On Computers

Recently, a woman told me she was looking for her biological father. “I think your husband, Bob Schwabach, is related to him,” she said. She needed to know the name of Bob’s father. So did her nine siblings, all of whom shared the same sperm donor. But Bob never knew his father’s name either, having spent his childhood in a foster home and orphanage. Sadly, the week before he died in 2020, he sent a note to a possible cousin, but never heard back. Now, thanks to Google Gemini, a competitor to ChatGPT, I may have found him. Gemini focused on a genetic marker called a “centimorgan,” or cM. Looking at three names on Bob’s family tree, Gemini declared that […]

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Filed under: AI, email, Internet, Internuts, search, spam, virus | Comments Off on GOOGLE’S GEMINI AIDS FAMILY DISCOVERY

The web is abuzz with “ChatGPT,” a new search engine. Some say it’s better than Google. It took only five days to reach a million users. In answer to your queries, ChatGPT can write poems, essays, opinion pieces and programming code. One of its answers explained how World War I contributed to World War II. But it doesn’t chat. When I complimented it, it got confused. To start, go to chat.openai.com and sign up for a free account. Take a look at the sample searches. They’re OK, but things get much more interesting when your queries get quirky. I asked it to “write bedtime instructions for toddlers in the style of the King James Bible.” It came back with: “And […]

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Filed under: gadgets, Internuts, search, trends | Comments Off on THE NEW GOOGLE?

Would it bug you if there were ads right there on your phone’s lock screen? Get ready. They’re coming. When your iPhone updates to version 16 in September, you’ll get ads, along with links to apps and news every time you look down, without tapping anything, according to TheVerge. Some Android phones will get ads as soon as next month, delivered by a lock screen company called Glance. You’ll see news, videos, games, photos, quizzes and commercials, all without tapping. The average person glances at their phone 65 times a day. There’s gold in them there hills. Fire Tablet Is Best For Watching Movies on a Plane “I recently flew for the first time in 20 years, and I must […]

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Filed under: Amazon, Internuts, science, search, tablet | Comments Off on ADS ON YOUR PHONE’S LOCK SCREEN

A reader wrote: “Two days ago my wife was nearly in tears after falling for a scam email that looked exactly like it was from the SAS Shoe site.” She was out $45 bucks. Others are being scammed by phony vaccine surveys. One reader said he was nearly taken in by a fake Pfizer survey, but hovered over the return email, which revealed sketchy-looking characters. If you do a Google search on “PSA post vaccine survey scam,” the US government at ICE.gov will show you exactly what the scammer’s email looks like. Don’t worry if you’ve already opened one. Just don’t click anywhere or open any attachments. There’s still time to panic. Google Pay and Mint Track Your Spending  Sometimes, […]

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Filed under: business, cheap calls, search, trends, virus, web | Comments Off on AVOIDING SCAMS

I asked a friend to be a guinea pig for the “EyeQue,” a $60 gadget that tests your eyesight and gives you a prescription.  Results were great for him, not so for me — but that wasn’t the machine’s fault. Besides giving you a prescription, EyeQue will send you a pair of John Lennon-style glasses for an additional $19. They call them “try-ons.” They work well and look fine, but you’ll probably want another pair. For instance, the bridge width and earpiece length may be slightly off, since EyeQue doesn’t ask for these measurements, which are typically found on your old pair of glasses. My friend ordered new frames from GlassesUSA, which is not affiliated with EyeQue. He now sees […]

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Filed under: apps, education, health, music, programming, search | Comments Off on LOOK MA, NO GLASSES PRESCRIPTION

Slideshows are one of those things that can drive us nuts.We’re always forgetting how we did it last time. When we look up instructions, we often get something that is no longer available in Windows. For example, when you look up “Movie Maker for Windows 10,” you get a lot of free products from unknown companies because the original Windows movie maker went kaput. Here are our top contenders for best slideshow maker. We judge mainly on ease of use. “Microsoft Photos” comes already installed on your Windows 10 computer. To find it, type “Photos” in the search box in the lower left of your Windows desktop and the app comes right up. If you just want Microsoft to make […]

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Filed under: backup, photos, search, shopping, web | Comments Off on BEST SLIDESHOW MAKER

A reader says he’s used the “Dogpile” search engine instead of Google for many years, but now it’s not working. We say drop it. Our research shows there’s a Dogpile hijacker that looks like the real thing. So what should you use instead, if you don’t want to Google everything? We’ve been trying out Yippy, which is powered by IBM Watson, the computer that beat Ken Jennings on Jeopardy. Yippy was developed by Vivisimo, which we’ve written about many times. Much of Vivisimo’s and Yippy’s artificial intelligence was incorporated by IBM Watson which “reads” all the scientific journal articles to make better decisions in some cases than doctors can. In our tests, Yippy’s results look good. Joy looked up “cotton […]

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Filed under: business, photos, search, web | Comments Off on DOWNWARD-FACING DOGPILE

We remember when personal computers first came out. You could build them yourself if you were savvy. That’s what Michael Dell did way back when. He sold them to other college students and the business went on from there. Now there’s a computer that kids can put together. The “Computer Kit Touch” is $280 from Kano.me. Designed for young children, it has a ten-inch screen. Follow a printed storybook to build a portable, touchscreen computer, and attach a keyboard. From there, kids can make apps, art, and games with simple steps. Included apps are Chromium (a web browser similar to Chrome), YouTube, Libre Office (similar to Microsoft Office) and Google Drive; more are available in the app store, such as […]

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Filed under: apps, business, education, electronics, gadgets, how-to, kids, podcasts, search, web | Comments Off on BUILD YOUR OWN

We asked AT&T how much it would cost to drop our TV service and just keep the Internet. They immediately offered to drop the monthly charge to $120 from $160. That’s better, we thought, but hardly the best. “Philo TV” has over 45 channels for $16 a month. These include A&E, Discovery, AMC, BBC America, Food Network, History, Travel, Lifetime, Food Network and Nickelodeon.  You can watch them on your computer or your phone. Or, if you want to watch on a regular TV, you can plug in a Roku stick or player, Apple TV, or an Amazon Fire stick. Roku and Amazon Fire are fairly cheap, $28 for Roku Express and $40 for the Fire stick. Though Philo doesn’t […]

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Filed under: Android, business, games, Google, Internuts, search, trends, TV | Comments Off on CUTTING THE CABLE, REVISITED

Sometimes you need to access your computer from a galaxy far, far away. Or at least from the beach. We used to like TeamViewer, but it got too complicated. So now we like the free “AnyDesk.” You can use this from any laptop, tablet or smartphone. In our tests, all went well. On a Chromebook, we used AnyDesk to control our Windows computer. It was only in the next room, but in theory it could have been far, far away. After clicking on the AnyDesk icon and typing the secret code, we clicked on familiar icons to browse the web, edit anything we had written, and play Peggle, our favorite game. In PowerPoint, we added a slide to our “History […]

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Filed under: apps, health, Internuts, remote access, search, web, wireless | Comments Off on REMOTE CONTROL