Rolandt

Good news! My November blood test results show that cancer levels are stable again – Nov = 8. Hopefully this 8-9 range will be the new normal for future tests. This test result shows that my Pomalyst chemo is effectively fighting my cancer. Recall that I stopped dexamethasone (steroid) in July due to eye damage and I’m just on chemo.

M protein (g/L) (0 = cancer undetectable)
Nov = 8
Late Oct = 9
Early Oct = between 5-6
Sept = under 7.7
Aug = value missing
July = 3.0
June =3.2
Feb 2015 (began chemo) 36.1

My m protein value is my cancer levels marker. Think of it as the amount of myeloma/cancer in my plasma cells. Plasma cells are white blood cells used to fight infection. That’s why multiple myeloma is a cancer of the immune system and also called a blood cancer. If my m protein is 0, then cancer is undetectable in my bloodstream.

I am much more fatigued now both mentally and physically, due to my elevated cancer levels while on indefinite chemo treatment. Thinking remains a challenge and conversations are becoming increasingly infrequent. This is to be expected as chronic fatigue is a common symptom of my multiple myeloma + anemia.

I will never let cancer discourage me. I’ll continue to maintain a positive attitude, focus on healthy eating, and avoiding negativity in my life.

Happy days ahead!

Thursday morning as fog blanketed the city, I travelled to Stanley Park. I wanted a setting that maintained the look of autumn through the fog. A surreal atmosphere.

To recap: On Sunday, December 3rd, I completed Cycle 37 Week 3. I have Multiple Myeloma and anemia, a rare cancer of the immune system. Multiple myeloma is a cancer of the plasma cells that affects the plasma cells, a type of immune cell that produces antibodies to fight infection. These plasma cells are found in the bone marrow. As a blood cancer, it is incurable, but treatable. Since February 9th 2015, I have been on Pomalyst and dexamethasone chemo treatment (Pom/dex). On July 16th, my dexamethasone treatment ended, due to eye damage, reported by my Glaucoma Specialist, from long-term use.

Weekly chemo-inspired self-portraits can be viewed in my flickr album.

May 2014: Granville Island

The post Week 147 of chemo complete: Cancer levels are stable appeared first on Fade to Play.

When we set out to launch Firefox Quantum earlier this year, we knew we had a hugely improved product. It not only felt faster — with a look and feel that tested off the charts — it was measurably faster. Thanks to multiple changes under the hood, we doubled Firefox’s speed while using 30% less memory than Chrome.

In less than a month, Firefox Quantum has already been installed by over 170M people around the world. We’re just getting started and early returns are super encouraging.

Here’s a look at the top initial indicators we are seeing for Firefox Quantum since our launch:

1. Our biggest release to date. Firefox Quantum is Firefox’s fastest path to 100M+ profiles and half a billion daily hours of use on a new release in recent memory – a product of both seamless release and strong uptick in new profiles. And, millions of users are still getting their first introduction to Firefox Quantum every day.
2. More users are coming from Chrome. We’ve seen a 44% growth in downloads from people who are using the Chrome browser compared to the same time last year.
3. Mobile is growing too. Our four core mobile apps are experiencing strong growth resulting from the launch of Firefox Quantum. Firefox for iOS and Android has shown a 24% lift in installs, and Firefox Focus for Android and iOS showed a 48% lift in installs.
4. The Add-ons ecosystem remains strong. Over 1,000 Firefox Quantum-ready extensions have been added to addons.mozilla.org since Firefox Quantum was released.
5. Screenshots is a breakout hit. It’s seeing very strong early traction. Users have taken over 30 million screenshots since the feature launched in late September.                                                                                           
6. Developer Support for Firefox Quantum:  Improved browser speed and stability, as well as high quality developer tools are giving developers more reasons to try and continue to use Firefox developer tools. Since the September 26th developer edition of Firefox Quantum was released, we saw a 10% increase in daily use of developer tools and a 53% increase in Developer edition downloads.

