How to set up Routines on your Amazon Echo

A few simple tips to make your Echo smarter than ever.

In just a few short years, the Amazon Echo has gone from a random speaker that nobody knew what to do with to a staple in the consumer tech space. Amazon’s evolved the Echo and Alexa (the AI that powers it) over those years, and one of the most powerful additions so far is a feature called “Alexa Routines.”

With Routines, you can configure your Echo to perform a variety of functions after saying one simple command. For example, instead of turning on your lights, playing the news, and catching up on the weather by talking to your Echo three different times, you can queue all these to go off one after another with just one keyword.

How to set up Routines in the Alexa app

You can make Routines as simple or complex as you’d like, and to help you get started, we’ve got a few tips to make the process as easy as can be. First, let’s make a Routine that’s activated by a voice command,

Launch the Alexa app on your phone or tablet.
Open the left-side menu and tap Routines.
Tap the + icon near the top right.
Select When this happens, choose voice, type in your desired phrase, and hit Save.
Tap on Add action and select the actions you want.

Tap Create once you’ve added all your desired actions.

This is where things get exciting. Right now, you can program Alexa to greet you, say a funny fact, play music, catch you up on the news, control your smart home gadgets, brief you on the traffic, change your Echo’s volume, and tell you about the weather. You can add as many of these as you’d like, and once you’ve got a few in place, you can reorder the position in which Alexa will act on them by holding down on the six dots next to each command and moving them up or down.

In addition to triggering Routines with a special command, you can also have them go off at a certain time of day. To do this —

From the Alexa app, open the left-side menu and tap Routines.
Tap the + button near the top right.
Select When this happens and choose Schedule.
Tap At Time to schedule the time of day the Routine is triggered and Repeat if you want it to repeat on certain days.

Tap the actions you want.

You can view your Routines at any time from the Routines page in the Alexa app, and tapping on an existing one will give you controls for temporarily disabling or deleting it altogether.

That’s all folks!

Need additional help setting up Routines? What are some of the ones you’ve already made? For any additional questions/comments, sound off in those comments below!

See at Amazon

Amazon Echo

• Tap, Echo or Dot: The ultimate Alexa question
• All about Alexa Skills
• Amazon Echo review
• Echo Dot review
• Echo Spot review
• Top Echo Tips & Tricks
• Amazon Echo vs. Google Home
• Get the latest Alexa news

See at Amazon

Today’s best deals you won’t want to miss

Whether you’re looking for new tech gear or household items, we’ve got you covered.

Today you can get big discounts on the Nighthawk X6 wireless router, an emergency jump starter, a robot vacuum cleaner, and more! Don’t pass these up.

View the rest of the deals

If you want to know about the deals as soon as they are happening, you’ll want to follow Thrifter on Twitter, and sign up for the newsletter, because missing out on a great deal stinks!

Where to buy the Huawei P20 Pro in the U.S. and Canada

Here’s where to go for Huawei’s latest and greatest.

Thanks to its striking design and triple rear camera setup, the Huawei P20 Pro is easily one of the most unique Android phones to be released so far in 2018.

You can buy the phone in both the United States and Canada, but since Huawei isn’t officially selling it in the U.S., doing so there is a bit trickier than in Canada.

In any case, here’s how you can get your hands on the phones in the respective countries.

United States

eBay (never-msrp and sobeonline1)

Our friends at Android Police recently spotted a couple sellers on eBay that are currently running pre-orders for the phone, and for folks that are dead set on using it State-side, this is your best bet for picking it up.

Both sellers have very positive ratings (99.1% for never-msrp and 98.6% for sobeonline1) and are selling the phone for just about $883 USD. That’s not cheap by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s also not terrible considering that the phone isn’t officially being sold here in the country.

No matter which seller you choose, shipments are expected to go out on April 18 with free Standard Shipping.

You’ll find 30-day return periods for both sellers, but the way these are handled is slightly different. You’ll pay for return shipping no matter which one you choose, but sobeonline1 does note that a 15% restocking fee may apply.

See at eBay (never-msrp)
See at eBay (sobeonline1)

Canada

Rogers

Pre-orders for the P20 Pro and regular P20 are live at Rogers right now, with the former going for $249 down on the Premium+ Tab plan and the latter setting you back $0 with the same agreement. Additionally, you can purcahse the P20 Pro outright for $999 or pay $749 for the P20.

