Caregiving Wins, Tech Fails, and Wi-Fi Tales

[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hey everybody, it's Barry here hanging out with my co host Bobby. We're here to chat about caregiving tech and some of the little things that make life easier or at least a little more interesting. Today's episode is packed with good stuff. Bobby's going to share how assistive access is making a big difference for his father in law and how you can set it up too. We'll tackle some tech headaches like cameras needing solid wi fi and why upgrading to Wi Fi 6 or 7 could save you a lot of trouble. And a listener reminded me I totally forgot to finish a story about Internet connected thermostats a few episodes ago. So don't worry, I'm finally going to spill the details on that. And we've also got a tech fails segment featuring iPhone updates and tricky lamp timers. And I'll dive into some real talk about stress and why it's hard to unwind. Plus there's a bonus episode coming to help you reset and relax. So stay tuned for that. So grab your drink, get comfy and get started. Hey, Mr. Clark, how are you today? [00:01:08] Speaker B: Doing fine. I know all of the world at Clemson Nation in particular is happy this weekend, so I won't tell you why. If you don't know, then you better ask somebody, so. [00:01:17] Speaker A: That's right. Just, just look at the colors, y'all. [00:01:19] Speaker B: Look at what colors? [00:01:21] Speaker A: Look at the colors. [00:01:22] Speaker B: Just look at the colors. So anyway, that's for all y'all who are not Clemson fans. Don't be turned off. You know, we don't always do this, but you know, this special moment. Special moment. [00:01:30] Speaker A: That's right. Special moment. That's a good way to put it. So I hear we got some tech wins this week, man. Besides, besides football wins, we got tech wins. So tell us a little bit about your father in law and your assistive access win. [00:01:43] Speaker B: Well, for those of you who don't know, my father in law without giving much detail is had a stroke event a couple of months ago and he's in assisted living and it's changed his life a little bit. Ours too, and we've been adapting. He is a very, very addictive person to his phone. He wants his phone all the time. So, you know, over the Thanksgiving holiday, the first thing was how you doing? The next thing is where's my phone? So we decided we needed to give him one. But his mobility and his cognitive ability is made using a regular phone, any phone, pretty difficult. And so I have a new appreciation for that. There is a feature in iPhones called Assistive access, which turns your phone basically into a jitterbug phone. And it makes it very, very simple for people who are struggling or people who have limited mobility to actually to use their phone. And it changes the way in this case an iPhone works to make it very simple and takes a lot of the extraneous apps and kind of know gadgetry around a phone and makes it very simple to use. So the way you get to access to it is you go to settings and you go to an accessibility setting and go to the very bottom of that list and you'll see assistive access. And when you first go into it, it asks you to manage it. You can choose the applications you want on the phone. It renames some of those applications to be what they do, not what they are. So phone changes to calls, imessage changes to messages, things like that. Even if you're running an iPad, which you can run this on an iPad, it'll change FaceTime to say calls to see something very simple. And so it makes the buttons really big, it makes this functionality really simple. And it's been a wonderful way for my dad to get reintroduced back to the phone without having to struggle on where things are, where they're located. And this is not a knock on Android or iPhone. Those phones have developed into something that's a lot more complicated than they need to be for people who are struggling, like my father in law is. And so we ran this on it, we did a couple things that made it really cool to use for him. You can add music to this phone. So the music app is very simplified. If you want Christmas music to be on it, you choose a Christmas list and that's it. That's all there is to it. [00:04:02] Speaker A: Nice. [00:04:02] Speaker B: If you want to simplify his life on who calls him, you can put in his contact information for people he knows and put the nicknames in. And instead of saying, you know, 803 something something, it will say hey, Jennifer's calling or it'll say hey, Bobby's calling or cousin Luke and whatever. And so those kinds of simplistic messages and the way the phone works, big buttons for going back to the features, no slide to lock in, you tap on the phone because they figure people who are having this kind of mobility would have trouble with a slide move. [00:04:41] Speaker A: Gotcha. [00:04:41] Speaker B: So things like that, that make this mode really ideal for him. You know, eventually we hope he will get back to whatever he likes to use, but it makes it really honest and simple for him to use at this moment. And he loves it. He's calling people now, he's receiving calls, he's taking phone messages and all those wonderful things. And he's not, you know, frustrated by the fact that he has to remember where to get phones or what it does or how it works. That's certainly, this mode is certainly a good way for people who are in my situation with my father in law. But even if you're not, say you're in my mother's situation where she has some memory issues and sometimes gets confused using the buttons and remembering what they do, you know, between the X and the green dot instead of a big button that says back really makes it good for her to use it. So I'm going to try using it on her, especially with an iPad so she'll be able to use something very simple because she doesn't care about all the apps. I got 300 apps on my phone. Probably you do too, Barry, because, you know, we're tech guys and that's what we do. They need five, six and you can control it and it's actually made so you can't get out of it unless you know a password. So you're in basically a new mode. The phone changes into something different. [00:06:01] Speaker A: So it's, it really just, it really turns what we call a phone into. Back into a phone again. [00:06:07] Speaker B: Yes. [00:06:07] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean we, I think, I mean I love what our technology can do for us, but sometimes I think it's lost. It's not being