Posted on January 25th, 2021 by Bob and Joy Schwabach
I ignore Facebook friend requests from strangers unless I’m sure they’re faithful readers of this column. But some are tricky. An apparent captain of an enormous shipping line requested a connection. I thought for a minute it was a legitimate request. One of my friends, a savvy public speaker, was Facebook friends with him. I decided to investigate, in hopes of warning her if he turned out to be a fake. His Facebook photo, profile and name matched that of the captain he claimed to be, which I found on LinkedIn and on the shipping company’s website. So I accepted his request. Minutes later, I decided it was a risky experiment, so I unfriended and blocked him. That didn’t prevent […]
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Filed under: books, facebook, gadgets, photos, science, social networks, TV | No Comments »
Posted on October 26th, 2020 by Bob and Joy Schwabach
Amazon Halo, the new Fitbit-type wearable I wrote about it last time, is even weirder than I thought. But I like it. Halo’s voice analysis can pinpoint my moods to the very second, telling me when I sound delighted, amused, shy, and so on. (I’ve yet to sound angry even once in over three weeks.) For example, it said I was “miserable” at 11:10 a.m., but “happy” exactly two seconds later. If you want to improve your tone, the app has video challenges for that. For instance, a four-time martial arts champion and yoga expert guides you in warm-ups for powerful public speaking. You can turn off the mike if you don’t want your tone analyzed. Speech samples are processed […]
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Filed under: Amazon, Apple, books, education, health, Internuts, iPhone, kids | Comments Off on A SECOND LOOK AT AMAZON HALO WEARABLE
Posted on March 30th, 2020 by Bob and Joy Schwabach
Joy’s women’s club went virtual, starting with a group video chat on Facebook. It was great. Joy felt none of the shyness she often feels at ordinary women’s club parties. She could be blunt, telling the group to stop focusing on technical aspects of the conversation. “Let’s just have fun,” she said and so they did. But sometimes the sound quality was poor, causing the group to say they’d switch to Zoom software next time. Zoom is hot right now. It’s designed for video get-togethers and works beautifully. It uses the computer’s built-in camera and microphone, or you can use a tablet or smartphone. When you use Zoom on your phone, computer or tablet, you see the face of the […]
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Filed under: books, business, computers, Internuts, kids, Mac, social networks, tablet, virus | Comments Off on ZOOMING IN
Posted on January 20th, 2020 by Bob and 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 June 3rd, 2019 by Bob and Joy Schwabach
We finally turned off a feature in Gmail that’s been there since the beginning and has been driving us crazy. It’s called “Conversation View.” We didn’t know you could turn it off. In conversation view, new messages show up at the bottom of the thread. If you have a ton of them, you scroll forever. For example, Joy’s friend Mary Lynn Funk went back and forth in one conversation for six months, all with the same heading. Half the time, Joy would lose the thread, unable to find the latest email, as she scrolled past long emails from three months before. Now those emails have been automatically separated into 49 separate chunks. It’s much more manageable. To turn it off […]
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Filed under: 3D Printing, apps, books, Gmail, Internuts, video | Comments Off on CONVERSATION VIEW
Posted on March 4th, 2019 by Bob and Joy Schwabach
The first time we used a Macbook Air, moving our finger on the trackpad caused the screen to jump around like mad. So-called “gestures” can whisk you away to a new place, shutting down whatever you were working on. Recently, a friend complained of this too, so we looked up the solution. These gestures are amazingly abundant on the Mac and are supposed to offer you alternative ways to interact with your computer. But if you find them as annoying as we do, here’s what to do: First, click on the Apple logo in the upper right of your screen. Then choose “System Preferences.” Click “Trackpad.” Note the three tabs, including “More Gestures.” Click a tab to see what’s under […]
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Filed under: books, Mac, photos, TV, video | Comments Off on GETTING BACK ON TRACK
Posted on December 17th, 2018 by Bob and Joy Schwabach
We downloaded our favorite paintings from the Art Institute of Chicago, which just made over 52,000 works from its collection available in high resolution. Then we put them on our TV and cycled through some favorites, like Van Gogh’s “The Bedroom,” Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte,” and Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks.” You can download what you like to your phone and then make a nice background show on your TV. To do this, we first tried the slideshow option on our seven-year-old Sony, but the images looked faded. We could have burned them to a DVD and used that to improve the colors but turned instead to try Roku and Chromecast. We have the cheap version of Roku, […]
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Filed under: apps, art, books, Internuts, music, virus, web | Comments Off on THEIR ART ON YOUR TV
Posted on October 22nd, 2018 by Bob and Joy Schwabach
“Robo calls” are getting worse. Adrian Abramovich, of Miami, has been accused of making 97 million spam calls and is facing a $120 million fine from the Federal Communications Commission. There’s a call-screening feature in the new Pixel 3 phone from Google, and it’s a sure bet you will soon see it in other makes. When your phone rings, you’ll see a “screen call” option. Tap it and a recorded voice in the Pixel phone asks the caller to state their name and the nature of the call. The caller might say something like “You have won a free cruise.” (We win an amazing number of those, which is unfortunate because Bob doesn’t like cruises.) At this point, you can […]
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Filed under: apps, books, electronics, maps, music, phones | Comments Off on LET THE ROBOT TAKE IT
Posted on August 21st, 2018 by Bob and Joy Schwabach
Users and Apple say the iPhone is the safest smartphone out there, but you can make it safer still. Start with the log-on. Do you use a fingerprint? You should. Joy initially had difficulties getting her Android phone to recognize her index finger. The solution was to use more fingers. Now she uses her middle finger to get into the phone, and this one rarely misses. (No comments, please.) If you have an iPhone X, you can use your face instead of a fingerprint. It’s rumored that all iPhones coming out this fall will have “Face ID.” It’s inevitable. What about a hacker breaking into your iCloud account on the web? It’s a good idea to set up “two-factor identification.” […]
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Filed under: apps, books, gadgets, Google, iPhone, photos, security, trends | Comments Off on DEFEND YOUR PHONE
Posted on July 30th, 2018 by Bob and Joy Schwabach
It’s a brave new world for dental patients: There’s a financial incentive to brush. We just earned 226 “Dentacoins,” a form of crypto currency, from brushing three times. We looked up their value and at the time of writing, they were worth eight cents. There are a dozen exchanges where we could sell our e-cash to get our eight cents, but the Dentacoin app says we must wait until we’ve accumulated more. Nuts. The brief spike in January when that amount of Dentacoin would have been worth $1.30 is gone, fell into a cavity. Perhaps it will rise again. “Dentacare Health Training” is a free app for Android or iPhone. It aims to make you a better brusher and flosser […]
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Filed under: apps, books, business, crytpocurrency, health, shopping | Comments Off on BRUSHING UP
