Tag Archive for: How To Kill An Hour
Amazon Echo
We have recently been sent the Amazon Echo and we love it! If you don’t know Amazon Echo is a home automation device that sits in your room and is controlled via your voice only. There is no screen and it includes only a 360 degree omni directional speaker with far-field voice recognition technology built in. Far field Voice Recognition technology is basically a really cool piece of tech that allows Alexa (the internal voice in the echo) to hear you from a far and in noisy environments or when you are playing music. The Echo is controlled entirely with your voice and is activated by simply saying “Alexa”
Alexa can do a range of things including:
- Plays all your music from Amazon Music, Spotify and TuneIn Radio.
- Echo has Bluetooth built in so you can stream music from iTunes/Apple Music or off of a bluetooth enabled device.
- Can answer questions, reads you audiobooks, reports news, traffic and weather & more using Alexa Voice Service
- Controls lights, switches, thermostats and more with compatible devices such as Philips Hue, Hive and Nest products.
- Alexa updates through the cloud automatically and is continually learning, adding new features and skills.
- Skills such as ordering take away from Just Eat or requesting a ride from Uber—simply discover and enable the skills you want to use in the Alexa App.
- The more you use Echo, the more it adapts to your speech patterns, vocabulary and personal preferences.
- If you are an Amazon Prime member you can also ask Alexa to purchase and order things for you, that includes things you have already bought before and many Prime products that are available on Amazon. (this can be password protected to avoid any buying mistakes)
To learn more and buy your own Amazon Echo please click here!
To listen to the guys chatting about the Amazon Echo please click here!
Twitter Muting
Twitter has shook a trolls life up!
This week Twitter has introduced a way to block/filter certain words or phrases from appearing on your timeline! It’s a brand new way from the social company to tackle trolls and abusive content on their site.
Muting a conversation that you are apart of is also a feature that muting allows. For example if you have engaged in a conversation for a while and have since dropped out of said conversation, by muting the thread you will no longer receive notifications regarding that thread (they will still be on the notifications tab on your Twitter profile, you just won’t have your phone constantly bleeping all day) Or if you have had a tweet go viral you can mute that also and stop getting notifications for that one tweet.
Another way that muting helps Twitter’s customers is the ability to avoid spoilers from sports events or film/tv shows from showing up in your notifications, however, they will still appear in your timeline – sorry!
Yet Twitter said in a post on their blog:
“This is a feature we’ve heard many of you ask for, and we’re going to keep listening to make it better and more comprehensive over time,”
So there may be some hope for you Walking Dead fans at least!
The main reason for the ability to mute certain words or phrases appearing in your notifications is a fight by the company against harrasment, racism and bullying on their platform. So alongside this muting feature Twitter have improved the way their users can report hate speech, with internal tools and training of staff to allow them to effectively and quickly deal with the content that’s reported to them.
While this feature goes along way to battle the bullies, Twitter said in a statement regarding the update
“We don’t expect these announcements to suddenly remove abusive conduct from Twitter. No single action by us would do that. Instead we commit to rapidly improving Twitter based on everything we observe and learn”
To listen to the guys discussing this feature please click here!
Fantastic Beats and Where To Find Them
Marcus Bronzy recently went to see the ‘Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them’ and the main consensus is that it was SICK!
It was aimed at more of an adult audience and wasn’t as child like as the previous Harry Potter films, it is set in New York, 70 years before Harry Potter, following the writer Newt Scamander on his adventures with the secret community of witches and wizards!
It is 1926 and something mysterious is on the warpath in the streets of New York, leaving a path of destruction in it’s wake and in doing so threatens exposing the wonderful wizarding world to the Second Salemers, a fanatical faction of the American For Muggles also known as the ‘No Majs’ — A dark wizard known as Gellert Grindlewald has absolutely destroyed Europe and left it in a mess has slipped away from sight, and is nowhere to be seen, is he to blame for the recent troubles seen in New York?
It is here where the main character Newt Scamander arrives in New York, where he is nearing the end of a global excursion to research and rescue various weird and wonderful magical creatures. Many of which are kept safely in (and away from danger from any dark wizards) in his leather case. The movie takes a turn for the worse when a No-Maj known as Jacob Kowalksi lets some of the beasts that Newt has managed to capture out of his leather case and free into the streets of New York! Which unbeknownst to Jacob is a serious breach of trust with the Statue of Secrecy, former Auor Tina Goldstein pounces on Newts misfortune and tries to regain her post! The troubles for Newt don’t end there as Percival Graves (Director of Magical Security at the Magical Congress of the USA) has suspicions on Newt and Tina!
