Tag Archives: news

Episode Links

PTJ 340: Money Walks

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As a boycott from major advertisers heats up, Facebook announces it will finally start taking action against hate and harmful posts. El Kaiser and J.D. discuss The Social Network’s latest moves, along with the other tech news of recent days, like Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference announcements and product updates from Google. J.D. also spins up a (Hopefully) Helpful Hint about searching newspaper archives for mention of your ancestors back in their day. PTJ 340 is right here ready to go!

Links to Stories in This Week’s News Segment

(Hopefully) Helpful Hint / Productive Use of Stay-at-Home Time

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PTJ 318: Honk If You Love ‘Untitled Goose Game’

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As crisp autumn breezes swirl through New York City at last, El Kaiser and J.D. get back to business, pondering new studies on social media’s effect on news and mental health, Apple’s bugfest of an iOS 13 release and a recent addictive video game about a horrible little goose loose in a quiet English village. El Kaiser also shares his observations on some recently acquired gear. Pour yourself a cup of hot cider and settle in for PTJ 318!

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PTJ 306: Internet Cleanup in Aisle Three!

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Freshly returned from spring break, El Kaiser and JD jump into the week’s headlines — including government attempts to regulate technology platforms and robots rolling through Walmart. JD also has a (Hopefully) Helpful Hint for wrangling the massive photo collection stuffed on your smartphone. Push play to hear it all on Episode 306!

(Hopefully) Helpful Hint

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PTJ 277: Magic to Do

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It’s been a week of heavy legal news, deals and global affairs — almost enough to make you want to escape to a fantasy realm to take a break over a pint of butterbeer. El Kaiser and J.D. sort through the stories of the week before moving on to a discussion of how the Harry Potter franchise is keeping active far beyond the original seven books. PTJ 277 awaits behind that Play button — Alohomora! 

Links to Stories on This Week’s Show

Harry Potter in the Digital World

 

(Hopefully) Helpful Hint, Episode Links

(Hopefully) Helpful Hint: Brief Cases

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Don’t have time during the day to go deep with all the news flying around the Internet? Thanks to a number of news orgs, you can get a quick crib sheet of current events so you’re at least in the loop with what everyone else is talking about.

APFor example, the Associated Press’s AP Mobile app for Android and iOS routinely offers a daily list called “10 Things to Know for Today.” You get the quick headlines — and you can go back to the app and follow up the full stories later when you have more time.

Ten items too much of a commitment? Try the “5 Things You Need to Know” list from the website for a magazine called The Week. The print version of the publication, by the way, serves as sort of a weekly reader for adults to collect capsule summaries of the top national and international stories of the past seven days.

NYTThe New York Times has a witty New York Today daily briefing you can get by email or read on the web, and it includes stories of local interest, traffic and transit updates — even the weather forecast. In its wide selection of email newsletters for which you can sign up, The Times has morning and evening briefings with top stories around the country and world. There’s also an afternoon update, and early headlines from Europe and Asia. The NYT Now app for iOS grabs the top stories out there for a quick look.

Want spoken words instead of written ones so you can multitask? National Public Radio’s NPR Hourly News Summary gives you a quick five-minute recap of the current state of the world and it’s updated about every 60 minutes. You can listen to it on the NPR website or stream it through NPR News apps for Android or iOS.NPR

If you don’t have five minutes, the BBC World News website has a One Minute World News video update, though the short commercial at the beginning is an extra 15 seconds.

And if you need a little more on the video, check out Reuters TV, which you can watch in a web browser, as shown below. Go to the site and it gives you an instant newscast with whatever if going on in the world at the moment. If you have an Apple TV or iOS device, you can also use the Reuters TV app, which asks how much news you want to watch — 10, 15 or 30 minutes — and then instantly whips together a newscast of the day’s top stories based on that amount of time.

Now, if only we could get the news to be actually good…

reutersTV

 

 

Podcast

PTJ 162: Microsoft Doubles Down on Hardware

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Back in the day, Microsoft was the elephant in the room. Apple was a cult favorite and Google was just a search engine. These days, Bill Gates’ pride and joy is the scrappy underdog and is doing all it can to stay relevant. To that end, the boys from Redmond unveiled a slew of products this week and that took aim squarely at behemoths Apple and Google. In a Hopefully Helpful Hint segment, J.D. explains how we can tweak privacy setting on Windows 10.

Episode Links

New News Apps

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The official arrival of Apple News last week brought a reminder that there are tons of customizable news-gathering apps out there. Some even serve like RSS readers to collect the top stories on topics you actually care  about. Yes, Flipboard and its ilk are still around, but here are a few news apps to consider if you don’t use one already.

  • applenewsApple News for iOS 9. Fresh out into the open, Apple’s elegant news reader invites you to tap through a series of tiles representing your favorite newspapers, magazines, blogs and other information sources — plus your favorite general topics — and set up your own personalized current-events feed. Once you create your news preferences, you can tap the For You button to see the headlines and the stories behind them. The Favorites area lets you select a specific news source, or topic like The Atlantic or Gadgets. Tap the Explore button to see suggested topics and channels. You can also search and save stories. Some news outlets have even said they’ll release exclusive content for Apple News.
  • GoogleNWGoogle News & Weather for Android and iOS. If you love Google News on the web, this standalone app takes you right to your personalized feed without having to dig through menus in the Google Mobile app or web site. The app pulls in news from 65,000 sources around the world. Once you select a story, you can tap it to drill down into other sources, opinion pieces, videos and more about that topic. You can easily swipe through your favorite news subjects and add them. Oh, get your local weather, too, if you let Google News pick up your location settings.
  • NuzzelNuzzel for Android and iOS. Unlike an app that gathers news using its own algorithms to crawl across the World Wide Web, the Nuzzel app grabs its headlines from what your friends are posting about on Facebook and Twitter. You do have to give the app permission to see your followers and friends lists, but it does help you keep up with what everybody else is talking about. So that could be helpful, especially when people are all up about momentary distractions like Pizza Rat.
  • BBCOthers. If you want a straight up news service app, there’s the Associated Press’s AP Mobile app for Android, iOS and even Windows Phone. Likewise the Reuters news starwarsapp works on all three of those platforms and has a version for the Amazon Kindle Fire tablet, too. The BBC News mobile app (shown above) got redesigned earlier this summer. In addition to online stories created by BBC journalists, you also get a live stream of BBC World News Radio. The app is available for Android and iOS and you can set up your own list of personal topics of interest. And one of those topics can be Star Wars, but if you want all Star Wars news, just get the Star Wars app. Seriously.
Podcast

Have You Been Ghosted? You Know Who to Call

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You date someone and suddenly they cut off  all contact. Texts are ignored, calls are unanswered. No explanation for the disappearing act. That poor confused, and propably angry soul, has just been “ghosted” and in this world, there are two types of people: ghosters and ghostees. El Kaiser explains how it is actually harder than ever to completely shut someone out of your life these days.

The iOS and Android have more in common than most people think. On this weeks episode, J.D. looks at the similarities between the two dominant mobile operating systems.

We also offer up a late summer hunk of tech news and shenanigans.

POP | TECH | JAM: Same as it ever was…