To sweeten the deal, Rogers is also including a free Huawei MediaTab T3 with the purchase of either of the two phones on “select 2-year plans.” Considering that the T3 has a retail price of $329, that’s not bad at all.

See at Rogers

Fido

You can also pre-order the P20 and P20 Pro at Fido, and pricing is the same. The regular P20 costs $0 down with the carrier’s Large plan and the P20 Pro goes for $249 down.

The outright prices are also the same at $749 and $999, respectively.

However, unlike Rogers, there’s no free tablet being offered here.

See at Fido

Why you (and your family) should be using 2FA and a password manager

Keep you and your loved ones safe and secure.

So much of what we do every day, day in and day out, is either done online or has a record kept online. Things like your email or a shopping website are obvious, but your bank, mortgage holder, health insurance provider and more are also online companies even if that’s not how we interact with them. There is a pretty complete fingerprint of your life stored where plenty of other people can (and often do) look for it.

So what should we do about it? That’s easy — use a good password for everything, make sure you don’t use the same password in more than one place, and secure things with a second step anytime you can.

You can’t remember all those passwords

Don’t feel bad because nobody else can, either. A good password simply means one that someone else who is really good at figuring this stuff out isn’t likely to be able to use. That means they aren’t something you are going to be remembering, especially when there are more than a few of them. That’s where a password manager comes in.

Best password manager for Android

A password manager is like a safe that holds all your passwords and gives the right one to the right place when it’s needed once it’s sure you really asked for it. Enter all your account information into it and then all you need to remember is one good secure password that’s used as your OK to let it share its data with another app or website. Now there is only one thing to remember and it gives you more secure access to everything else!

Remembering one good password is something we can all do.

There are a lot of good ways to manage passwords. A recipe box filled with index cards that sits on your desk is one way, but a good app from a trusted company does a better job and offers more features. Most have a way to keep a backup copy of your password database in case you lose your phone or it gets stolen, as well as extras like a place to store credit card info or secure notes. The best secondary feature you’ll find is a password generator that can create a good password, then put it in the database and be ready to serve it to the right place so you never have to worry about keeping track of it.

Password managers work great on your Chromebook, too!

• 1Password X brings me closer to using a Chromebook full-time
• Password manager Enpass now working seamlessly on Chromebooks

The first thing a person who gets your password is going to do is to try to use it everywhere. That’s why it’s important to never reuse passwords at more than one place because when someone breaks into the servers at Target, or Adobe, or Yahoo! or anywhere else and gets your username and password, you certainly don’t want to let them run up your credit card by buying things at Amazon. You just can’t remember all those passwords.

The convenience and security a proper password manager offers are better than anything you can do to manage things yourself and it’s more secure, too. If you’re not using one, stop right now and set one up — then help make sure the rest of your family is doing the same thing.

A password is a key to the door and 2FA is the drawbridge over the moat

I forget who said it, but 2FA (two-factor authentication) has been described this way. Imagine a castle with attackers at the gate. It has a very strong door (the password) but also has another deterrent in the form of a drawbridge that’s lifted so nobody can get over a moat filled with medieval monsters of some sort. 2FA is that drawbridge and it only gets lowered when you tell it to lower.

In non-technical terms, 2FA is simply a second way to prove your identity before access to digital data is given. You prove your identity using two of these three things:

• Something you know (a password)
• Something you have (a code from an app or text message)
• Something you are (your fingerprint)

How to set up two-factor authentication on your Google account

Most of us have used it in one form or another even if we didn’t know it. The three-digit number on the back of your Visa card is an example of something you have; ideally, you only know it if you have the card there in front of you which means you have your wallet which means you are probably the person whose name is on the front. A more complicated method that’s just as simple to understand: when you log into your computer at work the server checks to see if you swiped your employee ID to get into the building before it starts showing you any company data.

2FA for our online accounts is (thankfully) much more simple that an authentication server at work thanks to our smartphone. Using an Authenticator app you are given a short code to enter along with a password. Having this code means that you have your phone and your password — two of the three things. And as long as your Authenticator app is protected with a good password as mentioned above, only you can use it.

