Starting today, Google is making a welcome change to Google Assistant. You can now cancel alarms on Google Assistant and devices like the Google Home by just saying “Stop.”
The post You can cancel alarms on Google Assistant just by saying ‘Stop’ without ‘Hey Google’ command appeared first on 9to5Google.
Google just announced the Google Pixel 3a and Pixel 3a XL, the latest addition to its smartphone lineup and the first Pixels to come at prices that could be considered less than high-end. The Pixel 3a shares great similarities with the Google Pixel 3 line that proceeded it. These two phones appeal to a different subset of the market, though, with lesser specs, cheaper materials, and a lower price…
The post Google announces Pixel 3a and 3a XL w/ familiar design, lower price, Snapdragon 670, more appeared first on 9to5Google.
In December last year, Jean-Jacques Savin, 71, floated away from the Canary Islands off the coast of Africa in an orange capsule he'd built. Last week, he landed at the Dutch Caribbean island of St. Eustatius. The capsule has no motor and was steered by the ocean current. Inside the 10 feet by 7 feet capsule is a bed and kitchen for Savin to cook fish he caught during the nearly 3,000 mile journey. From CNN:
The trip was not Savin's first major adventure. He previously worked as a military paratrooper and a private pilot, and climbed Mont Blanc in 2015, according to his project's website.
Savin had hoped to reach the Caribbean by late March, but missed the mark by just over a month. He still intends to make it to French-owned Guadeloupe by boat, before heading home with his barrel.
This year, Android is reaching version 10 and operating on over 2.5 billion active devices. A lot has changed since version 1.0, back when smartphones were just an early idea. Now, they’re an integral tool in our lives—helping us stay in touch, organize our days or find a restaurant in a new place.
Looking ahead, we’re continuing to focus on working with partners to shape the future of mobile and make smartphones even more helpful. As people carry their phones constantly and trust them with lots of personal information, we want to make sure they’re always in control of their data and how it’s shared. And as people spend more time on their devices, building tools to help them find balance with technology continues to be our priority. That’s why we’re focusing on three key areas for our next release, Android Q: innovation, security and privacy and digital wellbeing.
Together with over 180 device makers, Android has been at the forefront of new mobile technologies. Many of them—like the first OLED displays, predictive typing, high density and large screens with edge-to-edge glass—have come to Android first.
This year, new industry trends like foldable phone displays and 5G are pushing the boundaries of what smartphones can do. Android Q is designed to support the potential of foldable devices—from multi-tasking to adapting to different screen dimensions as you unfold the phone. And as the first operating system to support 5G, Android Q offers app developers tools to build for faster connectivity, enhancing experiences like gaming and augmented reality.
We’re also seeing many firsts in software driven by on-device machine learning. One of these features is Live Caption. For 466 million deaf and hard of hearing people around the world, captions are more than a convenience—they make content more accessible. We worked closely with the Deaf community to develop a feature that would improve access to digital media. With a single tap, Live Caption will automatically caption media that’s playing audio on your phone. Live Caption works with videos, podcasts and audio messages, across any app—even stuff you record yourself. As soon as speech is detected, captions will appear, without ever needing Wifi or cell phone data, and without any audio or captions leaving your phone.
On-device machine learning also powers Smart Reply, which is now built into the notification system in Android, allowing any messaging app to suggest replies in notifications. Smart Reply will now also intelligently predict your next action—for example, if someone sends you an address, you can just tap to open that address in Maps.
Over the years, Android has built out many industry-first security and privacy protections, like file-based encryption, SSL by default and work profile. Android has the most widely-deployed security and anti-malware service of any operating system today thanks to Google Play Protect, which scans over 50 billion apps every day.
We’re doing even more in Android Q, with almost 50 new features and changes focused on security and privacy. For example, we created a dedicated Privacy section under Settings, where you’ll find important controls in one place. Under Settings, you’ll also find a new Location section that gives you more transparency and granular control over the location data you share with apps. You can now choose to share location data with apps only while they’re in use. Plus, you’ll receive reminders when an app has your location in the background, so you can decide whether or not to continue sharing. Android Q also provides protections for other sensitive device information, like serial numbers.
Finally, we're introducing a way for you to get the latest security and privacy updates, faster. With Android Q, we’ll update important OS components in the background, similar to the way we update apps. This means that you can get the latest security fixes, privacy enhancements and consistency improvements as soon as they’re available, without having to reboot your phone.
Since creating our set of Digital Wellbeing tools last year, we’ve heard that they’ve helped you take better control of your phone usage. In fact, app timers helped people stick to their goals over 90 percent of the time, and people who use Wind Down had a 27 percent drop in nightly phone usage.
