The idea is that spammers often use fake e-mail addresses, fake domains, etc. When the mail server receives an e-mail from a user for the first time, it delays accepting the e-mail and sends back a code to the server the e-mail is ostensibly from, saying essentially "I didn't get the e-mail. Sorry. Please try resending."
Real e-mail servers have this protection built in, and they just resend. Once the e-mail has been properly resent, the greylist program stores the information in a database and lets future e-mails through.
But if the spammer is spoofing the domain of the sender, the ostensible mail server will say "What? I didn't send that e-mail. I don't know what you are talking about." And then the spam is never delivered.
So this is not quite asking a question that legitimate recipients would know, but it is asking a question of the ostensible sender's email server that a real server would know.
The only downside is a delay in not getting an initial e-mail from someone. This might be several minutes or hours until it is resent. And if course it does not filter out all spam. But it filters out a lot.
Open the Phone App: Launch the Phone app on your Android device.
Access Settings: Tap the three-dot menu icon in the top right corner and select Settings.
Select Call Screen: Look for the Call Screen option in the settings menu and tap on it.
Configure Options: You can enable or disable automatic call screening. If your device supports manual screening, you can choose to handle the screening yourself by toggling the option off. If you prefer automatic screening, leave it enabled.
Choose Protection Level: You can select the level of protection you want:
Maximum Protection: Screens all numbers not in your contact list and automatically declines spam.
Medium Protection: Screens suspicious calls and automatically declines spam.
Basic Protection: Automatically declines known spam.
Also, I've converted my landline phone to an internet phone using MagicJack. It was $39 a year when I signed up for a decade or so, slightly more now. It requires the caller to tap a number before getting put through. Robo dialers can't do this.
2. Conversations with Strangers
I talk to Lyft drivers all the time. You can tell whether a conversation is worth continuing by their response to something simple, like your observation of the weather. Most people are more interesting than you'd think, and it's easy to shut off if you change your mind.
3. A Sleep Switch.
You can set a sleep timer for Audible books. Here's how:
While playing an audiobook, tap the timer icon and select a pre-set time or customize your own. The audiobook will then stop playing when the timer reaches zero.
Here's a more detailed breakdown:
Open the Audible app and start playing a book: Make sure the book you want to listen to is actively playing.
Locate the timer icon: This is usually found within the player controls, often represented by a clock or timer symbol.
Select a time: Choose from the pre-set options (e.g., 15, 30, 45 minutes) or create a custom time by manually setting the duration.
The timer will start: Once you've selected a time, the timer will begin counting down.
Audible will stop automatically: When the timer reaches zero, the audiobook will stop playing.
4. Dishwashers
Maybe when dishwashers are as smart or as interesting as computers, this feature will be more universally in demand. Many people order their computer from someone who puts together the parts, and you can examine all those part offerings on Amazon and elsewhere. I prefer washing dishes by hand, unless it's for a big group.
Yes, it's the foreigners who are often the most interesting, though during Covid I talked to a former restaurant manager of a large place who told me about how the owner decided everyone should be paid the same out of "fairness," from the busboy on up. He quit. I also learned a lot about his interesting relationship with his girlfriend, who was nice in every way but unnervingly quiet. Her family was the same way. He hit on one topic that brought her father out of his shell, something specific, like boats in a bottle, and wondered when next he went back, how on earth would he continue the conversation because that appeared to be it, interest-wise.
My most interesting conversation with a stranger was a flight from Bombay to Sidney talking with a woman who I started talking with in the airport. She was from southern India, flying out to join her MD husband. It had been an arranged marriage, which to her was the norm. Obviously an intelligent, educated, woman from a very different culture.
I had an acquaintance in college whose parents were from India. She believed: "Your parents know you best, and know best who would suit you, and they have the connections to make it happen. Why wouldn't they know best, given their maturity and life experiences?"
The best story I ever got from a Lyft/Uber driver: My driver said that once he felt unusually tired and decided not to take the last ride of the day. It went to a guy who was killed with an axe by a 16-year-old girl who had escaped from a mental institution. She'd stolen the axe from Walmart. My driver felt very badly about it. "If I'd taken that ride, I would have made her put the axe in the trunk," he said. https://www.chicagotribune.com/2020/08/25/chicago-teen-sentenced-to-27-years-for-killing-uber-driver-with-knife-machete-when-she-was-16/
It took me a while because I was looking at settings on the phone not on the phone app, but I found it. The only options are block all spam and spam calls or only block high-risk spam calls. The protection level doesn't seem to exist on my version of Android.
