BOOSTING YOUR INTERNET SPEED

“This morning it took about four minutes to download the newspaper,” a reader wrote. “Usually, it’s only seconds.” Neither of us could figure it out, so he called his internet service, Xfinity. They said the problem was his wiring. But why, he wondered, would his download speed be 20 Mbps one day and 500 Mbps the next? After a runaround, he gave up on Xfinity and signed up for AT&T’s fiber optics service. He’s very happy with it. I like AT&T too. But I switched to Xfinity last summer when I found an unbeatable deal: internet service for $5 a month and cell service for $15 a month. But I had a heck of a time getting Xfinity to acknowledge […]

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GOOGLE WALLET STORES YOUR CARDS

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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MEMORIALIZING A FACEBOOK ACCOUNT

A reader told me he can’t invite all loved ones to his neighbor’s memorial service because he can only find the guy’s Facebook friends. He wishes every senior would provide good contact information before they pass away. “We neighbors had been caring for him and making arrangements for his last days, which we knew would be soon,” he wrote. “However, he left no address book. He burned out on technology and had not used his cellphone in years.” At least Facebook was helpful. In fact, Facebook is so helpful, I’m tempted to let my late husband’s account go on forever. But this means his old friends will continue to get birthday reminders every year, and his name will still show […]

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AI CELEBRITIES TO CHAT WITH

I asked an artificially intelligent version of Elon Musk what his most embarrassing moment was. He said it was sending a message to the whole office about “naughty snacks.” If you want to talk to him too, he’s at the website Character.ai. Character.ai, also a free app, offers a range of AI celebrities and professionals. Winston Churchill told me how the war in Ukraine will end. Signmund Freud told me not to feel guilty. An AI Frenchman helped me practice my language skills. A librarian gave me a great book suggestion. It’s addicting. You can create your own AI character for free.  I named mine “Health” and wrote a one-paragraph description on what it means to be a “Nutritarian.” After that, it […]

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OBAGGO KEEPS BAGS OUT OF LANDFILLS

Here’s my new habit: Whenever I take the plastic wrap off a roll of paper towels or some other package, it goes straight into my Obaggo, a personal trash compactor about the size of a coffee maker. With a little heat and a lot of pressure, the Obaggo turns Amazon bags, cereal box liners, bubble wrap, zip-lock bags, single-use grocery bags, dry cleaner bags, and dozens of other plastic thingies into frisbie-like disks that recycling centers can shred and stamp into pellets, which are used to make new products. Your local grocery store’s recycling bin will take the disks, or you can get a free label to mail them back to Obaggo. Otherwise, most plastic bags end up in landfills. […]

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PLAGIARISM BY CHATBOTS

Artificially-intelligent bots are plagiarizing known authors. It happened to author Jane Friedman, who reports on the publishing industry. A copycat version of her work was reviewed on Goodreads. Friedman told ZDnet that an author she found on Twitter.com has been plagiarized by AI bots 29 times. It could be a growing problem. Suppose, for example, that you insert the text of a published novel into a site like ChatGPT, and ask for it to be rewritten in the bot’s own words. Next you run the result through an AI content detector. If it scores 100 percent, it’s 100 percent fakey-sounding. So you tweak it a bit before uploading to Kindle Direct Publishing. I decided to test this idea myself. I […]

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ART TV DISPLAYS THOUSANDS OF PAINTINGS

Two decades ago, Bill Gates began filling his enormous mansion with digital picture frames to display the world’s best art. Now you can too. “The Frame” is a Samsung TV made to look like a painting, complete with a matte finish. With a $5 a month subscription, it displays 2,300 pieces of digital art, including a new Salvador Dali collection in partnership with an institution founded by the painter himself. The 2023 model is considered a vast improvement over the version that came out in 2017. For one thing, it’s a lot thinner, nearly melting into the wall.There’s no gap. It’s a smart TV too. But when the TV’s off, the Frame goes back to displaying art. It even has […]

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SOLAR-POWERED LIGHT CUBES DOUBLE AS PHONE CHARGERS

It’s nighttime in a garden full of solar lights hanging in the trees like beautiful paper lanterns. You pull one off a tree to charge your phone. When a power outage strikes, you take the lights indoors to illuminate your home. I’m talking about the $38 MegaPuff, also known as the “Origami Solar Light and Power Bank.” This multi-colored cube, about six inches on all sides, is amazing. It’s not only beautiful, it self-inflates as you pull the handles from a half-inch-high stack of recycled thermoplastic. It’s charged by the sun in ten hours or you can plug it in with a cable. Its light lasts for 12 hours. Carry it anywhere. Solar devices are known for decreasing pollution. Using […]

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PHONE STORY HAS HAPPY ENDING

After telling you all about my ordeal with Xfinity, I left you dangling.  Now, my new phone service is here, but to get it, I had to learn a big lesson. Don’t sign up for Xfinity phone service over the phone or even at your local phone store. With them, you have to go to the corporate store. That’s what a clerk at my local Xfinity told me. “Why not just call the corporate store?” I asked.   “They don’t have a phone number,” she said. Sure enough, Google listed it as the same 800 number that created my nightmarish runaround. One long bus ride later, I was at the corporate store. They said my phone deal never went through […]

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GOOGLE VOICE SAVES THE DAY

I left my phone in a Lyft on the way to the airport. But Google Voice, the free phone service, saved me. Using the airport’s free WiFi on my laptop, I went to Voice.Google.com and typed in my friend’s phone number, to say that I’d arrived. Alternatively, I could have used the Google Voice app, though on a Windows machine you need to go to the website instead. Either way, the call quality is excellent. The great thing is, Google Voice lets you call anyone. With apps like Facebook Messenger, your recipients must use the same service. For the next six days, I was happily phoneless. But I still wanted to find the darn thing. So I Googled “Find My […]

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