Newsletter Archives

• Buy the drives you need before ‘chia’ gets them all

  Posted on May 10th, 2021 at 01:06 Brian Livingston Comment on the AskWoody Lounge

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  Prices of high-capacity solid-state drives (SSDs) have almost doubled at the producer level just in the past few weeks — and shortages are already affecting us. The cause is a new kind of cryptocurrency that demands vast amounts of disk space around the world for its financial network to function.

  The new digital coins, which began trading only a week ago, bear the odd moniker of “chia.”

  Read the full story in the AskWoody Plus Newsletter 18.17.0 (2021-05-10).

  AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Public Defender AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Cryptocurrency, hard drives, Public Defender, SSDs

• Microsoft Casual: It ain’t all fun ’n’ games

  Posted on May 3rd, 2021 at 01:04 Brian Livingston Comment on the AskWoody Lounge

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  New shoot-’em-up and twitch videogames get all the attention, but lots of people still like good ol’ strategy games, such as Solitaire and Minesweeper.

  Microsoft removed its games from Windows 8, but they’re just lightly hidden in Windows 10. In addition, the whole Microsoft Casual Games package is downloadable — and boy, are people having problems.

  Read the full story in the AskWoody Plus Newsletter 18.16.0 (2021-05-03).

  AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Public Defender AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Games, Microsoft, Public Defender

• Some laptops claim Thunderbolt 4 support but don’t deliver

  Posted on April 19th, 2021 at 01:04 Brian Livingston Comment on the AskWoody Lounge

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  The new Thunderbolt 4 standard works with the latest USB-C–equipped laptops to drive two 4K monitors simultaneously, run high-speed external solid-state drives, and plug into docking stations that support a wide variety of peripherals, cables, and ports.

  The promise of Thunderbolt 4 (TB4) is great, but the reality of this technology — which was announced as recently as January 2020 during the Consumer Electronics Show — is making it hard for some laptops to connect with everything they’re supposed to.

  Read the full story in the AskWoody Plus Newsletter 18.14.0 (2021-04-19).

  AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Public Defender AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Thunderbolt

• New smartphone? Great! Now don’t charge it past 80%

  Posted on April 12th, 2021 at 01:06 Brian Livingston Comment on the AskWoody Lounge

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  Sales of new smartphones are skyrocketing — Samsung’s new S21 line sold three times as many units in the US in March 2021 as last year’s S20 series did in the same period, according to SamMobile — but few people are learning from the manufacturers about these phones’ dirty little secret.

  That’s the fact that charging these devices’ lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries to a full 100% wears out a great deal of your battery’s capacity within a year or two. This has been written about before. But in this story, I’ll show you how to triple the usable life of your gadgets’ batteries — either on your own or using a simple app.

  Read the full story in the AskWoody Plus Newsletter 18.13.0 (2021-04-12).

  AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Public Defender AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Batteries, Battery charging, Public Defender

• The best laptop docking stations and hubs for 2021

  Posted on April 5th, 2021 at 01:06 Brian Livingston Comment on the AskWoody Lounge

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  More and more of us have been spending part of our time working in a business office and part of our time in a home office (which may sometimes be called “the kitchen table”).

  Even if you work primarily at home, there are always times when you want to work on your laptop in a hotel room or maybe that beach house you like to retreat to on weekends.

  Read the full story in the AskWoody Plus Newsletter 18.12.0 (2021-04-05).

  AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Hardware, Public Defender AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Docks, hardware, Public Defender

• LinkedIn deliberately scrambles résumé PDFs, experts say

  Posted on March 22nd, 2021 at 01:08 Brian Livingston Comment on the AskWoody Lounge

  ISSUE 18.11 • 2021-03-22

  The AskWoody Newsletters will not be published on March 29, 2021. We’ll see you again on April 5, 2021.

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  LinkedIn — the foremost social network for working professionals, with 760 million members in more than 200 countries — constantly changes the format of its PDF résumés to make it hard for companies to search for possible job applicants, according to human-resource consultants.

  Read the full story in the AskWoody Plus Newsletter 18.11.0 (2021-03-22).
  This story also appears in the AskWoody Free Newsletter 18.11.F (2021-03-22).

  AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Public Defender AskWoody Plus Newsletter, LinkedIn, Public Defender

• A $1,000 hot technology? It’s quite a steal.

  Posted on March 15th, 2021 at 01:02 Brian Livingston Comment on the AskWoody Lounge

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  Every technology has unintended consequences, but this is ridiculous.

