Something I did not catch when ordering a highly rated solar panel was that it might not work because the manufacturer didn’t know what they were doing when designing a solar panel for the Nest Cam Battery. Additionally the people reviewing it were not testing any longer than was required by whoever sent it to them.
The result is I have in my possession a solar panel that every time a could of significant proportions floats by I get a notification that one of my Nest Cams is not receiving enough power.
The problem is the solar panel reports that it’s battery power as opposed to solar and runs like it’s a powered camera for a bit and then alerts me. This is not a huge problem if you have no clouds ever but every cloud results in a notification that appears to be in the same class as any of my other Nest camera notifications.
As I am testing out a few solar panels (yeah, I got stuff going on it just doesn’t look like it after my 3 month medical hiatus,) I can tell you they do make solar panels that identify to the Nest Cams as Solar, and they cost the same.
Above left is a solar panel reporting it’s a plugged in USB power, it will alert during cloud cover. The one on the right correctly reports to the Nest Cam that it’s solar, and I got no issues with cloud and errant squirrel notifications.
Anyway, skip to the 1 star reviews as it doesn’t appear most people reviewing these on Amazon consider constant useless notifications to be a thing.
Side note – the ones I am reviewing had no reviews at time of acquisition, but the crappy ones are filling up with 5 stars even though they work significantly worse, and that burns my goats.
Google has announced seven new useful features coming or here for your devices today. It’s more like 4 features, but whatever.
Control devices from your home screen
The feature I find the promise of the neatest, although it unfortunately is not available on my Pixel 8 Pro as of this writing, is the ability to use your favorite devices in Google Home straight from a widget on your home screen. If you’re like me you have a bunch of devices but generally only need to control a few of them not by voice. A quiet time widget would do wonders for me for when I don’t want to wake someone by yelling “set temperature to 68 degrees”.
The post on the Google Blog indicates it’s here, my phone says it’s not. Probably will be here later as they seem to love to get to me last. I am very much looking forward to this particular widget. It’s been on my wishlist for a while now.
They also are rolling out the same ability it appears to Wear OS watches, and I could have sworn I did this already on a watch in the past.
Edit your messages after they’re sent
RCS messages can now be edited. During a brief window of time (15 minutes) you can tap and change the text.
This I assume will lead to kids pulling the rug out from under people in text threads by asking a simple yes/no question and then editing it, taking a screenshot, and otherwise doing what kids used to do on Facebook to make it look like everyone was supporting a hate group…
Will have to fire up an RCS thread at some point… my text message threads are so old even the RCS capable people are showing plain text.
Effortless hotspot sharing
Looks like they’re adding NFC relayed hotspot sharing so you don’t have to type in a password, just tap your hotspot phone to the device you want to share it to. Useful, but sharing hotspots has not generally been a difficult thing.
The feature was so meh, that’s interesting that they combined it with the announcement block of being able to switch Google Meet devices mid-meeting, which I guess also shows how well Google Meet must be doing at the moment.
Other stuff
More digital wallet payment options on watches (appears Paypal is an option in the US or Germany.)
I have a few (60) faces stored in my Nest cameras Familiar Face Detection area. It’s kind of nice to get a notification that our friends are at the door by name and have it announced “Connor is at the door” but a couple of days ago my 8yo got identified as a late 30’s bald friend of ours walking from the car to the front door, and later on was identified as her mom.
In the past I’ve gone in and cleaned out a couple of entries to clear these up. Sometimes five or six photos had slipped in to one contact. Yesterday it was over 100 photos on 45 of the 60 recognized faces, and usually was page after page of my youngest daughter. I cleared out over 250 photos of her on one contact alone.
In all cases the photos started around June of 2023, which to be honest may have been the last time I did any sort of cleanup. I cleared several thousand photos of her and one photo that was comically inaccurate of a friend being mistaken for a UPS driver who looked so much not like him I don’t know how to even start.
My oldest, who has presumably been on the cameras as much as my youngest had a couple of photos misrecognized, but I suspect over all of the ones I cleared out there were maybe 6 of her and 4500 or so of my youngest.
She had been misidentified as a 30-something black man, an 80 year old white woman, a bald man with face tattoos, her mom, her sister, me, our pest control guys, and every single friend of hers.
I start wondering if this might be an evolutionary trait she’s developed to camouflage herself from the machines.
This is not life threatening, but it is kind of nice being alerted that the someone in my yard is the person I am hoping in is my yard.
Moral? Check and see if your child is a chameleon on familiar faces. These can be found, if you use them, by opening the home app, choosing a camera, Settings, Events, Seen events, and under Familiar Face Detection choose manage.
I’ve got a kid who’s got problems self regulating emotions. I could go into details but it boils down to hulk smash. One of the stories I do feel I can relate involves her first school kicking her out over 20 times (yes, illegal, I know now) as well as putting her with a teacher in a parking lot because the entire school could hear her screaming. Smart kid, emotional control lacking and at the age she’s at now it turning more self destructive.
