Besides the Car Pro Show and our weekly newsletter, my other favorite radio show and newsletter is Kim Komando’s. We are on many of the same radio stations across America. She does for her listeners and newsletter subscribers exactly what I endeavor to do: Give you useful information to keep you up to date on the latest in cars, only she does it with technology and there is nobody who does it better. Not sure how she puts out a top-notch newsletter seven days a week, but she does.
With her permission, I comb her newsletters each week and curate a list of her tips and advice that I think you'll find relevant and interesting. Here's what I have for you this week!
Tech Tips & Interesting Finds From This Week’s Komando Newsletters:
Toddler takes command: Three years old and better in an emergency than half the adults I know. A little girl was at home in Texas when her mother suffered a medical emergency. The girl FaceTimed her grandparents 700 miles away in Georgia, and they called 911 as she comforted Mom. When paramedics arrived, she climbed onto a chair, reached the dead bolt and waved them inside. Her grandparents had rehearsed emergency steps with her. Apparently, toddlers remember the important meeting notes.
Rotors to the rescue: A non-verbal 10-year-old bolted from a Redwood City, California, school and headed straight for traffic on Woodside Road. Police launched a drone as first responder, and it found the child and led officers in before the first patrol car pulled up. If your child wanders and can't answer when you call, seconds are everything, and an eye in the sky covers ground no running adult can. Same drone tech we argue about for privacy, doing its best possible job. Sometimes the cavalry has rotors.
Step up your pace: New research on 103,684 people, tracked with wearables and followed for eight years, says the magic number is 7,500 to 10,000 steps a day for the lowest risk of early death. Can't get there? Speed up instead. Under 5,000 steps at a brisk 80-plus steps a minute matched the benefit of 7,500 at a stroll. Your watch or phone already counts both. Check the cadence number after your next walk. Short on time, long on life. Turns out you can walk your way out of it.
Captions for everything: The kids sent a video, you're in the waiting room, and the sound is off. Your phone can caption any video, podcast or voice memo on the spot, no internet needed. iPhone: Settings > Accessibility > Live Captions (English only, for now). Pixel: Settings > Sound & vibration > Live Caption. Samsung: Settings > Accessibility > Hearing enhancements > Live Caption, then tap a volume button and hit the caption icon. Silent phone, loud and clear.
Shop opera: I felt my credit card flinch when I read this. Amazon lets Prime Video viewers shop the jacket, lamp or mug they spot on-screen without leaving the couch. Its new Shop the Scene feature syncs the Amazon app to more than 600 titles and uses Amazon Lens to find similar products. Exact matches aren’t guaranteed, but the distance between ooh and checkout just became dangerously shorter.
Before you start blaming your Wi-Fi: Check Downdetector. Search the app or service acting up, like Netflix, Facebook or Teams, and you’ll see whether everyone else is having a bad day, too. It shows outage reports from the last 24 hours, along with common problems like logins, signal and streaming. Sometimes the problem really is on their end.
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