TECH
Whats a Simple Way to Video Chat with My Elderly Parents?
https://lifehacker.com/whats-a-simple-way-to-video-chat-with-my-elderly-parent-1846011264


The pandemic has been rough on everyone, especially when it comes to maintaining connection with the people we love. Luckily, technology allows us to maintain these connections in all sorts of useful ways. Chats. Game nights. Video calls. You can even watch movies together—even if you aren’t in the same room.
It can be especially challenging, however, when you’re trying to stay in touch with someone who isn’t as technologically savvy or is otherwise limited because of age or circumstance. Lifehacker reader Lorisa recently wrote to Tech 911 with her dilemma:
Just wondering if you know of a method as how we can setup remote video conference with our mom ahead of time as well as able to stream video (YouTube) to her favorite show.
We are moving our mom into a senior home care as her dementia is getting worse, and out of concern for her safety, we have to other choice but to move her into the facility that managed to keep COVID away by restricting outside visit at this time.
My siblings and I live in same country but not same city as my mom; therefore, we would like to set up a video time with her. In the past at her own home, we would come in and set it all up so that we can monitor her with video and etc. until [a caregiver came] in.
However, with Covid, the senior care already informed that any technology would have to pre-program ahead of time as all the facility would do is plug into the power but they would not do anything else due to the many policies in place. Our mom would not be cognitive enough to know and push on the tablet.
Consider a smart display for far-away family members
I’m glad you provided such extensive detail about this issue, Lorisa, because that really helped me out when pondering a solution for this one. I have one, but let’s quickly go over the basics.
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Whatever technological setup you’re going to use to connect to your mom is going to have to be something that’s absurdly easy to operate. Since the senior-care facility workers won’t mess with a device for you, and will only really plug it in, we have to rule out any kind of laptop-based setup. Someone would have to turn those on, after all, and I doubt they’re going to want to keep a laptop running 24/7 in your mom’s room. That, and if something goes wrong with any of these devices, the facility workers would have to help troubleshoot, which it sounds like they wouldn’t be comfortable doing.
You could set up and angle a smartphone to face your mom and just dial in to that, but that’s an awfully small picture for your mom to deal with. A tablet would be better, but I think there’s an even better solution: purchase a smart display for your mom. (I like Google’s Nest Hub Max.)
Smart displays are pretty foolproof. Once you plug one in and set it up, it’s going to be fairly self-sufficient; it’ll update itself as needed, reconnect to the internet if it ever goes down, and the most troubleshooting it’ll probably ever need is a quick unplug and plugging back in. That fits exactly what the facility workers would be able to do, should the need arise.
There is one little quirk you’ll want to address, though. When you go to set up the smart display before dropping it off at your mom’s facility, you’ll need to have some kind of phone number to associate with it—well, with Google Duo, technically. You’ll probably want to make a new, dummy Google account for all of this, append a Google Voice phone number, and then add your primary Google account as a member of the household (so you can control the smart display from afar).
Also, maybe as part of the drop-off process, you can plug the display in near enough to the facility that you’ll be able to set it up on their wifi. That’s the key part of this whole process, but I’m sure they’ll be amenable to letting you do that, at minimum.
You then have two options to launch video chats—assuming your mom isn’t capable of answering them herself. You can make a routine in the Google Home app for your mom’s account that calls your personal phone number (or whatever number you use with Google Duo) when activated. You can also use the built-in “Camera” feature within the Google Home app to pull up a live feed from the smart display (and talk to it).
I like the Google Duo approach myself, as I think it’s a more elegant solution. And I’m sure there’s a way you can set up a group video chat, too, once you’ve gotten the basics down. It might seem a little backwards to use a separate device to initiate a call from your mother’s smart display, but that’s the best solution I have if someone can’t answer a call themselves.
If any of this sounds confusing, there’s a fabulous guide on Reddit that you can use to get this setup working. I couldn’t recommend it more. Also, I’m not necessarily wedded to Google; it’s just the smart display I’m most familiar with. You can “drop in” on an Amazon display, too, and the company’s new “Care Hub” feature makes this even easier.
I think the only major issue you’ll have in this situation is the senior home your mom has moved to. Some of them might balk at allowing a device in that, theoretically, violates HIPAA as a result of its always-listening setup. (That, and you’ll want to lock down said smart display as much as possible to lessen the possibility that your mom, or anyone else, triggers it.)
This isn’t a perfect solution, but it’s the best one I have that requires the least amount of work. As a bonus, since you’ll be controlling the display from afar, you can queue up movies and music for your mom to watch whenever you want—assuming you’ve talked to her first, that is. I don’t recommend surprising her out of the blue.
Do you have a tech question keeping you up at night? Tired of troubleshooting your Windows or Mac? Looking for advice on apps, browser extensions, or utilities to accomplish a particular task? Let us know! Tell us in the comments below or email [email protected].
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I love CES time—short for the Consumer Electronics Show—because we get exposed to all kinds of outlandish devices that are fun to get excited about, but nothing you should add to your shopping list right now. And that’s especially true in the wide world of wireless networking. Linksys unveiled the AXE8400 tri-band router at this year’s show, and it’s a bit of an eye-opener in three different ways.
First, it’s a 4X4 MU-MIMO router that supports Wifi 6E, the latest and greatest standard found in exactly zero devices you can buy right now. In other words, the AXE8400 is yet another “future-proofed” router geared for early adopters, or will be once it arrives in the spring or summer of this year.
Second, it costs a whopping $450 for one router, and it’s really designed to be used in a mesh setup. Linksys, to its credit, gives you a deal on a two-pack—it’s $850 for a pair of AXE8400 routers. But you’ll still be paying more for your routers than you would a new Mac Mini.
