Posted on April 30th, 2018 by Joy Schwabach
Cozy up and get under the covers. “Calm,” is an app for your computer or phone and helps you fall asleep by telling you bedtime stories or providing music, nature sounds, and meditation lessons. We feel sleepy just talking about it. Their latest story is a Grimm’s Fairy Tale that claims to be the first one ever produced by artificial intelligence. It puts robots to sleep. Besides that, there are 80 stories written by actual humans. New ones come out almost every week. A couple of those are narrated by Stephen Fry, who played the helpful butler “Jeeves” in the “Jeeves and Wooster” TV series. We listened to “Blue Gold,” about the lavender trade. The only way it could have […]
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Filed under: browsers, cheap calls, health, Internuts, security, web | Comments Off on STAY CALM AND SNUGGLE DOWN
Posted on April 23rd, 2018 by Joy Schwabach
A reader told us she’s tired of being tracked. We suggest using the new Opera web browser. It’s free and you can get it from Opera.com. Once on board you will have a built-in “Virtual Private Network,” or VPN, as the techies call it. It automatically encrypts all your data so hackers can’t get to it, which makes it safe (at least until the counter-attack) when you’re using free Wi-Fi at the airport or a coffee shop. For your phone, there’s “Opera Free VPN,” from the iPhone or Android app stores. Besides safeguarding your data, it lets you into places you might otherwise not be able to go. For instance, some videos are restricted to certain countries. We’re looking at […]
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Filed under: Apple, browsers, facebook, Internuts, iPad, web | Comments Off on AT THE OPERA
Posted on April 16th, 2018 by Joy Schwabach
As a special treat for our regular readers, we have nothing to say about Facebook. Meanwhile, back at the ranch … Virtual Reality at the Mall “Virtual Reality” has been over-hyped as a way to experience a movie or game. But it may be about to bring you into the mall. At the Westfield Century City mall in Los Angeles last month, six people at a time were allowed into a special room containing a virtual “Alien Zoo.” Those who made the trip viewing other-worldly animals said the 12-minute journey was something like being inside “Jurassic Park.” Participants, wore goggles and backpacks, fended off aliens and in general had a whopping good extra-terrestrial time. The company that set it up […]
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Filed under: Apple, apps, Internuts, podcasts, radio, Virtual Reality | Comments Off on FACING FACEBOOK
Posted on April 2nd, 2018 by Joy Schwabach
This is one of the weirdest cases we’ve ever heard of from a reader. A woman wrote to say that anyone replying to her emails was redirected to a hacker. We tried writing her back, and sure enough, we saw her email address change before our eyes. An extra letter was automatically inserted. We didn’t put it there, we just hit “reply.” Off it went to the hacker. The next time, we hit “reply” we carefully erased the “send” address and put in the one without the extra letter. This was beyond annoying for the reader. Friends thought she was getting their email but those messages all went to the hacker instead. She first tried getting help from “Geek Squad” […]
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Filed under: Android, apps, games, Internuts, science, security | Comments Off on WHO’S THAT DOWN THERE?
