ThisToThat.com tells you how to glue anything to anything else. Select “metal” from the list and then choose “wood” and they’ll suggest various kinds of epoxy.
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Spreeder.com is a free speed reading tool. Paste the text you want to read in the window on the page and the words will flash by at any speed you choose. (This reminds Bob of an old Woody Allen joke: He learned speed reading and went through Tolstoy’s massive “War and Peace” novel in six minutes. He said it seemed to be about Russia.)
Because you don’t have to keep a finger on your place, you’ll find your reading speed increasing by 50 percent the first time you try it. We did.
The site gives you sample text to practice with, but we went beyond that: We pasted in a bunch of text from “Tarzan of the Apes,” free at Gutenberg.org. It seems to be about some guy swinging through the trees.
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The oddly-named “Misfit Shine,” our favorite fitness tracker, will be out in October in a new version, this time for $50 instead of the original $100. It’s called the “Misfit Flash.”
Besides tracking our steps, swims and bike rides, this gadget revealed that Joy is one of the deepest sleepers on the planet, and Bob is not far behind. Where most people sleep deeply for 20 percent of bed time, our deep sleep is usually over 50 percent. (We owe our calm, blissful state to never worrying about what idiocy the government is up to now.)
The Flash, like the Shine, is a little larger than a quarter. It can go in a pocket, a wristband, or your sock. Joy is desperately looking forward to the arrival of the Flash, so she can stop sharing with Bob, who has taken a shine to her “Shine.” You can pre-order the Flash on the web, or find it in stores in October. Unlike the earlier model, you can tap the Flash to see how close you are in percentage terms to your fitness goal. However, you’ll still want to sync it with a phone or tablet to get details.
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Bob has a kind of loose rule about high tech products: never buy anything with a low serial number. This would apply to the new iPhones and anything else that is guaranteed, they say, to improve your life.
Joy experienced an instant example when she downloaded the new, free, iOS 8 operating system to upgrade her iPad mini. Critics say this upgrade has more bugs than a New York apartment. Fortunately, she stopped after version 8 and didn’t install 8.0.1, which is an even buggier upgrade designed to fix the bugs in 8.0. The fix was so bad Apple pulled it immediately.
There is a long history of this sort of thing. Why do they do it – why do they ship stuff that still has flaws? Why? – because there is constant pressure in the world of high tech to “move it out the door,” as they say in the business, before somebody else does it ahead of you. Eventually, they fix the problems and we move on to the next widget. And by the way, if you need tech support – and you will – Apple’s is probably the best around. That’s a big change from the early days, Bob recalls, when they were just about the worst.
Several useful apps come with the new Apple operating system:
— “Health” (iPhone only) lets a medical record appear on your screen, even without a pass code of four numbers. If you’re in an accident, an emergency worker can get your blood type and other vital information.
— Enable “Family Sharing” in the “settings” area under “iCloud.” When one family member buys an app or song, the others get it automatically.
— Take time-lapse video, great for nature shots. (iPhone only.)
— Send text messages plus voice. Press and hold the record button in the “Messages” app. Unfortunately, this works for messaging between iPhone and iPad owners only. Joy couldn’t send a message to Bob because he’s not an Apple guy.
— Find the battery hogs. Some apps cause your battery to drain fast. Now you can tap “settings,” “usage” and “battery usage” on an iPhone to shut those off. On our Android phone, we use “Battery Doctor,” a free app, instead.
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Investopedia.com lets you practice investing and includes free newsletters such as “The Warren Buffet watch.”
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Digital-photography-school.com has some wonderful tips and tutorials. The article on “couples photography” reminds us that stiff photos of grandma and grandpa aren’t nearly as nice as photos showing them holding hands and looking at each other.
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TeamViewer for Android is a mobile version of this popular screen-sharing program. Use it to get tech support from a remote friend, or to offer it. When you sign in, you get a code to share and so it’s just the two of you seeing the same screen. Joy used it recently and was able to see a friend’s distant computer screen so she could show her how to add a profile picture to Facebook. The program is free for personal use.
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Story Bug lets you share an ebook with a child from afar, while video chatting together on an iPad or iPhone. It’s free for the first two books, then $5 a month. Of course you could do this in Skype for free, but it’s kind of neat to be able to look down at a story page and in a corner of the screen there’s a small video chat window. The books are aimed at babies and on up to age 6. Nice illustrations.
People are taking — and posting! – around 1.8 billion photos a day. Back in the primitive time of 2008, they took 20 million a day. We now post twice as many — 44 million, every hour. By the way: only one percent are still taken on film. Bye, bye, Kodak; sic semper transit and all that.
We got these stats from GetNarrative.com. Narrative makes a tiny camera around the size of a postage stamp that you clip on your shirt or anywhere to automatically take photos every 30 seconds. We haven’t tried it yet but it sounds fun. Unfortunately, it’s $279 for a twelve-month subscription and $9 a month to renew. The company stores and organizes the photos. The photos are filed by location, so you can use that to quickly narrow a search.
The battery lasts for two days on a single charge and the camera can store 4000 five megapixel pictures. To turn it off, put it in your pocket or lay it face down. Plug it into your computer to recharge the battery and transfer the photos to online storage.
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In our favorite non-violent action game is Peggle, a kind of cartoon pinball game. We once made a move so cool we would have liked to share it with others. Now the instant replay feature of the free game service “Raptr” lets you save video clips of your game play in any length up to 20 minutes. You could use your clips to start your own video channel online. There is a surprising large number of people who like to see video game replays.
If that sounds far-fetched, consider this: Watching other people play video games has become hugely popular. In 2012, 1.3 billion hours were spent watching other people play. That number nearly doubled last year, to 2.4 billion hours. It’s expected to be 6.6 billion by 2017, according to Raptr. It’s like watching football, and you can add sodas and potato chips.
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