How to create an Alexa Blueprint on your Amazon Echo

Build stuff just for your household, and have some fun with it!

Amazon’s Alexa platform has more Skills in it than any other smart home system, giving the Echo and Echo Dot a ton of things to use that can’t really be found anywhere else. Easily the coolest addition to the Alexa Skills lineup to date, however, is one which allows you to make your own Skills to only be used inside your household. These Skills are called Blueprints, are super simple to set up, and range from being a tremendous amount of fun to a serious and potentially life-saving resource.

Here’s how to take advantage of Blueprints for your Amazon Echo.

What is a Blueprint?

Amazon has created a series of question and answer shells based on a number of topics, and made it easy for you to plug in the answers you want. Blueprints turns those collections of answers into separate Skills, making it possible for anyone in your home to access this information and use it as they see fit. Currently, Blueprints are built so you can create your own private versions of a ton of different things. Amazon breaks these up into four categories:

• At Home is a collection of Skills for interacting with your family. These can be critical bits of information like how to get in touch with the Vet when someone is pet sitting or a list of instructions for the Babysitter, or you can create a collection of your favorite spots around town for house guests to hear when you’re not home.

• Storyteller is filled with ways to make your own stories for Alexa to read, complete with sound effects at the right time. You can create special bedtime stories for kids when you’re away from home, scary stories to play during a sleepover, or longer stories featuring your favorite princess or hero.

• Learning & Knowledge is the category for education. You can create flash card-style questions for your Echo to fire at you as you get ready for the day, assemble a collection of facts to be read to you as you cook, or create a quiz on a preferred topic to help you study.

• Fun & Games is the biggest section by far, filled with unique ways to smile either alone or with a group. Create a couples quiz for your friends to get themselves into trouble with, add jokes only your family will get to a special Skill, or see how far you can get playing the Letter Game with your kids.

The key to these Blueprints is they are simple to make, and they belong to only you. These Skills are created in your account, and only work on your connected Echo units, so you can have a lot of fun building something that won’t leave your home.

How to create an Alexa Blueprint

Creating your own Alexa Blueprint doesn’t happen from within the Alexa app, but instead from the special Blueprint website. You can access this site from your phone or your computer. To get started with your Blueprint, you first need to choose which kind of Skill you want to create from the list of available options.

Once you have chosen, you will be taken to a form to fill out the answers needed for Alexa to appropriately answer as many questions as possible. Some of these questions will be required to complete the Skill. If you try to move on to the next step without answering those questions, the website will prompt you with red text to fill out those sections.

After you have answered all of the questions in the Customize section of the form, hit the blue button labeled Next: Experience to be taken to the next section. The Experience part of the Blueprint handles the way Alexa responds to opening and closing the Skill.

You can personalize these messages however you see fit, and add as many alternate responses as necessary for when your Skill is used multiple times in a day. Once you have completed this section, you can name your Skill and send it off to your Alexa account.

Amazon doesn’t let you name your Skill anything it can’t pronounce in your language, but there are some other limitations. Special characters and punctuation cause some problems, so you may find yourself trying a few names before one is accepted.

Once a name is approved, you’ll be asked to log in to your Amazon account and the Skill will be uploaded to your Echo units. This takes a couple of minutes, but when it is finished you’ll see a green bar over the Skill and you will be ready to go!

How to use a Blueprint on your Echo

Alongside the name of your Skill, the Blueprint website has the verbal command associated with it for you to read. This is usually something simple like “Alexa, open X” where X is the name of the Skill you created in Blueprint.

Once you are able to access the Blueprint from your Echo, it will be available on every Echo connected to your Amazon account.

Amazon Alexa

• Which Amazon Echo should you buy?
• Get more Alexa Skills
• How to enable and disable Alexa Skills
• How to customize Flash Briefing
• How to get sports updates
• How to sync your calendar with Alexa
• How to shop with Alexa
• Send voice messages with Alexa

See more at Amazon

Take a nostalgic trip to Another World [Retro Review]

Another World is still a daunting challenge for gamers over 25 years later.

I’ll admit that I totally missed out playing Another World when it was initially released in 1991. Granted, I was three years old at the time of its initial release but still — no excuses. Another World was one of the more celebrated independent games of the early 1990s — an era of gaming that’s known for creating some of the most notoriously difficult games.