Here’s what the world is saying about Firefox Quantum:

7.  Social media Is buzzing. While the fun part was reading what new users had to say, the data also showed a significant positive shift in sentiment across Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, YouTube, and blogs. (Source: Crimson Hexagon social media analytics)

8.  Our Ads are taking off. We took a unique approach to marketing the new Firefox browser, where we focused on what it feels like — and even sounds like — to use our blazingly fast new browser. They came to life in television spots and promoted videos with our “Wait Face” and Reggie Watts video which, combined, had more than half a billion impressions, and a third of those views are from start to finish.

9.  Firefox in the news. We’ve received an overwhelming amount of positive coverage for the new Firefox browser. We’ve seen hundreds of headlines across the globe from Wired’s “Ciao, Chrome: Firefox Quantum Is The Browser Built for 2017, ” to El Pais’ “Firefox wants to reinvent browsers with Quantum” and Usbek & Rica’s “Firefox Quantum: ‘We’re back’.”

We’re incredibly heartened by the positive response since the launch. We’ll continue to watch these numbers, and plan to check back in the new year with an update!

 

The post Early Returns on Firefox Quantum Point to Growth appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

I love USB, cables, and charging things. So MacRumors comparison of different wired and wireless charging options and speed for the iPhone X is my catnip. tl; dr: USB-C + USB-C-to-Lightning cable gives you far and away the fastest times. I've found this true for the iPad Pro as well.

James Beshara has a really interesting read on how communication will change and evolve in a post-verbal world, namely one where human/brain interfaces like Neuralink can more directly transmit thought between people than the medium of language allows today.

After reading the essay I wonder if people's thoughts or the neural pathways they activate, if they could be directly transmitted into another brain, would actually make any sense to someone else with a unique internal set of pathways and framework for parsing and understanding the world. The essay assumes we'd understand and have more empathy with each other, but that seems like a leap. It seems likely the neural link would need it own set of abstractions, perhaps even unique per person, similar to how Google Translate AI invented its own meta-language.

Today idea-viruses that cause outrage (outrageous?) in today's discourse  have been weaponized by algorithms optimizing for engagement, and directly brain-transmitted memes seem especially risky for appealing to our base natures or causing amygdala hijack. But perhaps a feature of these neural interface devices could counteract that, with a command like "tell me this piece of news but suppress my confirmation bias and tribal emotional reactions while I'm taking it in."

Through the Lens

After more than 25 hours of research and hands-on testing 13 Thunderbolt 3 docks with more than $7,000 worth of high-end gear, we think CalDigit’s TS3 Plus is the best choice for Mac or PC owners who are looking to expand their Thunderbolt-equipped computer’s array of inputs and outputs—or just make plugging in and unplugging more convenient. It has more useful ports than most models, it can charge even the most powerful laptops at full speed, and it takes up little room on a desk. (All current Apple laptops and desktops except the 12-inch MacBook and the Mac mini have Thunderbolt 3 ports, as do a lot of newer PCs, such as our top Ultrabook picks; check your computer’s manual. If your computer is older, see our guide to Thunderbolt 2 and 1 docks. If your computer has USB-C but not Thunderbolt 3, check out our guide to USB-C accessories.)

After 15 hours of research and testing, and dragging three top-rated models over rocks and under pools, we recommend the Nikon W300 as the best waterproof tough camera to take with you when you go climbing, skiing, or snorkeling. It’s tough, easy to use, captures 4K video, and takes good-looking photos without any futzing.

After more than 40 hours of research and testing, including time spent making eight photo books and consulting with a master printer on the results, we recommend Shutterfly as the best online photo book service.

Microsoft is having another go at Windows on competing architectures. The older ones might remember that Windows NT was designed to work in IA-32, MIPS, DEC Alpha, PowerPC and later Itanium. Windows RT ran on NVidia chips. Now Microsoft is working with Qualcomm. Before the year is out there will be machines running on the Snapdragon 835 chipset that is also powering premium Android smartphones. Always connected, instant on, more than 20 hours on a single charge, that all sounds pretty impressive. Third time's a charm.

Der linke AirPod ist bei mir immer ruckzuck leer. Er kommt bereits mit dezimierter Ladung aus dem Case, wenn ich ihn länger nicht benutzt habe. Dann lädt er allerdings wieder ganz voll. Kennt das jemand?

Update: Apple tauscht die AirPods aus. Das kommt wohl selten vor.

