The Pebble Time app for Android has been updated with some enhanced support for notifications. With this update, Pebble has added a notifications app which allows you to act on any notification that has not been dismissed from your paired phone. Additionally, notifications dismissed on your phone will now dismiss on your watch.
Amazon has updated the Amazon Echo with some more new features today, this time bringing along support for Samsung's SmartThings, allowing you to control just about anything in your house with just your voice.
Back in May, Google and Twitter partnered to bring tweets into mobile search results. It was, and is, a pretty big deal for both companies. The relationship is apparently going well, as Google announced in a short update on its original blog post that it’d be including tweets within search results on desktop as well. Read More
From West Coast Native News: "This is how big a grizzly bears paw is – by the way, the bear is sedated and about to be tagged."
Going to the movies is getting airportified: your knapsacks, bags and purses will be searched on the way in to stop you from carrying in guns that you don't stick in your waistband or in a shoulder-holster.
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Jeff sez, "Tuts+ has made my six part introduction to PGP encryption, email and networking privacy available to readers for free."
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Google co-founder and Alphabet president Sergey Brin published a blog post this morning announcing Life Sciences as the first new company created under the Alphabet umbrella. The move was expected, as Alphabet CEO Larry Page wrote during the announcement of the new holding company that this area of focus was the perfect example of why Google needed to restructure itself. It's a bold bet with an enormous potential reward, but one that is far removed from Google's core business, and not likely to be financially self-sustaining anytime soon.
There are a number of already public projects that will be rolled up into life sciences:
Smart contact lenses that can monitor the blood sugar levels of diabetics
Nanoparticles that can be used to...
Brian M. Cassidy snapped this photo of a cat peering through a window with a poster announcing that it was missing.
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Twitter's stock price continues to slide, closing today at the $26 strike price at which it went public. It closed its first day of trading around $45, a mark it has not matched since May of this year. While the company has continued to grow its revenue at a healthy pace, it has struggled to turn a substantial profit and frightened investors with its lack of user growth. CEO Dick Costolo stepped down earlier this year, and has been replaced by co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey. But it's unclear if Dorsey will stay on as the permanent chief, adding to overall worries about the company's health.
There are plenty of budgeting tools out there, like Mint, that help you keep track of every penny and analyze your spending in a number of different ways. But if you’re new to budgeting, or you just like to keep things simple, it’s nice to have a basic view of your habits. Penny’s easy-to-read interface can help with that.
It works like a texting app. The character, “Penny,” guides you through the entire process. First, you set up your accounts. Unfortunately, it’s currently limited to a handful of banks and credit card issuers, but the major ones (Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, to name a few) are covered. Once you link your account, the app will give you a simplified view of what your spending looks like.
It organizes everything into five basic categories: food, transportation, bills, income, and other purchases. You can always look at your spending in these categories, but rather than explore trends on your own, you’ll have a few options to choose from in the texting interface:
Let’s say you choose breakdown by category. Penny will reply with a simplified diagram of your total spending in each category in the last thirty days. She’ll then show you each category, compared monthly.
It’s not a great tool for deep-diving into your budget. For example, with Mint, you can look at specific tags and subcategories of spending on your own. This app holds your hand through the process, but if you’re new to budgeting, that can be helpful.
Of course, you need your banking login to use the app, but they don’t store your credentials. Via their privacy policy:
Though we collect credentials to login to your bank accounts, we never save your credentials anywhere in our system—we use them to connect to your bank account, then forget them. Besides your personal information, we also track and store your usage of the app for internal analytics purposes. Finally, we store the transaction and balance information retrieved from your bank account. We only collect information when we think it would truly benefit your experience. We prefer to not know more about you unless we have to, since it makes our lives easier too! We protect the personal information you provide us by using industry-standard security practices such as encryption, firewalls, and access controls. We take security very seriously and have secured financial systems in past professional roles.
You can read their full policy here, and check the app out for yourself at the link below.
Penny | Apple Store
Penny | Google Play Store
OneDrive comes installed with Windows 10 and is enabled by default if you sign on with a Microsoft account. If you don’t use OneDrive, however, and don’t want it running in the background, there are some hoops you can jump through to disable it or get rid of it everywhere in Windows 10.
We’ve shown you how to get rid of the OneDrive icon in File Explorer with a registry hack, but that doesn’t uninstall OneDrive and it will still show up elsewhere. Although Microsoft doesn’t provide an easy way to remove OneDrive, you can disable it everywhere in Windows 10 or manually uninstall it.
Disabling OneDrive will prevent it from running as well as remove it from File Explorer, and you can easily re-enable it later if you want to. Unfortunately Windows 10 Home users don’t have access to the group policy editor, so they won’t have this option. But if you’re running Pro or another version of Windows 10, go to the Group Policy Editor (type in “gpedit.msc” in the search box) and go to Local Computer Policy > Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > OneDrive. Then enable the “Prevent the usage of OneDrive for file storage” setting.
To completely uninstall OneDrive:
taskkill /f /im OneDrive.exe to terminate any OneDrive processes and hit Enter.%SystemRoot%\System32\OneDriveSetup.exe /uninstall if you’re using 32-bit Windows 10 or %SystemRoot%\SysWOW64\OneDriveSetup.exe /uninstall if you’re using 64-bit Windows 10 and hit Enter.You won’t see a confirmation dialog or progress bar when you do this, but if you try searching for OneDrive, the app will no longer be found. Your OneDrive folder and files, however, will still be available.
