Author: Clinton

Continuing the theme of this year’s CES, which is “Google Assistant all the things”, Dish Network has announced that Google’s AI assistant will be coming to customers in the first half of 2018.

“Throughout 2017, DISH took major strides toward building a suite of voice control options for our customers, including a new DISH voice remote,” said Niraj Desai, DISH vice president of product management. “We’re pleased to be working with the Google Assistant to offer our customers the ability to control Hopper’s video experiences through the Assistant on speakers and phones.”

Assistant will be coming to three specific Dish devices:  Hopper DVR (all generations), Joey client (all models), and the Wally single-tuner HD receiver.  Users will be able to use Assistant when it is paired with a Google Home or their phone.

The Chromium team within Google has publicly published a detailed list of every Chrome OS device and its status on being protected against the Meltdown vulnerability.  The list can be found here and I strongly encourage readers to visit the link and bookmark it.

The list is broken down into seven columns that provide details for each device.  The columns are:

• Public codename for the device
• Marketing name of the device
• Kernel version
• Architecture (x86, ARM, aarch64)
• Date of when automatic updates end for the device
• If Meltdown protection has come to the Kernel Page Table Isolation (KPTI) in Chrome 63 for that device
• Kernel Page Table Isolation (KPTI) will eventually be updated

The last two columns in this table are the key ones to pay attention to as you review it.  This tells you if your device is protected, will be protect, or at EoL (End of Life) and will not be updated.

The Chromium team has updated the list of Chromebooks that can run Android apps either in the Chrome OS beta or stable channels.  In all, 10 devices are able to run Android apps now, bringing the total number up to 67 different Chromebooks and Chromeboxes that can run Android apps.

When it comes to pure new additions to the list, there are eight new devices that moved into the beta channel.  That includes the likes of the Toshiba Chromebook 2 (2015), the Haier Chromebook 11 C, and the Viglen Chromebook 360.  Two devices, the Acer Chromebook 11 (C740) and the Dell Chromebook 13 (7310) moved from the Beta channel to the Stable channel, meaning they are fully supported by those devices.

While the growth of Android apps on Chrome OS has been great to see, it doesn’t mean it hasn’t been without its challenges or limitations.  One such limitation is the ability for those apps to read a USB drive attached to your Chromebook.  The Android app is completely blind to that drive being there and can’t access.  It looks like that could be changing.

A new commit in the Chrome OS Gerrit suggests that through a settings in Flags that Android apps can be given permission to access the USB drive attached to your Chromebook.

const char kArcUsbHostName[] = “Enable ARC USB host integration”;
const char kArcUsbHostDescription[] =
“Allow Android apps to use USB host feature on ChromeOS devices.”;

When enabled, this would allow your Android apps to see your USB drive on your Chromebook.

After being an exclusive to Verizon since October of last year, the Kinda Blue color option for the Google Pixel 2 is now available to everyone from Google or on Project Fi.  The pricing of the phone and the functionality of the phone is identical to any Pixel 2, it is just that you have a more unique color option than Black or White.

The Kinda Blue color was an exclusive for the phone from Verizon as being the other launch partner of the phone with Google.  That meant that the phone was locked to the carrier like the other Pixel phones they have sold.  Now with it being available from Google directly, you can get it unlocked.

Google has begun the process of rolling out several accessibility updates to Google Sheets, Google Slides and Google Drawings.  The updates are all for the web-based versions of these G Suite solutions and are cloud-side changes that will be rolling out to all accounts over the course of the next couple of weeks.

First, Braille support has been added to Google Sheets.  Joining support that is already in Docs and Slides, within Sheets you will be able to use a Braille display to read and edit cell content as well as navigate between cells on a sheet.  Initially support for this will only be available on Chrome OS with the ChromeBox screen reader.  Google indicated in the release notes that they are working on support for other platforms and readers.