Webcams used to be popularly associated with adult websites but have now become an important tool used in business and schooling. Today, computers and even smartphones have a front-facing camera that can be used to make videos and be in online video meetings as well.

Webcams are also an essential digital educational tool for flipped classroom learning that involves the use of video. Although webcams can be used to make engaging video content and interactions, they have their cons as well.

The following are the pros and cons of webcams.

Pros

1. Better communication

With a webcam, communication is made easier as you can see the person you’re conversing with, as opposed to the regular texting or email. The importance of this is that you can tell the other person’s expressions better with body language and cues and you tend to be more emotionally intelligent while on video than over text, improving relationships. Hence, with webcams, you tend to have fewer issues with your partner or any other person compared to a conversation over a text.

2. Convenience and cost-saving

With a webcam, you can easily create videos as you just have to turn on your video, look into the camera and record yourself. Making videos like these for a business strategy can help you boost your profile and sales. Although the video quality from webcams is is not of better quality than a professional video, if you don’t have a good quality camera, this works just as fine.

3. Innovation

Webcams have now been extensively used in the field of innovation. Doctors and other medical practitioners are now making use of webcams to provide services to rural areas which don’t have access to proper healthcare services. Insurance companies also make use of this to prevent fraudulent activities.

Cons

4. You should not always use your webcams

Sure, it’s yours and on your computer. However, it’s not advisable to always make use of your webcams. For instance, if you are in a messy environment or you’re not properly dressed, turning in your webcam can be disastrous as you tend to look very unprofessional. People would get disinterested in whatever you have to say. Webcams can also expose you when you have something to hide.

5. Your security and privacy is not totally guaranteed

Hacking activities are carried out way easier with a webcam as it can allow a hacker to spy on you and your activities. This can be detrimental to your well-being and privacy especially if the hacker is doing this to exploit you or for entertainment purposes. If you would still like to have a webcam, get one that signals to you when it is in use or active. You can also place a sticky tape over the lens when it’s not in use or unplug it totally.

Conclusion

Webcams are wonderful tools used in videoconferencing and interactions. Like every other tool, it has its advantages and disadvantages. If you own and use a webcam, make good use of the tips in this article to protect yourself.

Sure, why not. Stack Overflow has teamed up with tech retailer Drop to release this cute little keyboard called The Key. It’s programmed to do exactly two things: copy and paste.

The product started as an April Fools’ Day joke earlier this year — Stack Overflow users were shown alerts claiming that they had a limited number of copy / pastes and that they could only lift that cap by purchasing The Key. Users, as Stack Overflow’s blog post notes, were disappointed to find out that The Key was not a real thing they could buy.

So, you can buy it now. It’s up for preorder on Drop’s website for $29. Per the company, the next batch is shipping on December 13th.

As you can see, we have three buttons here. We have C, and we have V. I’m not sure what the third button is supposed to do. That’s fine, of course, because the three keys are actually programmable — you can map them to do whatever task you want.

So there are some legitimate pragmatic use cases. First of all, if you make the third key a delete key, you can force every writer to edit their pieces with this device, and our articles will probably end up a lot more concise and better for it. More realistically, you can imagine mapping the keys to raise and lower brightness, for example (a setting that’s a pain to adjust on some computers), or to end a Zoom call.

Plus, imagine how cool you’d look using this in on a plane or something. Can you really put a price on a gadget-savvy aesthetic?

Now, macropads like this aren’t actually a new concept (though three is a somewhat small number of keys). You can get them all over Etsy — there’s one that’s literally just an Escape key.

But in addition to its unique preprogramming, this one does appear particularly well-made. It’s outfitted with Kailh Box Black Switches, which Drop claims will deliver “an ultra-smooth linear feel.” The case is CNC-machined aluminum with custom XDA profile keycaps. I’m also seeing a USB-C connector on the back of the thing, and there are feet on the bottom to keep it from slipping.

Oh, and you can also feel somewhat good about yourself while buying it. Stack Overflow is donating all of its proceeds to digitalundivided, and Drop is donating five percent of its portion.

