Handy hints and tips from your fellow readers
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Issue 632 • 25 May – 7 June 2022Want to recommend hardware or software
to fellow readers?
Email [email protected]Lenovo ThinkVision M14
£230 from Amazon http://www.snipca.com/41833Anyone in the market for a
secondary mobile screen should
consider the Lenovo ThinkVision M14
(pictured here in my home office). At 14
inches, with a resolution of 1920x1080,
everything looks clear and crisp, and
the matt screen makes it a dream for
working with text. It’s also impossiblylight – you really do not notice it
alongside a laptop.
It can draw power from the laptop
(beware – it munches through battery
power), or ‘daisy chain’ power into
the laptop from a plug or power bank
as it has two USB-C ports, and needs
only one cable to work (so is properly
portable).
As a lawyer, I like to work on
documents side by side, and this makes
the job easy. I can’t recommend it
highly enough – it even comes with a
neat little carry case and a built-in
stand!
Simon Grimshawversions of the Xbox and Sony PlayStation,
as well as the Sega Mega Drive. Some
bundles sold for £10. The DIN and PS/2
cables, which you advise to ditch, sold for
£2.50 each, as did old phone chargers. I
gather that TV or phono/RCA leads are
also sought after. It’s worth searching
eBay to see what price you might get. For
example, here’s what a search for DIN
and PS/2 cables throws up: http://www.snipca.
com/41831.
Alan Trueman
HARDWARE
Turn off smart plugs via Alexa
Your article on saving power
around the home (Issue 631, page
60) was very timely, with bills getting
more expensive. Like the writer Nik
Rawlinson, I use smart plugs to control
my devices. I combine them with my
Amazon Echo smart speaker to set up a
bedtime routine that shuts them all down
at once.
It’s much easier to carry out than it
sounds. You have to log into the Alexa
app on your phone or tablet, then tap
More, followed by Routines. Then you
have to tap the ‘+’ at the top of the screen,
followed by Name, and type goodnight.
Next, tap ‘When’ and type goodnight,
then tap the ‘+’ to the right of ‘Add action’
(^1 in our screenshot below).
Next, tap Smart Home followed by
All Devices, then tap each of your smart
plugs in turn and set their status to off.
When you’ve finished, tap the left-
pointing arrow to return to the Routines
home screen. Finally, tap Save. This
arrangement means that I only need to
say ‘Alexa, goodnight’^2 when going to
bed to turn off every plug on my network.
Ian RickmanThe one device you overlooked in
your otherwise excellent feature
on saving power was Tado’s Smart
Thermostat (pictured below). Using the
app I can control the heating in all my
rooms. The cleverest thing it does is to
take weather forecasts into account,
automatically turning down the heating
on warm days. I see now that it costs
£139.99 on Amazon (www.snipca.
com/41832), though I’m sure I paid a lot
less than that.
Pat MurrayVOIP
Use Sipgate for your phone calls
Following your How To on switching
to VoIP (Issue 628, page 35), I
wanted to put in a very good word for
Sipgate (www.sipgate.co.uk). It surprisesme that this German firm makes hardly
any effort to market itself in the UK.
It has a basic plan for £9.95 a month
(see screenshot below), but because
we use the service sparingly, relying
mostly on our mobile phones, we just pay
as we go. I put £20 in last October and
there’s still £8 left in the kitty. That’s
less than £3 a month! Calls are 1.18p a
minute (9.9p to mobiles). It’s very
reliable and has a handy service that
emails you any voicemails. What with
that and my 1p Mobile (www.1pmobile.
com), which is also amazingly cheap, I’m
paying less than £10 a month for my
comms. If only I could get my broadband
down to those levels!
Tony Allaway2
1