Finding Florida island real estate without leaving home

A friend who knew I was going to Florida a few weeks back asked be to bring her some of the real estate magazines that are available in restaurants and convenience stores. Our friend is nearing retirement and she’s thinking about a resettling near a beach, maybe in a nice condo on an island.

I was happy to deliver a stack of magazines, but I also suggested that her computer could show her far more real estate options than what she would see in this publications.

For example, let’s say she’s heard about a popular South Florida area like Singer Island near West Palm Beach. She could use Zillow to get an overview of real estate prices in the area, then zoom in to collect more information about the area and some of its better condo developments.

For a closer look at Singer Island properties, the Singer Island Real Estate website would be a good place to check. The site has details about the island and profiles of more than a dozen condo developments including Dunes Tower, Inlet Pointe and Martinique.

Any prospective condo buyer who spends some time online exploring their target location and its real estate market will be a much smarter shopper when they are actually on site.   

By: Ric Manning On 5/31/2017

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A receiver for an HDMI world

I bought the Yamaha RX-V379BL 5.1-Channel A/V Receiver receiver primarily to get multiple HDMI inputs.

DVD player, Apple TV, Chromecast - they all want an HDMI connection.

For years I used two Harman Kardon receivers for my two home audio/video rigs. They had only one HDMI input so each had an external splitter and a tangle of cables to go with it. The HK remotes were also very confusing.

I initially ordered a cheaper Yamaha receiver with fewer features by mistake but Amazon's return policy let me send it back for a full (and fast) refund.

The RX-V379BL has all the connections I wanted - four HDMI inputs and one HDMI output. And it was was very easy to set up, though it did take about an hour and a half to wire five speakers and a subwoofer.

I haven't yet used the acoustic optimizer, a microphone that lets you customize settings to suit your listening position and room acoustics. But I did use the Bluetooth feature to pair the receiver with my iPhone. Now I can listed to podcasts in surround sound.

And now I have a remote that even my wife has mastered.

By: Ric Manning On 5/30/2017

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Hey robot, clean my pool

I haven’t found a robot that I would want in my house, but I would be happy to put one to work outside where our backyard pool always needs a cleaning.

Robotic pool cleaners are connected to a pool’s intake system, then they roam the floor of the pool - and sometimes the sides - sucking up algae and bits of debris.  

I found a good roundup of the best pool cleaners at Intex Pool Pumps, a website that helps pool owners find and evaluate pool products such as pumps and heaters.

The website has an overview of several automatic cleaners, including models by Hayward and Polaris, and it explains the difference between suction, pressure and robotic devices.

Over the past few years, rooting pool cleaners have become more competitive and more affordable. While the higher level robotic cleaners can cost several hundred dollars, some some models are priced at under $200.

By: Ric Manning On 5/30/2017

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Publishers for your book are only one click away

The publishing industry is littered with tales of successful authors who spent their own money to publish their first books. You've heard of John Grisham? After 28 rejections, he paid to publish 5,000 copies of his first novel, "A Time To Kill."

Irma Bombauer used her life savings to publish "The Joy of Cooking," which would go on to become perhaps the most popular cookbook ever. And James Redfield sold copies of "The Celestine Prophecy" from the trunk of his car before it was acquired by a major publisher and became a best seller.

Self-publishing is a time-honored route for first-time authors to get their books out to the public. But it's also an expensive route, at least it was before the arrival of the Internet and a host of on-demand publishing services that have made self-publishing far more affordable and convenient.

Services like Blurb, Diggypod, CreateSpace, and Outskirts Press offer a wide range of publishing services for authors who think they have the next best-selling novel or for ordinary folks who want to create a photo album, a family history, or mom's recipe collection.

While online services are accessible to anyone and can accommodate almost any book project, don't expect them to be cheap or painless. In most cases, you will be doing all of the editing, photography and page design work. And plan to pay at least $15 per copy for even the smallest books.

My first self-published book was the story of a Southern ancestor's time in the Confederate Army during the American Civil War. I had written a narrative that blended family accounts, military records, and historical sources and I collected photos from Civil War archives and my own battlefield visits.

To turn the story into a book, I chose Blurb, one of the more popular online publishing services. Blurb provides a free program called Booksmart to handle page layout and design chores. The software lets you choose from among several templates for the book and for individual pages.

After a few hours of tweaking, I had a pleasing layout for a 26-page book and a nice cover. From there, it was a simple matter of clicking the "Publish" button to send my project to Blurb. My finished book arrived about a week later.

