Jan 21, 2026
Q: Well, the turkey is gone. Time to get up and get some shopping done, right?
A: Yeah…I am about napped out. I better get going.
I did make some progress this weekend. I was surprised to encounter some friendly elves delivering a Christmas tree to my building. I did some inquiring. A few clicks later and I am happy to report that treeelves.net is scheduled to bring a fresh Fraser fir to my house next week. The tree comes already on the stand and they will pick it up after the holidays all for a little over $100. My elves cover Atlanta, Charlotte, Greenville, Nashville and Richmond, but I suspect you can find a similar service in your area. I figure that earned me another nap.
Time to speak up! With the advent of Amazon Echo and Google Home, the smart speaker is everywhere. Still, some are not thrilled with the sound or other features and are looking for an upgrade. Sonos.com has the Sonos One at under $200 and Beam at $350. So, before you buy another Echo (amazon.com/echo) or Home (google.com/home), do some shopping.
Are you still reaching around the cord to turn off the lights? C’mon really? The son of the Clapper, the smart plug invasion has begun. At about $30 (wemo.com) there are dozens of choices, all pretty much the same. You plug them in, do some tedious syncing with Echo or Home, then say “Alexa, turn the den lights on.”
Most of the entrants come with an app, but after set-up, most likely Google or Amazon can handle what you need including scheduling, naming, and grouping your switches. These are not for all of your lamps. If your people are used to using the lamp switch, these can be annoying. So, a few go a long way to making your home a bit smarter.
Knock knock. Are you asleep? Smart video doorbells are not new, but if you don’t have one, you will probably get one for Christmas. At around $100 to $200, Ring (ring.com) and Blink (blinkforhome.com) lead the pack with many others to choose from. They either run on batteries or are wired to your existing doorbell circuit.
These oversized doorbells wake up when they detect motion. They ring (of course), but also buzz your phone or wake up Alexa where you can see and talk to your visitor or intruder and can record the event if you are busy napping.
Looking for a stocking stuffer? Buy your clan wireless charging pads. My first one 2 years ago cost me about $70 and changed my life. I mean I have to put my phone down when I am snoozing anyway. Now they are around $20 so you can afford to have them all around the house. Best bet…look at Amazon’s collection.
OK, no personal experience here…my blow-drying days are behind me. But consider the Dyson Airwrap (dyson.com) at $500 for your loved one. The videos sold me. This latest hi-tech gadget from that weird British inventor might be the personal gift you were looking for. Apparently, it is a blow dryer, curler, and straightener. Not sure what all that means, but I think it is good.
Trouble finding something for the nephew or grandson? I bought a Nintendo Labo kit (labo.nintendo.com). These are kits that extend the capability of the Nintendo Switch. You put together these high quality, durable cardboard extensions/holders for the switch controllers that act as peddles, joysticks, steering wheels and the like that interact with video games. These run about $80 and include robot, piano, vehicle and other configurations.
Ok, you still have time before you review your 2018 New Year’s resolutions. But, number one was to stop storing your passwords in a note on your phone. So, check out dashlane.com before the year runs out. Multi-device plans start at free, but at $10 a month you get advanced features like VPN protected Wi-Fi, encrypted document storage, dark web monitoring, credit protections, and identity theft insurance. This is a two-fer. One for you, one for Dad. Both of you will sleep easier.
Now it really is time for a nap. Have a great holiday.
Jan 21, 2026
Q: My kids gave me one of those family DNA spit tests for Father’s Day. What should I do?
A: DNA spit test. Maybe you should change careers; you have a knack for product promotion.
My kids sent me a kit as a gift too and I decided to give it a try. After a bit of spitting, I sent my sample to their lab and after a couple of months, I got my results. So, this is a good time for the PropellerHeads to weigh in.
Business for ancestry.com, 23andme.com, africanancestry.com, familytreedna.com, National Geographic (genographic.nationalgeographic.com), and dozens of similar services is booming. For about $100 (or a little more), these test kits collect your DNA (spitting or swabbing) to evaluate your genetic background. They correlate that to your ancestors’ likely geographic origins and then report back to you. Recently these have become very popular as family gifts.