But you rush to point out that an app isn’t a therapist and the two therapists who have tried and so far failed to help her control this agree. This is something we’re trying in addition.
I’m not sponsored by them, didn’t get the app for free, and expect nothing at the moment. Far as I know I have no PR ties with them but I have not investigated. We’re using it on a tablet I own and not a version they sell which based on reviews is not particularly good.
My wife bought it, or bought a subscription to it, I’m actually not sure at the moment how it works but we got a box with a pulse checking wristwatch and a squishy ball and some cards and basically I have no idea beyond that as once the app was up and going kiddo chugged along playing games and collecting items.
May 28, 2024
Day 1 has been uneventful other than my kid claims it’s her favorite game ever. Knowing her I suspect this was a ploy to just get screentime but we’ll see. Very little going on today to set her off.
I am of the idea this will not help personally. I would love to hold out hope an app could help but it seems a bit too simplistic of a solution.
Kid 1 who it was purchased for finds it neat, Kid 2 is going to try it later.
Kid 2 I decided to install it on a different tablet because part of Kid 1’s anger issues involve sharing her stuff, which I understand you give kid 2 anything and it comes back unpleasant. While Kid 1 has no issues letting her play and sharing the watch, the watchband they used almost caused a hulkout with Kid 1 attempting to help kid 2. Watch band is not multi-kid friendly.
May 31, 2024
At this point the two kids have fought over almost every aspect of this… who has the watchband, who has the best avatar, who played it first, and at least at the moment this has caused significantly more trouble than any gains. Some of this may be because we have one watch, but it reached the point I just had to tell the younger kid we got this for the older and in any cases all involved would probably rather Kid 1 use it.
Google and Bing are locked in a death match to bring AI to every single search, every application, and for the most part on search for me it’s unreliable, costs the search engine a lot more, and at least in my case has only been useful in one search.
They won’t let you turn it off however – there’s a trick CNET posted earlier today but it seems to be hit or miss with where it works… for me it only works on Edge browser that’s not logged into my Google account, and neither Chrome nor Chrome incognito work to show that web option.
Microsoft and Google want you to think of them when you think of AI, but all I see in their results are cobbled together usually incorrect or irrelevant information. I usually don’t want an AI overview, and it costs thousands of times more than a simple search does… and I’m ignoring that section usually. I can think of one time in the era of AI search where it came in handy for what I was looking for and I still couldn’t trust what it told me.
I am looking for a very specific article… how to milk an AI… Bing thinks I want a two page defense of AI. I don’t. I want an article entitled “How to Milk and AI” – it’s all right if it doesn’t find it.
I’m not putting Bing’s AI down, but there is no need to waste enormous amounts of processing power drafting several copies of text before choosing one defending the concepts and uses of AI when I am simply searching for text. I did not say “Bing! Defend thyself!”
I worry more about useless overuse of AI and how much it costs in terms of electricity and environmental impact than that it’s there. I don’t hate or fear it but I straight up am avoiding search engines that force it on me because for me it’s not delivering the results and it’s wasting resources when it’s not needed.
I want a search engine guys… give me that and a button to generate an AI powered overview and I’ll be happy… and you know what? I will use the AI overview occasionally… you can even make it so it’s a Pause AI and not turning it off so you can keep pestering me about it like Microsoft does to get me to use the Edge browser (yeah, it’s probably better, but I’m not going to it)
Y’all may recall I had surgery in February… and when I got back home I wanted to curl up with my tablet and just try and exist… unfortunately the tablet disappeared while I was in the hospital and it died before I started looking for it. All I knew was that a few days after my hospital visit the tablet had died at my house.
For the past 3 months I’ve been looking for this thing, and yesterday my youngest lost her bunny rabbit phone and we once again tore the house apart looking for it. Along the way looking for this my tablet was found wedged in a space between my youngest’s bed and the wall. Yay…
Her phone was eventually found, evidently the cats had come through and decided it was a toy (it’s got a rabbit suit) and knocked it well beyond what it could possibly accidentally have slid under the couch.
In each case the device had died and there was no way to ring it, no way to ping it, and no way to bring it back to life for just a moment to produce a beep. In the case of my kid’s phone we weren’t even sure she didn’t take it in the car somewhere.
I’ve had similar issues with my wife’s phone, usually it ends up being under a car seat somehow.
Let me suggest to all phone operating system developers to consider when the battery is at 2% and the phone has not moved in a while to just go ahead and get an ultra-precise location and have that available rather than what currently seems to be the case of “it appears maybe somewhere in these 3 houses”.
Knowing where the phone was when it died rather than knowing it was on this block would do wonders for discovering when a cat has moved something and prevent a whole lot of searching…
I had started shopping for tablets to replace my missing one… luckily it was found but I spent a good month looking for it and disassembling rooms.
Maybe an option for managed kid’s accounts, or my wife’s phone, to notify me when the phone is about to die so it can be located and placed on a charger.
For years if you wanted to look at Southwest Airlines as part of a comparison in pricing you weren’t doing it through Google Flights. That’s not the case any more and really no explanation why it’s been this way provided.
