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Tech News and Commentary
Dave and the team discuss Walmart’s missed scan detection, Apple expanding authorized repairs to Best Buy, a robocaller crackdown, retailer rankings, an app to scare off Tokyo gropers, and more.
Our guest this hour:
Bob Kittell, Professional keynote speaker on tech addiction at Ultra Memory Systems
John in Sartell, Minnesota listens to the podcasts and asked: “My son is entering High school and I’m looking at getting him a cell phone. I want to be able to control the content he sees and, at the same time, be able to keep track of where he is. I’ve heard we can put up like “fences” so if he leaves school grounds, we get an e-mail or when he gets home we get an e-mail. Can you recommend an app or a service that will provide this for me?”
John, first thing we should not is that trying to control what they see via restrictions on the phone is a losing battle. You can try, but they’ll be able to circumvent most of the controls you set.
There are parental controls baked into modern phones and services based on everything down to custom DNS servers to try to help you control what your kids have access to, but realistically at most you’ll be able to filter out apps by rating, or media by rating but that assumes it’s acquired via the regular sources and we all know there are other ways to get media files. For the most part a savvy child, or a child with savvy friend will find a way around those blocks in days if not hours.
As for geofencing, if you get them an iPhone it will already be backed into Find my friends (and you can use parental controls to keep them from disabling it), if you’re getting them an Android phone, you may want to look into apps like Life 360 or Family, both offer a variety of parental controls that include geofencing alerts.
Just remember two things: 1) The phone won’t be able to track a kid that leaves it behind, and 2) airplane mode and “not getting a signal” look the same on a phone tracking app.
Jason in McMinnville, Tennessee listens on WTN 99.7 FM and asked: “I have some older records but I don’t have a good speaker system. I’ve seen on Amazon and a couple other sites that they’re selling a Bluetooth turntable. I was wondering how that works. I know there’s special electronics in a turntable that gives you that “great old sound.” Do they digitize that music? How does that work exactly and should I get one?”
Jason, they are usually turntables that can output audio to a Bluetooth speaker. The way they get the music from the record is still the same, they way they feed it to the speaker is different.
As for whether you should get one or not, the only advantage is the convenience of the wireless speakers, if that interests you then it’s a good way to distribute your speakers without having to worry about wires, if you plan to keep it in one place and plan to have speakers around it, it won’t really make much difference.
The signal going to the speakers will be digitized, so if that’s a dealbreaker for you, this is probably not the kind of turntable you want, but realistically, the odds you’d be able to notice any difference at all in the sound quality are slim.
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