On Computers

A reader wrote to say he stopped his cable TV service and is now bringing $90 “back to the bottom line” each month. He bought the Winegard Flat Wave Antenna we wrote about to bring in free channels. But then there was another problem.

The $30 antenna weighs only a third of an ounce and connected easily to his TV. It brings in 16 channels in high definition. But the problem he needed to solve was adding a DVR (digital video recorder) to record some of the programs for later viewing.

He did some research on his own and ordered the “Channel Master DVR+,” ($300 on Amazon).  The Channel Master is getting good reviews and our reader is pleased with it so far. It plugs directly into the TV and is easy to set up. It lets you record only two hours of programs, but it’s easy to plug in an external hard drive to get more recordings. You get ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC, PBS, and many others. The best part is there are no channel subscription fees.

Cutting the cord to your cable provider is becoming a hot trend these days. A savings of $90 a month adds up to $1,080 a year. In ten years – and most people who have cable remain connected for more than ten years – that’s an extra $11,000 in your pocket. We think this is an unstoppable trend. Nielsen’s TV rating service, for instance, found that 96 of the top 100 most viewed programs are available over-the-air for free if you simply connect your set to an HDTV antenna. Read more »

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BitWage.co  surveyed 150 companies to find out how they felt about paying employees in Bitcoins. Thirty eight responded. Half said they’d considered it. Four are doing it.

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PBS Kids Super Vision, free for iPhone and iPod Touch, tells parents what PBS games their children are playing and what they’re learning at PBSkids.org.

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Ebates 2.0 is a new version of the Ebates app for Android, iPhone, and iPad (iOS 7 and up). It lets you get cash back on purchases, sometimes free shipping, and coupons.

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Opera Coast is a new web browser for iPhone and iPad. Swipe your hand to the left to go back to sites you recently visited. Tap the home button to get your list of favorites. The “Stuff We Like” feature helps you find popular content quickly.

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A new website, MagnifyMoney.com, has tools for comparing credit card deals, savings, and loans. CitiBank has the worst savings rate: It pays only $30 interest on $100,000 invested for three years.

We found that Fidelity has the best cash-back credit card and immediately wondered if the Fidelity card would be better than our American Airlines rewards travel card. If you spend $2000 a month, the Fidelity card returns $480 a year in cash back. If you had used an American Airlines card instead, $2000 a month would get 24,000 airline miles. We’d rather have the miles. If we had to buy them, they’d cost $98 more than we’d get in cash back from Fidelity. But if we start traveling on some other airline, it would be better to have the cash.

The site’s loan info section tells you which bank has pre-payment penalties, and whether the lender is clear about the terms.

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BBC.com/HorizonsBusiness has videos on technology and business. We learned about “GravityLight.” It works like an old grandfather clock: A smallbox is connected to a weight. As the weight drops, it runs a series of gears which spins an electric generator. It never needs sunshine or batteries and can light a 100-watt bulb. Every 15-30 minutes you have to lift the weight up again to keep it going. It goes on sale later this year. Cost is expected to be around $7.

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Viralnova.com/new-school-facts  has fascinating video: how an ant walks, how a cheetah throws its tail from side to side for balance as it runs, how boiling water thrown into the air turns to snow instantly when it’s minus 40 degrees out there.

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A reader wrote in to say he’s frustrated with Windows Live Mail, which is part of Windows 7, and would like to have Windows Mail back, which was part of Vista.

Why does Microsoft keep changing stuff we like? It’s their job, and they’re really good at it. First there was Outlook Express, which worked fine. Then came Windows Mail, which was confusing to anyone used to Outlook Express. (See: they are good at messing us up.) Then came Windows Live Mail, which is more like Gmail (because Gmail was already out and people liked it, so they had to face some facts).

So we did some research and found many complicated solutions. (You thought they’d make it easy?) If you need to do this, Google the phrase “Is there any possibility of using Windows Mail with Windows 7?”

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One of the first and most popular programming languages, “BASIC,” turned 50 this month. The acronym stands for “Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code,” it started as a student math project at Dartmouth College and from this small town in New Hampshire it conquered the world. Even Bill Gates used it.

BASIC is easy to learn and fun to use. What’s more it’s still useful; programs written in BASIC used to be extremely slow to run on early computers but today’s fast processors handle BASIC at high speed.

When Joy bought her first computer in 1983, the salesman expected she wanted to write BASIC programs, but she mainly used it for word processing. For those who learned some BASIC, however, it was a thrill to print out a picture of Snoopy made from letters and punctuation marks. With just two lines you could create a program that would add any numbers you typed. It was a thrill for us and would still be a wonderful teaching tool for children. It’s fun.

Go to RunBasic.com to download a free version for Windows, Mac or Linux. You can open a sample project and change it slightly to personalize it, or create something new. We tried the Hangman game and “Spirals,” which drew intricate drawings on the screen in three colors. There were also a few projects that didn’t work, but then it’s up to you to find and fix the flaw. (Remember the movie “TRON?” That’s a BASIC command ordering the computer to find the flaw.)

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