On Computers

CUTTING THE CORD

2012-05-21T19:26:55Z

Free Stuff on Hulu

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“Cutting the cord” these days means waving bye-bye to your monthly cable bill. But it depends on how much you like convenience, local sports, skipping commercials, and a few other things.

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Articles about the joys of watching all your TV on the Internet or from services like Hulu and Netflix often neglect to mention the annoyances, chief among which is watching Internet commercials. We also get tired of searching for things on Netflix. Here are a few other Internet TV annoyances:

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Old shows: Netflix and Hulu won’t have everything you want.
Prices: If you have a deal that gives you Internet service and TV service, cutting out the TV component may not save that much because they’ll probably up the portion you pay for Internet service.
A set-top box: You might have to go out and buy a box that connects to the Internet. Choices include Blu-Ray players, Xbox, Playstation, Roku Player, D-Link box, etc. Prices run $60 and up.

ODD BOOKS

2012-05-19T16:31:28Z

Four slim volumes from Maker Press can help you rule the world, or at least a small country. “Slim Volume” is a common phrase in publishing, but these four are really slim: 60-90 pages.

– “DIY Satellite Platforms,” by Sandy Antunes; $8. It may sound strange but you can build your own satellite. Hold the weight down to one kilogram (2.2 pounds) and you can think about launching it. CubeSatKit.com sells kits for doing this and charges about $40,000 if you want to actually put it into orbit. InterOrbital.com uses a tubular design and plans to charge $8,000 per launch. Other countries and private companies also sell launch services. (You don’t neccesarily have to launch your satellite; that’s just for serious types.)

– “Making Android Accesories With IOIO,” by Simon Monk; $7. This is not about making apps for Android phones but about making devices that can be controlled by an Android phone. Got that? Good. The devices not only receive instructions by phone, but can transmit back to the phone.

– “Environmental Monitoring With Arduino,” by Emily Gertz and Patrick Di Justo; $8. Make your own Geiger counter, examine water purity and create other environmental monitors, using the Italian open-design Arduino board.

– “Getting Started With Netduino,” by Chris Walker; $20. This is the most expensive of the four slim volumes and teaches you how to use the Netduino, a specialized version of the Arduino board. Uses Microsoft.net to remotely control motors and other devices.

LEARNING A LANGUAGE LIVE

2012-05-18T18:01:17Z

“PlaySay” for iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad is a free game that teaches you Spanish by giving you practice with a real person from another country. Listen to a phrase in Spanish, then tap the record button to record yourself repeating it; your Spanish-speaking partner will hear only the English equivalent. When he or she responds, you’ll hear the answer in Spanish, with an English translation.

The app gives you feedback, like “great pronunciation,” or prompts you to try again. When you’ve said your phrase, you have to wait for the other person to get back to the app and respond before you can go on to the next level. Our player in Barcelona was quick, and we had quite a conversation going. You can try it with others as well. We chose native speakers in Spain, Mexico, Chile and Peru. It seemed better and more fun than most language games, because you’re playing with a real person.

GETTING WITH IT

2012-05-17T16:09:40Z

Our 89-year-old aunt’s iPad arrived the other day and for several days it stayed in the box. (Imagine, for the sake of contrast, a 3 year-old’s reaction. He’d have it out of there in a minute and would probably have it figured out in 15.)

Still, our aunt is very excited about it. She just had to wait until she finished hosting a seniors’ tennis tournament. She calls the iPad her “computer” and said she talked to someone about Wi-Fi, whatever that is. She called tech support but said she couldn’t understand what they were explaining. You’d think they would know how to speak to the elderly. She’s actually completely coherent and reads newspapers every day but this is her first computer of any kind.

Kenny S from Crossloop is starting a club for seniors, giving them a community to interact with and teaching them how to show off to family members how much they know. You can find him at crossloop.com/kennys.

SELL YOUR TV OR MOVIE SCRIPT TO AMAZON

2012-05-15T15:00:45Z

Amazon is now producing sitcoms and children’s TV for their “Instant Video” service on the web. If you have a script, you can submit it and get an answer within 45 days. That’s a far cry from the runaround most writers get when pitching scripts. Hooray for the digital age.

To submit your script, head to Studios.Amazon.com. Studios, launched in 2010, has received 7,000 scripts so far, and has 15 movie projects under development. The TV venture is new.

If your TV script is chosen for development, you’ll get $10,000. If it gets distributed on Amazon Instant Video, you get $55,000 plus five percent of royalties on toy and T-shirt sales. They also offer $33,000 for various writing assignments, and contests with prizes of $12,000.

SAVING A BUCK ON APPLES

2012-05-14T20:55:37Z

It turns out that buying a Mac or iPad at an online store like Amazon, MacMall or MacConnection, is often cheaper than buying one at an Apple store.

That struck us as pretty odd because of the way Apple closely controls it’s pricing, But a deal’s a deal, and we’re not going to knock it. Next question: Should you wait for a later version or go for it now? DealNews.org helps you decide. Click on “When to Buy a Mac” to get the results of three years worth of price research. (They also sell refurbished MacBooks.)

DealNews found that MacBook Pros experienced a substantial drop in price, as did other Apple products, not long after their introduction. The latest MacBook Pro came out in October and saw discounts of up to $300 three months later. Prices went frrom $1799 to $1499.

