Geekly Update - 10 January 2019

The AskBobRankin Geekly Update

This just in from the Department of Extremely Long But Excellent Department Names: Professor José Holguín-Veras, director of the Center of Excellence for Sustainable Urban Freight Systems at New York’s Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, says if you think you're doing the world a favor by shopping from home, you're wrong. Deliveries of e-commerce purchases are causing more urban traffic congestion than is avoided by shoppers staying home.

Self-lacing Nikes first appeared in "Back to the Future Part II" back in 1989. But they're no longer the stuff of movie magic. Nike has introduced The Adapt BB, the first self-lacing basketball shoe. The $350 sneakers can "lace" themselves using the Nike Adapt mobile app, which communicates with an embedded motor and gear train to customize the fit to the foot.

Facial recognition did not work as intended on 42 of 110 tested smartphones, researchers report. When it did work, an inkjet printout of an owner’s photo was often enough to fool the face-lock feature.

No, it's not the world's largest toaster. LG's Signature OLED R9 is a 65-inch TV that rolls up and down like a window shade. It's pretty awesome and awesomely expensive, with a projected sticker price of over $8000. For that much cash, I don't see why they don't include a toaster slot.

This just in from the Deceptive Marketing Department: AT&T’s “5G Evolution” is not 5G, and not that evolved, either. It's actually a slightly enhanced 4G service whose availability is extremely limited.

Verizon is the only mobile carrier to offer true 5G service, but there are no phones with 5G capability yet. However, special 5G antennas which connect to the router are starting to roll out. The very first U.S. household to get Verizon 5G broadband is in Houston. The Harris family logged speeds up to 1.3 Gbps. The monthly cost is $70 for new customers.

It wasn’t a fatal attraction, but an Arizona woman sent over 159,000 text messages to a man she met via a dating app, and was charged with stalking after she parked at his home.

Windows 10 Update will reserve 7 GB of your storage space so it can roll back failures like the October 2018 features update.

Almost $500,000 in Ethereum cryptocurrency was stolen by thieves who effectively rewrote the coin’s history so that money went to them instead of its original recipients.

The Etch-A-Sketch doodling device is now replicated in Web-A-Skeb, a browser-based Web app from Google Chrome Labs. All the two-dimensional fun, without the powdered aluminum.

The government shutdown has already resulted in more than eighty .GOV sites becoming unavailable because there’s no money to renew their security certificates.

U.S. phone companies are allowing their copper wire networks to disintegrate in blatant disregard of federal and state laws, endangering rural residents who rely on DSL for life-supporting telemedicine services.

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