The Gadgets Page

Anita Sarkeesian has created a brilliant analysis of the boring tropes that video games have been using ever since the beginning of gaming. Her YouTube channel, Feminist Frequency, has all the videos, but here is a playlist of the entire series:

After watching these videos, I suddenly felt a huge relief. THIS is why I don’t like so many games. I don’t really want to save the damsel in distress. I don’t want to earn rewards that take the clothes off the women in the video game. I always felt as if I was not the target audience of the video game industry and now I know why. They have LITERALLY written games that only appeal to less than half the population. LESS THAN HALF.

That is so sad and fiscally idiotic. Women want to go on adventures, too. We don’t want to save our husbands or boyfriends. We want to bring them and our friends along with us. Write games for EVERYONE and you will sell more. I can’t stress how important this is. A good game that lets EVERYONE play will make millions of dollars. It will sell game consoles. I wish I could reach into the minds of every game designer out there and make them understand that if they STOP writing games for straight males and START writing games for EVERYONE, then they will make so much more money.

Plus, I could really use a fun and interesting game right now. I’m getting a little sick of all the Bejeweled rip offs.

My contract is almost up. I have been unhappy with AT&T ever since I was forced to change over to them to get that very first iPhone so long ago. I used to use Sprint and I loved them, so it was hard to accept that changeover. It’s time to make another change and I had no idea which company to go with.

Fortunately, the Coverage? app really helped me decide. Here is a quick video describing how the Coverage? app works.

I have been using Coverage? for years in order to tell whether I would be able to use my phone when I travel, but today I used it to decide what company I should go with.

The MOST important coverage is how it works where I LIVE, so I looked at the map for each of them:

Sure, there were a few dead spots in the Sprint and T-Mobile coverage, but Sprint offers virtually unlimited data, so that seemed like a really good option for me. It did until I decided to check some of my favorite vacationing spots, like Quartzsite. That map told a VERY different story.

Sprint and T-Mobile were useless in Quartzsite, so our annual trek with the camper would have me go completely dark every year. That wasn’t good. Then, I tried the holy grail of phone coverage: Valley of Fire State Park in Nevada. For years, we have wanted to camp there, but have avoided it because we had no phone coverage. When I checked the map today, I was shocked to see that Verizon had the entire park covered! AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile are no where to be found in Valley of Fire State park.

It’s amazing how quickly all my opinions can change just based on a few snapshots. I hadn’t even considered Verizon when I was thinking of switching, but now it is the only one I’m interested in. Coverage? has helped me numerous times when we have planned our camping trips. It’s why I reviewed it on Starling Travel instead of here:

• Starling Travel – Do You Have Cell Coverage? Find Out With Coverage?

This is the first time I’ve used the app to help me decide which company to choose. I am additionally grateful for Coverage? for helping me all these years.

It sounds like a great deal, doesn’t it? All you have to do is download the Magzter app, pay the $9.99 a month fee and you can have access to over 2000 magazines and comics!

But I’ve been burned before… so I looked at the list of magazines and I thought I found paradise. All of my favorites were listed on their website! I got so excited.

I added the magazines and signed up for the Gold account. Then I tried to download one of my favorites. Oh… that one isn’t included on the Gold account. Oh well, I’ll try another one… That one isn’t included either. Sure, it LOOKS like I can read the magazine, but the only thing that downloads is a preview issue that has about 6-10 pages from the latest issue.

Okay… well… what magazines ARE included?

When I went to the Gold Magazines and chose the ones from the U.S., there were only 34 magazines. THIRTY-FOUR. Not even one magazine in my favorites was included. NOT ONE. When I allowed the magazines to be from any country and chose the ones that were in English, there were a bunch more added to the total, but I’m really not interested in reading Elle India or New Zealand Women’s Fitness.

So, yet again, I cancelled the introductory subscription and deleted the app. Why do I keep falling for these things?

