Antennas to get free TV over the air

 People seem to have forgotten that broadcast television still exists, and not only is it free, the quality is BETTER than cable, satellite or internet TV,  which is compressed.   ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, Fox are all available free.    And there are none of the disputes between TV stations and cable  companies over fees for "retransmission" causing blackouts and ever-increasing rate hikes.  

Beware the huge amount of scam antennas offered on Amazon and eBay.  Broadcast TV travels "line of sight"   Your antenna must be able to "see" the top of the broadcaster's antenna -- generally on a 1000 ft tower.   Your indoor antenna can work for up to 15 to 25 miles.  An antenna on your roof  up to 75 miles.  That's it.  These below are all scams.

Indoor antennas CAN work.   I use this Philips antenna which gets most of the channels in a bedroom 25 miles from the transmitters:

You will be much happier with an outdoor antenna, even if mounted in the attic. 

 Winegard, Channel Master, Clear Stream and the GE and RCA branded products by Jasco are good.

The Toasty Heater scam on YouTube

Here is a storyboard for one  of the ads.  YouTube has forced them on users over 10 million times. The story told is fake, names are fake, video is stolen. Same old conspiracy narrative used 100 years ago by scammers..perpetual motion machines, Tesla's free electricity through the air, pills that turn water into gasoline... but THEY don't want people to have it, so some wealthy group buys the secret and buries it.

Another, different cast, same story

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moOKE_0OAkQTias

Chromebook time stamp error still not fixed - a bug that could skew justice

"Don't be evil" was Google's motto for years.  Now it's "Do the right thing."    Evil is just evil.. but the "right thing" is more slippery.    The right thing  for whom?   The shareholders or  the user, forced to use Google software on their mobile phone unless it's an Apple i-Phone,  or school-issued Chromebooks.

I use a Chromebook, because it's the safest computer available.  The operating system cannot be hacked or modified, as it's on a protected partition,  and is verified on every bootup.  But in 2019, I reported a bug in Chrome where the time stamps on files moved from a phone are off by hours.  The ISO 8601 standard for time stamps (for 40 years) is that time stamps are LOCAL time with a flag that shows the time difference from UTC or Greenwich Mean Time

<time>   T141312-6 is 2:13 p.m. and 12 seconds  LOCAL TIME and -6 shows that my LOCAL TIME is UTC minus 6 hours. But somebody at Google thought 2:13 p.m. was Greenwich Time and the time stamp needs to have 6 hours subtracted to be LOCAL TIME.  

People have gone to prison for murder, or gone free - on time stamps on selfies and text messages.  "Here is a selfie he made at home - with geolocation tag -  he could not have POSSIBLY murdered a woman in Austin and be home in Dallas, 200 miles (320 km) away 15 minutes later"   But he could in 6 HOURS and 15 minutes.    

This is a big friggin deal in a few cases.  3 years ago, I noticed photos I made of items at an auction inspection  were time stamped 6 hours before I got there.  I reported this to Google (I have a  business plan with phone support)  The guy got his supervisor on and said "WOW, that's a serious bug" with highest priority and would be rolled out as an update as soon as it was fixed,  without waiting for the next official release of Chrome. It was fixed in an update a few days later.  But yesterday I was moving some photos to an archive, and noticed that photos obviously made in daytime were stamped  as  taken before sunrise, and it started doing this on everything after January 1, 2022

Today, Nov. 10, 2023  I took a test photo of the clock on  my  wall at 7:44  AM  and the time stamp shows 1:44 AM.    So this is giving  6 hour early timestamps for nearly 2 years.  I looked on the official Chrome help pages, and there are DOZENS of people reporting this problem.  This post from a user in India , 5 1/2 hours AHEAD of Greenwich time, reports time stamps 5  1/2 hours in the future, as if he were in Los Angeles.  But look at the bottom...EVERY post reporting what a Google supervisor called "WOW That's a serious bug"  has no answer from Google, and "This question is locked and replying has been disabled"

