Category: NZTekonverse -> Google
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Apple vs Google vs Microsoft vs Samsung vs….etc etc etc…
So I have listed the names of the world’s four biggest computer hardware / software vendors … or at least the best known, in various different ways. Apple and Microsoft have been the two leading providers of desktop operating systems for decades. Apple and Google are the two leading providers of mobile operating systems. Apple…
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Google ditches another email service
Following last year when Google arbitrarily ditched email notification from Youtube, they have now notified that the Feedburner service will be changed, and in their words, “we will be turning down most non-core feed management features, including email subscriptions, at that time”. So as we read it, Google has summarily decided that email subscriptions are…
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Samsung Galaxy A12
Well it’s time to get some posting underway for 2021 (other than rail maps) so here is a brief run down of a recent acquisition, a Samsung Galaxy A12 phone. This model was released late last year so there is relatively little information available for it on a lot of sites. The example mentioned here…
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General computing update – week 34, 2020.
Since writing early July about about the need to replace the disks in mainpc I have finally progressed towards this stage by purchasing the first of two disks. As noted in the earlier post, this was prompted by an I/O failure of one of the disks that resulted in it dropping out of the RAID…
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Google Photos: The free photo service’s automatic deduplication creates challenges
Yeah, we all know what Google Photos is. Another cloud based service from Google, and one that other cloud providers like Flickr find it difficult to compete with. I was quite keen on Flickr, but they have their own issues, like that people outside the US have no rights under the DMCA, anyone can send…
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OverGrive seems to work again…for now.
OverGrive is a Google Drive client for Linux. It has been around for several years. I used (and licensed) an earlier version of the product, which I was forced to stop using last year because it stopped working (this quite often happens when Google updates their API to a new version which requires software changes).…
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Tech giants need to be reigned in before they start ruling our lives
As if there wasn’t enough bad PR already over Google and Facebook, here’s an article about how some guy got a lifetime ban from AirBnB. He gets no right of appeal or anything. They do not have to explain or account to him or anything that would be considered fair (maybe he has recourse in…
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Privacy concerns about Big Data well-founded
Since I wrote about escaping from Google’s walled garden on my Android phone, I have made some effort to further implement this on my desktops as well. Geoffrey A Fowler is a columnist in the Washington Post and he has written a number of articles about these privacy concerns about Google’s vast data mining efforts…
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Escaping Google’s walled garden on handhelds [3]: Using Lineage OS – 1
So last time I wrote about the installation experience for Lineage, now it is time to have a look at early impressions of using it. Along the way I discovered some stuff about the Nexus 5X. It turns out that it was first shipped with Android and the final official release of Android for it…
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Escaping Google’s walled garden on handhelds [2]: Installing Lineage OS
So after further investigation I decided Lineage OS would be the most straightforward means of getting my Nexus 5X off Google. This is quite a lengthy process that involves replacing the installed Google bloatware on the phone with the LineageOS installation images. LineageOS provides guides, which are pretty good except that like me, you can…