Here’s their general Apple buying advice; with prices depending on memory sizes:

The MacBook Air: Wait a couple days when a new one comes out and save $49; wait three months and save $299.
IPad, wait two months, save $49. Wait 12 months, save $139.
IPhone: Wait 11 days, save $39.

APP TESTING

2012-05-10T17:02:02Z

If you ever wanted to get paid for testing iPhone, iPad, Android or Blackberry apps, head over to UserTesting.com. Answer four questions about your experience with an app or a mobile website and get $10. To sign up, click the “We’re Hiring” link at the bottom of the UserTesting home page.

UserTesting.com is a useful site for programmers who want to find out if their apps are user-friendly. Screen capture software creates a video of the user experience, showing where the users tapped and where they got bogged down. Prices start at $39 for one user test or $87 for a panel of three testers.

GOOGLE DRIVE

2012-05-09T17:58:15Z

Just after we wrote about Microsoft’s Skydrive’s free 25 gigabytes of online storage, they started charging for it. They’re still king of the freebie hill with seven free gigabytes, but the competing new Google Drive is worth a spin.

Google Drive (Drive.Google.com) gives you five gigabytes free, and unlike other storage sites, lets you edit the documents you store. That’s because it connects seamlessly to Google Docs, which has it’s own word processor. And — as they might say on late night TV — any documents you create with the Google Docs word processor don’t count toward using up the five gigabytes of storage. If you need 25 gigabytes, it costs $2.49 a month.

The built-in search function in Google Drive makes it easy to find saved documents and photos in any of 30 file types. It’s supposed to be able to identify a person in a photo, such as Steve Jobs, without any caption. Well, that’s the theory. In our tests, it could only find Steve Jobs’ photo if it was already labeled “SteveJobs.”

To get it, start by downloading a small program to your PC or Mac. You don’t have to install it, but having the drive on your desktop makes it easier to organize stuff into folders. Once you do that, your files and folders will be available on any computer you use, as soon as you sign in to your Google account. This is totally significant, because you might be out there in the cosmic ether with just a smartphone or one of the new tablets. An Android app for Google Drive is also available, and an iPhone app is coming soon. CNETtv.com has a good video called “Get Started With Google Drive”

FIXING THE PICTURE ONLINE

2012-05-08T18:19:25Z

Photo editing doesn’t have to be difficult or expensive. We’ve found a lot of free photo editors for use online.

For example, go to Pixlr.com and click the “Express” link to get some amazing photo effects without having to download anything to your computer. It all happens in your browser window. We clicked on “Webcam” to let the website use our computer’s built-in camera to snap a picture. Then we added a frame and improved the color. Amazingly, we looked younger and better, which is just the way we see ourselves. We also tried uploading a photo stored on our machine. After that, we added text and clicked “autofix” to improve brightness and color automatically. Other tools include “airbrush,” “rotate,” “red eye,” “liquify” and dozens of others.

This was so much fun we wondered why Facebook paid $1 billion recently for “Instagram.” (Oh well, easy come, easy go.) Instagram applies some interesting color filters to your smartphone photos and makes it easy to either monitor the photo albums of others or gain followers for your own photo albums. But Instagram has a lot of competitors, such as Pixlr.com/o-matic, PicYou.com and PicPlz.com, and they don’t require an iPhone or Android phone.

Photoshop.com is another free photo editor. It’s from Adobe and has all the basic fixes, such as red-eye and brightness control, and adds special effects like “pop color,” which turns your photo to black and white except for one color, say the color of your nephew’s shirt, to make it really stand out. Another tool we liked was “sketch,” which makes the photo look like a drawing.

THE NEW WORDPERFECT IS JUST ABOUT PERFECT

2012-05-07T18:08:56Z

Corel’s WordPerfect has long been a favorite with lawyers and bureaucrats. But the new version should draw other users as well.

WordPerfect Office, like Microsoft Office, comes with a slew of programs, including word processing, a spreadsheet and presentation software. Unlike Microsoft Office, however, WordPerfect Office also includes programs to publish e-books, organize PDFs, create zip files, edit videos and a tool to automate the legal citation process.

The new version, X6, allows automatic “Bates numbering.” We mentioned that to a lawyer friend and he said “What’s Bates numbering?” (Bates numbering is a system for indexing and time stamping sections of a brief for the court.) We guess he’s not a trial lawyer.

WordPerfect Office X6 also shows you how your document or show-and-tell presentation will look on an iPhone or Android Phone. It also adds a routine for easy publishing to a Kindle. Long overdue is support for multiple monitors. Using two displays is handy for those who like to put a document on one screen and a spreadsheet or some other file on another. You can also do this with a split screen option found in Windows and Macs, but you then lose a lot of screen real estate, as they call it.

WordPerfect has a tiny market share compared to Microsoft Word but we always liked the easy way it lets you arrange pictures or move blocks of text in your document: You move pictures and other marked blocks just by highlighting them with your mouse and dragging them wherever you want on the page. WordPerfect still has “reveal codes.” (This goes way back to the early days, when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth.) They reveal the formatting codes for a document, which lets you see and easily correct problems in the layout or fonts.

There’s a “home and student” version of WordPerfect Office for $99 and a free trial at Corel.com.