Get a break on prescription prices through Good RX app

We went to the drugstore to pick up Bob’s prescriptions and the pharmacy clerk said she did a little research and knocked $135 off the price. That cut the bill in half. She should go on our Christmas list.

What she did was look at our prescription list and then went to her phone to check that against an app called “Good RX.” This must be pretty new stuff because we just heard of it last week. We heard of it but we’re not as sharp as the pharmacy tech and we didn’t install it on our phone. We thought: Come on, how much could this save you?

Good RX gives you coupons for lots of pharmacies, just about any you can think of. You can print them out or show them on your phone. Savings run up to 80 percent. You can also print the coupons directly from your computer by going to GoodRX. com.

So this cut our drug prices without requiring an act of Congress.

FREE SCIENCE SciHub. org is a free searchable online database of 67 million scholarly articles. They’re made available by a 20-something grad student from Kazakhstan named Alexandra Elbakyan. Similar sites are cropping up quickly.

As you might expect, the publishers’ rush to the courthouse could rival a cattle stampede. Ordinarily the cost for downloading an article is $30 apiece, which adds up pretty quickly. Free is a very attractive price and everyone in the scientific community seems to be using these sites because they’re quicker, easier and, let’s not forget, free. The loudest complaints have come from Elsevier, a Dutch company that is the largest publisher of scientific papers.

What about copyright laws? And what about payments to the authors? Well there are no payments to

the authors; Elsevier doesn’t pay the scholars anything. Because of the constant pressure to publish in the academic world, researchers are usually happy to be cited more widely.

But what about Elsevier’s copyrights? Could Elbakyan, and others running copyrightfree websites, be arrested and extradited to the U.S.? Almost certainly not. This may come as something of a shock in the U.S. but many countries have no laws governing foreign copyrights. Elbakyan’s website is hosted in St. Petersburg, Russia, where judgments made by American courts are not enforceable. CODING WITH MINECRAFT A certain young relative of ours loves a game called Minecraft. He is not alone. More than 144 million copies of the game have been sold

worldwide. By the way: Four of those games were sold in Antarctica. Lots of indoor time in Antarctica.

Microsoft paid the game’s creator $2.5 billion four years ago for the rights. You can build things in Minecraft using low resolution blocks that look slightly like Lego bricks. But you can go way beyond that; the blocks can shrink automatically to provide perspective, and they can even be assigned tones, so your picture can play its own background music.

Basically, the little blocks are programmable, and we found a great book for these players. It’s called Coding

With Minecraft, by Al Sweigart, $ 30 from No Starch Press.

The author begins, “‘Just three more diamonds, and then I’ll stop,’ I remember telling myself … I needed the diamonds for a new pickax. I needed the pickax to mine more obsidian. I need the obsidian to make a Nether portal. I needed to go to the

Nether world to pick up lava. And I needed the lava for … what did I need the lava for again? Oh, right. I was sculpting a giant phoenix statue in the side of a mountain. I wanted to make lava pour out from its eyes and beak.”

If you play Minecraft, you’ve mined for diamonds, made dozens of tools and built all sorts of structures. But what if you could program Minecraft robots to do all of that for you in a fraction of the time? That’s the thesis behind this book.

INTERNUTS

“40 Resources Every Designer Should Know.” A search on that will turn up project templates, ideas for Web design and Photoshop tips. You can even make your own graph paper. Webydo. com is one of the free sites mentioned here for making your own website.

“The complete list of Google Home Commands so far” or “The complete list of Alexa commands so far” will

bring you a couple of articles from CNET listing everything you can command your smart speaker to answer or do for you, such as play music, play a game, give you a reminder, tell you the weather forecast, and answer all kinds of questions. Sometimes.

“15 Tiny Things to Improve Your Life.” Search on that phrase for some great suggestions. Example: If a task takes only a minute or less, do it as soon as you think of it. Or practice a new skill or hobby for 10 minutes a day.