Two-factor authentication: What you need to know

This sounds like a lot more hassle than it really is because your phone is also secured and can be trusted. Most places that offer 2FA also allow you to say you trust the device you’re using to access it and you can bypass the step once you’ve proven your identity. As long as you have a good password on your phone and the company that makes it doesn’t allow someone unlimited tries to guess that password, you’re pretty safe.

One extra layer of security is never a bad thing!

But trying to access the same account from another device, whether it be another phone or a computer, means you’ll need to enter the 2FA code. This means you can get on Twitter or Facebook (or Amazon or your bank’s website) from your phone easily but I can’t get in from my phone or computer without having your 2FA code, which only comes to your phone. Following? It’s a great big circle of trust that doesn’t allow anyone else in it.

Google wants you to upgrade to (its) better two-factor authentication

How to install and set up Authy for two-factor authentication on your Android

Be safe, be secure

Look, we know that most of us aren’t high-profile targets with people focused on hacking into our lives. Those people have extra steps they can take, but we don’t need those. But we are all potential victims of chance when it comes to phishing attacks or corporate database breaches. Not using a password manager and 2FA whenever it’s offered is crazy.

Don’t be a victim. And don’t let the people closest to you be one, either. Use a good password manager and two-factor authentication for everything, all the time!

Twitter asks users to change passwords after bug exposed them on internal log

The bug in Twitter’s hashing process has since been fixed.

Twitter today asked all of its users to consider changing their passwords after discovering a bug that caused them to be stored “unmasked in an internal log.”

According to Twitter, the bug has been corrected and it has seen “no indication of breach or misuse by anyone” after an investigation.

We recently found a bug that stored passwords unmasked in an internal log. We fixed the bug and have no indication of a breach or misuse by anyone. As a precaution, consider changing your password on all services where you’ve used this password. https://t.co/RyEDvQOTaZ

— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) May 3, 2018

The bug itself is related to the hashing function Twitter uses to mask passwords. Twitter says passwords were written to an internal log before the hashing process was completed, leaving them exposed. From Twitter:

We mask passwords through a process called hashing using a function known as bcrypt, which replaces the actual password with a random set of numbers and letters that are stored in Twitter’s system. This allows our systems to validate your account credentials without revealing your password. This is an industry standard.

Due to a bug, passwords were written to an internal log before completing the hashing process. We found this error ourselves, removed the passwords, and are implementing plans to prevent this bug from happening again.

Out of caution, Twitter users should reset their password for the service, as well as those for any services using the same password. Now would also be a good time to start using two-factor authentication if you aren’t already.

Video Game Hall of Fame inducts ‘Tomb Raider’ and ‘Final Fantasy VII’

The Strong museum has announced this year’s inductees to the World Video Game Hall of Fame — Spacewar!, John Madden Football, Tomb Raider and Final Fantasy VII. They were selected from 12 finalists that also included Asteroids, Call of Duty, Dance Dance Revolution, Half-Life, King’s Quest, Metroid, Minecraft and Ms. Pac-Man. “The four inductees span multiple decades, countries of origin, and gaming platforms, but all have significantly affected the video game industry, popular culture, and society in general,” said The Strong museum in a statement. Tomb Raider and Final Fantasy VII were finalists last year.

The four inductees will be featured in a permanent display at the museum. Nominees are judged on how widely they are recognized and remembered, if they’ve enjoyed long-term popularity, whether they’ve had an international impact and, most importantly, that they’ve had a significant influence on the design and development of other video games, popular culture in general or on other forms of entertainment. Journalists, scholars and other video game experts make the final selections.

Via: VentureBeat

Source: The Strong

Microsoft is fixing a Windows 10 bug that causes Chrome to freeze

Since the Windows 10 April update, some users have been dealing with frozen systems when they’re running apps including Chrome or using the “Hey, Cortana” command. The good news is Microsoft’s working on a fix, which may be ready in time for next week’s scheduled patch.

The monthly Windows 10 updates typically include new features, like the recent Timeline activity log, and seek to squash bugs, such as the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities Microsoft added defenses for in March. Sometimes, as with the update Microsoft rolled out on April 30th, the patches unintentionally add more problems.

Until it can deploy a fix for the Chrome bug, Microsoft suggested those whose systems are locking up can try a workaround key sequence. If you have a keyboard, simultaneously pressing the Windows logo key, Ctrl, Shift and B might help, as that resets the graphics driver. Tablet users can try the pushing the volume up and down buttons together three times within 2 seconds. If you have a laptop, you might be able to unfreeze your system by closing and opening the lid.

