GETTING CHEAP STUFF FROM CHINA
A young friend told me that the same $12 necklace from Target is only $1 from China. How is that possible?
Chinese sites like Temu rely on a loophole in US customs laws. If a product is less than $800, they can ship it directly to a shopper without being inspected or taxed. There’s a bill in Congress to stop that, but for now you can get amazing deals.
Temu is the number one free shopping app in the Apple app store and the Google play store, beating out Amazon and Walmart. Here’s the catch: According to ZDNet, it takes 10 days to deliver your package and it may look different than it did on Temu. But you’re guaranteed a full refund if you return the item within 90 days.
The app opens with a spinning wheel. I landed on $100 worth of discount coupons. But I had to buy three items to activate them. So for $24, I bought two tailored shirts and a floral decoration for the base of the kitchen faucet. To use my coupons, I have to spend at least $5 more for the $5 off coupon, and up to $130 more to use the $40 off coupon. I’m stopping right here.
Learning a Lesson on eBay
On eBay, I just sold a like-new headset retailing for $220 for only $50. Oops.
Though eBay suggested a starting point of 99 cents with free shipping, I chose $50, and received only one bid. I thought I could cancel the sale, but a minimum bid is a legal commitment. I’ll bet others have made this mistake.
Bing Chat Labels Your Photos
At a wedding, my niece took a picture of a river in Tblisi, Georgia, which borders Russia. To find the name of the river, I uploaded her photo into “Bing Chat,” Microsoft’s version of artificial intelligence. If you use photos with people in them, Bing blurs the faces to preserve your privacy.
Bing got it right. It was the Vere tributary of the Mtkvari River. But I had to tell Bing that it was in Tbilisi, otherwise it guessed Chicago, Paris or London.
To get started on a phone, install “Bing Chat with AI and ChatGPT-4” from the Apple app store or the Google Play Store. ChatGPT-4 is the deluxe version that companies pay for. On ai.com, you only get ChatGPT-3.
To use Bing Chat on a Windows computer, open the Microsoft Edge browser and click on the little blue speech bubble with a “B” in it in the upper right of your screen. From there, type in your question and decide on the degree of control you want. You can click “More Creative,” “More Balanced” or “More Precise.”
I like how Bing Chat gives you the sources for the info it fetches. Dotted throughout each paragraph, you’ll see little numbers that look like footnotes. Click on one to get a link to the source and go straight to that website. Or, on a computer, hover over the number to see where it’s from without going to the site. For example, for health info, you might see WebMD, the Mayo Clinic and Healthline.
Age Old Question
A reader asked me if it’s OK to leave his computer on 24 hours a day. It’s on the brink of dying, he said, and he’s afraid to turn it off.
I used to leave mine on 24 hours a day because I use an app called “BOINC,” which allows leading scientists to share my idle computing power. That’s probably how I wore out my previous hard drive, because it was constantly spinning.
Your Windows computer, by default, uses the “Balanced” power plan, which turns off your hard drive after a set time of idleness. However, one user, responding to an article on Winaero.com, said that his drive never stops spinning, even when set to go off after 20 minutes. This can happen if you leave a video on pause, or have a program open such as Microsoft Word, which will autosave your file every so often, or something like BOINC. If in doubt, turn your computer off overnight.
But if you have a solid state drive (SSD) like I do now, it’s safe to leave it on all the time. As for electricity use, a computer idling with the screen blank may use around 50 watts over an eight hour period. A traditional 100 watt incandescent bulb uses 800 watts per eight hours.
The Magic of Solid State Drives
Writing in HowtoGeek, a blogger says he has been using the same SSD (solid state drive) since 2011. When he gets a new computer, he just reattaches it.
I can attest to the superiority of SSDs, having experienced two hard drive deaths (HDDs).
With an SSD, you can keep storing new data on it almost forever. To kill a one-terabyte SSD in five years, you’d have to save 328.8 gigabytes of new info to it every single day. That’s impossible for most people.
Here’s another myth busted: Though I knew that SSDs are much faster than HDDs, I thought the main benefit was boot-up speed. But they’re also more energy efficient and take up less space. The internal kind from Samsung, the 370 Evo, $39 on Amazon, is a rectangle less than four inches by three inches and holds 500 gigabytes. With an SSD case, it becomes an external drive.