a phone and calling it a phone anymore doesn't really make a lot of sense. I think it's, it's grown way past its phone roots and sometimes people just need a phone, you know, really they just need to communicate with people. They don't need to. [00:06:28] Speaker B: In this mobile. For my father in law, he wants, he needs something simple. And it has the added benefit that both of my, my sister in law and my wife are using this really to, to control what he can do so they can get into the. His icloud account and put his contacts in. They don't have to be on the phone. [00:06:47] Speaker A: Nice. [00:06:47] Speaker B: So that's, there's some really nice features that go with that that make it look nice. [00:06:51] Speaker A: Seems like I've read that it lets you, lets you control what contacts are seen. You can put, you can have it where people, only people in your contacts call you in that, right? [00:07:01] Speaker B: Yep. [00:07:02] Speaker A: And vice versa. You can decide whether or not we. [00:07:04] Speaker B: Talked about that in an earlier podcast that there's a feature on iPhones and on Androids that says if they're not in the contact list. They go back to your to voicemail. So only the people we have in his list can get through. And everything else gets a voicemail, which we can check and say, oh, we missed that person. We can add them to the list. And so the next time we call again. [00:07:26] Speaker A: Cool. Cool. It seems like I remember something too about the like a lot of the standard Apple maps. I mean Apple apps, they've made up where it's. Where it's friendly to this mode. But you still might have some other apps that don't really know about this mode. But they still work too, don't they? [00:07:41] Speaker B: They still work, yes. They're put into frames and they. So like you could do Hulu. Okay, you bring up Hulu. Hulu still has the same options on it, but it puts underneath it things like going back. So instead of having the normal arrow to go back which might be in the corner and really small, this one's really big at the bottom. My mother doesn't really care how big the screen is. A matter of fact, she wants to know where the controls are more than anything else. [00:08:03] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:08:04] Speaker B: So this, it makes Hulu a much easier app for her to work with. She doesn't have to hit on things for hidden features. They're sort of there. [00:08:14] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. The concept of things like controls disappearing till you need them, it seems to be a little bit of a foreign concept to somebody who grew up on. [00:08:23] Speaker B: Person with accessibility issues because they don't know what's there. You're having to do something interesting or, you know, still swipe or touch just to see what her controls are. [00:08:34] Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. [00:08:35] Speaker B: What I see is this is this has actually been in an iPhone since iPhone OS 17 and it's now integrated into the ipados. I can see more and more applications keeping putting some features in this. So as things get better and better as we go from 18 to 19, I bet there'll be more applications with better features and adaptability to this. And so it's really cool to do this, especially if you're trying to help your elder through whatever technology woes we need to get through this. Mo can really be helpful. [00:09:08] Speaker A: That's awesome. And that's something I like that a lot of these big companies are doing is paying a whole lot more attention to accessibility in all kinds of ways, whether it be physical or cognitive or whatever. So that's cool. That's couple of clips. [00:09:22] Speaker B: Make sure that if you're. There is a feature to turn on the speaker when it comes on and make sure you turn that on. There's a hidden feature inside of it. Each of the applications does have some accessibility access features. So you might want to go on an app and look and see what it can do. Maybe it does something like always make the back button visible, something like that. So make sure you. You tweak into that. This does not work with standby mode. So my hope is that one featured one day that it will work with standby mode. But you can probably get apps that mimic standby mode that will work and you can put them in remind our. [00:09:57] Speaker A: Listeners what standby mode is. [00:09:58] Speaker B: Standby mode is when you put a phone on a little stand, it goes into its charge mode and it brings up a clock or temperature or something like that. It's a really cool feature that came in, I think with version of 18, but it won't work in assisted mode. [00:10:15] Speaker A: I gotcha. [00:10:16] Speaker B: You can put. So get an app. I use a couple of apps like Alarm Clock, which brings up a mode like that. Or you can use something called Big Clock that I found on the app store that gives you kind of a view of a clock in different ways. And I got a demonstration for that for the viewers who are out here. I can make that happen. So it does things like this. [00:10:37] Speaker A: Ah, cool. And that's really cool. Just listening and it's great big numbers on the screen. I mean, massive. Cool. That makes for a great alarm clock. Or at least a bedside table clock, I guess is a good way. [00:10:48] Speaker B: It looks like an old style, you know, click over clock. [00:10:50] Speaker A: So yeah, clock radio. Awesome. [00:10:52] Speaker B: So there are apps like that that work in assistive mode, but you can't get standby to work that way yet. So maybe Apple will recognize that and realize that they need to make that work some. [00:11:00] Speaker A: Well, that's cool. Awesome. Well, I'm glad you got a win there. That's fantastic. [00:11:04] Speaker B: Yeah, that was a really nice win. And he's continuing to use it. He used it last night on for some calls for me. You make FaceTime calls with it too. So it does something kind of things like that. That's Good. [00:11:13] Speaker A: Simplifies the FaceTime calls. [00:11:15] Speaker B: Yep. [00:11:15] Speaker A: There, there's. There's. I've got a couple relatives that I might talk into trying that out just to make things simpler for them. Especially one relative who's kind of has, has some vision problems. And I think those big touch targets would probably help out a lot. [00:11:28] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:11:29] Speaker A: Yeah. Cool. So that's great. So I'm hoping that some of our listeners