What makes DeepMind’s latest accomplishment is noteworthy is the fact that it conquered three games with very different rule sets using a single AI. AlphaGo Zero, the latest version of AlphaGo, began “tabula rasa” without any prior knowledge or understanding of Go, shogi or chess, but the AI managed to achieve “superhuman performance” in all three games with stunning speed. IBM spent more than 10 years perfecting Deep Blue before it successfully mastered chess. AlphaGo Zero did it in just 24 hours.

Now put all of that into a computer the size of a smartphone and we are toast.

More >

Die deutsche IBM-Truppe war mit einem Wunschkonzert schon ein bisschen vorgeprescht, aber jetzt geht es richtig los mit den #domino2025 Jams. Die Treffen in Ehningen und Düsseldorf sollen auf 35 Teilnehmer begrenzt sein. Rechtzeitig anmelden!

More >

Techcrunch:

As Spotify continues to inch towards a public listing, Apple is making a move of its own to step up its game in music services. Sources tell us that the company is close to acquiring Shazam, the popular app that lets people identify any song, TV show, film or advert in seconds, by listening to an audio clip or (in the case of, say, an ad) a visual fragment, and then takes you to content relevant to that search.

We have heard that the deal is being signed this week, and will be announced on Monday, although that could always change.

More >

Moodle News, Dec 09, 2017

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This post references an announcement that "Beginning with up-and-coming LMS like Degreed, Digital Chalk, Cornerstone OnDemand, and Docebo, LinkedIn Learning will now let users access their vast repository, made mostly of video lessons." This makes the case in the headline, that we are now entering an era where the LMS will import and display external content. On the face of it, this is good for both producers and students, however the leveraling of exclusive deals will begin to mitigate against the advantages. Unlike 'net neutrality', there is, after all, no such thing as 'LMS neutrality'. This article could be longer and more informative, but sadly, it isn't.

[Link] [Comment]

Jon Christian, The Outline, Dec 09, 2017

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This should be of no surprise to anyone, I'm sure. The subtitle of the story is "how brands secretly buy their way into Forbes, Fast Company, and Huffpost stories." We also read that "four contributing writers to prominent publications including Mashable, Inc, Business Insider, and Entrepreneur told me they have personally accepted payments in exchange for weaving promotional references to brands into their work on those sites." Ben Werdmuller wryly comments, "Trust in the media is declining, you say ..."

[Link] [Comment]

Michael Geist, Dec 09, 2017

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Michael Geist has a couple of posts on "a coalition that plans to file a proposal with the CRTC that would lead to the creation a mandatory website blocking system in Canada." It would be run not by the courts but by "a new “Internet Piracy Review Agency”, envisions the creation of mandatory block lists without judicial review to be enforced by the CRTC." This is a bad idea, he writes, for several reasons, not the least of which is that the purpose of such a blocking mechanism would evolve from obvious cases. "Recent history suggests that the list will quickly grow to cover tougher judgment calls." Also, "the creation of a blocking system will invariably lead to demands that it expand to other areas. Whether fake news, hate speech or unlicensed content, if blocking websites without even court oversight is viewed as fair game, the CRTC will face a steady stream of demands for more." I'm in agreement with Geist on this.

[Link] [Comment]

Overview of server virtualization, setup of Vagrant box for gRSShopper, an overview of the gRSShopper application, including its use in a Firefox panel. Online Educa Berlin, Berlin, Germany (Workshop) Dec 06, 2017 [Comment]

IEEE IC Industry Consortium on Learning Engineering, Dec 10, 2017

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The vote to launch this was taken just a couple weeks ago and mine was the sole vote against, this based solely on the name, which I think is a bad idea. The engineers are getting far ahead of the theory in e-learning, and as a result, we're getting solutions thta are inappropriate. And I don't think that learning is something you can engineer as though it were a bridge or an electrical circuit. But it still makes sense to have a consortium supporting the development of, say, learning technology  engineering. 

