If you’ve been trying to keep an aging all-in-one printer out of the graveyard, forget it. Move on. I’ve been banging my head against the wall with a bunch of space-hogging Dell printers. I had an 8-year-old, office-grey laser printer for manuscripts and an equally old and grumpy faded-white scanner-fax-printer inkjet combo for which the cartridge nozzles kept drying out, still half full of ink.

The Tibetan government, law firms in Thailand and human rights groups in Sudan are all using a relatively new encrypted communications tool — one that fits easily, if not cheaply, onto your smartphone. Silent Circle is an encrypted voice, video, text and file-transfer protocol that’s available in app forms for Android devices, among others.

I recently took a look at MeteoEarth, a rather spectacular Google Earth-like animated weather app. This visual, 3D globe-spinning weather app for Android provides zoom-in weather visualizations of the kind seen on TV — and indeed, the publisher is a provider of weather-in-motion graphics to broadcasters. Well, MeteoEarth’s visually stimulating show-off app has an all-rounder cousin, WeatherPro.

If you’ve ever been involved with any kind of work-related group project, you’ll know what a nightmare it is to collaborate via email. The management of file versions alone is enough to introduce ambiguity and quickly hiccup the whole thing. Plus, if you’re not careful, it’s possible to start an entire email thread questioning what file version you’re supposed to be looking at.

You know those fancy, animated weather visualizations that you get on the local television news broadcasts — the ones with the 3D drill-down dynamic graphics that make it appear as if the meteorologist is directing the clouds? Well, you can now get something similar on your Android device. MeteoGroup is a European producer of weather-in-motion graphics that it supplies to broadcasters.

Having recently had my bicycle stolen — after having a set of wheels pilfered in a previous year — I was getting mad and, to quote the 1976 movie Network, I was not going to be taking it anymore. I decided to beef up my security both in general and on the replacement bike in particular. I was going to invest in some security tech.

A few weeks ago I looked at Burner, an Android app that creates anonymous, disposable phone numbers for your smartphone. Android app Snapchat is in the same arena in that it, too, provides privacy for smartphone users. The difference, however is that this app uniquely deletes MMS-like multimedia messages once they’ve been viewed.

A few weeks ago I looked at Burner, an Android app that creates anonymous, disposable phone numbers for your smartphone. Android app Snapchat is in the same arena in that it, too, provides privacy for smartphone users. The difference, however is that this app uniquely deletes MMS-like multimedia messages once they’ve been viewed.