Android Coliseum

I do enjoy having a 'smart house'. Our vacuum, our speakers and displays, and even bettte as it's nearing the time for deliveries (Christmas ordering) having a security camera (or 2) to help monitor things. I was approached by the folks at Rebluum to look over their solar powered camera. I was hesitant as I've had purely solar powered items (flood lights etc...) and never been something I wanted to rely on.

Always looking for something to help fill in those long trips lately, you can only watch so many real crime documentaries on a flight before they blur together. So let's find a good game. Today, I had the chance to review Black Border 3. It's on sale for just 90¢ (Canadian) at the Play Store as well, so why not give it a shot. On its premise it looks like a simple app where a vehicle comes to a checkpoint at a border and you see if it can pass or not.

I'm loving my AI lately. Been showcasing it to a lot of colleagues, and I'm trying to find ways to implement its efficiencies into my life lately. One of my favourite tools for digesting a lot of information is the Notebook tool. This is a bit of a sandboxed AI, where you feed it specific information and tell it to come up with details. I've put in football rulebooks and created quizzes, or a presentation on changes.

So I found this quirky little bug, and I've submitted the feedback,  and they've said it's been elevated and looking for a fix. We'll see how soon it comes. Here's me giving a simple demo So, essentially, if you take a photo, and then go into Google Photos and make a simple edit (a crop, in these cases), when you go to another app to select it to be included/attached, the image picker can't see it.

So, yeah, we'd been hearing the rumours for a bit. They made a huge splash and gotten into BestBuy, but just couldn't get that foothold needed and have decided to put their efforts where it better pays off for them, and are exiting sales in North America. If you go to their site today (and because I'm in Canada it defaults to their Canada page) you'll see they have an important bulletin: It was odd that the page was blank for me this morning - but if you go there now the phone images are back.

I've been waiting for this, and can't wait to try it out properly. I'd given out hope that it might come for a while (usually a US English thing for the longest time), but doing some work last night I noticed now that on the web (and PWA), Gemini offers a Spark 'slider' for me to dive into developing some automated tasks. It's not yet available on the app yet, and I don't think it's meant to live there, rather because of its complexity it's meant as a web thing.

Okay, so I've been looking for things to help fill my time over the summer... it's quieter for me now and on days like today when it's a million degrees and poor air quality, I hunker inside and enjoy some dehumidification an AC. But what to do inside; find a fun game.

Work has me travelling a bit lately, and add in that it's pipe band travel season and a couple family trips too; and I'm always looking for something to ensure that I can charge my devices as I go around. My normal go-to accessory is the Statik SmartCharge, it doubles as a powerbank so I can watch movies on the airplane, and then a wall charger when I'm in the hotel. Well, Statik one-upped themselves with a new model now with their 2nd generation.

I do enjoy having a 'smart house'. Our vacuum, our speakers and displays, and even bettte as it's nearing the time for deliveries (Christmas ordering) having a security camera (or 2) to help monitor things. I was approached by the folks at Rebluum to look over their solar powered camera. I was hesitant as I've had purely solar powered items (flood lights etc...) and never been something I wanted to rely on.

I do enjoy having a 'smart house'. Our vacuum, our speakers and displays, and even bettte as it's nearing the time for deliveries (Christmas ordering) having a security camera (or 2) to help monitor things. I was approached by the folks at Rebluum to look over their solar powered camera. I was hesitant as I've had purely solar powered items (flood lights etc...) and never been something I wanted to rely on.