Author: Clinton

Evernote has announced that they have selected the Google Cloud Platform as their choice for data storage and usage, replacing their own server farms and data centers.  The news is another big win for Google’s cloud services which has gained a number of high profile customers over the course of the past 18 months.  Adding Evernote to that mix will not only add another marque for them but will bring additional support and reliability for Evernote customers.

Until now, Evernote has owned, configured, and maintained its own servers and networks. This approach gave us the ability to build the service we wanted the way we wanted to build it. But it is also limiting—expensive to maintain, slow to upgrade, and difficult to scale. And while the infrastructure we have now is perfectly suited to support Evernote as it runs today, it lacks the speed and flexibility we need for tomorrow.

Essentially the move is about future proofing the company’s services yet continuing to support the existing 200 million users of the service today.

If you are using the Chrome browser on your Windows, Mac or Linux machine, there is an important update that is out now for you to download.  The update, version 53.0.2785.113 has several security improvements in it but most of what has been fixed has not been released by the Chromium team.  As is often the case on these mid-stream releases (remember, they just released a big update last week), the team and their researchers found a significant security issue and they won’t release the details of it until a majority of users have updated to the build.  Once that happens, all the gory details can be found on the Chromium Blog.

That said, there are five named fixes in the update, two of which were considered high priority.

Android Marshmallow continues to see incremental growth in the install base according to the latest figures from Google.  In the platform version dashboard report released today, Marshmallow’s install base grew from 15.2% last month to 18.7% this month.  The growth was certainly expected given that a number of devices were updated to Marshmallow this past month from a wide range of manufactures.  Still, Marshmallow remains well behind the leading release, Lollipop, which stands at 35% of the install base.

As a reminder, these figures are derived by Google from devices that visited the Google Play Store for a 7 day period that ended on September 5, 2016.  While it is by no means exhaustive, it does give a good indicator of the varieties of Android that are out there and still in use today.

Today’s Deal is literally today only and it is on the current (at least this week) flagship Nexus device, the Nexus 6P.  Today over on eBay you can pick one up either in Aluminum or Graphite with 32GB of storage for $399.  That is $100 off the regular price for this model and as a 6P owner, I can’t say enough good things about this phone.

There is nothing to really frown upon once you start digging into the specifications of the Nexus 6P.  It is powered by a Snapdragon 810 processor that is made up of a quad-core Cortex-A53
running at 1.55 GHz and a quad-core Cortex-A57 running at 2.0 GHz.  That processor is coupled with an Adreno 430 graphics processor and 3GB of RAM.  The 6P on eBay comes with 32GB of storage but unlike some other manufactures, the 3GB of RAM is in all of the storage options.  Like previous Nexus devices, the 6P does not have any expansion options for memory.

Twitter looks set to be changing the way it counts the 140 characters in your Tweets.  In a report by the Verge, it looks like the micro-blogging site is going to stop counting things like your username, images, polls and GIFs which will give users more characters for actual content on their posts.  While a firm date was not formally indicated by Twitter to the Verge, they are referencing two sources that the day all this starts is September 19th.

Beginning September 19th, the company will cut down on exactly which types of content count toward the platform’s 140-character limit. Media attachments (images, GIFs, videos, polls, etc.) and quoted tweets will no longer reduce the count.

If September 19th is the date or not, this is a fundamental change to how Twitter works and it could have big implications.

Samsung is working hard to try to sort out the battery situation with the Galaxy Note 7 and in their homeland, are taking an extrodinary step.  Starting today, the Associate Press is reporting that  Koreans who have a Galaxy Note 7 that has been recalled but is still out in the market, will receive an OTA update that will limit the battery charging to 60%.  The idea, of course, is to not over charge the batteries (which is a leading theory on the battery exploding issue) and make it painful enough for users to return the phone for an updated and safe unit.

Unfortunately, for now, this is only going to happen in Korea.