[Link] [Comment]

Tanya Dorey, Small Stories, Dec 15, 2017

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I've been on Mastodon for just over a year; my first post was last December 3. Since then I've written small stories, discussed theory, documented 1500 km of bike rides, and engaged in general banter. What I like about it is that it is a small and informal community I can share with. Some people call it a pedagogy of small. Others call it a pedagogy of slow. If it's a pedagogy at all, it's a pedagogy of harmony (which really, at long last, may be my answer to Friere). Tanya Dorey writes, "With that first step, we are again at an interesting starting point.  Where do we go from here?" This article is a collection of thoughts from her and four others who share the same social space I share on this harmonious platform. P.S. be sure to explore trubox.ca as another interesting alternative form of pedagogical community.

[Link] [Comment]

John Hilton III, David Wiley, Jared Stein, Aaron Johnson, Brigham Young University, Dec 15, 2017

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In the ongoing discussion on OER repositories David Wiley suggested today that "While many people are aware of the 5Rs framework for thinking about the legal openness of OER, but far fewer people are aware of the ALMS framework for thinking about the technical openness of OER." It was introduced in 2010 in Open Learning, a Taylor & Francis journal that throws up a subscription barrier if I want to read it. But there are open access copies here and here. The acronym stands for "Access to editing tools, Level of expertise required to revise or remix, Meaningfully editable and Source-file access." The authors write, "technical aspects of OER will affect how ―open‖ they really are. Creators of OER who wish to promote revising and remixing should ensure that OER are designed in such a way that users will have access to editing tools, that the tools needed to will not require a prohibitive level of expertise, and that the OER are meaningfully editable and self-sourced."

[Link] [Comment]

Combining small multiples with the grid layout can make for an intuitive geographic reference. Read More

For many people, logging onto Facebook and scrolling through their News Feeds is a daily activity. In fact, the company announced in June that it had hit a two billion monthly active users, marking impressive year-over-year growth.

However, not everyone is so bullish on the social network’s increasing prominence in people’s everyday lives. In fact, Chamath Palihapitiya, who joined Facebook in 2007 and operated as vice president for user growth, said he feels “tremendous guilt” over his role in helping the platform become such a dominant force.

“I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works,” he said at an event at Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Palihapitiya mentioned that the drive for online interactions such as ‘liking,’ ‘commenting’ and ‘sharing’ posts online. Facebook  to criticize social media platforms as a whole. “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works,” he said,  “No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth.”

To illustrate this, Palihapitya cited an incident in India in which fake messages about kidnappings were shared on WhatsApp and eventually led to the hanging of seven innocent people.

“That’s what we’re dealing with,” said Palihapitiya. “And imagine taking that to the extreme, where bad actors can now manipulate large swathes of people to do anything you want. It’s just a really, really bad state of affairs. And it’s not an American problem — this is not about Russians ads. This is a global problem.”

Via: The Verge

The post Former Facebook exec says social network is ‘destroying how society works’ appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Interac believes December 22nd will be 2017’s busiest shopping day. This data comes from a retrospective look at information gathered from December 2016.

According to Interac, Canadians made over 24 million transactions and spent $1.2 billion on Friday, December 23rd, 2016, which beats the year’s previous total by 19 percent.

Interac projects there will be 25 million debit transactions on Friday, December 22nd this year, meaning that Canadians will likely spend more than 1.2 billion on Christmas gifts.

Hill + Knowlton Strategies conducted an online survey of Canadians who were 18 years and older. The survey started on October 27th and went until November 1st.

According to Interac’s survey, Canadians used ‘Interac Flash,’ a contactless way of paying with one’s banking information, 1.5 billion times in 2017 which is 80 per cent more than last year.

The survey also looked at how much Canadians want to spend, if Canadian plan on going into the red and how much Canadians love lists.

The post Interac forecasts 25 million debit transactions on December 22 appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Canadians prefer brick and mortar stores compared to online shopping, according to a report by Angus Reid Institute.

The information gathered indicates that 74 percent of Canadians would rather shop at physical stores rather than online if given the choice. The numbers are in favour of physical stores across the board, with the study going so far as to state that even Canadians in the 18 to 34 age range prefer to shop in physical stores.

The study also found that entertainment products are what Canadians primarily shop for online. The results show that 60 percent of books, movies, music and video games are purchased online by Canadians. In terms of groceries and food, 95 percent of Canadians would rather purchase those items from a physical store.

