Tag Archives: Google+ Hangouts

PTJ 155 News: Grin and Bear It

August 20, 2015 J.D. Biersdorfer Leave a comment

After months of speculation, Android M has an official snack nickname in Google’s pantheon of tasty versions! Android 6.0, the next version of Google’s mobile operating system, will be called Marshmallow and the software development kit is now available for those who want to build apps for it. Ever so busy, Google also just built a standalone website for its Hangouts videochat service, too.

As a story in last weekend’s New York Times tells it, Amazon is the modern equivalent of a massive Dickensian workhouse where everyone is overworked and crying. As one can imagine, however, Twitter got hopping and Amazon spokespeople were quick to defend the company, fanning out across print, television and Internet to rebut The Times. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos even wrote a company-wide memo that was widely leaked, and the NYT Public Editor weighed in as well.

Amazon was not the only company with a PR team in overdrive lately. The social media team at the dating app Tinder took offense to a Vanity Fair article lamenting the rise of hookup apps in general and went on a long Twitter rant against the magazine and the author of the article. During the tweetstorm, the Tinder Twitter complained the writer did not contact the company for comment and accused Vanity Fair of one-side journalism. Others noted the article wasn’t specifically about Tinder, but dating apps in general, and said the company behaved like a hurt teenage girl lashing out and seemed surprised that journalists do things differently than PR people. Salon wondered if the whole thing was “a sincerely epic case of butthurt or just a clever attention-getting ruse.”

In other online hookup news, the National Security Agency and AT&T apparently had quite a partnership in sharing customer data. As revealed in the latest document dump from Edward Snowden and reported by The New York Times and ProPublica, AT&T gave the NSA access to billions of emails crossing its domestic networks, as well as a massive amount of cellphone calling records.

As for government agencies, there are new reports out that the hack on the Internal Revenue Service was larger than originally thought. New evidence points to the hack starting several months earlier than first noted as well. So, instead of 100,000 people having their personal details swiped, it’s more than 300,000.

Sprint is the latest carrier to ditch two-year cellphone contracts, following T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless. As part of its service overhaul, Sprint introduced its iPhone Forever plan, which gets you the current model for $22 a month on your bill.

The Federal Trade Commission has announced the winner of last spring’s “Robocalls: Humanity Strikes Back” challenge to developers. The $25,000 prize goes to an app called RoboKiller. If you want to know how it works, check out this PDF and the Kickstarter page.

The same sort of malvertising campaign that infested Yahoo’s ad network seems to have spread to other sites around the Web. The Malwarebytes security team reports they’ve now seen poison adverts on aol.com, weather.com, Weather Underground, The Drudge Report and other well-traveled domains.

Comcast is said to have new video platform called Watchable waiting in the wings. According to the Business Insider site, the telecom giant has formed partnerships with digital publishers like Vox, Buzzfeed, The Onion, Mic, Vice, Refinery29 and other sites to package content for streaming on the service. (BuzzFeed, for its part, announced this week that it was getting a 200 million dollar investment from Comcast family member NBC Universal to put toward its video efforts.) The new Comcast service, if it exists, could also compete with Verizon’s upcoming Go90 mobile video service.

Facebook is revamping its blog-like Notes feature to make it more appealing to users who have forgotten than Notes exists. Some have observed that the wide-margined new Notes templates make them look like articles on Medium. (Does anyone remember actually using Facebook Notes outside of those viral “15 Things” lists?)

Boston Dynamics recently released a video (below) that showed off Atlas, its humanoid robot with a stomp through the woods in such a manner that The Washington Post likened it to “a drunk Iron Man.” For those who have forgotten, Boston Dynamics is owned by Google, which is testing Atlas as an experimental bipedal rescue machine. Try to ignore the fact that it looks like, well, a Cylon.

The 9to5Mac site is beefing up the details on its New Apple TV rumor coverage and is now predicting the new set-top streamer will have a new streamlined hardware design, new user interface, iOS 9, App Store access, that dedicated remote control we heard about earlier this year and Siri support.

Apple’s Siri assistant can do more than just set calendar appointments and look up baseball scores. The program was credited with saving the life of a teenage boy in Tennessee when he was pinned under his truck after the tire jack collapsed. While he was shifting around trying to get out from under the 5,000-pound Dodge Dakota, he heard the familiar Siri bleep coming from his back pocket and was able to get the app to call 911 for help with a life-saving butt-dial.

