Most Liked Technology Blogs (217)

I estimate the percentage of iPhone users versus 'the other phone' users to be as high as 70/30 and many most of them have an apple watch to go along with their setup. The phone rings and they look at their wrist. Most of the time, you don't hear their phone, but you see them looking as text messages or Twitter feeds scroll across the screen.



Digital or simulated analog watch face, some try to emulate what is on the main screen to their iPhone.

One guy in the design department wears Apple earbuds and talks through the Wi-Fi connection in his watch while his iPhone sits in a charging cradle.

So the idea of carrying around a phone that does everything hasn't replaced a wristwatch, as I found if it's not an Apple watch, it's the 'old standard' watch.



However, if you've got money... nothing says it more than a diamond watch.



In summary: It would appear having a cellphone doesn't eliminate the need or desire for a wristwatch, probably because watches are often worn as jewellery that happens to tell time.

Apple watches are on sale this weekend!

I have an added feature with my phone carrier to notify me of potential spam calls and an enhanced blocking feature. For some reason my good friend John gets added to the blocked list. Several calls to tech support gets him removed and minutes later... he's back to being blocked!

My call was transferred from the carrier to Samsung's tech support where I installed an app allowing them to do diagnostics remotely on my phone. They couldn't find John on the blocked caller list so it must be a glitch. According to Samsung, the cure was to go back to the carrier and get a new SIM card.

A second after I entered the store, the salesman asked if he could help. I explained my friend keeps getting blocked on my phone and that Samsung said I need a new SIM card.

Immediately I detected an attitude... he said that wasn't the problem and that I needed to buy a new phone. After we went through the identification verification, he got the tool to remove the SIM and I said "The phone is still on!"
That didn't stop him from removing the SIM and inserting a new one while the phone was powered up.

Flipping screens on my phone and his tablet to enter the new number scanned from the card holder, he was back and forth a few times removing and reinstalling the SIM. All attempts were unsuccessful as the phone reported no SIM installed, when one was in the phone. He removed it again and installed the old SIM and got the same message.

At that point... he told me my phone was broken. I asked his name, SNATCHED MY PHONE FROM HIS HAND, said "Have a nice day" and walked out of the store.

Ya think I was pissed?

There's another store 5 miles away, so I went there.

Explaining the salesman (at the first store) 'hot swapped' the SIM on my phone. The new guy knew exactly what I was talking about. He scanned the card, installed a new SIM, powered up the phone and all was well.



I cannot recall how many times my phones have had SIM card changes in the last 25 years and EVERY time it was done with the phone turned off.

Basically, removing the SIM while the phone was on, damaged it, installing a new SIM while the phone was on, damaged it too.

John isn't on my blocked list anymore.

I'm happy that the issue was only with the SIM cards and thankful that it didn't damage my phone or the SD memory that shares the same tray.

Not rocket science...

Technology moves forward. Maybe you remember when FM radio was broadcast entirely on an analog signal. Then stations added a digital band of information was simulcast along with the digital signal. The FCC changed all that and stations are fully digital sending streams of digitally encoded signals. The same thing happened with TV. If you were receiving broadcasts from an antenna on an old TV set, you had to add a digital receiver to convert the new digital signals.
The purpose for that was to send more data over the same bandwidth. Effectively adding more stations on the same channel.

Cell phone services are all switching to 5G, but the majority of customers are still using 4G. Surprising there is a small percentage of devices that can only work on a 3G signal.
If you are using an old style flip-phone, chances are it's on 3G. Lots of communication devices like tablets require 3G service.
Depending on your carrier, some of the major companies will be phasing out 3G. That change affects many old-style life-alert systems and discount carrier cellphones used only for 911. Unless they upgrade, they will be totally useless.

I'm reading the phase-out could happen as early as the first quarter 2022.

That's a topic I haven't discussed before. Consider the extreme hot and cold temperature range on the moon. -208F ( -133C) in darkness to 250F (121C) in direct sunlight.
I'm not sure how they got the darkness reading as we haven't sent any lunar landers there, but they've got the facts.
We've setup seismic measuring equipment near the Apollo 17 lander module in the 70's that detects activity.
Is it important to know what happens on the surface on the moon? To scientists who make a living on doing 'out of this world' research it is.
I would think the moon is a pretty quiet place. No hurricanes, strip mining, fracking, nuclear missile testing and things that happen on earth...

Maybe one or two things to mention. The Russians attempted their own lunar landing that ended up in a devastating crash. Yeah, the country who invaded Ukraine has the money and resources to explore the moon. That's got to be a huge source of quake, possibly changing statistics in the Farmer's Almanac update later this year. The other thing is an alien base setup on the dark side of the moon. So, maybe there is a lot of excavation and road work happening behind the scenes.

Thoughts are running deep on the subject.




Link that kinda got me started:

A Tire Pressure Monitoring System (TPMS) monitors the pressure in a cars tires and should it drop below a certain safe point, an icon on the dashboard will light up. This is a warning should a tire take a nail and lose air as driving on a flat can destroy a tire, especially the ones with a low profile.

Temperature changes will make air expand and contract and 2 cold mornings in South Florida (below 50F) made the warning light come on. A few minutes of driving and the tires warmed up increasing the pressure and the warning light went off.

