Tech News and Commentary

Dave and the team discuss Dominos and the ADA, NASA's all electric X-plane, Ring and remote activation of cameras, using a smartphone to verify your identity, Uber Pet, and more.

Our guest this hour:

Jason Taylor, Chief Innovation Strategist and Advisor to the CEO of UsableNet

Eve in Lewes, Delaware listens on 105.9 WXDE and asked: "I'm the caregiver for my disabled brother and my 88 year-old mother. There's times when I'm away from their home. It would be very helpful if there were some kind fo a button that my brother could push that would send me a message. Right now we use a walkie-talkie type family radio, but I have to be home or within range of the walkie-talkie. neither my brother or mother can use a cell phone. And we don't want to use some kind of medical button or third-party service. So I'm wondering if there's anything like that out there where he can push a button and it would send me a text message that would alert me that I was needed."

http://www.intotomorrow.com/media/podcasts/2019/10-11-2019/10-11-2019-H2S1.mp3

Eve, usually to do something like that and avoid a monthly fee you’d have to build it yourself with something like a Raspberry Pi and push buttons, but that’s not something you’d probably want to go into unless you’re comfortable working on builds like that, since it’ll probably require the button, some soldering or a breadboard, and a little bit of coding.

There is an easier way to go about this that would let you do this cheaply and without monthly fees, but it also requires some coding.

Amazon now sells an AWS button that can be used to interface with their web services platform. One of the actions you can set that button up to do is send a text message with a predetermined message. You can even make it react differently if it’s clicked and if it’s held down.

Again, the catch here is that it requires programming. You’d have to set up an Amazon AWS account and use their Lambda serverless platform to get it set up and working.

IFTTT has a similar offering through smart buttons from third parties that can integrate into their services like the Logitech POP. Going with IFTTT would be easier overall to set up since there’s no real programming, there’s just setting some options, but you will probably pay more upfront for the button itself and it will likely only able to send one message rather than reacting differently to different inputs on some of the buttons available.

Ray in Niagara Falls, New York listens to the podcast and asked: "For years I had DSL. I got 1 or 2 down. I finally switched over to cable and am getting 118 down but the computer doesn't seem that much faster. It's still super slow. I have a Gateway computer, am connected to the Internet via ethernet card. It's an Intel i5 3.10 GHz, 20gig RAM and I think it should be better that it's doing. Don't know what I'm doing wrong or if there's some settings that I can change."

http://www.intotomorrow.com/media/podcasts/2019/10-11-2019/10-11-2019-H2S2.mp3

Ray, what is slow in your computer?

If your internet connection still feels slow, you may have some other issue, for example a DNS issue that is delaying pages from even starting to load. If the rest of the computer feels slow,