” fitness band was hilarious. I kept waking up to see if I could improve my sleep score. I couldn’t stand to see a “poor” grade. I kept trying to go back to sleep until I got a “fair.” The next night, my sleep score went up to “good,” with eight hours and six minutes of sleep but slightly less rapid-eye-movement than ideal. It also told me how long I took to fall asleep. Last night, it was zero minutes, compared to 14 the night before. I was asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. The funniest thing happened when I took a nap. The app changed my score to “poor” and […]

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MOVING UP IN THE WORLD

We’re moving to the highest floor in our apartment building. There’s less storage space but a great view. Do we want to take 300 CDs with us? No way!  We’ll use MusicShifter.com to digitize them. We hardly ever play CDs anymore anyway, because we’re too lazy to look through them. It’s easier to say, “Alexa, play Benny Goodman.” But that’s a shame because we’ve got lots of CDs worth playing. When was the last time we played the soundtrack for the movie “The Imposters” for example? Far too long ago. Digitizing solves that problem.  MusicShifter.com will digitize all your CDs onto a thumb drive for 69 cents a CD. When you get your drive back, full of music, there are […]

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TAPING THE DOC

We often leave the doctor’s office scratching our heads. It’s not because we have lice, it’s trying to remember what he or she said. So now we put ‘em on tape. (We don’t really use tape any more, we record them on Joy’s cellphone.) One doctor we recorded baffled us even after we played him back. So we fired him and got another. But the recording helped us get on a new track, so to speak. We think his problem was a one-track mind. We started out with “Smart Recorder,” free from the Android app store. It automatically skips periods of relative silence, so if you want to use it to record talks with your spouse at night. However, that […]

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GOOGLE ASSISTANT KEEPS ASSISTING

Google Assistant is now inside our Android phone. She says little but hears all. You’ll get yours soon enough. Google Assistant will do your bidding when you speak to it, even when the phone is dark and locked. We could be lying on the couch half dead and say, “OK Google, call the Doc.” The next step: it will bill us too. Most Android phones don’t have the Assistant yet. You can find out when yours will have it by Googling the question. (Yes, Google has become a verb.)  Last month, we read that the Assistant would be on both the “Nougat” and the “Marshmallow” operating systems at the end of February. That’s 30 percent of all Android phones. We […]

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MEDICAL APPS

A reader asked us to find her a blood pressure app for the iPhone. There are several of these for both iPhone and Android. Unlike the kind you see at the doctor’s office, the apps do not use a compression band that temporarily cuts off your circulation. They measure the slight pulsing from placing your finger on the phone. We tried “Finger Blood Pressure! Free” on our Android phone, and compared it with the reading we got on the $35 Omron 3 Series Blood Pressure monitor with a pressure cuff. The Omron is battery operated, so you’re not tethered to the wall plug. Omron said Joy’s systolic pressure was 118, her diastolic reading was 74 and her pulse was 46. […]

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APPLE WATCH

When we tried out some smart watches, we mainly used them for checking email, noting the weather and keeping track of stocks. Our friend Louise got an Apple Watch, and she uses it differently.

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THE RISKS OF APPLE PAY

According to a 2015 Mobile Payment Security Study of 900 security professionals, half say mobile payments such as Apple Pay are not safe. Nevertheless, nearly all expect paying by phone to become a lot more common in the next 12 months.

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STAYING FLEXIBLE

Bob was wrong about Joe Biden running for president, but he may be right about flexible computers. He predicts that a computer that wraps around your arm will one day be the norm, not a smart watch on your wrist.

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