Thanks, Gizmo, for all the holiday cheer, as well as the look into the future of Gizmo's Freeware.
I would like to personally thank all of Gizmo's contributors for the tons of brilliant articles about software to make my (computing) life more interesting, and especially, more secure.
It will be interesting to see security articles and suggestions regarding various mobile OS's.
I am happy to see the change coming. Can't wait!

and thank you gizmo for helping to teach an old dog new tricks. for taking me out of the dark ages and into the light. happy holidays

Thank you for the many, many years of helpful hints and tips. I help other "older" computer users and often guide them to your site. You've made many hesitant users into confident, safe "surfers" here in Canada. Please continue to provide the excellent information we all need. I'm looking forward to learning more "new" things in my seventh decade.

Thank You Gizmo, I wish you your Family and Friends, Merry Christmas and all the best for the year 2015

Yea this is my first choice for freeware and info..

Thanks once more to Gizmo, M.C. and ALL of the editors and contributors who help maintain this truly essential site -- with warmest best wishes for the holidays and coming year: health, peace, contentment.

Happy Holidays Gizmo,

This the gold standard for software research, I never install anything without seeing if it passes the sniff test here, for the past five years me and my computers thank you !

I'm sure the future here is bright,

Thanks again ,

Bud :)

Post Script to earlier comment:

Gizmo's Freeware may focus on zero-cost solutions, and the site itself be free (not to mention free of advertising), but it does cost real money to maintain.

Gizmo and his extraordinary collaborators knock themselves out all through the year on our behalf; hopefully, other frequenters of the site will join me in making a contribution to help defray the costs and sustain their worthy, indeed essential, efforts.

jorgeem1717 took the words right out of my mouth. Nothing I can add to improve on that.

Best Holiday wishes to all of you.

You are my mainstay for quality apps and software for free that help me so much financially as well as just plain work-wise. Please stay around for us and the addition of more mobile help is warrented and will be welcomed as long as the desktop, cloud and other types remain in force for those of us who need them. I could just give you a big ol' thank you kiss on your forehead for all you do for us throughout the year! And your volunteers too~ Onward and upward...

We love you back, Gizmo and Co! I teach computing to friends n family and yours is the first site I recommend. Besides that, what everyone else has said above.

I really appreciate all the hard work that goes into the Gizmo's community.

Thank you, Gizmo. Your site is a delight.
Quality information uncluttered by Graphic Designers on speed.

Thank you and all of the editors for everything you've been offering us. :-)

Still an oasis of sanity in the cesspool known as the web 2018. Thank you gizmo!
Hope you rhiannon and all had a great Christmas, Happy 2019, donation coming in the NY.

Great resources and great volunteers doing an excellent / unbiased job make this site a valuable resource to folks looking for solutions to all sorts of computing needs. Just because its free does not mean its inferior! In fact I've found for many solutions the free stuff is often better than a paid alternative. The one element here as opposed to other free sites is the great evaluations of the products and product categories. Its been a go to site for me for many years and I hope for many more years. Keep up the good work.

Congratulations on the great service you provide. I am sure many users, like myself will do our best to keep this service going

Nice! Thanks!

me2. When i see the word "App" (or "smartphone" for that matter) i read "collector of your personal information."

It seems clear the business model is, we give you something you value for free, and we collect and sell information about you to help companies target ads to you (and who knows what other uses).

Is there any indication this app is not part of that model?

For example, what kind of information could an app gather about you if it could scan several of your documents?

@Jojo Yee thanks for the effort and time that went into this review. I appreciate it, notwithstanding my privacy concerns. Not everyone shares these concerns.

I have not been able to make this app work, though I have many times followed the instructions exactly, and etc. None of my three devices will recognize any other. Or, I should say, they did one time but only once. The Lenovo web site offers no support and makes posting a comment difficult. I have had to give up the app in frustration.

Exactly the same for me. I've had to give up after days of trying all the instructions I could find online. Nothing worked.

Software? Not.

Definitely, Speccy is always my first choice for a quick rundown of hardware or if I need to monitor temperatures for any reason.

