Tag: google

Google Updates When They Stop Supporting Pixel and Nexus Phones

Pixel will be supported until October 2019, and Nexus 6P is up to September 2018.

:'(

It is understandable, since as the generation of phones aggregate, it would be too busy to support all of them and it would be nearly impossible to have bugs in it.

But at the same time, it is sad to learn that when the old phones are still usable, it will be unsupported. The hardware won't expire till 5 years, 10 years maybe. But the software is outdated within 2 or 3 years. Why? Is it really necessary to stop supporting old phones that fast? Continue reading Google Updates When They Stop Supporting Pixel and Nexus Phones

Google Home and Project Soli = ?

Google Home is coming out today. It is getting super excited to see that Google is using its cutting-edge technology on smart home, just like Amazon Echo and Samsung Atrik. What is interesting about Google Home is that we see many other opportunities other than just voice commands.

While security is surely one thing (and one big thing of course) in these smart home devices (or precisely in the IoT development), I thought of one thing in particular: sensing. Although it is not limited to Google Home, here I use it as an example. Continue reading Google Home and Project Soli = ?

Google Drive is a joke..

Seriously, Google Drive is a joke.. today I trashed one folder by accident and when I go online and try to recover the folder, nothing is inside the recovered folder. And then I have to go to Trash tab and go to fetch each individual file being removed by the Google Drive Desktop app. Sorry for this word, but it is a joke. I'll be moving to OneDrive for now..

AlphaGo wins 4:1

Lee Sedol vs AlphaGo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFr3K2DORc8

In fact AlphaGo already won before, which is pretty awesome. This time, "it" challenges a more advanced and experienced player.

Starting way earlier than this event, AlphaGo has proven its capability of winning the game, and now we are testing its capability of winning advanced game.

I kinda wish Lee won. Yet, AlphaGo wins in the first match.

The moment I figured Lee lost, I actually did not feel excited about the technology. I felt panic. Yes, panic. And overwhelmed.

Aren't people from Google who build this feeling panic?

Update: learned a bit about machine learning and deep neural network. Well, now I feel fine and no more panic. The bottom line is they still work obeying the "rules" that we quantify. Even if AlphaGo jumps out of the box and ignoring the rules by themselves, it is more likely that bugs happen rather than AlphaGo gets evolved and can think on its own. Happy life.

Project Fi Phone Number Tip

This is a tip for people who don't care about $3.

I got the Project Fi sim card a while ago, but I got a very stupid number that I don't like. So I figured, since we could port our number to Project Fi, we should be able to find us a good number somewhere, and then port the good number to the Project Fi account. Continue reading Project Fi Phone Number Tip

Google Drive Suggestions

Strongly suggest Google Drive to include the following functionalities:

  1. The ability to sync subfolders rather than the main folder
    This has been discussed widely on the web. One workaround is to leverage Google Drive's multiple folder feature, but that is very inconvenient and can get messy easily.
  2. The ability to recovery files in a batch
    If multiple files were removed by Google Driver's bug for example (yes, I have been through that pain in a**), there is no other way but right clicking files one by one to recovery the files. There should exist a recovery function that says "recovery the files being removed xxx minutes ago."
  3. Fix the bugs in Google Drive
    There are two major bugs that exist in today's Google Drive product. One is the uplink. The transmission is based on UDP and there's not much guarantee that packets are delivered correctly (well, there is a "guarantee" but a very loose one). The large file transmission can go wrong, causing a packet sending storm that our router thinks as an attack. The Internet would be totally shut down for protection in this case. But guess what, it's just Google Drive goes wrong.
    Another is a bug that deletes the files "randomly." If there is a sync error and it is not resolved before I restart the computer, there is a chance that Google Drive thinks I personally and manually removed the un-synced folder. In this case, the folder is then marked as "deleted" and the Google Drive app tells the server to remove that folder online! WTH!

In fact if anyone searches online, there are many complaints about the issues I've mentioned above. It's been years and Google Drive isn't any better. I'm guessing this is because Google is such a big company and Google Drive team doesn't quite care about users due to the large base number of existed users.

Project Tango Tablet... Hmm...

Got the tablet two days ago and played it for a while... Project Tango utilizes IR depth sensor to obtain the distance of different objects (and possibly the resulting image is a combined work with fisheye camera). My assumption is they use camera to do some imaging processing to find out rough edges of different objects, and then use the depth sensor to get distance info. And to be honest, it is just a big toy when things work like they should. Continue reading Project Tango Tablet... Hmm...