Another World absolutely falls into this category. Released as Out of this World for its North American release, this is a cinematic-style platformer that was widely celebrated by critics and gamers at the time for its art style and story.

Having never played the game despite it being ported and released on over 20 different gaming platforms, I decided to look through the Google Play reviews for the 20th Anniversary Edition released for Android back in 2011 — the general consensus seems to be “wow, this game was amazing when I was a kid, but tough as nails then and still tough as nails to play today.”

Lacking the nostalgic connection from my childhood, would Another World draw me in? To start, the story focuses on Lester, a scientist who is accidentally transported to an alien world when an experiment goes wrong. Lester must figure out the rules of this strange new world, avoid the many deadly creatures that inhabit it, and find a way to escape.

It was a super cool concept back in 1991, and still is over 25 years later, but this the game does you NO favors when you’re just starting out. The game barely explains the controls, which default to intuitive touch controls with an option to switch to on-screen buttons. There’s also no directions given as to where to go or what to do, so you’re kind of left to figure things out through trial and error. When you discover your blaster pistol, you’re kind of left to figure out on your own that a single press shoots a laser, a medium press puts up a force field, and a long press can destroy walls.

I’ll admit, I almost gave up on this game in the first few minutes because I couldn’t figure out how to get past the first big enemy. I immediately commiserated with all those poor kids who struggled with this game back in the day.

Fortunately, one of the benefits we enjoy in 2018 that wasn’t available to gamers in 1991 is the Internet. I was able to easily find a walkthrough to lead me towards the solution, and I leaned on it to get through some of the tougher sections that sometimes require leaps of logic that certainly explains why so many gamers at the time had a hard time beating it.

Once you’ve figured out how to manage the controls, and after a lot of trial and error figuring out what the game wants you to do, you work your way through what is still a pretty intriguing game. Even without the nostalgic connection, I was pretty hooked on seeing this game through to completion. I also appreciated the option of switching between the HD remastered graphics and the old-school graphics from the original game.

Ultimately, it’s hard to justify the premium Google Play Store price for this title unless it’s a total nostalgia trip for you. Otherwise, your best bet to check out this game in its full glory is via GameStash, where Another World is but one of hundreds of cool games available to play unlimited and ad-free for just $4.99 a month. Check it out and start your 30-day free trial.

See at GameStash

Add two USB ports to any wall outlet with the $8 Aukey power strip

More power options in the same space.

The Aukey dual USB/AC wall outlet power strip is down to $7.99 with code 2XFITO5N on Amazon. It’s $16 without the code, so you’re saving 50% off the price. If this deal looks familiar that’s because a recent code brought the grey version down to $7. That deal has since expired, but the white for $8 isn’t too bad either.

Sure, the plug requires both outlets to use, but it gives you those outlets back and adds two USB ports for you! The top of the device has a little lip that can hold your phone while it’s charging, too. It has safety precautions to keep your devices from over-heating and over-charging. Aukey backs it up with a two-year warranty. Users give it 4.6 stars based on 21 reviews.

Aukey also has options with 4 USB ports on sale for $16, so be sure to check them out as well.

See at Amazon

3 things we need to see from Google Play Music at Google I/O

Changes are coming to Google Play Music at this year’s Google I/O, and here’s our wishlist.

Google I/O is less than two weeks away, and while there are a great many Google products and services hopefully seeing some big updates during the coveted keynote, few services are expected to see as drastic and possibly game-changing updates as Google Play Music. Google Play Music could see a lot of changes — or even complete replacement — on May 8th, so while we wait to see what we’re getting, let’s recap what Google Play Music needs.

App layout overhaul with a streamlined or compact layout

Google Play Music received its last overhaul back in 2013, when it traded a black and blue Holo UI for a white and orange Material Design UI. The app needs to be redesigned from scratch at this point, but the biggest things that need fixing are these:

• Reprioritize the hamburger menu or ditch it for bottom tabs like YouTube and Spotify have. Tabs would require Google Play Music to seriously scale back on the sections, because right now things are bloated, cluttered and downright crazy.
• Streamline and condense the UI to showcase more on screen at any given time, switching from large, album-collage thumbnails to a more compact list form on many sections of the app like Recents, Playlists, and Albums, which can become downright painful to scroll through with a developed library.
• Speaking of scrolling, scrolling and menu controls overlap on Google Play Music to the point that it’s damn near impossible to add songs from the Songs section of My Library to a queue or playlist. Switch to a better scroll bar or a jump list like Action Launcher’s Quickdrawer
• Completely replace the Home page. The bold banners suggesting stations, new releases, and music we’ve listened to around this time before are way too big and completely ignored by a large section of users. Make the Home tab a medley of Recently Played, suggested stations, and recommended releases, like YouTube’s home page.