Via: Magzter launches “all you can read” magazine subscription for $9.99 per month | TUAW: Apple news, reviews and how-tos since 2004

LONG ago, I bought the Tilt Shift Generator App. It is one of my favorite apps to use to create beautiful pictures.

• TiltShift Generator – Fake Miniature on the App Store on iTunes

I mostly use it to add a little pizzaz to a normal photo, rather than making a tilt shift photo. For example, I recently earned my one year chip at Overeaters Anonymous and talked about it on Starling Fitness. Here is the photo for that entry in its original form.

And here it is with the tweaks from Tilt Shift Generator.

I really liked how the selective focus on the one year chip really made it stand out. That little extra makes a photo even better at times.

I have been using this app for well over five years and I absolutely adore it. If you are looking for a quick way to make your photos look just a tad bit better, this is a great app for you, and at only 99 cents, it’s a great deal!

What if you had unlimited messaging, photo messaging and voice messaging and it was all free? Some people don’t have that on their phone plan. Or some people regularly need to talk to people internationally. I actually have an app that provides this for me called WhatsApp.

• WhatsApp

Here’s a quickie review of it from Cult of Mac. This review is almost a year old, but it’s a good introduction.

I like that it works on wifi, without sucking down my data or minutes. Additionally, there is a way to send voice messages. By holding down the microphone on the right, you can record a message and send it, just like phone messaging. This has been SO helpful to me because there is one person who I need to call and leave a message every day, but her phone is a nightmare. Sometimes the voice mail comes. Sometimes I just get a weird silence and no way to leave a message. I have NEVER had this trouble with WhatsApp.

I have always shied away from apps like this because I HAVE voice messaging on my phone. I HAVE text messaging on my phone. It’s just like iMessage… except ONE important thing…

Whomever I’m talking to doesn’t have to have an iPhone. This app works on iOS, Android, Blackberry, Nokia, Symbian AND Windows phones. Whatever your friend has, they can message, voice and photo message with you for FREE.

I downloaded Duolingo quite a while ago. It was a game. It acts like a game. It looks like a game. I set it up for only five minutes a day. I thought, I’ll play this for a while. See if I learn anything.

I set it for French.

I wanted to learn French so I could read the advertising posts on Facebook from Safari Alto, a camper manufacturer from Montreal, Canada. It was a humble goal, especially since they usually provide an English translation.

To be fair, I speak Spanish pretty well and took a semester of Latin in college, so this is the third time I’ve tackled a language. Some of the words are very similar to either the Spanish or Latin words I know, so I have a little bit of a head start. Still, I’m shocked.

After only a few months of practicing five minutes every day, I was able to read my first Safari Alto Facebook post:

I covered the English and was able to understand most of the French. It was such a feeling of liberation! I had only been playing with Duolingo for a couple months at that point and I could understand something!!

Then, yesterday, a friend linked to this video:

I was watching it on my phone, so I couldn’t read the English translations, but I UNDERSTOOD IT! I didn’t get the nuances of the fact that the cat didn’t live there, but I understood the punchline. He wanted the human to open the door because it was closed, not because he necessarily wanted to come in. “Porquoi?” “Se ferme!” Even now, it makes me laugh again.

All because of a silly little video game. I have spent a mere five minutes a day playing my game and now I can UNDERSTAND things. I’m not fluent. I’m not even able to understand the answer to a simple question like, “Where is the bathroom?” But I can understand the gist of things.

Thanks, Duolingo!

I am in a panic. When I loaded Google Reader this morning to look at my RSS feeds, they announced that it would be retired in July. That gives me MONTHS to find a new RSS reader, but I was sincerely ANGRY.

I know I SHOULDN’T be angry. Google Reader was a service that I was not paying for. I was happy to use it and never worried for a second that Google would pull a “Yahoo” and kill my beloved reader. Even though they crippled it by taking out all the things that my friends had shared and shoveling them into their Google+ monstrosity. I STILL believed that Google wouldn’t possibly kill Reader. Call me naive. It appears that Google is heading the route of so many companies before it, killing the things that they have created despite protests and beloved status.

