On Computers

Forty years ago, Bob wrote about an idea that may finally be gaining adherents. As a homeowner, he thought it was ridiculous that everybody on the block had their own lawnmower. Why not just have one and pass it around? Why try to own everything if you can share it? To pay for repairs or replacement, you would all contribute to a common fund, maybe monthly or once a year. It took the Internet to move this idea along.

People are now sharing tools and toys using apps like “Freecycle,” amounting to 700 million pounds of used items last year, according to a recent report by author Jeremy Rifkin. If those items were stacked in garbage trucks, they’d reach over thirteen times the height of Mount Everest.

Over 800,000 people in the U.S. now use car-sharing services like ZipCar.  In New York, thousands of homes and apartments are shared to save the cost of hotel rooms. Over 416,000  people use the web app “Airbnb” to find a place to stay when they travel. It’s the start of a long trend, and Bob notes that the interests that will be arrayed against it are large and digging in. (Hotels, for example.)

Filed under: environment, Internet | Comments Off on THE INTERNET OF SHARING

“Lost Civilization” is a “hidden object” game set in Prague, London and Mexico it’s $5 for iPhone or $10 for PC or Mac. We found ourselves hooked for three days, trying to get our heroine’s fiancé back safely as we went from one archeological dig to another.

The nice thing about hidden object games is that your three year-old, your grandma and everyone in between can play together. “Lost Civilization” has you searching for clues and inventing ways to get people out of your way.

Such games are kind of a middle ground between the complex adventure games that can literally go on for years, and the short-term games like Angry Birds that can be played for a few minutes or a couple hours.

Lots of these hidden object games are available in the iPhone/iPad App Store. The one for PC/Mac came from SteamPowered.com. The website requires installing a free download before you can start playing, but it opens a whole world of games to buy or play for free. Through this service, we were able to re-introduce our nephews to the classic “Monkey Island” game they played as young children. Bob has one of the first copies ever sold, signed by the creator, but it’s almost impossible to get it to play on a modern PC.

“Steam” became famous for long, complex games like “Half Life,” but also has free games and early classics, such as the LucasArts Adventure Pack, with “Loom,” “Indiana Jones,” and “The Dig” for $10. The Dig was written by one of the great science fiction authors, Alan Dean Foster.

Filed under: games, kids | Comments Off on GAMES: LOST CIVILIZATION

If you’re like us, you’ve sent and received hundreds of photos by email. Where are they now? “Lost Photos” is a free app for Mac or PC that can find them for you.

Unfortunately, the free version will only uncover 100 photos. For $3, you can get all your photos. Not one of the first 100 photos we recovered were from friends. They were ads. So we spent the $3 to go the unlimited route. What turned up were 4,830 photos. The program has a nice photo carousel, making it easy to flip through them quickly. We saw old photos of relatives and friends we’d forgotten about, though we may not have the time to cruise through all 4,830.

Lost Photos works with Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo and iCloud. Find it at LostPhotosApp.com.

Filed under: photos | Comments Off on FINDING LOST PHOTOS

The other day, our smart TV got dumber. It stopped giving us channels like Amazon and Netflix. Using the “reset” command fixed it, but in the meantime, we had a chance to explore the $49 Roku Streaming Stick and we took it.

We never thought you needed a Roku player if your TV already has Hulu, Netflix and Amazon. But the extra channels turned out to be fun, even if some of them require a monthly fee. Joy is now hooked on “The Daily Burn” — unlimited exercise videos for $10 a month. The yoga channel is the best she’s seen, and she was sore for three days after the “inferno” squats with weight lifting.

The “Daily Burn” show on the Roku player

We also tried out The Wall Street Journal channel, A&E movies, Redbox Instant and Pandora radio.  Blockbuster on Demand charges about $4 per movie. Roku has a search function that makes it easy to find movies and TV shows by title or the actor’s name. The Roku games include more than the usual Angry Birds and similar games. We had fun with “Wheel of Fortune” and “Jeopardy.” (In the old days, we paid $50 for a Wheel of Fortune game on a CD.)

Filed under: health, TV, video | Comments Off on WE DO THE ROKU

A friend of ours owns a bookstore in a tiny town and to get more people into the store, he shows free 3D movies.  He’s technically savvy so we were curious about what kind of projector he chose. It was the Optoma HD 25.

Part of the reason was the price. Epson just about owns the projector market, but until recently, most Epson home theater projectors cost around $2000 or more. They’ve since come down in price, but the Optoma 25 was around $800 on Amazon.

He says the Optoma HD 25e projects beautifully on a ten-foot screen, has 2800 lumens (which means a bright picture) and the machine is quiet. It handles 3D movies well and is brighter than some Epson projectors at the same price.

