Articles by Patrick Nelson

We've looked at personal tracking products before, including stolen-phone locators and a breadcrumb-tracking, mugging-alarm combo for Google's Android mobile operating system Where some of these kinds of products have disappointed is that they have needed daily user intervention to make them functional. The personal attack alarm required turning on...

Yuilop is available for free in the Google Play Store. I know, from correspondence that I receive, that readers of this column are pretty global, spread all over the world and in some pretty distant places. That's why I was intrigued when I came across VoIP Android app Yuilop.

A few weeks back All Things Appy covered some of the best, must-have free utilities for the Android mobile environment This time, we look at requisite keyboard, antivirus, backup and download management apps to supplement the battery management, task killer, storage analyzer and monitoring tools that we've looked at previously....

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, the American Red Cross and local governments can all provide copious documentation on ways to prepare for weather and other disasters, but it's often geared towards perishable food and single-family homeowners in the 'burbs -- not information-hungry urban dwellers. Typically omitted are some very simple tri...

Back in 2011, in the dark, pre-tablet days of the netbook, Motorola introduced a phone and laptop combo called the "Atrix." The then-powerful 4G, dual-core AT&T phone slotted into a unique receptacle on the back of the optional laptop's clamshell hinge -- a bit like a game cartridge slides into a console. The phone then powered the Chromebook-like, highly stripped-down laptop...

Scanner Radio Pro Android is available for US$2.99 in the Google Play store. Fire season is upon us here in Southern California, and due to the lack of rain earlier in the year, we're seeing critically low live fuel moisture. The amount of residual moisture in grasses and brush is at levels lower than we've seen in years.

Ever since the days of the fax machine and clamshell PC, I've delighted in the concept of working away from home or office. I have fond memories of lugging those clunkers from the back of my car in and out of motel rooms through bone-chilling blizzards and driving rain -- adding to the carry-load, certainly, but bringing freedom....

Many of us are about to face higher winter heating bills this winter. Some suppliers, like the predominant British Gas in the UK, are raising prices by up to 8 percent. The U.S. Energy Information Administration, meanwhile, reckons on a staggering 13 percent increase this year for those using mainly natural gas to heat homes in the U.S There's not ...

A desktop is a fine spot for browsing the world's spoken-word media, and the Chrome browser is a fine tool to do it with This week's All Things Appy takes a look at the top must-have, free apps for the Chrome browser environment. We include some for Internet radio, some for podcasts and one for quickly grabbing a podcast feed....

Christian Gllner's Benchmark & Tuning (Full) app is available for US$2.99 in the Google Play store. Here's a novel way to find out if you do indeed need a new phone. It's a benchmarking app that will test components and provide a comparison with crowdsourced benchmarks from other common devices out there....

Christian Gllner's Benchmark & Tuning (Full) app is available for US$2.99 in the Google Play store. Here's a novel way to find out if you do indeed need a new phone. It's a benchmarking app that will test components and provide a comparison with crowdsourced benchmarks from other common devices out there....

Price-matching, product reviews, historical pricing data and automating the coupon process are all superb uses for apps in the desktop browser environment. This week's All Things Appy takes a look at the five must-have, free apps that complement online shopping.

You know all those free programs that typically come on PCs and mobile devices whether you want them or not? Common examples include paid antivirus programs within the PC environment and phone company add-ons like music stores within Android Often called bloatware, they are usually manufacturer- or carrier-sanctioned stripped down come-ons designed...

Do you remember the scene in an early Star Wars movie where R2-D2 and Chewbacca played a holographically generated, Jedi 3D board game while killing time in their light freighter? Full-color, three-dimensional game pieces were projected onto the board. Chewbacca wasn't a particularly good loser, and R2-DR2 blipped and beeped a lot ...

The touchscreens prevalent on vast numbers of laptops awaiting your hard-earned dollars in consumer electronics stores accommodate highly suitable new tools for creating art. The tactile nature of the screen, as opposed to the awkward mouse, makes sweeping strokes and other gestures a lot easier....

WeatherPro by MeteoGroup is available for US$2.99 in the Google Play store. I recently took a look at MeteoEarth, a rather spectacular Google Earth-like animated weather app. This visual, 3D globe-spinning weather app for Android provides zoom-in weather visualizations of the kind seen on television -- and indeed, the publisher is a provider of we...

Early upgrade plans are tips of the hat to phone-as-fashion-statement. Who wants a graying two-year-old phone? Such plans do come at a cost, however What if you don't actually need a new phone and the innards and battery are still good? If you're not a hard-core phone geek, aren't they all just about the same? Slab of plastic with screen, in other ...

It's not all photo apps and more apps when it comes to taking photographs with an Android smartphone. I've written about apps for photography with an Android smartphone, but there are some basics that you need to know, unique to smartphones, that have nothing to do with imaging apps....

The Multipath Router -- a project seeking crowdfunding on Indiegogo -- could change the way we connect to the Internet ...

This week's All Things Appy takes a look at the five best, free geo-oriented apps for the iOS platform. To keep your costs down, we're concentrating on those tracking apps that don't require additional hardware, like sensors....