Bosch do not require you to connect your dishwasher to WiFi. You can use all the normal functions without the need to connect through an app to remotely control/change etc any operation.
Some Bosch models some of the control options are only available through the app. Beyond that, my wife and daughter are more paranoid on the subject than I am, worry that at some point it will be possible to access the machine remotely without our having connected it.
I have a safe sentinel which sends an SMS if it detects motion or light. They charge $5 a month, but no specific carrier or credentials to enter. Apparently they've got some deal with all carriers to sneak in very tiny messages -- time/date maybe, temperature, cause of alert, battery charge.
Bosch could probably do something the same to void the warranty if used more than twice a day or some other rate which implies commercial use instead of home. But the extra cost per machine hardly seems worth the trouble, when a simple internal use counter would do the trick too.
I had a thought yesterday about spam calls. I used to hang up right away for unknown number, but that doesn't let them leave a message, so I just let it ring; I'd like a third answer button, yellow, which would silence the ringing but otherwise continue as if I had done nothing.
I also sometimes answer the call, say in a hurry "Who's this?", put it on mute and speaker, and see what happens.
What I would like is a button after having answered which plays back an audio recording and hangs up. I would set mine to me yelling, "Where the F* did you come from", the sound of a car crash, sirens, and so on. Or someone yelling, "Can't you read the sign? NO PHONES!" and a couple of gunshots, screaming, footsteps running, and a siren. The only real problem is that the caller might think it his duty to call 9-1-1.
There is an app which almost accomplishes one of these tasks. There's an audiobook reader ('smart audiobook player') which monitors for phone movement and will turn off the audiobook after an extended period without movement. It's not a guarantee you're asleep but it's not a bad way of guessing.
The downside vs what you're suggesting is it requires leaving your phone on your bed instead of integrating with your smart watch.
More than 20 years ago I had a similar thought--that a person's phone number and email address could be thought of as property that each person could determine a price for someone else to use. And, this price could vary depending upon who is calling with an easy way to provide refunds and adjust the caller's next-call charge, to $0.00 for friends, family, business associates, or businesses you want to hear from, and to some other amount for those who you are less interested in communicating with.
There are some issues with regard to unknown callers who may have vitally important information for you, but those might be resolvable by adding a workaround for certain calls--think emergency services, police, etc.
I was told, at the time, that the payment and refunding schema would be impracticable and unworkable, but it seems now, with cryptocurrency facilitating potentially near costless small transactions (Bitcoin’s Lightning Network or Ethereum’s Raiden) this might now be viable.
Probably the most straightforward path for implementing this would be via governmental mandate, but, I understand you would prefer a strictly tech or market-driven approach.
The helpful-unknown-caller case has to be handled carefully. "I found your cat, but I'm not paying a deposit to call you about it" or your doctor's office (calling from a different number than the incoming line; this happens to me a lot) telling you they need to reschedule you. Employees at businesses probably aren't authorized to spend that nickel or dime or whatever so they'll just hang up.
I don't know what the solution would be, but it feels like we'd want to do some user research.
I think the Ozlo Sleepbuds do something pretty similar to what you want for the audio as you go to sleep - and they then optionally fade in some sort of masking noise to help you stay asleep in places where you might otherwise be woken by extraneous sounds.
As Joy said, Android already does that with call screening, it's just not enabled by default. It basically has an "virtual assistant" answer the phone of anyone that isn't in your contacts and alerts you if you should pick it up.
On that last one, TBH I just want a dishwasher that works. Not sure if you have heard of the "Technology Connections" guy but you and him are in the same wavelength on household appliances. Might want to check him out:
Wrt Bosch. We have a Bosch. When we need to, we'd replace it with another Bosch. Like you, I would not want it to connect to WiFi. My local network is based on eero mesh routers. The eero app lets me selectively disable local connections. Which I would do (with prejudice :) to the dishwasher ...
The one we are replacing is a Bosch and we were never very happy with it. At this point, the cost to fix everything wrong with it is nearly a thousand dollars.