Jerry I guess software means O/S here.

Doesn't work for me. I get a black screen; the music works and I can click on stuff on the screen but can't see anything. Same with the card game.

Webroot blocks this site as containing "suspicious content" - any ideas what that might be?

I kept the same game going for several days until it just beat me, score 197,330. I captured the screen for proof, but don't know how to post it in this comment, or even if that would be allowed.

E-mail it to yourself, or embed it in a dummy page and download it?

Nice find rob !
Something there for everyone..... thank you !

Ascendo DataVault works across all Android, IOS, Windows and more. Great 256 bit encryption, DropBox sync. I have been using it for years across all these platforms.

"Try it out. It's fun and free, and very simple to play."

You said all, rob. Just a few more words: great pastime, cool simple game!

Thank you! :-)

Excellent little game, Rob! Quite like Othello/Reversi, but the 1 or 2 square move choice is a nice little twist.

Disappointed at this news. It was one of the main reasons why we purchased Alexa devices. Now we won't be able to listen to our owned music? Not cool.

** Update ** Thanks for the reply via Facebook. I didn't notice the option to keep songs that are already uploaded. So glad I saw this article before April 7th.

Amazon's allowance of uploaded songs was 250, quite different from Google. From what I can gather, this was done to weed out inactive accounts where the MP3's were taking up space. Might have been a lot of accounts, given how much server space amazon has and sells. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It might let some people down.

I don't know about unfair, but you've got Finland listed twice, where it should only be once...the correct countries are SWEDEN, USA, NETHERLANDS and FINLAND!

I'll give this a go today!

I tried one during it's beta & it may have been the one you were speaking of: fontifier? I think?

Can you tell me if the letters need to be centred in each square for even the symbols? I recall that when I did the one from before, the quotes mark was too low & comma too high-- if you know what I mean? Can you elaborate?

Cheers!

Sorry - It doesn't work. The web-site locks up at the first step!

For me, this site is more good idea than definitely doable, and for the reason that some have mentioned - if you don't have a steady hand and eye, getting each character to line up, look connected to adjoining letters, and be smoothly drawn is downright difficult. My results were also on the horrendous / unusable side of the results scale.

@Fairportfan: It may be simple, at least in theory, but easy to accomplish / get good results, its nowhere near being simple.

Okay. I tried it. Just a quick'n'dirty; i only generated the numbers 0 to 9 and the letters to write a short sentence.

I tried it twice - once using a black ballpoint and one using a fine-point Sharpie. I wasn't particularly careful about my penmanship, either.

Not counting the trip to the store to buy a marker and pen (thirty minutes), and arguing with my DTP software as to whether they were fonts it wanted to admit existed (other programs had no problems; i guess Serif PagePlus is snooty), total time involved in making this limited character set was about twenty minutes, counting making the scans.

You can see the result at http://electronictiger.net/fonts.png

(When i was actually making the fonts, i noticed that they offer the templates as PNG images; as i said before, if you download those, you can copy/paste individual images into the blocks if you are having trouble writing in them on the template itself.)

Remember to print the templates in colour - actually, i don't know if it will make a difference, but the faint images in each block are red to make them less likely to reproduce.

Do NOT scan in B&W mode - greyscale is preferable, but they say you can get away with colour.

I scanned at 300 DPI.

Hope this helps.

(I'm working on a very large set, with numerous special characters; when i finish it, i'll post the results online and link 'em here.)

What browser?

Worked fine for me in Opera, and in Firefox and (though i use it only reluctantly, and generally only to check websites) in IE.

=============

Try clicking the "Create Template" button. If that works, it's not locked up, just strangely designed.

While you're at the first page, try typing characters that aren't already shown in the block, and they should go into the list to be on the template, even there's no cursor there.

I used a black, fine point, BiC Mark-it pen. The 5 or so letters that did come out well were beautiful and well formed. But the rest of the letters that did not (they showed up as blank rectangles) made me quit my efforts.

I can't understand why only some letters appeared and not others, when this is a *hand* writing font, and theoretically anything that's in the box, regardless of shape, should show up.

Try again with a Sharpie.