Back during WWDC 2017, Apple unveiled a new speaker for the home called: HomePod. This is Apple’s first take on the smart speaker space that has been heavily dominated by the likes of Amazon and Google. With the HomePod, Apple talked about the smartness of this speaker. This speaker has the ability to sense the room and location in that room it is in to delivery crisp sound.
Netflix is bringing Season 4 of Black Mirror to us, and it looks awesome. This season isn’t changing its core tridition of being compelling. If you haven’t watched Black Mirror before… This is a show about how future technologies can benefit/harm humans. This show has a very interesting twist on how a cool piece of tech can actually ruin your life. If you haven’t seen the trailer for Season 4 yet, checkout the video below.
Engadget has also made a very nice write up about this upcoming season.
What are your thoughts on the 3 seasons of Black Mirror?
~robert1ee
I haven’t watched the keynote yet; however, from what I have read Apple has made some nice tweaks to all their OS’s.
What stood out to you?
Dear Comcast/Xfinity customers…
Times are hard enough to make sure you can catch your show when you need to. So… the World gave us DVR. And the World was happy. On day two, the World gave us the X1 platform. And the World was happy. On day three, the World takes away our X1 platform. And the World was, errrrrr, happy???
According to the Comcast forums… many are having trouble.
The code error, as seen above in the picture, is RDK-03031. According to Comcast, you see this message when the X1 box is having trouble connecting to the X1 Platform (just as the picture above states). Here is what is suppose to resolve the problem:
However, the 
instructions above don’t seem to fix the issue at hand. There are many people in forums that are having trouble. Many are saying their Internet works still, but TV is a no go.
Many have said they have tried these instruction more than once. I have the X1 platform, and I have tried three times now. I have called the tech support number multiple times. All I get is a busy signal.
I tried to use the online Chat for help. With this, all I got was a “Connecting to Agent” status. 40 minutes later and it still says this. Frustration starts to set it.
My Roku purchase seems to be looking better and better each time I use it, and tonight won’t be no exception. In fact, tonight will be an awesome night to catch up on those TV shows I have been missing.
According to tch3612: No Connection.
Also, there are problems when trying to call Comcast:
Laurie posted that she believes it is a system way outage according to information from her local Comcast.
Are you having problems with your X1? If so, let us know what is happening at your home below in the comments.
UPDATE: Appears that folks are finally starting to see some of their X1 systems coming back to life. If you are still having issues, try one of two solutions that commenters have discovered below to see if this fixes things for you.
Sources: Comcast Forums
CVS and about 60 other businesses are wanting to create their own payment system called CurrentC. CurrentC doesn’t use NFC, it actually uses a QR Code??? Because this new payment system doesn’t use NFC, CVS has turned off ALL of the NFC enabled payment systems.
WHAT!?!?!?!?
Seriously… this is the WORST decision that these companies can do. If you actually read into what CurrentC is, you’d want to stay far far away from it. Not only can CurrentC connect directly to you bank account, it can keep track of your purchases (and purchasing habits), and can get access to part of your phone that it doesn’t need to know (like Health data stored on your device).
CVS (and everyone else about to do this too)… you are in the wrong. What you are doing isn’t any different than saying… we don’t accept Visa and Mastercard anymore, only cash checks and American Express. SMH
I hope Apple and Google take down this app. CurrentC should be stopped before it is even implemented. I use my phone with Google Wallet at CVS all the time. Two days ago, the transaction wouldn’t go through. The cashier and I didn’t know what the problem was. Now I know why it didn’t go through. Wow!
Read the article here: http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/25/currentc/
Twitter #Music is now upon us… What is this and what can it do for you?
Twitter #Music is a service by Twitter that allows you to discover music. How does it allow you to discover music? It uses Twitter tweets from its users that mentions song from iTunes, Pandora, Spotify, and other music serivces. Twitter then uses this information and lets you see what’s popular at the moment.
The website is laid out in tiles. You can hover over a tile and click the play button for a 30 second preview of the song. You can also follow that artist by clicking the Twitter bird icon that shows up in the top right corner as you hover over a tile. There are different sections you can find music, such as: Popular, Emerging, Suggested, #NowPlaying, then your own page of artist you follow.
Like the website… the iOS App has a tile layout as well. The tiles are interactive. These expand when you touch on one to emphasize the song/artist you are listening to. With the iOS App, you can login to your Spotify or Rdio account to listen to full length songs. Once you press play, it will continue to play each song from left to right.
Swiping from left to right (and vice versa) takes you to different sections. As mentioned above, you can see what’s Popular, what’s Emerging, what’s Suggested, what’s #NowPlaying, and your profile. You can also access drop down menu by pressing the top bar to then select a section.
This app is definitely something special. I will update as I play more with this app for a complete review…
robert1ee