Sadly, no (opinion): our Bosch has just kept chugging along and I have not been disposed (yet) to consider alternatives when it does reach EOL. But, I probably now will do some investigating one of these days (including Miele): it's a poor customer experience to have a built-in "phone home" that cannot be disabled on the unit itself. (I suspect that they justify it in the name of providing troubleshooting support or for gathering data for product improvement.) If that's where Bosch wants to go, I probably should entertain alternatives (even if I can disable it at the router).
Spotify has a feature to turn off sound after a set amount of time. If you know you fall asleep within say 30 minutes, you can use that as a low tech substitute to your falling asleep problem
I heard #2 proposed as a possible future dating app way before there were ubiquitous smartphones making that actually possible. No idea why nobody actually did (or if they did why it fizzled).
As for #3, the Spotify Premium app (and I think many others) has a timer that you can use to stop it from playing after a preset amount of time, which is close enough for most purposes, and I suspect you could rig something exactly like what you describe by joining a sleep-tracking app and a media app through IFTTT or Zapier or something
To block spam calls on your Android phone, you can utilize the built-in caller ID and spam protection features, or use third-party apps like Truecaller. The built-in feature allows you to block numbers directly from your call history or by adding them to a block list. Additionally, you can enable caller ID and spam protection, which will identify and warn you about potential spam calls, and even automatically block them.
I like the idea of the sleep switch. I suddenly woke up a few nights ago into the third hour of the Karamazov Brothers audiobook that I had put on to help me fall asleep.
Concerning individual specifications for high-end German dishwasher, this is how it works for high-end German cars. It tends to add considerably to the price of the ‘basic’ model, though.
There's a clever spam block that I use called greylisting. Details here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greylisting_(email)
The idea is that spammers often use fake e-mail addresses, fake domains, etc. When the mail server receives an e-mail from a user for the first time, it delays accepting the e-mail and sends back a code to the server the e-mail is ostensibly from, saying essentially "I didn't get the e-mail. Sorry. Please try resending."
Real e-mail servers have this protection built in, and they just resend. Once the e-mail has been properly resent, the greylist program stores the information in a database and lets future e-mails through.
But if the spammer is spoofing the domain of the sender, the ostensible mail server will say "What? I didn't send that e-mail. I don't know what you are talking about." And then the spam is never delivered.
So this is not quite asking a question that legitimate recipients would know, but it is asking a question of the ostensible sender's email server that a real server would know.
The only downside is a delay in not getting an initial e-mail from someone. This might be several minutes or hours until it is resent. And if course it does not filter out all spam. But it filters out a lot.
That works for email but my problem is phone calls which, unlike email, have to be dealt with immediately so interrupt whatever I am doing.
I find the comments section of Substack a good surrogate for conversation with ‘interesting strangers’. Maybe one could build on it.
My equivalent used to be Usenet, then Slate Star Codex, currently Data Secrets Lox.
Which is down?
1. Phone spam
Call screening on Android phones works well.
How to Enable Call Screening
Open the Phone App: Launch the Phone app on your Android device.
Access Settings: Tap the three-dot menu icon in the top right corner and select Settings.
Select Call Screen: Look for the Call Screen option in the settings menu and tap on it.
Configure Options: You can enable or disable automatic call screening. If your device supports manual screening, you can choose to handle the screening yourself by toggling the option off. If you prefer automatic screening, leave it enabled.
Choose Protection Level: You can select the level of protection you want:
Maximum Protection: Screens all numbers not in your contact list and automatically declines spam.
Medium Protection: Screens suspicious calls and automatically declines spam.
Basic Protection: Automatically declines known spam.
Also, I've converted my landline phone to an internet phone using MagicJack. It was $39 a year when I signed up for a decade or so, slightly more now. It requires the caller to tap a number before getting put through. Robo dialers can't do this.
2. Conversations with Strangers
I talk to Lyft drivers all the time. You can tell whether a conversation is worth continuing by their response to something simple, like your observation of the weather. Most people are more interesting than you'd think, and it's easy to shut off if you change your mind.
3. A Sleep Switch.
You can set a sleep timer for Audible books. Here's how:
While playing an audiobook, tap the timer icon and select a pre-set time or customize your own. The audiobook will then stop playing when the timer reaches zero.
Here's a more detailed breakdown:
Open the Audible app and start playing a book: Make sure the book you want to listen to is actively playing.
Locate the timer icon: This is usually found within the player controls, often represented by a clock or timer symbol.