Microsoft delayed the April patch over Blue Screen of Death issues, so while the May update is set for the 8th, Microsoft could push it back to make sure it fixes the freezing bug. Chrome has 62 percent of browser market share on desktops, according to Net Market Share, so even if they don’t use “Hey, Cortana,” a majority of Windows 10 users are at risk.

Via: The Verge

Source: Microsoft

Atmospheric harvesters will enable arid nations to drink from thin air

As climate change continues to wreak havoc upon the Earth’s weather patterns, formerly lush locales like the American West are finding themselves increasingly parched. Perhaps nowhere is that abrupt arridization more pronounced than in Cape Town, South Africa. Since 2015, the region has suffered severe droughts and the coastal capital of 4 million people has struggled to maintain a steady municipal water supply.

Cape Town narrowly avoided Day Zero earlier this year, when the city’s taps were projected to run dry, but the city is expected to face another critical shortage in 2019. The situation has become so dire that officials are seriously considering importing icebergs to augment the water supply. But why try to tow 70,000 tons of ice 1,200 miles up from Antartica when modern technology can suck the humidity we need out of thin air?

Pulling potable water from the atmosphere goes back to the days of the Incas, who captured and collected dew from “fog fences.” And why wouldn’t they. Earth’s atmosphere contains an estimated 13 trillion liters of water vapor at any given time — that’s the equivalent to 10 percent of all of the planet’s available surface freshwater. Of course, the process of collecting morning dew for a pre-industrial society exists on a completely different scale than what will be needed to quench the thirst of the 4 billion or so people who will be impacted by water shortages in the coming years.

But just because the challenge is daunting doesn’t mean it’s impossible. A number of researchers and private companies are developing the next generation of atmospheric water harvesting devices. The current state-of-the-art dew-harvesting refrigeration-based machines operate by lowering the temperature of the surrounding air below the dew point and then collecting the vapor. Unfortunately, as the relative humidity drops below 50 percent, the efficiency of these machines nosedives too, requiring untenable amounts of electrical power to operate the refrigeration units.

However a newly developed sorbent-based alternative has recently shown that it can harvest atmospheric moisture even when the relative humidity drops to around 10 percent. Under those conditions, that works out to around three liters of water for every million liters of air. If you were to try to harvest that using dewing technology, you’d have to drop the air temperature to below freezing. Once that happens, it “becomes technologically infeasible because you have to first unfreeze the water,” Dr. Evelyn Wang, a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT who helped construct the test device, told Engadget. “The advantage of the work that we’re doing is the fact that you can in fact operate efficiently the system at low humidity conditions.”

Created by a collaborative team from MIT and UC Berkeley, this proof of concept device uses a metal-organic framework (MOFs), a material invented in the 1990s by UC Berkeley chemistry professor Omar Yaghi. Depending on the metal and organic molecules used, chemists can control what gases will bind to the MOF and how strong those connections will be.

Yaghi’s team has developed more than 20,000 types of MOF in the past two decades, one of which bound to methane and has been considered for use in the fuel tanks of natural gas-powered vehicles. In this case, however, the research team used a variant dubbed MOF-801 — Zr6O4(OH)4(fumarate)6 — which had previously shown itself to collect more water and need smaller temperature swings to work than conventional sorbents like zeolite or silica gel.

Rather than being powered by an electrical grid, the MOF device designed by Wang’s team only requires a heat source to separate water molecules from the MOF’s organic bits. “[The heat source] can be that of the sun, it could be other sources as well,” Wang explained. “What we anticipate is pretty much a passive system.”

The device itself is a simple design with two main parts: the absorption layer (aka the MOF) and an enclosed, an air-cooled condenser. The backside of the MOF is painted black, to operate as a solar absorber.

At night, the enclosure walls are opened to enable airflow past the MOF and it becomes saturated with vapor. Once morning rolls around, the enclosure is buttoned up and the black side of the MOF is covered with an “optically transparent thermal insulator” (OTTI). When the MOF is exposed to sunlight, it heats up, causing its organic molecules to release their hold on their water molecules, which condense at ambient temperature for collection.

