Posted on November 28th, 2022 by Joy Schwabach
It takes a lot of gumption for a small company to put their smart speaker up against Google’s and Amazon’s. But the $349 “Mark II” from Mycroft.ai is a big disappointment. It looks like a retro TV, roughly five by five-by-five inches. On its cheery display, it shows the temperature, date and time, plus the answers to your questions, often with a small picture. I love the look. But its voice assistant, Mycroft, is a dud compared to Google and Alexa. When I said “play music” I got nothing. When I asked for a bread recipe, I got a picture of an album by the group “Bread.” When I asked for a definition of “optometry,” it didn’t know. When I […]
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Filed under: Amazon, electronics, gadgets, Google, Internuts, photos, tech support | Comments Off on MYCROFT CAN’T COMPETE WITH ALEXA OR GOOGLE
Posted on November 21st, 2022 by Joy Schwabach
Scammers are now adding hoaxes to legitimate text messages. It’s getting easier to be fooled. Recently, a friend of mine got a legitimate text about her furniture delivery. It asked her to choose a date. When none of the dates worked for her, she wrote down the number listed in the text, to get more options. What made it suspicious? She couldn’t just tap it to initiate a call like you normally can on a cell phone. And the guy who answered said: “How old are you?” When she said “70,” he said, “You sound so young, like you’re 30.” Then he added: “I’ll need your credit card number.” “Why should I give you that?” she asked, before hanging up. […]
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Filed under: environment, Internuts, Microsoft, photos, spam, text messaging, word processing | Comments Off on FAKE TEXTS LURK INSIDE REAL ONES
Posted on November 14th, 2022 by Joy Schwabach
My black and white pictures of a 1970s newsroom came vividly alive after I let palette.fm colorize them for free. All I had to do was upload my photo and watch it fill with color. I couldn’t believe how those old days became vibrant. A friend tried it with his childhood Christmas photos. At first, his shirt came out green instead of blue. Then he tried one of the palette.fm filters, and the true blue came out. But the web browser may also make a difference. In his tests, Firefox did a better job than Chrome or Vivaldi. I didn’t like any of the Palette.fm filters, preferring the unfiltered version. The browser didn’t matter much either. But I got slightly […]
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Filed under: books, drones, gadgets, Google, Internuts, phones, photos | Comments Off on COLORIZE YOUR BLACK AND WHITE PHOTOS
Posted on November 7th, 2022 by Joy Schwabach
When I spilled orange juice on a Macbook it died. Apple said it couldn’t be fixed. But if that happens to the new Google “Framework,” I could just swap out the bad part. The $999 “Framework Laptop Chromebook Edition,” by Google, is made of replaceable components. It’s part of the “right to repair” movement, which is all about do-it-yourself (DIY). Instead of buying a new laptop, you could theoretically keep upgrading the parts forever. Each component has a QR code that takes you (or your repairman) to DIY guides for replacing or upgrading. At 2.8 pounds, the Framework weighs the same as a Macbook Air, and is similar in size. Unlike the Macbook, its basic memory can be upgraded from […]
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Filed under: computers, environment, games, Internuts, trends, Wikipedia | Comments Off on NEW CHROMEBOOK LETS YOU SWAP PARTS