So, I exported my subscriptions using Google Takeout and put them into Vienna, which is an open source RSS reader. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than Newsfire, which cost me ten bucks and couldn’t import the .xml file that Google provided me… grr…

I would be bothered by going back in time by about five years to a desktop RSS reader, just like the old days, but I’m not. I realized that I only read RSS when I’m on my “real” computer, so the fact that it’s not synced with my iPhone or iPad isn’t an issue. I just don’t read RSS on my iPhone or iPad, mostly because reading RSS is my form of work and work is VERY difficult to do on my phone.

In short, I feel betrayed by Google. I know I shouldn’t because I wasn’t paying for the service, but I feel as if Google can no longer be trusted. I’m downloading all my YouTube videos and I’m suddenly worried whether shifting our email to Google’s professional email service was worth it. If they are willing to kill a service that I used EVERY SINGLE DAY, then they might just be willing to kill my email or delete all my videos. I can’t trust them anymore and suddenly, I’m looking at other options.

Thank God I don’t have an Android phone…

When I used to browse the web and find something I wanted to remember, I’d bookmark it with a description of what it was. I’m crafty, so I would do this with crafts. I also have three kids so I’d bookmark an educational site or ideas for decorating.

This worked great for me, until the hubby decided I needed an iPad upgrade (okay, I wanted it too). I’m not super technical and he is, so I let him do it for me. Everything went great until tried to go to a bookmark on the new iPad – everything was gone, and the bookmarks on my old computer had been wiped clean. I no longer knew where that cute headband idea was, or the great site for math games, it was all gone. I was able to remember some of the sites that had catchy names but for the most part I was back to ground zero.

I knew there had to be a better way, and stumbled upon it a few days later, when my sister-in-law was telling me about her new favorite site – Pinterest.com. This site lets you pin pictures from the web and categorize them by whatever you choose. Not only that, but you can find other people with similar tastes or friends and follow them to see what they have pinned. You can also browse Pinterest to see what has been pinned lately.

I have to warn you though – it can become addicting. To pin your own stuff, you add a “pin it” button to your toolbar. Then, if you’re on a site you want to save, click the “pin it” button and it will display all the pictures on that page. Select the picture you want to save, select a board (like a folder) and give it a description or note. Viola! It is saved into your account on Pinterest land. You can have your pins posted on Facebook if you want also.

There are different kinds of pinners, those who pin everything and do nothing and those who pin and do. I fall somewhere in the middle. So far I have made a ton of projects:

• Bracelets and rings
• Halloween treats
• Beaded spiders
• Cookie dough dip out of hummus (not recommend – and I went back and commented on my pin to that effect so my “followers” wouldn’t be led astray)
• Jewelry holder out of an art canvas
• Energy balls (these were good)
• Spelling game for my kids
• Felt flowers
• Repurposed a t-shirt into a shrug
• Dish washer detergent from scratch
• 72 hour emergency kits
• Foot scrub
• Crafts for the kids

As you can see there is a wide variety of crafts to choose from.

You can also pin travel ideas, books, gadgets, humor, etc. Pinterest has a list of 32 categories for you to browse, and assign your pins to, for others to browse, but you can create as many boards as you want and name them whatever you want.

Additionally, Pinterest has created an iPhone app to work with their website. You can download it here:

• Pinterest iPhone App – Cold Brew Labs [iTunes link]

A few tips and tricks I’ve found:

• The Pinterest app is a little crashy. When it starts acting strangely, restart the app, or if that doesn’t work, restart the device.
• On Pinterest.com if you click on the pinterest logo at the top it will take you back to the home screen.
• You can search for friends to follow by name in the search box, and everyone who has signed in with their Facebook account will have their profile pic so you can see who it is.
• If the Pinterest web site is too much information for you, try the app. It gives you the top pins for that category and you can pin from there. Here is a picture (above right) of what the DIY & Craft board has on my phone.