At its Search On event today, Google introduced several new features that, taken together, are its strongest attempts yet to get people to do more than type a few words into a search box. By leveraging its new Multitask Unified Model (MUM) machine learning technology in small ways, the company hopes to kick off a virtuous cycle: it will provide more detail and context-rich answers, and in return it hopes users will ask more detailed and context-rich questions. The end result, the company hopes, will be a richer and deeper search experience.

Google SVP Prabhakar Raghavan oversees search alongside Assistant, ads, and other products. He likes to say — and repeated in an interview this past Sunday — that “search is not a solved problem.” That may be true, but the problems he and his team are trying to solve now have less to do with wrangling the web and more to do with adding context to what they find there.

For its part, Google is going to begin flexing its ability to recognize constellations of related topics using machine learning and present them to you in an organized way. A coming redesign to Google search will begin showing “Things to know” boxes that send you off to different subtopics. When there’s a section of a video that’s relevant to the general topic — even when the video as a whole is not — it will send you there. Shopping results will begin to show inventory available in nearby stores, and even clothing in different styles associated with your search.

For your part, Google is offering — though perhaps “asking” is a better term — new ways to search that go beyond the text box. It’s making an aggressive push to get its image recognition software Google Lens into more places. It will be built into the Google app on iOS and also the Chrome web browser on desktops. And with MUM, Google is hoping to get users to do more than just identify flowers or landmarks, but instead use Lens directly to ask questions and shop.

“It’s a cycle that I think will keep escalating,” Raghavan says. “More technology leads to more user affordance, leads to better expressivity for the user, and will demand more of us, technically.”

Those two sides of the search equation are meant to kick off the next stage of Google search, one where its machine learning algorithms become more prominent in the process by organizing and presenting information directly. In this, Google efforts will be helped hugely by recent advances in AI language processing. Thanks to systems known as large language models (MUM is one of these), machine learning has got much better at mapping the connections between words and topics. It’s these skills that the company is leveraging to make search not just more accurate, but more explorative and, it hopes, more helpful.

One of Google’s examples is instructive. You may not have the first idea what the parts of your bicycle are called, but if something is broken you’ll need to figure that out. Google Lens can visually identify the derailleur (the gear-changing part hanging near the rear wheel) and rather than just give you the discrete piece of information, it will allow you to ask questions about fixing that thing directly, taking you to the information (in this case, the excellent Berm Peak Youtube channel).

The push to get more users to open up Google Lens more often is fascinating on its own merits, but the bigger picture (so to speak) is about Google’s attempt to gather more context about your queries. More complicated, multimodal searches combining text and images demand “an entirely different level of contextualization that we the provider have to have, and so it helps us tremendously to have as much context as we can,” Raghavan says.

We are very far from the so-called “ten blue links” of search results that Google provides. It has been showing information boxes, image results, and direct answers for a long time now. Today’s announcements are another step, one where the information Google provides is not just a ranking of relevant information but a distillation of what its machines understand by scraping the web.

In some cases — as with shopping — that distillation means you’ll likely be sending Google more page views. As with Lens, that trend is important to keep an eye on: Google searches increasingly push you to Google’s own products. But there’s a bigger danger here, too. The fact that Google is telling you more things directly increases a burden it’s always had: to speak with less bias.

By that, I mean bias in two different senses. The first is technical: the machine learning models that Google wants to use to improve search have well-documented problems with racial and gender biases. They’re trained by reading large swaths of the web, and, as a result, tend to pick up nasty ways of talking. Google’s troubles with its AI ethics team are also well documented at this point — it fired two lead researchers after they published a paper on this very subject. As Google’s VP of search, Pandu Nayak, told The Verge’s James Vincent in his article on today’s MUM announcements, Google knows that all language models have biases, but the company believes it can avoid “putting it out for people to consume directly.”

Shopping online isn’t always a convenience. If you enjoy window shopping or browsing curated collections at a brick-and-mortar store for inspiration, finding something online you don’t yet know you want or are unaware of is tricky if you start with a text search. Google is announcing new shopping search tools to try to alleviate this, with features that utilize Google Lens for finding products to buy from pictures online, broader search terms to help you browse clothing, and the ability to check in-store inventory from home. It claims the new tools will help shoppers “find what they’re looking for in a more visual way.” This comes after Google allowed all businesses to create listings on Google Shopping for free last year. Now, it wants more window shopping to be done right from Google search

Google Lens has been around since 2017, replacing Google Goggles that came before it, with the ability to use a smartphone camera to conduct visual searches based on the identification of objects found in the real world. Those image searches have allowed users to learn more about the things around them, even finding the same or similar item to buy without looking for a label or barcode to scan. Now, Google wants to make it possible to shop for any product you see in an image or video on the web with nothing more than the picture itself. Soon, iOS users will have a new dedicated button in the Google app, allowing a Google Lens search of any image on a page to bring up Google Shopping listings for purchase through a visual match. The feature will also be coming to Chrome on the desktop.