Southwest is now on Google Flights! Talk about building things that are useful for people @dflieb :P
I couldn’t find any flights or dates that Southwest would have saved me anything on, but options are always good and I haven’t searched that much for a Southwest Winner.
It’s Saturday Night, for reasons unknow I’m sleepier than normal and decide to go to bed early. At 11:13 I hear two very close and very loud gunshots… my wife asks me if that was the cat and I tell her I doubt he’s learned to fire a 9mm, let along in such rapid succession.
Being the action hero that I am I check the camera and rewind just to verify that I did in fact hear gunfire and not that guy with the supposedly specially tuned car.. I say specially tuned because he shows up on neighborhood forums anytime someone calls it a gunshot muffler. Nope, it’s not him and I am about to call police when I hear the police.
Nothing but Download Failed, played fine, no options available to get to the police
With my street swarmed by police I wander out to offer the audio of my cameras. The shooter did not go by my house and I don’t have cameras aimed up the road, although I suspect I should at this point.
In the Google Home app I view the clip, attempt to download it so I can email it so they have the bang bang click (third shot jammed,) and no. I got nothing but “download failed” and an option to retry. I’ll save the next 20 minutes of attempting to download any clip from any Home-controlled camera using the Home app and skip to that I remembered one of my cameras is one of the old Nest cameras and can be accessed via the Nest App, which while it’s the same company, the Nest app actually works and isn’t a half assembled attempt at moving a working app into Google’s One App Solution.
I get the audio from the old nest app, create a clip, share it to YouTube and forward it to the police.
Completely failed by the Google Home implementation again.
It’s been announced that Reddit is going to be used to train OpenAI’s ChatGPT model on current topics (and probably more closely resemble human interactions.)
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In other words if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.
I suspect using the voting combined with the commentary is going to help reveal what is a useful comment and not, but I can’t help thinking that ChatGPT is going to start making some pretty snarky responses on current events if it’s trained on the groups I’ve looked at.
What I suspect location queries to ChatGPT will return in 2025
I suspect were I a regular contributor to Reddit I’d be annoyed that a chatbot is being trained to comment like me as I thought I was only being used for advertising purposes and not training Skynet to replace me.
It appears the main focus is on more recent content rather than resurrecting deceased redditors as AI ghouls to comment on the state of the post-IPO reddit, but everything Reddit now feeds the machine. Your work for your friends is being sold as a commodity. Fun times.
S’gotchaMe Profile on Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/artist/0hQBkU2vuMYXucmd89JUSw?si=JA77npD1QTWbSaUr89c0sQ&dl_branch=1Itunes/Apple Music - https://musi...
Gemini, the Assistant replacement, was offered to me today and I fell for it. I quickly ran it through a list of things I do on a regular basis and for many it worked fine but for my driving offerings it failed to the point I am going to have to switch while I’m in the car.
Update: this has evidently been around a couple of weeks, it was new to me to be bugged to switch.
The main issue is there is no YT Music integration at the moment, but it will pull a list of YouTube videos that you can select, which is essentially useless when driving. What’s worse, for me at least, is that asking it to play the news results in nothing. It can’t, and there’s no way to ask it to ask Assistant to play the news.
Yeah, I like the news and music in the car… this kills that. Or at least it does for me as of the time of writing… betting they fix the music integration pretty quickly as they already have other integration like Google Maps and “navigate home” still works… it’ll just be a long and quiet ride home.
Now it seems to do well at your standard LLM responses, but it does not do continued conversation so I find it asking me a lot of questions and then finding out my spoken answers have gone nowhere.
I suspect this will get better quite quickly, however being Google I suspect the things I use most will be the very last to start working.
Gemini also seems to suffer some identity issues as it believes it’s Assistant in some replies. The replies in general are much more expansive than Google Assistant had and asking follow up questions is quite useful, except I have to say “hey Google” for every follow up because continued conversation doesn’t seem to be a thing here.
Minor issues to something that actually looks like it could be amazing… but I do have to switch it for driving, and there’s no automatic way to switch from Assistant to Gemini or back at the moment. Actually I see no way to switch out at this point and stuck with Gemini telling me conflicting things for changing Assistant, which doesn’t seem to work… womp womp.
Immediately after I wrote this and had received multiple wrong replies it gave me the correct info which is open Gemini, press your profile pic, go to settings, down at the bottom is Digital Assistants from Google, press that and you can switch between Gemini and Google Assistant, which isn’t that hard but you’ll find that Gemini is simply gone from your phone after that.
Not terribly hard to re-install it from the play store, and it appears to survive the next switch, but not exactly smooth.
I am completely out of the loop today for a variety of car related reasons, so I suspect this has something to do with all the Google announcements that I managed to miss and am catching up late in the day on.
