The Ins and Outs of Using Gadgetry

Great article about the simple tricks you can do with technology
We have all moved on from not being able to program the clock on the VCR or microwave but how many of us know all these simple tricks about phones, cameras and computers?
All of us have a friend who is clueless about their PC or phone - please pass this on to them

Every time a reader asks me a basic question, struggles with a computer or lets a cellphone keep ringing at a performance, I have the same thought: There ought to be a license to use technology.

By DAVID POGUE

I’m not trying to insult America’s clueless; exactly the opposite, in fact. How is the average person supposed to know the essentials of their phones, cameras and computers? There’s no government leaflet, no mandatory middle-school class, no state agency that teaches you some core curriculum. Instead, we muddle along, picking up scattershot techniques as we go. We wind up with enormous holes in our knowledge.

This week, for example, a reader asked me about those weird, square, pixelated black-and-white bar codes that are cropping up on billboards, movie posters, signs, magazine ads and business cards. Nobody ever bothered to explain them. (They’re QR codes — quick response bar codes. You can scan them with your iPhone’s or Android phone’s camera, using a special app that translates it into an ad or takes you to a related Web page.)

That interaction made me realize that it’s time to publish the first installment of what should be the Big Book of Basic Technology Knowledge — the prerequisite for using electronics in today’s society. Some may seem basic, but you’ll probably find at least a couple of “I didn’t know thats!” among them.

Cellphones

¶ Searching for a signal scarfs up battery juice appallingly quickly. Turn your phone off, or put it into Airplane Mode, before you travel out of cellphone range — for example, on a plane or, for AT&T users, Manhattan and San Francisco.

¶ When you need the phone number, address or directions for any commercial establishment, call 800-BING-411 for an amazingly good voice-activated agent. (Thank you, Microsoft.)

¶ You can skip the inane 15-second voice-mail instructions when leaving a message (“To page this person, press 5”) — if you know your friend’s cellphone carrier. If it’s Verizon, press * to cut directly to the beep. AT&T or Sprint, press 1. T-Mobile, press #. (Better yet: Do the world a favor and add this trick to your own greeting: “To cut to the beep, press 1.”)

¶ If you travel overseas, you may return to a smartphone bill for $5,000 or more, thanks to the staggering international Internet fees. (You might not even know your phone is online — if it checks e-mail every 15 minutes, for example.) Despite many well-publicized horror stories, some people still don’t realize they should call the cellphone company before traveling to buy a special temporary overseas plan.

Cameras

¶ The half-press trick eliminates the frustrating delay when you press a pocket camera’s shutter button. Frame your shot, then half-press the shutter button. The camera beeps when it has locked focus — and that’s the time-consuming part. When pushed the rest of the way down, you snap the picture instantly. No lag.

¶ Your flash is useless if the subject is more than about eight feet away. Turn it off. (This means you, concertgoers and football fans.)

¶ If you erase photos from your memory card accidentally, you can still recover them if you haven’t used the card since. For about $30, you can download memory-card recovery programs; Google “memory card recovery” to find them.

App Phones

¶ On the iPhone, the camera doesn’t snap the photo until you release the on-screen shutter button. That’s good to know if you want a steady, blur-free shot. Frame the shot with your finger on the button, then snap the photo by lifting off the screen instead of tapping it.

¶ On iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and Palm/H.P. phones, tap the Space bar twice at the end of a sentence. You get a period, a space and a capitalized next letter, without hunting for punctuation keys.

¶ Also on those phones, you can type dont, wont, youre, didnt and so on. The phone adds the apostrophe to those automatically. (But you’ll have to learn the difference between it’s and its.)

¶ On a BlackBerry, hold a letter key down to capitalize it.

The Web

¶ You can press Alt+D to highlight the Address bar at the top of your Web browser. Without touching the mouse, type the site name you want.

¶ You don’t have to type “http://www” into your Web browser. Just type “nytimes.com” or “dilbert.com,” for example. In Safari or Firefox, you can even omit the “.com.” In Internet Explorer, you can press Ctrl+Enter to add “.com,” or Ctrl+Shift+Enter for “.org.”

¶ You can tap the Space bar to scroll down by one screenful. Add the Shift key to scroll back up again. (You can also hit the Page Up/Page Down keys, if you have them.)

¶ When you’re filling an order form, you don’t have to slide six miles down the pop-up menu to choose your state. Instead, type the first letter to select it without the mouse. (If you get the wrong state, press the same key again. For example, press C once for California, again for Colorado and a third time for Connecticut.)

¶ When you get an error message — in a program, on your smartphone, on your tablet — search it on Google. You’ll find out what it means instantly.

