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Tech News and Commentary
Dave and the team discuss Call of Duty on Nintendo, Meta and the news, Taco Bell and electric cars, and more.
Don in LaBelle, Florida asked: “Chris mentioned that he’s on a diet. I was wondering if he’s using any digital apps or devices to help him with his diet, or if he has any recommendations for people who might want to do likewise.”
Chris answered: “Well, Don, as weve mentioned earlier, Ive started using the Dexcom G6 system. That was originally meant to help me keep an eye on my glucose levels – and not eat the tons of carbs that I had been. But a nice side effect of better glucose levels is weight loss. So, in a way, you could say that the Dexcom has helped a lot in my weight loss.
Another piece of tech Ive been using is a scale from FitIndex. These things are like $20 on Amazon, but they have Bluetooth and connect to a smartphone app to help you keep track of your weight loss, body mass index, body fat percentage and even things like muscle and bone mass.
The app I think I use the most, though is Runkeeper. I love this app. My exercise of choice is power walking. (I dont run and I dont really understand people who actually enjoy running for fun.) It tracks your runs (or in my case, walks) and gives you insights such as pace, average speed and will even interrupt your music if you want, as youre exercising, to let you know when youve hit each mile, half-mile, or whatever else you set.”
Joe in Hazleton, Pennsylvania asked: “I’d like to copy just part of an e-mail into a folder. How can I do that. And the other question is… Is it possible to totally delete yourself from the Internet as if you’ve never been there, and go back to an analog world? I don’t think you can. It’s just a curiosity question. Should promote some interesting conversation.”
Joe, when it comes to storing just part of the email, the only real option you have is to paste the part you want into a different document and save that document in the folder. Theres no out of the box option to save a part of an email.
macOS does allow you to drag a partial clipping to a folder, which is useful when you want to save something partial to copy and paste later, but it wouldnt be a great choice for long term storage either.
When it comes to being off the internet, no realistically you cant remove yourself from the internet. Not only is it unavoidable in day to day life these days, but you will also be added to the internet by others, whether it be by people on social media, or by the governments voter registration records, or real estate records, or by private companies that will try to sell your profile to others for sales purposes, or in a thousand other ways.
Theres not a lot you can do in the modern world to get away from it, you can just minimize how much it intrudes into your life.
Joe in Berkley, Michigan asked: “I have an Apple iPhone 11 Pro max and I’m trying to access iTunes off my computer. I downloaded a lot of my different discs – music – and I’m trying to put it on my iPhone. I’m not successful in doing that and I’m not sure what’s happening. I can see my iPhone in iTunes but it has no location where I can pull the information over.”
Joe, this question feels like a throwback to 2014! No one seems to sync their music to their phones anymore. Everyone seems to be using some service like Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube Music, etc.
If you can see your iPhone in iTunes, youre 99% of the way there.
There should be a little icon for your iPhone that you can click on. That should let you access a menu that will show you Music, TV Shows, Podcasts, etc.
Click on Music and youll have the option to sync your entire library or select specific content like playlists or songs.
Depending on what you want to do make youre choice there, click on Sync, and wait for it to be done.
If youre syncing over a USB cable, it may help to know that you can also sync over WiFi, so if you want to add or remove a song later on you can do it without having to physically connect the phone to your computer.
Mark in Georgia asked: “We have “2 Gibabyte” fiber which we’re very happy with. With WiFi we get about 600mbps. The router however, if I plug directly into it will probably give us 2 gigabyte. With the advent of WiFi 6 and WiFi 7 coming, what are the advantages of these – both in the current time period and in the future?”
Mark, all that WiFi 6 and WiFi 7 really offer is better speeds.
In the case of WiFi 6 and 6E you can get that better speed today, and it will be speeds up to 10gbps. In the case of WiFi 7, youll have to wait a couple of years and you can expect the limit to be around 40gbps.
In your case in particular, youre wasting money every month by paying for the connection youre paying for, since you seem to be limited to something in the neighborhood of 802.11n speeds.
You can probably pay less every month and get the same real world speeds youre getting now, but if you actually wanted to get faster speeds you could look at a WiFi 6E router.
Realistically, almost no users need 2gbps today, so theres not much reason to spend money on the newer hardware, but if youre paying already you might as well wait that .2 seconds less for something to load.
Robert in Miami, Florida asked: “My question today is about VPN. What does it stand for? How effective are they? How safe are they? and can they really guarantee our privacy? And is there a possibility that “an agency” is out there running the show and completely have all of our information?”
Robert, a VPN is a Virtual Private Network.
They are extremely effective for their intended use, which is just to provide remote access to a private network, in fact just about anyone in the corporate world will knowingly or otherwise interact with a VPN pretty much daily.
In terms of security, no they dont guarantee it. You can assume that any government entity will be able to access the raw data, and by tunneling through a virtual private network all youre assuring is that your data is only visible to those network owners.
That can limit exposure, for example, if youre trying to avoid snooping when using public WiFi, but it wont in any way ensure your privacy if all youre doing is paying a 5 person company in Panama to route your browsing through their server.
It just means they can see your data instead of your ISP, which may still be a win since ISPs openly admit to selling your data, but that doesnt mean that the VPN provider wont do the same.
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