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People are online... and it looks like all systems are up!

Bought a couple for the twins, and my thoughts were, another TV gimmick, to rob the poor.
But I was surprised to see that this is really an alternative to costly, vapid, cable, broadcast or Satellite TV.
?Good capitalism?

What do you think?

It could have a camera, microphone, it automatically follows you at a distance you do not even know it is there. Perhaps, it could even be armed. Your own guardian angel....

You send it to pick up things from the store for you, you use it to give you up to date road/weather conditions.


Is something in our near future?

Four years ago, I went shopping for a Smart TV. The salesman explained (at the time) the current Smart models had a processor/engine that was slower than some models that weren't Smart. I asked if I buy a non-Smart TV, how do connect it to the internet and his reply was with an add-on device called CHROMECAST.

His whole focus was, I should get a TV with a faster engine. The analogy was watching a golfing event and the ball streaking across the screen. Did I want to see the ball clearly or or a with a tail like a comet? The slower engine has limitations on fast moving objects.

So, I bought the TV with a faster engine and a Chromecast. It was great. Easy hookup and I was able to 'cast' YouTube videos to the TV from my desktop computer!

My son-in-law complained that he had to rent another 'box' from the cable company so he could watch Netflix on the TV in the bedroom. I bought him a Chromecast for Christmas and he said it was the BEST gift he ever received.

He preferred to control it via his cellphone. iPhone to be exact.

It's been months since I moved and we hooked up the 4 year old TV via the cable box as part of my HOA package, but... I didn't get around to connecting the Chromecast.

Last week, we purchased a new TV for the living room... yeah, Smart TV. This time, we had the option of one with a faster engine, much better than the older models. It's not that I wanted to watch golf balls streaking across the screen, I wanted something new. So far, I only hooked up the cable box and bypassed the setup routine.

The old TV got moved to the bedroom and this weekend, I got around to connecting the Chromecast on it. What a pain. Google Chrome for desktop no longer supports Chromecast. I've got to link everything to a phone (or tablet) to make things work now. That involves logging in to create an account as the new app that connects to Chromecast is Google Home, as 'we' now have to power to connect any smart device to other smart devices via this app. I say, f'king great...

Third time's a charm... Chromecast was willing but Google Home failed. It's amazing how I b*tch and send out service tickets and 'right after' it miraculously works!
Anyway, I have it connected to an old phone using Wi-Fi. What I didn't experience on my desktop is advertisements. I'm unable to play YouTube videos in Chrome, it routes to the YouTube app that not only plays commercials before each video, it's got them jumping up around the selections. One wouldn't go away until I made a selection.


Next time around I'll be looking to download ad blockers for YouTube and Chrome.

Early in my relation with Amazon, I made the mistake of buying several items in my cart, just after a price increase. Apparently the algorithms decided that price increases were the way to get me to buy, because pretty soon most of the items in my cart were getting their price bumped up. I found that annoying……and expensive.

So I moved items up from my "saved for later" list to my cart; I kept at least 6 items in my cart. Because most purchases are from WANT and not NEED, I am in no hurry. Each time one of them got increased in price, I deleted it from all lists. It only took Amazon about 10 days to notice. Now, when Amazon wants to encourage a purchase, they >decrease< the price, with no more bumping up the price.

Yes, Amazon algorithms study your buying patterns, and price accordingly. Depending on shopping and buying habits, different people get different prices on the same item. You Amazon addicts out there, if you are not in a rush, and if you want to pay less, you might want to give my method a try.

This is for young people who weren't around when there was no such thing as online anything. The personal computer wasn't even invented yet. Oh, there were computers, but you needed a forklift to move them and a college degree to be allowed near one. There was no Google or any other search engine. If you needed to research anything you looked it up in an encyclopedia, or went to the library for a book on the subject. libraries were very popular, everybody had a library card.

If you wanted to buy something from a distant company, you called them on the phone at a number you got from an ad in a magazine or newspaper or on TV. Maybe they would send the item COD or you had to mail them a check before they shipped the item.
There were no dating sites. If you wanted to meet somebody, you either went to a bar, cruised around looking for someone waiting for a bus and offering a ride or a friend introduced you to a sibling or a friend. There were also "Lonely Hearts clubs" you could join. It was a painstaking process but at least you weren't spinning your wheels on someone from a different hemisphere or getting fleeced by scammers from Nigeria or Ghana.
There was no email. If you wanted to write to someone, you either wrote or typed a letter, put it in an envelope, put a stamp on it and brought it to the post office to mail it. If it was going very far away you could send it Airmail for extra postage or it would be transported by train or steamship if it was going across the ocean. It could take a week or longer for a letter to go cross country by regular mail.

There were no online games. If you felt like playing a card game you got out the deck of cards and played with another person(s) or played solitaire. Same with any other kind of game. Or you could go to a bar where they may have had a console with a game called PONG which was just bouncing a ball back & forth on a TV screen with a paddle you controlled with a knob.

But the word is finally in, at the "too much money and time on hands" Consumers' Delectronics "group f-ck convention" in LV Nevada. Thank the Goddess, we now have an AI frying pan.That's right peebles. It not only listens and speaks to us, but can guide our culinary skills based on what it hears about the recipe. Forget those earlier front door items that can smell us coming, and critically warm up the musical door knobs, or even the indispensable opera singing his and hers AI plastic back scratchers. No, my vapid CS consumers, this here is the real McCoy in human "must have" survival items. "Tell me, Jimbo, here are the ingredients for roasted garden earth worms---Your thoughts?" Who can really ever exist without these marvels of technology? At the Vierk Institute, the (only 1%) of sucker cash soaked TD-HD Syndrome patients who don't improve, get one of these pans to take home to the little family. And a firm handshake from the Vierk himself. Don't let the door hit on the way out, Friends. Such a deal.

Different than my previous blog about a flying car, a quad copter is a large-scale drone with sufficient lift to carry a person and not be flown remotely.
Toyota has a SkyDrive prototype and claim to be the first. That's not accurate as other companies have been testing prototypes for several years.

Only good for 5 to 10 minute flights, it's far from being practical.

Seriously, I get it. You manufacture products that are sold in pilfer-proof packages. Unfortunately, the consumer needs special tools to get the package open without destroying it's contents.
Computer memory sticks, for example. Small devices that are probably easy to steal, so they come with a plastic cover that requires scissors to open the package.

Probably the worst I've found are the products that are 'encased' in a 2 part thick plastic case that has a hard curled heat formed edge that is sealed all the way around. I have to use metal cutting shears to get those things open at a risk of sharp edges to 'get you' as you remove the product from the case.

Stores in the Unites States have very liberal return policies and usually ask no questions when returning goods... broken or not.



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A number of technological traits will drive smart-domestic generation well past what’s available on keep cabinets nowadays. innovations in synthetic intelligence, as an example, stand to upend almost the whole thing in our lives, inclusive of our houses. you would possibly already be the use of some sort of AI-powered voice-assistant device to get the modern news or weather forecast every morning. however inside the smart home of the future, the ones AI structures ought to function the mind for whole homes, getting to know about citizens and coordinating and automating all in their various smart gadgets. IoT employer Crestron, as an instance, is operating on software that tracks someone’s habits, like which tune they need to listen inside the morning or which lights they want to be on at a certain time of day. Then, as soon as it gets the hold of a user’s preferences, it automatically plays simply the right playlists or dims the lighting fixtures before bedtime. “That’s sincerely the following evolutionary step in proper automation,” says John Clancy, head of Crestron’s residential commercial enterprise.