¶ If you’re trying to paste some ridiculously long Web address where it would be confusing to read (or impossible to fit, as on Twitter), visit a site like Tinyurl.com or Bit.ly. These free sites convert long addresses into very compact ones.

Editing Text

¶ You can double-click a word to highlight it. (You don’t have to drag the mouse across it, in other words.) You can triple-click a word to select the entire paragraph.

¶ When you see highlighted text — in your word processor, for example, or in a Web browser address bar — you don’t have to delete it first. Just start typing.

¶ Sick of how Word automatically creates clickable links, boldface words, indented bulleted or numbered lists and other formatting as you type?

The on/off switches for these features exist, but they’re well hidden. In Word 2010 (Windows), open the File menu; click Options, Proofing, AutoCorrect Options, then AutoFormat Options. On the Mac (Word 2011), open the Tools menu; click AutoCorrect, then AutoFormat As You Type.

Mac Specials

¶ When you buy something online, don’t waste paper by printing the confirmation page. Instead, choose Print, and from the PDF pop-up menu, choose “Save PDF to Web Receipts Folder.” You get a beautiful PDF copy stashed in Documents, in a folder called Web Receipts.

¶ You can view most documents without opening a program to do it. At the desktop, highlight the icon and then tap the Space bar — a fantastic way to preview photos, but also great for Office documents, PDF files, movies, sounds and so on.

¶ Press Command-Delete to put a highlighted icon into the Trash.

Windows Specials

¶ When you want to send a file to someone, right-click its icon; from the shortcut menu, choose Send to Mail Recipient. Windows thoughtfully creates an outgoing e-mail message with the file attached. (If it’s a photo, Windows even offers to let you shrink them down to reasonable e-mailable size.)

¶ Ever wonder about the Windows-logo key? It sets off a host of useful functions: press it with F for Find, with D to see the desktop with all windows hidden, with L to lock the screen while you wander off to get coffee, and so on.

¶ You don’t have to pay for antivirus and anti-spyware software, year after year. Microsoft offers a perfectly good free security program.

All right, there’s a start. There are more waiting for you at nytimes.com/pogue.

Here’s hoping that your tech knowledge is just a little less sketchy.

E-mail: pogue@nytimes.com

Standardised Phone Accessories

From Pogue’s Posts. He discussed Mobile phone manufacturers unifying their power chargers. I hope they unify the other jacks too – earphones specifically. And why does it take till 2012? Anyway – a good move.

Who wants to bet Apple doesn’t change real quick? A safe bet I reckon

It’s also going to change. The GSM Association (a cellphone-company trade group) announced this week that its members have agreed to settle on a single, standard charger design for all cellphones—MicroUSB—and will aim for January 1, 2012 as the deadline (http://bit.ly/f9xqG).

So far, companies like AT&T, LG, Motorola, Nokia, Orange, Qualcomm, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, T-Mobile and Vodafone have signed the agreement. (It’s not clear to me whether non-GSM carriers like Verizon and Sprint will be part of this deal.)

But when you contemplate all the pointless, duplicated manufacturing, shipping, packaging and discarding of all those 51,000 tons of crummy black power bricks every year, this is the best news we gadget freaks have heard in a long time.

Christmas Gift Idea - Indestructible Phone

I found this posted on LifeHacker. I reckon there might be plenty of people who would like a nice size, near indestructible mobile phone.

It’s probably a bit late for a Xmas present recommendation but it is still a good idea and $550 with a 3 year warranty is quite reasonable for a good phone. Most people wouldn’t keep a mobile longer than 3 years – planned obsolescence is a killer these days

There's nothing more infuriating (or expensive) than a mobile phone that doesn't stand up to the most everyday of activities, like being smashed by a hammer, dropped in a beer bath or strapped to a rocket. If you've ever found yourself in this situation, Sonim has a sturdy solution to your woes. Engineered for sports enthusiasts and those who work in harsh environments, the military-spec, Bluetooth and Push-to-talk enabled XP1 is shockproof, waterproof, dustproof, extreme temperature-proof and, considering the 3-year unconditional warranty, moron-proof. Despite having been on the overseas market for over a year, the indestructible mobile remains the only one of its kind in Australia and is available at Crazy John's for $549 outright. The device is hardly pretty, but it is something to consider for any adrenaline junkie, drunk, klutz, brickie or astronaut on the lookout for the ultimate in non-breakable mobiles, this Christmas.

