I’ve had the pleasure of playing with the 4K Argus 4 Pro color night vision camera for a few weeks at this point and it is hands down the best night vision I have ever seen, but besides that it’s everything I’ve wanted in a solar/battery camera for years.

Traditionally Wi-Fi/battery cameras I’ve so far tried, you’re tied into either a cloud service or local recording only. The Argus 4 Pro lets you use a NAS, SD card, FTP, and an Reolink Home Hub. I’ve currently got mine recording to SD and an FTP.

The unit connects via Wi-Fi 6 and can be powered by a solar panel and the battery or via USB-C power. I was using the solar panel until last week and it had no issues keeping the unit at 100% ever time I checked.

It’s got 180 degree video from two cameras stitched together extremely well (until your face is right on the camera and then you’ll see in video 3) and it just seems to work.

I should probably preface the videos below with there is no spotlight. That’s over light saturated front and center tree, two areas of light on the ground from other sources, but it’s dark when viewed.

I am re-mounting the camera in the front of my house as soon as I can figure out where to place the solar panel to try and catch some of the neighborhood weirdness, and I am taking requests for challenges against this camera which I will post here.

My Argus 4 Pro survived two rather major storms / getting blown off the shelter where I had placed it (without using mounting hardware) and a bird deciding it was a fine couch.

I’m not sure if the distance relays from the videos very well, but the house on the right in the middle of it is where my Wi-Fi is located and the Reolink Argus 4 Pro never seemed to have any issues being near the back of the yard.

Night coloring of faces is not perfect, but it’s so much better than any IR camera I’ve seen. And the ability to see people and things in other people’s yards without a spotlight being turned on is insane (also a reason I don’t have a lot of video to share, I need to point it elsewhere.)

There’s a launch day special going on at the moment where the camera and setup I received is $179 USD, which appears $20 off. My email says the base price is $239 so not entirely sure what’s going on there but it’s worth it at either price. The price is going to be whatever the link says.

You can grab the Reolink Argus 4 Pro at Reolink, Amazon, and wherever fine solar/battery color 4K night vision cameras are sold.

I didn’t catch anything interesting on video during testing, wish I could have caught a deer, burglar, or some such. I will be doing more testing with this as the camera is getting put into permanent rotation if it can handle the rigors of constantly being triggered out front.

Cut and paste Reolink 4 Pro press release follows

Reolink Announces Argus 4 Pro 

World’s 1st Day & Night Color Vision Home Security Camera

Reolink Argus 4 Pro sets a new standard in the industry with 180-degree blindspot-free images and all-day color vision in 4K UHD resolution.

Wilmington, Del., June 10th, 2024 –  Reolink, a renowned home security solution provider, is proud to unveil its newest addition to the Argus camera lineup: Argus 4 Pro. Engineered with proprietary cutting-edge technology and user-centric features, the Argus 4 Pro redefines home and business surveillance with its unmatched combination of 4K UHD 180° blindspot-free view and all-day color vision. The new Argus 4 Pro gives users extra peace of mind with a single wide panoramic view in vivid color that they can access remotely to keep an eye on their properties anytime, anywhere. 

The Argus 4 Pro sets a new standard with its dual 4mm lenses, achieving an expansive 180° ultra-wide-angle view in 4K UHD resolution. This Reolink innovation surpasses the industry norm by concentrating pixels more densely, ensuring the finest image clarity. Argus 4 Pro seamlessly integrates dual lenses to not only deliver a blindspot-free view but also to enhance detailed image capture, overcoming significant image distortion challenges associated with Dual-Image Stitching Technology. The advanced algorithms developed for the Argus 4 Pro minimize distortion and cover every possible unseen area, ensuring a seamless and clear panoramic view.

Reolink’s industry-leading ColorX technology ensures the camera catches the light as much as possible. In low light conditions, the Argus 4 Pro can shoot full-color images with no need for infrared lights or spotlights, delivering nighttime images bright and vivid as the daytime ones. The Argus 4 Pro transcends the limitations of traditional IR night cameras and results in saving 2W/h power consumption when the camera is in night vision mode. The embedded Reolink ColorX technology contributes to a 30% more battery life comparing with other IR 4K UHD resolution cameras at a night condition*. 