And finally, it’s not just shotgun owners and other privacy minded people who are annoyed by unmanned drones buzzing around overhead. Bears in the woods do not like drones either. Researchers at the University of Minnesota put health-tracking monitors on six black bears and recorded the ursine reaction to 17 drone flights. The heart rates of all the bears increased when the drones were within 21 years overhead — which indicates stress. The 15-page paper titled “Bears Show a Physiological but Limited Behavioral Response to Unmanned Aerial Vehicles” was published online in the journal Current Biology and concludes that more research is needed to see if the bears would get used to the drones over time. The study, in one convenient image:

Wildlife researchers do use drones in their work to observe animals from a distance, and Canada even has what the BBC calls a “goose-bothering drone” designed to scare off pesky Canadian geese in Ottawa by blasting recordings of predatory birds. And why yes, that drone is called the GooseBuster. Who ya gonna call?

Episode Links

PTJ 142 News: You’ve Got Sale!

May 14, 2015 J.D. Biersdorfer Leave a comment

This has been quite a year for mergers and acquisitions — or at least attempts thereof. This week, Verizon Communications announced it was buying AOL. Inc. for $4.4 billion dollars. AOL Inc. produces digital content and advertising and claims to be the 4^th largest online property in the United States with 200 million customers. The Huffington Post is expected to be spun off, but Verizon should keep some spare cash handy — the company also needs to pay $90 million to settle a US government probe into unauthorized charges on customer bills.

No more grand Windows OS launches? Microsoft is changing the way it does these things and says Windows 10 is going to be its last major revision of the system. At the Microsoft Ignite conference in Chicago this week, Microsoft development executive Jerry Nixon said that going forward, Windows will stop being a standalone system with and become a service, with updates and improvements rolling out regularly.

It’s developer conference season at last! The Google I/O 2015 Conference is later this month, May 28th and 29^th at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. (There may also be a celebration of Google’s self-driving car program, which has now covered 1.7 million miles and only been involved in 11 minor accidents — and none of them was the Google car’s fault.) Attendees are expected to get the inside scoop on things like on Android M, the next version of Google’s mobile operating system, Android Auto for car infotainment, the Chrome operating system for netbooks, Google TV, wearables and other projects. Then Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference rolls into town 12 days later, starting June 8^th and running through the 12^th.

If fancy Apple computers aren’t in your budget, keep your eyes peeled for the CHIP (shown below), the new $9 computer envisioned by a startup called Next Thing Co. A funding drive to build CHIP went up on Kickstarter this week with a pledged goal of $50,000 needed to buy components in bulk. As of this week, the project was closing in on $1.1 million.

If you hate those unintentional selfies from taking pictures through windows, you’ll be glad to know that the smart folks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology now have an algorithm for that. The algorithm can sense discreet dual reflections from double-paned windows and remove them from the image. The MIT team will be presenting their findings next month at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference in Boston.

The Warner Music Group released is second-quarter earnings report this week and had one bit of surprising news: music-streaming revenue surpassed music-download revenue, as the press released stated it “for the first time in the history of our recorded music business.” Fluke or paradigm shift? Time will tell.

There’s a new social network in town (and in beta) and it’s designed for members of the build-it yourself maker community to show off projects and share knowledge. The new site is called MakerSpace and it’s the official community for Maker Faire.

Mozilla released Version 38 of the Firefox browser this week. In addition to the usual bug fixes and speed bumps, Firefox 38 now includes integration with the Adobe Content Decryption Module to play back copy-restricted content within the HTML 5 video tag. This could let users watch DRM-enabled content in Firefox — although only on the Windows version of the browser at the moment.

Microsoft is making it easier for more people to try the preview of the new Skype Translator for Windows 8.1 and Windows 10. While the original version required interested users to sign up for the software, Microsoft had removed that bit of electronic paperwork and now you can just go to the site and download it to get yapping with someone in another language.

Google’s director for law enforcement and information security, along with one of the company’s lawyers, did a Reddit Ask Me Anything last week and during the course of the question and answer session, it was revealed that Google does not use end-to-end encryption for its Google Hangout chats. So yeah, those Hangouts could, in theory, be wiretapped by government request.

