Google translate
(Google Translate App)
Google translate allows translating to 103 languages by typing. You can translate without any internet connection. The instant camera translation allows you to translate text in images by pointing your camera to the object. You can do a speech translation using your phone.

iTranslate
(iTranslate App)
iTranslate is a free translator and dictionary app to translate text or for voice-to-voice conversations in over 100 languages. The Offline Mode allows you to translate while you are traveling.

Microsoft Translator
(Translator website | Translator App)
Microsoft Translator is a translation app that can translate text, voice, conversations, camera photos, and screenshots. You can download languages for offline translation for your travel purpose. The voice translation allows translate speech, the split-screen mode allows two participants to have a bilingual conversation.

Google Assistant interpreter mode
Google Assistant has a new interpreter mode that translates your conversations in real-time. To enable the feature, ask the Google Assistant to, “Hey Google, be my French interpreter” or “Hey Google, help me speak Spanish”.

Bluetooth Speaker
With a Bluetooth speaker, you can wirelessly stream high-quality sound from your smartphone or tablet. It has a built-in, rechargeable Li-ion battery that supports hours of playtime. If the Bluetooth is not available in your device or not working, you can plug the audio cable into the speaker to enjoy the music.

Mini portable speaker
If you want to carry a tine speaker with you, this portable mini speaker is for you. It has a rechargeable Lithium battery built-in, playtime can last for 8 hours. To connect, plug the speaker into the 3.5mm socket of your smartphone, MP3 player, Tablet, PC, and Laptop. Use your connected device to control music or video and to adjust the volume levels.

Smartphone Stand
You can get a mobile phone stand to hold your mobile phone to watch videos for a long time. You can also make a mobile phone stand using cardboard, there are a number of free DIY tutorials available on Youtube.
You can also purchase a finger loop mount stand or a cell phone ring holder stand. It supports 360-degree rotation and a 180-degree flip.

Camera Lens Kit
You can get different types of camera lens kit for your photography needs. There are macro, wide-angle, fisheye, and telephoto clip-on mobile lenses available. The lens can be screwed into the clip provided. The clip ensures that the lenses are perfectly aligned with your camera.

Virtual Reality Headset
VR gaming is considerably spiked among gamers. With a VR headset, you can enjoy a fully immersive viewing experience. It is comfortable to wear, with adjustable headband, head support, and foam face cushioning. It is also compatible with most smartphone models with 4.7 to 6-inch screens with a gyroscope feature. There are plenty of options to choose from, there are a number of manufactures offering VR headsets including Samsung, Sony, HTC, Google, and others.

Mobile Gamepad
You can turn your smartphone into a gaming console with a mobile gamepad. Mobile gamepad offers low latency Bluetooth connection that enhances the overall experience of smartphone gaming and better connectivity. The gamepad has a textured rubber grip to make it anti-skid and comfortable for long hours of play. The secure clamp ensures the safety of your smartphone while playing games.

What is your opinion about these smart accessories for your smartphone? The additional wireless speaker will definitely improve the movie viewing experience, as it delivers realistic audible sound. There are smartphone screen magnifiers available to magnify the phone screen 2 to 4 times. Many users commented that the magnifier screen makes it easy to watch what’s on our screen, especially for elderly people. The portable design will allow you to collapse the box and carry it anywhere. You can find enclosed screen magnifiers, it improves screen brightness, and effectively prevents the reflective image. The magnifier can reduce the eyes fatigue when you watch videos on the phone.

First thing is to find out the stuff that you want to turn into a surveillance system, it may be a laptop or a desktop computer. Analyse what you have, if an old working laptop with a useless camera, then we couldn’t use it for our purpose. For desktop’s, there is no video cameras are built on to it. We have to add a video camera by purchasing a new one or use an old webcam that we don’t have any use now. Next, there are a few good programs available to capture images from the camera. You can use programs like Yawcam, ispy, securityspy, etc. For a laptop, you have to adjust the screen turn off time setting to keep the laptop live when it is plugged in. Laptops are meant for long time portable use, and it’s power settings are arranged accordingly, the screen on battery power turns off after a few minutes, similarly the screen turn off after a few minutes even if your laptop is connected to a power plug. But you can change the settings by changing the power saving settings.

To change the power saver option, click on the battery icon on system tray in your laptop screen. Click power and sleep settings, you can see the option box next to the screen, asking, “on battery power turn off after”, and “when plugged in, turn off after”. change the answer to “Never”, instead of a few minutes.

If you are using an old PC, ensure it has internet connectivity, USB port to connect the camera (one camera per port), a hard drive with a minimum of 40/100Gb storage capacity. There are kits available to connect multiple cameras to your computer.

