Danie van der Merwe

Samsung Food Plus could be the ultimate meal-planning app but it costs $7 per month

Tue, 03 Sep 2024 16:18:09 +0200

gadgeteer@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

Samsung Food Plus could be the ultimate meal-planning app but it costs $7 per month

New features on Samsung’s AI-powered food and recipe app could make your meal planning and food management chores much easier. With Samsung Food, you can now add items to a Food List just by taking a picture. The app can then suggest recipes based on the food you have, automatically remove them when you cook a recipe using anything on the list, then add food items back to the list when you tick them off your shopping list.

Samsung says the service now creates meal plans based on your food list and prioritizes items “nearing use-by date” (this has to be set manually). Plus, a new “Search with Your Food List” feature lets you easily find a recipe based on what you have. All this should make meal planning and shopping much easier, as long as you’re willing to do it all in Samsung’s app.

Vision AI leverages your phone’s camera to identify items to add to your Food List. Just snap a picture of whatever is in your pantry or fridge, and the ingredients will be added to the list. Once you’ve cooked something, the app can automatically remove it from the food list and add it to the shopping list in the Samsung Food app. When you shop using the list, the app can automatically add items purchased to your food list.

This app really does seem to have achieved a level of perfection, if it really does what it promises. Quite a few of these features are already in the free and self-hosted Grocy app, but the work is a lot more manual in Grocy. I'd imagine though this Samsung app may be really worth it for larger households, or where someone operates a household on a more professional basis.

And of course being cloud based means you need to continue paying, will struggle if you lose Internet access, or it will all die if Samsung loses interest in it.

See With AI food recognition Samsung Food could be the ultimate meal-planning app

Samsung’s meal-planning app can now recognize the food in your fridge — no smart fridge required.

#technology #pantry #shopping #meals

technology meals pantry shopping

How to use Google's built-in shopping list (and why you probably should NOT use it)

Thu, 14 Apr 2022 12:31:50 +0200

Danie van der Merwe

gadgeteer@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

Where do I start? It's just possible that no-one at Google actually goes shopping, and it's clear yet again that this app is just another after thought that will get abandoned in time. It does allow one to create multiple lists (per shop in other words) but everything is just added in one long list which can be alphabetically sorted or kept in the order you added it. Really!!! No manual re-ordering, and no grouping into shopping aisles or categories?

There are also no quantities to be set, or prices, or notes, or photos per item. The app came out a few years back, and I'll bet many don't know about it. Even the average todo type app will do a better job for shopping lists than this offering.

I've long been using Our Groceries app, on both Android and iOS, and it has all my shopping very well organised, including being able to tick items off on my Apple Watch, as I shop. I also did a video overview, just this week, of the Grocy ERP app that does a much better shopping list than Google's one.

Yes, the Google Shopping List has Google Home integration, but then so does Our Groceries app.

See How to use Google's built-in shopping list (and why you definitely should)

#technology #shopping #shoppinglist #google #groceries

Follow these simple steps to make the most out Google Shopping

technology shopping shoppinglist groceries

Grocy - a Web-Based Self-Hosted Groceries and Household Management Solution for your Home

Tue, 12 Apr 2022 21:49:49 +0200

Danie van der Merwe

gadgeteer@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

Grocy can help manage not only shopping lists based on inventory, recipes and meal plans, but also chores, tasks, equipment manuals with notes, and batteries that need to be charged or replaced across devices. A key part of its inventory management is keeping an eye on expiring products which could be just thawed out of a freezer, or could be medicine stored in a first aid kit, etc. It can also monitor how much wastage you produce from spoilt products. You can use all of its integrated features, or just a single feature if you want to keep it simple.

It will easily run on a Windows PC, or in a docker container, or easily installed under cPanel on any Linux VPS hosting.

This video gives an overview of what Grocy does, as well as a tour of the interface and features, and the settings menu.

See https://youtube.com/watch?v=kMpui1hw-gM

#technology #opensource #groceries #grocy #selfhosted

technology shopping opensource selfhosting chores household grocy

Be alerted for price changes on websites for Black Friday Specials with Distill Web Monitor or similar browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox or Opera

Tue, 23 Nov 2021 13:18:54 +0100

Danie van der Merwe

gadgeteer@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

Whether it is for alerting to Black Friday or other online specials, competitions, or availability of tickets, these types of extensions can be very useful.

Distill Web Monitor is not the only one out there, but it seems to be an overwhelming favourite on the Chrome store with over 200,000 installs, and an average rating of 4.6/5.0 stars. It allows for some really flexible monitoring as well as having many options for alerts.

The free version does have some limitations, especially for the cloud version (no browser needs to be active), but if you run the alerts on your local browser you can have up to 25 running, with alerts set down to 5 seconds. Mobile app versions are only for paid services.

Visualping is another very popular service, but it has a lot more restrictions on the free plan. Thing is, when you get down to hour and minute interval monitoring, many services charge for that as a cloud service. I still fondly remember the Check&Get application that you could install in the early 2000's that used to do this. However, there is also a self-hosted open-source option called changedetection.io.

