Category: technology

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This New App Claims to Help Break Your Smartphone Habit

It’s a well-known fact that our smartphones were designed to be addictive, and phone companies’ success at achieving that has many people calling smartphone addiction a growing threat to public health. Even if you don’t want to admit it, you probably know this from your own usage. Perhaps you have even tried to limit how often you use your phone, but it’s always tougher than it sounds.

If so, you’re not alone. As a result, you, like so many others, likely experience the unpleasant side effects of too much phone time: distraction, depression, anxiety, and neck pain – just to name a few.

Image Credit: Pixabay

As someone who spends a lot of time in front of her laptop, I can attest to these side effects, which is why I’ve engaged an app that shuts down all my social media sites for allotted amounts of time when I need to focus on writing.

It was eye-opening to discover how hard it was for me at first. I often clicked out of my work and tried to scroll Facebook, only to find it blocked.

According to WIRED, a similar app is coming to your Apple or Android device, and it may be just what you need to get over the hump to a phone-free dinner. It’s called Flipd, and its aim is to reduce the amount of time you spend looking at your phone, which, hopefully, could help break the habit for good.

Image Credit: Flipd

For those of you who can’t fully commit, you can use the app’s “Light Lock” feature, which is displayed on your main screen and runs on a timer. It doesn’t shut off access to any of your apps — it just serves as a subtle reminder that you’re not supposed to be opening them.

If you want/need to turn the timer off, you can, but Flipd makes you click a button that shames you with a “Yup, I’m weak” admission.

If that’s not enough motivation to keep you on task (honestly, it wouldn’t be for me), then you can engage a “Full Lock” mode, which does prevent you from clicking on any downloaded apps for the duration of the set time. However, you can still text and make phone calls, if you’re worried about safety.

Image Credit: Flipd

In addition to helping you “turn off,” the app tracks how much time you spend staying away from your phone, so you can pat yourself on the back for every minute you manage to do it. According to the Flipd creators, you should be aiming for at least 3 hours a day of free time (and sorry, sleeping doesn’t count).

While the app is free, you can upgrade to a paid version that has extras like custom timers and schedules.

Godspeed, my screen-grabbed friends!

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Why You Shouldn’t Let Your Baby Sleep in a Car Seat

Most parents are probably guilty of doing this, even though we know that car seat manufacturers and pediatricians warn against it. But when you’re sleep deprived and your little one is snoozing away, it’s hard to justify waking them up.

Well, as easy as it might be to let them keep snoozing, one mom’s story – and a reminder of the official party line on the subject – means we all need to suck it up and get your kid out of the car seat as soon as they’re in the house.

Photo Credit: Pixabay

The anecdotal (and heartbreaking) evidence comes from mother Lisa Smith, who lost her 1-year-old daughter, Mia, from positional asphyxia after napping in her car seat at daycare.

“I got a call while I was at work,” Smith told ScaryMommy. “Worst call I’ve ever had in my life. ‘Drop everything. Mia didn’t wake up from her nap.’”

Smith and her husband were aware of the dangers of allowing their daughter to sleep in the car seat, the childcare provider claimed she was not. That lack of awareness cost the Smiths their daughter, and Lisa has made it her mission to educate others.

A 2015 study published in the Journal of Pediatrics found that 47 children (2 and under) had died over a four-year span, all of them in car seats outside of a car, and experts remind us repeatedly of safe sleep recommendations and that car seats don’t meet any of them.

Photo Credit: Pixabay

“There’s nothing about the car seat that’s designed to sleep,” Sharon Evans, a trauma injury prevention coordinator at Cook’s Children Hospital, told WFAA News. “Of course, it the straps aren’t tight, the child can kind of slump down.”

In a safe sleep brochure created by the New York City Administration for Children’s Services (ACS), they explain that “because babies don’t lie flat in car seats, they can suffocate when their heads (which are very heavy compared to the rest of their bodies) tip forward, blocking their airway. These products are not made for babies to sleep in and are dangerous because babies are not sleeping flat on their backs.”

The official recommendation from the American Association of Pediatrics is that infants sleep on a tight, fitted sheet on their back, in an environment free of other items like blankets, pillows, or toys. They also recommend that infants room in with their parents for six months to a year.

As tempting as it can be to break the rules for our own comfort, parents like Lisa Smith hope we’ll remember their tragedy and think twice.