Blurb's prices depend on the style of book and number of copies that you choose. For example, you could get 50 copies of a 200-page paperback book in the larger trade format for a little less than $200. My book of text and photos, printed on photo paper with a soft cover, cost about $25 for one copy. For a few dollars more, I ordered an ebook formatted for the iPad and a PDF version, which can be viewed on most computers and tablets.

People turn to self-publishing services to print books on a wide range of topics such as photo albums, how-to books, and genealogy reports as well as novels and books for children. Books that might have a broader interest beyond friends and family members can be offered for sale through a personal online store or through Amazon.com. And who knows? Lightning might strike. Not long ago Amazon announced that 27 of its top 100 Kindle books came from self-published authors.

By: Ric Manning On 5/29/2017

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This stock-picking service follows proven winners

With perfect hindsight, we would have been able to predict that tech stocks like Amazon, Facebook, Tesla or Google would double or quadruple in the years after the companies went public.

But some savvy investors like Carl Icahn and Warren Buffett could see that far into the future and they made a bundle of money by betting on some of those and similar tech stocks. Buffett is still buying share of Apple.

So, if they’re so good at it, why not just buy what they buy? That, in a nutshell, is the philosophy behind Express Alpha, an investing system that says it “beat the S&P 500 by a huge margin over the past 10 years.”

The company calls its approach an “investing accelerator.” It’s a system that helps small investors  piggyback their stock trades to moves made by a group of successful investors that includes Icahn and Buffett along with other billionaires and investment funds.    

Express Alpha says it provides it’s subscribers with regular buy and sell advice, along with its assessment of the investor it’s currently tracking, looking at the investor’s success and strategy.

To get more details, use the Contact Us page on the Express Alpha website.

By: Ric Manning On 5/27/2017

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Magnetic blocks build little engineers

Gizmo Editor Review

It seems as though most new toys are primarily passive entertainment devices. My grandchildren’s rooms are filled with toys that sing, dance or scoot across the floor and they came that way right out of the box. All the kids or their parents had to do was insert batteries and flip a switch.

That may be fine for the little tykes, but I would like to see the older kids have a toy that would let them create something straight from their imagination.

That’s why I bought a set of IMDEN Magnetic Building Blocks for 7-year-old Luke. They have more tech appeal than the snap-together blocks he played with as a toddler with just enough technology to be a big boy’s toy and the ability to put engineering concepts within his grasp.

The IMDEN set comes with 92 block pieces in square, triangle, and hexagonal shapes. The pieces have embedded magnets that allow them to be easily snapped together to make a virtually unlimited number or geometric shapes. You also get two sets of wheels on platforms and a pair of towers that can be used to build a Ferris Wheel, among other things.

For ideas, there’s a 30-page booklet that contains pictures of more than two dozen creations along with step-by-step instructions to build a car, a helicopter, a penguin and lots of other objects. The magnets allow the pieces to easily join each other.

You can make an elongated rectangle to serve as a tail or a submarine body, or a build a pyramid for a nose or a dome. The magnets shorten the time between inspiration and completed project and and make revisions a snap, literally.

I dropped off the blocks at Luke’s house, then checked back with him a week later to see what he could do with them. He immediately grabbed the wheels and showed me how to build what he called an “animal car” — a Transformer-style vehicle — that he whipped up in about two minutes. You can watch him at work in the video below.

On another occasion, his friends tackled the rotating wheel with only minimal assistance from the instruction. And the girls in the group seems to especially like the letter and number panels that snap into the square blocks, allowing them to name their creations.

I liked the sling bag that comes with the blocks set. It makes clean up easy and keeps all the loose pieces in one place. But most of all, I liked how the blocks let Luke gave his active imagination an easy and rewarding outlet.

The IMDEN Magnetic Building Blocks are priced at $29.99 and are available on Amazon.

By: Ric Manning On 5/19/2017

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How to make passport photos the right way

The last time I renewed our passports, I thought I could save some money by shooting the required photos. How hard could that be? It’s just a head shot taken with a neutral background.

It turned out that the government has some pretty strict rules about what qualifies as a passport photo and I wasted time and money by giving it photos that got rejected. If I wanted do-it-yourself photos, I should have checked out Passport Photo Workshop.

