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Archives (page 19 of 199)

January 22, 2018

HomePod Will Support HomeKit Scenes For Muting Siri, Offer Personalised Results For Individual Voices →

Rajesh Pandey, writing for iPhoneHacks:

Interestingly, Apple also seems to be adding support for multiple voice recognition in HomePod. The icons discovered in the Home app suggest that Siri would be able to recognize an individual’s voice and offer them personalized results.

Although the Echo offers multiple user support, you have to tell it to switch users. I’m not aware that it supports voice recognition, so this would be a big differentiator for the HomePod. And of course leave it to Apple to allow for easy muting of the Siri, for privacy-minded users. That’s the benefit of Apple’s business model not being tied to advertising.


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January 20, 2018

Apple Receives FCC Approval for HomePod, Suggesting a Launch Could Come Soon →

Juli Clover, writing for MacRumors:

Ahead of the promised “early 2018” launch of the HomePod, Apple has received official FCC approval for the smart speaker. Now that FCC approval has been obtained, Apple is free to begin selling the device at any time.

We’ll see if Apple is too late to the game on this one. Amazon looks to have the biggest lead, and CES was filled with smart assistants from other manufacturers this year. Also, the type of person that might get a HomePod for audio, as opposed to for its smart assistant features, seems to me to be the type of person already immersed in the Sonos ecosystem. Count me in that camp. I’m still on the fence with the HomePod – the reviews will go a long way toward my decision.


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January 19, 2018

How to Detect if Your ISP is Throttling Netflix and Other Online Services

With the FCC having rolled back Title II protections that classified the Internet as a public utility, you may wonder if your ISP is throttling your traffic. The Wehe app, available on both iOS and Android, allows you to do so.

Wehe - ISP detect throttling

The app is part of a study on ISP’s treatment of different kinds of traffic.

Wehe uses your device to exchange traffic recorded from real, popular apps like YouTube and Spotify—effectively making it look as if you are using those apps. As a result, if an ISP tries to slow down an YouTube, our app would see the same behavior. We then send the same app traffic, but replacing the content with randomized bytes , which prevents the ISPs from classifying the traffic. Our hypothesis is that the randomized traffic will not see application-specific shaping, but the original traffic will see it. We repeat these tests several times to rule out noise from bad network conditions, and tell you at the end whether your ISP is shaping your traffic.

Wehe: Check Your ISP for Net Neutrality Violations

Warning – the app takes a long time to perform its testing. That might be due to server overload.


January 19, 2018

Office for Mac now shares a codebase with Windows, gets real-time collaboration →

Samuel Axon, writing for Are Technica:

Microsoft has released a major Office update for Mac. Update 16.9.0 finally brings long-anticipated real-time collaboration features and automatic cloud saving. Notably, the Mac version of this software is now built from the same codebase as the Windows version, which means that Office shares a codebase across all platforms for the first time in 20 years.

This bodes well for Mac-using lawyers, and really for all Mac users who use Office in a mixed-platform environment. I don’t expect to ever see complete feature parity, but this might get us closer. I use Word on both Windows and Mac, and require some brain re-wiring each time I jump between them. Tools such as Quick Parts work differently on each platform.


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January 19, 2018

An interview with Manton Reece of Micro.blog →

From Colin Devroe’s interview of Manton Reece, the man behind micro.blog:

Facebook recently announced they were hiring 10,000 moderators, and I know Twitter has a large staff as well. I expect one mistake that these larger social networks made early on was hiring too many programmers, and not enough curators. For Micro.blog we always want people who can interact with the community and stay ahead of any issues.

I’ve been getting heavily into micro.blog over the last week or so. I like the philosophy behind it, which comes through in this interview with its creator. Micro.blog is all about the open web – you own your own content. If Twitter has you down, or you have a blog that has been stagnating, check out micro.blog.


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