The pressure is probably at the low reading so I'll top off with more air later today.

I have an old laptop that only gets used when I'm outside, usually on a jobsite and I need to review drawings that I don't have printed copies of. The battery would only work for a short time, so I replaced it. The hard drive was slow so a friend suggested I upgrade to an SSD (solid state drive) that works faster with less power drain.
Good idea. I bought the drive, 500 gigabyte. The problem is the drive on the laptop is 1 terabyte. While I'm only using a small part of the capacity, the conversion software won't compress what I have to the smaller drive. No problem. I bought a 1 terabyte SSD but I haven't gotten back to the project. It's in the box on my desk collecting dust and the laptop is somewhere in the living room, also collecting dust.

I have a computer simulator for learning to fly model aircraft. It does airplanes, drones and helicopters. I used it religiously and the cord at the top of the controller wore out. It doesn't work reliably. No problem said I, as the plan was to cut a few inches of the worn wire off the cord and reconnect it.
There is a coil (interference filter) where it exits the controller that I snipped off. One problem is 6 wires come from the USB side and 5 wires come from the inside of the controller. Something gets changed in the coil. It took a few days of searching for my test meter. I gave up and bought a new meter. It's been a few months and the opened controller is on the shelf.

While looking for something else, I found the test meter that I couldn't find earlier. So now I have 2 meters and the project isn't finished.

I bought a new controller but it doesn't work with the older software, so I had to buy the newest version simulator and I'm undecided if I will go back complete the project.



The thought now is to pay my friend who suggested I do the SSD upgrade. His business is technical electronic repair. Changing the drive and repairing the controller is something he could easily do.



Projects I don't complete.


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I just seen where a report by the government was due out by 6/25. In fact, I have been reading a couple articles about this report. It is theorized that the report will most likely not contain any sort of confirmation about aliens existing. The consensus of these articles conclude that most likely the leaked UFO footage will still not have any conclusive information of their origins.

Back in the day, I have shared my UFO experience on here. Since then, a buddy of mine told me he and a friend had seen the same triangle shaped craft. He even elaborated a little more on it...more than I shared locally here...he said that he could feel a vibration throughout his body. I told him, that is exactly what I felt as well.

Now reading this most recent article, it included some footage of the leaked videos of the UFOs. I was somewhat surprised to see that one of the videos showed a triangle shaped craft.

As I said, it is most likely the upcoming report will not conclude alien life, and with me and my friend not seeing any physical aliens, it would be somewhat foolish to conclude aliens were flying that triangle. However, with my personal experience, it was not only me who had witnessed this event. My ex-girlfriend had also witnessed it, and their was something strange that had happened to us at the end of our experience...even at the beginning of it when I first seen the craft.

When I first seen it, it had appeared to be the full moon. I mean, it looked exactly like a full moon. For a split second I had thought it was the full moon until I had realized that was impossible. That night, it was severely storming out. I rationalized to myself, how could that be the full moon...it was storming and hence cloudy out. As soon as I thought that, the "full moon" had disappeared and then the craft had exposed itself to me. It almost seemed as if it read my mind. In fact, the timing of everything...I would swear it read my mind.

The second weird unexplainable thing that happen. After the craft revealed itself to me, I freaked out and yelled for my girlfriend. She had made it upstairs, next to me by the window, by the time the craft had slowly hovered over our heads about 30 feet in the air and stopping. The next thing we recall is standing face to face to each other in the center of our room. We had no conscious recollection of how we got there and no memory of how that craft left.

So my conclusion is...yes...I cannot say conclusively there were aliens in that triangle-shaped craft, but, there was more than just that craft going on there that night...technologically wise. The vibration in my body I felt, how it was able to seemingly read my mind, and how we unconsciously got positioned face to face in the center of our room.

I hope that report can shed some light on that stuff as well. I suspect it will not and most likely downplay those leaked video footages as best they can.

I should heed my own advice about changing out old computer parts. Two computers failed last month and are being replaced. The good thing is the hard drives are intact and I'm able to save most of the data contained on them.

Unfortunately, some licensed programs I got free cannot be replaced or would now require payment.

I found a 2gig spare video card and installed into a spare computer I haven't used in a while and now, it's giving error messages. The drivers are updated but I'm unable to troubleshoot... for lack of time. It's quicker to remove the video card and revert back to the onboard video.

I tried removing 4 gigs of RAM from a dead computer and put into a computer with 4gigs expecting 8 gigs... it won't boot now, so I reverted back to a working computer with 4 gigs.

If it's not broken... don't (try to) fix it.

Okay, Okay... no more swapping parts and upgrades... for today.
Tomorrow is a different story!

New computer this week running Windows 10 Pro and updated Microsoft Edge started some things I didn't notice on my older computer it replaced.
I'm online making a purchase and when I get to the cart to review, banners fly out to show the same items elsewhere at a lower cost.
Amazon and Walmart, but the savings were less than a dollar per item.
Since my purchase with this vendor has free shipping over $100, it makes no sense to break an order up to 3 vendors. Kinda like spending a dollar to save a dime. Triple billing, triple deliveries, triple order tracking.

Actually, the annoying part is Microsoft getting into my online purchasing. It may have been there in my previous computer (running Windows 10 with Edge) but I never noticed the banners before.

My computer is spying on me...