I have seen this, and DONE this at General Dynamics, on an automatic test station for the F-16 program.      A test sequence I wrote was supposed to  indicate a failure and go on to the next test.  Instead it indicated a failure and STOPPED.   An END where   it should have been  GOTO.  That simple fix  on the local copy of the software at Hill Air Force Base didn't get made to the source code,  and the bug  came back when they got master versions of the file.  Embarrassing.   But the day I got the report that the problem was back,  I worked until 9 p.m. to get a new disk mastered and sent to Hill Air Force Base where they had it the next day.   (These were  HP removable hard disks the size of a large pizza...I think they held 20 MB)  

But here we have people reporting this time stamp bug, and the discussion is shut down....This is not just an oversight -- it is their  POLICY.  I can only describe it as EVIL 

99.99% of Chrome users don't notice this or care.  Until you are suspected of a crime and the police start looking through your devices.

Your microwave oven has a built-in cool tray

You have just heated something in the microwave, and the bowl is very hot.  Find the oven mitt,  burn your hands and hope you don't drop it,  scoot the hot bowl onto a plate without spilling it.

Or

Just carry it out on the glass platter, which is designed to stay cool.

Took me 35 years to notice this...

Rodents can come through holes purposely made in a slab foundation

 A rat infestation problem on-and-off since 2015 where 3 pest control companies could not find the entry point where they were getting in, was solved accidentally.  A bathroom remodel required opening the sheet rock behind the tub.  My 1988 Texas house is built on a solid slab concrete foundation.  So why  are dirt and rat droppings piled on the foundation around the tub?

From the rats tunneling under the foundation and coming through the huge hole in the foundation that goes all the way to the dirt.  Is that a joke?  Sadly, no.  It's called a "bath trap"  STANDARD in slab foundations, because the pipes from bathtub and shower drains are BELOW the floor level, and the opening is for "plumber convenience."   

It's now considered "best practice" to fill this opening with sand or pebbles with a thin layer of concrete that can be chiseled out if plumbing work is needed.  While most commercial buildings have access panels for plumbing, few homes do.  If you have mice or rats and hear scratching under a bathtub, it may not just be a nice place to nest, it may also be the biggest entry point.  

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Localism will save traditional broadcasting

Fort Worth's KTVT Channel 11 has been branded as CBS11 and CBS-DFW for nearly 30 years since Rupert Murdoch bought KDFW Channel 4, and dropped CBS to make it a Fox station. Opryland owner Gaylord sold KTVT outright to CBS Corporation in 1999 for half a BILLION dollars. 

Since local news and local identification is how local broadcasters can compete with streaming services, CBS11/CBS-DFW has rebranded as CBS Texas.  Which sounds like a statewide broadcast. 

 And dropped the 6 p.m. local news, replacing it with "Jeopardy!"

The epidemic of video ads for scam products

A series of videos on YouTube and Facebook are promoting a scam for TVBoost, a flat TV antenna that picks up local HDTV broadcasts -- poorly. A YouTube "sponsored" video has nearly 4 million views since July 31, 2023 - six weeks. It doesn't pick up any satellite broadcasts, has no "state of the art chip technology," it's a total scam. But the back stories these scammers use are seen over and over. Drones, Laser flashlights that cut through metal, a phone charger that removes the bad code that Apple inserts to make the phone run slow to make you buy a new one, a worthless desktop plastic "air conditioner."

And it's always a good guy (first name only) working for the industry who feels guilty about the high prices his company charges, he quits or is fired, invents something that does not and can not work as claimed, but the industry is trying to shut him down, so hurry and buy this now while you still can!

Most people are not experts in a field that can spot these frauds instantly. So many advances have come about in the past 50 years, average people see this and think "isn't it wonderful."

Whatever the scam is about, people who recognize it as a scam report it to Facebook, or YouTube, and these promotions, which are paid content, NEVER get taken down. Link to video