Select a time: Choose from the pre-set options (e.g., 15, 30, 45 minutes) or create a custom time by manually setting the duration.
The timer will start: Once you've selected a time, the timer will begin counting down.
Audible will stop automatically: When the timer reaches zero, the audiobook will stop playing.
4. Dishwashers
Maybe when dishwashers are as smart or as interesting as computers, this feature will be more universally in demand. Many people order their computer from someone who puts together the parts, and you can examine all those part offerings on Amazon and elsewhere. I prefer washing dishes by hand, unless it's for a big group.
Thanks for the information on the timer on Audible. I also talk to cab drivers or Uber drivers, who are often foreigners.
Yes, it's the foreigners who are often the most interesting, though during Covid I talked to a former restaurant manager of a large place who told me about how the owner decided everyone should be paid the same out of "fairness," from the busboy on up. He quit. I also learned a lot about his interesting relationship with his girlfriend, who was nice in every way but unnervingly quiet. Her family was the same way. He hit on one topic that brought her father out of his shell, something specific, like boats in a bottle, and wondered when next he went back, how on earth would he continue the conversation because that appeared to be it, interest-wise.
My most interesting conversation with a stranger was a flight from Bombay to Sidney talking with a woman who I started talking with in the airport. She was from southern India, flying out to join her MD husband. It had been an arranged marriage, which to her was the norm. Obviously an intelligent, educated, woman from a very different culture.
I had an acquaintance in college whose parents were from India. She believed: "Your parents know you best, and know best who would suit you, and they have the connections to make it happen. Why wouldn't they know best, given their maturity and life experiences?"
The best story I ever got from a Lyft/Uber driver: My driver said that once he felt unusually tired and decided not to take the last ride of the day. It went to a guy who was killed with an axe by a 16-year-old girl who had escaped from a mental institution. She'd stolen the axe from Walmart. My driver felt very badly about it. "If I'd taken that ride, I would have made her put the axe in the trunk," he said. https://www.chicagotribune.com/2020/08/25/chicago-teen-sentenced-to-27-years-for-killing-uber-driver-with-knife-machete-when-she-was-16/
It took me a while because I was looking at settings on the phone not on the phone app, but I found it. The only options are block all spam and spam calls or only block high-risk spam calls. The protection level doesn't seem to exist on my version of Android.
David
Just a suggestion.
Bosch do not require you to connect your dishwasher to WiFi. You can use all the normal functions without the need to connect through an app to remotely control/change etc any operation.
Some Bosch models some of the control options are only available through the app. Beyond that, my wife and daughter are more paranoid on the subject than I am, worry that at some point it will be possible to access the machine remotely without our having connected it.
I have a safe sentinel which sends an SMS if it detects motion or light. They charge $5 a month, but no specific carrier or credentials to enter. Apparently they've got some deal with all carriers to sneak in very tiny messages -- time/date maybe, temperature, cause of alert, battery charge.
Bosch could probably do something the same to void the warranty if used more than twice a day or some other rate which implies commercial use instead of home. But the extra cost per machine hardly seems worth the trouble, when a simple internal use counter would do the trick too.
I had a thought yesterday about spam calls. I used to hang up right away for unknown number, but that doesn't let them leave a message, so I just let it ring; I'd like a third answer button, yellow, which would silence the ringing but otherwise continue as if I had done nothing.
I also sometimes answer the call, say in a hurry "Who's this?", put it on mute and speaker, and see what happens.
What I would like is a button after having answered which plays back an audio recording and hangs up. I would set mine to me yelling, "Where the F* did you come from", the sound of a car crash, sirens, and so on. Or someone yelling, "Can't you read the sign? NO PHONES!" and a couple of gunshots, screaming, footsteps running, and a siren. The only real problem is that the caller might think it his duty to call 9-1-1.
There is an app which almost accomplishes one of these tasks. There's an audiobook reader ('smart audiobook player') which monitors for phone movement and will turn off the audiobook after an extended period without movement. It's not a guarantee you're asleep but it's not a bad way of guessing.
The downside vs what you're suggesting is it requires leaving your phone on your bed instead of integrating with your smart watch.
Someone should invent shoelaces that stay tied.
Superglue.
And scissors, and lots of spares.
How would you ever get your shoes off?
