AI still as on long way to go

Its all the rage now, it’s seems that the future of computing seems to be around AI. So what are they talking about? Simple, anything that talks possibly?

I recently caved in or more exactly, the child within couldn’t resist and went and got my hands on a Google assistant or home or what ever you want to call it. It came with a free googlecast which was actually more of a pain in the rear than anything so it was left unplugged. Having read about mycroft that is likely to be played with at a future date but not now.

First impressions were, this is pretty good but AI? For an intelligence it’s pretty stupid. This isn’t very intelligent because you have to train it. Being in the UK may also mean there are limitations because as usual some one at Google didn’t think that all countries are equal. If they release something then maybe where it comes then ask features should be available. No, I’m not going to try Amazon thingy because that company is still banned in my house. So far I have got it setting alarms, telling the weather, etc. I have tried the IFTTT stuff but that still needs work. The next thing will be sending texts if possible and opening curtains but that will be when I have time and something that also works with home assistant.

Why Isn’t Google Calender Syncing Across Devices?

Off and on for a while I have been wondering why my tablet hasn’t been syncing with the phone calender, after all, they are both connected to google calender right? I did a quick internet search and there are others having the same issue and you always get the answer “go here, google has the solution as they give instructions”. Well they are wrong in some cases!

After tonight’s investigation as to why the calender on my phone is not showing the same things on my Nexus 7 and when I checked in my browser with the account used for both devices. I found that the events that I have been putting into my phone religiously so I don’t miss anything were not showing on either. Since getting the phone I thought that I was using google calender, I was wrong. Has it turned out I was using the phone calender which doesn’t get backed up to my google account so what I was adding was only staying on the phone. Yes, the calender was set to show google calender events for the account in question but as I found out, I wasn’t actually using it. It is highly likely why nothing showed in Sunrise calender. I only found that I had this situation because I was checking the version number of the app was the same as what was showing on the web page. The only way I could do this was by going to play store and searching for google calender. This was because of very few setting options in the opened app. What I found was that the google app it self was shown as not being installed.

The end solution was to redo my calender by adding events via the browser, installing the proper google calender to check that it was syncing properly. The result was yes, it worked and now I have my stuff available on all of my devices. The other result was that I decided that the google calender was really boring and plain and reinstalled sunrise calender which is somewhat more attractive.

Forcehawk

Whats Wrong With Development!

With all the stuff that came out of CES via the reports I was reading I was going to comment on all the new stuff coming out. Much of it seems to be old stuff rehashed, some new (but seemed to be based on sci-fi stuff). But I thought I would pass comment on the development of stuff particularly software of the Android kind and where it needs to go.
I was prompted by the sudden increase in the power consumption on my phone and the much fiddling to try and find the cause. Well, I might have found it, google services! It also highlighted that several apps where power intensive and most of these were google. I really don’t understand why this is the case. They spend millions on development and buying other companies in order to achieve their goal but they are missing the root problem. They are ignoring improvement to what they already have. I’m sure some adjustment or alteration could improve performance and lower power required for the app. I’m also sure they could make their apps more independant of each other thus not requiring them all to be running especially ones which the user doesn’t use. There are other apps which are better than googles own so why not be able to turn off or better uninstall them after all I thought android was supposed to be free and open source but this doesn’t seem to be the case. From this I will be introducing a new idea to this blog…App of the week or what ever! This will hopefully highlight apps and possibly other software or hardware from small companies that I think are worth while and deserve a user review (not from a techno journalist)

What I mean is, and its not just google, its others as well, they are sacrificing development time by going for new stuff like new gadgets and new features and not dealing with what they have and improving it. In this case they could be improving the power consumption of the app which will hopefully in turn improve battery life. Now this would be a step in the right direction for the future because mobile devices would be able to be used more and for longer and thus be a damn sight more useful than they are now.

What’s the point of this post?

I would like to appeal to developers to improve what you already have instead of spending your current time on new features until its perfect!

Forcehawk