The Argus 4 Pro sets the pace with its incorporation of Dual-Band Wi-Fi 6 technology, marking it as the first-ever battery-powered home security camera with the most smooth 4K streaming experience. This innovation leaps forward in wireless connection, ensuring that even amidst numerous devices, the camera data transfers with lightning speed, enabling real-time previews and swift recording downloads that are both smooth and highly detailed.

Privacy is paramount at Reolink, with robust security measures in place to safeguard users’ personal data. Reolink’s commitment to privacy means providing end-to-end encryption, customizable privacy settings, and diverse data storage options—all without any subscription fees. 

Key Features:

• 4K UHD 180° blindspot-free View
• All-day Color Vision
• 30% More Battery Life
• Wi-Fi 6 Ready, Smooth 4K Streaming
• Easy Installation Everywhere
• Enhanced Smart Detection with Accurate Alerts
• Diverse Local Storage (with support of 128GB SD card and Reolink Home Hub)
• Remote Access Anytime Anywhere
•  24-Hour Battery in Just 10 Mins of Charge

“The Argus 4 Pro represents the next evolution in smart home security,” said  Fabrice Klohoun, Marketing Manager at Reolink. “With its advanced features and robust privacy protections, it offers unmatched surveillance experience and peace of mind to our customers.”

It is now available for purchase on Reolink.com and Amazon. To learn more about the Reolink Argus 4 Pro and Reolink’s full range of smart home security solutions and services, visit Reolink.com.

 *Testing in specific lab conditions.

About Reolink

Reolink offers smart security solutions for homes and businesses, aiming for a seamless security experience with its wide range of products. Serving millions globally, it provides video surveillance and protection, standing out for its commitment to security technology innovation. Learn more about Reolink’s offerings at Reolink.com.

The Argus 4 Pro color night vision camera is here and it’s just great by Paul E King first appeared on Pocketables.

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I have been devoting some time to continuing to learn lockpicking while there aren’t a lot of things going on. This has been aided by being in a review program where among other things I can get locks and review them.

tl;dr – lock bloggity

Fret not, there’s a ton of gadget news and reviews and potentially a series coming up, but at the moment old school turning metal is amusing me.

But I thought I’d share a lock I just got… advetised 75mm padlock, hardened steel, disc detainer core, waterproof, element proof and more. Sounds good right?

It was a 67mm padlock in a 73mm plastic shell first off. Front of the package claimed waterproof, back of the package said not. Logos were falling off where they’d been applied. I’m pretty sure the keys I have are the same cut as the keys shown in the product photos (which was the case with my last disc detainer core.)

“Hardened steel” that can be easily scraped with a fingernail file and damaged easily by light pressure with plyers.

The other day I got a 10 pack of wafer lock lock-out locks and was through all 10 in under 5 minutes. I wish this was about me being good, but it’s how absurdly low security some of these locks available for review are.

I got a two pack the other day that popped open as I was sticking a rake tool in it. It took slightly longer to single pin pick or shim open but not much longer. So much insecure crap out there and it’s priced online at about the same pricing as what has actually stopped me.

I’ve got a collection of 25 or so rather simple to open locks, including a glass storefront lock that I can get in using just a wire (or pick, or rake, not been able to zip) and I decided it was time to take on something real. Free is good but I wanted a challenge.

Picked up a Masterlock 5, and yeah… I am currently defeated. I’m interested to see how long I am as this brand is what amused me enough to get into lock picking. Well, people popping open Masterlocks with other Masterlocks is.

Due to reasons I ended up with three pick sets. A set from Lockpick Extreme I got for attending a seminar along with 5 extremely easy cores, a 24 piece set I got off of Amazon because I wanted a collection of see through locks (page gone now,) and a set from Covert Instruments including an FNG.

I discovered, as I was told, that I would use the see-through locks a couple of times and tire of them. They’re all as simple as can be, and useful once if you don’t have YouTube to see what you are doing… actually I take that back, I did get some useful hand/eye feedback on how far in a lock I was and that did help some. That said, I wish I could re-key and make them a bit more realistic.