out there might get a chance to Use this if it's a good use case for them and we'll see how it goes. And we'd love to hear any feedback and any questions that you have about assistive access and we'll see where we go from there. So moving on, I think you had some information you wanted to talk to us about about cameras and setting up remote cameras that say maybe older relatives, houses to kind of help them out and tell me what you got going on there. [00:12:00] Speaker B: So my, my mother is, is in a situation where me seeing her and knowing she's okay really helps her and me. So when she calls me and she needs to be reassured, I can do things like I said there, there's nobody at the door, there's nobody else in the house, the alarms are mom, that kind of thing. So you know, those things help her and you know, she knows that in her recessive mind of, of way things are that her son says it's okay, that maybe it's okay. So in order to do that, we recently set up a couple, several cameras. Now I'm actually running ADT and I'm not. This is not commercial for them. They have not given us money yet. So you know, this is just a casual mention that that's what I use. And they use Nest cameras, Google Nest. We have several of them in house. Each one of them though requires a certain amount of bandwidth in order to work properly. So Nest cameras take pictures and they store that those pictures in a central hub on the Internet. If you don't have enough bandwidth to do that, they don't perform right. You can't connect to them, they can't record things. And so one of the things you really need to do if you set up a camera like this is make sure that your home Internet is robust enough to handle the candle, the camera's needs. [00:13:18] Speaker A: Gotcha. [00:13:19] Speaker B: So at first what happened, because my mother is not a big computer user, having a lot of bandwidth for her didn't make sense at first. But now that we have these cameras, you have to make sure that that bandwidth matches the need of the camera. So we have five cameras in house, which is considered a small network, three to five. And each one of those cameras, depending on what they're set for, you can do 720p, which is 720 pixels pictures per minute. You can, that's a small version of a camera and it only requires about 1.2 megabits of bandwidth. [00:13:57] Speaker A: Gotcha. [00:13:57] Speaker B: So if you're doing a house and you've got 300 MHz of bandwidth, you need to subtract that from that list for every device that you might have. So when I say device, I don't mean just cameras. If you bring a phone or you got a computer set up, or if you have a wireless router or something like that, then you takes away from your bandwidth items. So when mom's alone, she's only got her computer, she has a watch and a phone. Three devices. So each one of those devices requires a little bit of bandwidth to operate from. Primarily now we have to add five cameras to that. So as you can see, that number can go way up. If you're doing high resolution, 1080p kind of things, it goes from 1.2 megabits to 2 megabits. And so you can have situations where you have multiple cameras set up and you might need extra bandwidth. You should talk to your security provider about what they require. I think we're going to put a cheat sheet that I kind of came up with into the show notes later on. That kind of gives you a way to start and start thinking about this. [00:15:04] Speaker A: That'll be helpful. [00:15:05] Speaker B: How much bandwidth you have in your house equates to how operable your cameras will be. And if you have people come in, like on a holiday with lots of people coming in with their own devices, guess what? Their bandwidth needs add to your network. So you can have issues. This also means things like Roku's and Apple TVs. They take bandwidth. So you can see if you list all the things in your house now that might take some bandwidth up, you can add up to dozens of devices really quickly. Especially if you're inviting people into your house. [00:15:39] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:15:40] Speaker B: And they're bringing their bandwidth needs to it. [00:15:43] Speaker A: Especially even if you're like on an old, an older Internet connection. Like a year or so ago, I got away from an AT&T landline, and on a good day, I might have had 25 megabits down. And that gets eaten up really quickly when you start talking about a whole bunch of cameras, Right? [00:15:59] Speaker B: Yes. So you have to start measuring that. It's a bit of math. You know, if you really want to be robust about it, for every device you have, think of 5 megabits of bandwidth. So if you have a dozen of those devices, okay, five times 12, that can get you into 60 or 70 megabits of bandwidth. Now add on the computers you might be having. If they've done an update or if they're pulling down video or you're doing a studio thing like we're doing, then you can easily exceed, you know, a simple 24 megabit connection. With a basic cable, you can overwhelm it pretty quickly. Even the higher end stuff, the things that are 100 or 200, can get really down there as far as that's concerned too. So you gotta be careful. And so I was noticing issues when I was in the house. When other people came into the house with my mom, they brought their cameras and their things in and maybe they would, mom would let them get into our network, then that would take away from the camera views. So the caretaker you're inviting in to help mom and she connects to your network now, her device devices are on your bandwidth and so you need to make sure you account for that. So I'm probably going to have to go back to my provider for mom and get her bandwidth moved up so I can get more dependable cameras. That's really important. Most of these cameras are done wirelessly now. And so you're not just connected to the Internet connection you have to your home because they're wireless. They're using wireless bandwidth and constrictions and restrictions and capacity in it. And so if you're on Wi Fi 5, you probably can overwhelm your network with just five or six different devices. But if you're on Wi Fi 6, that limit goes from five or six devices to say 30 or 40 devices of robust connectivity. So most people are on Wi Fi 5 and will see issues like this. So you need to change your WI FI standard too. Everybody should be moving to Wi Fi 6. And frankly, if you can buy a Device that's Wi Fi 7, which just got released earlier this year, you need to think about