While I have a decent amount of daily readers (thank you btw,) the comments section has been a ghost town for the past few years and as such, paying for Disqus I decided to see exactly how much per user comment I was effectively paying with their yearly basic plan and it comes out to something like $5.08 per comment. Appears more people email me or attempt to contact me via LinkedIn (don’t do that) than do the site. Seriously, stop with the LinkedIn.
Disqus’s free tier ads something like 12 ads per page and I’m already fighting to get our advertising platform to chill out (no really, this has been an effort.)
Would love to have had Pocketables turn into a hangout for tech geeks offering their own perspective on things, but I’ve never been able to keep the site regular enough to engage viewership… womp womp. Oh well. I never claimed to be a community builder, just finder of interesting tech.
This does not mean anything for the site going forward except you might have to jump through a couple of hoops to tell me I’m an idiot on a review or news item. The site made enough money to last another year and with some adjustments because I did not write for a couple of months, it’s on track to pay me back for the purchase sometime in May of never…
If anyone has any free Disqus replacers feel free to mention them.
Update – Disqus doesn’t allow you to cancel a subscription online, only by emailing them at cancellation@disqus.com… and for the past 3-4 days my message has been unable to deliver to them…
Hi there. My name is Paul and I’m stuck in the Nest ecosystem (unless I want to ditch several hundred dollars of product). Nest is a brand that Google acquired, decided to stamp the brand name on everything, started to integrate the app into Google’s one giant Home app, got stuck halfway through on the security side, and pretty much abandoned as far as any long term users can tell. The Google Home migration for Nest camera products has left users who migrated or were forced to migrate a list of cameras you can view from the web and that’s about it.
See, if I were able I would be on the Nest app, but unfortunately Google’s newer Nest cameras don’t work with the Nest app… they only work with the Home App.
The Home app features a lack of event history on the web for older devices (you have to go to the Nest app for those,) no ability to save clips, can’t create timelapse videos, was bad enough when Nest fell, but what was worse is Nest’s home/away generally worked and Google Home’s tends to be almost completely broken for me.
Now, my setup should be if either me or my wife is home the away mode should kick on, but if either of us is at home it should not. This is done with the Home app / Google Location Services.
What happens is if I leave the house is Away mode kicks on, and if my wife is still at home (happens in the mornings a lot,) I get notification after notification that someone is in the house. These are notifications I actually do want, but only after she’s left. If I’m driving to work it’s nonstop dings while I’m trying to listen to music or a podcast. This has resulted in me setting home mode multiple times just so I can listen to whatever I was listening to.
When I get home, I’m generally in the house and picked up by the living room cameras before Locations Services have had a chance to figure out I’m home, but if my wife gets home before me it may be a good 10 minutes before it recognizes her device and we both get notifications there’s movement until such time as it figured out we’re home, connected to the network, been in the geofence for minutes, offered the door handle gods a firm handshake, or whatever it is that triggers Google Location services to trigger.
I’ve had to set “home” mode many times when I’m not there and Kim is, and when she eventually is out the door and off to work I can guarantee you I’ve never thought to set it back to Away mode once I made it to work.
This combined with the numerous false alarms I get daily because I have a shadow on a wall that looks enough like a human face to trigger a person seen in my living room, or I have a tree that triggers my back yard camera’s person identification, and a chair in my backyard that quite often triggers and says it’s me recognized in the back yard, render any notifications I get pretty useless.
The problem here is I straight up do not pay any attention to Nest Alerts any more because I’ve been conditioned not to. This limits what usefulness this has, but the Location services really limit the use, or my trust, as I have found that I am listed as home sometimes when I am not.
While I could complain about where Nest stands in its obscenely slow transition to Google’s attempt at a One app in the form of Home, the main issue is location services and it is evident that is where the fault lies because in Google Maps we have a geofence that tells one another when we arrive at the kid’s schools. This is absurdly useful if you’re not on a regular schedule / can leave to work from home / or in the case of working in Nashville: stuck in traffic. There’s no wondering of “did they make it in time or do I need to call the school?.” Wouldn’t be an issue if our kids could be trusted with a device, or Nashville would adopt a sensible traffic light solution, but that’s evidently out the window at this point.
What happens more often than not is this produces a false worry that the other parent did not make it to school because the notification does not trigger. The geofence fails to establish that one of us went there, were there long enough to pick up a kid, and left.
And I think the reason for that is the location services and reporting just straight up don’t work. My daughter and some friends went out walking one day with another parent and I happened to be driving through the area and stopped at the location it said she was at. She wasn’t there. Really, sounds stalkeresque but her phone was reporting she was at one location next to where I was going, and she was actually 1200 feet away. Called and asked her where she was and yup, it was not there. Updated Google Maps / her location, was told that “just now” she was right where I was standing and the accuracy circle was pretty small on Google Maps.
These are three phones, two Samsungs and one Pixel, all using Google’s location services and all just off. The fact that my kid’s was reporting off by 1200 feet makes me think that is why me or my wife don’t enter the geofence of the schools to trigger notifications.
My wife’s phone, at home (work from home day,) showing at home on Google Maps (or in the neighbor’s back yard,) not at home for Google Location Services because I am getting alerts when she pops into range of a door camera and the heating/cooling has switched to away mode.
