respublica

How much do you know about science and technology?

The PEW Research group has a 13 question quiz which will let you find out just how much you know. 

Never been a science or math person but even though I didn't get them all correct, I'm relieved I didn't miss them all.

Info about your cell phone contract

Recently more reporting is being done about cell phone contracts and this particular piece of information is worth knowing. What you can do about it is not quite as clear.

From the New York Times technology writer David Pogue: 

When you buy an iPhone or Android phone, the true cost is around 600 dollars but with a contract you'll pay 200 dollars up front and pay off the rest each month (20 $ normally) as part of your two year contract. But, once you’ve finished paying off your phone, your monthly bill doesn’t go down. You keep reimbursing the cellphone company as though you still owed jon it. Forever.

This is why most experts are now recommending you upgrade to a new phone as soon as your two year contract is over. Why keep paying for something which is paid off, or as David Pogue put it, "what if you had to keep making mortgage payments after your loan was fully repaid?"

T-Mobile is the first cell phone company to put a stop to this practice and it remains to be seen whether the big guys at Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint will follow suit. T-Mobile will also be doing away with the locked in two year contract, you can leave anytime for any reason without penalty.

A note about T-Mobile-they aren't yet up with the big guys in offering the fastest internet network or even selling the iPhone. But they are working on this and will soon be selling the iPhone 5.

Read the whole article to get a good look at how cell phone companies operate get as much money out of you as possible.

Technology and eye glasses

Back in 2006 there was news of the development of eyeglasses with flat lenses that can change their focusing power at the flick of a switch, allowing the wearer to change their focus from the horizon to something a few inches away in a split second.

Haven't heard of anyone owning a pair of these yet though.

Now we hear of Google Glass which is Google's attempt make wearable computing mainstream, and it's effectively a smart pair of glasses with an integrated heads-up display and a battery hidden inside the frame. Surf the web through your glasses!

We shall see how this goes over.

Little iPhone tricks you may not realize

From the NY Times today a couple of hints on how to make things easier when writing on the iPhone or iPad. 

When you are typing words and need to switch over to numbers or symbols or other punctuation marks and get weary of touching the .?123 box and back again to letters, try this: press the .?123 key down and slide your finger to the number or punctuation mark you need. Once you slide over and select the character, you can resume typing without having to tap back and forth between the different keyboards.

Cool, eh? It works!

Pressing and holding down a vowel or other letters that use accent marks reveals a pop-up list of accented characters to choose from, like é or ü. 

Quickly tapping the shift key twice will allow you to type in all caps. Only in iPhone 5 that I can tell.

Access all sorts of smileys, animals, shapes, and other peculiarities from your emoji-enabled keyboard. Just go to Settings > General > Keyboard and tap International Keyboards. Add a new keyboard and select Emoji. Now when you type, just tap the globe button and choose the emoji that fits the mood.

Thursday tech, just say no

I didn't realize I woke up this morning ready to gripe about everything until I started reading the papers. Here are a couple of "please no" new tech items which we really don't need and which will drive us crazy if we happen to be around someone who uses them.

Mobile Karaoke app so you can practice your singing anywhere. 

A small but full featured keyboard for the iPad Mini. Isn't this a bit of overkill? I mean, seriously, the Mini is meant to be portable, light and unobtrusive, food for browsing and consuming information. Adding a keyboard seems bizarre.

 

Eco machines

Did you know there was such a thing as an Eco Machine which will allow you to insert your old cell phone and then receive money for it? There is! Many of us have old phones in a drawer because the companies don't want your old one.

Regionally, only St. Clair Square and and Alton Square now have new Eco ATM machines where you lay your phone in it, the machine scans it and searches for the highest worldwide price, then gives you the money on the spot.

Crazy right? I'd love to know if this really works and if you do really get money right away, money that is maybe more than a couple of bucks. In reality certain phones will naturally be worth more than others.