The playback screen on Google Play Music is so in need of an overhaul that it gets its own section, because the way Google Play Music does its Now Playing screen is widely hated and has several highly noticeable problems:

• Album art is zoomed in to fill the full screen, regardless of the opaque top and bottom bars of the screen containing the track information and track controls that cover up part of the album art, often leading to awkward crops of artist’s torsos, arms, or legs. This is especially noticeable on extra tall devices, which are becoming more and more prevalent.
• The track controls are split between the opaque bottom bar and sitting above that bar within the album art. This means that the Shuffle, Repeat, and Google Cast icons can be obscured or completely lost in bright or busy artwork.
• The seek bar is a thin orange/white line that runs at the edge of the bottom bar and the artwork, saddled right between all the other track controls, which can be accidentally hit while trying to tap a point to seek to. The seek bar is so thin that it’s easy to miss, meaning that when you swipe to seek you could accidentally swipe to the next or previous song.

A vision of lovely darkness, brought to you by Substratum.

And last but not least, I’ve been begging since 2013, and I don’t intend to get up off my knees and stop until I have it: for the love of Duarte, give Google Play Music a dark theme. A good dark theme is easier on the eyes for after-hours listening, a true black dark theme can help AMOLED phone users eke a little more out of their battery during a jam session, and if you don’t think a dark UI doesn’t look readable or sexy, just ask Spotify.

Better multi-device handoff and Chromecast stability

We can listen to Google Play Music on a wide, wide array of devices, but we can only listen on one at a time. However, your queue is unique on every device, and if you want to start listening to a queue on your phone and keep listening on your computer once you get to work, you’ll have to save it as a playlist, rather than being able to move your current queue from one device to another like Spotify does with Spotify Connect. It’s a small feature, but one that would be absolutely heavenly to have.

Speaking of device handoffs, Google Play Music was one of the launch services for Chromecast. How is it possible to still have this many issues streaming music this many years later? Google Play Music still skips random songs in playlists on a weekly basis, and good luck casting any songs longer than 15 minutes.

Device policy and upload/download changes

I accept having a device limit. I do. I even understand having a specific limit on phones, as much as it hurts someone like me who goes through a lot of them. But the device policy on Google Play Music needs to be revisited for a few very important reasons.

• Your computer can be counted twice because both the web extension and Music Manager count as an activation.
• Devices that can’t download/upload to your Google Play Library can still count against the ten device limit, like Android Wear 2.0 watches and Android TVs.
• Almost every Android phone or tablet that ships Android has Google Play Music on it, and it can often activate itself before you have a chance to go disable it.

If you burn through your 10 device authorizations (and 4 deauthorizations) with phones and tablets and watches and TVs, you could not have a way to upload new music or download what is already rightfully yours, since you can only do so on a computer.

Let me repeat that: if you run out of device authorizations and de-authorizations, you can be locked out of downloading music you own.

Being unable to upload or download music from our library on the device we use most also needs to be rectified. Local-only songs cannot be added to playlists or casted. We shouldn’t need an old-looking and old-acting Music Manager or Chrome extension in order to add songs to our cloud library and cast them.

But really, all we really want is a little stability

The future is uncertain for Google Play Music. That much is clear. Google Play Music could get replaced at Google I/O. Google Play Music could get merged with YouTube or YouTube Music in some unholy Frankenstein magic. Google could be completely overhauling the service and changing everything we thought we knew about the service.

We just don’t know. And that’s scarier than things staying the way they are right now.

A music subscription is a vital piece of most users’ mobile lives. We wake up to music; we brush our teeth to music; we get through the day without taking a tire iron to our enemies and annoyances thanks to music. Music makes us better, and it’s too important a service to be hanging in limbo like this. With as little change as Google Play Music has seen in the five years since the last major update, no small number of users have jumped ship to other services that seem to be growing and improving while Google Play Music just sits there and bloats, like a belly-up orange-and-white goldfish.