Google did not give specific dates for this feature launching on iOS or desktop, stating that it hopes to roll them out by the end of the year. There was no initial mention of if or when this feature may come to Android, but Google has clarified that it plans to extend this functionality to Android at a later date, after the iOS and desktop versions.

Another shopping-focused feature coming from Google, which has surely been spurred on by the boom in e-commerce since the beginning of the pandemic, is easier browsing of clothing, accessories, and shoes via search results based on general terms. Google says that if you search for a generic article on mobile, for example, “cropped jackets,” you will see a visual feed of that type of clothing in a variety of colors and designs. These visual results will be accompanied by relevant videos, style guides, or local shops that carry those styles. From there, you can filter your search further according to brand, style, or department; check ratings and reviews; or compare prices on the results that appeal to you most.

Google calls this window shopping, which is one of the challenges of shopping for clothes online compared to going to a physical store to see what’s on display. It claims the dataset is pulled from over 24 billion product listings. The new feature is available only on mobile and is usable right from a Google search beginning today.

The third and final Google Shopping update allows users to remotely check in-store inventory directly within a Google search. Shoppers searching for a product are able to filter by “in stock.” This selection should show nearby stores that have the item available. Google claims the new feature can help a small business attract new customers, though it remains to be seen how accurate it might be across a variety of retailers and how one might ensure a product is there for them once they arrive — particularly at small businesses that do not have curbside or in-store pickup.

Google has indicated that it does rely on data from the retailer to determine stock status and claims it will only indicate an item is in stock when there is high confidence; otherwise, it may show limited stock.

The new “in stock” filter is available today across mobile web browsers and the Google app on both iOS and Android.

A little over a month after Facebook announced a test blending Instagram Reels’ short-form video content with its main Facebook app, the company is ready to roll it out fully in the US. Now, the creators who use it can create reels on Facebook, and Facebook is testing suggestions that will push the videos to its users.

A big part of the Reels effort is appealing to the people who make entertaining content, and with its news feed, Facebook can offer potential levels of exposure that are bigger than anyone else, including competition like TikTok and Snapchat. To drive the point home, Facebook announced a Reels Play bonus program, which will invite certain creators to get paid based on the performance of their reels.

Interested parties can sign up for the bonus program, but even if you’re not yet a pro at going viral, you can still create a Reel on Facebook. If you’re not familiar with the feature that Instagram added a year ago, it’s very similar to TikTok, with tools for you to easily edit videos with your own audio or popular song clips from the library, AR effects, and stitching.

Google Maps has new features that should make it easier for users to see wildfires, tree canopy, and locations without formal addresses. It’s all aimed at helping communities be “safer, more sustainable, and discoverable,” according to the company.

A new wildfire layer on Maps will begin rolling out globally this week, Google announced today. It’ll show most major fires, those prompting evacuations, across the world. Red splotches and pins on the layer will indicate where blazes are and how far they’ve spread. By tapping on any single wildfire, users can see more information, like how many acres have burned, what percentage of the fire has been contained, and links to local emergency resources.

The map is updated about every hour. It uses data that’s gathered by satellites that are then processed by Google’s geospatial analysis platform, Earth Engine.

It builds on a feature Google piloted in California in 2019 and expanded to the rest of the US in 2020. That pilot allowed people in the US to see the shifting boundaries of a nearby wildfire in near real-time but didn’t allow for users to view more than one fire at a time. That was limiting since multiple blazes can break out simultaneously within the same region during fire season, which is growing longer and more intense in the Western US as a result of climate change.

Not only will users in the US now have a bird’s-eye view of major fires nearby; they’ll also even be able to see small fires on the map — a feature not yet available in other parts of the world. Australia and some other locations could have that capability “in the coming months,” Google says.

