TURNING THE FIRE INTO A SHOW

I was so bummed by the difficulties of the $399 smart speaker I received from Mycroft AI that I unplugged it and stuck it in the closet. Then I discovered that my Amazon Fire tablet can do everything I wanted the Mycroft to do and more. If you put a Fire in “Show Mode,” and enable Alexa, it becomes a smart speaker with a display screen, just like the Amazon Echo Show. When it’s not displaying the weather and the time, it shows photos, Amazon’s art collection or whatever you choose from a list. Every two minutes, it switches to a news headline with a video option, recipe suggestions, fun facts and more.  Recently, I enjoyed hearing about the “inspiring […]

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ADS ON YOUR PHONE’S LOCK SCREEN

Would it bug you if there were ads right there on your phone’s lock screen? Get ready. They’re coming. When your iPhone updates to version 16 in September, you’ll get ads, along with links to apps and news every time you look down, without tapping anything, according to TheVerge. Some Android phones will get ads as soon as next month, delivered by a lock screen company called Glance. You’ll see news, videos, games, photos, quizzes and commercials, all without tapping. The average person glances at their phone 65 times a day. There’s gold in them there hills. Fire Tablet Is Best For Watching Movies on a Plane “I recently flew for the first time in 20 years, and I must […]

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ZOOMING IN

Joy’s women’s club went virtual, starting with a group video chat on Facebook. It was great.  Joy felt none of the shyness she often feels at ordinary women’s club parties. She could be blunt, telling the group to stop focusing on technical aspects of the conversation. “Let’s just have fun,” she said and so they did. But sometimes the sound quality was poor, causing the group to say they’d switch to Zoom software next time. Zoom is hot right now. It’s designed for video get-togethers and works beautifully. It uses the computer’s built-in camera and microphone, or you can use a tablet or smartphone.  When you use Zoom on your phone, computer or tablet, you see the face of the […]

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PICKING UP A TABLET

We bought the newest iPad model because we couldn’t stand getting iPad or iPhone questions from readers without being able to try out the solutions ourselves. We’re happy with the current model but a newer version is coming out sometime this year. The next iPad is rumored to have an anti-reflective coating on the surface. That’s what’s used in telescopes and microscopes. It improves the contrast of the image by eliminating stray light. A triple-rear camera is also expected, for extra wide photos and videos like the iPhone 11 Pro can take. But we’re happy with the current model. It sells for $249 at Amazon, down from $329 at Apple.  What we like best about our iPad is the sound […]

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FREE TV

“Locast” brings TV over the Internet. Locast is low-cost. How low? How about free?  The TV people, namely CBS, ABC, Fox and NBC, are upset and are suing. They want to keep collecting the fees they get from cable companies. This follows an old business practice: If things aren’t going your way, sue somebody. It reassures the shareholders that you’re on the job and who knows, it might even work. The fees collected by the big networks amounted to $10.1 billion last year.   Locast brings you TV through an internet connection. So far, it’s available in 13 markets, such as Boston, Chicago and New York,  but it will be coming your way. It worked great on our TV, and we […]

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FIRE UP THE TABLET

Joy left her Kindle Fire tablet in the gym. At first we thought it was somewhere around the apartment but it never turned up. So she decided to bite the bullet and buy Amazon’s “Fire HD 10.” It’s $150 and looks as good as an iPad for less than half the price. She got it in blue. She knew the old one had been stolen as soon as she turned on the new one; now there was one Portuguese and two Chinese dictionaries. Some circumstantial evidence is pretty suspicious. So she went to the “Manage your Kindle” section of Amazon and de-registered the old device. The Kindle Fire HD 10 and HD 8 come with Alexa, Amazon’s voice assistant. It […]

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OUR NEW PHONE

There are 4.66 billion cell phones in the world. Ours cracked. Water got in and they just don’t work as well when they’re submerged. ‘Hooda’ thought it? It was the third gone gadget in a year. So bye-bye Google Nexus 6P and hello Google Pixel 2. All 158 apps from our old phone transferred over automatically as soon as we signed into our Google account. (Who needs 158 apps? We don’t even remember what they all do; they went in just to test ’em for the column.) The data in some of those apps was gone. Unfortunately, Joy had a couple hours of Bob’s deep voice recorded on the old phone, telling her about his adventures in Morocco as a […]

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THE RIGHT LIGHT FOR NIGHT

The latest version of Windows 10 has a “Night Light” feature. It allows you to adjust the screen color from the regular bright white on a sliding scale from a light tan to orange. It’s free and you can get it if you search for “Windows 10 Creators Update.” Heaven only knows we need it. At least Bob needs it. He uses a tiny program called “Pango Bright,” from Pangolin Laser Systems that allows the user to scale down the screen brightness from 100 percent to 20 percent. Dealing with the fully bright screen is especially annoying at night or in darkened rooms. We owe this to Steve Jobs, who was the first to give us the bright white screen […]

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BLUETOOTH MYSTERIES

We heard from a reader who wasn’t sure what Bluetooth was and why she needed it on her new iPad Mini. The answer is (the envelope, please): It’s a short-range radio transmitter and receiver, and she doesn’t need it.

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STILL HOT FOR THE LATEST KINDLE FIRE

When we briefly mentioned the new $50 Amazon “Kindle Fire” tablet, ours hadn’t arrived yet.  Now that we have it, we’re more impressed than we expected. Here are a few things we haven’t seen in other reviews: First off, the full content of the Washington Post  is free for the first six months, $4 a month after that. That’s because Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, recently bought the Post, so he can offer any deal he wants.  A catchy headline from the newspaper on the main screen of the tablet lures you in. This is totally addictive: Joy hasn’t gone a day yet without reading the Post’s featured story.

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