On Computers

PerfectlyTimedPics.com has many cute photos, such as a giraffe peeking through someone’s French doors, a bear on a JetSki, or a little girl feeding a squirrel. We liked the toddler curled up with a puppy for a nap and the gecko giving a high five to a man’s finger.

NOTE: Always be careful of the ads in sites like this. We advise not clicking on any of them; beautiful Russian girls looking for boyfriends may not be may not be what you expect. The ads are questionable but the site is otherwise fun.

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IFLscience.com has fascinating bits, including “21 GIFs that explain mathematical concepts.” For instance, did you know that the number Pi (3.14159 etc.), is equal to the distance traveled by rolling a wheel exactly one revolution? That distance turns (ha, ha) out to be 3.14 times the diameter. This is true no matter what size the wheel.

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If you’re one of the 271 million Twitter users, you may want to know how many people are potentially viewing your tweets. Go to Analytics.Twitter.com to find out. We found that our tweets were received daily by around 1800 people. Of course, just because someone is getting your tweets doesn’t mean they’re actually reading them. Stop us before we tweet again!

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It sounds so easy. Shutterfly.com automatically assembles a photo book for you. No more placing photos in albums, or even buying an album.

Here’s the problem. When a family member sends you a link to their Shutterfly photos, it’s likely to have only a few dozen pictures you actually want. But instead of taking your selection and putting those into a book for you, they put in the whole thing. Bob’s son just sent him 278 photos, and the resulting book would have cost us $83 plus shipping and taxes. Forget that.

To get the photos we wanted, we checked off our favorites, making a new album with 50 photos in it, selecting from the ones we were sent. This time it only cost us $11 for a 5 by 7 book. Lesson learned: Don’t click “Make a photo book” until you’ve created a new album.

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We recently used ScanMyPhotos.com to have a big box of our favorite old photos scanned and placed on a DVD. They charged $159 but it was worth it. We then used Kooboodle.com to store them online, and this was free.

ScanMyPhotos was easy to use but requires some work on your part. We ordered the service online and they sent us a pre-paid mailing box to put our photos in. It was the first time we’d looked at these photos in years. They gave us six months to get the photos back to them and of course we dilly dallied for a few months, because it’s sort of a pain going through all those photo albums to look for the gems.

They required photos of the same size to be grouped with rubber bands, and for extra fees they will provide more services: For $70 you can have your photos digitally enhanced, for $13 you can have them put on a flash drive in addition to a DVD.

Kooboodle searched our hard drive for photos and put copies of all of them in private storage online. This is a nice service, especially since its free for as many photos as you have.  It’s owned by ClickFree, a company we’ve written about them many times, because they make backing up easy.

Having your photos stored online makes them easy to skim through and easy to select ones to send to print or email. Highly recommended.

Filed under: photos | 2 Comments »

You’d have to be living on Mars to be unaware of all the smart watches coming out this year. But did you know you could also get a smart ring?

“Ringly” has $195 rings with a choice of emerald, onyx, pink sapphire or moonstone. Each ring connects to your iPhone or Android phone by the phone’s Bluetooth wireless chip and will vibrate and light up when a call or message comes in. That could be handy if your phone is set to vibrate. You might otherwise miss a call if it’s in a purse or bag. Of course the ring has no screen, so you won’t know who’s calling unless you look at your phone. You can  set it to flash only when certain people call or text.

Ringly needs charging every two days; just put it in its jewelry box, connected by USB to a power source.

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You don’t have to buy a new tablet or computer to get a good one, any more than you have to buy a brand new car. “Refurbished” machines are items returned to the store or the manufacturer, but they’re not lemons.

According to Digital Trends, an online magazine, refurbished tablets and computers are subject to more rigorous testing than ordinary machines. After a person returns something to the store, retailers want to be darn sure there’s nothing wrong with it. From our own experience, we know that some equipment labeled as “refurbished” is brand new and has never been opened; a company ordered too many and returned the surplus.

Apple has an online store where refurbished iPads sell for $420, an $80 savings. At other company sites, smartphones, tablets, computers, laptops, cameras, and TVs are discounted by as much as 50 percent. To find the Apple refurbished department, go to Apple.com, click “store” and scroll down to the bottom of the page. In tiny print, you’ll find “refurbished and clearance.”

Similarly, Amazon has an outlet store at Amazon.com/outlet. You can find others by going to Google.com or any other search engine and adding the word “outlet” to your search term. For example, a search on “Sony Outlet.” or doing the same for Dell, HP, Nikon, New Egg, Best Buy and many others, turns up their bargain basement divisions.

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There’s a new version of “PawTrack,” for monitoring your kitty. It’s a GPS collar that keeps tabs on tabby. The collar is $125 and the service is $10 a month. It lets you know when your furry purry returns home, when it sleeps and where it goes when it roams the neighborhood. The new version is due in November.

But you may want to re-think the need to let your cat outdoors. We Googled the words “dangers of letting cats outside,” and found a list of potential problems, including ticks and fleas, car accidents, poison and cat fights. Outdoor cats live on average four to five years, we learned, while indoor cats live 12 to 15, with some living as long as 20 years. On the other hand, maybe a short eventful life is best.

(Bob says it has been experience of many years as a newspaperman, that articles about cats draws more readers than any other subject except movie star scandals.)

Filed under: GPS, security, wearables | 1 Comment »

Die.net/earth has a “World Sunlight Map.” It shows where the sun is shining at  the moment you are looking at the map, also which areas are in darkness.

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Livemocha.com is a language learning community that covers more tongues that you ever thought you might want to know. Say it in Farsi (Iranian), or Zulu (South African tribal language).

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