On Computers

Modify your phone to open your garage door

A reader wanted to use his smartphone as a garage door opener.

What a great idea. That way, if the homeowner gets a ride home from someone else and doesn't have the opener with them, they can use their phone to raise the door. And that would let anyone else in the family who has the app on their phone do it, too.

We found out how to do this through a video tutorial on Lifehacker.com. Once there, search on "Monitor and Control Your Garage Door with Your Phone." Our reader said he got it going with the help of his tech-savvy son. All a person needs is a smartphone, a Bluetooth headset, a $1 transistor from RadioShack and a soldering iron. Oh, and you might need a smart kid.

How to Buy a Windows Laptop

You might think that you could just amble into Office Depot or Staples and buy whatever laptop felt right to the touch. But frankly, all the different specs can seem confusing.

Really, there are only a few considerations to think about. The PC should have "Intel Core i7" or "Intel Core i5," which references the speed of the central processor. You don't need i7 unless you're a serious gamer, do scientific work or edit large movie projects. When we bought a Windows laptop about four years ago, it had i3, which shows how these things have moved along.

The new computer should have four to eight gigabytes of RAM (random access memory). RAM is different from storage, which is usually on a hard disk drive. Get the most RAM you can afford.

Weight is another big consideration. Lenovo now makes the lightest-ever laptop, the LaVie Z H550. At 1.72 pounds, it's around half the weight of the three-pound 13-inch Macbook Air, which feels like nothing. However, at $1,300, the Lenovo is also expensive for a Windows machine, and we find a 13-inch screen too cramped.

If you're wondering about a laptop with a touch screen, we say forget it. Using touch is natural on a tablet, not so natural when the screen is perpendicular to you. But it could be useful for a kitchen recipe computer.

Cheaper Calls

A company called KnowRoaming makes calls cheaper for international travelers by offering a $30 SIM card that automatically switches between providers to eliminate roaming fees. It's thin and sits on top of a regular smartphone card, so you never have to take it out.

Whether or not this is a good deal depends on how you travel. We have a friend who travels so much she calls herself "Nomad Nana" and even writes a blog under that name. She says she avoids roaming fees simply by buying phone cards in every country she visits.

But there are times when she goes somewhere and stays for a while, giving her plenty of time to buy a local service card.

If you're a business traveler who moves in and out of places quickly, you may be due for a conference call the minute you arrive in a new country. If you use a KnowRoaming card, you'll be switched to the local service as soon as you land. If the next day you find yourself in another country, it switches again. We don't know anyone who jets around this much, but we worry that we just don't give enough tips to the super-rich and it's time to catch up.

An alternative is the Sim4Globe SIM card. It works with any unlocked phone in more than 190 countries. Calls cost up to 87 percent less. There's no contract; just sign in and view the cost per country. By the way, international tourism increased 5 percent in 2013. That's 52 million extra people taking selfies every time they land.

Internuts

• Midomi.com listens while you sing or hum a tune and then tells its name. Sometimes. It never did recognize our rendition of La Bamba, but was quick to get the Zulu folk song, "The Lion Sleeps Tonight."

• USTechVets.org helps veterans transition into civilian jobs. It includes educational resources and a job bank. Their resume data base has almost a million resumes.

App Happy

• CCleaner, free for Android, gets rid of junk on your smartphone. We've used it on our computers, and the phone app is just as good. It got rid of 898 megabytes of useless files, almost a gigabyte. A $2 app for iPhone/iPad called CCleaner Doctor is made by a different company but does a good job, too.

• Mia the Happy Helper is a free iPhone/iPad/Android game for kids ages 4 to 6. (We remember the first version from more than a dozen years ago.) Mia is a mouse on a mission. Sometimes she's looking for hidden objects, other times she's playing a small piano, sometimes she counts. The $2 version adds more missions.

Books: Crypto Currency

Bitcoin is a much bigger deal than we thought.

In the new book The Age of Crypto Currency by Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey, two veteran Wall Street Journal reporters, we learned that bitcoin is used all over the world where banking is a problem.

An Afghani teenager, for example, traded her bitcoins for an Amazon gift certificate and bought her first laptop. Without bitcoin, her earnings would likely have disappeared into her father or brother's bank account. In Mali refugee camps, people receive bitcoins as text messages on $5 phones. Without cryptocurrencies, workers often have to depend on strangers to carry money back home to relatives.

The book, $28 from St. Martin's Press, also gives readers a concise history of money. In so doing, the authors show how bitcoin might eventually be a more stable currency than what we use now, hard as that is to believe, because it can get government out of the equation. The book had a big write-up in Economist magazine recently and is getting other rave reviews.

Bob and Joy can be contacted by email at [email protected] and [email protected].

SundayMonday Business on 01/26/2015

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