“She was our first born, our only child, and she didn’t deserve what happened to her. But other families don’t deserve this to happen to them, either.”

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This Online Museum Is Preserving Sounds for Future Generations

Conserve the Sound is not your average museum. It describes itself as “an online museum for vanishing and endangered sound” and it’s exactly what the world could use right now. Daniel Chun and Jan Derksen are the brains behind the operation, and they’re committed to preserving sounds that are vanishing from our everyday lives.

Some examples include a rotary phone, typewriter keys, and the buzzing sound of a vintage intercom.

Remember the vintage viewfinders you used to play with as kids? That sound is cataloged by Conserve the Sound as well.

Be sure to browse through the online museum’s website. I guarantee there’s something on there to make everyone feel like an old timer. What a great idea!

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Top Beer Producer to Eliminate Plastic Rings and Glue Its Six-Packs Together

It’s no secret that the plastic rings that hold our beloved six-packs together are horrible for the environment. They end up in oceans and animals become caught in them and starve to death. I’ve even seen photos of turtles who got stuck in them and the plastic totally changed their shapes. Overall, it’s an environmental disaster. And you know that quite a few people aren’t taking the time to cut up the rings before putting them in the trash.

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons

But there’s good news from a top beer producer. Carlsberg, based in Denmark, has taken a bold step forward and come up with a glued six-pack design called the Snap Pack. This allows the six-packs to stay together without any extra plastic by using dots of glue.

The glue is strong enough to keep the cans together during transport but can be pulled apart easily.  It took three years to perfect the design. Carlsberg estimates that their new measure will reduce their use of plastic by 75% and will save over 1,300 tons of plastic each year. The Snap Packs will debut in the UK in September 2018 before they spread out to the rest of the world. Let’s hope other companies follow Carlberg’s lead.

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Can You Believe A Typo Helped End World War II?

As World War II tore its way through Europe, the British had to get the best and brightest minds involved in the war effort if they and their Allies were to be victorious. Enter Geoffrey Tandy…a man who was a bit taken aback when he was summoned by the Ministry of Defence in 1939.

Tandy was a volunteer in the Royal Navy Reserves, but his regular job was as a cryptogamist for the National History Museum. Cryptomgamists study algae and Tandy wasn’t sure where he fit in with the war effort. Tandy then guessed that the Ministry had made a mistake and confused his job with a cryptogramist—a codebreaker. Tandy was pretty much useless to the Ministry and didn’t do much for two years until something miraculous happened in 1941.

Photo Credit: Wikipedia

That year, the Allies torpedoed and sank German U-boats. Among the wreckage was detailed instructions about how to unscramble messages for the German Enigma Machine.

Photo Credit: iStock

There was one problem: the papers with the instructions were waterlogged and needed to be restored in able to be deciphered and put to use. The Ministry needed a person who was proficient at drying out damaged materials that were waterlogged. Tandy had been trained in preserving algae in that manner and his two years of relative quiet were about to come to an end.

Photo Credit: Wikipedia

Tandy used absorbent materials to dry out the papers until they were able to be read. The information was used to crack German codes and Allied forces got inside information about their opponent’s war strategies. It’s estimated that the cracked codes caused the war to end earlier than it might have otherwise, and likely saved millions of lives. It’s uncertain how exactly Tandy ended up at his post, if it was a typo or someone misread the spelling of his position. Either way, the misunderstanding turned out to be a godsend for the Allied forces.

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These 10 Adults Are Having a Hard Time in This Millennial World

Millennials get a lot of grief for being, well, Millennials. But there are a lot of older folks who feel pretty out of place and confused these days, too.

The world is rapidly changing around them, and these “adults” sometimes feel a little dazed and confused. Here are some good examples of that phenomenon.

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18+ Wonderful Tweets for All You Book Lovers out There

There’s nothing better than cracking open a good book, don’t you think? If you agree, then these tweets are certainly for you.

Book lovers, rejoice!

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This Man is Giving Us a Glimpse of Amazing 100-Year-Old Photographs Using Modern Technology

If you stumbled onto a box of 100-year-old photo negatives that were all worn and cracked, you’d probably think that their true images were probably lost forever, right? Well, that’s not always true.

Lucky for all of us, 70-year-old Greg Pack of Essex, England, thought no such thing when he found a battered old box at a boot sale. His son tells ITV News that the box and its contents – 100-year-old glass negatives – caught his father’s interest.