Finally, the router comes with built-in motion-sensing. Linksys bills this as a useful whole-home security feature and part of its separate “Linksys Aware” service, which will run you $3/month or $25/year. Yes, that’s right: You router now comes with a subscription service, because hashtag revenue, but it’ll only notify you if it detects motion in your home. It won’t connect to any other smarthome system—not even your smartlights—which lessens its usefulness considerably.
I don’t mean to dunk on Linksys unnecessarily. However, this router, and the excitement some will have over the “latest and greatest” device for wireless networking, is indicative of a larger issue. Namely, you don’t need to buy very expensive, new routers with technologies that might not make a lot of sense for your home setup.
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Stop buying routers because of their newness (or box copy)
I try to be accommodating with new technology launches. I get the excitement; I’ve covered the wireless networking industry for years. New standards come out, companies rush to be the first to market with routers that support them no matter what, and the devices typically cost a lot more than what you’d otherwise pay for a router in a year’s time or so.
However, I think it’s important to remember a critical piece of advice: Don’t buy a router that hasn’t been benchmarked by a number of reviewers in various situations. Ideally, you want to get a good representative sample of how a router performs in various real-life situations, instead of taking the word of that one reviewer who ran a few speed tests from another room and declared it the best wireless router ever assembled.
As wireless expert Dong Ngo puts it:
“Downloading a movie (or Netflix streaming for that matter) depends on the Internet speed, which has little to do with Wi-Fi. They are two different things.
Wi-Fi is the alternative to network cables — it allows for a local network without wires. So, the increased speed of Wi-Fi 6 is only meaningful locally, within your home or office.
In other words, assuming all of your devices are Wi-Fi 6-enabled, you’ll be able to print, perform network Time Machine backups, or stream from a local NAS server, etc., much faster.
As for the Internet, currently, the majority of residential broadband services offer speeds significantly below that of Wi-Fi 5, which is already plenty fast. Consequently, if you use Wi-Fi 6, you’ll experience no improvement at all in Internet access.”
Remember, just because a router is new, and just because it has different features that allow for higher maximum speeds, doesn’t mean that it’s the best on the market. And then there’s the price factor: Honestly, if I was building out the network for a reasonably sized house, I wouldn’t buy a two-access-point mesh system for $850. I’d buy a bunch of prosumer gear and saturate that house with access points.
Most people don’t even have a super fast internet connection to begin with. And even those lucky enough to have a gigabit pipe gigabit fiber going into their homes would probably see a greater benefit from more access points around their house—even if they support a slower standard than Wifi 6E, like “mere” Wifi 6 or, gasp, Wifi 5.
A Wifi 6E router, like any router, is going to lose performance the farther away you are from it. I’d rather have a bunch of “wifi bubbles” giving me ~750Mbps downloads and file transfers across more areas of my home than one room in which the wireless maxes out north of 1Gbps, with a steady drop-off in wireless speed as I move away.
Yes, a wireless mesh setup can help address this issue, but then you’re also dealing with the occasional peculiarities of a wireless bridge. As always, I think the best solution for great wireless speeds at home is a classic one: scatter access points around your home, even if they only support 1Gbps wireless connections at most. That should be more than sufficient for your everyday needs, so long as your network does a good job about dumping you and your family’s/roommate’s/pet’s devices to the best (MU-MIMO) wireless access point as they walk around. (Your devices typically handle that handoff, but just in case, it never hurts to have a great wireless setup that can also take charge as needed.)
It’s fun to get excited about new technology. I’m sure there will come a time when Wifi 5 will seem as ancient as wireless-n. For right now, don’t waste money on expensive Wifi 6 “solutions” when you can do better, for less, with “slower” gear. Wait until you need that much networking firepower, and you’ll probably get a much better deal—and better access points.
TECH
WhatsApp is Ditching These Old Phones in 2021 [Updated]
https://lifehacker.com/whatsapp-is-ditching-these-old-phones-in-2021-updated-1840367419
![WhatsApp is Ditching These Old Phones in 2021 [Updated] WhatsApp is Ditching These Old Phones in 2021 [Updated]](https://newsfortoday.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/nmprofetimg-1722.x77227.png)
WhatsApp will soon drop support for another round of older versions of iOS and Android. As described in WhatsApp’s recently updated system requirements, you must have a device that runs at least iOS 9 or Android 4.0.3 in order to access WhatsApp after January 1, 2021.
Notable devices losing WhatsApp support next year include the iPhone 4, Samsung Galaxy S2, and the Droid Razr.
WhatsApp’s move is hardly surprising. All technology gets left behind at some point, and this now seems to be an annual tradition for WhatsApp. Last year, the company removed even older Android devices, iPhones, and all Windows phones from its list of supported devices, and we suspect there will be another round of cuts in twelve months.
These changes are likely due to Facebook’s recent integration of WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram direct messages into a single, cross-platform service that doesn’t play nicely with older operating systems.
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That said, most of the affected devices are around ten years old and are no longer supported with OS updates themselves. So, if you’re still clutching an ancient iPhone, this might be yet another sign that it’s time to upgrade.
If your device is still eligible but its operating system is not, make sure you update your smartphone to meet the new WhatsApp requirements. You can check your Android version and if there are any updates available under Settings > About Phone. iPhone users can do the same in Settings > General > Software Update.
If your device’s operating system is too low and no update is available, it might also be worth looking into WhatsApp alternatives if you don’t feel like buying a new phone. We can’t guarantee that other chat apps will also support your super-old smartphone, but they’re worth exploring if WhatsApp is cutting you off.
This article was originally published in December 2019, and updated on December 30, 2020 with new WhatsApp requirements.
[BGR]
TECH
Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccine generates immune response, few side effects, in early trials – CNN
https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/13/health/johnson-coronavirus-vaccine-early-trials/index.html