My cheap Amazon set gets some use, but I seem to be mostly using the Covert Instruments or Lockpick Extreme set – either of those feel right… the cheapies do the job but the feedback just isn’t there for me. It may be because I’m training myself on the more expensive sets, I’m not sure.

I ended up getting a vise. I am a bit ashamed of that as I don’t feel I have the skills to need a vise… but I also felt I kept moving my hands around and was cramping and getting annoyed so it’s cheaper than physical therapy.

I have become absolutely fascinated in how to overcome most daily lock I encounter… I have no intention of using my skills for evil, but it has taught me a lot of things to slow down even people coming via sledgehammer (which happened to a person in our neighborhood recently). Fun times.

Plugging along in lockpicking by Paul E King first appeared on Pocketables.

So… there’s a camera you might want to look at if you’re in the market for an outdoor camera in the next few weeks and that’s the Reolink Argus 4.

It will be launching on the 10th of June, 2024, and is a 4K battery/solar powered 180 degree camera that claims color vision at night.

You can preorder it now and get $50 off when you reserve it, or wait until the 10th when I am allowed to say more.

You might gather I’ve had a chance to play with one of these and can’t speak about it. Gather your questions and if for some reason I was not able to speak about it, I would probably be able to speak about it once the 10th has passed. That is if I weren’t allowed to speak about it.

Pre-orders can be placed here.

Reolink Argus 4 Pro – color vision at night (preorders) by Paul E King first appeared on Pocketables.

Setting the stage I had a doctor’s appointment and the subject of a hep b vaccine came up and I said I had had it. My records didn’t indicate this, I couldn’t remember why I had had it, and it had been over ten years ago. I was getting blood tested anyway so to make sure I had it we did a test on the antibody and something else that is done with the antibody test.

I got the results back which indicated I indeed had the antibodies to it (I remember getting it, just not where,) and I wondered what this second test that was part of it was and googled it.

I wish I had taken screenshots of my AI assisted search, I really do. Because what I read indicated that I had an active hep b infection. The only way that would have been possible were if I had received blood during my operation tainted with it, but still it was concerning and I wrote my PCP about it.

Shortly after I wrote the doctor I did another search and AI popped in again and indicated test result meant there was no infection. Multiple searches ignoring the helpful AI indicated that was the case as well.

It felt like WebMD was in control for a bit… today asking the same questions I did yesterday is yielding nothing.

I’m really over glitchy AI search by Paul E King first appeared on Pocketables.

My household has far too many Google products in it, among them several Home Hub, Nest, and original Home speakers. There are very few commands we actually use on a regular basis but turning off a light near the bed, setting the temperature, and turning on an array of lights to make my basement look less like a death trap are things we use all the time.

For the past few months a rather regular event has been my wife attempting to turn off a device, being greeted by a male voice saying that the TP-Link Kasa service is unreachable and to try again later. No matter how many times she asks once it’s told her it’s down Google Assistant will have the male voice, and all her requests will somehow not work.

Now, I know the voice options for Assistant, it’s one of the male voices… but none of us have chosen one of the male voices. Both her and my Google Assistant voices are stock and neither of the kids have chosen that voice. Once the man’s voice is heard, nothing works for her. I ask Assistant to turn out the light and bam.

It’s become a running joke that it just hates her. The later it is in the night the less chance she has of it turning off the light she’s reading by.

Light is wired in such a way that to turn it off manually you need to crawl under a desk six feet away, using voice commands is preferable.

We’ve never been able to narrow down anything other than that it’s on one of the original Google Homes, and it’s usually after 11pm. Works fine any other times. If I’m not mistaken the volume is also slightly louder, although that might just be the voice.

Google Assistant/Home: A strange man’s voice answers by Paul E King first appeared on Pocketables.

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.

Getting a 3rd party solar panel for your Nest Cams? Check the bad reviews first by Paul E King first appeared on Pocketables.

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.)

More digital car key support.