Photo Credit: Twitter

Even though the images were faded, the former artist used a mixture of his professional knowledge and modern technology to “restore” the photos well enough to be seen easily.

Pack held each negative up to the light and took a picture using his iPhone, then used Photoshop to turn the negative images into positive ones.

Photo Credit: Twitter

The results, as you can see, are pretty freaking cool.

I never would have thought to do this, so thank goodness for professional photographers and creative minds! More little treasures would be lost without them.

The man’s son, Scott Peck, has been updating Twitter on their search for the people in the photographs, their families, or even just a way to date the images. This list was in the lid and seemed to be a useful starting point.

Photo Credit: Twitter

But as you can see, turned out to be a red herring.

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The saga continues, so make sure you’re following him on Twitter for updates if you’re intrigued!

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Older Millennials Remember Formerly Popular Websites That No Longer Exist

It’s important to remember that millennials are not teenagers. Many of them are grown-ups who still remember the early days of the internet. You know, when it was still a novelty and didn’t control every aspect of our lives?

Here are 15 websites we thought would never fall by the wayside, but that no one under the age of 25 would remember at all.

Cheers to getting older!

 

#15. Flash is dying.

“I didn’t learn about this website until a few years ago, but I would say homestarrunner.com mainly since Flash is dying.”

#14. Cards and chess.

“yahoo games used to be the best place for cards and chess and a ton of other games online.”

#13. Digital bubble wrap.

“Bored.com. Just for the digital bubble wrap alone!”

#12. Loved it.

“Wondering if anyone was gonna bring up livejournal. I got one when you still needed a code from a friend. Loved it.”

#11. So much angst

“Xanga. I kind of want to go back and read what 16 year old me wrote, but I think I’d die from the embarrassment.”

#10. By trial and error.

“Angelfire and Geocities were sites where you could make your own “website” and they would host them for free. It was fun back in the day learning really basic html by just trial and error. I don’t think anything like that exists any more, maybe blogspot would be the closest thing like it today.”

#9. Chatrooms.

“Napster. Not just for music downloads. I spent a lot of time in the chatrooms there.”

#8. Every Wednesday morning.

“The Onion used to publish a new edition every Wednesday morning. I was chomping at the bit by Tuesday night.

They had a better format back then, too.”

#7. Ready and waiting.

“AskJeeves. Just imagining a man named jeeves staying awake 24/7 to answer all questions.”

#6. Random forums.

“Webrings, almost every single band in the world had an forum with thousands of people, so many forums for other random shit. Bonzai Kitten and other joke sites, then there are the citrus extravaganza and other sites that weren’t so jokey but went viral nonetheless. In the early 2000s you saw websites like what Reddit would base itself on: Something Awful (which I could never stand), Fark (which used to be pretty great until terrible mods drove it into the ground and the owner stopped caring and decided to try politics instead), hell at once point there was this Reddit thing that would pop up but most people were like “meh, I already got something better” and just let it be.

Chatrooms in general are something that seem to be long gone. So many bots, so much chaos, but it was a bit wild wild west back then. Using bots and tools to clone names and accounts, kick people off chats, log them offline, etc (AOHell was probably the biggest known one if any of you want to look up what it was like).

And I remember websites/programs like The Palace and such which were chatrooms that allowed people to move around and be seen as avatars, oh how amazing the future was then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Palace_(computer_program) Again you could use a lot of bots to mess with people, one you’d commonly see was a bot that stole people’s avatars which usually angered the entire lot as there seemed to be a general rule of “ask if you want it”/”trade” etc. as a lot of them were made by the person “Wearing” them.

Good times, actually. I think one of the most distinctive things, especially of the 90s was the lack of people from every corner of life. It would be extremely rare to run into some old grandparent, there was this active subculture of people while most people just stuck to reading their emails and calling it a day. Now everyone is online, everyone is on Facebook, etc.”

#5. Scan every download.

“Limewire was filled with trojans and malware but Kazaa wasn’t much better. Kazaa Lite was what people used if they didn’t want to do a scan after every download.

Then Torrents came along and no worries.”

#4. Ah, memories.

“Neopets! God I sucked at neopets.”

#3. Over 2 decades.

“The hamster dance

Edit: hamPster dance. Forgot the P cause it’s been over 2 decades.”

#2. Pre-Tinder.

“Amihotornot.com”

#1. Budding weebs.

“gaiaonline. So many budding weebs on that site.”

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