[LifeHacker Christmas Gift Guide]

The evolution of the Mobile phone

I thought this was very interesting – especially the way the phones ‘morph’ into one another. The video perspective doesn’t really show you the changing scale of phones though. Those early phones were over 1kg – we have whole laptops that are lighter now.

I also noticed the time lag – we must get our mobiles here in Oz a lot slower than their release in the US, etc.

Check out the stats on the number of phones sold and messages and stuff. Amazing really.

SMS cost 4x more than data from the Hubble

I knew those phone providers were ripping us off!

A University of Leicester space scientist has worked out that sending texts via mobile phones works out to be far more expensive than downloading data from the Hubble Space Telescope.

Dr Nigel Bannister’s calculations were used for the Channel 4 Dispatches programme “The Mobile Phone Rip-Off”.

He worked out the cost of obtaining a megabyte of data from Hubble – and compared that with the 5p cost of sending a text.
He said: “The bottom line is texting is at least 4 times more expensive than transmitting data from Hubble, and is likely to be substantially more than that.

Full article at Physorg.com

Interesting Uses of Camera Mobile Phones To Stay Productive

I thought there was really some useful tips there. Living in a small town I don't often have the parking issue and lets just say that checking if my hair is ok before the party is not a concern :). But a photo of something, a place or whatever, as a reminder of a date is brilliant as the date and time is stored with the picture. Photos of complex items like cables could also be helpful.

The cameras in newer mobile phones are getting better. Most are 2megapixel and some are 4 or 8 megapixel. But that's only half the story as the lens in a camera is more telling of the photo quality than the megapixels alone. So the lens in a mobile phone will never be the best and most stand alone digital cameras will be better.

In some instances a higher resolution photo would be better - e.g. if you want to scan the text or have fine detail to prove the dints on your rental car. So if you have easy access to your digital camera for these sort of things then use it instead

I am going to use that grocery list one though - I always forget something! And I don't know about you but I carry my mobile all the time and hardly ever use it so this might make it a little more useful!

Some creative and productive uses of camera mobile phones (and digital cameras):

Computer Screen Capture - You can use the Mobile Phone cameras for capturing screenshots of error messages that popup while you are reinstalling a copy of Windows or modifying some BIOS settings. In situations like the dreaded Blue Screen, Print-Screen key is useless but any phone-cam will get the job done.

Remember Dates - Some time back, I had gone to a nursery school for submitting the admission form of my son. I don’t remember the exact date now but luckily, I had snapped a picture of the school and so that date is automatically stored with the image.

Cable Connections - Before removing the cables from your home theatre system, gaming console or the computer, it is a good idea to capture the connections with your phone camera. Then you won’t have problems plugging the cables again in the right ports as the pictures will show you “what goes where”.

Use Mobile Phone as a Web Camera - There are some free utilities that will convert your mobile phone camera into a web cam for your computer. You can use the web camera via a USB cable or wirelessly through Bluetooth.

Car Parking - Most shopping malls here have huge underground parking but there aren’t any signboards so it gets tough to locate the car. So when you park the car, just look towards the escalator (or the exit door) and take a picture or record some video. This will save lot of effort (and time) when you return with all those heavy shopping bags.

Scan Printed Documents - Mobile phone camera can work as scanners for capturing clippings of text from newspapers, library books and printed magazines. Just photograph the page and use a service like Qipit or ScanR that extract the text out of pictures taken with a mobile phone. (See “Use Mobile Phone as a Scanner“)

Replace Paper and Pen - Your wife has prepared a long list of items that you are supposed to pick from the grocery story. Why tear down that paper from the diary or put extra pressure on your memory - just click. You can also use the camera phone for capturing information written on whiteboards, subway maps and notice boards.

Google Maps and Directions - You are travelling and need the driving directions from Google Maps onto your mobile phone. If your phone has no Internet or you are not too sure how to transfer data from computer to the phone, just open Google Maps, press F11 for full screen and click with your phone.

Rent A Car - If you are taking a car on rent, capture all the areas with dents and scratches so that you don’t run into a dispute when returning the car to the agent. Thanks CraftyGirl.

Security Weapon - Before you board a taxi in some unknown place, take a picture of the license plate and driver details that are generally written near the passenger seat. Email the picture to your spouse or friend as a security measure.

Shopping Alone - If you are in a store shopping without your spouse, get his/her opinion on the stuff you are about to purchase by emailing pictures though your phone. A word of caution here - some shop owners may consider your action as “digital shoplifting” and this may lead to an embarrassing situation.

As a Mirror - When you are about to reach the party, take a self-picture with your mobile phone to make sure that that makeup and hair style is in perfect condition.

Interesting Uses of Camera Mobile Phones To Stay Productive

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