Do you feel pressured to get a 5G phone? If so, ignore the hype.

“I’m told I have to go to a 5G phone soon,” a reader wrote. “What’s your best recommendation for an old guy who seldom makes more than two to three calls a month but wants to keep GPS and take photos?”

“Fuggedabout it,” I said. “You don’t need 5G.” Why should he get a new phone capable of using a higher speed network when he’s not  experiencing any delays now? As for GPS, it has nothing to do with 5G.

AndroidCentral has an article on both sides of the fence. On the pro-5G side, it claims that the “extra milliseconds it takes 4G LTE to form a connection can really start to add up for a heavy user.”  A millisecond is one thousandths of a second. Are we really in that much of a hurry? Of course, we must also consider “the Internet of things,” a brave new world where your toaster talks to your phone and your vacuum cleaner goes on strike. (Don’t tell me yours does this already.) It could complicate matters in the future. But not yet.

The bottom line: Unless you’re frustrated by long wait times when downloading or uploading, skip 5G for now. I’m certainly going to wait. I’ll ignore the experts who say I should throw out my phone when it stops getting updates after its third birthday in May. All I have to do is use a free security app like Avast and/or Malwarebytes.

If you feel your phone has been compromised, do a factory reset. Then change your passwords.

Map Tip

It used to drive me crazy when my GPS app kept talking to me even after I had arrived at my destination. Now I know what to do.

From the home screen on an iPhone, swipe up from the bottom of the screen and pause in the middle of the screen. Swipe right or left to find the app you want to close. Then swipe up on the app’s preview to close the app. If you you forget these instructions, just say, “Hey Siri, how do I close an app?”

To close an app on an Android phone, tap the small square in the lower right, then swipe up on an app to close it. If you don’t have the tiny square on your screen, just swipe up from the bottom of your screen and cycle through the apps. When you get to the one you want to close, swipe up and it will vanish. To change your method of navigation, go to “Settings,” then “System,” then “Gestures.”

Too “Wordly”

In the last column, I said there was an app and a website for the popular word game, “Wordle.” But the app I downloaded was “Wordly,” not “Wordle.” If you want more than Wordle’s one daily challenge without getting Wordly, go to devangthakkar.com and click on “Wordle Archive” in the upper right. It has over 250 puzzles, with a new one every day.

The Best Way to Work With Audio Files

It would be nice to record your children or grandchildren’s cutest utterings. Or you might find lectures worth recording. Either way, there may be rough spots you want to edit out.

To record a talk on my Android phone, I used the free Otter.ai app, which is also available for iPhones and includes transcripts. Then I turned to the free online program, “MP3 Cutter,” at Clideo.com to cut off the part I didn’t want. All I had to do was mark the desired beginning and ending. MP3 Cutter did the rest. Then I clicked “export” and “download” to save it to my computer. Next I used Clideo’s free “Audio Joiner” to stitch together various segments. Then I emailed the file. Since it was too large for Gmail, Gmail automatically converted it to a link. The recipient only has to click on it to download the file and play it.

Troublesome Transfer

A reader notified Verizon by snail mail that he was transferring to Consumer Cellular. That started his trouble. He’s the third person I’ve heard from who spent hours trying to get a number transferred, either from Verizon or AT&T. Some tell me they spent four hours or more on the phone.

When he couldn’t get his number transferred, the reader said, “Verizon’s East Coast office clarified that the correct procedure was followed. But they want me to pay for use I didn’t accrue.” It’s intensely aggravating, given that he’s been a Verizon customer for 14 years, never missing a payment or even being late once. “At present I’m just letting them stew in their own juice,” he said.

Windows Boot-Up Trick

If your machine won’t boot into Windows, here’s something to try. Turn the machine off three times in a row. The trick is, each time you go to turn it off, hold down the power button for ten seconds. After the third time, you should get the Automatic Repair screen with advanced options enabling you to enter the Windows Recovery Environment.  For more info on this from Reviewed.com, see “How to Enable Safe Mode in Windows 10 -11.”

Internut

Shmoop.com/shakespeare-words. Go to this site and click on “A-B,” or “C-D,” and so on to see the words Shakespeare coined. It turns out he invented over 1,700 words, including “addiction,” “bedroom,” “bedazzled,” “kissing,” and “gossip.”