Let there be light (and phone) with MegaPuff
It’s nighttime in a garden full of solar lights hanging in the trees like beautiful paper lanterns. You pull one off a tree to charge your phone. When a power outage strikes, you take the lights indoors to illuminate your home.
I’m talking about the $38 MegaPuff, also known as the Origami Solar Light and Power Bank. This multicolored cube, about 6 inches on all sides, is amazing. It’s not only beautiful, it also self-inflates as you pull the handles from a half-inch-high stack of recycled thermoplastic. It’s charged by the sun in 10 hours or you can plug it in with a cable. Its light lasts for 12 hours. Carry it anywhere.
Solar devices are known for decreasing pollution. Using a MegaPuff or its predecessor, the SolarPuff, will save 90% of the carbon emissions of a single incandescent light bulb.
The founder of the company, architect Alice Chun, added the portable charger to her original origami design when she noticed that power failures in the U.S. had increased 60% since 2015. She also noticed that in some countries, like Haiti, the power is so spotty that people own three phones, just to keep their lifeline going.
I talked to Chun after she had returned from personally delivering lights to children in Turkey. She’s also donated thousands of SolarPuffs to badly wounded kids in Ukrainian hospitals and people in Nepal, Haiti, Burundi, Syria and Puerto Rico, after devastation caused by war or natural disasters. Here’s what she told the kids: “The light of your hearts and minds is even more powerful than the sun. If you keep fighting with that light and never give up, you’ll achieve your dreams.”
The July 15-16 weekend wraps up a wildly successful crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter where the MegaPuff is selling at a discount for $38. If you missed that, you can get it on the company’s website, solight-design .com. Or you can get the SolarPuff, which was featured in the Apple TV Plus documentary “Gutsy,” about women entrepreneurs. It starts at $18. You can also find SolarPuffs on Amazon, in museum stores and in a few Whole Foods markets. I’m going to get its floating pool lights for a family that doesn’t have a lighted pool. These start at $28.
Amazon trade-in
I just got my Sonos One speaker out of the closet. Amazon offered me $85 for it. Talk about easy.
Just Google the words “Amazon Trade-In” and choose from the list of electronics it will accept. Print out the free shipping label Amazon sends you, box up your item and drop it off at a UPS store. Boom, you’re paid. The credit showed up in my Amazon account just a week later.
Though I might have gotten $130 for it on eBay, I love the hassle-free nature of the Amazon deal.
Calendar reminders
The problem with calendars is that I never remember to look at them. So, after switching to Google calendar years ago, I always clicked “more options” on an event to have an email sent to me 10 hours before it started. That was before I discovered Daily Agenda. It’s a Google calendar setting that brings you a single reminder for the whole day’s events. It’s delivered by email every day at 5 a.m. Of course, you have to remember to put those events on your Google calendar first.
To set it up, go to google.calendar .com on your computer. Click the little gear that’s at the top of the calendar, next to the question mark. When it opens, click on your name on the left to get to settings. Next click the three vertical dots, and “settings and sharing.” Scroll down until you see “Other notifications,” and choose “Daily Agenda.”
Getting photos off your iPhone
Using a MegaPuff will save 90% of the carbon emissions of a single incandescent light bulb.
A reader asked about photo sticks that will copy your photos from your iPhone to your computer in one fell swoop. I told her she doesn’t need one if she follows one of the following methods.
First, try connecting your iPhone to your Windows computer using a cable with the lightning charger on one end and a regular USB on the other, or an adapter. Windows will pop up asking you if you want to import all the photos. The import should begin as soon as you click “yes.” But in my experience, Windows always conks out. Instead, I have to open the Microsoft Photos app first, by typing “Photos” in the search bar in the lower left of my screen. From there, I can click an icon to import all iPhone photos. That icon is the one to the left of the person icon, at the top right of the screen.
If you have a Mac, it should swing into action as soon as you connect your iPhone. If you don’t have the right cable, however, or don’t want to bother buying one, you could install the free Google Photos app using the App store on your iPhone. From then on, the pictures you take with your iPhone will show up at the Photos.Google.com website. Give it a few minutes, but once they’re up there, all you have to do is to download them to your computer. You can rightclick a photo and choose “save as” or click the three vertical dots and choose “download.”