Tech News and Commentary

Dave and the team discuss Snap and record labels, a malware art project selling for over $1M, inexpensive tablets by Walmart, cameras to ensure pizza quality, an iPod upgrade, a UFO train sighting, subway trains and smartphones, Alexa deleting recording, and more.

Chantel in Ontario, listens on AM800 CKLW and asked: "I would like advice on a GPS trackable watch/phone for my son."

http://www.intotomorrow.com/media/podcasts/2019/05-31-2019/05-31-2019-H3S3.mp3

Chantel, you have a couple of options here, but your easiest one would probably be a basic phone.

Both iOS and Android offer options to track your child’s location and they both do so via their family features. Basic Android phones tend not to be great, but they’re cheap, so they may be a good option for this.

Just open the Family Link app and you will see an option to set up location tracking right there, you can use that find out where your child is.

You could also give your child a smartwatch with an active phone line, that would give you the option to reach them and it would tell you where they are, but you’re looking at a larger price tag than that of a basic phone, and they’d likely have to share someone’s number if you don’t want to pay to give them their own. That means your calls would ring on their watch as well, like the return of some terrible 20th century past when phone lines were shared… the horror.

Roberto in Puerto Rico listens to the podcast and asked: "I been using a Motorola phone for a couple of years, I think it's a complete device but my wife recommends that I move to iPhone. What do you guys think?"

Roberto, phones are way too expensive these days, if you’re happy with it and think it’s all you need, you might as well delay getting a new one.

Smartphones choice mainly comes down to personal preference. They all do the same stuff, so there’s really very little point in arguing over the very, very tiny differences around how they do things to try to decide which one is better. They’re all similar computers built by giant corporations that are just trying to get another billion before the end of the day.

If your current phone is good enough for you, might as well just keep it for the time being. It will fail sooner or later but why not squeeze a little more life out of it?

John in Raleigh, North Carolina listens on WPTF and asked: "I have Windows 10 Desktop. When I open a Word document, I get "Command can't be performed until a dialog box is open." so I drill down to the Microsoft folder and open the "templates" folder, then deleted, normal.dotm - deleted that file and then I'm able to open a word document successfully. The problem is while I'm doing that, Microsoft re-adds that file, so when I try to open a Word document a second time, I get that message again. So I need to figure out how to stop Microsoft from adding that file back after I delete it."

John are you running Word 2007 by any chance? This used to be a problem a few years ago on that version.

The root cause for this seems to be that the template contains some macro, something harmless that Microsoft puts in, but it’s still some form of macro. Some (but not all) antivirus programs will detect that macro and act to keep it contained and that triggers that message from Word.

Since this is probably a very, very old version of Word,