We’ve tried several of the new watches that count your steps and measure your fitness, but the one we stuck with turned out to be the least difficult to use and among the least expensive.
The Omron Digital Pocket Pedometer was $22 at Amazon. (Amazon’s prices fluctuate, so while you’d think they were always the best deal, often they’re not. Check other discount stores as well.)
The Omron Digital Pocket Pedometer is about the size of an old-fashioned pocket watch. It can clip onto your belt or go into a pocket. It tells the time, counts your steps, tells how many calories you burned, keeps track of how many of those steps were at a workout pace and has a memory mode that cycles through your progress for the past week. At midnight, your steps reset to zero.
A much fancier alternative is the Magellan Echo, $150 from Magellangps.com. It tracks running and cycling and connects by Bluetooth to your phone apps to show your heart rate, distance and other statistics. Push a button on the watch to stop and start music or skip to the next song. The built-in, replaceable battery lasts six to 11 months, so you don’t have to plug it in to recharge as you do with most smart watches. And it’s waterproof.
BATTERY DOCTOR
A young relative visiting us this summer noticed how quickly our Samsung Galaxy S3 went dead. A free app called Battery Doctor fixes that.
Battery Doctor has 150 million downloads for iOS and Android phones. The good Doctor gave our phone a “51,” which was “unhealthy” the first time we ran it. Tapping a fix-it button for the powerhogging apps on our phone, we boosted the rating to 77, and gained 25 minutes of battery life.
The real killer is data. We’re on T-Mobile’s $ 30-a-month unlimited data plan. So we leave the 4G cellular connection on at all times and don’t worry about it. It turns out this is the real battery hog. By letting Battery Doctor fix it, our rank zoomed to 97 and we gained another 189 minutes of battery life. We just have to remember when we’re away from home, and not using a Wi-Fi connection, to go into “Settings” and tap “Mobile Networks” to turn the cellular connection back on. Battery Doctor also has an app manager for uninstalling apps you no longer use. People tend to pick these up, look once and then forget about them.
BEST PDF EDITOR
The whole point of saving a document as a PDF (Portable Document Format) is to preserve its formatting.
Anyone can open it with a free program like Adobe Reader, and it will look exactly the same as the original that was sent. But if you want to make changes, you have to convert it to a form that can be edited.
Abbyy.com is a leader in the PDF conversion business, and its latest program is called PDF Transformer plus. It’s not in its final form yet, but you can download it for 30 days for free to see how it works. We tried it, and it works very well already. It lets you convert 100 PDF pages at a crack, so you can move through a long PDF very quickly. We took the PDF of our Samsung Galaxy S3 manual and turned it into a Microsoft Word document. The results were nearly flawless, and small errors could be corrected manually.
If you’re not game on trying the preview version, Abbyy’s PDF Transformer 3.0 is a third the regular price at $20 and also has a free trial. It has a lot of the same features, but the new version adds the ability to add extra comments to a PDF, fix typos, and so on.
MIXING IT UP
Free video-editing programs typically let you make only short videos, but MixBit lets you put together as many as 256 short ones for a whole hour of play.
It’s for Android and iPhones only, but that pretty much covers the field. Besides making your own video mixes, you can throw in videos made by other MixBit users. The clips that go into your mix-and-match video can be as long as 16 seconds each. You can trim longer videos to make them usable as clips and then put an hour’s worth together.
MixBit was created by Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, co-founders of YouTube. The app’s big coup recently was capturing Kim Kardashian’s Oct. 21 marriage proposal. It was one of the first publicized recordings of the proposal.
The mixer works, but we found it tough to figure out. This is true of most new programs we encounter, the problem being that the programmers already know how everything works and can’t see it from the point of view of a newcomer. We captured a lot of videos but were clueless on how to put them together. You may find it easier.
IMPROVING EDUCATION
Like Bill Gates and many others, we’re big fans of KhanAcademy.com, which offers free lectures in math, science and history. These video lectures are being used to change the usual path of learning: Instead of listening to lectures during class and doing problems at night, students watch the video lectures at night and then work on problems in the daytime, with teachers standing there to help.
A new study from public policy research firm MDRC confirms this works. Many failing first-graders have caught up with the rest of the class, and high school seniors have seen grades go up 6 percentage points.
BOOKS: A THEORY OF FUN
A Theory of Fun for Game Design, by Raph Koster, $35 from oreilly.com, is now out in color, with a full-page cartoon flanking every page of text.
The author was the lead designer for popular online games such as Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies. He discusses what makes a game fun and how games can teach primitive survival techniques. Creative designers, he says, use other games for inspiration. The forward is by Will Wright, creator of Sim City.
Bob and Joy can be contacted by email at bobschwab@gmail.com and joy.schwabach@gmail.com.
Business, Pages 22 on 12/23/2013