The Angus Reid Institute also found that 65 percent of Canadians who shop weekly prefer online purchases. Furthermore, those who browse and buy online fall into the 25 to 34 age range.

That said, the study also shows that 65 percent of Canadians believe that they’ll do more online shopping in the next year or two, even those ages 65 and up.

The Angus Reid Institute attained its research by conducting an online survey that took place from October 24th to October 27th.

When it comes to methodology, 1,504 Canadian members of the Angus Reid Forum took part in the online survey.

You can find the full report here.

Image Credit: Pexel Ports 

Source: Angus Reid Institute 

The post Canadians prefer physical stores rather than shopping online, says study appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Instagram wants to make it easier to discover new content that’s relevant to your interests.

The social media giant will now allow users to follow specific hashtags, not unlike one would follow a friend or celebrity. The existence of hashtag following was first reported back in November, when it was discovered Instagram was testing the feature with select users.

To start, either search for a particular hashtag of choice or tap on one found in any post. Relevant hashtags and accounts will be displayed in your search results.

Tap on a hashtag you’re interesting in to open its dedicated page and tap the ‘follow button.’ From then on, you’ll begin to see top posts from that hashtag in your Instagram feed, as well as some of the latest stories associated with that hashtag in your stories bar. As with Instagram accounts, hashtags can be unfollowed at any time.

You can also see which hashtags other people are following by searching their profile. As with the friends you follow, this information will remain hidden to anyone but your followers if you set your account to private.

This isn’t the only new Instagram hashtag feature introduced this month. Last week, the company announced a new initiative that alerts users when they’re searching for hashtags associated with behaviour that is harmful to animals or the environment. Working with animal protection agencies, Instagram said it is looking to reduce the number of “wildlife selfies” — instances in which people remove animals from their homes to take pictures with them.

Source: Instagram

The post You can now follow hashtags on Instagram in your main feed appeared first on MobileSyrup.

If you build it they will come, and if you reach capacity you need to add more capacity. That mantra comes in handy with the overwhelming success of the King Street pilot project in Toronto which does a “vehicular road diet” on cars on the street to facilitate faster streetcar times. As reported in the Toronto Star , researchers from the University of Toronto found that  “during the evening rush hour period of 4 to 7 p.m., the mean travel time for westbound streetcars in the pilot area has been cut by 24 per cent, to 17.3 minutes, from 22.8 minutes before the pilot began. The mean travel time for eastbound streetcars has been reduced by 20 per cent, to 16.4 minutes from 20.6 minutes.”

For an investment of just 1.5 million dollars a reliable and more efficient street car service is now available and has been wildly popular, serving tens of thousands of transit users. Cars are forced to exit right at major intersections  if they enter King Street, and police officers enforced this behaviour by aggressive ticketing cars that did not leave the street. On street parking was removed from the pilot area, and streetcar stops relocated to the far side of intersections for passenger safety, convenience and efficiency.  The streetcar carried 65,000 passengers a day before the pilot project, with 10,000 cars a day hampering streetcar movement.

It’s no surprise that the streetcar’s efficiency is maximized at rush hour when there is little other vehicular traffic on King Street. Toronto’ Transit Commission is evaluating the pilot and will be releasing data on transit service and the car traffic in mid December.

Android developers can now access the Android 8.1 Oreo API today, and Google will be rolling out the next version of Android to compatible Pixel and Nexus devices over the next week.

Owners of the 2016 Pixel twins, the Pixel C, as well as the Nexus 5X and 6P can expect the update first.

If you don’t want to wait for the update notification, you can sign up for the Android Beta program to quickly receive the full version of Android 8.1.

You can also unlock your bootloader and flash the stock Nexus or Pixel image — which is a bit of a complicated process — or you can sideload the OTA update file. However, sideloading the OTA update is yet another lengthy process.

It should also be mentioned that the Pixel 2 XL at the MobileSyrup offices has yet to receive the Android 8.1 update notification. Still, we’ll remain vigiliant knowing that it should be arriving soon.

Source: Android Developers Blog

The post Android 8.1 Oreo rolling out now to Pixel and Nexus devices appeared first on MobileSyrup.

I’m in the market for Christmas presents for my true love, @mrshrbrmstr, and thought I’d look to an age-old shopping list for inspiration. Just what would it set me back if I decided to mimic the 12 Days of Christmas in this modern day and age?