And finally, from the Department of This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, Google announced this week that it had to temporarily shut down the online Map Maker component that lets users add their own content to Google Maps due to vandalism. The service has been plagued with pranks and obscenities in recent months, including an image of the green Android taking a leak in the Apple logo and an area of the White House called Edward’s Snow Den. Google said earlier this year that it planned to build a spam protection system into Map Maker, but perhaps it’s time step up those efforts. If they can make a self-driving car, how about a self-driving map bot that cruises the site looking for the naughty edits?

Episode Links

PTJ 132 News: Raise Your Glasses

March 5, 2015 J.D. Biersdorfer Leave a comment

Amid all the noise from both sides of the issue, the Federal Communications Commission voted last week to adopt the new rules that reclassify broadband Internet service as a public utility. The lawsuits are looming, but for now, the rules have passed. But something new to consider from it all: Mobile broadband service also falls under the new rules. As The Verge site points out, this is a total game-changer in the mobile space.

Mobile is everywhere, and especially out at the Mobile World Congress expo in Barcelona this week. Among the announcements: the fancy new Samsung Galaxy S6 and its sibling the Galaxy S6 Edge (shown here). Microsoft and HTC were among the many companies announcing new smartphone models with Lumia 640 line and the One M9 respectively; BlackBerry is fighting to get back in the game with its security-enhanced BlackBerry Leap smartphone, Intel has announced the next generation of Atom processors, and LG showed off four new phones and the fancy LG Watch Urbane Smartwatch that runs on Android.

Also in Android news, Google mentioned a new forthcoming Android Pay mobile payments service to compete with Apple Pay and the newly announced Samsung Pay. The Big G also said its Project Loon adventure is floating closer to becoming reality and the company may also be considering its own wireless service. Microsoft also introduced a new Universal Folding Keyboard for people who hate to type on glass screens.

The social network formerly known as Google+ is being split up into two parts, at least internally within the halls of Google. These parts shall be known as Photos and Streams. Google Hangouts will continue as a standalone communications tool for video.

Apple has announced a Spring Forward event for March 9^th, presumably to discuss the final specs and ship date for the Apple Watch. Apple CEO Tim Cook has been dropping hints about apps for the watch. And, as part of its OS X Beta program, Apple also released the first public Yosemite 10.10.3 beta for Mac participants.

Oh, when governments and technology collide. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is getting heat and may have broken some rules by using a personal email account to conduct government business during her tenure with the State Department. The Federal Records Act does not like it when official government business is conducted on personal email accounts with questionable security. Mrs. Clinton has since asked for the messages to be released.

President Obama has come out against new policies the Chinese government has placed on US technology companies who want to do business over there. The Chinese government’s pending new rules require tech firms to provide copies of encryption keys to Chinese authorities and to build security backdoors into systems, all in the name of counter-terrorism. The US does not like this. (To quote the comedienne Brett Butler, “Oh, Arturo, Prince of Irony.”)

And finally, if all these government eyeballs looking at you are making you nervous, you may want to keep your own eye on the development of AVG’s “invisibility glasses.” Although still proof-of-concept and dorkier for even some of the biggest dorks around to actually wear, the idea shows a nice little spark of resistance in an over-photographed world. In the meantime, sports fans of lousy teams (New York Jets, Mets, Knicks — take your pick) have an alternative solution for avoiding recognition on camera.

Podcast

PTJ 110: Just Keep it Out of Your Pants

September 25, 2014 Pedro Rafael Rosado Leave a comment

We’re pretty confident Steve Jobs would have advised us not to stuff the bendable iPhone 6 Plus into our pants pockets, much in the same way he helpfully suggested that we should hold our iPhone 4 differently to help alleviate antenna issues.

Also pretty confident his pants pocket recommendation would go over just as well as his “antennagate” tip did.

This week on the show J.D. shows us where we can go for music lessons online and El Kaiser reviews DUBS “acoustic filters” from Doppler Labs.

In the news, Home Depot’s lax network security; Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba sets IPO record; UPS Stores set to offer 3D printing service; Amazon workers strike in Germany; despite reports of bendy new iPhones, Apple sells millions of them; and NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft enters the orbit of the planet Mars.

