It includes some games, utilities, productivity…etc. Some of the programs we may be reviewing later.
Category: Lifestyle
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Software for Starving Students
We’re always on the hunt for free stuff. Lifehacker was nice enough to point us to a site which has put together a package of free software with an installer on a CD. Software for Starving Students.
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Anonymous and Free Phone Numbers
Some say that with the prevalence of cell phones and internet telephony, that landlines are dead. We aren’t quite sure about that…but technology is continuing to enhance the old system.
Craigsnumber, apparently created with the goal of allowing those posting on popular site Craigslist to provide a phone number that will keep them anonymous, offers a temporary extension, although with limited area codes, that will be forwarded to your real line. You can specify the length of activation. Certainly a simple and uncomplicated service. Lifehacker has more details.
There are alternatives, of course. Freedigits.com offers a free VoIP phone line with a random US number. Their goal is to encourage you to go with them for paid service, but there are no strings attached to their free offer.
Another option is Grandcentral.com, which also offers both a free and a paid service. Their philosophy is one phone number…for life. Their free service offers three phones, caller ID, the ability to switch phones in the middle of a call, custom ringtones while waiting for you to pick up, the ability to record any call with a single button press, as well as SPAM blocking. The free service has a limitation of 100 minutes a month of calls received through them. It doesn’t offer any service not offered elsewhere as add-ons to other paid services, but it is a good option for some. Lifehacker reviews it here.
If none of these options work for you…you can always just pay for VoIP service. Just remember, despite our skepticism about customer service…if you give them money, they are supposed to help you. If you don’t…they have an excuse not to.
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Why do our electronics Break?
We thought we would point our readers toward this CNET discussion about Why Our Gadgets Break? It seems illogical that older electronics were built to better quality standards, while the new ones are built cheaply and designed to fail within a shorter period of time in order to encourage upgrading, but that is the truth with many things.
Engineers have designed objects designed to fail for years. Otherwise, how will they sell electronics to people satisfied with their old reliable pieces? Even if they themselves are not designing this way…the push to make the cost less expensive forces them to use cheaper materials…integrate components…The only positive side is that it forces engineers to find clever and often better ways to do things with less.
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Consumer Electronics Customer Service Contacts
The Consumerist has links to lists of Consumer Electronics companies and how to contact them. Not much to say…except…useful. For the entry, click here.
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Ten Minute Mail
Sometimes, simple ideas are the best. Take 10minutemail.com for a temporary email address that expires in ten minutes. The best use is to receive emails for organizations that require sending you informtion by email to verify yourself, but follow up with spam.
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Backup Your Windows Notebook Now or Face Dire Consequences!
We like the title of this article from the Mobility Guru a great deal. Backup is something we save for the last minute too often…and ultimately forget, dooming us in an emergency. It is not a matter of IF you need to back up your data, it is WHEN.
For the frugal individual, try an old hard drive. For a minimal fee, you can convert it to USB operation and use it as backup. There is also the CD/DVD option, which will definitely work for some data. For the average person remember…your media files will not change, and thus can be backed up on a few DVDs rather efficient. For frequently updated information, such as application data, a copy of your registry, and your documents, you can use the old hard drive, supplemented with regular optical disc backups to back that drive up.
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You Can Now Break the Software Locks on your Cell Phone
As CNN reports, new copyright rules announced Wednesday allow cell phone owners to break software locks in order to use them with competing carriers.
The U.S. Copyright Office determined that consumers cannot enjoy full legal use of their cell phones because of software locks added by the providers block access to the phones’ programs. Since ownership of the cell phone is technically that of the customer, restricting the software means that they are putting an artificial limit on the hardware.
For those of you choosing to stay with your provider, the advantages come with features that are locked out. For example, many providers lock out the feature allowing you to transfer ringtones or pictures taken with a camera phone to a computer using a data cable so that they can charge you for transfer over the network. Ringtones and such are big business.
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Nintendo for the AARP Generation
Nintendo showed up last month at the Life@50+ event, the New York Times reports, sponsored by AARP in Anaheim, California. Promoting games to generation more used to board and card games might seem like a stretch or a reach, but it is apparently working in some countries.
Nintendo in Japan has been focusing on producing products for an older generation, including a which puts players through a daily routine of number games, word puzzles, and reading exercises. They were offering the US Version of this, called Brain Age, at the AARP event.
We think the idea of designing computer games for an older generation is a good one. Marketing to them may be a bit harder, but as with many other things, if you feed an untapped market with well-designed, thought-out, and tested products, you will not only be successful financially, but you will be starting a new trend.
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Ten Things Not to Do With Your Hard Drive
We’re always amused when we read of the foolish things people have done with their important information. Protecting your data, if that data is important to you, takes some foresight.
The people at Silicon.com have put together briefs of foolish things people have done to their hard drives or other data sources. The list includes:
- Formatting your drive…ten times
- Leaving a banana to rot on top of your hard drive
- Mailing your drive in for repair in a pair of dirty socks
- Dropping it
- Spraying WD-40 into a drive to quiet it
- Dropping it from a helicopter
Now…we can’t emphasize this enough…backup your data…protect your data…disaster may strike at any moment. And if it does…the services that specialize in data extraction cost big bucks.
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For Those of You Who Like Macs
As Wired reports, Justin Long, well known as the face of the Mac in their recent Get a Mac campaign, will not appear in that series of commercials when they resume.
Long plays opposite John Hodgman, who plays the role of a PC. Now, we think Hodgman steals the show from Long, despite the fact that Long plays the product that Apple is trying to push.
For years, we did criticize the Mac when you had to buy all the hardware from Apple and could not do anything with it yourself. We still recall the Performa which we spent hours trying to disassemble to replace the battery that controlled the clock. Even that supposedly required an Apple technician. The Performa(feel free to comment to disagree) stunk as a computer.
But in recent years, the Mac unveiled OS X – which is actually a UNIX based operating system. That allowed hundreds of open-source programs designed for UNIX systems to be easily ported over. The creation of USB as a standard had already made the purchase of peripherals that were Mac compatible easy, and then Apple opted to switch the processor line for the Macintosh to Intel, the processor that most PCs are based on(No, we aren’t forgetting AMD). Intel processors aside, the hardware standardization and the switch to an operating system that incorporated the best Apple GUIs had to offer with the power of UNIX removed most of our fundamental objections to the Macintosh.
That just left the price point and the fact you can’t build one yourself from parts. But, we have no trouble considsering them as an option for those for which they are suited. For those of us with tight budgets, a PC running a free Linux distribution might be almost as good. Of course, Linux and free means no tech support.