On Computers

Five-dollar chocolate bars and $15 bottles of olive oil. What gives? Chocolate prices hit record highs in 2024 due to dry weather in West Africa. Extreme droughts in Spain and Italy caused the price of olive oil to double. Could AI help? You bet. Just as ChatGPT was trained on billions of words, “Botanic,” offered by Living Models, is trained on DNA, the language of plants. It may sound corny, but Botanic “gets” corn. It also acts as a bud to your spud. For example, drought and rising temperatures in Idaho and Washington led to smaller yields and lower-quality potatoes. Botanic can help with that. Currently, it takes about eight years of trial and error to develop a new drought-resistant […]

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Filed under: AI, Amazon, Android, business, education, inventions, trends, weather | Comments Off on AI CAN HELP WITH GROCERY PRICES

My friend Bonnie needs a Korean translator for her memoir.  Could she use AI, she wondered?   To test it, I pasted one of her short essays, “The Cat Ate Kimchi,” into the search box at Claude.AI. She was thrilled with the result. After a few minor touch-ups, she sent it to a Korean writer. The writer found it as hilarious as I did when I first read it in English.  Before testing Claude further, I asked if it would recommend itself for the job. After modestly admitting that it wasn’t a native Korean, it said its translation would work well for a self-published book or as a rough draft for a human translator. Bonnie’s project meets both criteria. Her memoir […]

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Filed under: AI, Android, Internuts, iPhone, troubleshooting | Comments Off on CLAUDE TRANSLATES YOUR MEMOIR

A reader named Sam told me he has a problem. His Windows computers aren’t playing nice with each other. Unlike his iPad and iPhone, they’re never in sync. “I have two laptops,” Sam said. “Both are HPs. If I post something on a spreadsheet downstairs, I want it to share the same info to the upstairs laptop, which is hooked up to a printer.” But it’s not happening. Here’s the answer. Keep your documents, spreadsheets and presentations in your Microsoft OneDrive folder. Then any changes you make while you’re working on one computer are automatically reflected in the other, no matter where in the world you are. For a visual demonstration, go to YouTube and search on “Move files to […]

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Filed under: AI, Android, Internuts, science, video | Comments Off on THAT SYNCING FEELING

As I stood outside a California restaurant waving goodbye to a friend, my phone stopped working. Had I been hacked?  Even before it stopped working, it had slowed to a crawl. Then, just as suddenly, it sprang back to life. That’s how I was able to order a Lyft to get back to my sister’s house. Before I could enter my destination, however, the app thanked me for scheduling a ride with my pet. It also assumed I was going to a Monarch Beach resort. Weird. I don’t have a pet and I wasn’t headed for the resort. I hopped into the Lyft anyway, explaining to the driver, who spoke limited English, that I was going to a different address. […]

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Filed under: Android, Internuts, security, text messaging, Virtual Reality, virus | Comments Off on HACKED!

Which is better, Android or iPhone? Whatever team you’re on, you’re unlikely to switch. Unless your family is on the other side. An Android-loving grandfather said he switched after his son-in-law couldn’t send video of his child, born seconds before. “He said the video wasn’t sending and he figured out it was me,” the reader wrote. “When he deleted me from the group, it sent, and every iPhone got it.”  There would have been no compatibility issue if everyone had been using the free WhatsApp. So I asked Granddad why he didn’t suggest it, since he’d used it to send texts to his friends in Haiti. He said he didn’t want to make everyone else use a different app just […]

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Filed under: AI, Android, Apple, games, Google, health, inventions, iPhone, news | Comments Off on ANDROID VERSUS IPHONE

A friend said she often loses cell service when camping in Yosemite. Either she’s too far from a cell tower or the signal is blocked by hills, dense trees and stormy weather. So what happens if she’s stung by a bee? There’s no Google when the internet is down. But there is artificial intelligence. A new iPhone app called “Survivalist.ai” can answer almost any question you throw at it, even offline, because it stores 1.8 gigabytes of info on your phone and was trained on 15 trillion tokens of public data. However, it can only provide event information up to March 2023. That’s because the system is based on many different language models, one of which, Llama 3.1, took 7.7 […]

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Filed under: AI, Android, apps, computers, Google, Internuts, keyboards | Comments Off on GETTING ANSWERS OFFLINE

“Private Space” is coming to Android 15, the next version of the Android operating system. It gives you a secret compartment for all of your apps, photos, documents and more, similar to Samsung’s “Secure Folder.” I enrolled in the beta version of Android 15 to try it out. Setup was easy. To start using Private Space, I tapped the word “Private” at the bottom of my app list. Private Space is like having an extra phone. It includes separate versions of Chrome, Gmail, Photos, Camera, Files and the Play Store. You can add more apps directly to the private area. To test it, I typed up a list of passwords on my computer, then took a picture by tapping the […]

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Filed under: Android, games, robots, security, troubleshooting, word processing | Comments Off on NEW SECRET COMPARTMENT IN ANDROID 15

“You’ve been hacked!” Those words spilled out all over a friend’s computer screen. Then her phone rang. The caller said he represented U.S. Bank, which happened to be her bank. “You’ve been hacked,” he repeated, giving her his fake employee badge number. Then he got permission to install an app to control her computer from afar. After that, she called her bank. They told her to come in and set up a new account. Then she asked a techy friend to fix her computer. He probably used Windows recovery options. But she still couldn’t sleep. So when I dropped by, I ran a McAfee virus scan, just to be sure. I wasn’t expecting any problems, because I would have seen […]

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Filed under: AI, Android, art, Internuts, photos, robots, security, social networks | Comments Off on HACKED!

My membership card for a local art museum never arrived. “We don’t use physical cards anymore,” the museum staffer explained. She suggested Google Wallet. The free Google Wallet app for Android now contains my museum card, credit card and loyalty cards from restaurants and stores. It can also store virtual car keys, transit cards and vaccination cards. If I had also been able to store my driver’s license, I would have saved a lot of hassle at the airport recently when I accidentally left my I.D. at home. But the Wallet only accepts driver’s licenses issued in Arizona, Colorado, Georgia or Maryland. With Google Pay, a part of Wallet, I can use my phone instead of a credit card. It’s […]

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Filed under: Amazon, Android, apps, business, computers, Google | Comments Off on GOOGLE WALLET STORES YOUR CARDS

Sometimes, an artificially-intelligent search bot doesn’t know beans about beans. It can even confuse poison with food. ArsTechnica bloggers went to saveymeal-bot.co.nz, where a robot creates recipes from what you have on hand. When the bloggers typed “ammonia, bleach and water,” they got a recipe for “the perfect non-alcoholic beverage to quench your thirst.” To avoid disasters, the site now asks you to choose ingredients from a list. From my humorous choices, they created “Pickled Spaghetti Surprise.” It included jam, olives, pickles and mayo. Turning serious, I got a surprisingly tasty “Creamy Peanut Noodle Stir Fry.” To try it yourself, go to saveymeal-bot.co.nz, and click “Get Savey.” Then choose your ingredients. Happy cooking. Sharing Your Location I love sharing my […]

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Filed under: AI, Android, apps, cheap calls, Internuts, maps, photos, security, text messaging, virus | Comments Off on MORE PROOF THAT AI ISN’T ALWAYS INTELLIGENT