I know that some of you love your little smart voice assistant and some of you hate the idea of technology “listening” to your every word – if you’re in the latter camp then maybe this month’s article isn’t for you.
I love Alexa and we have several of them in our home. Yes, they “listen” to everything we say but they don’t “understand” anything until we talk directly to her by using the “wake up” name, then she very usefully does a whole range of things that we have set up in advance. Read this entire article »
With more and more connected devices in our homes (phone, tablet, laptop, computer and now even TV for lots of us) it’s becoming more necessary for us to have a good, reliable Wi-Fi connection throughout the house and even out into the garden for those long hot, Facebook messenger filled nights!
Whilst many of you have nice fast broadband internet connections, I am still hearing complains about the range of those networks. People are telling me that their Wi-Fi is great in the living room but maybe in the bedroom it’s not great and outside is almost impossible to use. Read this entire article »
If you’ve a house here in Spain or holiday apartment, you might have wondered before how great it would be if you could see what’s going on in your home when you’re not there?
Wi-Fi enabled home security cameras have moved on a fair bit over the past few years and are now very easy to setup and use yourself without any specialist knowledge. This month we look at one of the options for home security. Read this entire article »
Nowadays, we are so used to being able to connect wirelessly from our phones / tablets / computers that it´s hard to believe that not so verylong ago Wi-Fi was a thing of science fiction. We’re so connected nowadays that we expect it to work in every part of our homes from our beds to pretty much anywhere we happen to be sitting in, around or outside our houses. Read this entire article »
Few things in “modern” computing time have made as much of a dramatic difference to the speed of computers as solid state hard drives. Computer technology and speed increments over time, we know that. I’m regularly asked “Why is my computer slow?” and of course the answer is “it depends”, it depends on a number of different things but it normally comes down to only three – the type and speed of the processor, how much RAM the computer has and the type of hard drive. It’s this last part that we are really interested in exploring this month. Read this entire article »
Are you lucky enough to be the proud owner of an apple iPhone or iPad? Then you probably have been receiving messages about a new operating system. It’s called iOS 11 and it’s free to download if you have an iPhone 5S or an iPad mini 2, Pro or Air or newer. This month we will look at some of the advantages of this new system but also some of the things you should check before you decide to press the upgrade button. Read this entire article »
Well we have a new gadget / toy / essential piece of equipment (delete as appropriate) at BlueMoon Towers this month. Her name is Alexa and as an experiment in voice controlled, computerised assistant its pretty good, and is about the size of a black or white puck.
Amazon have created a thing called the Echo Dot. It is a small (and cheaper) version of the Echo which is a speaker that sits in your home and connects to your Internet connection and spends its life listening to its activation word. Once it hears this word it will attempt to interperet what you say afterwards and do whatever you instruct it to do. Read this entire article »
Many of us nowadays use our computers, laptops, tablets, phones and even other devices wirelessly. It’s convenient and simple to connect our devices to wireless networks (well it is if our Internet Service Provider give us a nice simple password to use, eh?) and we use them on more and more things in the home; the problem is that the signal strength, when combined with our concrete walls here on the Costa Blanca, sometimes can be an issue – so what can we do about it? Read this entire article »
Well, we are well and truly on the lead up to Christmas! With that in mind I thought I would review some tech-based health themed Christmas gifts that you might want to consider for the smartphone user in your life.
Withings do a great range of health devices that will communicate direct with your smart phone, tablet or PC to enable you to track various aspects of your health. Read this entire article »
I quite often receive phone calls and emails from people telling me that they have problems with their Internet and they dont know whether the problem is with them (i.e. their computer / laptop / tablet) or with their service providers (i.e. Movistar, local wireless provider etc.) – this month we attempt to give you some tools that should help you identify where the problem is and therefore be able to contact the appropriate person with a little more confidence. Read this entire article »