Episode Links

Music Videos

September 23, 2014 J.D. Biersdorfer Leave a comment

Piano lessons (or whatever instrument your parents thought you should play) are something many of may have found a total drag when we were growing up. Some people liked the lessons, though, and regret letting their musical skills lapse. Some people never got to have personalized guidance and have been dreaming for years about picking up an instrument as a new hobby. If you fall into one of these camps but are too busy to find a local teacher, music instruction has gotten decidedly more digital the past few years.

Sure, you can order instructional DVDs or video downloads for your instrument of choice from the Web. If you want more personalized guidance in your musical education, however, consider online lessons with a live teacher through your computer or tablet’s webcam. Thanks to Skype, Google Hangouts and other video-calling software — and websites that help you find a teacher — you can take those weekly lessons and get feedback from a live human without leaving the house.

One of the big sites in the web-lessons space is the Zenph Online Education Network. The company is based out of North Carolina’s Triangle Research Park area and offers to hook you up with teachers for more than 30 different instruments. Piano, guitar, brass, woodwinds, strings and percussion are offered, as well as lessons in songwriting, voice and music theory. Prices per lesson vary by teacher, but $20 for half an hour or $30 for an hour are common, and you can book a free trial.

ArtistWorks is another site, and it offers live and pre-recorded lessons on both music and art. This site uses a subscription-based model for its pricing plans starting at about $30 a month — $90 for three months. On the ArtistWorks site, you join a “school” — a specific section dedicated to a particular instrument and teacher. The schools have a lesson library, video exchange and personalized feedback. Some of the teachers are very well-known in their fields, like Tony Trischka for banjo, Mike Marshall on mandolin or clarinet lessons with Ricardo Morales of the Philadelphia Orchestra. You can also get free sample lessons.

If you’re a parent and looking for an online music teacher for your child (or yourself), Lessonface.com is another site to consider. The portal connects students of all ages to instructors for piano, guitar and most school-band instruments. You find a teacher by filling in a web form with your instrument, cost and schedule preferences. Prices average around $35 for a half-hour lesson. Some, but not all, instructors offer trial lessons if you want to see how the student does with the teacher.

Guitar is a very popular instrument for teens, so if you’re narrowing your search to the six-string axe, check out FindaGuitarTeacher.com. The TakeLessons.com site also has personalized guitar instruction, along with bass, ukulele and a few other instruments.

Those are just some of the many sites for online music instruction. If you just want some general guidance or see how a particular riff or song is reverse-engineered, do a search on YouTube or Vimeo. And if you have a fairly recent Mac and the yen to learn guitar or piano, that copy of Apple’s free GarageBand program lurking in your Applications folder includes basic lessons in both instruments and links to buy more lessons online.

The benefits of music education, especially in younger kids, are pretty well-known at this point. Even if you’re an adult and working full-time, though, setting aside a bit of time each day for musical pursuits can be rewarding in itself with a little bit of acoustic therapy that pushes you in a new direction. And who knows — maybe all those years of playing Rock Band on the game console has actually given you a head start.

Podcast

PTJ 69: Apple Brings the Free and the Breezy

October 24, 2013 Pedro Rafael Rosado Leave a comment

Apple unleashes a second fall product announcement and while most of the updates were expected, they still managed to surprise. J.D. has a Hopefully Helpful Hint detailing how to configure Twitter and other services to deliver emergency alerts directly to your smartphone. In the news, Nokia holds what could be their last phone hardware event before the unit becomes part of Microsoft; Microsoft’s new Surface 2 tablets arrived in stores and Windows 8.1 was finally made available to the public — but not without problems; Lenovo launches a new Android-based convertible laptop/tablet; BlackBerry releases the long-awaited Android and iOS versions of its popular BlackBerry Messenger software; Google provides free voice calling; Netflix continues its surge; and a British mathematician develops a formula for the perfect pizza. The podcast revolution continues…

Episode Links

PTJ 69 News: Do the Math

October 24, 2013 J.D. Biersdorfer Leave a comment

Over yonder in Abu Dhabi, the Finnish firm Nokia held its presumed last phone hardware event before the phone unit melds into Microsoft. As for Microsoft, the company’s next generation of Surface 2 tablets arrived in stores earlier this week. Last week saw the arrival of Windows 8.1, which will hopefully bring some relief to people who were hating on 8. Download Day was not without its problems, however, including installation errors and the unceremonious yanking back of the Windows 8.1 RT update for what Microsoft termed “a situation” and several users called “the blue screen of death that won’t let my tablet boot.” Microsoft released a Surface RT recovery image two days later.

