Spire fitness tracker keeps tabs on stress levels
Joy is a mouth breather and was wondering if she breathes irregularly. So she got one of those new $150 fitness trackers, Spire, to monitor her breathing and emotions — stress levels — as well as her steps.
It has notions: When Joy did a backbend today, a popup message immediately suggested she calm down. The Spire said she hadn’t been calm for hours. “Who says I’m not calm!” Joy is demanding as we type.
Spire looks like one of those smooth flat stones you pick up on river bottoms; it has a clip to attach to your shirt or pants. It goes with an app for your iPhone or iPad. (Android app coming up soon.) The app shows three flower petals in three colors, for calm, focus and activity. When you’re balanced, all three fill with color. If only one or two have color, it indicates which area needs improvement. You decide whether you’re going for super calm, super productive and/or super active. For the first few hours, “calm” and “focus” barely registered, but began to pick up as the day went on.
The app told Joy she breathes at 17 breaths per minute. That’s right in the middle of the normal adult range between 12 and 20. That’s what the app said, but to check we went to Breathing.com. (Where else would you go?) It had interesting links to places like Scorecard.Goodguide.com, which had information on “pollution by zipcode,” letting you know where pollution might interfere with breathing. (Our advice: Stay out of Los Angeles.)
The bottom line: Spire gave us a lot more information than we needed. Joy achieved super calm in seven hours. (Namaste.) Checking the app became addictive, and may have made us less calm at first. The company has a 30-day return policy if you don’t like it. We bought it at Spire.io, but it’s also on Amazon.
PRINT IT ON ALUMINUM
We just had a photo “aluminyzed.” It looks great.
Aluminyze.com will turn your photo into anything from wall art to a license plate. Joy took a photo at a women’s club event and had it aluminyzed for the head of her committee, who typically receives a gift certificate at year’s end. This was different.
Here’s what we liked: It’s waterproof, durable and super light. It doesn’t need a frame. The colors are vivid, and it’s glossy like glass, though you can also choose a satin finish. The image can be printed in the shape of hearts, clouds or letters. An iPhone case is $30, just the back panel is $15. Prices for wall art start at $20 and go up to $319 for a 30-by-40-inch. So far almost half a million photos have been aluminyzed.
APP HAPPY
PhotoMath, a free app, lets you take a picture of an equation and get an answer plus the steps involved. (Does not recognize handwriting.) Assuming you already have it on a screen somewhere, this is easier than re-typing the mathematical expression at sites like WolframAlpha. com. PhotoMath already has 11 million downloads for the iPhone and Windows Phone version. That’s a lot of downloads, but it didn’t work for us. You try it. An Android version is coming soon.
Plex is a free app for users of the Roku, a device that brings in hundreds of extra channels — Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, YouTube, for example — on your TV. Plex gives you shortcuts to your favorite content and lets you pick up where you left off in a movie or show. You can also get it for laptops and tablets.
SPEEDING UP AN ANDROID
It’s not just computers that slow down: Android phones do, too.
A free app called Droid Optimizer from Ashampoo. com made our apps open a few seconds faster, and it has a lot of other features too.
The Optimizer’s onetouch speed-up button gave us almost double the RAM (random access memory) we had before. (If RAM is low, the phone can’t hold on to many things at once.) The app manager uninstalled apps we didn’t need any more — 47 of them! An “auto cleanup” got rid of junk files.
This app’s “privacy adviser” warns you about what kind of information your apps are accessing but the warnings border on hysteria. It labeled 15 apps “suspicious,” but when we looked at the details, it was all stuff the app needed in order to work. For example, Microsoft Outlook was labeled “suspicious” because it could read our contact list. Well that’s what it’s for, folks. We ignored the warning.
INTERNUTS
CamelCamelCamel.com tracks price history on Amazon. “Top price drops” tells you which products are on the way down. Fisher Price’s Jeep Wrangler went from $290 to $179, for example. In general, toy prices have lots of give.
We used to subscribe to Mental Floss, a fun trivia magazine, but the website — MentalFloss.com — is almost as good. Recently we learned about music for cats and 11 tasks that technology will make obsolete. (Robots will fix dinner for you, for example.) How about seven adorable animals that are surprisingly violent? Watch out for those koala bears.
A BETTER LANDLINE
We had an AT&T phone for decades, but then technology advanced and they didn’t. So now we have still have a landline, but it’s not theirs. (For that matter, even they want to get rid of their landlines.)
It looks like an ordinary desk phone but connects over the Internet to a service called Vonage. This has been around for a dozen years or more, and we first got onto it when we saw a computer company exec using one.
They recently added “selective call block” to block unwanted calls. They can be blocked from your home and smartphones. Another new feature is SimulRing. When a call comes in, it rings on all your phones, no matter which one is called. We also have call waiting and caller ID. The basic service is about $13 per month before taxes and surcharges; those just about double the bill.