that because they must have much more robust capabilities and can withstand lots of devices on them all at the same time, that kind of thing. [00:18:18] Speaker A: Yeah, good point. Very good point. I mean, I'm guilty of this. If something's working, I don't like to mess with it. But I just realized the other day, like the router that, the router that we're using right this minute, it is five years old. And you know, after a while things start to degrade. I've noticed I've had to reboot this thing a lot more lately and I just went out and bought two new Eeros. I'm going to go ahead and mention that brand which have updated WI FI standards on them and two of those were less than what this other one cost five years ago. So it's, you know, it's, it's not minimal, I mean not completely minimal to Upgrade, but it's not as expensive as it used to be. Not to mention the setup as a whole, a whole lot easier than it used to be if you need to change out your WI fi. WI FI adapter. [00:19:04] Speaker B: And distance makes a difference in WI fi too. So if you're closer to the router, you get more capability and more speed. If you're farther away, you get less. And that, that less capacity can add on to cameras not working. It can add on to things not connecting when they should. So you have to be careful about that. And frankly, most good providers, we have spectrum in the area, they offer WI fi, six kinds of routers, and you should take advantage of them. Some of them, yeah, comes from the provider. Yeah, you should definitely do that, even if you don't. You know, the Euro is a very good device to do that kind of thing because it manages how many devices you have in your network. You can actually see how many you have with an iPhone, app or something like that. And so my thought would be that that can solve many people's problems is what WI fi are you using? And if it's Wi Fi 4 or 5, go get a euro, you're talking a hundred bucks, maybe on sale, you can get it for 60, and it's worth every penny. And then again, check with your provider because they can often provide you with a wireless connection that's Wi Fi 6 or greater. [00:20:11] Speaker A: One thing I wanted to mention too, about eero, and there are other brands who do this too, but these are just ones that I happen to like, is that they do something called mesh WI Fi. Yes, they, they usually, I guess traditionally you had a WI fi access point in your house that was attached to either the modem that came in from the provider, or maybe you attacked. Maybe it was part of the router that came from your provider and it was one place in your house. And like Bobby said, the things where you're close to that, that that access point did great, but things where you were farther away, like devices that you had that were maybe on the far end of the house or something, maybe didn't get quite as much speed or weren't as stable. What EERO has tried to do is made something called a mesh network where you can have these little repeaters that you. That you put throughout your house that will extend that signal further out through your house or your property or wherever you're trying to do this. And they made them where they're expandable. You can, you can work just fine with one eero, just like a regular wifi access point. But if you buy more and place them where the app tells you to place them, then you can extend your network way across in a whole lot better. That's some things to think about. If you're going through this and you want to do cameras like Bobby's done, where you can kind of keep an eye on things from a distance. I can highly recommend a mesh network if you've got them spread out. For sure. [00:21:36] Speaker B: Yeah. And places where you have houses that have multiple levels, houses that are longer maybe than the typical 4 to 500ft that you might see with a router than a circular kind of coverage, you need to consider that those things can improve performance and make it much easier for you to get consistent capability and bandwidth throughout your house. So if you haven't done that, if you haven't, I think there are even apps that will tell you where the gaps are. You can actually see them when you go around and notice that your WI fi is not as powerful as. But there. There are apps that would actually document and give you suggestions of what you can do about that kind of stuff. [00:22:13] Speaker A: There you go. So, like Tom Cruise said in Risky Business, if you had the means, I highly recommend it. [00:22:20] Speaker B: Yep, yep, yep. [00:22:23] Speaker A: Oh, good. Good deal, man. Well, that's great. So two. Two good wins there and lots of good advice about cameras and bandwidth issues and WI fi all around. I want to talk about a win I had this week. Cool. So I think last. Last time we were together, we talked a little bit about that There was a new feature for iOS 18 called Screen Sharing and FaceTime. [00:22:44] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:22:44] Speaker A: Actually got a chance to use it and it saved me a ton of time. I was talking with my. With my aunt the other day, and she was having some trouble, I think, connecting to the WI FI in her. In her alf. And she was talking to me on the phone, just over cellular, and I said, you know, well, let me take a look at things. She said, what do you mean? I said, well, hang with me here for a second. I'm going to put you on FaceTime. So I gave her, you know, I hit the FaceTime button and, you know, she picked it up and I could see her face. And I said, okay, in a second you're going to see some messages on the screen, and I want you to just reply to them, tell me what they say, and I want you to. I'll tell you what to do. So I hit screen sharing and there is an option there about either sharing my screen or requesting access to see her screen. I Hit Request Access. She said, okay, it's asking me if you can do this. I'm like, yep, that's great. Go ahead, do that. And so bam. I could see her cell phone screen on my screen over FaceTime. And that was, that was killer. So I had her move around a little bit and I can make sure it was working good. And that was great. But I needed to go to her settings and make some changes. So I hit the little button in the, in the corner in FaceTime that said request Control and it popped up on her side, asked her if she wanted to give control to me. She said yes. And it was just like, I had her phone in my hand. I could move around, I could go to settings, I could make changes. So it's. She literally