So happy pinning, and I’ll see you on Pinterest.

Update 06-21-12 from Laura Moncur: I had avoided Pinterest when Christy reviewed it because it was so difficult to find the original link to the photos on their site. I’m happy to announce that they have fixed that, so I can easily see WHERE the pins came from, no matter how many times it has been repined. I’m happily pinning along with Christy now and I love it!

I was first in line the night of pre-orders for the new iPhone 4S because my poor 3GS had seen better days. After skipping a generation, there are so many new features to enjoy on my new phone that I’ve felt a little overwhelmed with all of it.

That’s why I’m so surprised at how UNDERWHELMED I’ve been with the location reminders.

Having a phone with a working GPS antenna is a blessing, of course (my 3GS lost its GPS capabilities in its tragic fall that cracked the screen), but the GPS on the iPhone still isn’t sensitive enough to make location reminders work. The biggest problem is that the location reminder has to get pretty far away before it is triggered. We were about a mile away from the house when my test reminder went off and that was too late.

The typical example: “Remind me to call my wife when I leave work,” is a good test. Depending on how far away your home is, you might actually SEE your wife before Siri reminds you to call her.

Additionally, I had particular problems telling Siri where my work and home are. It’s perfectly easy to tell her to remind me when I leave “here,” but if I want to have her remind me to call Mike when I arrive at work, she would tell me that she didn’t know where my office is. I added my work address into my contact information and the iPhone was able to find it on a map when I tapped on it, but Siri still insisted that she didn’t know where my office was.

In the end, she had a problem with the city abbreviation. She couldn’t recognize SLC as Salt Lake City (even though the map app had no trouble with it), so she was powerless to set up that reminder until I changed it. It was frustrating to me and I’m a power user. I can’t imagine how frustrated a beginner might feel about this.

Yes, Siri is amazing and she makes me feel like I’m in the future, but her location reminders are hobbled by GPS inaccuracy and address parsing problems. They are a great thing to show off your phone, but they aren’t quite useful enough to be trusted.

Having heard about the iPhone 4S and Siri, I wanted to experiment with it and see how well it worked. Laura’s old iPhone 3GS had a cracked screen, so she bought the new iPhone 4S. She showed it to me and I thought Siri was very interesting and we became curious if there was something similar to it for the iPhone 3G. We began searching and we found Vlingo.

Vlingo is free to install and available for not only iPhones, but Android, Windows and Blackberry users as well. There is also a Vlingo Plus that charges a one-time fee, but that appears to be available for Samsung Jack and HTC users only.

We compared Vlingo on my iPhone 3G and Siri on Laura’s iPhone 4S together and took this video. They do both need to be connected to the internet in order to work.

I was very surprised at how well Vlingo did. My poor old 3G has slower internet than Laura’s iPhone, but it was only seconds behind when we searched for turtles. When we both called a phone number I forgot to push the button a second time otherwise it would have called at the same time. I like that with Vlingo you can choose when it starts listening, while in Siri you start as soon as you start the program. As you can see, Vlingo works slightly better than in Siri when emailing.

I was slightly disappointed with Vlingo when trying to set an appointment. Hilariously, it searched for “set an appointment at 5:00 tomorrow” in Google. Vlingo Does have some other disadvantages as well:

• When starting the app, it asked for access to my contacts, so it doesn’t already have access to my contacts.
• In Vlingo, you must hit the button again to stop it rather than it noticing when you stop talking like Siri does.
• We found that Vlingo doesn’t have access to the Apple apps like the calendar, reminders or alarms.

For those of you who already have an iPhone 4S then you wouldn’t be interested in Vlingo, but for all of us who have older generation iPhones (or Android, Blackberry or Windows phones) I would suggest Vlingo. It cannot access the calendar or the alarms, but it can do everything else Siri can and will solve your Siri Envy nicely.