Q I have hundreds of miscellaneous pages of
recipes I’ve ripped out of magazines over the
years. I was thinking of scanning them and
storing them on my laptop, but it would be
ideal for me to have them stored on my iPad
for easy use in the kitchen. I thought I could
photograph each recipe, but that may use up
too much space. Can you give me some ideas?
A Hundreds of photos shouldn’t take up too
much space on your iPad, but the quality of the
photos must be good enough to clearly read the
recipe ingredients and instructions. A camera
held steadily over each page should do the trick.
Or, you can use a flatbed scanner or a printer
with a scanner to digitize the pages.
But before you go through all that, are you
sure you can’t find these recipes online? You
could bookmark them, create a folder in your
iPad’s web browser called “Recipes” and then
search for them by keyword.
Assuming you want to keep the recipes
you’ve already clipped, you can store them on
the iPad and add some tags to the photo so you
can search by keyword (such as “quiche” or
“chicken”). Another idea is to create a folder on
a free cloud account, such as Microsoft’s
OneDrive, Dropbox or Google Drive, and then
access it from your phone or laptop or tablet.
Q I have shoeboxes with hundreds of photos,
and a few photo albums too. What would you
recommend for me to scan everything, so I can
share some of them on Facebook?
A While you could painstakingly do this
on your own with a flatbed scanner or
printer with a scanner, it
would be much easier
and less time-consuming to use a digitizing
service. With these
services, your prints
are digitized and
returned to you on
archival-quality
DVDs. Each DVD
holds up to ;;; images.
After the photos are
digitized, you can name and
organize them so you can easily find them on
your computer.
Q My wife and I have used a Panasonic
[DECT] ;.; telephone for years. Got it at
Costco—still works great. Here’s the problem:
After all these years, the machine’s answering
service is getting full and there are many messages that we want to keep (friends and relatives no longer living, our grandkids when
they were younger, etc.). Any ideas would be
greatly appreciated.
A If you have a smartphone or tablet, open the
voice recorder app (usually preinstalled on
smartphones) or download a free recorder app
from the App Store (for iPhone and iPad) or
Google Play (for Android devices). Then, play
the voicemail into the microphone of your
smartphone or tablet. It might take a little trial
and error until it’s clear enough, but this is the
simplest (and cheapest) way to digitize old analog voicemail messages.
Once the voicemail is on your phone or tablet
(now as an audio file), you can email it to yourself
to archive on a computer or upload it to a free
cloud service for long-term storage. Give the file a
good name so that you can easily find it by keyword (such as “John Smith, ;;;;, voicemail”).
Q I have some vinyl records that I would like
to convert to CDs. What would be the best way
to do that?
A The easiest way to rip old vinyl into CDs is
through a turntable that plugs into your computer. Once you copy the files over to your
computer—usually handled with free software
like Audacity—you could “burn” the songs
onto recordable discs to play elsewhere.
Some turntables record directly
onto flash drives, which you
also might play in your car, if
that’s where you want to listen
to your music.
There are also services that
will do this for you, so perhaps do a
web search for local companies. This
is a lot of work, however, and you
might consider going with a music
streaming service instead, which will let
you search for and instantly play tens of
millions of songs for a monthly fee. Popular services include Spotify, Google Play Music, Pandora,
Amazon Music Unlimited and Apple Music. C
Since you asked …
Questions from the Tech Connection mailbox
TECHCONNECTION
MARC SALTZMAN
Marc Saltzman, a leading
high-tech reporter, contributes to more than three dozen
prominent publications,
appears on radio and TV,
and is the author of more
than ;; books. He’s on
Twitter @marc_saltzman
Saltzman will answer selected
questions in this column.
He regrets that unpublished
questions cannot be
answered individually.
EMAIL
connection@costco.com
Please include “Marc Saltzman
Q&A” in the subject line.
MAIL
Q&A with Marc Saltzman
The Costco Connection
P.O. Box 34088
Seattle, WA 98124-1088
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COSTCOCONNECTION
Costco carries a wide variety
of electronics in the warehouses,
with an expanded selection
online. Also, Costco’s Photo
Centers provide a service that
transfers photo prints to DVDs.
THE