See Monitor websites for changes, get SMS alerts and email alerts | Distill.io

#technology #shopping #monitoring #blackfridayspecials #distillwebmonitor

Track websites and pages for changes. Get email alerts, push notifications and slack/discord alerts on changes.

technology shopping monitoring alerts

This new website tells you if a Takealot deal is good by displaying the history for the price of an item

Mon, 22 Nov 2021 19:19:04 +0100 zuletzt bearbeitet: Mon, 22 Nov 2021 19:19:37 +0100

Danie van der Merwe

gadgeteer@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

Serval records the daily historic listed and selling prices of popular products on South Africa’s biggest ecommerce site and presents these in a simple graph.

To check the pricing history of a particular product, visitors must copy the URL of the product from Takealot’s site.

The generated graph will then show the product’s pricing from the date that Serval started tracking it.

Takealot's pricing is a bit odd though as just before supper I saved an item to my wishlist at R159, and by the time I finished supper, it shot up to R199 (and has been as high as over R400 despite the normal retail price being R200 to R210). So this site may be very useful to many South Africans.

See This new website tells you if a Takealot deal is good

#southafrica #takealot #shopping #servaltracker

A new price tracking website makes it easy for Takealot shoppers to see whether they are scoring a good deal on a discounted product or whether the saving shown has been overstated.

technology southafrica shopping takealot

Fakespot extension for detecting fake shopping reviews - Is it tracking you?

Sat, 17 Jul 2021 13:46:48 +0200

Danie van der Merwe

gadgeteer@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

I heard about this app and extension service because it was pulled from the Apple Store because Amazon issued a takedown notice for something that is wrapping around their website and potentially exposing your data etc. So it got me interested as yes that is essentially what any extension or app can do, so nothing really unusual.

Well, what I noticed was this:
1. Fakespot's website no longer seems to have a 'paste URL' to search. That is how I would have wanted to use it as I'd then know there is no browser extension watching every movement I make 24/7.
2. On their website, my tracker blocking shows some usual ad server sites (not unusual if you want to display adverts there), as well as Connect Facebook, TikTok Analytics (really?), and Google Tag Manager.
3. So I went to look at what the privacy policy is and what is stated for the Google Chrome extension, and it says for 'User activity: For example: network monitoring, clicks, mouse position, scroll, or keystroke logging'; and for 'Authentication Information: For example: passwords, credentials, security question, or personal identification number (PIN)'. Again, potentially any extension 'could' access this info, but why would they need to? It also states: 'Not being sold to third parties, outside of the approved use cases'.
4. On their privacy policy page: 'Please note that we do not alter our Service’s data collection and use practices when we see a Do Not Track signal from your browser' and 'Market our products and services to others'.

Maybe I'm just getting too cynical, but why can't it just do a plain URL lookup on the page without gathering so much other data? I mean, you'd be interested in such detailed shopping browsing apart from Facebook?

See Fakespot

#technology #privacy #tracking #adverts #fakereviews

Thank you for using Fakespot. Our mission is to bring transparency and trust back to the Internet. As part of that mission, we believe it is important to be open and clear with our users on what personal information we collect and how we use it. To be clear, we do not sell any user’s personal information. We may share your personal information...

technology tracking privacy shopping

How Everyshop achieved thousands of reviews hours after launch... they partnered with global review aggregator TestFreaks to provide product reviews

Sat, 20 Mar 2021 09:15:43 +0100

Danie van der Merwe

gadgeteer@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

I really don't like this as those reviews say nothing about other purchaser's experiences, the accuracy of the listing, delivery issues, etc. Even though their competitor (Takealot) has a lot fewer reviews they certainly appear to be genuine reviews as quite a few are negative and I've veered away from some products. I leave reviews about the accuracy of listings, delivery issues, and the tested capacity of rechargeable batteries.

Reviews also give an indication of how many people have bought one product vs an alternative product. This is all meaningless on Everyshop's site. I only want to see verified purchaser reviews. I can search for my own global reviews.

See How Everyshop achieved thousands of reviews hours after launch

#technology #southafrica #everyshop #onlineshopping

Many Everyshop products had thousands of reviews on the day of its launch, which raises the question – how?

technology southafrica everyshop shopping technology southafrica everyshop shopping

Checkers Sixty60 - South Africa's fastest grocery and liquor delivery service within 60 minutes to selected areas for a flat R35 delivery fee

Mon, 14 Dec 2020 21:53:16 +0100

GadgeteerZA

https://hubzilla.gadgeteer.co.za/channel/gadgeteer

Download the Checkers Sixty60 app and place an order in as little as 60 seconds. They don't have a website to shop online so you need to use the mobile app. They deliver Checkers groceries and beer, wine and spirits from Checkers LiquorShop at the same low in-store prices.

Sixty60 delivers 7 days a week – so you never have to worry about running low on groceries and drinks again (Lockdown restrictions permitting). Save time and get your groceries and drinks delivered for a R35 flat fee.

Supposedly you can even check progress of the in store collection and the progress of the delivery to your location via the app.

See https://www.checkers.co.za/sixty60

#technology #southafrica #shopping #groceries