Ideas from Mark Stout

 A follow-up to my last post about Google's NotebookLM. Google's developer conference started today.  I watched the keynote and there was a great deal said about AI.   What I thought interesting is they have published a NotebookLM with a lot of data about the conference you can query and summarize in NotebookLM. Sources for the notebook includes a YouTube video of the two hour keynote and a host of articles pertinent to what is happening at IO, the convention. You can access this notebook here .

 Artificial Intelligence is all over the news.  I played with ChatGPT when it first appeared, and I was not impressed.  I also played with Google's NotebookLM.  I was intrigued by it. You could then feed in documents from your Google Drive and then ask questions and it would answer based on what it found in your documents. In the eight months I was away from computers, things changed dramatically.  AI got smarter; and it will continue to evolve. NotebookLM can can now pull in sources from places outside your Google Drive.  For this example, I chose a Wikipedia article and a YouTube article about the Amazon River. It took a few minutes and generated an informative summary of the topic. What was truly amazing was it also generated a podcast about the Amazon, with a man and woman speaking.  Apparently two voices having a conversation are more engaging than one voice lecturing. A link to a video I made showing the demo is at the end of this post. Another g...

Funny how tech priorities change. In the first 30 years I lived from one PC to another. Starting with a Radio Shack Model I, then an IBM PC, then a long, long succession of PC compatibles; each faster than the last with ever increasing hard drives. The change from one PC to a new one was a sea change. Each so much faster and smoother. Now, I've been content with a laptop built in 2013. It has an i7 processor and 12 gigabytes of memory, so performance wise it is fine. I admire my foresight then to go big.  I do not game play or do high end video processing. I rarely use it as a laptop. Its hooked to two monitors and Bluetooth keyboard and mouse.  My sole tweak to my home setup when quarantine and working from home started in March was a docking station so I could switch easily from work laptop to personal laptop. If I covet anything, its more and larger monitors. You can't go too large, or too many. After the fever of wanting a new PC passed from a every two year event, to thre...

When Google announced they were killing off Inbox, I feared my inbox would become unmanageable again.  Alas, I was wrong. Inbox's web interface was seductive enough that it made Gmail seem as musty as an 19th century home.  Now that I am forced to go there, I've been using the filters more to move emails I do not need to see to folders.  Now, little appears in my inbox, and what does appear is quickly swept away in the Android app or check boxed away in the web app. I just keep they continue to add new features to Gmail as they have promised.

Google Now is so yesterday, since there is now Google Assistant. Last week Google held its Developer Conference, Google IO, in Mountain View, California. While no new products were released to coincide with the conference, Google showed a number of products that will be coming out this summer and others later on. There were a few items that hopefully will make family life a bit easier. Google Now, Google’s interface for talking to your Android or iPhone, is now called Google Assistant. You can now carry on a conversation with Assistant more than in the past. In the keynote speech, Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai asked, “What’s showing nearby” and was shown a list of movies. He said: “We want to take the kids” and the list was amended to show only family-friendly films.  The Assistant asked, “Would you like tickets to any of these?” and he answered, “Jungle Book.” The app bought tickets online and had them waiting at the theater. You can ask Assistant, “Who is Brad Pitt?” and ...

Google has two new phones, the Nexus 5X and the Nexus 6P. The chief advantage of a Nexus device is that it is first to get new operating systems. These phones come with the latest Marshmallow version of Android, announced a few months ago. When the next version of Android comes out, these phones will be first in line for them. And the upgrades come direct from Google. Other Android phones have to wait until the phone’s manufacturer releases a version of Android for the phone, and your carrier approves and transmits it out to you. Some current phones won’t get Marshmallow for months; some older phones not at all. The 5X is made by South Korea’s LG and sports a 5.2 inch display. The 6P, made by Chinese maker Huawei, sports a bigger 5.7 inch screen. Read the rest at FamilyTechOnline.com

H ave I ever mentioned, I am the founder of the Google Keep Community over on Google+ ?  It has over 4000 users. If you have questions or needs regarding Keep, that is an excellent place to begin. Google Keep Community on Google+

A new Family Tech column is up. Google gave out many gifts at their recent Google IO Developers Conference.

This year at their development conference, Google reemphasized and made over search. Family Tech is online.