Why bother? Well, say you are thinking of running for president. You may want proof that you are 1/16th Native American. A test like this could quell the fake news.
From my perspective, the services are all pretty similar in process and result, although the providers may dispute that. Results can vary based on your particular match to their reference DNA databases. Here, size may matter. These are decent places to do a little buyer’s research: bit.ly/2OtnJacand bit.ly/2kJx6Fs.
These tests are based on what is called autosomal chromosome testing. This involves matching similarities from 22 of your 23 chromosomes, making allowances for their dilution over generations. A good primer can be found at bit.ly/2NVKORP.
Be prepared. All of these services offer much more for more of your money. Once you get your DNA results, they encourage you to sign on to their full-service offerings, where they will find DNA matches, provide family tree research, offer relative connection services, and more. While these services can prove costly, combining your family history with historical records and DNA matching can yield impressive results. If you are keen on researching your genealogy and adding leaves to your family tree, this may be the way to go.
A lot of your family history research can be done for free, without DNA. Your best results probably will come from several approaches (bit.ly/2n05SLP), including interviewing family; gathering birth, marriage, and death artifacts; and looking up historical records.
Is DNA testing safe? That remains to be seen. Some companies say they will only use your DNA to help improve their customers’ results. Others make it clear that research, including new drug formulations, may be helped by your data. Just ask 23andMe about the $300 million cash infusion from pharma giant GlaxoSmithKline (bit.ly/2Okxtnf). Senator Chuck Schumer of New York thinks ethical use of DNA testing may warrant some oversight (https://nbcnews.to/2zqCYc6).
There are also stories about DNA testing revealing step children long ago swept under the rug. Sometimes, the news resulting in divorces. This PropellerHead is not sure of the veracity of these claims, but caution may be in order.
Your DNA is your essence. You are giving these companies the keys to who you are. If paying to give your DNA to big pharma (who may very well make a fortune on the next wonder-drug) works for you, fine. Otherwise, consider opting out of third-party use and research. In any case, remember: you sent your spit voluntarily.
I know you have heard this a million times before, but watch where you mail your bodily fluids.
Jan 21, 2026
Q: I heard something on the radio about Amazon building a robot to help them decide who to hire but the robot was sexist or something and now I’m confused. What’s going on?
A: What is up with all this advanced technology being racist and sexist all the time?! Dark skin not triggering automatic bathroom soap dispensers (bit.ly/2EGvngP)? Facial recognition software telling Asians to open their eyes for their passport photos (https://reut.rs/2S8NheC)? Shouldn’t tech be smarter than that? It’s an old problem that boils down to new technology not being tested on minority populations and it goes back at least to the invention of scissors for only right-handed folk.
You’re probably referring to the story “Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women,” reported by Reuters at https://reut.rs/2D1MeJg. It wasn’t a robot—it was a computer program meant to help guide hiring decisions. And it wasn’t sexist; it was just responding to the input it was given. That’s what computers do, often to the chagrin of users and programmers alike.
Such stories have become increasingly common as big tech companies have tried to automate decisions that once fell to lowly humans. After all, if Alexa can understand speech well enough to turn off the lights, shouldn’t her cousins be able to sift through some résumés? One of the hopes for Artificial Intelligence was that it might make decisions based on pure data and rigorous math without succumbing to prejudices like people do.
What went wrong? One of the first lessons of programming is GIGO—“garbage in, garbage out.” It doesn’t matter how great your program is: bad inputs lead to bad outputs.
The type of AI used here is called Machine Learning (ML), because it mimics how humans learn. Consider how kids learn to distinguish cats from dogs. They don’t memorize a set of rules to apply whenever they see an animal. Instead, their parents point to Fido and say “dog,” or tell them to “pet the cat” when Whiskers saunters by.
Different neurons are activated when they see different animals, and eventually their brains associate certain patterns of neurons firing with cats and others with dogs. At that point, they have learned the difference.
Programmers simulate this brain behavior with a program called a neural network. These are trained by showing them thousands of labeled cat and dog pictures. Then they are tested when asked to categorize a new picture not seen before. If their training was successful—if they determined the patterns that differentiate a dog from a cat—they will correctly identify new pictures without human intervention.
