On Computers

We bought 15 boxes of Kleenex to blow our allergy-clogged noses. Then we got a couple of air cleaners that got rid of the allergens and we don’t need the Kleenex. This is a lot like life.

Our first filter was a Whirlpool, our second was a “Honeywell HPA 250” from Best Buy. Why do we go into this? Because the second one struck us as the edge of the wedge: we can control it with an app on our smartphone.

This is the trend: the smart home. Two or three years and every appliance in your home, apartment or country cabin will be ready for remote wireless control. You don’t even have to be there, you’ll check in on the Internet and turn everything on or off and adjust the settings.

Now, this is not new news. But what gets to us is the price of the stuff: the wireless controlled air cleaner was only about $20 more than the plain one. This is bound to be a kind of minimal price difference that we will find in all our future devices. Therefore it’s gonna happen. Read more »

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A new book, “iPad and iPhone Kung Fu,” by Keir Thomas, $19 from the Pragmatic Bookshelf, promises to turn you into an Apple ninja.

Here’s what we like about it: Every thing you could conceivably want to do on your phone or tablet is listed as a tip right up front. Pick the tip that interests you and then go to the pages on how to do it.

For example: put a call on hold, take a panorama shot, get free stuff from Apple, it’s all there. And it’s listed several ways. You can look at tips by category, like “Maps and Navigation,” “Creativity” or “Productivity.” Or browse all 318 tips listed in order of appearance, starting with “taking photos in burst mode,” moving on to “quit GPS to save battery life,” and ending with calling your iPad from your iPhone using Facetime, or vice versa.

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Get ready to cancel your Automobile Club membership. “Jumpr” is the size of a cell phone and can start a dead car battery.

We’re awed. It’s hard to believe that something that weighs only two ounces more than our smart phone has the power to jumpstart a car.

Jumpr, $90 at JunoPower.com, delivers 12-volt, 300 amp output and comes with a jumper-cable attachment. It might not be enough power to start up a V8 engine, but it should work OK on four and six cylinder engines. It can also charge your smartphone. You can look up a YouTube demo of it. It’s supposed to be available in June.

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Sixty-six percent of players dump their free Android and iPhone games the day after they try them out, according to a study by Swrve, a company that helps developers of free games make some money. Around two percent of players buy things within a game. These spend $20 on average.

For example, Big Fish Games doubled its revenue from free phone and tablet games to $120 million, a lot of dough from a free game. How are they making money? Well, if you run out of poker chips in their card games, you can buy more. Same is true in other kinds of games. We’ve enjoyed Big Fish’s “hidden object” games, but a phone’s screen is too tiny for us. We sometimes play on the PC.

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If you’re like us, your iPad screen is so full of colorful icons for programs, it’s getting hard to find the ones you use regularly. Clean up by putting them in folders, and type a label for those folders.

To create a folder for two or more icons, put your finger on one until it begins to jiggle. Then drag it on top of a similar icon. For example, one labeled “YouTube” might be dragged on top of another labeled “Vimeo.” The iPad will automatically give the folder a name, such as “Entertainment,” but if you tap the “x” for delete you can rename it. When you press the home button, your icons stop jiggling.

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We recently watched a NOVA science show about a guy who created a game that lets people from all over the world help find solutions to cancerous growths and viral infections. The solutions were tested in the lab, and when they didn’t work, people went back to their computers and found others that did work.

The latest game, “Eterna,” is available for anyone to try at EternaGame.org. You play by designing RNAs. (RNA is a chemical cousin to DNA that can perform a wider variety of tasks.) The idea is to engineer molecules to fight disease. The game includes animated videos to explain the science behind the game.

The earlier game, “FoldIt,” has had over 500,000 players logging millions of hours. The players helped scientists understand how proteins fold into the intricate shapes that support life. The success of the newer game “Eterna” has already led to an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and may result in new solutions to disease.

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Engaging in a Skype video chat with a group, where each person is in a different location, used to be part of their premium service. Now it’s free.

To start, locate one of your friends on Skype. Then click the plus sign next to their name and choose “add people.” Start adding them and when you’re finished, click the call icon. For now, it works with PC, Mac and the Xbox One. Depending on the device, you can call people in three to 10 locations.

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Before

After

When you see an older celebrity pictured in a magazine and looking 20 years younger, you can’t help wondering if some trick is involved. Well it is, and we’ve discovered a way for anybody to do it. (No, it’s not botox.)

It’s a $50 program called “Portrait Pro,” from PortraitPro.com. Take any photo in the computer and let the program work its magic for a few seconds. The results in Joy’s case were so stunning, she is reluctant to accept her old look. She will only walk outside now with the new “Portrait Pro” photo pasted on her face. (This has caused some comment.)

You can see examples of before and after photos on their website. When you see it you would think they must have done something that you won’t be able to imitate. But this thing is magic and dead simple to use. (By the way, it’s not really magic: Bob looked the same before and after. Sigh.)

To start, open a photo in your computer. The program draws lines around facial features. Adjust the lines if you wish, but we found it unnecessary. Just click on “male,” “female” or child and click “next.” That’s it. It saves under a new name, keeping the original. The program slims faces, enhances skin, changes the lighting, and integrates with Facebook. It all happens as fast as you can snap your fingers. There’s also an advanced version that works inside Photoshop or as a standalone, handles more image formats and can improves batches of photos at once.

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“Multicolr Search Lab” fills your screen with similarly colored thumbnail pictures taken from ten million free-to-use photos on Flickr. All pinks and reds, for example. If you click on any of the tiny pictures (very tiny) it opens up.  (By the way, Flickr gives you a terabyte of storage for your own photos.)

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Vimeo.com/channels/cavort has videos of New York, Sydney and San Diego taken by a drone. Fly over skyscrapers or dodge the waves. You can sometimes see the drone’s shadow on buildings or rocks. More cities coming soon.

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