Let’s try to do the whole thing in R (of course!).

We’ll need to:

• Grab the lyrics
• Parse the lyrics
• Get pricing data
• Compute some statistics
• Make some (hopefully) pretty charts

This one was complex enough formatting-wise that I needed to iframe it below. Feel free to bust out of the iframe at any time.

Some good follow-ups to this (if you’re so inclined) would be to predict prices next year and/or clean up the charts a bit.

Grab the code up on GitHub.

(Note: ColourLovers API times out occasionally so just try that snippet again if you get an error).

At the Amazon AWS re:Invent event last week, Amazon made a slew of announcements relating to new AWS service offerings. Here’s a quick round-up of some of the things I noticed, with links to announcement blog posts rather than the actual services themselves…

First up, AWS Cloud9,  a browser based Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for writing, running, and debugging code. AWS have been moving into developer and productivity tools for some time, and this is another example of that.

For the non-developer,  Amazon Sumerian may be of interest, providing a range of tools and resources that allow anyone to create and run augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and 3D applications. The interface is a GUI driven one, so it’ll be interesting to see what Amazon have made of it compared to the horrors of their developer service UIs…

Whilst text editors are the preferred environment by “real” developers, many of the rest of us find Jupyter notebooks a more accommodating environment. So it’s interesting to see Amazon using them as part of their SageMaker service, a fully managed end-to-end machine learning service that enables data scientists, developers, and machine learning experts to quickly build, train, and host machine learning models at scale. The notebooks look to be used for data exploration and cleaning, whilst other components include model building, training, and validation using Docker containers, with model hosting that can also provide A/B testing of multiple models simultaneously.

On the back end, AWS already offer a range of database services, but now there’s also a graph database called Neptune. Graphs provide a really powerful way of thinking about and querying datasets – they really should be taught more and at an earlier stage computing education – so it’s nice to see support for graph databases growing.

I’m not sure how closely Neptune ties in to the new AWS AppSync, a fully managed serverless GraphQL service for real-time data queries, synchronization, communications and offline programming features? Skimming the announcement blog post it looks as if it ties in to DynamoDB, so I’m not sure? Perhaps this is more about using it as a responsive data query language and server-side runtime for querying data sources that allow for real-time data retrieval and dynamic query execution?

Whenever I try to use an Amazon Web Service, I find myself in the middle of configuration screen hell. When I saw the AWS Fargate service announcement open with the claim that [a]t AWS we saw [container management solutions] as an opportunity to remove some undifferentiated heavy lifting, it made me laugh. I find it easy to launch containers at places like Digital Ocean via Docker machine, but now perhaps things will be easier on AWS?

Of course, containers are still virtualised offerings – maybe you really want access to the bare metal of servers you probably don’t have hanging around at home?

• Processing: two Intel Xeon E5-2686 v4 processors running at 2.3 GHz, with a total of 36 hyperthreaded cores (72 logical processors);
• Memory: 512 GiB;
• Storage: 15.2 terabytes of local, SSD-based NVMe storage;
• Network: 25 Gbps of ENA-based enhanced networking.

That do you?

If you aren’t taken by the idea of running your data through AI models running in the cloud, even if it is on your own bare metal rented servers, you might fancy running them locally. DeepLens isn’t just a video camera with a 4 megapixel (1080P) camera and 2D microphone array, with 8GB of memory, Ubuntu 16.04 that can download prebuilt models and run your data through them. If it’s anything like the AI packing Lockheed Martin F35 stealth jet, I’m not sure what it phones home, though?

Who remembers dialling the speaking clock when they were a kid? Here’s a modern day version of a universal time signal that can help you keep distributed things in synch with each other. The new  Amazon Time Sync Service provides a time synchronization service delivered over Network Time Protocol (NTP) which uses a fleet of redundant satellite-connected and atomic clocks in each region to deliver a highly accurate reference clock. NTP has been around for ages, but providing a reliable service as just another AWS service call helps build lock in to the AWS ecosystem. (In part this reminds me of Google making a bid for DNS domination several years ago.)

