When a neighbor’s 12 year-old stayed with me for a week, she stayed up past midnight every night to shop on her phone. Where were parental controls when I needed them?

It turned out she was buying cheap items from China. The same $12 necklace from Target was only $1 online, she pointed out to me while we were in the store. Once, she came to me at 2 a.m. to ask if she could use my PayPal password for a $20 shipping charge. Another time, she didn’t go to sleep until 9 a.m. the next day. Short of taking her phone away, I wish I’d had a Gryphon.

The Gryphon is a router that lets you strictly monitor how the internet is used. At bedtime, the internet is blocked until morning. At homework time, you can fine tune which apps and sites are used. At any other time, hit “suspend” to put the internet off limits for as long as necessary.

Besides the ability to control WiFi use, the Gryphon has an app to block excessive data use. But couldn’t a savvy kid just delete it? Nope, a parent must put in a password.

Alternatively, you could use an iPhone’s Screen Time features, but those could be undone. Ideally, I’d get a child used to strict time limits while they’re young.

The basic Gryphon Tower I is $148, or $89 on July 11 and 12 during the annual Amazon Prime Days sale. If you need coverage for 3000 square feet, there’s the Gryphon Tower II. It’s $299 now, but $179 on Prime Days.

YouTube Summaries

Did you ever want to get to the meat of a lecture or a how-to session on YouTube without listening to the whole thing? The Eightify app for Chrome summarizes videos using ChatGPT.

In the free version, you only get three summaries a day for videos 30 minutes or shorter, with a 25 minutes pause between summaries. In my tests, Eightify did a great job on an analysis of the war in Ukraine and other topics.

To try it out, go to the website eightify.app on your computer from either Google Chrome or a Chrome-based browser such as Microsoft Edge or Brave. Then click “Install Chrome extension.” Next, go to YouTube, choose one, and click the orange “Summarize” button. You’ll be pushed to get the paid version, but you can ignore that. If you want more summaries, it’s $4 a month if you pay annually, $8 a month otherwise.

What’s New in WhatsApp?

WhatsApp, the popular texting and free-phone calling app, has a new setting to silence unknown callers.

Start by opening WhatsApp, then tap the three stacked lines in the upper right and choose “Settings.” Now tap “Privacy,” then “Calls.” Finally, toggle the switch on for “Silence Unknown Callers.”

A Greener Lawn

I just watched a YouTube video from the Henry Ford innovation series about a new kind of sprinkler system called “Irrigreen.” It’s amazing.

Just as a printer sends specific colors to areas of a photo, the Irrigreen sends water to specific areas of your yard, using software to calculate the shape of each area. In a video, you can see it handle even zigzag sections without wasting any water on the non-grassy parts. The stream changes shape to fit the area it’s watering, typically saving about 40 percent. With the standard sprinkler system, 75 percent of a lawn receives too much water just to be sure the remaining 25 percent gets enough. Prices range from $1,873 for one sprinkler head to $7,784 for 18 of them.

Scheduling a Text

If you’ve ever realized you’re sending a text too early in the morning or too late at night, schedule it to arrive at a more reasonable time.

Here’s how to do it on an Android phone: Start a text as you normally would. But instead of tapping the send button, do a long press on it. Up will pop some scheduling options. Choose “pick date and time” if you don’t like any of the options. Tap “save” and then tap the send button. If you change your mind before the message has gone off, tap the send button again and choose “Update message,” “Send now,” or “Delete message.”

On an iPhone, try a free download from the App store, such as Moxy Messenger. It  makes it easy to schedule all texts. Once you tap “save,” your message has been scheduled, unlike the Android version, which requires you to tap “send” a second time.

Cheating with ChatGPT

In some classrooms, 40 percent of students use ChatGPT to do their homework, according to CNET. They can get past the plagiarism screeners if their prompt – the words they type into the search bar– are smart enough. But one physics teacher found a novel way to thwart this. He asks students to use ChatGPT but requires them to give a full critique of the results.

Internuts

– The Monarch MKV is a driverless tractor that analyzes crop data while planting, harvesting, etc. It’s electric, with zero emissions. Mashable’s Future Blink series has a video about it.

– “Man-made flying saucer takes flight in China.” Google those words to see a YouTube video on a new way to transport tourists in Southern China. The iUFO has 12 propellers surrounding a pilot in the middle. It can stay up for 15 minutes.

Filed under: apps, environment, Internuts, kids, text messaging, YouTube