Updated April 2018: This article has been updated, overhauled and refined ahead of Google I/O 2018, which is where we hope Google Play Music will be similarly updated, overhauled and refined.

The lure of the remote: why I stopped Chromecasting the second I got an Android TV

In a world of ever-growing choices for entertainment, the remote is a small taste of the familiar and the obsolete way of finding and playing our media.

We have so many choices when it comes to our entertainment. We can watch YouTube on our phones, our TVs come with “smart apps” of varying ease and intelligence, and then there are set-top and streaming devices like Roku, Google Chromecast and Android TV. There’s a lot of ways to consume your media, and a lot of tools for it, but the most popular one isn’t your phone or your tablet … it’s your remote. That’s right, for tens of millions of tech users who grew up with TV and old-school cable, the siren song of the remote is just too powerful, and it keeps pulling me back in.

Once upon a time in 2014, I was in love with my Chromecasts. Set-top boxes and smart TVs were out of my fresh-out-of-college budget, but at $35 — and still $35 today — the Chromecast was firmly in impulse buy territory, and it was a snap to install and use. Back in 2014, the list of apps that used it was still relatively small, but for the apps that weren’t supported, I could simply cast from my trusty Chromebook. The experience wasn’t flawless, as my subpar router would often drop a connection mid-episode and force me to restart my cast — or worse, restart my episode — but it was cheap, it was easy, and 90% of the time it worked.

This love affair carried on for two years, and in that time I took on my parents’ old 42-inch “dumb” TV, happy that it worked with the Chromecast. I looked at the apps on this Vizio TV back home and cringed. It took close to a minute for Netflix or YouTube to open, and even with a QWERTY remote, it still took forever to find anything to watch. I could already be casting what I wanted to see while they were waiting for the app to load, so why wouldn’t they just use the Chromecast plugged into the back of their TV? I didn’t understand why they’d settle for a slower, clunkier UI using the boring old remote.

Then I got an NVIDIA Shield TV as a Christmas present in 2015, and my Chromecasting days ended the minute I opened the box.

My Shield TV came with a remote and a game controller, and that controller soon became my best friend. Even though the Shield TV comes with Chromecasting built in, I’ve used it maybe two dozen times, and all of those times have been for music. Even though it takes me longer to find what I want to watch using a remote, it just feels easier to use the remote rather than pulling up app after app on my phone looking for something to cast. The remote is convenient, especially if my phone is across the room or being used for other tasks, like gaming or taking screenshots for my articles.

Now, this isn’t to say that the remote on the Shield TV is something special. As a matter of fact, the actual remote experience pales in comparison to using the controller, as the D-pads on the controller are the best tools for speedy scrolling and seeking, short of flicking up and down on a touchscreen. And I can’t deny it, a touchscreen offers a far faster experience for finding content, but when watching that content, Chromecasting doesn’t offer the kind of quick playback control that remote-enabled systems do. Yeah, you can pause using the remote, but if you want to rewind, even just 10 seconds to hear the joke that got covered up by a timer going off, you have to pull your phone back out to seek. As someone who is notorious for skipping around in the episodes and movies she watches, this meant that even if the remote takes longer to get my content, I’ll be able to watch it more easily once my urge to skip a scene strikes.

There is a rumor of a new Android TV dongle coming at Google I/O, and I’m all for bringing a solid, more-affordable Android TV experience to more people, because as successful as the Chromecast is, it is always going to be fighting the siren song of the remote. What I’d like to see even more than a new Android TV dongle is an update to Chromecast that would enable it to recognize and accept more remote commands than play/pause, because the best of both world would be a Chromecast or Android TV that allows you to find what you want to watch and Cast it from a phone, then allow you easy remote controls for playback like rewind and fast forward.

Well, I can keep dreaming, and as I dream, I’m going to go scroll through YouTube for some more distractions.

How to download music on Fitbit Versa

Phone-free tunes are just a few taps away!

The Fitbit Versa is Fitbit’s most successful stab at the smartwatch market to date, and one of its highlight features is the ability to download and listen to music on it without the need for your phone.