lives an hour and 15 minutes away from me. So just being able to give her a call, go into settings, make a quick change for her literally saved me at least three hours, probably more time to go up there and do that by hand. Not to mention scheduling it and working around everything else that's going on. So, my goodness, we've been waiting way too long for this. And to finally see it in action has been fantastic. I gotta say. [00:24:39] Speaker B: Yeah, when I. We can do this on a Mac. You've been able to do it on a Mac for a while. And when I discovered this, this was life changing too, because I don't know if any of our callers have done this before. You will have a. Aha. Yeah, I've done that moment when you're on your phone with your loved one and they, you don't know what they're looking at. And you have to ask them to describe what they see, what they're doing, what they're looking at, where they're looking at. You know, it can change a simple thing like, oh, I know. Hanging up the phone can take an extra five minutes because you're trying to tell them it's the red button that says leave. It's the red button that says, I'll hang up. Instead of just saying, hey, you're in the wrong place on the other side over here. That really helps. So these are features we need as caregivers and for text. Any vendors listed in this, you need to wrap all this stuff up and put it in a package. Because we will buy, it, will pay 2x for it. I mean, because these are the kind of things that really make sense for us, to help us, our loved ones, get through it. And it's, I think it's just the time of it Right. So what are we buried? What generation are we? I guess we're exes. We're exes. [00:25:47] Speaker A: Yep. [00:25:48] Speaker B: Baby boomers are the people we're helping. They need this bag. [00:25:52] Speaker A: Yeah, they do. [00:25:53] Speaker B: So definitely we use those kind of products and there's a variety of products. I think we talked about a few of them before on the Mac side House. Now that that has come to iPhone iOS. Wonderful. Yeah. [00:26:03] Speaker A: What you said about trying to imagine their screen just cracked me up. I can remember my wife laughing at me one time because I was on the phone with my dad and he was trying to explain something that was going on his phone. And I'm sitting here in my chair, I have my eyes closed and I'm in this kind of, I don't know, monk mode, trying to visualize in my mind what his screen looks like. [00:26:20] Speaker B: What his screen looks like. What color is that button? Jeez. [00:26:23] Speaker A: Getting questions about to tell me how to do it and just imagining what's going on. It's like, yeah, this is too much. [00:26:28] Speaker B: If anybody does this for a while, things, hey, this the left hand corner in the top side next to the green button. You get this, you just rattles those off. You've been through hell, you know, it's been. We were sorry. We're sorry. [00:26:39] Speaker A: Oh, wow, that's great. Well, okay, well, I'm gonna move on from that one because that one's a good win. A friend of the show, I'm gonna call him Stefan. He pointed out to me the other day I saw him and he. That a couple of episodes back I was going to tell a story about getting an Internet connected thermostat connected. And I got distracted during the conversation and we were. Went off on a different tangent altogether and apparently I never got back to it. So this is for Stefan. Oh, let me, let me, let me give a little bit of background here. My, My wife's mom is in an assisted living facility and she moved from her house and property a few hours away, just put it that way. And right now there's. There's no one living there and has some relatives and neighbors who come by and take a look at the place occasionally. But. And we have some other relatives who come by and, you know, do a few things around the house from time to time. But it's a long way away to get there physically and do anything. And over the years, the air conditioning system and the furnace system in there had an old school thermostat. So at the change of the seasons, you would pick a time when you would Switch it over from cool to heat and vice versa. And you know that that's just the way things were. Well, these days things are a little bit more easy to make those changes from a distance. So what we did is we called the heating and air in that area and ask them if they would come out and connect a digital thermostat. And most of these these days have the ability to connect to the Internet so that from a distance you can control that thermostat. You can set up schedules if you want to, you can switch over from heat to cool, or you can just set it up so it's automatic and it takes care of itself. So the company did it, they installed this thing, but then they let us know, hey, we, we got it installed, but we can't connect it to your house's Internet because we don't know anything about your passwords. And of course we don't want to give anybody, just random people the passwords to the, to the WI FI there. So we took a trip, physically, we were headed that way anyway for, for a little tiny vacation. We stopped by the house and literally it maybe took 10 minutes to get this thing going. It consisted of going in, looking at the brand of the thing and I think we had the package that it came in. There's some simple instructions here about either scan this QR code with your phone or go to this Internet address and pull down an app for the phone. We pulled down the app, followed the instructions about connecting a thermostat. It asked us to go over to the thermostat, hold a few buttons down till a code came up. We typed that code into the app. It went through a few little steps where it connected to that thermostat and then said, hey, what WI FI network do you want to connect this to? Since my phone already knew about the WI FI network in that house, I was able to just pick, pick that one and it said, done, not a problem. So it really quickly connected that, that thermostat to the WI fi and then it prompted me to make a little account for the app. And within five to 10 minutes I was controlling the weather inside that house. I was able to control, I was able to give those account details to my wife and to my sister in law and any of us can, can reach, reach out across the Internet and change the weather in that house now. So which is good. But what we really did though, since not a lot of people are there, we set a schedule for it so that it would, we made