Tech News and Commentary

Dave and the team discuss adult toys at CES, Prime Day and Target's response, Apple Park, app spending, world emoji day, and more.

Our guest this hour:

Laurie Cantillo, Deputy Director for Communications of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Gavin in Bossier City, Louisiana listens on 710 KEEL and asked: "I just had a newborn baby. Out of all the new cameras/monitors and all that for the baby, which one would you recommend and which was the best. I want to monitor heartbeat, oxygen. I want to be able to see live video of my child from anywhere I may go."

http://www.intotomorrow.com/media/podcasts/2019/07-19-2019/07-19-2019-H1S1.mp3

Gavin, heart beat sensing and oxygen monitoring shrink the list and raise the price tag.

There are some no-brand options you can look at on sites like Amazon, though it doesn’t sound like you’re willing to take a lot of risks here.

You can look into combination devices like the Babysense Hisense 7 that comes with sensor pads to also monitor movement one of those will cost you around $130.

On the more specialized side, there’s a company called OwletCare that builds systems that do just what you’re looking for and they combine motion sensors, heart rate, and oxygen sensors, but they’re packages look more likely to work than many of the touchless ones we’ve seen. One of their products is a smart sock for the baby. The full system with the sock and the camera will cost you $400, you can also pay $25 a month, which probably means that you’ll be paying for this system for longer than your kid will use it.

The problem with a lot of these systems is that they’re basically unproven. Someone aims a camera at a baby, and monitors oxygen, but they’re not true medical devices, so the quality and the price tag associated with it varies greatly.

We’d steer clear of any camera-only systems that offer heart rate and oxygen monitoring. There’s a good chance that those won’t work at all, but even the more sophisticated ones are unproven and largely unregulated.

Pete in Madison, Mississippi listens on SuperTalk 97.3 and asked: "Hi Dave, my issue is that my laptop once I upgraded to windows 10 takes literally about 5 mins to boot up, any ideas? It was fine before the update"

http://www.intotomorrow.com/media/podcasts/2019/07-19-2019/07-19-2019-H1S5.mp3

Pete, it’s tough to know what could’ve been broken by the update without knowing what the update contained, but it would be good to check for driver updates.

You’re probably not the only one facing this issue and slow boot times are sometimes related to drivers not playing nice. Particularly graphics drivers have been known to cause this issue before.

Windows’ own Fast Start has been known to cause this in the past, so you may see your performance improve if you turn it off under your power and sleep settings.

When you participate on the show – anytime 24/7 – and we HEAR you with any consumer tech question, comment, help for another listener, tech rage or just share your favorite App these days … you could win prizes.