Just like the Ionic before it, you can download over 300 songs on the Versa and listen to them with your favorite pair of Bluetooth headphones. You currently have three different ways to go about this, and this is how to get started with each one.

Deezer

Deezer is the latest music service to launch on Fitbit Versa/Ionic, and it’s already become my preferred way for storing tunes on my wrist. You’ll need an active subscription to Deezer Premium+ which costs $9.99/month, but Fitbit users can take advantage of a free 90-day trial if you’re new to Deezer.

From the Versa page in the Fitbit app, tap on the Media tile
Under Services, select Deezer
Go to fitbit.com/deezer and enter the activation code found in the Deezer app on your Versa
Log in or register for a new Deezer account
From the Deezer section in the Fitbit app, tap the new Add Music button
Select the playlist you want to add

Although the setup process may seem a little clunky, Deezer’s my favorite option for storing music on the Versa, as it gives you the most control over choosing which songs you’d like to listen to. You can download the pre-made playlists from Fitbit, your Flow station that’s made up of songs based on your listening habits, or any playlists you’ve liked or made in the Deezer mobile app.

In other words, if you’ve already got a perfectly-constructed playlist of your favorite workout songs, you can download it without a problem.

Pandora

Just like Deezer, listening to Pandora on your Versa requires a paid subscription. You’ll need Pandora Premium in this case, and just like Deezer, you’ll need to pay $9.99/month for it. Pandora’s 30-day trial for new members isn’t as generous as Deezer’s 90-day one, but it’s still something.

From the Versa page in the Fitbit app, tap on the Media tile
Under Services, select Pandora
You can tap on Log In to Pandora if you have an account, but new users will want to choose Start Free Trial
Enter your Pandora credentials, tap Log In, and you’re good to go

Although the setup process for Pandora is much simpler, its actual functionality isn’t nearly as useful.

Once you’re logged in, you have two options for storing music – automatically syncing your “top Pandora stations,” or choosing up to three of Pandora’s most popular Workout stations.

Here’s my issue with this – syncing your top stations doesn’t guarantee you’ll get music that you want to work out to, and there’s no way to customize the pre-made stations you can choose from. It’s a very locked-down setup, and it’s one I’m personally not a fan of.

Local music

If you don’t want to bother with streaming services and already have a library of local files, you can also transfer those directly to the Versa.

From the Versa page in the Fitbit app, tap on the Media tile
Under Services, select Personal Music
Per the instructions on the screen, go to fitbit.com/setup on your computer
Download the Fitbit Connect app that’s available for Mac and Windows

After downloading Fitbit Connect and installing it on your computer:

Click the Manage My Music tile
Go the to Music app on your Versa, open it, and tap Transfer Music
After your Versa has established a connection to your computer, you can choose which playlist to transfer
To choose which folders Fitbit Connect pulls your music from, tap the Settings icon in the top right, choose Advanced Settings, click the + icon, and select the folder you want

In my experience, the process for transferring local music is the least enjoyable of the three methods. The Fitbit Connect app often fails to see the Versa, and even when it does, it’s not uncommon for it to drop the connection altogether.

It’s nice that the option for this is here, but if you can, I’d strongly advise going with Pandora or Deezer instead.

Fitbit Versa and Android: Top 10 things you need to know

MoviePass now prevents you from seeing the same movie more than once

New and existing subscribers are affected by the change.

MoviePass – the lustrous subscription service that enables you to see up to one movie per day for just $9.95/month – just got a lot less appealing.

Following an update to the Android app and a change to the Terms of Service that just came in today, MoviePass subscribers are no longer able to see a certain movie more than once.

As of 12:49 PM EST, April 27, 2018, MoviePass’s official support site says –

We recently updated our Terms of Service to reflect that MoviePass subscribers are only permitted to see a select movie in theaters once with your MoviePass. We hope this will encourage you to see new movies and enjoy something different!

This change affects new and existing subscribers, including those that pay on an annual basis. Opening the MoviePass app now presents you with a “friendly update” letting you know about the new rules, and any movies you’ve already seen using the service are now grayed out with a message that says “You’ve already seen this movie.”

As someone who paid $89.96 during the $6.95/month promo in late March, this news is disappointing, to say the least. MoviePass does state in its TOS that it “reserves the right to change or modify the Service or subscriptions at any time”, and for new or potential customers, this will simply be something they’ll need to take into consideration before signing up.

