2024-12-23 TIL: NORAD Santa Tracker, ReadTogether.ai, HappyKids, and Phonewords Explained

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NORAD Tracks Santa

NORAD Tracks Santa is an annual Christmas-themed program in which North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) simulates the tracking of Santa Claus, who is said to leave the North Pole to travel around the world on his mission to deliver presents to children every year on Christmas Eve.

This tradition began in 1955 when a child accidentally called NORAD’s predecessor, CONAD, asking about Santa’s whereabouts. The commander played along, starting a yearly tradition.
Today, NORAD uses radar, satellites, and jets to track Santa every Christmas Eve.
- Although NORAD claims to use these technologies, the website primarily simulates Santa’s journey and displays predetermined location data to users.

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Readtogether.ai

Read books together with your kids.

Technologies used:
- How to convert a hard copy into a high-quality E-book.
- How to extract content from the E-book — gpt-4o + another model for verification.
- How to read the content — ElevenLabs, Cosevoice + F5-TTS.
Explore a collection of children’s books shared by users, and add them to your library.

Happy Kids

HappyKids is a FREE and SAFE video streaming app to educate and entertain kids. HappyKids provides kid-safe content in forms of Popular Shows, Movies, Rhymes, Stories, DIYs, Gaming videos, and more.

Hamer loves it and now prefers it over YouTube Kids.

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Phonewords

Phonewords are mnemonic phrases represented as alphanumeric equivalents of telephone numbers, using a standard phone keypad:

2 → ABC

3 → DEF
4 → GHI
5 → JKL
6 → MNO
7 → PQRS
8 → TUV
9 → WXYZ

For example:

You can start a conversation by calling 1-800-CHATGPT (1-800-242-8478).
The public NORAD Santa Tracker hotline is 1-877-HI-NORAD (1-877-446-6723).