Last year, the team set up the MOF device atop a roof on the University of Arizona campus, where the relative humidity during the day drops to as low as 10 percent but climbs to an average of 30 percent at night. Using just 3g of MOF, the team extracted about .75g of water — not enough to quench your thirst but plenty to validate the team’s modelling predictions.

“A lot of the tailoring of the MOFs is important because there are other types of material that can absorb water,” Wang explained. “The key here is that it’s not just the amount of water you absorb, but also the amount you can release via low-grade heat sources.”

The MOF device is still in its early prototype stage, though Dr. Wang does expect to have a commercially viable iteration capable of providing the daily needs for a family of four available within 3 to 5 years. She envisions this technology being used as a primary source of drinking water in the developing world and remote locations where there is no water infrastructure but could also be employed in urban settings, much like home solar panels are used today.

But before that can happen, Dr. Wang cites a couple challenges that must be addressed, “MOFs are really compelling in terms of the performance but right now the scalability to larger volumes is limited for certain types and the cost is also pretty high.”

Dr. Wang’s team is far from the only outfit working to collect water from cloudless skies. The US EPA recently signed a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement with Israel-based Water-Gen. The company’s “GENius” technology has been around since 2014 and works much like a standard air conditioner, except that it produces potable water. Unfortunately, for it to generate 2 liters per hour, each half-meter of structural material has to be exposed to air with a relative humidity of 60 percent.

Similarly, the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) agreed earlier this week to purchase 150 solar-powered harvesters from Arizona’s Zero Mass Water. These 300-pound devices rely on a 32 square foot solar panel to power a small fan which pushes ambient air past the company’s proprietary hygroscopic material for capture. The water then filters down into a 30 liter reservoir. Depending on the relative humidity, these machines can collect between four and 10 liters of water daily. And unlike Water-Gen’s technology, Zero Mass’ devices operate with humidity levels as low as 10 percent.

It remains unlikely that atmospheric water generation will be the magic bullet to solving the Earth’s growing potable water shortage issues. But combined with other evolving technologies such as oceanic desalinization, humanity may just be able to continue slaking the thirst of an increasingly populated and parched planet.

Images: UC Berkeley and Berkeley Lab (MOF structure); Nature Communications (harvest process)

Google adds more Assistant features to Wear OS

Google brought its AI assistant to Android Wear 2.0 last year, and has been adding features like Routines and Custom Device Actions ever since. Now the company is bringing a few new features to Assistant on Wear OS (as it’s now called), including contextually aware conversation suggestions, auditory answers to your questions and actions for connected devices.

You can already tell Google Assistant to control your smart home devices like, say, setting the temperature of your LG fridge. Now this feature is coming to your Wear OS device, too, which means you’ll get to talk to you wrist to set your thermostat or turn on the Hue lights in your bedroom. Hearing the answer to a question via your watch speaker or Bluetooth-connected headphones can be more convenient than having to lift your wrist to see a visual response, too, and pre-set response suggestions will offer up things you might not think of when asking Assistant for the weather, for example. All these features will roll out to Wear OS devices over the next several days, so keep an eye out for an update.

Source: Google

New ‘Overwatch’ map brings the battle to Italy’s canals

Last month, players of Blizzard’s hero shooter Overwatch took a trip into the game’s fictional past with a new temporary game mode, Retribution. The brawl portrayed heroes escaping through the streets of Venice after a clandestine mission gone wrong. Though the event ended on Tuesday, players can still roam (and fight) around gorgeous Italian canalways as the latest map, Rialto, is added to the game — along with a few hero changes in the latest patch.

Half a dozen heroes are getting tweaked in the patch, but all are minor ability changes except Hanzo. The nimble archer gets his first big rework, swapping out his super-lethal scatter arrow for a fast-firing ability (“Storm Arrow”) that lets him quickly spit out up to six shots. Also, his double-jump is now a vertical lunge, differentiating him even more from his shuriken-tossing brother Genji.

Rialto is the game’s fourth escort map, but unlike the nighttime version seen in Retribution, players will cavort around the serene Italian city during the day. Clearly, some pros are pretty excited about getting a new arena to compete in.

😘 pic.twitter.com/mzq4zq5VBg

— London Spitfire (@Spitfire) May 2, 2018

Source: Overwatch patch notes – May 3, 2018