This technology is powerful: it gave us Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant. But because of GIGO, it also gave Amazon a “sexist” HR assistant. The quotes are because the program doesn’t really know about men and women—it only knows about inputs and outputs. Since it was trained with résumés that Amazon had accepted and rejected, it learned that Amazon didn’t hire many candidates who graduated from majority-women colleges or listed certain hobbies (softball, maybe, or ballet). Amazon did not provide details, but they did cancel the program.
It turns out that feeding biased data into a program designed to look for patterns causes it to learn the biases and then mimic them. GIGO.
The problem is not new. In 2016, ProPublica claimed to find it in software that predicts recidivism rates for criminal offenders (bit.ly/2JgDqzC). That same year, Microsoft had to shutter an AI-powered Twitter chatbot after twenty-four hours because it quickly learned to imitate homophobic slurs (https://for.tn/2D1M4Bo).
Even when the results aren’t disastrous, they can be just…weird. Witness Burger King’s advertising speak created by similar programs: bit.ly/2EFV1SL. Or check out a whole site dedicated to AI weirdness: aiweirdness.com.
What’s the solution? Feeding in unbiased data certainly helps, as does removing irrelevant data points. Some researchers report success with a statistical trick called oversampling—giving their programs three copies of each résumé from a woman, for example, so the program doesn’t notice a discrepancy in previous hiring practices.
We think the problems will persist until someone invents Artificial Judgment (AJ), to coin a term, to go along with AI. We’ll get on that right away, as soon as we extract this left-handed mouse from its packaging with our new left-handed scissors.
Jan 21, 2026
Q: Since 2019 is upon us…what can we expect in the world of technology next year?
A: We’ll make a deal with you: We’ll share our predictions for 2019 here with you, and in return you agree not to go back and check how well we did on our 2018 predictions, capiche? (For the record: Right about Bitcoin and TV shows, sort-of right about Internet of Things, and so very, very wrong about MoviePass, which we now expect to bite the dust before next Christmas.)
Based on current trends, we expect continued success for Apple in their campaign to make people think it’s normal to pay over $1000 for a new phone every two years even though we think that’s ridiculous. (For that kind of denaro, you can buy a pretty decent laptop.) But we also think that will create a market for cheaper (sub-$400) phones from lesser-known companies you probably haven’t heard of yet.
The good news is that probably near the end of 2019, a few phones will start to support 5G networks, which means download speeds twenty times faster than current 4G connections. Molto veloce! Fantastico!
Along with faster speeds comes more connected things in general, including many that will make you wonder “why on earth does that thing need an Internet connection?” We’re talking more connected toothbrushes, shoes, and garbage cans (“more” because there are some already). Why not e-floss to send your flossing statistics to your phone for later review? Compete with your Facebook friends to see who flosses the best! Also, look for the phrase “smart toboggan” to make its debut.
Smart TVs are already a thing (with built-in Roku or similar services). They’ve been hacked before. We expect a few more news stories about these getting hacked more as they become more popular. This means creeps on the Internet will be able to spy on you through your TV, which has already been proven under controlled test lab conditions.
As someone who created websites in the late 90s, it feels weird to write that “Microsoft will continue their push to support and transition to open-source technologies,” especially given that their official company motto in 1998 was “Be Evil.”
On the flippity-flop, Google (official company motto in 2013: “Don’t Be Microsoft”) will be featured in at least a couple of news stories where we find out they track everything we do every second of the day. But since that’s how they give us directions without us even asking, and how they auto-complete what we type into our emails (How did you know I was going to say that?! Get out of my head!), no one will care.
As more lawsuits are brought against Facebook, leaked documents will continue to reveal the systemic nature of their problems with protecting privacy and user data. But since everyone on the planet already has a Facebook account, not enough people will care for it to make a difference to their bottom line.
The only casualty will be the recently-launched Facebook Portal because the idea of putting one of their video cameras in your home is just too much and besides, we already have a video camera in our home from Amazon so why do we need another one?
Finally, 2019 will be the year that thousands of people finally look at a new laptop from Apple and decide that the thrill is gone. For a few years no, laptops from HP, Dell, Asus, and others have bested the latest offerings from Apple on both form (thinner, smaller, lighter) and function (better specs, and for much less money). But since Apple has convinced people that spending $2500 every two years for a new laptop is normal (it’s not!), they’re still going to have a great year.