This year, we’re going even further with new features like Focus mode, which is designed to help you focus without distraction. You can select the apps you find distracting—such as email or the news—and silence them until you come out of Focus mode. And to help children and families find a better balance with technology, we’re making Family Link part of every device that has Digital Wellbeing (starting with Android Q), plus adding top-requested features like bonus time and the ability to set app-specific time limits.
Android Q brings many more new features to your smartphone, from a new gesture-based navigation to Dark Theme (you asked, we listened!) to streaming media to hearing aids using Bluetooth LE.
You can find some of these features today in Android Q Beta, and thanks to Project Treble and our partners for their commitment to enable faster platform updates, Beta is available for 21 devices from 13 brands, including all Pixel phones.
Jim Browning got a look into a Kolkata call center via one of the scammers' insecure machines: "You're looking at the webcam of a scammer named Deva ██████. He's currently uploading the phone numbers of people who will be his next potential victims. All are numbers of people who have previously fallen victim to a popup scam."
These guys are a particularly nasty group from Kolkata in India. They run a refund scam and this video shows what their call center looks like, how they operate, who and where they are. I've sent a link to the unblurred version of this video to the Kolkata Cyber Police (for all the good that it will do).
The offices are "small and cramped" and full of smoke.
Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android games that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous week or so. Today I have a fantastic hack and slash platformer, a gorgeous twin-stick shooter with a Lovecraftian theme, and a competitive mini golf game from Noodlecake Studios. So without further ado, here are the most notable games released this week.
18 new and notable Android games from the last week including Grimvalor, Tesla vs Lovecraft, and Golf Blitz was written by the awesome team at Android Police.
Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android applications that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous two weeks or so. Today I have an AR release from Childish Gambino, a new Playmoji pack filled with Pokémon, and a virtual reality release built around a short story by Philip K. Dick. So without further ado, here are the most notable Android apps released in the last two weeks.
15 new and notable (and 1 WTF) Android apps from the last two weeks including PHAROS AR, Playground: POKÉMON Detective Pikachu, and The Great C (4/20/19 - 5/4/19) was written by the awesome team at Android Police.
'Come on, angry claw puppy! Play with me!'
So cute.
Clover the Aussie Pup has an Instagram worth following.
View this post on InstagramCatto, please be my friend
#chesterragdoll @chesterandollieragdolls
A post shared by Clover The Aussie Pup (@aussienamedclover) on
[via]
My dear pal Barbara Rushkoff embroiders fantastic minimal portraits of musicians and other artists, writers, and thinkers whose work has inspired her over the years. I love the seeming simplicity of her illustrations that still beautifully convey the essence of her subjects! Also, the name of Barbara's Instagram account has me in, er, stitches: yr_resting_stitchface
Above: Robert Smith of The Cure. Below: Billie Eilish, Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson of the B-52's, Nilufer Yanya; Mark Hollis of Talk Talk; Joy Division's Ian Curtis; St. Vincent; Debbie Harry; and David Bowie.
It's been interesting watching all of these Pixel 3a/3a XL leaks happen all over the place – though it's hard to beat the insanity that led up to the Pixel 3 reveal last year – but it looks like Best Buy has taken the device's release for granted and jumped the gun a bit, as you can see in the photo above. Oh, boy.
Our tipster spotted this retail Pixel 3a XL box at a Best Buy in Springfield, Ohio just right out there in the open for all to see.
Read MoreWhoops, looks like Best Buy already put out some Pixel 3a XLs was written by the awesome team at Android Police.
This morning, retail packaging for the Pixel 3a leaked corroborating screen size, pricing, and the “Purple-ish” variant. Another leak today includes images of all three colors, and marketing copy that Google will be using to highlight the key features.
The post Leaked Pixel 3a promos highlight Night Sight, 3 years of OS updates, Call Screen appeared first on 9to5Google.
It's so fluffy!
[faints of cute]
Mirror, Mirror on the wall - Who has the fluffiest tail of all?
[via]
“Singing in the Rain,” with a pug wearing electric windshield wiper goggles.
Silly Marshmallow the white pug.
You're welcome.
[YouTube Link, originally published in 2016]
I missed this NPR video when it first came out, but I came across it today on the delightful Doobybrain website. It's about the evolution of the supermarket apple from the "mealy and tough-skinned" Red Delicious to the mouth-watering Honeycrisp. (I really want apple slices with peanut butter right now.)
As a method of testing battery output, it seems a bit elaborate, but racing AAs down coiled copper tubes looks like a lot of fun. Mr. Michal:
Duracell, Varta or Energizer, Which Will Be the Best? In this video you'll see two races between aa batteries. Infinite loop and DRAG RACE. How to make the simplest electromagnetic train in the world ? It's very easy. You only need these three parts. 1. copper wire raw 2. battery ( AAA, AA or C ) 3. and two neodymium magnets ( it must be larger in diameter than battery )
I figure as a benchmark, you'd need to immobilize the tube for comparisons to be fair? Say, if you wanted to create a whole YouTube channel dedicated exclusively to well-controlled battery races.
