🧛 What’s feeding on your power bill

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🎉 Big news before we begin. Starting this Saturday from noon to 3 p.m., you can listen to me on our new Los Angeles affiliate KEIB AM 1150. It’s a huge station! You can listen from Ventura County, LA County down past Orange County and inland, too. Details here. I hope if you’re in the area, I can count on you to be a listener. Thank you!

Well, hello, it’s Wednesday, {{first_name | friend}}. Hitchcock gave us Rear Window. Smart TVs gave us Rear Viewers. Yep, you settle in for movie night, all cozy and innocent, while your TV is watching alongside you. Thanks to ACR (automatic content recognition), many smart TVs can identify what’s on your screen, whether it’s streaming, gaming or that DVD you swear you’ll return someday.

📺 Guess how many snapshots of your screen a smart TV using ACR can capture in a single hour? A) 60, B) 700, C) 7,200, D) Zero, that would be illegal. Take your pick, the answer is buffering at the end. 

💧 I write this for you: Get my Splash of AI free newsletter every Thursday. I’ll show you how to spot 401(k) fees eating your future, practice a language with voice AI, avoid fake chatbot apps, understand why AI companies are shredding books and build sharper designs with Claude. Yours for free. Sign up at SplashOfAI.com, so it hits your inbox tomorrow morning. — Kim

🤯 WOW! The Department of Energy says switched-off gadgets, blinking clocks and standby lights eat 5% to 10% of your home’s electricity, about $100 to $200 a year. A $10 gadget stops the bleed and guards your house while you travel.

The Short Version: Put $10 smart plugs on your worst standby offenders, schedule them off overnight and set a lamp to fake occupancy on vacation. Steps below.

📖 Read time: 3 minutes

Walk through your house at night and count the little glowing lights. The TV standby dot. The microwave clock. The cable box that is never really off. Every one of them is quietly running your electric meter while you sleep.

It’s called vampire power, and the Department of Energy says these always-on gadgets eat 5% to 10% of your home’s electricity, roughly $100 to $200 a year, sitting there doing nothing. One analysis compared the average home’s idle load to brewing 234 cups of coffee every single day.

A smart plug ends the drain. These little adapters sit between the outlet and your device, and you control the power from an app on your phone. They start around $10 each. 

So easy to use. Plug one into the wall, plug your device into it and add it in the free app. That’s it.

My recommendations. Grab these Linkind plugs (24% off, $19, two-pack) because they’re Matter-certified. That means they work with Alexa, Google Home, Apple Home and Samsung SmartThings. All of them. Only need Alexa but more outlets? Amazon Basics’ $40 smart power strip is a solid bet.

The worst offenders are entertainment centers, game consoles and anything with an instant-on feature or a glowing standby light. Put those on a schedule, and you stop paying to keep them half awake. 

Most plugs’ apps show how many watts each device pulls, so you can spot the biggest energy vampire and unmask the culprit.

Here is the trick that makes smart plugs worth it twice. Screw a smart bulb into a lamp, and while you’re on vacation, set it to switch on and off at natural times. You can use Linkind’s smart light bulbs (32% off, $23, four-pack) for this. 

A dark, still house says nobody is home to a burglar. Lights that come alive at dinner and click off at bedtime say someone is here. Most apps have an away mode that randomizes the times, so there is no pattern to spot. Two plugs and two lamps make an empty house look lived-in for the price of a couple of pizzas.

Lower bill, safer home, five minutes of setup. Your outlets have been sucking you dry for years. Time to put a stake in them.

🎯 Send this to someone who complains about their electric bill and travels a lot.

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👺 Tax guys taxed: Buckle up. Ernst & Young, the giant paid to handle sensitive tax records, got finessed by hackers, who downloaded client documents with SSNs, income and financial details. The thieves reportedly had weeks inside a third-party support system this spring. EY’s offer? 24 months of free Experian monitoring, with an Oct. 31 sign-up deadline. How generous! Still, take it. Treat every urgent tax email like it came with a fake mustache. Ah, the tax industry, the gift that keeps on giving. 

Brains need boredom: Imagine your kid opening a book and their brain hunting for the skip ad button. That’s popcorn brain: Constant device stimulation makes slow, linear information feel like punishment. It shows up in kids and adults, at home, school, anywhere a screen becomes the pacifier. The cure? Limits, longer reading, offline play and the lost art of being bored. Some people even do a “dopamine reset” by staring at a wall for an hour. No joke. 

📵 Dog video denied: Get this. Apple’s iMessage scanning flagged a completely innocent dog video as nudity and blocked it before it could send. I mean, Apple’s technically not wrong, unless the dog had clothes. But this is a news flash that more happens on your phone than meets the eye. The scan happens on-device, which sounds more private than cloud snooping but still means your phone is judging your attachments. Call me crazy, I want my messages uninspected.