And lest you think we have a problem with Apple: They will continue to dominate the tablet space, and for good reason. Android tablets just aren’t as good and won’t be before 2020.
A few parting observations: Tumblr will continue its slow descent towards wherever Myspace ended up now that they’ve banned adult content. The market for meal kit delivery services will consolidate and shake out – instead of Blue Apron and a dozen others, there will be maybe a third as many in a year’s time. Mama mia!
Lastly, just like every year, the PropellerHeads will be here to answer your questions and help you make sense of the technology landscape in 2019. That’s not a prediction – that’s a threat! We mean, a promise – capiche?!
Jan 21, 2026
Q: Can I really find out who my soulmate is based on my Starbucks order?
A: So either Starbucks has decided reading tea leaves is the new PSL or you are referring to an online quiz making the rounds.
Before we delve into answering your question, let’s talk a little about the evolution of quizzes. Seeing a quiz about your love life, intelligence, or just the ridiculous on social media or sites like BuzzFeed are commonplace, but really they all got their starts from the pioneers of the quiz, women’s magazines.
Ladies Home Journal in the 1950s rolled out the earliest versions of these types of quizzes and just as you would suspect, even in their infancy were laced with heavy amounts of judgement and expectations. Are you marriage material? Are you a good parent? Tally your score and find out the answers unique to you (bit.ly/2VZ98qH).
These quizzes evolved as the women’s movement grew and changed over the last half a century, but found a place in most major women’s interest publications. The tone of how women should act, live their best life, take care of themselves, and how they stacked up amongst their peers was always a common theme (bit.ly/2CnEfn8). As backlash in advertising and fashion magazine portrayals of beauty are continually being challenged, attitudes on these quizzes have shifted from a gospel of self-comparison to merely entertainment.
A quick look at the Cosmopolitan’s recent quiz offerings will show you how the topics have evolved (bit.ly/2DcPf8d). My favorite being “How old is your boyfriend, really? Is your grown-ass boyfriend actually just three toddlers stacked on top of each other (bit.ly/2Fwd9hC)?”
Fast forward from page to screen and there is no doubt that BuzzFeed is the leader in online quizzes. BuzzFeed found its footing on the back of making lists that gained a quick following but noticed that the few quizzes they had put out had a long life. Though not immediate hits, these posts seem to grow in popularity over time and they decided to invest time and effort in making more of them. With the quiz “What city should you actually live in?” (bzfd.it/2Cq09Ga) being the tipping point and thus BuzzFeed quizzes are now the standard by which all are measured.
The architects of these quizzes say the most popular ones claim to reveal something unknown about a person but admit that there isn’t a scientific method in creating the material – just a formula for fun (bit.ly/2RPKkSY).
BuzzFeed has figured out how to take this formula and make it profitable for themselves as well as other organizations (read.bi/2AOtASa). Take your question for example: Of course I’ve been waiting my whole life to find out my soulmate’s name is Blaine, but didn’t Starbucks just get another chance to try and make Refreshers happen? I mean we all just want a Frappuccino. Deal with it.
A quick review of the Quiz page (bzfd.it/2aJ8avc) and you will see quizzes that will reveal your hidden secrets based on your shopping habits at a particular retailer or your order at your favorite restaurant. Yes, I know ordering the Rooty Tooty Fresh and Fruity from IHOP makes me a genius, but I am glad that you know it too.
So we’re hopefully in agreement that these quizzes should be taken as entertainment and know that at times the goal will be to market something to you simultaneously. Hidden (or explicit) marketing may not be the only thing to be mindful of when clicking. Many quizzes shared and taken on social media sites like Facebook are fronts for undesirables to collect and share your personal information. Also, the methods used to entice you into clicking preys on the very need for validation that magazines and societal pressures instilled in us decades ago (bit.ly/2TRFVfz).
To answer your original question, there can be some hidden truth amongst the fluff. Blaine and I are currently on our way to London (where I am truly meant to live), working through the Sunday Times crossword (since we’re both geniuses), while snacking on our Bloomin’ Onion (the only app for true romantics).