Although Amazon have until now shied away from offering their own operating system, (Fire OS never really went anywhere), I wonder if they are making a play for the internet of things with Amazon FreeRTOS, an IoT microcontroller operating system … that extends the FreeRTOS kernel, a popular real-time operating system, with libraries that enable local and cloud connectivity, security, and (coming soon) over-the-air updates. Hmm… Android wasn’t a Google initiative originally…

And if they can’t get you to use their IoT O/S, maybe you will avail yourself of the IoT Device Defender. Details look light on this at the moment, but this puts a marker in the sand…

With Amazon Echo, Amazon made an early play for voice devices in the home. One of the benefits of getting services out there and used by folk means you have more training data to feed your AI services. So it’s perhaps not surprising that there’s a push on a new batch of voice related services:

• Amazon Comprehend, a continuously-trained trained Natural Language Processing (NLP) service. Features are typical of this sort of service, as offered already by the likes of Google, Microsoft and IBM: language detection, entity detection, sentiment analysis, and key phrase extraction, but I’m not sure I’ve spotted topic modeling as a service before (but then, I haven’t been looking);
• Amazon Translate is a high-quality neural machine translation service that … provide[s] fast language translation of text-based content;
• Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service. Apparently, audio files stored on the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) can be analysed directly, with timestamps provided for each word and inferred punctuation

It wasn’t so very long ago that YouTube hadn’t event been imagined yet. But the pace of change is such that if you want to build your own, you probably can do, complete with monetisation services. AWS Media Services is an array of broadcast-quality media services, offering:

• file-based transcoding for OTT, broadcast, or archiving. Features apparently include multi-channel audio, graphic overlays, closed captioning, and several DRM options;
• live encoding to deliver video streams in real time to both televisions and multiscreen devices. Support for ad insertion, multi-channel audio, graphic overlays, and closed captioning;
• video origination and just-in-time packaging that takes a single input and produces output for multiple devices, with support for multiple monetization models, time-shifted live streaming, ad insertion, DRM, and blackout management;
• media-optimized storage that enables high performance and low latency applications such as live streaming;
• monetization services that support ad serving and server-side ad insertion and accurate reporting of server-side and client-side ad insertion.

Of course, if you don’t want to become an over the top TV broadcaster, you could always use a couple more of the  new video services as a part of your own state surveillance system.

For example, Amazon Kinesis Video Streams can ingest streaming video (or other time-encoded data) from millions of camera devices without having to set up or run your own infrastructure. Hook that into to your public traffic cams and process it…

…perhaps with Amazon Rekognition Image, which provides scalable image recognition and analysis, with object and scene detection, real-time facial recognition, celebrity recognition and text recognition. Apparently, it’s the first video analysis service of its kind that uses the complete context of visual, temporal, and motion of the video to perform activity detection and person tracking. Oh good…

It looks like Telus’ Apple Watch Series 3 LTE data plans are now live, despite the carrier’s website still not listing the Apple Watch Series 3 as being officially available. Telus still lists the Apple Watch Seres 3 as coming to the carrier and allows those interested to sign up to receive more information about the smartphone.

A number of readers have reached out to MobileSyrup stating that they’ve received a recent carrier update for the iPhone that enables Apple Watch data support.

The full update details read as follows:

Carrier update for Telus iPhone enables Apple Watch data support $20 activation fee $10 a month includes one gigabyte of data to add to a shared data plan

This means that Telus’ Series 3 LTE plans come in at $10 per month, coupled with a $20 activation fee. In contrast, Bell charges $5 for the smartwatch’s data plans. In order to get the carrier update, watchOS 4.2 needs to be downloaded first. Users then have the ability to activate the Apple Watch Series 3 on Telus’ network (as long as their carrier is Telus, of course).

It’s still unclear when Rogers plans to launch Apple Watch Series 3 LTE plans, though the service will likely arrive at some point in 2018. We’ve reached out to Telus for more information and will update this story when we hear back.

Are you a Telus customer that owns an Apple Watch Series 3? Let us know in the comment section if you’ve been able to download the carrier update that activates the Series 3’s LTE connection with Telus.

Thanks for the tip Mikey.

The post Telus’ Apple Watch Series 3 LTE smartwatch data plans are now available appeared first on MobileSyrup.