Alarms for home – Setting Up

• The first step is to check the places you want to fix the camera. Take a quick tour of your premises and spot the locations.
• Switch on your PC clean up the system and remove unwanted applications, keep the only essential applications that a system needs.
• Connect a webcam to your PC and check the intended item is to be monitored, like your children, your pets or your garden. If you want a panoramic view of a place or room fixes the webcam at a height that gives you a better coverage.
• Carry out a Preview check. You can do this by using the camera monitor’s Preview window.
• Configure the application for your need, like sending Emails or SMS when motion detected, etc. (read webcam monitor configuration settings)

Webcam Monitor
(http://www.deskshare.com/wcm.aspx)

Webcam monitor is a surveillance software detects motion and triggers alerts that can record video and audio of the incident, notify you by e-mail or text message, or sound an audible alarm.  It can also begin recording at pre-set intervals to maintain a record of events. It’s as simple as connecting a camera to your PC.  Using the configuration wizard, you can easily set up and running in minutes. WebCam Monitor can automatically upload recorded video, audio, and photos to a server.  Video can also be streamed live over the Internet, letting you monitor events from any computer with an Internet connection. Professional security features include automatic time-stamping of recorded video and photos.  All monitored activity is displayed in an event log for quick reference.  The Auto Delete function lets you keep a “last number of days” set of recordings and photos, without risking filling your hard disk and without having to manually track and delete files.

Yawcam
(http://www.yawcam.com/)
Yawcam is short for Yet Another WebCAM software, is a webcam software for Windows written in Java. The programmers of  Yawcam keeps it simple and easy to use but to include all the usual features like video streaming, image snapshots, built-in web server, motion detection, Ftp-upload, text and image overlays, password protection and other features.

iSPY
(https://www.ispyconnect.com/)
iSPY is an open source Video Surveillance software for windows to control your cameras and access live video and recorded content from anywhere in the world. Main features of this software, unlimited cameras, and microphones (including IP and USB cameras), Motion Detection, motion processing, recording, scheduling, audio, remote Access, network audio broadcasting, password protection, desktop recording, YouTube uploading, cloud uploading, FTP, SFTP, SMS, Twitter and Email alerts. You can use the ispy user guide to install and configure the software.

ContaCam
(https://www.contaware.com/)
This is also a free Video Surveillance and Live Webcam software for Windows, it is light on system resources, and does not contain unnecessary bloat. It is fast, light, and versatile enough to meet all your security needs while still being very user-friendly and able to run on even the most moderate systems.

There are other programs like EyeLine Video Surveillance Software offering monitoring and recording 100+ camera sources simultaneously with motion detection recording which saves space by only recording when something is happening, and it will send Email or SMS alerts when motion detection happens!

You can find a number of similar software’s online. Most of them have all the features but with a price to enjoy all the features. Look for a lightweight software that requires less hardware requirements to use with your old system. Do you want to edit your videos? You can use easy to use video editing applications like, Movavi Video Editor or Corel Video Studio to edit or trim your videos. To take screenshot of the video with its settings, you can use a screen capture tool.

Seafile
(https://www.seafile.com)
Seafile is self-hosted open source cloud hosting solution with file sync and sharing feature with good performance and reliability. Seafile organizes files into libraries, each library can be synced into any desktop computer working in Windows, Mac, and Linux. Libraries and folders can be shared to users or groups, with read-only or read-write permissions. Files can access using Android and iOS devices. The community edition is free and the price for the free edition is free for up to 3 users.

Nextcloud
(https://nextcloud.com/)
Nextcloud is a self-hosted platform for storing and syncing your files and data. Nextcloud can run on the server and can access from your desktop or mobile devices.

Cozy
(https://cozy.io)
Cozy provides free open source cloud storage solution across different platforms.

Pydio
(https://pydio.com)
Pydio is open-source software deployed on your servers to create your own cloud server platform. You can centralize your files and access your files from any device.

Resilio
(https://www.resilio.com/)
You can sync photos, videos, music, PDFs, docs or any other file types to or from your mobile phone, laptop, or NAS using P2P technology. You can send photos, videos, or any other large file directly to anybody. It syncs every folder automatically to all your devices, to sync, just add a folder to it and it automatically becomes available on all your linked devices.

Tonido Server
(https://www.tonido.com/)
You can set up your personal cloud with Tonido. It allows you to access all your files on your computer from a web browser, smartphone, tablet or with a DLNA enabled devices. All you want to do is install the Tonido Server software and your computer becomes a private cloud server.