More than 20 years ago I had a similar thought--that a person's phone number and email address could be thought of as property that each person could determine a price for someone else to use. And, this price could vary depending upon who is calling with an easy way to provide refunds and adjust the caller's next-call charge, to $0.00 for friends, family, business associates, or businesses you want to hear from, and to some other amount for those who you are less interested in communicating with.
There are some issues with regard to unknown callers who may have vitally important information for you, but those might be resolvable by adding a workaround for certain calls--think emergency services, police, etc.
I was told, at the time, that the payment and refunding schema would be impracticable and unworkable, but it seems now, with cryptocurrency facilitating potentially near costless small transactions (Bitcoin’s Lightning Network or Ethereum’s Raiden) this might now be viable.
Probably the most straightforward path for implementing this would be via governmental mandate, but, I understand you would prefer a strictly tech or market-driven approach.
The helpful-unknown-caller case has to be handled carefully. "I found your cat, but I'm not paying a deposit to call you about it" or your doctor's office (calling from a different number than the incoming line; this happens to me a lot) telling you they need to reschedule you. Employees at businesses probably aren't authorized to spend that nickel or dime or whatever so they'll just hang up.
I don't know what the solution would be, but it feels like we'd want to do some user research.
I think the Ozlo Sleepbuds do something pretty similar to what you want for the audio as you go to sleep - and they then optionally fade in some sort of masking noise to help you stay asleep in places where you might otherwise be woken by extraneous sounds.
As Joy said, Android already does that with call screening, it's just not enabled by default. It basically has an "virtual assistant" answer the phone of anyone that isn't in your contacts and alerts you if you should pick it up.
On that last one, TBH I just want a dishwasher that works. Not sure if you have heard of the "Technology Connections" guy but you and him are in the same wavelength on household appliances. Might want to check him out:
https://youtu.be/jHP942Livy0?si=ML3LqrtjYevwegf9
Him and I disagree on the effectiveness of my dishwasher though lol. He did convince me to stop using pods and use the prewash and it's helped a bit.
Wrt Bosch. We have a Bosch. When we need to, we'd replace it with another Bosch. Like you, I would not want it to connect to WiFi. My local network is based on eero mesh routers. The eero app lets me selectively disable local connections. Which I would do (with prejudice :) to the dishwasher ...
Any opinion on the Miele?
The one we are replacing is a Bosch and we were never very happy with it. At this point, the cost to fix everything wrong with it is nearly a thousand dollars.
Sadly, no (opinion): our Bosch has just kept chugging along and I have not been disposed (yet) to consider alternatives when it does reach EOL. But, I probably now will do some investigating one of these days (including Miele): it's a poor customer experience to have a built-in "phone home" that cannot be disabled on the unit itself. (I suspect that they justify it in the name of providing troubleshooting support or for gathering data for product improvement.) If that's where Bosch wants to go, I probably should entertain alternatives (even if I can disable it at the router).
Spotify has a feature to turn off sound after a set amount of time. If you know you fall asleep within say 30 minutes, you can use that as a low tech substitute to your falling asleep problem
I heard #2 proposed as a possible future dating app way before there were ubiquitous smartphones making that actually possible. No idea why nobody actually did (or if they did why it fizzled).
As for #3, the Spotify Premium app (and I think many others) has a timer that you can use to stop it from playing after a preset amount of time, which is close enough for most purposes, and I suspect you could rig something exactly like what you describe by joining a sleep-tracking app and a media app through IFTTT or Zapier or something
To block spam calls on your Android phone, you can utilize the built-in caller ID and spam protection features, or use third-party apps like Truecaller. The built-in feature allows you to block numbers directly from your call history or by adding them to a block list. Additionally, you can enable caller ID and spam protection, which will identify and warn you about potential spam calls, and even automatically block them.
https://cal.com/
They do scheduling and calender management. And they have so you can setup paid calls.
Having interesting conversations with strangers is easier than its ever been(proof): https://odysee.com/@nly:f/letshearit011:f
I am looking for any type of job, so since im good with computers i would be more than willing to up you out with computer stuff!
I like the idea of the sleep switch. I suddenly woke up a few nights ago into the third hour of the Karamazov Brothers audiobook that I had put on to help me fall asleep.
Concerning individual specifications for high-end German dishwasher, this is how it works for high-end German cars. It tends to add considerably to the price of the ‘basic’ model, though.