MOTOROLA MYSTERY

A reader said that he wants to replace a five-year-old Motorola phone with a later version. But new Motorolas often have worse reviews than old ones, though the new ones tend to cost less. For example, I paid $170 for the 2021 Moto Power G on Amazon but it now goes for $270 to $400.  Does that mean people prefer the old to the new? Has Motorola gone downhill? The latest Moto G Power has nine percent one-star reviews on Amazon, which is a lot. But it’s reasonably priced at $200, has a relatively fast Snapdragon processor and the same great  battery life as the older Moto G phones. It can go five days on a single charge. It also […]

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OBAGGO KEEPS BAGS OUT OF LANDFILLS

Here’s my new habit: Whenever I take the plastic wrap off a roll of paper towels or some other package, it goes straight into my Obaggo, a personal trash compactor about the size of a coffee maker. With a little heat and a lot of pressure, the Obaggo turns Amazon bags, cereal box liners, bubble wrap, zip-lock bags, single-use grocery bags, dry cleaner bags, and dozens of other plastic thingies into frisbie-like disks that recycling centers can shred and stamp into pellets, which are used to make new products. Your local grocery store’s recycling bin will take the disks, or you can get a free label to mail them back to Obaggo. Otherwise, most plastic bags end up in landfills. […]

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LONG LIVE THE FLOPPY DISK

Floppy disks, a creation of the 1960s, will never die. Or will they?In a video that went viral this month, a Chuck E. Cheese employee is seen loading a 3.5-inch floppy into a computer. The floppy is used to send data to animate Chuck E. Cheese and his robotic friends. There are many other entities that use floppies as well. Even our military does. The US Air Force operates six Boeing 747-200 airplanes, each 36 years old, that get updates from floppies. Two of these are Air Force One planes. Airbus, the European rival to Boeing, aswell as some business jets, also use floppies. Why don’t they upgrade to USB sticks, SD cards, or wireless transfer? It would cost thousands […]

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THE FUTURE OF CRYPTOCURRENCY

After the FTX bankruptcy debacle, people lost faith in cryptocurrency. Even I did, though I bought a sweater with bitcoin in 2017. It might be different if I lived in another country. Take Lebanon, for example. According to a report last month, people who try to get their cash out of a bank have to give up 85 percent of it.  CNBC quoted an architect who said he now gets 90 percent of his payments in bitcoin there, which he swaps for a “stablecoin” called tether, which he exchanges for US dollars. “One of the big attractions of cryptocurrency is its independence from governments and traditional financial institutions,” said Joel Ewing, the president of the Bella Vista computer club in […]

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SHOULD YOU GET 5G?

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 […]

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THE DARK SIDE OF 5G

Joy sent off the wrong column last time. The one without Bob’s views on 5G. She swears she didn’t do it on purpose. So here’s some wisdom from the more experienced half of our duo.  There are two problems with 5G (fifth generation wireless). First, you almost certainly won’t get the speed advertised. Second, it ignores the competition, FTTH, or Fiber to the Home. Unlike 5G, FTTH involves laying actual cable connections, which is expensive. It’s not wireless. But it’s fast and secure. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) says it’s the only way to give options to the 68 million Americans who have only one choice of Internet Service Provider.  According to the EFF, 5G customers will either get moderate […]

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A HEART-WARMING TALE

The cat came back. Not the very next day, but it did come back. They thought he was a goner. It all happened after we wrote about a $30 security camera called “Wyze Pan Cam,” The price was right, so they bought it. The reader wrote to say that she and her husband put one in their open garage to see if they could find out where the cat went. “It took over a week, but we finally saw our beloved kitty,” she said. “He is coming regularly now. He was a feral (wild) cat to begin with, so it will take time to get him back inside, but you have no idea how helpful this is for our emotional […]

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A TRAVELING MAN

A reader wrote to tell us about “Mobile Passport,” a free app which lets him breeze past the long lines at the airport after an overseas journey. Here’s how it goes: “So I was blindsided on a recent overseas trip when my daughter told me about this app.  By filling out some basic info and submitting it electronically when you arrive stateside, you skip right past the long line at immigration, to go to a line of one person (in our case) who was enlightened like we were.  It took us about one minute. This will certainly change when others learn about Mobile Passport so don’t tell anyone.  But for now, wow!” Okay, so we’re telling someone; what can we […]

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REMOTE CONTROL

Sometimes you need to access your computer from a galaxy far, far away. Or at least from the beach. We used to like TeamViewer, but it got too complicated. So now we like the free “AnyDesk.” You can use this from any laptop, tablet or smartphone. In our tests, all went well. On a Chromebook, we used AnyDesk to control our Windows computer. It was only in the next room, but in theory it could have been far, far away. After clicking on the AnyDesk icon and typing the secret code, we clicked on familiar icons to browse the web, edit anything we had written, and play Peggle, our favorite game. In PowerPoint, we added a slide to our “History […]

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THE REAL MCCOY

We have a reader named McCoy, and he maintains that he is “The Real McCoy” (accept no substitutes). Well, we believe him and he has some good tips, which we will pass along a little further down the way. This goes back to a topic we wrote about a couple weeks ago. But it’s an important topic, and becoming more immediate as the world goes increasingly gonzo about these new digital assistants like Google Home and Amazon Echo. We are going gaga along with everybody else and of course — as usual — the situation will grow increasingly worse as other manufacturers join the fray. Our Internet signal is strong in our office but not so good just 40 feet […]

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