The cheapest little epic: People paid a fortune for tickets to The Odyssey on IMAX while 2.1 million others watched the whole movie inside an X post. Yep, just as the director intended, watching the feature-length film on a cracked iPhone. The high-quality bootleg appeared Saturday and lasted roughly two and a half hours before it got removed and the account was suspended. That’s almost enough time to finish Nolan’s nearly three-hour opus. Copycats followed, naturally, but some links delivered two hours of Rick Astley instead. Classic. 

🪐 Outsource your darkness: A few generations ago, we were figuring out how to put light everywhere, and now we’re trying to do the opposite. Folks are starting to miss the night sky. Starfront Observatories, on 40 dark acres in West Texas, lets stargazers ship their own telescope or rent gear for $99 to $149 a month. At night, giant roofs roll back, and hundreds of scopes stare up, all controlled from your laptop. The Milky Way via login. Renting darkness by the month. Somewhere, your power company is taking notes.

States are sitting on billions in unclaimed money. There’s a free site to check if some of that belongs to you. Who knows? You could be like Steph. She found $1,200 the same way.

Listen on Komando.com →

🎧 Or search “Komando” wherever you get your podcasts. I’m everywhere.

⚡️ 3-second tech genius: That “barely used” bargain might not belong to the seller at all. Save the listing photo, go to images.google.com, click the camera icon and upload it. A reverse image search will show where else it appears. If you see the same couch or car in older listings or on another site, keep scrolling.

⚠️ Don’t ignore this warning: Hard drives fail. It happens every day. When yours dies, I don’t want you to panic. I want you to be like me and rely on Carbonite. It runs in the background and restores your files with one click. I wouldn’t put my name on this if I didn’t use it myself. Grab my exclusive 50% off deal before it ends.* 

Autofill has a downside: Saving your credit card in a browser is convenient, but a hacked extension could get access to it. When a site offers to remember your card, say no. Then open browser Settings and turn off Save and fill payment methods or Save and autofill payment info. Delete any cards already stored, too.

🗣️ Give “Hey, Alexa” a rest: Follow-Up Mode lets you ask another question or give another command without repeating the wake word every time. Turn on the lights, set a timer, then play music without saying “Alexa” between each action. Say, “Alexa, turn on Follow-Up Mode,” or open the Alexa app > Device Settings > Follow-Up Mode. Finally, Alexa learns what every parent already knows. You shouldn’t have to repeat yourself.

🙄 Let Instagram take out the trash: Rude comments and DMs don’t deserve your attention. Go to Settings and activity > How others can interact with you > Hidden Words. Type in the words or phrases you never want to see and tap Add. Instagram will automatically hide matching comments and messages. Troll problem, meet filter.

📲 Thinking of switching sides? Google’s making it easier to move from your iPhone to a new Android. During setup, follow the prompt to wirelessly transfer your photos, contacts, messages, passwords and even your eSIM. No cable or separate app needed. It’s starting with select Pixels and Samsung’s new Galaxy Z Flip8 and Z Fold8 series.

Augmental launched the MouthPad, a custom retainer that turns your tongue into a Bluetooth mouse. It sits on your upper teeth, tracks tongue, head and sip gestures, runs 7+ hours per charge and even lets people game. 

They also unveiled VOX, a wearable microphone pendant that hears your voice through your body, letting you whisper messages in a library or noisy café while ignoring most background chatter. 

Together, they’re building what they call Skinware. Hey, guys, we already have skinware, it’s called clothing. 

Give it a look here.​​

🎓 What you learned today: Standby gadgets can quietly siphon up to $200 a year unless smart plugs put them on a schedule, an EY breach, iMessage’s on-device scanning can block the family dog like it’s evidence, browser-saved credit cards are convenient until they’re not, and a mouth pad turns your tongue into a hands-free Bluetooth mouse. Not bad for one email. If your streaming bill feels like a second utility, it’s time for a breakup. Tomorrow, I’ll show you how to swap one paid app for $0 without ruining movie night.

📺 The answer: C) Up to 7,200 snapshots an hour. That’s about two screenshots every single second, from the moment you turn the TV on. Cozy! Researchers found some smart TVs can capture a frame roughly every half-second to identify what’s on-screen and send that viewing data back for ad targeting.

Oh, and they can even do it from devices plugged into HDMI, not just built-in streaming apps. So yes, your news habits, prestige drama, late-night infomercial spiral and “I’m only checking one sports score” lie can all become part of the profile advertisers pay for. 

The good news? You can shut this down in about two minutes. Every brand buries the setting under a different innocent-sounding name (Samsung calls it Viewing Information Services, LG calls it Live Plus). 

I’ve got the step-by-step for every major brand right here: How to turn off ACR on every major TV brand.

I guess you could say your TV really knows how to capture an audience. Go flip that setting off.

Kim Komando • Komando.com • 510+ radio stations • Trusted by millions daily

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Photo credit(s): ChatGPT/Kim Komando, UGREEN, Augmental

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