The Award Winning Place for Plain English Explanations of Internet Stuff
A massive Comcast telephone outage is affecting businesses and homes alike across the United States for the second day in a row. States coast to coast are affected, including California, Washington state, New York, Georgia, and Pennsylvania, along with inland states like Colorado and Illinois. Major cities that are effected include Chicago, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, Denver, Houston, Atlanta, Manhattan, and Philadelphia, along with many outlying cities in those areas.
A study out of Virginia Tech, dubbed “The iPhone Effect”, found that even just the very presence of an iPhone or Android phone, or other versions of smartphones, has a substantial negative impact on the quality of in-person conversations and connection. It also introduces us to the concept of ‘polyconsciousness’.
Does the Apple Watch natively record your steps without the iPhone? Yes! Your Apple Watch has a pedometer function, and automatically counts steps without the iPhone – in fact you don’t even need to take your iPhone with you for the step tracking and step counting function to work! That’s right, you can leave your iPhone at home and your Apple Watch will count your steps for you!
If your Android is operating on the 4.2 operating system, AKA Jelly Bean, you may notice something in your calendar is missing – the entire month of December. Those running the 4.2 operating system on the Nexus 4 device, Nexus 10 device, Nexus 7 tablet and Galaxy Nexus smartphones have reported the issue.
You may have read our article about the Chumby, and about how much we like it. Well, now you don’t even need a Chumby to enjoy the Chumby experience! If you have an Android phone, you can get Andorid Chumby application on your phone! Some people are finding that the Chumby app for Android doesn’t work, but that’s because there is a trick to getting the Chumby. It is an easy trick to getting the Chumby android app to work, and here it is!
The response to our tutorial on how to password protect and disable the wifi on an iPod Touch or iPad (or iPhone, for that matter) has been amazing. So many people want to be able to completely disable Internet access on these smart devices so that they can let their children use them without worry that they will get into something online that they shouldn’t. So here is our tutorial on how to disable wifi (with password protection) on an Android phone or tablet.
Wouldn’t you think that it would be fairly straightforward to figure out how to change or update your phone number on eBay? eBay has been around long enough that when some people first opened their accounts they may even have had landlines (imagine that)! However, it’s not obvious how to update your telephone number on eBay, so here is how to change that phone number.
If you are like countless other users who are tired of autoplay videos on Facebook (and other websites), here is how to stop videos from automatically playing on Facebook and other sites, on your iPhone or Android phone, and in Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and even Internet Explorer (IE).
Ever wish that while you were listening to a song on your phone you could also see the lyrics? Well, you can, whether it’s music that you have resident on your phone, or you are listening to a music service such as Pandora, or, yes, even Spotify.
Remember flip phones – phones you could fold in half? Remember how much more convenient the folding phone was to stick in your pocket? Then came smart phones, which signaled a death knell for phones that you could fold and put in your pocket. Until now.
A new law introduced in New York would allow police to take your cell phone on the spot, and analyze it to determine whether you were on the phone, or texting, or reading email, in the moments leading up to the accident. Dubbed the Textalyzer – or Textalizer – the bill’s proponents say that the concept is not much different than a Breathalyzer, which police use on the spot to see whether someone is over the legal blood alcohol limit while behind the wheel.
From the “we knew it was a good idea” department, based on the responses to our own article List of Phone Numbers that Telemarketers Use to Call You, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced this week that it will start publishing a list of telephone numbers which robocallers, robodialers, and telemarketers are using to make their telemarketing calls and robocalls.
We all know that fake reviews on sites such as Yelp and Amazon are the bane of both the business and their customers. And some of us knew that you can buy fake reviews for your product on places such as FiveRR. Now Amazon is suing over one thousand Fiverr sellers, all whom have advertised, sold, and posted phony reviews on Amazon, says Amazon.