There’s still one limitation, however, that Google has yet to hammer out with the wildfire layer. It can only be updated when the user is connected to the internet, which poses problems when wildfires take out power lines and cell towers.

The other two updates Google announced are primarily designed to give local governments better planning and mapping tools. Google launched a Tree Canopy Lab last year in Los Angeles to help the city identify spots in need of more trees. Getting more greenery to those neighborhoods is one way to prevent heat-related illnesses and death in places that are the most vulnerable during heatwaves. Temperatures can actually differ from neighborhood to neighborhood based on how much greenery they have, a trend that is made worse by a history of racial segregation in the US.

Google says Tree Canopy will be available in over 100 more cities in 2022, including Guadalajara, London, Sydney, and Toronto. It charts out the density of tree cover using images taken by plane for Google Maps.

Using Google Maps has always been more challenging for people who live in places without formal addresses. That’s made it more difficult for packages and emergency services like ambulances to reach many people living in rural areas and developing nations where addresses aren’t commonplace. So Google today launched a new app called Address Maker to make it easier for governments and NGOs to build out their own maps to fill in the blanks.

Address Maker is an expansion to Google’s existing Plus Codes, which allow people to share their location using a six-digit code in lieu of an address. (There are also Plus Codes for places with traditional addresses. The Plus Code for Google’s headquarters, for example, is ‘CWC8+R9 Mountain View, California.’)

While a Plus Code for places without addresses will show up on Google Maps, a route to reach it might not. Address Maker aims to make it faster and easier for officials and local advocates to assign Plus Codes to locations and chart previously unmapped roads for an entire community. It uses an open-source algorithm, and Plus Codes are accessible offline.

Batteries are vital in the life of most electronic devices. Batteries also assure the proper functioning of your laptop. Bad batteries can damage the computer and disappoint you when there is a power outage. Batteries act as a great backup source of electricity on laptops, especially in a place with no power supply. The HP LA04 battery is a genuine HP battery that guarantees long-lasting battery life when using your computer.

After some usage, batteries will eventually deplete and will not last very long. Depletion in battery life is also in the situation of batteries that initially come with laptops when you purchase them. Getting a suitable laptop battery replacement might sound hectic, but HP-battery has the best HP batteries to help you replace your weakened laptop batteries.

Why Are Batteries Important?

Modern technology has solved some problems with the invention of batteries. Below are some of the importance of batteries in our world today:

• Great Backup Plans:Batteries serve as the perfect backup plan when you are in a place with an unstable or infrequent power supply.
• Cost-Efficient Energy:Batteries are cost-efficient because once there is a good quality battery, you can renew the energy by plugging it into a compatible socket to refuel the batteries.
• Renewable And Clean Energy:Batteries act as a source to clean, reliable and renewable energy. Getting a good battery is also one of the significant steps to take to prevent future disappointments.

Ways to Maximize a Battery’s Life

Proper maintenance of a battery will extend its battery life over a long period. Getting a good and compatible charger will contribute critically to the length of a laptop’s battery life. Closing software and applications that are not in use will contribute to prolonged use of the computer. Rough handling or negligent acts can damage the batteries, such as spilling water or exposing it to direct sunlight.

Advantages of quality HP Batteries

Some benefits come with buying the genuine HP LA04 battery. Some of the advantages are:

They Are New Batteries

The HP LA04 batteries are new, so you do not have to be skeptical about the quality. The qualities are top-notch, and the batteries have never been used and will guarantee you long battery life.

The Batteries Are Of High Quality

The LA04 laptop batteries have the highest quality grade. The battery has gold plated contacts to help enhance its performance. It also uses premium quality battery cells.

They Come With Warranty

After buying the LA04 laptop battery, you enjoy a one year warranty, in the case of defect caused in creation. There is also a 30 days refund policy if it shows deficiencies in the first 30 days of usage. Hp-Battery.com is particular about consumer’s satisfaction and have put in place reasonable measures.

Final Thoughts

The high-quality LA04 laptop batteries come with 41Wh capacity and 14.8v in terms of voltage. The HP batteries are long-lasting Li-Ion batteries made from premium battery cells to maximize its battery life. The HP batteries are reliable for use at home or at work.