It’s a shame because this could probably be easily fixed and it’s been literally years of issues.
The Thinkware U3000 Dash Cam was delivered to me in October 2023 and has been in use for far too long without a review. Sorry about that Thinkware, some health things came up. The unit I was given is powered by an OBDII connector (or or alternate 12v power adapter,) and adds features my other dash cams didn’t have such as a parking mode that will trigger and record events when your car gets bumped, or someone walks in front of the camera.
As readers of Pocketables might recall I recently had some health issues, so the first interesting test the U3000 got was being installed and running for almost two months off my car battery without my car being started. It was still running fine when I started being able to drive again and I had no warnings or any indications that the battery was low at two months. I had expected that I would be jumping the car, but yeah, worked fine. This may be because the unit is timed to turn off after a couple of days however, just discovered that option after I wrote this.
The U3000 records up to 4K on a front camera, and at 2K on a rear camera (I did not get the version with the rear camera,) and records to a sufficiently fast SD card. From there video can be exported to an app, or you can pop the SD card out and read it on a computer.
The unit has pretty decent night vision, claims to have red light camera, tailgating, and lane departure warnings. However living in a state with only one county with red light cameras, and only having the front camera, I’m not sure how that works. My vehicle also has lane departure warnings so I have never enabled that.
A bright and sunny day, nothing happens. Make sure to choose 4k viewing or you’ll get a pretty low quality start.
I suspect the red light camera alert is one of the internet based features rather than a hardware feature, and that will require you to connect to your hotspot on your phone or vehicle, or just drive very very close to your house. There are a host of Thinkware Connected features, but on this unit you’ll be required to supply nonstop Wi-Fi for this unit at least.
I’ve found that I don’t miss the screens my other cameras had, I barely used them anyway but I do miss the rear camera just for completeness and wish I’d gotten that, but I get and review what I get and review.
Ooh, one neat thing it appears you can watch from a remote location if the unit is connected to the internet. I don’t have the ability to safely do this but could be neat if you’re managing a fleet or want to know how your kid is driving.
U3000 nitpicking
As with all dashcam apps I’ve reviewed, I really don’t like it. At least not the Android implementation. It’s not terrible, but there are things about it that really are annoying and incomplete feeling.
We’ll start with the videos. You want a video off the the camera you transfer it to your phone. Once it’s on your phone it’s in the app’s private data and if you want to do anything with it, such as upload it to YouTube to send to the police you have to open the app and move it to an album. Once it’s in an album Android can manage and do whatever you want with it.
I however see no practical use to hide the videos from the rest of the Android system. There should at least be an option for where to place them because if you download the videos, get out of your car and walk over to an officer, to get the video you need to launch the app and it needs to connect to the dashcam… if it can’t it will just hold you hostage until it times out attempting to connect which appears to be about 30-45 seconds. At that point you can now go into the app and view videos from there, choose to export them to an album, from a file viewer toss them to YouTube, and then send the officer a link as there seems to be no share option in the app. Far too complex a process after you’ve just witnessed an accident.
While the resolution is indeed 4K, in lower light some artifacting is a bit over the top when people are speeding past you as shown below.
This jeep is made of mostly pixels that look like rubber ducksEven in the tiny image you can see it’s kind of lossy in low lighting situation
In both of the above the overall picture looks fine, but you’re more than assured that while it’s 4K you’re not going to be getting that without artifacting and image loss. Pretty much standard on devices that aren’t taking 500+MB a minute for video recording, but a pain if you want to pick out a license plate. I really wish there were an “I want to record this at 2 gigabytes per minute” option so I could slap in a 128GB and have 60 minutes of video I could count the speckled berry bird crap on car windows at 500 feet, but no. This is the case for everything I’ve reviewed as a note.
Night video is pretty good, unfortunately all my night video has slid off of the card and I’ll have to record some more at some point.
My kids have complained repeatedly about their desire to turn the notification off about how many events have happened since the car was shut off as it annoys them. I don’t see an option to change that, but also it is not much of an annoyance to me.
During the 7 months I’ve been reviewing this (once again, sorry on that delay Thinkware, got a freaking tumor to blame,) really not a whole lot has happened. I’ve recorded a couple of crashes, used the video to report some people who need a talking to, and handed over the video once to police. Everything was recorded well enough to see what happened, although you might not be able to tell who was looking where.
It’s a really neat dashcam, and I never thought I would dig a device without a screen as much, but I do really appreciate it just being out of the way and recording. I never notice this while driving. I never am distracted by a light flashing on and off, and I am never worried that it looks like I have something worth breaking into my car to steal because it doesn’t look like much more than a dashcam.
I also wish there were some voice option where I could trigger it to mark something as important so I can go back and find it later. I’ve taken to just giving the camera a whack which will mark that video as an incident/potential crash.