TECH
Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccine generates immune response, few side effects, in early trials – CNN
https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/13/health/johnson-coronavirus-vaccine-early-trials/index.html

TECH
Your Illinois News Radar » ILGOP on Welch: “Travesty for the people of Illinois” – The Capitol Fax Blog
https://capitolfax.com/2021/01/13/ilgop-on-welch-travesty-for-the-people-of-illinois/

* Press release…
After a series of caucus votes, Illinois House Democrats have finally chosen Representative Chris Welch to be the next Speaker of the House. Illinois Republican Party Chairman Tim Schneider released the following statement in response:
“House Democrats have chosen to go from Mike Madigan, the most corrupt politician in America, to Rep. Chris Welch, a top Madigan lieutenant who has been credibly accused by multiple women in court documents of harassment, assault, and retaliation.
It’s now clear that House Democrats are doubling down on allowing Madigan’s corrupt machine to continue running state government. In Madigan’s stead, they have promoted a serial harasser and assaulter of women. But in spite of that, Welch passed the most important test this fall – he’s been a loyal Madigan ally for years but performed most recently as Madigan’s human shield in legislative hearings investigating the sweeping corruption scandal that ultimately brought Madigan down.
This decision is a travesty for the people of Illinois, and we will make sure every voter understands that House Democrats just can’t quit Madigan.”
Thoughts on the tone?
…Adding… Look who’s back…
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. https://t.co/ReZoroDXV7
— Radical Candor (@RadicalCandorIL) January 13, 2021
…Adding… Illinois Policy Institute…
Matt Paprocki, president of the Illinois Policy Institute, offered the following statement:
“This is a historic day for the General Assembly. For the first time in nearly four decades, Speaker Madigan was not voted into power by members of his own party.
“No state gives their House speaker as much power as Illinois. Under Madigan’s 36 years as speaker, Illinois’ finances deteriorated from a perfect credit rating and just under $6 billion in unfunded pension debt to the lowest credit rating in the nation and over $144 billion in pension debt. And the state’s notoriety for public corruption has been backed up by 1,978 public corruption convictions since Madigan first became speaker, more than any other state and over one a week.
“This vote must become a catalyst for lasting, meaningful change. Illinois can only reverse its culture of corruption and recurring financial crises by dismantling the system that has allowed for one person to control so much power, starting with the House Rules. For the first time in nearly four decades, state lawmakers have an opportunity to change this power structure and finally put an end to the endless cycle of debt and corruption. This moment in Illinois state politics should not be just about a new face, but about a new way of doing the people’s business.”

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Harvey Weinsteins bankruptcy judge confirms sexual misconduct settlement: report – Fox News

Winter Weather Advisory issued for Metro Detroit, other counties until 4 p.m. Tuesday – WDIV ClickOnDetroit

Inova canceling all first-dose COVID-19 vaccine appointments – Inside NoVA

Coronavirus update San Antonio, Jan. 25: Leaders report 2,082 new COVID-19 cases, 13 new deaths – KSAT San Antonio

With limited vaccines, Monterey County moves to vaccine Phase 1b, Tier 1 – KSBW Monterey

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China and Nepal finally agree on Mount Everests height after years of dispute – CNN

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Carlos Hyde Goes 50 Yds for Seahawks Longest Run of Season! – NFL

Arsenal vs. Man City recap: Gunners THRASHED! What next for Mikel Arteta? | ESPN FC – ESPN UK
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Country Singer Lily Rose Signs With Big Loud and Republic, Debuts Video for iTunes Chart-Topper ‘Villain’ (EXCLUSIVE)
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