sure that it stays on automatic and that the. The furnace comes on when it needs to and the AC comes on when it needs to. And better yet, we just don't have to bother with it. So highly recommend that. And so there you go. Stefan wanted to let you know what the. What the details were. Let's see here. Those are a lot of good wins and we, we've been doing good with those, but we've had a few. I've had a few tech fails this week. [00:30:23] Speaker B: Yeah. Because failure helps you learn too. [00:30:26] Speaker A: Yes, this is true. This is true. So I've got. Got two small ones and you may have something to add to this. So big automatic updates are jarring now. I can't say that upgrading to iOS 18 is a fail because there's so many really cool, cool features that have come along and helpful features. But I got this phone call the other day and it was my aunt calling. She said. She said, barry, something just was really odd with my phone the other day. I put it on the charger and I woke up and I picked it up that next morning and there were all these crazy languages on the screen. It took me aback for just a second. Tell me, tell me what it was doing. Well, it was saying hello, and then it was saying Ben, Vienna. And it was, you know, great, yen. It was doing a whole bunch of different things. And I was like, okay, I know what's going on. So if you're not an iPhone person, if you are, you've probably already seen this. But on major updates, usually when it updates the operating system, it will come up to the hello screen. It's kind of a famous thing with Apple. It says hello, and it takes the time to go and print out the word hello in about 15 or 20 different languages. And it just kind of goes through that. Nothing special. You open the phone up like you normally would. You maybe have to hit a continue button or something, but that's it. So. But it really freaked my aunt out. She looked at it, she's like, I don't know if I've been hacked. What's going on? It's kind of crazy. So she went and found one of the tech people in her assisted living facility and said, what is going on my phone? And the person smiled and, you know, opened it up, hit continue and let it go. So what? Really a big deal. But it's something that I think if you're into tech, you don't think about if you have relatives or elderly loved ones who are not into that and don't understand what's going on. It can be really jarring. And I understand it. You know, all of a sudden there's weird stuff on my phone that I don't understand, you know? [00:32:20] Speaker B: Yeah. This brings me back to a kind of a policy I have in my own life. So I know I'm the tech guy in my family, you know, that I've got, you know, my wife and my sister are equally capable in lots of ways, but they're all going to look at me and go, is this safe to do? So I need to have a device or set up a practice where I try to update to see what they're like and sort of figure out what to expect. So for my mom, I don't want her ever to have to go something and click on something cold and figure out if it works. So I make a plan every so often. Okay, I'm going to check to see if she has updates. I'm going to see what they do. I'm going to try them before she tries them and kind of give her, okay, this is going to happen. Don't worry about it. It's okay. And so there are ways for you to do that now, There are actually ways that companies do that in places where they prevent people from going to the next update until they approve it. I'm not saying you're trying to do that, but you do need to be aware. So when you see that update come up, realize that update is going to also come up for your mom's phone, your dad's phone, and so what do you want to say to them about that? So not saying you have to be early adopter, but you certainly can't wait for months for this to happen. You have to plan for this to happen and you want to do it deliberately. [00:33:44] Speaker A: Stay ahead of the game, really take. [00:33:46] Speaker B: Deliberate steps instead of being accidentally put in the situation where you're 300 miles away and you don't know what happened because of that update. Yeah, it's one of the reasons why I choose things like Apple because they normally are pretty sound about that. I've heard some nightmare stories about other phones and other OSs that have issues with phone updates or maybe never get them, but we won't get into those flavors. But you still need to realize what your lovers are going to expect. So if you have somebody with an Android phone, it might make sense for you to pay attention when the next update for Android comes out and whether they get it or not. So just be aware. [00:34:22] Speaker A: Yeah. And even little things, you know, it's not really A fail here. With big upgrades, there's still some unexpected things that you may not. Might not even catch, or it might be so normal for you that you don't even think about it as being a problem for them. When it hit me with my. With my dad, I was up to see him the other day. And the last time I was up there, I had upgraded him to iOS 18 while I was there and made sure everything was cool. It was during the day, it looked fine, looked beautiful. We went through several of his normal things that he does make sure he could do them was cool. So he called me the next day. She said. He said, since this. Since you upgraded this phone, it's doing weird stuff. And I'm like, well, what do you mean? Well, my icons, they're. They're not the same color. They're all black, but they're all black. I don't understand dark mode. So one of the things that happened when I upgraded my dad is there was this. There's a switch on the display settings that lets you decide whether or not you want to go into dark mode in the evening to kind of save your eyesight. So it doesn't keep you didn't blind you in a dim house or if you're outside. And it's something that I don't think it was ever turned on on his phone before, but the upgrade to iOS 18 set that automatically for him. So finally saw what it was the other day when I was up there, and I was like, okay, I get it now. I see what's going on. So take two seconds to flip it around to say, stay in light mode all the time, because that's what he's used to. But, you know, little things to look out for, like that, you know, they're still going to be odd things, and now that you can kind of check on it from a distance without having to go over there. But that's very. [00:35:55] Speaker B: I can really help. And yeah, so you got to be careful