Code explorers poking around version 4.4 of Google Play think they’ve found signs that Google is planning its own Android-based Newsstand in the near future. And as we’ve seen with other products, Android’s not just for tablets anymore. Lenovo, maker of giant 29-inch desktop computers, also has a new Android-based convertible laptop/tablet. No word on if the Lenovo A10 will hit the US yet, but is available in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the Asian Pacific countries.

Facebook had a case of the Monday Morning Blahs this week — the site was acting erratic and refused to let its users post comments or photos, update their status lines, send messages or “like” posts. “Network maintenance” was eventually blamed for the issues.

The hardware may have tanked, but BlackBerry was able to put out Android and iOS versions of its popular BlackBerry Messenger software that was formerly constrained to BlackBerry devices. The company reported that six million people signed up for information about the app before it was released.

Also in app news, Google has added free voice calling to its Google Hangouts app for iOS. The updated version of the iOS app arrived last Friday and brought with it free in-app voice calling to numbers within the U.S. and Canada, plus incoming call support to a user’s Google Voice number.

On the entertainment front, Netflix announced that it now has 40 million subscribers worldwide and announced that its quarterly earnings had quadrupled. Orange Is the New Black, the women’s-prison drama that arrived in July, is the company’s most-watched original series ever. And the Hollywood Reporter and Variety are both reporting that Tim Burton and Michael Keaton are in talks for a sequel to 1988’s Beetlejuice.

Feeling hungry? A mathematician at the University of Sheffield in England has calculated a formula that is supposed to create the “perfectly proportioned margherita pizza.” Dr. Eugenia Cheng’s equation factors in the volume of dough, the constant volume of toppings, and the ratio between base to topping to find the “optimum mouthful.” (Who cares about P versus NP when the optimum mouthful problem has been licked?)

Oh, yeah. Apple had an event on Tuesday. It announced some stuff, namely the release of OS X Mavericks, new MacBook Pro laptops, more information on the tubular Mac Pro, new free iLife and iWork software and, oh, new iPads. Time to start guessing when the iPhone 6 will arrive!

(Hopefully) Helpful Hint, Episode Links

(Hopefully) Helpful Hint: Pass Me the Remote Control

May 8, 2013 J.D. Biersdorfer Leave a comment

“See the Start menu button? Okay, click that and go to Control Panel. No, Control Panel, over there. Do you see it? Yes, you have Control Panel, just look a little closer…”

Anyone who’s done technical support for a friend or family member over the phone has probably felt some frustration about not being able to see the computer’s screen to better assess the problem and guide the user along. Although they can often be overlooked, remote assistance tools — which let you see the other person’s screen and even take over control of the computer through your Internet connection — can make it easier for helper and helpee alike.

Tapping in via remote assistance is not as hard as it used to be, thanks to new software and services. For example, Google recently added a Remote Desktop feature to its Google+ Hangouts group video-chat service.

There’s a little bit of set-up involved, but a guide on PC World walks you through the steps. The Remote Desktop function had been previously seen as an extension for the Chrome browser, so that’s a possibility as well for helping out from afar as well; Google has info on using it here.

If you don’t use Google+ hangouts, or the Chrome extention, the Windows operating system has its own Windows Remote Assistance feature that’s been around for at least a decade and also lets you tinker with someone else’s computer over an Internet connection; questions about it are answered here.

Mac OS X has a few ways to share the screen (including with the Messages app) so you can see what’s going on and better direct your support. Apple has its own instructions for screen-sharing in OS X 10.8 here.

Third-party remote desktop apps like LogMeIn or TeamViewer, but these can be pricey if your needs go beyond the freebie editions. There’s also a whole category of remote desktop apps for mobile devices as well, so search your app store if you want to go that way.

Because it involves surrendering control of the computer, a remote assistance solution should only be used between trusted parties — and at least one of those parties needs to know what it’s doing. Remote assistance is obviously better for diagnosing software problems that it is for hardware issues, but if you just need to tweak a setting or find a “lost” file that accidentally got saved to the wrong folder, it can be a great tool for wielding your Jedi Master technical expertise when you’re not even physically in the room.

The independent audio magazine devoted to mashing up pop culture, technology and more. J.D. Biersdorfer and Pedro Rafael Rosado are your hosts. It's an Internet Radio revolution!