Articles tagged with "phone"

A few days ago I was sitting at home, re-watching an episode of Breaking Bad, when I noticed - during a scene where Skylar White was talking on the phone - that the audio track had a weird background vocal track to it. The vocal wasn't part of the phone call Skylar was on, and there weren't any SWAT outside the door ready to burst in on her - so the audio seemed a little out of place. Then the scene changed, and after a little while the voice started up again, which was odd. I paused the show, and sure enough the background voice kept on speaking - letting me know it definitely wasn't part of the show.

On 27 July, Australians experienced the first nationwide test of AusAlert, a new civil defence emergency warning system designed to deliver urgent messages directly to compatible mobile phones during bushfires, floods, terrorist incidents, and other major emergencies.

In the past few months I've been watching a website that makes some quite extraordinary claims, at least in my opinion. It's immersioncosmetics.co.nz What has really piqued my interest is a new product recently advertised. It's Shungite, a relatively rare black stone with fairly high carbon content, usually 30-95% but often with many impurities and fullerenes, a spherical carbon molecule usually known as buckyballs. It was originally discovered in Shunga, in the Karelia region of Russia, but is more widespread than that,

Back in November last year, I wrote a critique of a Safe ICT questionnaire I picked up at the Go Green expo. We recently received a copy of Safe ICT's most recent newsletter where they responded to my criticisms. I'm not going to rebut their rebuttal, as this kind of to and fro rarely ends up being productive, but suffice it to say that Safe ICT's overly cautious advice for people using technology is not in alignment with our understanding of the science, and is not based on any scientific evidence of harm.

I was frustrated and disappointed last year when Samsung refused to repair my Note 20 Ultra 5G under warranty. Despite my efforts to fight for what I believed was a just cause, Samsung gave me the cold shoulder. As a long-time Samsung user (and I still own one now, even after my bad experience), I know the brand can produce great products, but I'm concerned that my recent experience with their practices could be breaching the law.

Recently I received an email that purported to be from the anti-virus company Norton that was blatantly a scam, but I decided to follow through as much as I could to see what the scammers were trying to do. There's often a side effect of doing this, which is that I can waste the time of the scammers - the more time they're on the phone to me, the less time they'll have for scamming people who are at risk of falling for the scam. Plus maybe, just maybe, the scammers will start to question their career choice if many of their potential marks end up making their life a frustrating misery. Below is a series of events that, all in, might have taken about an hour from start to end.

Craig wrote last week about his experience at the Auckland Go Green Expo, and I also mentioned that myself and Bronwyn, along with Daniel Ryan, attended the Wellington Go Green Expo a couple of weeks ago. As I mentioned briefly on last week's podcast episode, apart from the frustration of the fact that the vast majority of stalls have nothing to do with going green, one particular stall annoyed me more than any other.

The BBC (in its travel section) has an interesting article on the Skirvin hotel in Oklahoma, supposedly the most haunted hotel in the US. The article talks a little about the hotel and the ghosts that supposedly haunt it, and then details how the journalist paid for a ghost hunting couple to come and see if the hotel was really haunted. Things have changed in the ghost hunting world - where historically ghost hunters have used physical devices to record “anomalies” such as temperature changes, Electromagnetic Frequency (EMF) fluctuations and the like, these modern day ghost hunters have an app for that - or rather several apps, of which they mention the names of two of them in the article. So I figured that, as a skeptic, I really should take them for a test drive and see what they can do.

I had a phone call this week from "Spark". I spoke to a couple of Indian gentlemen who explained that my private IP address had been made public, and that this meant that my internet connection was compromised.

Fijian government representatives, including leader Frank Bainimarama, were at a lavish launch event a couple of weeks ago to announce the launch of a new app which is set to revolutionise our mobile phone use.

A dermatologist at a recent anti-ageing conference has said that regularly exposing the face to the light and electromagnetic radiation from smartphones can speed up ageing and wrinkles. Doctors even claim they can tell which hand a person holds their phone in just by looking at which side of the face is most damaged.

Most of the serious claims have already been removed, after I talked to them on the phone, but Resene still talk about crystal energy and other nonsense concepts.

An Auckland University study reveals the costs-financial and emotional-of telephone psychics.

Followers of Ben Goldacre's Bad Science blog (www.badscience.net), will be aware of the recent panic in Britain over wi-fi radiation in schools.

An anonymous contributor to the website, http://mostembarrassingmoment.com, shares her experiences as a professional tarot card reader.

I would've thought the main hazard from mobile phones was the increased risk of accident when using one in the car. No-one seems to worry about this, however, instead many are deeply concerned that a few milliwatts of radio waves are going to fry their brains. This has opened tremendous opportunities for the enterprising.