with little. With any change for my mom is a huge change for her because of what her situation is. But also just baby boomers don't like that kind of change. They want it to be simple and unchanging and the answering the phone is the same way. Answer the phone from, you know, time we were little to the time we are now. So the smartphone is nice because it has an adaptability to change and to. To your scenario and settings, but that change is jarring for some people, so you just have to watch that. [00:36:29] Speaker A: And I don't know if It's a, if it's a, if it's a thing with all boomers or not, but the boomers in my family who are having these kind of tech things, tech issues are prone to, let's say prone to hyperbole. [00:36:44] Speaker B: Yes. They make the change much bigger than it really is. [00:36:47] Speaker A: It is. This thing's doing crazy things. It's doing, it's going crazy. What do you mean by crazy? Well, all my icons are darker than they used to be. Okay, that's crazy. Yeah. So it might not be as big a problem as it seems, but you know, could be just my relatives. I don't, you know, just one of those. [00:37:03] Speaker B: Yeah, it's, it's one of the simple things. You gotta just. [00:37:08] Speaker A: Yep, yep. So on a non electronic technology bit, I had another fail this week. Mechanical timers. You ever dealt with the mechanical timers for like turning on lamps and stuff like that when you're out of the house or when you're away? [00:37:22] Speaker B: Yeah, I have some history of that. So. Go on. I'm curious to what you, what you ran into. [00:37:27] Speaker A: So if you don't know what they are, they're, they're these little timers that you can buy. The technology in them is very old, but you, you can, you can pick them up for 10 bucks or less. Usually you plug them into the outlet in the wall and then you'd say maybe plug a lamp into that, that timer and there's this mechanical dial where you set the current time and then these little, these little buttons, a circle of little tiny buttons that could be in two states, they can be pulled back, pulled out, or they could be pushed in. And if you go around the dial, I think it's maybe 30 minute increments all the way around or maybe even more increments than that, I can't remember. But it's the entire day, it's 24 hours around the circle. And pushing or pulling these things up helps you set the state of the timer. So. And in this case I literally can't remember if it's down for on or up for on. And thus the problem, I could not remember this. I set one of these up for my, for my aunt's house. I wanted to make, I wanted to make, make this scene where, you know, in the evenings when it's just about dark time, I wanted a lamp to come on in her front room and you know, stay on to, I don't know, maybe 10 o'clock at night or so, then roughly around the same time that that thing goes off. Or maybe a little bit before I want another lamp to pop on in her bedroom. So maybe it looks like she's in there reading or something, so. And then it stays on for a few hours and then goes off. So. Wanted to happen, wanted that to happen every day. These little mechanical timers flummoxed me. I had the hardest time figuring out, even from the instructions, which were tee tiny and not very. Not very straightforward. Had the hardest time figuring out which part of the dial had to do with the daytime, what part of the dial had to do with the nighttime. Whether or not pushing the things in meant that the switch was on, or pulling them out meant the switch was on. I thought I had it all right. And I get a call like a week later from a neighbor, says, you know, there's lights coming on in your aunt's house, like at 2 in the morning. And I'm like, surely, surely, I got that right. But apparently not. So those things kind of beat me down. I need to pay more attention, obviously. But some of these things can. Can be a little bit more complicated than you think. [00:39:33] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:39:34] Speaker A: It seems like such a simple thing. [00:39:35] Speaker B: And you can overdo it, you know. [00:39:37] Speaker A: Yep. Yeah, you can. It's true. [00:39:40] Speaker B: Yeah. Lights on, 2:00 in the morning. Nah, probably not a good idea. Maybe even, you know. So my mom gets upset with the alarm, telling her that it's on or off, and it's like people talking to her out of nowhere. So if I turn it on remotely, I have to call her first and say, hey, I'm getting ready to do this. [00:40:03] Speaker A: There's going to be a voice in your house. [00:40:04] Speaker B: There's going to be a voice commanding from somewhere that says things like alarm on and ready to arm. Something like that. So you have to be aware that people live in your space. And sometimes complicated is not always the right answer. Sometimes it's just simple. [00:40:21] Speaker A: Yeah, sometimes it is. You got any more? You got any fails for this week? [00:40:26] Speaker B: You're making me think of some things off the top of my head. I know. One of the things that I've actually been thinking about in some ways is how to. How to mimic things. And I'm not in my house, you know? You know, you do think about, okay, how do I make people think that somebody's here and think twice about this? So which light in the house do you leave on? Or do you have something that could mimic a TV being on? So there's actually a device, I think, that was out there. I have to find and put it in the show. Notes that is a device you plug in and it does multi lights and gives the appearance that I tell television is on. So you can do a lot of stuff like that. So but I think the thing that's the most important is from a tech point of view is making sure you have your neighbors phone numbers and cell numbers so that you could text them and they can text you when they see things. And you know, that's the simplest things. So the package arrives and you're out on a seven day vacation and you want to avoid porch pirates. You can text your neighbor and say hey, can you mind just putting that in another place? So I would encourage people that look for the simple answers. Yeah, most of the time they're way better than a complicated device anyway. [00:41:36] Speaker A: That's good advice. Good advice because I have way over complicated a lot of things with things like home automation assistance and having Alexa do things for me and you know, you're right, simple is better. Simple is better for sure. [00:41:53] Speaker B: And there are a lot of