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HOLDING ONTO A GREAT IDEA
Inspiration is fleeting. Brahms once raced wildly across a field to get home and write the notes of a new theme before it fled his mind completely.
Should a similar problem arise for you, you can use your phone as a note-taking device by dialing phone numbers for either of two free services. Maybe hum a few bars. The two services, ReQall.com and Jott.com, let you record your thoughts, even a simple to-do list, which can then be e-mailed, text-messaged or read back when you call again.
Your notes can be sent to your cell phone by text message, if you wish, and you can set the time for the transmission. You might want to get reminders when you're traveling. You can create a core list of repetitive tasks and just amend them as the dates change. Or send a phone message to a group of friends at once, to organize a get-together.
Both services use voice recognition to categorize your thoughts and lists. If you say "ask," ReQall will put an item in your to-do list; say "buy" and it puts an item in your shopping list. You can search any list by keyword.
The free version of the Jott service includes ads. If these bother you, Jott has a $4 per month plan that lets you use the service without listening to ads. You get 15 seconds of recording time for each call. For $13 a month, you get 30 seconds.
FREE STUFF
A business card from a maid service was left under our door -- we hope it wasn't a hint to clean up our office -- and on the back it said, "Business Cards Are Free at VistaPrint.com." We thought that was pretty interesting because it was a nice card, very attractive. This got us interested in VistaPrint, of course, so we went there and ordered some cards.
The larger question that most people ask at this point is how can a company support itself by giving out free products. Quite a few companies do this, particularly in software. Well, the answer is partly that the free product carries some promotional notice. In the case of the free business cards, it's the Web site on the back, so it's advertising.
The other part of the answer is that these companies sell other stuff. So if you go to the Web site, you can get the free item, but there are also other things for sale. VistaPrint sells personalized T-shirts and car-window decals and such, for example.
Speaking of free stuff, we have long used the free ad-blocking software Ad-Aware from Lavasoft.com and the AVG virus blocker from Grisoft.com. They're both good freebies, and both companies sell other programs that might entice you when you go to their Web sites. But you don't have to buy the other products, so what it boils down to is there really is a free lunch.
BACK TO BASIC
People who started using computers many years ago probably remember BASIC, a relatively simple and easy-to-learn programming language that allowed them to write their own programs. Some famous people have published small programs written in BASIC. Novelist Michael Crichton ("Jurassic Park," "Andromeda Strain," etc.), for example, wrote an Apple program many years ago for casting I Ching. Bill Gates must have written hundreds of programs in BASIC and is often credited with having invented the language.
Well, BASIC still lives. The name is an acronym for "Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code," and there are several versions. Microsoft sells its own, Visual BASIC, which includes commands for creating graphics and animation, in several editions. There's a free version called Visual BASIC Express Edition available from Microsoft.com. Visual BASIC provides the power to easily create Windows programs.
Joy recently began working with another version called REALbasic, which is $100 for the "personal edition" from RealSoftware.com, $500 for the professional version. Joy says it is both fun and real easy to follow. There are books on REALbasic, and a great video tutorial is available free on the Web site.
What sets REALbasic and other current versions of BASIC a long way apart from the early days is pre-set modules. In the old days, if you wanted your program to, say, connect to the Internet, you had to write a routine that would instruct the computer to connect to a modem and dial a certain number and enter certain codes, etc.
Well, why re-invent the wheel? Modules soon became available to perform common actions like connecting to a modem, and you could just copy those and plug them into your own program. Now the modules are labeled in a column that appears on the left of the screen; just drag-and-drop them into your program as the need comes up. You can create databases and even games in the BASIC language. REALbasic works with Windows, Mac and Linux.
THE NUMBERS REPORT
The social networking site Facebook.com now claims 80 million users worldwide, about the same as MySpace.com. Another site, LinkedIn.com, popular with business users, claims 24 million users. A much larger number of people visit these sites each month without registering.
BOOKS
You can't get real chemistry sets anymore, not like the ones Bob had as a kid. Lawyers fixed that. But you can still make things bubble up at home with experiments described in Robert Thompson's "Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments," $20 from makezine.com. Learn how to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen, synthesize rayon from paper, use forensic tests for blood, drugs and poisons.
NOTE: Readers can search several years of columns at the "On Computers" Web site: www.oncomp.com. You can e-mail Bob Schwabach at bobschwab@aol.com and Joy Schwabach at joydee@oncomp.com.