This is the second time we’ve encountered someone who watches television shows and movies using a projector. They shine it onto a wall, and of course the picture quality depends considerably on how clean and white that wall is. The best picture surface would probably be on those glass bead roll-down screens that used to be common for watching home movies or educational films at school. You can probably find those at garage sales now.

There are several things to look for when shopping for a home projector. First off, look for “1080p,” which means high definition. It’s a must if you want a cinema-crisp experience on a big screen.  Also make sure it has support for an HDMI cable; otherwise, it’s more of a computer projector than a home theater.

Filed under: gadgets, video | Comments Off on SHOW TIME

Next time we travel or use our computers outside the home, we’re going to use Avast’s “SecureLine” to connect to the Internet. That way, even if we’re using the notoriously dangerous public Wi-Fi in an airport, no hacker can see us.

Actually, anyone who uses a phone, computer or tablet to connect to public Wi-Fi, no matter where they are, opens themselves up to potential hackers. Yet when we wrote about SecureLine before, it was only for users of Avast anti-virus software. Now Avast has a stand-alone version. You don’t have to be an Avast customer to use it.

SecureLine acts as a tunnel in the air, funneling data through an encrypted line invisible to hackers. It’s quite easy to use and there’s a free trial at Avast.com/Secureline-vpn. It’s $60 a year for the PC and there’s a version for tablets and phones.

Filed under: security, virus | Comments Off on AVOIDING HACKERS

“Send me $100 by PayPal if you want to use your phone.” That was the threat some Australian iPhone users saw on their locked screens, reports Digital Trends, an online newsletter.

It happened so far away that why should we care about it here? Well the answer to that is it seems to be the kind of lockdown that could happen anywhere and probably will. By triggering that feature remotely – and so far no one is sure how that was done – the iPhone owner is effectively locked out. Some users were locked out of other Apple devices as well, including iPads and Macs.

The support forums on Apple.com and Twitter went wild with complaints. Each ransom message named the hacker as one Oleg Pliss, an Oracle employee who apparently had nothing to do with it. Whoever is doing it should obviously be tried in a kangaroo court.

Filed under: security | Comments Off on IPHONE RANSOMS DOWN UNDER

Chromebook,  designed by Google, is as close as you can get to a trouble-free computer. Nearly all of its software exists in a Google cloud on the web and every time you connect it looks for and fixes any problems that might have come up when last used.

The first one came out in 2011. The latest is “Chromebase,” (“We don’t understand why they don’t call it “California Chrome-book.”) It’s a $350 all-in-one from LG. An all-in-one computer looks like it’s just a monitor. The innards of the computer are fitted inside. it’s sleek and easy to handle. The Chromebase has an HDMI port, so it could also serve as a TV.

It makes a great second computer for surfing the web, watching videos, and doing email. The new version adds the ability to edit videos. Anyone who has a Chromebook, Chromebase, or Chromebox will get the update automatically.

On the downside, it does not run Microsoft programs like Word and Excel. But Google has its own versions, called “Google Docs.” There’s little that can go wrong.

Filed under: computers, Google | Comments Off on THE NEW CALIFORNIA CHROME

We’re going to need a Thunderbolt connection just to share all our photos. Thunderbolt is a lightning fast connection developed for Apple. Some new PCs from HP and Asus will have it too, and fairly soon there will be Thunderbolt cards you can plug into the motherboard of older PCs.

The latest Thunderbolt connection can transfer data at 20 gigabytes per second. The latest USB 3 connection has a maximum transfer rate of five gigabits  per second. Still, we’re getting fast. What caught our attention about this high speed transfer is that a typical full-length movie is less than two gigabits. So in theory at least, you can send a standard movie in a second. Read more »

Filed under: electronics, storage | Comments Off on LIGHTNING FAST

Pretty soon we’ll all be on candid camera. Facebook users upload 350 million photos a day.  That’s over 200,000 pictures a minute. It’s running about 120 billion a year currently and accelerating constantly. In the two years since the company went public, they’ve accumulated 250 billion photos, one-fourth of a trillion.

Now that’s just Facebook. There are many other sites that store and display photos, and to take a rough guess from our own experience, the total would be at least double the Facebook numbers. That’s seven billion pictures every ten days. And that doesn’t count videos posted to the web, and we’re not even thinking about government agency pictures.

Well there are seven billion people in the world. What else are they doing? Who’s at the office? Some of them must be toddlers. But of course some of them are also in their teens and twenties, and boy, are they taking pictures. By the way, there are seven billion people and there are six billion cell phones; most of them can take pictures.

Filed under: numbers, trends | Comments Off on SMILE