If you do want to remove the OneDrive related folders and their contents, head to TechJourney for additional commands to run as well as orphaned registry keys to clean up.
Should you change your mind and want to reinstall OneDrive, head to the “%SystemRoot%\SysWOW64\” folder in File Explorer and run the OneDriveSetup.exe program.
Disable or Uninstall OneDrive Completely in Windows 10 | TechJourney
Google and European regulators continue to fight over which links ought to be removed under the controversial "right to be forgotten." In an order this week, regulators have taken issue over a decision by Google not to remove nine links, which the company argued were newsworthy. It's among the more complicated situations that have come up: the links are to articles about the right to be forgotten, but they reference a specific person who successfully had Google remove results about an old crime. Google says the results are of significant public importance and ought to be presented; regulators argue that they undermine the right to be forgotten by surfacing search results that aren't relevant to that person.
The latest Android Wear update brings along with it interactive watch faces, which will make it even easier to stay connected on the go. Currently, users have to fumble around with their watch to try and see what the next event in their calendar is, or to launch an app, but that is all changing.
With the new functionality, developers can add additional information to watch faces that can be revealed with just a single tap.
Dog logic! Good boy, Artie.
Android: Google Now on Tap was easily the coolest feature announced at Google I/O this year. However, you still can’t use it yet. If you want to get an idea of how it works, though, Microsoft has gone ahead and added it to their Bing app.
The feature allows you to scan whatever page you’re currently reading and get search results and or links to other apps (like IMDb or Wikipedia) to take action. In my brief tests the feature seemed a little rough around the edges. Some contexts that seemed like they should’ve at least been able to pick up some proper nouns didn’t return any results. Microsoft has also announced that they’re making an API available to developers, but it’s not clear how many third-party devs are actually plugging into the feature to improve it. While there’s still room to improve, this one is actually available, while Now on Tap won’t arrive until Android Marshmallow finally drops.
Bing Search | Google Play Store via Microsoft News
Sony has officially unveiled its SmartBand 2 after accidentally publishing details about the activity tracker earlier this year. As the leak had suggested, the SmartBand 2's biggest upgrade is a heart rate monitor, which will augment the device's ability to track users' fitness. Like the original SmartBand, it also functions as a sort of triage system for notifications, connecting to users' Android and iOS smartphones and vibrating to let them know about incoming calls, texts, and emails.
Unlike the SmartBand Talk with its 1.4-inch e-paper display, the SmartBand 2 has no screen and instead relies on vibrations and LEDs to get its messages across. It also functions as a music remote and has a smart alarm clock feature that monitors...
It's exactly what it seems to be: a twister formed over a fire's intense heat, drawing the blaze hundreds of feet into their air.
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That's the life. (more…)
Imagine a world where search engines proactively send recommended articles, people and companies to their users — and all of these recommendations are extremely helpful and relevant. This is an example of using context for discovery, and it’s the future of the Internet. Unfortunately, today’s search engines aren’t mind readers. Not even close. It’s not until the… Read More
People will always be more willing to help when they feel like they owe it to you. This classic persuasion method requires a little pre-work, but can make it much easier for you to convince others to lend you a hand when you need it.http://lifehacker.com/5911280/how-to...
The goal is reciprocity, and that requires you helping them out too. Robert Cialdini, the author of Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, suggests that helping others to advance their goals first is the key. The trick, however, lies in how you go about it. He explains to Harvard Business Review:
Get in the habit of helping people out, and—this part’s really important—don’t wave it away when people thank you. Don’t say, “Oh, no big deal.” We’re given serious persuasive power immediately after someone thanks us. So say something like “Of course; it’s what partners do for each other”—label what happened an act of partnership.
Don’t wait to be asked to help with something, just help. Then make it count by explaining why you’re willing to help. Tell them, “that’s what friends do for each other,” or “anything for a team member.” The next time you need help from them, you’ll probably get it.
The Uses (and Abuses) of Influence | Harvard Business Review
Photo by Betsy Weber.
Motorola is now taking orders of the Moto X Play from customers in the UK through its Moto Maker service, with prices starting at £279 for a custom 16GB version. The Moto X Play was announced during Motorola's July event, and will be the little brother to the Moto X Style, but won't make its way to the US.
With voice dictation built right into the keyboard of most smartphones, dictation apps have become a hard sell. But now Nuance, arguably the leader in speech to text, thinks it has a good reason for people to start paying for one: it's coming out with a new app called Dragon Anywhere that's supposed to be far more powerful at dictation than anything Apple or Google can offer.
Fossil, the watchmaker that's carved out a home at Macy's, JCPenney, and other retailers, is getting into the smartwatch game. The company previously signaled plans to release an Android Wear device, and today Fossil showed off its upcoming products. Yes, "products" because there's more than just a smartwatch headed to retail; Fossil is also working on a connected band and another, connected watch that's not quite as high functioning as a full-on smartwatch.
But the Android Wear timepiece is definitely the most interesting thing here. Fossil didn't offer a long glimpse, but you can see the watch's silver finish, leather straps, and yes — it's got the same black bar / "flat tire" look as Motorola's Moto 360.
Fossil and Intel's...
The movie studios continue to demand Lord High Internet Executioner status because "piracy is destroying the film industry," even as box office records are smashed anew: Straight Outta Compton broke $2B in record time.
New Zealand's Waitomo Glowworm Caves shimmer with a constellation of glow worms, and Jordan and Jenna from Stoked for Saturday got this gorgeous footage after a lot of trial and error. Read the rest