User demanded a ‘wireless’ computer and was outraged when its battery died This reminds me of a good friend of ours. He loves the idea of new technology, but he has no idea how to use any of it, god bless him. Years ago, when Aftershokz came out with wireless headphones, he excitedly bought a …
Category Archives: gadgets
You Can Cross, But You’ll Want To Watch Out For Self-Driving Teslas
There are variations, but generally, an accessible pedestrian street crossing signal sounds something like this: But for a little while in Redwood City, California, some of them sounded like this: Or in Palo Alto, like this: Those are obviously not the real voices of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, but I must say that the …
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You Should Try The App I Use. It’s Called Blanket
I’m worlds better than I used to be, but I’m still not anything close to what you’d call a champion sleeper. Even now, there are nights when it’s just not happening for me no matter what I do. Sometimes the problem is too much noise outside. Sometimes it’s weird dreams. Sometimes it’s headaches or my …
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Skidding In With Voting Info At The Last Minute
So…it’s provincial election time…way too soon. And here I am, doing my usual thing where I try to figure out voting details, especially where assistive voting is concerned. Here’s what I have learned. I even hassled some election office people to get some of this info, although I had to do a lot less hassling. …
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Long Live the Death Of The Touch Screen
Touch Screens Are Over. Even Apple Is Bringing Back Buttons. Product designers are embracing how users actually feel after years of pushing flat and sleek Man, do I ever hope this guy is right, because I hate touch screens. I say that without the slightest hint of exaggeration. If there was a regular old push …
“How Do We Weaponize This Against The Vulnerable,” Asked Everyone
Reading about a concept called purpose-bound money, a few things come to mind. I’d love to know how much investment cash was fleeced out of people who didn’t realize they were financing the invention of the gift card. It sounds like a privacy nightmare by design. Assuming they haven’t already, how long is it going …
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Would You Like Fries With That? Should I Toss Them In The Coke?
I haven’t heard anything about how Google and Wendy’s are doing with their AI ordering experiment, but according to this here report from the BBC, IBM and McDonald’s have been trying something similar and it’s gone so well that the system is being removed this summer. It seems that it failed for the very reasons …
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I’m Suddenly Not Very Thirsty
I just got what should have been a very tempting marketing email. “Splash into our summer cocktail menu,” it offered. It also used this emoji. 💦 “What,” you might be asking yourself at this moment, “is the problem there? I assume there’s a problem since you said “should have been tempting”.” The problem, my curious …
I’m Sick Of These Mute Muting Mutes In this Mute Muting Movie
If you’re a certain kind of person, the idea of a device that could cut all of the bad words out of movies and TV shows might sound just dandy to you. And if it could also swap those words out of the closed captions and replace them with nicer ones? Even better! But I …
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Rest Easy, Buzzer
When we stopped overpaying Bell for a landline in favour of only overpaying Rogers for cell service (what a country we live in), by far our biggest logistical hurdle was making sure that Carin and I both had access to our building’s buzzer so that either one of us could open the door if the …