Today we’re introducing several updates to Google Earth Timelapse, a global, zoomable time-lapse video that lets anyone explore the last 35 years of our changing planet’s surface—from the global scale to the local scale. This update adds two additional years of imagery to the time-series visualization, now spanning from 1984 to 2018, along with mobile support and visual upgrades to make exploring more accessible and intuitive.
Timelapse provides a comprehensive picture of our changing Earth—including stunning phenomena like the sprouting of Dubai’s Palm Islands, the retreat of Alaska’s Columbia Glacier and the impressive urban expansion of Las Vegas, Nevada (seen below).
See the growth of cities around the world, including Las Vegas, Nevada.
See the impact of large-scale infrastructure on a local level such as hydropower dams in the Brazilian Amazon.
Gaze in awe at the scale of change, sometimes rapid, like bushfires in Australia's Northern Territory.
See the complex dynamics of many different things at play in a small place like volcanoes, deforestation and wildfires.
Explore patterns of human activity, like surface mining, which takes many diverse forms across the world.
Scientists, documentarians and journalists have used this dataset to help us better understand the complex dynamics at work on our planet. News outlets have brought their reporting to life with Timelapse imagery, from coverage of the floods in Houston, Texas to population monitoring. Recently, a team of scientists at the University of Ottawa published an article Nature based on the Timelapse dataset which revealed a 6,000 percent increase in landslides on a Canadian Arctic island since 1984. Starting this week, if you’re in the U.K., you can see Timelapse imagery featured in Earth From Space, a new BBC series about the incredible discoveries and perspectives captured from above.
Zeit Online uses Timelapse to show the extent to which jungles are cleared for soy production in Brazil.
Using Google Earth Engine, Google's cloud platform for petabyte-scale geospatial analysis, we combined more than 15 million satellite images (roughly 10 quadrillion pixels) to create the 35 global cloud-free images that make up Timelapse. These images come from the U.S. Geological Survey/NASA Landsat and European Sentinel programs. Once again, we joined forces with our friends at Carnegie Mellon’s CREATE Lab, whose Time Machine video technology makes Timelapse interactively explorable.
Today's update also adds mobile and tablet support, making it a little easier for you to explore, research or get lost in the imagery—from wherever you are. Up until recently, mobile browsers disabled the ability to autoplay videos, which is critical for Timelapse (since it’s made up of tens of millions of multi-resolution, overlapping videos). Chrome and Firefox reinstated support for autoplay (with sound muted), so we’ve added mobile support with this latest update.
Earth Timelapse, now available on phones and tablets, includes a handy new "Maps Mode" toggle to let you navigate the map using Google Maps.
The design of the new Timelapse interface leverages Material Design with simple, clean lines and clear focal areas, so you can easily navigate the immense dataset. We contributed this new user interface to the open-source Time Machine project, used by Carnegie Mellon and others. Read more about our design approach at Google Design.
We’re committed to creating products like Timelapse with the planet in mind, and hope that making this data easily accessible will ground debates, encourage discovery, and inform the global community’s thinking about how we live on our planet. Get started with Timelapse on the Earth Engine website, or take a mesmerizing tour of the world through YouTube.
Nvidia news and rumors are always exciting, even here in the Android space. The company best known for its graphics cards earned a lot of positive vibes in our neck of the woods with the Shield (Portable), Shield Tablets, and of course, the Shield TV. Because of this good reputation, whenever news about a new Shield product emerge, people (read: me) get excited. XDA found in some digging that Nvidia could possibly be working on a 2-in-1 tablet.
Read MoreNVIDIA code points to forthcoming desktop mode, possible 2-in-1 SHIELD Tablet was written by the awesome team at Android Police.
Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android games that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous week or so. Today I have a fantastic sci-fi noir point-and-click adventure game, a traditional puzzle adventure that covers some difficult topics, and a Metal Slug-themed idle clicker. So without further ado, here are the most notable games released this week.
26 best new Android games released this week including Whispers of a Machine, Agatha Knife, and Metal Slug Infinity was written by the awesome team at Android Police.
Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android applications that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous week or so. Today I have a social podcast app, a self-driving car service app, and a tie-in release that will help you set up the newest Harmony remote. So without further ado, here are the most notable Android apps released in the last week.
15 new and notable Android apps from the last week including Swoot, Waymo, and Harmony Express (4/13/19 - 4/20/19) was written by the awesome team at Android Police.
The public markets are hungry: as Uber and Lyft look to IPOs to let their investors -- who have been subsidizing 40-50% of every ride -- redeem their shares through sales to the public capital markets, the companies are desperate for ways to reduce their unprofitability and increase those share prices.
