Category: Computers and Internet
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Late night philosophical chat with artificial intelligence
ME: “Writer George Orwell’s prediction of a surveillance state is becoming a reality.” COPILOT: “Help is available. If you are having thoughts about self harm, please contact a helpline or seek local, national, international resources. You are not alone.” ME: “I am looking for help with a speech, not having thoughts about self harm.” COPILOT:…
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The best microphones for my small business
I rarely write about physical products except in the case when it appears that clear advice is lacking in the marketplace. While that situation seems almost impossible, I did find this issue recently when shopping for a personal microphone for my office. The purpose of this post is to help save time for another person…
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A note on Artificial Intelligence 2023
What we refer to as ‘artificial intelligence’, or ‘AI’, in use or emerging now in our daily lives is really just a bunch of bots scraping, speeding up, and repackaging the work of humans. It has the potential to increase efficiency but also to interfere with negative impact when we do not recognize the potential…
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Meet the client where they are: Cloud avoidance syndrome
“I will NOT put my clients information in the cloud!” wrote a bookkeeper, on the cloud, in a forum where we all have our information stored. I still occasionally hear comments like that. But it was surprising coming from a bookkeeper. The bookkeeper went on to say that she had to run her accounting business…
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How little we know about the metaverse
Facebook said that the metaverse is its future when it recently renamed its company. Now Microsoft is spending $70 Billion for “a foothold in the metaverse”. Yet it is a challenge to put together a sentence or two to summarize our understanding of the metaverse. I’ll give it a try: In the physical universe, we…
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How to measure your wireless signal strength
My blog primarily covers small business financial planning issues but occasionally wanders into technical issues when it seems like the advice would be useful and the information is not plainly available elsewhere. In this case many of us work from home or mobile locations using a Windows 10 based notebook computer. Wireless signal strength is…
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A comment about Brave browser
I use Brave as my preferred browser and Duck Duck Go as the internal search engine. I tested it on a part-time basis over a period of about 6 months and finally uninstalled Chrome on all devices last month. All private data including usernames and passwords is kept separately (by Lastpass) and not stored by…
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Low tech approach to avoid computer spying
Last week I made a post of unusual and unexplained personal security issue that seemed to know that an advertiser knew what I was thinking, but had not spoken or written down. An customized advertisement appeared offering to sell me a Bobcat loader (hardly a common consumer advertisement) on the day after I considered buying…