And finally – I don’t know how to stress how much I absolutely hate glued on product. I just went through this with my last dash cam and although I didn’t have any of the issues with this one I had with that, it very much limits one moving the unit around if you’re not happy with placement or switching vehicles. While I’ve got it mounted in the center, I’d love to move it to the passenger side just to get it completely out of my line of sight. Ah well.
This is driving video from a Thinkware U3000 Dash Cam. This is part of a review on Pocketables that I am writing and contains nothing interesting other than ...
A couple of years ago a friend of mine had his gmail hacked. His initial complaint was that a whole bunch of banks and website suddenly had started sending him signup information to the tune of 30-50 an hour. Most of these were overseas and he said he had no idea what was going on and I informed him his gmail had most likely been hacked and he was being used as a legitimate email address to reply to things and to change his password and sign everyone out right now.
He said he’d get to it after work… I told him he’d be sorry, get it now before it spreads. He didn’t.
TL;DR – two tales from my recent past that most of the details are omitted.
Of course shortly after this they changed his password and signed him out, and rather than a couple of minute change your password sort of thing it became an ordeal as they discovered his financial history and started working their way into that and various social media that just requires an email verification for lost password. Every major service needed contacted as they’d gone to them, changed the password, changed the email address, took control of the account.
He didn’t lose anything that I know of, but recovering took days and he’s being spammed by financial institutions, foreign social media sites, and otherwise lives with an email box that’s the result of being used as part of an attack. Could have been stopped quite a bit sooner but yeah… take an emergency break from work before you have to take days off of work dealing with this. It wasn’t a human doing this it was a bot and could have been stopped sooner.
I know another man who got scammed by a crypto group that had a great looking app, and site. All was fine and dandy until he attempted to pull money out of the thing and they required a deposit to get his money out. Oof… I’m not sure exactly how, but assuming the app he was using for this crypto scam gained hackers access to his Facebook, Apple ID, Email.
See here I’m conjecturing as we don’t know how they got his Facebook, just that one day his 3000+ followers started getting a fake blog about how this person had just got a certificate of training in crpyto exchange… this wasn’t truly too far off for him so I didn’t call him until the next post a day later where he was claiming to have made a lot of money and was holding up a sign saying so. This was out of character.
I called him, he’d been hacked, they got access to all his bank accounts, apple account, anything that required his phone/sms they had intercepted. I’m not really sure how this was done because nobody found out or investigated too deeply. He ended up having to get a new phone line and Apple account in order to regain control. But he waited a couple of days while an IT guy was begging him to go and report this to the police and grab a phone he could operate off of and start reporting it.
The couple of days and thinking it was just a Facebook hack and not immediately contacting all financial institutions and issuing a fraud alert cost him thousands. Now people who get hacked like this generally get their money back, but he’s a business so that looks like it’s not going to happen. At least that’s what I’m hearing. No idea on if all his email was compromised but one can imagine.
During all of this he sat on it for a couple of days because he had other things he needed to do. I suspect had he acted at the outset the money wouldn’t be gone, but I don’t know for sure. Now he’s got the fallout from everything that happened to deal with for the next several months, and I believe his FB may still be compromised and scamming people.
I talked to the IT guy who was helping him through this and during the recovery they called Facebook supposedly and it ended up being a scammer trying to get their credit card number to “pay Meta’s costs for your negligence.” He also had Apple support supposedly calling up that sounded a bit scammy.
In either of the above examples I don’t know that jumping on it immediately would have changed much, but not making eliminating a hack a priority ended up costing one thousands, and the other weeks.
Make it a priority, take the time off, it’s an emergency and not just changing a password event. If you’ve had the email you use for social media or banking compromised make the assumption that those places all need contacted.
Google Fit, the ultimate hub for third party fitness trackers, but strangely never worked with Fitbit even after Google acquired them, is the next plot at the Google Graveyard with an estimated dead-by date of 2025. The existing APIs at least.
Even with this news however there’s no reason to worry because there are two other half baked APIs that sort of work and are surely going to be good by the time they pull the plug… just like Play Music was a complete product when they EOLd Google Music…. just like that…
It doesn’t mean that your absurdly inexpensive Chinese fitness tracker that worked with Google Fit will be useless…. except it does.
There is a migration guide for developers, but there’s very little helpful information according to Ars Technica who I’m linking below rather than lifting a paragraph that’s about equal to what I’ve written.
Your Fitbit account is also evidently being shut down and migrated to your Google account. Looks like a bunch of half baked solutions still.
While the Google Fit APIs may be changing, the platform doesn’t appear to be listed as the next plot in the Google Graveyard… but yeah, your cheap watch is going to stop working. They’re also talking about Google Health, which is probably going to actually replace Fit.
It’s going to create a mess. Google’s good at doing that.
In other news it appears they took the Fitbit dashboard off of the website which means that they finally aren’t telling you to install Flash to do food tracking.
My Pixel 8 Pro has been pretty solid lately, but this changed yesterday when my kid took it for a few minutes to play some YouTube videos on the ride home. I don’t think she had anything to do with it as the only thing she had done was disable Bluetooth (my car has a 3 second delay on Bluetooth audio which makes it completely useless for watching videos.)