hidden features on some devices that you kind of need to elect. My home pod will listen in if you want. If it hears a strange noise like in the alarm, it'll let you know and you should take advantage of that. Your Alexa device can do an intercom. So explore those kind of options because they can solve things that don't out there. And instead of spending a lot of money on stuff that probably complicates your life, yeah, it'll work. But you know, now you added another bandwidth to your house, another complication to your life. Another is this dip switch up or down for yes or no. [00:42:22] Speaker A: So and two, even if you want to go, go complicated like that, go, go slowly, slowly, go easy, go easy. Don't go all in at this at the beginning because you might decide that that's not what it's not for you. And one thing I always like to tell people too is like if you're going to set up complicated things, you better make sure somebody else besides you. [00:42:46] Speaker B: Knows how, knows how to deal with it. I think you've talked about that before. [00:42:49] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:42:50] Speaker B: Documenting your administrative life is important. Telling people how to do that, including others in that too. [00:42:57] Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. [00:42:58] Speaker B: So it was really important that my wife know how to set up, you know, assistive access. Then it's not just me. So she's making her own decisions and I learned a lot from what she was doing. So include your people in this. [00:43:10] Speaker A: So yeah, for sure. Okay. Well, I've got one last thing I want to talk about for today. In this is, this is not tech related at all. This is more about brain. Your brain and your body and your emotions and those kinds of things. We try to cover the gamut here. And this is, this is something different. So I was at dinner the other night with some friends and my friend Ellen, I think we mentioned her early on. I think in the first couple of episodes Ellen mentioned to me that she's having some trouble letting things go. You know, she's had trouble with, you know, working through her parents being in assisted living. One of her, one of her parents passed away not too long ago and she has a lot of trouble relaxing and sleeping. And it reminded me of something that, that my therapist taught me actually. So I've said this before in other episodes, but I'm going to go through it again and give you a pointer to some specific advice here. So when you are under stress constantly for a long time, your body and your brain start to think that this is normal. And you know, a lot of us have been there. We, when you, when things are coming at us all the time, you're used to that keyed up thing. And especially if you're dealing with, with parents or loved ones going through these big transitions in life, you can, can, you can understand what I'm talking about. You probably feel it. So like I said, your brain start, your body and your brain start to think that this, this is normal. And our bodies and our brains hate change. Even for the good change, you know, even for the good. So the thing is when things change for the good and maybe even kind of lighten up a bit and you're not as, you're not getting these stressors hitting you, hitting you all the time. Our brains, they have this bad habit of starting to look for things to be wrong or expect things to go wrong just to feel normal. It's kind of weird, isn't it? You know, it's, it's a, it's trying to, trying to get back to stasis. I get. Yes. So my therapist gave me a progressive muscle relaxation exercise to do to kind of help reset the expectation of what normal is. And it's something that you do it, you do it for a week or two, just a few minutes a day. But I can attest that it does work. It's one of those things that, you know, takes a few minutes. It's, it's kind of doing something for yourself and it might be, might be something good for our listeners. So it's, it's more than we can put in the podcast. Here today, but I'm going to do a couple things. I'm going to put a link in the show, notes to some instructions, written instructions on how you can do it yourself. And hopefully a few hours after this episode is published, I'm going to publish a special episode that is me guiding you through that technique. Just wanted to make it a special episode so that you could save it if you need to. You could keep it on your phone. And then when you need to do the exercise, you can just listen to my voice telling you how to do it. So I think hopefully that'll be something that some folks can get some use out of and it might help you get to reset that normal for your body and your brain. So keep a lookout for that special episode. [00:46:16] Speaker B: Yeah, I agree with the idea that your body can start to look for patterns, and when you start not seeing those patterns, sometimes that causes anxiety. So I highly recommend that you find something. If you don't do what Barry's asking, you do find something that resets your equilibrium to a point where you can know what relax is. So, yeah, it's really important to do that. [00:46:41] Speaker A: That's a good thing. It's a good thing for sure. Well, I think that's all I've got for today. You got anything else? [00:46:46] Speaker B: I have this one thing now. If you like what you heard, if you like the conversation that we've had, then you should reward us. Give us a rating of high rating so they'll just know what you. What you like. And then go ahead and subscribe to that so you can get our downloads from podcasts from whether you like it, you know, your favorite podcaster alike. That really helps us spread the word about our show. We want the community to grow and the community gives answers. We have an email address that you can send stuff to. You can look in our show notes to do that and go ahead and subscribe, give us a rating. Make sure you let us know what we're doing right and what we're doing wrong. [00:47:20] Speaker A: Yeah. And pick one friend that you think could use it and give them a. Shoot them a link to the show. [00:47:25] Speaker B: Absolutely. [00:47:25] Speaker A: That'd be awesome. Okay, everybody. Well, thank you for being with us here for episode eight of Care Tech and Tips. And we'll be back in a couple of weeks. Take care. [00:47:33] Speaker B: Hopefully, I guess in the. We're close to the new year. [00:47:36] Speaker A: We're getting there. That's right. All right, take care, everybody. Bye.