Posted on January 27th, 2020 by Joy Schwabach
A reader sent us an article about contact lenses with augmented reality. Now you can be out of touch with reality all the time. Mojo Vision Contact Lenses: Though they’re like regular contacts, they also give you the weather, a map, your heart rate, blood sugar and other info floating in the air before your eye. They remind us of Joy’s “Form Swim” goggles, which give swim statistics in front of the right or left pupil. Google is an investor in MojoVision. Availability: In two years, or so they say. Segway S-Pod: Remember how the Segway was going to revolutionize transportation? It never happened, though we do see tourists using them. Segway just announced a sit-down version, which goes up […]
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Filed under: Uncategorized | Comments Off on COOL INVENTIONS
Posted on January 20th, 2020 by Joy Schwabach
Why are they all spying on us? It’s because they want to sell us stuff. The “they” we’re talking about are Google, Amazon and Apple. They record you when you use the microphone on your cell phone or computer. It also happens when you talk to one of your smart speakers, like Amazon’s Echo or Google Home. We tap the microphone symbol when conducting searches on our phone. We can ask for a Chinese restaurant nearby faster than we can type it. These days everybody delivers. We’ve written before that we don’t care what gets recorded. Our conversations are beyond boring. A reader wrote that he agreed but was still bothered by it. He felt that what he had to […]
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Filed under: books, Google, security, spam | Comments Off on WHY ARE THEY SPYING ON US?
Posted on January 13th, 2020 by Joy Schwabach
Our oddest Christmas present this year is a robot vacuum, given to us by a young relative. Bob was hugely skeptical at first but he has to admit: “It works, but it doesn’t hold much.” Go to YouTube.com to find reviews for dozens of these, from Roomba on down. Ours, the “LeFant 300m,” costs $140 on Amazon. Roomba ranges from about $200 to over a thousand. We have hardwood floors, four small mats in the kitchen, and a large Home Depot rug in the living room. It seems complicated, yet the robot vacuum handled them all, traveling from room to room in our small apartment. We charged it by plugging it into the wall. We dumped the debris by using […]
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Filed under: cheap calls, gadgets, games, Internuts, shopping | Comments Off on ROBOT VACUUM
Posted on January 6th, 2020 by Joy Schwabach
Calling for tech support is often the beginning of a descent into gloom and doom. Here’s an example from a recent reader letter. He says: “I have recently turned eighty, my hearing is not the best. My Norton antivirus coverage expired and I needed to renew it using a new email address.” The nightmare begins. The whole process took two hours. He was told to bring up a chat screen but the “send” button wasn’t showing so he couldn’t respond. This happened over and over with different tech support people. After calling Norton, he writes, “I couldn’t understand the heavy European accent of a woman with a little girl voice. Soft voice, low volume, my deficient hearing, etc. The whole […]
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Filed under: anti-virus, browsers, cameras, environment, phones, security, tech support, web | Comments Off on THE TECH SUPPORT DUNGEONS