When I got home I noticed it was in Do Not Disturb mode… huh, maybe kid accidentally hit that while trying to hit Bluetooth, so I disabled DND and noticed shortly that I could not tap to wake the phone. I could press the power button but tap to wake was no longer working. There was an icon that indicated navigation or driving mode was in effect but no way to spawn it, and I attempted to open maps and nothing. Just nothing would work map-related. Finally had to choose to switch programs, scroll way over and find maps, close it by swiping.
Things seemed to return to some normalcy and I didn’t notice anything else odd with the device yesterday, but today my alarm didn’t go off. I plan for things like this and have a backup alarm but after I got up the phone was face up, working, knew what time it was, and the alarm was set. It just didn’t go off. I decided it was time to reboot the phone.
Phone being rebooted I set to checking work email while the kids got ready for school only to find that I could not open emails, I could only select them, requiring me to manually close gmail and reopen it after which it appeared to work normally.
As it’s close to Pixel update time, I suspect Google has pushed something in advance.. that or my phone became possessed.
Of all the failings I’ve had with Google products, the alarm is a new one.
A long time ago I was contacted by a PR firm about Monopoly Go! I passed on any coverage of the thing because I really don’t have too much time for anything, let alone an app version of a board game that notoriously ruins families. Cut to about two months ago when my wife showed me a screen and asked if I thought I could predict where the third diamond ring was.
I told her where I assumed it was, and it was there. This repeated several times a day with my choices being far more accurate than they reasonably should have been able to be leading me to the conclusion that there was trickery the likes of which I had seen before in another game I quit because it became world-consuming. That game had most of my fellow players spending $30 a month just to be powerful enough to not be fodder. The choices didn’t matter, you got what you got and it was predictable.
One day we went out and she left her phone at home and when she got back I heard “arrrrrr… the Walrus destroyed me!” and I gathered a mutual friend had 1) been sucked into the vortex that is Monopoly Go! and 2) raided / stolen / something to that effect while my wife was away from her phone. She never forgot her phone after that.
Movie nights started to become an effort to explain what she had missed because she looked away at her phone to attack a co-player I assume. “Well, if you’d been watching the movie you would know that person died in a car explosion.” She developed the ability to tune out her surroundings to I guess go another round, I’m not exactly sure what she’s doing, just that she has a group of opponents and she’s sticking it to people in said group.
I still am asked to find the last diamond ring regularly, and I find it or I know before I choose that I have not found it and have no clue why I know this. I still find this odd and am wondering if there’s a tell on the screen I’m not consciously picking up on.
It is evidently a neat little game and addictive in its free form, but reminds me a bit of the tricks Last Shelter and other world-building games institute to keep you coming back day after day. The reviews tend to indicate that there may be an invisible pay to play glass ceiling, but that’s not something I’ve been asked to look at and none of my Google Play Millions have been requested (I’ve got $41 something for reasons).
The children ask when she’s coming back from Monopoly Go! and I just don’t know.
I’m curious about this game, but someone has to feed the cats.
Thought I’d lay down what happened with two of my fiber modems this past year. They were the old style that looked like these BGW210s, although I can’t say for sure if that was what they were as both were removed by AT&T.
The first was at my house, and the issue was it straight up refused to factory reset and was being a butthole. Yes, that’s the correct terminology, being a butthole. I’ve been in IT since the 90’s and that’s right there in the manual. Butthole. “Do not subscribe to the equipment’s butthole.” It refused to play nice on Wi-Fi (acted slower than Glitch getting the second episode of the Amazing Digital Circus out,) and would slow down to a crawl for no apparent reason.
We managed to troubleshoot it on the phone to somewhat working level, but it was being really funky when attempting to do anything with the Wi-Fi (like being so slow you couldn’t load the admin page,) so it got swapped out for a beige abomination which has so far given me no trouble.
The second, which was also a black tower from 2018 if I remember correctly, started figuring out when I would leave my workplace and slow to a crawl. This was after the Nashville Electric Service had power off to our building for several hours and nobody informed me because they didn’t want to bother me post hospital. As such rather than me dancing around and shutting things off like a graceful little IT fairy, power was yoinked from the AT&T equipment (they said no UPSes. Not me,) and my guess is this is when the black fiber modem at work was injured.
It came back as something different, darkly disturbed and exceedingly annoying. Every day around 5:20am and 2:40pm the unit would slow down. Nothing too epic at first but connections would drop, lookups would fail, if you could connect to a speed test you were getting great results but quite often you would connect and be informed by the webpage you just loaded that there was no internet connection. I was usually driving to get my kid when the slew of calls would come in. “The fiber calls for you Paul… it beckons” and I’d have to pick my kid up and by the time I got back to work it was completely fine again.
The AT&T app said it was broken, but not much more beyond that. A tech was dispatched, we discussed what I was seeing, he said the old black thing was old and to swap it out with the new 1990’s beige thing, which looks exactly like the one I’ve got at my house. Swap completed I once again proceeded without any issues.