The pair of them join as unlikely allies, along with Queenie (Tina’s Sister) and their accident prone Jacob to get back Newts beasts before Percival gets them and harms them! The stakes are high though as the four friends are now branded as fugitives and their mission to save Newts precious beats may put them on a dangerous path with the dark forces which could force all of their worlds (No-Maj, Wizarding) to the brink of war!
To listen to the guys discussing Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them please click here!
Check below to see the trailer!
Fleetlights
Fleetlights is a new initiative from Direct Line aimed at giving light to some of the darkest and most dangerous places in England.
What Fleetlights basically is, is a fleet of drones with lights attached to them which follow you around via an app on your phone. The best use for this would be in places like Petworth which is home to one of themost dangerous roads in the UK. Due to the lack of streetlights people cannot see where they are going or walking so with the use of Fleetlights they are able to get home safely.
Direct Line are preparing for a future version of insurance companies where they’re becoming much more preventative of accidents rather than dealing with accidents after they have happened and Fleetlights looks like an incredible way to start! A user can even set a group of drone’s to light their path rather than just illuminating above them via a way pointed path set by the user.
To listen to the guys discussing ‘Fleetlights’ please click here!
Please see the video below for more information regarding the Fleetlights technology!
To listen to the guys discussing Fleetlights please click here!
Kenu Stance
We love our gadgets here at How To Kill An Hour and the Kenu Stance is no different, in fact we love it! It’s basically a really small and simple tripod, that is the first tripod that utilizes your phones charging port to safely mount the phone, it’s designed to go on to small surfaces, like a wall, a table or a window sill. The tri-pod can be designed to either stand a phone upright or fold up the legs and stabilize the phone to watch a film in landscape mode, it can also be used to shoot incredible timelapses like this as well!
There’s a bunch of functions that the two differing tripod options can do such as:
- Streaming live video.
- Creating time-lapse videos.
- Watching films.
- Chat using FaceTime and Skype.
- Take use of the timer option on your phone’s camera better with self-timer shots.
It even has a built in key ring and bottle opener so this little device is more than just handy for photography, it can even get the party started!
To listen to the guys discussing the Kenu Stance please click here!
Please see the video below for more information!
Prices start at £13 for Android Phones and £20 for iPhones with lightning connectors.
To buy your own Kenu Stance please click here!
To listen to the guys discussing Kenu Stance please click here!
The Grand Tour
The wait is over.
The three musketeers of the motoring world are back and in a big big way! It feels like a lifetime since we have seen Clarkson, Hammond and May on our screens, since their dramatic departure from the BBC 18 Months ago (By sheer luck Clarkson hasn’t technically been fired from the BBC, which is made note of in the 10min introduction to the show) by boy was it worth it!
The show starts off with Clarkson leaving an office building in London in dark gloomy rain and handing a security guard an ID badge (metaphor for the BBC?) with radio clippings of a person leaving a show layered underneath. We are then presented with Clarkson getting a plane and traveling over to a colourful and vibrant LA and it is here where Clarkson looks happier and free from the doom and gloom, a metaphor for the shackles of the BBC? The Grand Tour is on the internet and you can get away with a lot more on the internet and his controversial phrases won’t harm his employers as evidently as he would if he was still on the BBC. Again this is made note of within the first 10mins and he makes a joke about tents and gypsies.
Small jabs to the BBC and Top Gear are found throughout the show, such as The American, Conversation Corner and ‘Your Name Here Corner’ one can only assume that ‘Your Name Here Corner’ is a nod to ‘Gambon’ on the Top Gear’s track. But besides all of the sly digs toward their former employers the show is essentially Top Gear but with a lot more money thrown at it $13.3M approximately per episode ($160M for 12 Episodes) and it is shown throughout the show just where that money is going. Just in the first 10 minutes alone the hordes of cars driving through the desert would have cost a lot of money!
If you liked Top Gear with the three friends mucking around, you’ll love The Grand Tour It is essentially their old show in a fancy new packaging. If you didn’t like them before you probably won’t like them now. If you’re a new customer to The Grand Tour and Clarkson, Hammond and May, they’re like marmite and the show isn’t as much a motoring show but more of an entertainment show. So don’t expect to see intricate reviews of cars, but more of three guys having fun with cars. From what I have seen we’re in for a ride over the next 12 weeks and I cannot wait.
To watch The Grand Tour click here!
To listen to the guys talking about The Grand Tour please click here!