Google Glass is trickling out to non-Googlers who are part of the Glass Explorers group.  Just before that began, I wrote this column explaining Glass .

I save this blog for my geekiest posts and haven't been doing much geeky things lately; instead concentrating on more technology for the family issues in my column. Although I have started doing a bit more geeky things in the column, with How-To support on its blog, like the recent column on consolidating a families photos from their many camera phones, to one place. However, I just worked out something geeky, and wanted to document it here for others that might search for a solution in the future. When I first bought my Galaxy S III (I'll call it the Galaxy S3 here too for searching purposes), it did not have Google Now on it.  So I started using Samsung's own S Voice. When Jelly Bean made it to the S3, Google Voice became available. However, when I click the button on my Bluetooth earpiece, it was S Voice that came up. One night I decided to sit down and solve that problem, thinking it would be relatively easy. I did find some good resources, but som...

Why am I an unabashed Google fanboy?  For free productivity tools. That is the topic of this week's Family Tech column . Remember, all Family Tech columns are  listed on their own page

A new Android OS, an exciting new Events capability for Google+ allowing for a central pool of photos everyone takes at a wedding reception and other events, and skydiving gadget freaks.  What more could you want from a business conference? This is the topic of this week's Family Tech column. Remember, all Family Tech columns are  listed on their own page .

I have been bad about posting these. About to get much better. Google Drive 4/30 Kickstarter   5/6 Linking Web Services      5/13  (Evernote users: More about this  in my book ) Google Voice 5/22

A great tip from " This Week in Google #114 " ( TWIG ) from the TWIT network  : to find shared Google Circles, just search in Google Plus for "Shared a circle with you" (use the quotes).  You can refine it by adding a word after the quote, like Photographer, or a state name, or city etc.

As an Android devotee, I was a bit worried about Android's exposure to patent law suits.  Today, Google went a long way to solving that problem by buying Motorola Mobility. As the photo shows, Motorola has been around the mobile communication business a while.  Their patent trove should give pause to anyone wanting to challenge Google. Google pledges to run Motorola as a separate business.  They are trying to balance their need to own a company like Motorola without ticking off the other manufacturers that support Android. Hopefully, they will use Motorola though to come out with some awesome phones and tablets to serve as reference designs for other manufacturers, sort of what they have done with the Nexus phones produced to their specs by various manufacturers.

The next version of Chrome will be able to execute C++ and other code directly inside of the browser. If I understand this correctly, this basically makes the browser real close to an operating system, and makes web only devices like the Chromebook even more functional. One criticism of the the all-web-apps approach taken by the Chromebook is there are certain apps that do lend themselves to being a web app.  Video editing is one, it takes way too much processing power, and you can not have the editing on a server, and then the display downstream via the web.  Latency would be an issue; the video would be slow and jumpy. By being able to execute code inside the browser, a browser only PC can do serious apps, like video editing. This is going to lead to a new generation of web apps. This article by TechCrunch says this is a long time coming, and refers to a talk in 2010 when Google first mentioned this. In reality, this is what Microsoft feared ...

I've written before about a Google Labs jewel called App Inventor.  It allows non-programmers, or hobbyist programmers like myself, to create programs for Android phones and tablets. Now news that as part of Google's elimination of many of their Labs ( their source of not fully realized products and add-ons), App Inventor will be discontinued . Per Google : With the winding down of Google Labs, Google will discontinue App Inventor as a Google product and will open source the code. Additionally, because of App Inventor’s success in the education space, we are exploring opportunities to support the educational use of App Inventor on an open source platform. As a result of these changes App Inventor will be available through the end of the year but users should expect the current  App Inventor URL , to change sometime in the next 90 days. Please subscribe to the  App Inventor Announcement forum  for future updates. And then, almost cruelly, the post goes on to...

Google Chrome OS is shipping t his summer on two new netbooks.  For some users, I think they might mayke a lot of sense.  I talk about it in a Family Tech column .

I've been using Google Docs as my primary word processor for the last year.  I write my weekly column on it for example. I'm, pleased to see that you can now use the full Google Docs word processor on the iPad.  I have owned Documents to Go  for those times when I needed this capability.  I used it briefly this morning, but will test it more fully soon.