So if you’ve got an old black fiber wireless gateway from many a moon ago… I think it’s their dying time. They were released in 2016, have lived a long life, it’s time to put them out to pasture if things are getting strange and you have stripped away all other possibilities…
Sorry Ol’ Yeller… that’s what I named mine due to the yellow cable…
The last update of Chrome added the ability to ask Google’s AI Gemini questions directly from the address bar thus reducing the necessity to press “b” and watch it autofill to bard.google.com which redirected you to Gemini’s landing page.
To access Gemini on a current version of Google Chrome on a desktop type @gemini followed by your question. A full page will appear an you’ll continue any conversation in it.
It does not appear to be working on Chrome Mobile at the moment with my attempts at conversing with Gemini returning horoscopes for my other half cusp.
This doesn’t appear to be more than a fancy redirect at the moment, but it’s something new to let you know that Google has an AI too and you should play with theirs more than Microsoft’s, which wedged its AI into Edge and the online office products I’m told.
Currently no AI model can tell me if there were a third AI model constantly asking the large language models questions and then processing and asking more questions about the nature of existence and self whether it would achieve some sort of self-awareness, or perhaps just a book deal and someone making money off of sentient AI propaganda.
Also no AI model seems to be interested in telling me why my screenshots universally look like garbage on this computer… so obviously AI has failed.. nah..
It’s a neat shortcut, I feel Bing’s much more intrusive approach is going to win out however.
I got an unexpected credit from Google for my two nightblind Nest Cam IQs. They were well out of warranty and I suspect that someone decided that being as I have a blog with ten of readers perhaps extending an olive branch would be a nice thing to do. It was. I’m not sure if I mentioned it in the previous article but these cameras are expected to live 5-8 years and mine lived 5 years and 3 months (for one) and probably right under 5 years for the second one. They lived as expected and I suspect started their night vision issues when we had temperatures near or below zero for a few days.
The credit, along with my credit from some Pixel purchase and discount for being a Google One subscriber ended up getting me their three pack bundle of the battery camera I’ve never been particularly fond of. I’m mostly not fond of it because attempting to export video clips is just a pain in the butt and handing things over to the police or a neighbor it’s easier if I just capture my screen and then post it on YouTube for them.
They didn’t have to extend the olive branch. I’ve dedicated quite a bit of my time to reviewing (unfavorably) their Nest WiFi and subsequent customer service interactions where I was told that the most generic and standard internet connection was in fact very strange and I needed to put my fiber modem, or work network, into a different mode. (Psst. I review Wi-Fi here as well as other stuff, I know what I’m doing. It wasn’t a complex network.)
I will be going three more cameras into the Google ecosystem. My night blind cameras still work perfectly fine for basic daytime use and I think I’m going to bring them to the office inside and create some grand and terrible experiment utilizing the known faces feature.
While it’s true I would not purchase their new cameras with the current software, I’m pretty much locked into the Google Ecosystem from the other cameras and as such this was a pretty cool thing on Google’s part to do.
So yeah, thanks Google. I mean it.
On to the creepy stuff however… and it may be just me as I suspect there’s a database of bloggers who have received Google’s sweet deep kiss and complained loudly about it (free stuff,) they contacted me on my personal email. There are ways to find it on Pocketables, but still a bit unexpected. My Nest Cams IQ that failed however were not free stuff, they were me wanting to play in the Nest playground since I really did love the thermostat.
I don’t have exact stats, but in the five years I’ve had the cameras I’ve been contacted by the police three times for events that went on at the apartment buildings across the street, recorded a shootout between idiots at a car dealership 500 feet from my kid’s bedroom.
recorded idiots shooting at a parked car who were actually caught by the police because the police were in a parking lot filling out paperwork 200 feet away, recorded my youngest attempting to run into traffic (she claims she didn’t, I’ve got video,) caught a cat vandal (below)
Watched as FedEx destroyed my lawn and left $500 of packages in the middle of the yard in the rain, watched as an army of slugs made a mass migration across my front yard to the neighbors, and caught video of a crazy man leaving a threatening note in the neighbor’s mailbox.
I’ve had video of people probably checking out whether they thought they could steal packages without being caught, mailbox thieves, missing animals, etc.
The Nest Cam IQs really served their purpose, and the rest of the Nest family of cameras has served to keep my kids honest, figure out what jacket they lost at school, and check in on the cats from time to time. The doorbell, well that’s been kind of a disappointment but that’s a different story.
I’m glad I’ve had them. I am going to miss the Nest Cam IQs software (Nest app)… hopefully they’ll get the Google Home app/webpage up to the level that the Nest app was six years ago… I can hope that it’s not another Google abandoned project.
And finally, while I made a joke about being in an abusive relationship with Google, if you’re in an abusive relationship be it with a corporate monopoly or a terrible partner, seek help and get out. Life is too freaking precious to let something as valuable as you are be abused.
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