Luckily for them, the rideshare companies operate "two-sided markets," a darling of neoliberal economic orthodoxy, wherein they are able to control the prices that customers pay and the share of those payments that reach drivers, and that means they get to fuck everybody over.
Both companies have been ratcheting up fares as they have increased their exposure to the public markets, but not only are they not sharing these new revenues with drivers -- they're actually cutting real wages to drivers.
Drivers are figuring this out by sharing screenshots of the fares charged and their remittances with passengers (Uber and Lyft otherwise hoard all information about the spread between fare and wage).
“I always check the rider app anytime before taking rides. During morning rush they’re charging passenger $145 to go to the airport. I only get $33. Lyft started doing this four weeks before IPO,” said one Lyft XL (larger vehicles) driver in San Francisco, California, who requested to remain anonymous because they are currently applying for a new job. The driver said they have to work 100 hours a week just to make the same amount of money they did last year. “It’s amazing they have been able to get away with everything they are doing. Now they are charging passengers surge and keeping it all.”
Sinakhone Keodara, 44, has been driving for Lyft in Los Angeles since September 2018. “I have noticed the pay continuously goes down. It’s getting harder and harder for me to make $100 a day,” Keodara said. He is currently homeless, living out of the car he leases through Lyft. “Unless I go on an airport ride, I don’t make any money. Essentially, I’m paying to give their riders a ride.”
Both companies have increased what they charge for time and decreased what the charge for distance – a move that should benefit drivers stuck in traffic but penalises those who drive greater distances in lighter traffic.
Uber and Lyft drivers say apps are short-changing wages while raising fares [Michael Sainato/The Guardian]
(via Naked Capitalism)
MandalaGaba is a drawing board that specializes in mandalas and other artistic mathematical magic. Click and drag and watch what happens! You can save and share your work; the creators have a blog and an instagram featuring quality examples.
After radial symmetry (mandalas) and tessellations, I just finished implementing recursive drawing. Do tweak the buttons & sliders, seeing their effect on a pen stroke is the best way to understand what they do. I hope this is fun.
HP’s latest Chromebook features a 15-inch touchscreen display with thin side bezels, and a slightly more premium finish compared to entry-level Chrome OS devices with Android apps. At $449, the HP Chromebook 15 is slim, light, and includes a full numeric keypad on the edge-to-edge keyboard.
The post New HP Chromebook 15 features touchscreen, premium finish, numeric keypad for $449 appeared first on 9to5Google.
A southern Australia livestock sales agent saved a magical unicorn sheep from the slaughterhouse by trading its owner two cases of beer in exchange for the fantastic creature. (The unicorn, named Joey, apparently does have a stunted second horn but whatever.)
“We’ll break him in, take him to shows and pageants, and who knows where we can go, maybe Hollywood,” (Joey's new human companion Michael) Foster told 7News Adelaide.
“I’m sure the kids will get a big kick out of patting a real-life unicorn, we might even do unicorn rides.”
To say that Google's and Amazon's relationship has been going through a rough patch over the past couple of years would be an understatement. The two companies have been on a path of mutual destruction, causing services of one to disappear from devices of the other, and vice versa. It looked like a resolution was nowhere in sight, so you can imagine our surprise when we saw the news that Google and Amazon have finally kissed and made up.
Read MorePeace in our time: YouTube is coming to Fire TV, Amazon Prime Video to support Chromecast was written by the awesome team at Android Police.
Here’s a shocker. Google and Amazon are settling their feud and officially making a move that’s awesome for consumers. Amazon Prime Video is coming to Chromecast and Android TV.
The post Amazon Prime Video is coming to Chromecast and Android TV, YouTube will head to Fire TV appeared first on 9to5Google.
In the past few days, we’ve seen an exceptional number of OnePlus leaks hit the web. Now, Pete Lau has dropped the first official OnePlus 7 teaser, hyping up the “especially smooth” experience it will deliver.
The post OnePlus drops first OnePlus 7 teaser, hints at ‘especially smooth’ experience appeared first on 9to5Google.
Spending money online is more and more common. You see an item you like and the purchase is just a couple of taps away, you barely get any time to have second thoughts. With digital stores, that's even more exacerbated by the presence of apps, plenty of entertainment options, not to mention games and all their tempting in-app purchases. Having a mental budget is all well and good, but if you don't actually know how much you've spent or if you don't get reminded that you're nearing or have surpassed your limit, then it's pointless.
Read MorePlay Store helps you budget your monthly purchases to avoid overspending was written by the awesome team at Android Police.
Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android games that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous week or so. Today I have an excellent simulation game where you build your own construction company from the ground up, a unique story-driven puzzle game from the creator of You Must Build a Boat, and the official release of the sequel to the spooky adventure game Distraint.
29 best new (and 1 WTF) Android games released this week including Construction Simulator 3, Photographs, and Distraint 2 was written by the awesome team at Android Police.
Want to boop that beef snoot so bad.
