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Tech News & Commentary
Gio in Cooper City listens to the stream and is calling via the App asked: “Question about virtual reality glasses that I saw on a recent video – I fell in love with them, but I’m not really sure how they work – how you can interact with your phone.”
Gio, What you saw was the Samsung Gear VR (as in Virtual Reality), and it’s really cool.
It does a great job of tracking your head and immersing you in a 3D world that responds very naturally to your movements.
The way it interacts with the phone is simple: you open a lid on the font and the phone literally goes inside the headset.
After it’s inside, the phone projects two images (one for each eye) to give you a 3D effect, and it tracks your head’s movement using it’s built in gyroscope so that it can move the images as your head moves.
Now… that’s the cool part, here come the bad parts: it costs $200, there’s only a handful of apps that work with it, and it only works with Samsung phones… specifically only with Samsung Note phones… as long as it’s the Note 4… yup, it’s useless unless you own a Samsung Galaxy Note 4, and the Note 4 is not a cheap phone that you’d buy just to use with a headset.
We have good news for you though! Google came out with a competitor that’s not limited to the Note 4. It’s called Google Cardboard, and as you probably guessed it is entirely made out of cardboard. Now Google just used it to show off the same feature and gave the kits away at Google I/O (some years you get a phone, some years you get a Chromebook, some years you get a cube made out of recycled egg cartons).
You can buy copies of the same kit for as little as $4 online.
For more information tune in to Hour 2 of our podcast.
“This Week in Tech History” Weekly Feature with Chris Graveline
Debbie in San Jose, California listens on KLIV 1590 AM asked: “I am wondering if I really need to have a laptop computer. Someone told me that unless you have a solid state laptop, that when you carry it around and bump it, you might break it. I heard that the tablets are different. I’m wondering if there is a tablet out there with Windows and what you think of it.”
Debbie, It would take more than just a bump to break a laptop, they can take a pretty good beating, otherwise business travelers wouldn’t be able to take them on planes, and traveling sales staff would not be able to drag them along to their appointments.
Typically, any laptop hard drive will be able to handle a decent drop without breaking as long as it’s either off or it’s able to detect the drop and park it’s heads before it hits the ground. Tablets have also been known to suffer from cracked screens far more often that laptops.
Having said that, if you take good care of them, they should be be reasonably durable.
Now, do you need a laptop? it’s hard to say, you may not, if you’re not using it for work, or if you mostly just consume information but don’t have to produce a lot of documents.
You can also look into solid state drive Chromebooks, they will save you a lot of money and they may work for you if your computer use revolves around the internet.
It is true, however, that moving a laptop with the lid open and the computer running can cause problems with a traditional hard drive if you bump it sharply, perhaps by setting it down awkwardly. Powered off, lid closed is one thing, powered on with the lid open is entirely another matter. A laptop using a Solid State Drive, or SSD, would not be subject to this same risk.
Again, if what you really need is Internet access and you don’t need to run any specific Windows apps like Microsoft Office, that Chromebook option might be good.
Finally, are there tablets running Windows? Yes. Quite a few of them. High end products like Microsoft’s Surface Pro 3 and the upcoming Surface Pro 4, which are basically a computers in tablet form, all the way down to the Dell Venue 11 or the really low end Lenovo Miix 2. You can pay $240 or as much as $1200, and that’s before you add the optional keyboard.
If you want a fast Windows tablet, it will cost you more than a comparable notebook computer would. Whether you need a laptop or a tablet is really determined by how you’re going to use the device. Tablets are great for CONSUMING content–reading, watching or listening to things–while laptops are better for CREATING content. High end tablets with detachable keyboards can do both, of course, but you WILL pay for that flexibility.
For more information tune in to Hour 2 of our podcast.
Guest Segment:
Pam Oakes, ASE professional auto tech – Car Care for the Clueless
Automotive care for those who need more help
Drake in Sarnia, Ontario listens Online asked: “I was wondering if there was a program that could restrict certain features of a computer. For example, to disable right-click or only allow access to certain parts of the control panel.”
Drake, Not using the Home edition of Windows, no. The Professional edition has something called the Group Policy Editor that allows you to control exactly what the users on the computer can do and it’s a fairly simple thing to disable Control Panel access.
Note that disables ALL of the Control Panel. You can’t select functions individually. Now, as for the mouse, again there isn’t an easy way to do this. You would have to write an executable program that captured the mouse clicks and discarded the right button. There isn’t an off the shelf program to do this, so the job would fall to you.
Frankly, it would be easier to pry up the right hand button on the mouse and break the circuit board underneath it. We wracked our brains trying to figure out why you’d want to do this and all we could come up with is that you want to run some kind of automatic kiosk that users couldn’t break out of. Is that correct?
If you’re using Windows 8.1, the simplest way is to create a user account on the PC and configure it for “Assigned Access Mode.” This special mode, added with this latest version of Windows, lets you configure an account to run one program and one program only. If you lock it to Internet Explorer, they can run the web browser and nothing else. It’s really quite slick.
For more information tune in to Hour 2 of our podcast.
Tim in Sparta, Tennessee listening on WTN 99.7 and calling in via the App asked: “I am looking for an app that will allow me to text my son from my Android phone to his iPod Touch. I don’t really want to go to an iPhone, so I’m trying to find something that’s compatible to both of us so he can text me while he’s at the house and I’m at work.
Tim, A great free app that you should consider is TextPlus available for both Android and IOS. You can get an unlimited texting group and even also lets you set up your own phone number. It is ad-supported, but it will get the job done. TextNow is another free unlimited texting app similar to TextPlus but just with a simpler interface. [JP]
There are however hundreds of messaging apps that work on both iOS and Android that you could use, for example: Skype, WhatsApp, Google Hangouts, Viber, Kik, Yahoo Messenger, Nimbuzz, Line, Tango, Pinger, BBM, Snapchat, ooVoo, Facebook Messenger and lots and lots more.
Basically, as soon as users figured out that you can text for free using your data and it has less of an effect over the course of a month than opening a single YouTube video does, messaging apps got popular. However, they’re all basically the same, pick whichever you like best.
For more information tune in to Hour 2 of our podcast.
This Week’s Prizes for Our Listeners
OWC: Dual USB Flash Drives – The amazingly small flash drive with both a Micro USB and a regular USB interface all-in-one.
Jabra: SoleMate Portable Bluetooth speaker for your laptop, tablet, smartphone or music player
PhoneSoap: Several Antibacterial – All Natural Touch Screen Polish
Livio Radio: Bluetooth Internet Radio Car Kit – FM transmitter that allows you to bring Internet Radio and hands-free calling to your car.
iLuv: A pair of ReFashionOlogy Canvas Exterior, Collapsible Headphones with a Titanium Diaphragm
Westinghouse: Unplug Wireless Bluetooth Sound System