On Computers

My great-grandfather was a Cherokee, according to my mom. So I’m one-eighth, I figured. But Ancestry.com and 23andMe say I have no Native American ancestry. Who’s right? To find out, I used MyHeritage’s new GAIA service, powered by artificial intelligence. First I asked it to research my great-great-great-grandmother Jincey Bales, on my mom’s side. GAIA found several family trees that listed her parents’ and siblings’ birthplaces as Red Clay, Tennessee, the last capital of the Cherokee Nation in the eastern United States. One tree lists her as “Tsinvsi,” a name that appears to be Cherokee. Her dad, John W. Craig, is labeled “Cherokee” in another family tree. Yet another tree labels a Craig of the next generation as “Cherokee.” Another […]

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Filed under: AI, batteries, gadgets, Internuts, phones, wearables | No Comments »

When Google Gemini replaced Google Assistant on a reader’s Android phone, her favorite morning routine disappeared. “Until Wednesday all I had to do was say ‘OK Google’ and it would give me a good morning, tell me the weather and the time and a joke, and read me the news,” Sheila said. “A pox on them all for changing my routines.” Almost as bad, Alexa changed its voice. “Am I too old for all this?” she wondered. “After all, I learned to talk by listening to Franklin Deleano Roosevelt’s fireside chats on an old-fashioned radio console.” No way. She followed my instructions perfectly. To go back to Google Assistant on an Android phone, first open Settings, go to Apps, then […]

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Filed under: AI, Internuts, robots, wearables | Comments Off on AI BLUES

When an old high school friend reached out to me through Classmates.com, I had a fascinating discussion, thanks to input from Google Gemini. First my friend Stephanie and I reminisced about the good old days on the high school newspaper staff. One time, some sang “Tea for Two,” while others pounded on their desks to the beat, pulled the blinds up and down rhythmically or used a ruler as a baton to add to the merry mayhem. Meanwhile, our mild-mannered teacher ignored everything. He wasn’t even that mad on the day when students set up the whole classroom on the street, complete with the American flag in its holder. Or when a few guys locked me in the dark room […]

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Filed under: AI, Apple, art, Google, wearables | Comments Off on ART AND AI

So much for free Wi-Fi on a plane. After an Alaskan Airlines flight, my laptop was overwhelmed by spams and scams. As the pop-ups filled my screen, I saw a rotating parade of horribles, with messages like “TROJAN found,” and “Remove the Virus Now! I wasn’t sure what to do, except to avoid clicking on anything. So I turned to Anthropic’s artificially-intelligent Claude AI for help. It suggested using Windows Defender for a virus check, then doing a malware check using the free version of Malwarebytes. I was surprised to learn that the obnoxious banners were the only problem. After trying a couple of Claude’s suggestions, I chose the simplest one: blocking all notifications from all websites. To accomplish this, […]

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Some lawyers abuse AI, by allowing it to cite fake cases. But BrentWorks has a solution.  Unlike AI, its “CiteSentinel” tool doesn’t guess if a case is real, then lie about it when confronted. It cross references cases against verified legal databases, by scanning a legal brief and identifying every string of text.  Here’s one it would have caught before it ever went to court. In 2023, a man sued an airline after a metal cart struck his knee. His legal team used ChatGPT to generate arguments. The result was six fake citations. Even so, the team couldn’t resist turning to AI again when the judge asked for verification. Later, they had to pay a $5000 fine and send a […]

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Filed under: AI, Internuts, kids, news, passwords, photos, trends, wearables | Comments Off on AI AND THE LAW

When I went on a 2025 Princess cruise to Alaska, I got spotty connectivity on my Android phone, compared to what my iPhone-owning friends experienced. I ended up paying $100 just to send email for a day or two. But at least I was able to make phone calls throughout the voyage.  It was whole ’nother ball game for my friend Tammy when she took an MSC cruise to the Caribbean in March of 2026. The ship offered an internet package for $35 a day that didn’t cover calls. “Too pricey,” she decided. More typically, Carnival cruises charge $23.80 a day if you buy it before the cruise, and $28 to $35 if you wait. So if I ever go […]

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Filed under: AI, apps, Internuts, security, spyware, wearables | Comments Off on AT SEA WITH THE INTERNET

I love “The Ultimate ChatGPT Prompt Book” by Igor Pogany. It’s both fun and serious. The author has lived in six countries, speaks three languages natively, has 30 million views on YouTube and over 400,000 followers.  The Ultimate ChatGPT Prompt Book offers 750 examples of questions or commands you can use at ChatGPT.com, all of which have been tested by experts, from practical to funny. I found myself tweaking every single one, just as it encourages you to do. In the “Excuses” category, for example, I typed: “Write something funny and short with an absurdly implausible reason for not going for a walk with someone you find boring.” It came back with: “I’d love to walk, but I accidentally agreed […]

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Filed under: AI, books, gadgets, security, troubleshooting, wearables | Comments Off on THE ULTIMATE CHATGPT BOOK

Three months ago, my history club had a talk on the history and future of robots. The speaker, who has a PhD in artificial intelligence, predicted that five years from now, every home would have one. This sounded incredible at the time. Now it sounds plausible. Back in 1981, an IBM personal computer cost $5000 if you included the monitor and other essentials. But that didn’t stop people from buying them, especially as the price dropped. With robots, the price is falling faster. Now you can get one for $1500 or less. The $1500 Posha is a countertop robot chef with 1000 recipes up its sleeve and counting. In an article in The Verge, I read that it made a […]

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Filed under: AI, apps, Internuts, robots, security, spam, virus, wearables | 1 Comment »

The new $597 WavWatch 2.0 is on my wrist. If I put it up to my ear, I can hear the high frequency sounds it’s emitting. The low hums can be heard a foot away. It sounds hokey, but apparently the human body, in response to specific sound vibrations, can get a wellness tune-up. The “WavWatch Fanatics,” a Facebook group with over 6,600 members, swears by it. They say they sleep better and feel less joint pain. Some are no longer depressed. Is it just the placebo effect? According to a study published by the National Institutes of Health, low-frequency sound stimulation in patients with fibromyalgia produced statistically significant improvements in pain, sleep and mobility. But the test subjects weren’t […]

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Filed under: AI, apps, computers, health, Internuts, wearables | Comments Off on WELLNESS WATCH

The new ChatGPT-5 is wiser than the last one. It wouldn’t have encouraged a man to eat sodium bromide, which literally drove him crazy. The guy’s goal was to lower his sodium use, so he asked GPT-3.5, the most recent free version, if the bromide would be a good substitute. It said yes. But sodium bromide causes hallucinations, grotesque rashes and more. Eventually his body had thousands of times the tolerable dose. Fully psychotic, he spent three weeks in a mental hospital. The doctor made him drink water to flush it out. Still delusional, he tried to escape. Finally, he was cured. When I asked ChatGPT-5 how his answer would differ from the previous GPT, it said it would have […]

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Filed under: AI, computers, wearables | Comments Off on NEW CHATGPT-5 OFFERS BETTER REASONING