The Windows program is designed for use by amateurs in a home, business or organization. It has a step-by-step wizard interface that walks you through the process and provides dozens of passport photo templates and a set of simple editing tools.

Among the program’s features is an Auto Crop option that will automatically recognize facial features. Cropping can also be done manually to produce photos that meet ISO/ICAO standards.

Users can input images from files, a webcam, SD cards or Canon’s EOS series digital cameras. It also supports a variety of output options.

For more details and to download a free trial version, visit the Passport Photo Workshop
website.

By: Ric Manning On 5/02/2017

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Alexa is a welcome addition to Amazon's tablet

Gizmo Editor Review

What’s the first app you install on a new tablet computer? For me, it’s Amazon’s Kindle app. I have to have my book library close at hand and tablets have become my preferred reading platform. Close behind come Amazon’s music and streaming video apps along with Amazon’s  shopping app.

And now there’s Alexa, the voice-controlled personal assistant that we have added to the household through two stand-alone devices, the Amazon Dot and Tap. Alexa delivers news updates and weather reports, dims the hall lights, plays music and reads my current Kindle book, picking up where I left off.

Clearly, I’m all in with Amazon, which is why I was pleased to get my hands on the Amazon Fire Tablet after Xberts chose me to write this review and provided the product for free. Amazon’s line of Fire tablets are the first tablet devices to include Alexa built into the operating system, making it a tablet you can talk to and one that talks to you.

The Fire Tablet I received is Amazon’s starter model that has a 7-inch high-resolution screen, 8GB of memory and an SD slot for additional memory. It’s the version Amazon sells for $49.99.

How can a tablet with those specs have such a low price tag? One reason is the Fire Tablet contains ads. When you wake the tablet you see a screen selling a variety of products. So far, I’ve seen ads for Band Aids, bottled water, Starbucks’ fancy drinks and a leasing deal on a Genesis, Hyundai’s new luxury car.

But more important than the ads are the myriad offers buy or sample Amazon products like audio books from Amazon-owned Audible or a subscription to The Washington Post, which is owned by Amazon’s founder.

The Fire is not designed to be a multi-purpose tablet computer like the iPad Mini or the Samsung Galaxy Tab. Its job is to help you live inside the Amazon ecosystem where it’s easy to play music from your Amazon-housed collection, stream movies and TV shows from Amazon and shop for things like dog food or kitchen appliances. In other words, all of the things we’ve come to rely on Amazon to provide. And it does that job very, very well.

Setting up the Fire Tablet took a little longer than I had expected. It had previously been registered to someone else - perhaps it was a returned or refurbished item - so I had to start by re-registering with my own Amazon account. That instantly got my books and other Amazon stuff loaded into the tablet.

The Fire Tablet runs Google’s Android operating system, but you would barely know that by looking at it. The home screen is populated Amazon apps and as you swipe left, you drill deeper into your Amazon world.

Each swipe shows pages that display your books, music, videos, games, audiobooks and the digital newspapers or magazines that you have subscribed to. The book or movie you’ve most recently accessed is featured on each page along with related content that Amazon’s algorithms think you might want to purchase.

There’s no Google Play store on the Fire Tablet. To get new apps, you go to the Amazon’s app store where you can download Pandora, Netflix, YouTube and other popular apps.      

That was fine so far, but where was Alexa? The app was not pre-loaded with all the other Amazon apps as I expected. It turned out that the operating system needed to be updated - twice, actually - before Alexa was ready to ready to run.

With Amazon’s Dot and Echo, the devices are always listening for someone to say “Alexa” to launch the service. On the Fire Tablet, the process is slightly different. Alexa appears when you press and hold the Home icon for two seconds. When you hear a chime and see a blue line at the bottom of the screen, Alexa is ready to hear your question or command. You don’t have to say her name to get her attention.

Users who are new to Alexa can use the Alexa app to personalize the service by selecting applets from a library of skills. If you’re already an Alexa user, your library of skills will be linked to Alexa on the tablet. One feature that I particularly like is how Alexa will read any of my Kindle books that allow that functionality. I just have to say “Read 1984” and Alexa picks up where I left off.

Alexa is a welcome and useful addition to the Fire Tablet. It’s an non-threatening introduction to voice control that greatly expands the tablet’s usefulness. Now I have another way to get my daily news briefing, tune in to my local NPR radio station, play goofy music for the little kids and get answers to like “How hot is the sun?” And, of course, buy more dog food.

By: Ric Manning On 5/01/2017

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