Do you have a valuable collection of baseball cards or Barbie dollars in the house? They could be worth more (or less) than you ever dreamed. I undertook a pandemic project a few weeks ago and took out bins of old baseball cards from a storage room. Like many kids of the 80s, I dreamed the cards would someday be…
Who knew you can read a nation’s mood by looking through the app stores? Apple and Google have released their lists of the best apps of the year. And you can easily see, it’s been a rough year for many of us. Apple named Wakeout! it’s the iPhone app of the year. When companies sent people home to work last…
For many of us, this will be the first Christmas in ages where we haven’t been able to spend it with family. I started looking for some gift ideas that may help ease that pain a bit and keep the family close together during the holidays. I’ll bet you or someone in your family has a stack of old VHS…
If you’re old enough to remember “The Jetsons”, you probably realize we’re leaving in a Jetsons era (except for the space-cars). Remember Rosie? The Jetson’s housekeeping robot? This Christmas lots of people are adding robots to their own homes. Robot vacuum cleaners have been popular for years but they’ve been priced too high for most people to buy one. Prices…
Say this about the pandemic of 2020, it created hundreds of options for Christmas gifts that we’d never have thought about before. For example, people have watched more TV. Netflix in particular has seen a rise in subscribers and those subscribers discovered shows like “Queen’s Gambit” which sparked a boom in the chess industry. If you haven’t seen it yet…
When movie theaters closed due to the pandemic this past spring, many families began creating their own movie theater in their backyards. Digital projectors have come a long way in recent years and now it is possible to create a drive-in type atmosphere in the yard with a wireless projector and inexpensive movie screen. While there are many versions of…
This holiday season, whether you’re having people over (which is not recommended this year) or fixing just for your immediate family, these apps can help you find new recipes. For beginners, Project Foodie is an app to try. This app is from the talented professional chef Daniel Holzman. He assumes you know nothing or very little about how to create…
This is an unprecedented holiday shopping season. With many retailers either closed or significantly cut back on Black Friday sales, shoppers are swarming the virtual stores looking for great deals on their computers or smartphones. There are lots of deals to be had this year and most Black Friday sales started a week or more ago. A recent survey by…
Needless to say this will be a Thanksgiving like never before. Travel restrictions are in place to stop the spread of the coronavirus and many people just don’t want to risk being close to family members who are out of town or who they see only a few times a year. Thanksgiving though is perhaps the most family-centered holiday of…
In a normal year, college students home for the holidays could find work in local restaurants, shops and stores. 2020 is no normal year of course, and many of those students will have a great deal of trouble finding any seasonal job opportunities. Only that’s not necessarily true. Seasonal jobs have gone online this year and the working remotely or…
