Tech News and Commentary

Dave and the team discuss drone use by public agencies, McDonald's passport hotline, Ford partnering with Agility Robotics to create autonomous delivery vehicles, facial recognition for pandas, Alexa's future mind reading, and more.

Bob in El Paso, Texas listens to the podcast and asked: "I want to buy a new notebook computer and they're telling me the drive is an eMMC drive. And I want to know if that's upgradable. I want to get a good size solid state drive and I'm not familiar with the eMMC drive. Can you give me some help on that?"

http://www.intotomorrow.com/media/podcasts/2019/05-24-2019/05-24-2019-H3S1.mp3

Bob, don’t count on it being upgradable. Sometimes they are, but for the most part, they’re not.

eMMC memory is basically chips integrated into the motherboard and generally speaking, they’re not expected to ever be touched.

You may be able to use an SD card or a USB flash drive or hard drive to add some external memory, and if that fits your needs then the eMMC not being expandable may not be terrible problem, but if you absolutely need more memory, don’t count on being able to expand the eMMC like you could a hard drive or an SSD by simply replacing it with a bigger drive of some kind.

eMMC doesn’t share connectors with SSDs and they’re not interchangeable, it’s a probably one of the reasons they’re popular in low-cost computers, they pretty much ensure a quick upgrade cycle by the owner…

Karola in Westmoreland, Tennessee listens on 99.7 WTN and asked: "Want to know if there's anything I can get to boost my Internet. My router is at one end of the house, but when you're at the other end of the house (it's only about 1,500 square feet) the signal is sketchy. You may or may not get signal or keep it. And I was wondering if there's something I can get to boost that. And also, my daughter's cell phone will pick up pretty good in the living room but the rest of the house is pretty sketchy. Wondering if there's anything to boost that as well."

http://www.intotomorrow.com/media/podcasts/2019/05-24-2019/05-24-2019-H3S3.mp3

Karola, the easiest way to improve your WiFi around the house would be a multipoint system of some kind.

You can try a standalone repeater, but they’re not always easy to set up and sometimes force you to connect to different networks depending on where you are.

If you can spend a little more money, a mesh or pseudo-mesh systems like Eero, Google WiFi, or Netgear’s Orbi will give you a much better and more seamless experience.

Those systems use multiple access points, but they’re better at talking to each other, and as far as your devices are concerned there’s just one network and you don’t have to worry about jumping to the better access point and see your signal deteriorate until you do.

As for your daughter’s phone, you can buy a cellular repeater compatible with the network she uses, weBoost sells quite a few at varying price points from less than $100 to several hundred, but there are two things to keep in mind there: 1) You need to install it somewhere with a signal so it can pick up something it can boost, that part should be doable since she has a signal in part of the house, and 2) if your WiFi gets lost inside your house, the repeated cellular signal may too.

If your daughter’s carrier supports it,