Personal Cloud Devices

Western Digital My Cloud
(Western Digital Store)
You can quickly set up your personal cloud with MyCloud home device. Just plug the device into your Wi-Fi router, then use your mobile phone or tablet to visit mycloud.com/hello, to set up your account. Now you can share, access and backup files. You can use My cloud home mobile app, desktop app or mycloud.com to upload, access and share your files. You can organize it and can access anywhere through an internet connection using Gigabit Ethernet. You can purchase the device from 2Tb to 8 TB or more. My cloud mirror devices offer mirror mode (RAID 1), that saves everything twice offers more protection. In My Cloud Mirror dual hard drives are set to Mirror Mode (RAID 1), that automatically duplicates the centralized content twice for better data backup protection.

There is a list of Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices available. Seagate’s personal cloud home media storage device is useful to build a home personal cloud storage network. QNAP and Synology disk station offers replaceable hard drive based storage solution.

The main advantage of this type of personal cloud storage device is you have full authority on your data, you know where is your data (in cloud service you don’t know its location of storage), you know if someone had hacked your data, and you are sure that the data are stored safely in your premise. You can extend the storage by yourself.

Use a Computer Spreadsheet
If you have good at Excel program or Google spreadsheet, you can use formula and budget formats to enter and analyze the transaction and income in the spreadsheets. If you are a newbie to the real world and independent, you have been spending more than you can afford. You need a personal budget spreadsheet to track your daily budget. You can get a free personal budget sheet from vertex42, Microsoft Office templates, Google free spreadsheets (login to view the spreadsheet).

Use a Personal Finance Software
You can use a web-based or a desktop based program with a companion mobile app that can sync seamlessly in the background to track your income and expenses. You can find a number of items from the web, I just mention some of them to get an idea about how it works.

Quicken
(https://www.quicken.com)
Quicken helps you to view your banking, investment, retirement, and credit card accounts in one place. You can analyze what’s coming in and what’s going out. You will get alerts about your bills, so you never miss a due date. You can review your portfolio, monitor performance, and see market comparisons to make your buy or sell decisions.

Mint
(https://www.mint.com/)
With Mint, you can create budgets and see their suggestions based on your spending. You will receive alerts for unusual account charges, and get custom tips from Mint for reducing fees and saving money.

You Need A Budget
(https://www.youneedabudget.com/)
You Need A Budget (YNAB) is the name of a budget tracker. they say, their Four Rules are the key. You can learn their method and you could budget successfully (blindfolded, with one arm tied behind your back-their website claims!). You can access real-time information, from any device, anytime, and can share finances with your partner (think twice!). Eye candy graphs and charts help you to analyze your progress. There is a trial version available for 34 days, so you are comfortable to test their methods.

Use a Personal Finance Mobile App
The new gen apps are there to track your expenses. Nothing can be better than having a simple mobile app in your pocket for tracking personal finances in real time. Here are some apps that I noticed in the play store.

Money Manager Expense & Budget
(Money manager in Play store)
Money Manager helps you to record your personal and business financial transactions, generate spending reports, review your daily, weekly and monthly financial data and manage your assets with Money Manager’s spending tracker and budget planner. You can also view the Money Manager application using a Wi-Fi connection. Easily edit and sort the data by date, category or account group on your PC is an added advantage than other apps. You can observe fluctuations in your accounts indicated on graphs on your PC. I installed and currently using this app and works flawlessly, but I didn’t test the PC version because I don’t have paid version!

Mobills Budget
(Mobills in Play Store)
Mobills is a budget planning app that allows you to create a custom monthly budget to take control of your money. You are able to manage your money, track your spending, and achieve your financial goals all in this app.

It is not as easy as you think. Budgeting is not restrictive. We can’t spend less even we decided to spend less (it can, then better), the best option is to spend right. We need to track down our daily expenses (need to make it a habit, otherwise we don’t do) and analyze our spending habit. If high take the remedial measures for the upcoming months.

Not only spending less saves your life. Its all about setting and reaching your goals. You need to define a goal (like build a new home, a family trip, buy a car) then setting new, bigger goals, and doing it again. It works, I set a goal and add a fixed amount each month into a SIP account and instructed the bank to deduct it from my salary when I get the salary. I do it within the salary week itself. This small amount added in each month finally grew into a big amount at the end of the year and I used it to purchase the right thing that I intended. Now I have a few goals and I am investing in each goal every month. Otherwise, I will spend that money to buy something or spend carelessly.

There is a 50:20:30 rule of Budgeting, it says that you should spend 50% on your needs, 30% on your wants and keep 20% for your savings. You can adjust the ratio as per your life. It is a good idea to do some calculation on 30th of every month, by taking a notebook, write down the saved cash, balance in your bank account, balance in your pocket, credit card payments, remaining loan payments, your goal value and all other finances that you need to bring on record.

It is a good idea to download the monthly bank account statements and credit card statements in excel sheets, also save as pdf files in your computer or laptop in a secured private folder. Remember, application in youth makes old age comfortable. Easy come, easy go, but steady diligence pays off, so save every penny and get rich.