  Essential elements in the devices we use every day — lithium, platinum, palladium, rhodium, basic semiconductors — are soaring in price as demand outstrips the facilities we humans have built to extract and produce them.

  It’s gotten so bad that common street thieves are stripping tech parts from autos and trucks simply to fence the “hot” components, which are literally worth more than their weight in gold.

  Read the full story in the AskWoody Plus Newsletter 18.10.0 (2021-03-15).

  AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Public Defender AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Crime, Precious metals, Recycling

• There are no USB cables any more

  Posted on March 8th, 2021 at 01:04 Brian Livingston Comment on the AskWoody Lounge

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  

  By Brian Livingston

  It used to be that you could run any old USB cable between just about any two USB ports, and the devices on each end would simply work. But that hasn’t been true for a long, long time.

  As more and more manufacturers wanted to bring different devices with different needs to market, the standard USB-A cable was lost in the shuffle. Instead, we got a gaggle of novel USB connectors named Mini-A, Mini-B, Micro-A, Micro-B, Apple’s similar-but-different Lightning, and more.

  Read the full story in the AskWoody Plus Newsletter 18.9.0 (2021-03-08).

  AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Hardware, Public Defender AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Public Defender, Thunderbolt, USB, USB standards

• Here’s looking at you, kid: the child-cam scam

  Posted on March 1st, 2021 at 01:06 Brian Livingston Comment on the AskWoody Lounge

  ---

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  Here’s looking at you, kid: the child-cam scam

  By Brian Livingston

  It’s terrible when no one is paying attention to you. But it’s much worse when someone is paying attention to you whom you don’t WANT to be paying attention to you.

  Around the world, millions of nursery schools, daycare centers, and private homes have installed “child cams.” These are intended to allow parents to see what their kids and caregivers are doing at daycare, how their infants are sleeping in a crib room, and so on. Many of the systems allow the video to be viewed from a distance across the Internet.

  Read the full story in AskWoody Plus Newsletter 18.8.0 (2021-03-01).

  AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Public Defender, Security AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Internet of Things, privacy, Public Defender

• Amazon’s new ‘same-day nodes’ will displace postal deliveries

  Posted on February 22nd, 2021 at 01:06 Brian Livingston Comment on the AskWoody Lounge

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  Amazon’s new ‘same-day nodes’ will displace postal deliveries

  By Brian Livingston

  The market dominance of Amazon in online retail is well known. But what’s less understood is the effect the corporate giant’s expansion into superfast delivery services will have on the US Postal Service and private parcel companies.

  Marc Wulfraat has extensively studied Amazon’s plans in the United States and 22 other countries in his role as president of MWPVL International, a logistics consulting service based in Montréal, Québec.

  In the past year, Amazon has built eight new “same-day fulfillment centers” in the US.

  Read the full story in AskWoody Plus Newsletter 18.7.0 (2021-02-22).

  AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Public Defender Amazon, AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Public Defender, USPS

• Batteries so powerful they do everything but fly

  Posted on February 15th, 2021 at 01:10 Brian Livingston Comment on the AskWoody Lounge

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  Batteries so powerful they do everything but fly

  By Brian Livingston

  There are times when I’m power-mad — I just want the biggest battery available to power my laptop, my phone, and heck, maybe a cup warmer for my coffee, too.

  I’m not going to drag around a cart with a propane generator just so I can compute. Fortunately, power banks that can double or triple the life of a laptop are now affordable and light enough to carry around in a shoulder bag or backpack.

  But what about airplanes?

  Read the full story in AskWoody Plus Newsletter 18.6.0 (2021-02-15).

  AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Public Defender AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Batteries, Power, Public Defender, Travel

• Surf the Web — even when your ISP is down

  Posted on February 8th, 2021 at 01:50 Brian Livingston Comment on the AskWoody Lounge
  

  PUBLIC DEFENDER

  Surf the Web — even when your ISP is down

  By Brian Livingston

  It’s a well-known subset of Murphy’s Law: Your Internet service provider will go down at the worst possible time for you.

  When my ISP goes dark, whatever boat I was trying to float becomes pretty much dead in the water. On occasions like this, my usually sympathetic friends become singularly unhelpful: “Just go outside and take a walk for a while.”

  But if you’re hosting a video conference, moderating a hot stock-tips forum, or preparing a report for presentation to your board in an hour, your participants aren’t going to accept excuses such as, “I decided to take a walk instead.”

  Read the full story in the AskWoody Plus Newsletter 18.5.0 (2021-02-08).
  This story also appears in the AskWoody Free Newsletter 18.5.F (2021-02-08).

  AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Public Defender AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Home Networks, Public Defender
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