[Google Blog or Explore What’s New]

Google adds some useful Android features today by Paul E King first appeared on Pocketables.

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.

Yesterday I discovered my kid’s face in almost every single Nest familiar face detection entry I had by Paul E King first appeared on Pocketables.

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.

June 1, 2024

After constant fighting both between the kids and with the watch to recognize and more trouble than it’s worth the tablet it was on was broken (appears to be stepped on) and that is that. I’m not getting another tablet to use it on, they are not using my tablet, and as such this is the end of the experiment.

I don’t think the tablet being stepped on was a result of Mightier, that probably was an accident. The kid who needs it doesn’t take care of her stuff so that’s simply the end as there will be no replacement.

I had it far shorter than I would have expected it to have any effect in, but what I did observe was a never level of fighting between my kids so there’s that. I would not have offered it to Kid 2 had I known the nonstop headache is was going to be.

Game looked cute

June 6, 2024

Evidently when my wife went to cancel the subscription they offered to send her a tablet it would work on for $10. She took the bait. We’re waiting on the tablet to arrive at this point.

While I am not sure if the game loss plays any factor in it or not, the amount of arguing has gone down markedly. We have also been taking them to activities any free time they have so that may be part of why it’s gone down though.

June 7, 2024

Tablet arrived yesterday – it’s an Android Go tablet slightly larger than the phones they have (that they don’t have this week(. I didn’t have anything to do with setting it up, my wife did, and then I noticed that all it would take is an accidental tap and they’re in her email.

Funny thing about the tablet is it does not have Mightier installed.

We are refraining from handing the tablet over until I remove my wife’s account and place the tablet under the control of one of the child accounts, which I will probably do later today. I would have today but forgot to bring it to work.

Tablet does not handle the USB-C chargers we use for all the phones… this does not bode well because the only tablets that don’t are pretty garbage. I will have to plug it in elsewhere, which yeah, something is cheap.

Starting Mightier with one of my kids, I’ll let you know how it goes here by Paul E King first appeared on Pocketables.

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)

Editorial: May I suggest an option for an AI pause on search by Paul E King first appeared on Pocketables.

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.

95 days after my tablet went missing it turns up while searching for a missing phone by Paul E King first appeared on Pocketables.

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

— Rajan Patel (@rajanpatel) May 22, 2024

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.

[9to5Google]

Southwest Airlines pricing now on Google Flights by Paul E King first appeared on Pocketables.

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.

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.

A new Google Nest Camera fail over the weekend by Paul E King first appeared on Pocketables.

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.)

Redditors agreed to it in the terms of service.

When Your Content is created with or submitted to the Services, you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of, distribute, store, perform, and display Your Content and any name, username, voice, or likeness provided in connection with Your Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed anywhere in the world. This license includes the right for us to make Your Content available for syndication, broadcast, distribution, or publication by other companies, organizations, or individuals who partner with Reddit. You also agree that we may remove metadata associated with Your Content, and you irrevocably waive any claims and assertions of moral rights or attribution with respect to Your Content.

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.

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.

[IPC]

OpenAI training models on Reddit data by Paul E King first appeared on Pocketables.

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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.

Gemini is here to make your phone slightly less useful by Paul E King first appeared on Pocketables.

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.

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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…

Site news: ditching Disqus next week (updated I can’t get it to cancel) by Paul E King first appeared on Pocketables.

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.

Randomly broken Google location services limit Nest security usefulness by Paul E King first appeared on Pocketables.

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.

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.

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.

Instruction manual is also only online and can be found here.

Overall

While I only had the front camera kit, you can grab the full kit at Amazon and add features such as a rear camera, tailgater alarms, and added ability to capture a more complete scenario when someone speeds by you and then immediately wipes out. You can also grab it from a non-tagged link on the Thinkware Store.

Thinkware U3000 Dash Cam six and a half months review by Paul E King first appeared on Pocketables.

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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.

I’ve now known two people who didn’t think getting hacked was a priority and found out it was by Paul E King first appeared on Pocketables.

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.

[ARS Technica]

Google says F’it to Google Fit APIs by Paul E King first appeared on Pocketables.