Taking a screenshot of your tv is not what it used to be

Did you ever try to take a picture of something on tv in the pre digital days? I bet you did and what you got was an image of a mess of lines, maybe one wide black line running through the middle or just a white screen.

Well those days are over since the dawn of digital. Digital cameras, digital/high def tvs all make getting a picture of something on tv almost real life. I've been aware of this for a while but never paid too much attention to it until yesterday when I took a picture of little Max who was visiting and got the tv in the background as well.

Yes, there's Ina Garten plain as day. Taking a snapshot of something on tv may be rare, but it is now possible to get a pretty darn good image. Just an FYI

Calibrating your tv

This article gives some advice on the best settings on that flat screen we now all have. Some of this I understand, some I don't, but the information is interesting and helpful if you want to use something other than the default settings which come with your set.

The author claims the best setting is the cinema setting. And, new to me is a 'demo setting' also called torch setting by experts and means something similar to what you see on the showroom at Best Buy. But that setting is not what tv experts think of as a true rendering. He also claims that plasmas are the very best as opposed to LCD but that they're not being made as much these days because they don't stand out in showrooms.

I'm going to check and see if we have a demo setting. However, the way the average person can make their flat screen tv look its best is to have it hooked up to a digital HD box. All of us now must have a digital line, but we don't all have our tvs hooked to high def. And it's high def which makes all the difference.

We have only one of our tvs with high def converter because you need a box for each tv, at least with Charter. And that gets expensive. This is the main reason we'd consider The Dish or some other company, I'd love to have our other tv's look as good as our main one.

Photographing your Christmas tree

I've noticed a lot of enthusiasm for taking pictures of Christmas trees and outside lights among people I know and as everyone has discovered, it's hard to get a true rendering of the softly lit scene. So I've come up with a couple of hints which may help, hints I've learned after years of trial and error, reading advice from experts, and just plain luck. 

One technique which will always bring up a clear photo of a Christmas tree is to use flash, but by using the flash you lose all the ambiance of the lighted tree. There's very little color and the picture is as you'd see it during the day with no lights on. That's not what we want. Like this 

Or this:

If you take the picture with no flash, the ending picture normally has some blur, like this:

What you really want are photos more like this:

The same goes for your outside lights

Sometimes the best time to shoot your outside lights is just at dusk, when it's not quite full dark. Just make sure you don't get any of the still lightish sky in the picture.

Now what's the best way to do this? My advice is from an amateur perspective, not a professional who has all the bells and whistles, lens, meters and tripods. 

If you have a pocket sized digital camera i.e. a Canon or Lumix or Kodak or any of the many on the market there will be a dial near the shutter button to change the settings so that the camera will know what you're trying to achieve. I've had good luck with the night scenery or candlelight setting on my Lumix and Canon. It also works with a digital SLR as well. But here's the main thing you want to do in conjunction with this setting, put the camera on something stable and then push the shutter button. I have been carrying around a wooden kitchen bar stool that we normally sit on.  Spending several hundred dollars for a tripod is not something most of want to do and using what you have can work well. 

Put the camera on whatever you have, make sure the flash is off, check the scene in the viewfinder, push the button and then take your hand off the camera. Most of the time the shutter will stay open for a few seconds to record the scene. Leave it alone until it is completely finished. Try this a few times until you find the best way to keep everything steady and you'll be surprised how much better your Christmas lights turn out.

Fire up that phone

Power outages in NYC brought about more than just life in a cold dark house, it also meant people had no way to charge their phones. And our phones these days are lifelines to the world beyond. Some folks in Brooklyn are able to charge their phones with camp stoves made by a company called BioLite. The BioLite people set up a charging station on the street and let people charge their devices. 

The link has a photo of the camp stoves charging. The BioLite camp stoves are powered by fire which does something with air to produce a small amount of electricity which in turn will charge. Not only that, but these small things will also cook a small meal and power up LED lights. You want to do this outdoors, however. 

On some level it seems like a smart idea to have one of these in the garage or basement, just in case.