texts

Want to curb texting and driving? Turn it into a joke

There's nothing worse than a senseless death.

Not that any death makes sense, of course. But it's easier to accept someone dying of sheer old age than a 16-year-old being crushed in a car because she was texting Polly about the dimples on Charlie's cheeks.

This week, advertising's loudest are meeting at the Cannes Advertising Festival. One campaign doing absurdly well is an absurdist effort from Australia that tries to stop people doing stupid things around trains.

Called "Dumb Ways to Die," it takes the silliness of how people die around trains and raises … Read more

Review: SpeakText for eBook loads and reads out eBook files on your phone

SpeakText for eBook is another in a long line of SpeakText apps that offer a useful text-to-speech tool in a dated and often confusing interface. While the core functionality of the app works well, it is often frustratingly hard to navigate and there are a number of limitations that will make the app less useful in certain situations.

There are two functions in SpeakText for eBooks. You can load an eBook into the app directly, choosing from anything in your documents folder, or you can type text into the interface and it will be read by the system voice. Both … Read more

Bill would force you to give police phone after accident

You may feel that everyone wants to peek inside your cell phone just at the moment.

Please, therefore, allow me to make you a little more insecure.

State legislators in New Jersey would very much like to make it easier for the police to go through your cell phone, should you be in any way involved in an accident.

The wording of their proposal -- Bill S 2783 (PDF) -- is quite precise in its breadth:

Whenever an operator of a motor vehicle has been involved in an accident resulting in death, bodily injury or property damage, a police officer … Read more

Hillary Clinton shows she's down with tech and joins Twitter

Demonstrating that she's savvy with the world of social media, Hillary Clinton has finally joined Twitter with a dose of tongue-in-cheek humor. And, with only one tweet, she already has 220,000 followers and counting.

In her profile, Clinton describes herself as a "Wife, mom, lawyer, women & kids advocate, FLOAR, FLOTUS, US Senator, SecState, author, dog owner, hair icon, pantsuit aficionado, glass ceiling cracker, TBD..."

She also references and uses a photo from the popular Tumblr meme "Texts from Hillary," which pairs humorous fictitious captions with images of Clinton texting.

Here is her first … Read more

Review: Color SMS Text Message Friends adds highlights to your texts

Color SMS Text Message Friends lets you send texts in color, but your friends need to have the app installed, as well, in order to see the colorful messages. If you can convince your social circle to add it, then you might get a kick out of this application.

When you first start using Color SMS Text Message Friends, only a handful of its colors and about half of the available fonts are unlocked. If you want to use them all, you have to surrender a dollar. The app's layout is a little plain, but it does make inputting … Read more

Mac tip: Copy and paste plain text with Get Plain Text

Rich text formatting, be gone!

Two questions: Do you use a Mac? Do you find yourself copying and pasting text throughout the workday? If you answered "yes" to both questions, I would recommend spending $2.99 in the Mac App Store on Get Plain Text.

Once installed and running, Get Plain Text places an icon in your Mac's menu bar. Click on it and from the drop-down menu, choose "Automatically clear formatting." Now when you copy and paste text, you'll grab only the text and none of its formatting. You can easily turn this … Read more

Use Google Now to send text messages, e-mail

During Google I/O Google announced some improvements to its Google Now service. One of those improvements -- as we have already covered -- was the ability to create reminders within the app. One other feature we haven't discussed yet is the ability to send a text message or e-mail using Google Now.

Similar to the way Siri works, you're able to give a voice command to Google Now and have a message composed, complete with the recipient of your choosing (so long as they are in your contacts). After Now has filled in all of the required … Read more

Local hero? Man tweets DUI checkpoint locations

When there's a long weekend, the police sometimes create longer lines of traffic by setting up random checkpoints to test whether you have enjoyed yourself to the point of irresponsibility.

It's a tradition not unlike grilling and insulting a relative.

Increasingly, however, social media has allowed real human beings to contact other real human beings in order to avoid being randomly stopped and having their breath searched.

Sennett Devermont has turned checkpoint alerts into what he believes is a public service.

Devermont, a co-founder of the dating site site DateUp (later sold to IAC) and various other ventures, … Read more

Review: Stick Texting Lite livens and customizes texting in a new, exciting way

Stick Texting is a great concept that can turn boring text messages and e-mails on their head. The free app has a number of limitations, but even without the full library of animated and standard stick drawings, this is an app that you'll continue using over and over again to customize your text messages.

The iPhone (and any device like it) has changed how people send text messages. Images, emoticons, and animations are now easy to send from device to device, especially with Apple's free Messages service. Stick Texting takes advantage of that by allowing you to copy … Read more