On Computers

MentalFloss.com has an “amazing fact generator.”  Click “hit me again” to keep it going. We learned that Thomas Jefferson hated meetings with foreign dignitaries so he would often greet them wearing his pajamas. The sum of all the numbers on a roulette wheel is 666. When Canada’s Northwest Territories considered renaming itself in the 1990s, one choice was “Bob.” (They’re a casual lot, these Canadians.)

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Reshareworthy.com has awesome video clips. In the video above, four women use each others’ violins, cello and piano.

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Photo by 3Ders.org

LocalMotors.com is sponsoring a contest to see who can design the best 3D-printed car. You have to enter before May 12 and the winning design gets $5000. The car will be printed at a manufacturing show in Chicago in September.

If this all sounds too fantastic for words, keep in mind that Local Motors will still have to add a motor. The folks at LocalMotors say it will be an electric motor. Wheels would probably help too.

You can get free 3D design software at Easel.com. Big-time CAD (Computer Aided Design) programs sell pretty cheaply on the Internet if you’re willing to buy a used copy or an old version. It’s amazing how much the price drops on a perfectly good program as soon a later version comes out.

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We’re still getting letters from readers about Microsoft dropping support for Windows XP. As we’ve said, Bob’s computer is Win XP and he isn’t worried. With a good anti-virus and anti-spyware program, you’re fine. Around 95% of all automatic teller machines and 25 percent of all computers still use Windows XP, so this operating system is not going away for a long time.

If you want a new computer anyway, we find Windows 8 just as easy as Windows 7. Microsoft recently released Windows 8.1 to quiet some of the complaints about Windows 8; but even more recently they announced that they will not support Windows 8.1 unless you install a recent update, found in the Windows Store. It’s hard to be a big-time computer executive; all that thinking overheats the brain chip.

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While you’re up, how about solving a problem or two? “World Community Grid” is a free program that harnesses the power of linking thousands of computers to solve problems. (We are proud to say we first suggested doing this in a column written more than thirty years ago.)

Download the freebie, powered by IBM, and scientists can use your computer or smart phone when you’re not. Right now they’re working on ways to detect cancer before it turns deadly. They’ve also found 35,000 materials with the potential to double solar cell efficiency.  (Thirty-five thousand?) And now they’re going after childhood’s most deadly diseases.

The free program, at WorldCommunityGrid.org, comes in a version for Windows and Mac as well as Android phones and lets you choose which projects you want to help with. We checked all of them and it didn’t slow our computer down even slightly. In less than 24 hours, we helped complete a project to find cancer markers.

NOTE: The program only works when your computer is on. But you can save energy by turning off your screen. With just the computer running but the screen dark, you’re using less electricity than a refrigerator light bulb.

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So the one-day sale Of Google’s Internet connected glasses resulted in one-day thefts. They all sold out in five hours, at $1500 apiece. The thefts took place a few minutes later. (They look like glasses but Google calls them “glass.” This may be in preparation for the return of wearing a monocle as a fashion statement.)

Now we would think that anyone who steals Google’s new high-tech glasses would be a prime candidate for a class in remedial robbery. Because they’re all registered and need to connect to the Internet. So as soon as the thief connects, it’s “Hi, there” time.

Where’s the Copy?

Okay, enough of that.  Joy did something recently that might be useful for others. It has nothing to do with Google Glass.

Bob wanted to look at a copy of our weekly column to check twice for errors before it went out. “I’ll put it on a thumb drive (some people call them flash drives) and leave it by your keyboard,” she said.

Now we have many of these little drives; they’re cheap and often they’re given away at trade shows. We must have a couple dozen.

So to get to the point … The column wasn’t on the thumb drive by Bob’s keyboard. And it wasn’t on another one nearby and it wasn’t on any of the other little thumb drives that litter the office. Where was it? It turned out that without checking the destination drive, she saved it to a camera card.

Who would have looked there? If you ever want to save a file to a place no one would think of looking, why not save it to a camera card? You could even put the card back in the camera and walk out the door, snapping the guard’s picture as you go. Tell him you’ll send him a copy.

We would now like every spy agency in the world to send us a check for learning about this clever trick. If they get caught, well those are the breaks.

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Microsoft surveyed over 10,000 people ages 18 and up from all over the world and this is what they found out:

— Only 36 percent of respondents limit the amount of personal information they put on the web.

— Only 37 percent look for ways to prevent identity theft.

— Fifteen percent of respondents say they or someone they know was a victim of identity theft.

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Joy’s Kindle Fire went into a coma for several months and the battery wouldn’t charge. So we got an iPad Mini, a smaller version of the iPad for $278 from Amazon.

Every reviewer says that if you’ve got an original iPad, which we do, you’ll be wowed by the screen resolution of the iPad Mini. Well, we’re often cranky, so we weren’t wowed. In fact, at first we didn’t even notice this great improvement. But the real joy (sorry about that) of the smaller iPad is that it’s light weight and easy to hold.

The iPad Mini gave us a chance to test all those apps that supposedly only work on the newest Apple devices. New or old, they all seem to work. They all look nice, but if we hadn’t thought we needed to replace the Kindle Fire, we wouldn’t have bothered. Strange world: the Kindle Fire started working again right after we bought the iPad Mini. We live in a very mysterious universe.

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“Chinese Cubes Starter Pack” is $149 from ChineseCubes.com or free in a limited version for iPad/iPhone. It’s a system of learning Chinese by moving blocks, each of which has a Chinese character, a meaning in English and a simplified way of writing the word or phrase. Using the blocks in various combinations can produce 2500 phrases.

The starter pack comes with a webcam– something nearly every computer has these days — but the program won’t let you go on until you plug it in their web cam. This is unfortunate, because their web cam doesn’t always recognize the blocks you place in front of it. If you keep doing it, however, the instructor built into the software will finally acknowledge that you got it right.

In the early stages, the instructor shows you exactly what to look for; it’s just a matter of going through a pile of 45 blocks. Then you practice pronunciation and use a writing pad to draw the characters.

We couldn’t find any reviews for this learning system, so Joy spent several hours with it as her obligation to promote understanding between nations. (”Char siu” means barbequed pork.) She thought it was fun, despite the frustration when the webcam couldn’t distinguish the blocks. (Bob says he knew a guy who had a Chinese friend write out a note in Chinese characters that he could hand to waiters at restaurants. It said: “I’ll have what the people at the next table are having.”)

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In the Android world of tablets and phones, game costs pile up. We heard about a child who spent $70 on her new adventure game before mother caught on. Most of the money for these games goes for buying “equipment.” Like: everybody needs a light sword these days. Where have you been?

In response to criticism, the Google Play store now lets you set a password requirement for purchases offered within a game. To use that, tap the Google Play Store, then the menu button on your phone. From there, tap “settings” and look under “User Controls.” For iPhone users, you can set up a password requirement in “settings.” Tap “General” and then “Restrictions.”

If you want the device to shut off after a specific time, there’s an app for that. For Android, it’s “Kids Place.” For iPhone, it’s “Parental Time Lock.”

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