However, for customers that pay for their membership upfront for all 12-months, it’s a bit shocking that MoviePass is forcing them to abide by the same rules. That’d be like paying for an entire year of Netflix and then a few months later being told you can only watch one show per day. It’ll likely help MoviePass to stop bleeding money as quickly as it is, but it’s a terrible look for customer loyalty.

If you’re a MoviePass subscriber or have been thinking about trying out the service, what’s your take on this?

House Democrats want to step up the fight against robocalls

Some in Congress don’t think the FCC’s latest anti-robocall measures go far enough. Democrats in the House Committee on Energy and Commerce have put forward one bill and two drafts that would give further grief to spam callers. The fully formed bill, the HANGUP Act, would force federal debt collectors to get your permission before robocalling you. This had actually been part of the 1991 Telephone Consumer Protection Act, bill sponsor Rep. Anna Eshoo said, but the 2015 Budget Act rolled it back. She characterized these automated calls as harassment, whether it came from a government contractor or anyone else.

The drafts may be more aggressive. Rep. Frank Pallone’s Stopping Bad Robocalls Act would address some of the complaints that led to a court shooting down an FCC rule in March and set concrete goals. It would clarify the definition of a robocall, set clear exemptions, create a national database of reassigned phone numbers and require the FCC and FTC to work together on reducing spam calls by “at least” 50 percent year-over-year.

Rep. Debbie Dingell’s CEASE Robocalls, meanwhile, would remove the common carrier exemption that prevents the FTC from taking action against providers who abuse robocalls. Smaller VoIP carriers have been “heavily involved” in robocalls, Dingell said.

These three proposals certainly aren’t guaranteed to become law. Even if all three are completed, they’ll still have to get Senate equivalents and pass both sections of Congress before they can be signed into law. If they do clear these hurdles, though, regulators would have considerably more authority to slap down robocallers. While there’s no doubt robocallers will persist, the ideas would at least draw a clearer line in the sand for potential offenders.

Source: Energy and Commerce Democrats

Nest Hello review: A premium doorbell for the paranoid homeowner

Last September, Nest introduced several new offerings aimed at beefing up your home security. There was the Nest Secure alarm system, an outdoor version of its Nest Cam iQ and the Nest Hello, its first-ever video doorbell. The Hello is obviously Nest’s answer to Ring, a competing video-enabled doorbell brand which has since been snapped up by Amazon.

The Hello, however, is a little different, with features like facial recognition, continuous video recording and HDR video. But getting the most out of it requires a subscription, and at $229, it’s not cheap. Still, if the idea of a video doorbell intrigues you and you’re ready to commit to a Google-and-Nest ecosystem, the Hello certainly fits the bill.

For the past year or so now, I actually jury-rigged an older Nest Cam to my front window in order to catch any potential package thieves. So when I heard about the Nest Hello, I was pretty excited because it meant I could finally take the cumbersome setup down. The slim and slender Hello doorbell with the 3-megapixel camera on top and a glowing button underneath appeared to be a much more elegant solution.

Installing it is a little tricky because it needs to be hardwired into your home. Thankfully, I already have an existing doorbell chime setup, so it was just a matter of replacing that with the Hello. It comes with a bunch of different parts, like a chime connector and a wall plate, which were all a little intimidating to me. The app will walk you through DIY instructions, but my house is pretty old and I’m not a wizard with wires, so I decided to opt for a professional installation instead.

Nest set me up with a local Nest Pro to help me out with that. The cost of this varies from contractor to contractor, but Nest says it’s typically around $200. It took a little while to arrange a time for them to come by and install it — apparently, Nest Pros are popular — but a week or so later, a couple of workers arrived. After about 40 minutes, the installation was done. While the process was smooth, the old doorbell did leave a rather unsightly imprint on the wall. It’s not a big deal — I can just touch it up with paint — but it’s something I hadn’t considered.

As I mentioned, I already had another Nest Cam setup, so incorporating the Hello was as easy as adding it to my existing account. Like the other Nest cams, the Hello’s stream shows the live video at the top of the app, with archived clips underneath. You can also view the video full screen if you want. If you have a Chromecast, you can even watch the videos on your TV, too.

Images and video from the Hello are sharp and colorful, and the HDR support delivers great contrast. Night Vision mode automatically turns on when the lights go out, and that looks clear and crisp as well. If your home WiFi isn’t particularly strong, you can lower the quality of the video in the app’s settings to save some bandwidth.

What I especially appreciate about the Hello’s camera, though, is the 4:3 aspect ratio and the 160-degree field of view. The reason for this is so you can view your visitors from head-to-toe. My front door is at the top of a flight of stairs, and I liked that I could see all the way down to the sidewalk. One time I saw a couple of strangers hanging out by the base of the steps, which roused my suspicions. Thanks to the microphone on the camera, I could eavesdrop on their conversation (which made me feel a tiny bit voyeuristic to be honest) and thankfully, it turns out they were just talking about, well, shopping for groceries.

Like other cameras, the Hello sends notifications to your phone whenever it senses motion. In my experience, the Hello was pretty aggressive at the most sensitive setting, resulting in notifications every few minutes. When I set it to person detection only, even then it’s accidentally triggered by the sidewalk, which gets busy during the day. There’s an option to have the camera turn off when you’re home, or you can set it to come on to a schedule. But for me, a video doorbell should be on 24/7, so I left it on.

But the Hello is more than just a camera; it’s also a doorbell. And as a doorbell, it works incredibly well. When someone presses that glowing button, not only will your indoor chime go off, you’ll get a notification on your phone. I happen to have a Google Home Mini, and I was able to set it up so that if someone pressed the doorbell, Assistant would announce, “Someone is at the front door.”

The Nest Hello becomes more useful if you pair it with a Nest Aware subscription. With a subscription, you will have 24/7 continuous live recording and archival footage for the past five, 10 or 30 days. Cost ranges from $5 a month to $300 a year, depending on the amount of video history you want.

The other big benefit of the Aware subscription is the facial-recognition feature. I tried this out with my husband and I, and I was surprised at just how fast the Hello was able to recognize us. After appearing in front of it a couple of times, it collected photos of our faces in the “Familiar Faces” section in the app. I grouped up photos of me and my husband separately and assigned them a name.

So now, whenever my husband (whose name is Brandon) rings the doorbell, my phone as well as my Google Home Mini announces “Brandon is at the front door.” It seems like a minor feature perhaps, but knowing that the person at the door is someone I knew rather than a stranger made me a great deal more relaxed.

Prior to the Nest Hello, I considered the Ring as an alternative. The Ring Doorbell Pro is priced at $249 retail (it’s currently selling on Amazon for $222) and has similar video-monitoring features, and though they’re not as advanced, the cheaper $100 and $200 Ring options don’t need to be hardwired at all.

The Hello, however, seems to offer a lot more than what Ring does. Not only does it have many of the same features, it includes upgraded perks like continuous live 24/7 video recording and facial recognition. Yes, it’s a little annoying that you have to pay a subscription fee to get those upgrades, but I think it’s worth it. And, since I already have a Google Home Mini as well as another Nest Cam, it was pretty easy to integrate it into my existing smart home setup.

The Hello is everything that I want from a video doorbell. It acts as both a security camera and a way to see who’s at my door when I’m not home in a smarter, intuitive way. By itself, the Hello is a good video doorbell. Combine it with Nest Aware perks and the rest of the Google ecosystem, and good becomes great.

Facebook Messenger ‘sleep mode’ locks your kids out at bedtime

Facebook’s Messenger for Kids has courted its share of controversy in the short time it’s been on the scene. In an effort to clean up the app’s reputation, Facebook is adding a feature that parents have been asking for: making it inaccessible during certain timeframes. Specifically, during dinner, when they should be doing homework or at bedtime. Thus, “sleep mode” for the app.

When the feature is activated from a parent’s account, the app will be inaccessible by the kids, blocking off access to sending or receiving messages or video calls and the rest of the app’s functionality. Facebook says the “off times” can be changed whenever you see fit.

This likely won’t quell the voices saying that kids shouldn’t have access to such technology in the first place. Or, do anything to assuage the worry that so much digital communication at an early age could have a dire impact on childhood development, of course. But, if you’re keen to stick a smart device in your kid’s hand, now you’ll have a little more control over when they can use one aspect of it.

Source: Facebook