What does Smart Home Week mean for you as a consumer? It means great deals on smart devices of course. Both the Amazon Alexa and Google Home are currently discounted on selected sites and the popular Philips Hue Colour starter kit is also on sale.

Other neat smart device kits, such as the Yale Smart Living and Samsung Smart Things are also supporting the Smart Home Week campaign so these can also be found on Amazon with a hefty reduction in price.

Here is the link for the Amazon Smart Home Week page: https://www.amazon.co.uk/b?ie=UTF8&node=14929309031

Jon Wilson joins Denise, Chris and John as a board member with the title of Technical Services Director.

Jon has shown outstanding commitment to Tanist over the past 3 years. He consistently has the interests of our clients in mind and works hard to ensure our IT Support team delivers a customer focused service.

It is very pleasing to promote one of the team in this way.

Since the Assistant’s release over 50 new features have been added and there are no signs of slowing down as Scott Huffman has shown us.

One of Assistant’s new tricks is the ability to type to it, avoiding the awkwardness of speaking to your phone in any public area. As well as this, the inclusion of Google Lens allows interactions with Assistant through your camera. The selling point of Lens is that it can interact with the world around you and give you search results based upon what you point the camera at, for example if you saw a poster advertising your favourite band’s concert, use Lens to see if tickets are still available then book them if they are, no typing required.

The incorporation of Lens into Assistant means that if you pointed your camera at a sign in a foreign language it could translate the text for you. Lets say that the text was advertising food that you hadn’t heard of before, you could then ask Assistant “What does it look like” and it would bring up pictures of that dish, without having to type or say its name. It would take all the details it needs from the camera using Lens.

A major announcement is that Google Assistant is coming to the iPhone. It will be available on all devices on iOS 9.1+. This is a very smart decision from Google as it will bring people into the Google ecosystem. It will mean that regardless of what side of the smartphone fence you sit on Assistant will be available for you. Unfortunately it is only available in the US on launch but we hope it wont be too long before it hits the UK. Get it on the app store.

Assistant will soon be available in more languages. Beginning in the summer Assistant will be available in German, French, Brazilian, Portuguese and Japanese and by the end of the year support for Italian, Spanish and Korean will arrive.

Here is an overview what was unveiled in the keynote for I/O 2017.

Google Lens:
Google Lens essentially an updated version of Google Goggles. Is it much much smarter however. It allows to to use your camera to get more information about whatever you are pointing it at. For example, if you were to point your camera at a flower and launch Google Lens it would be able to tell you what type of flower it is. If you saw a poster advertising your favourite band’s concert, use Lens to see if tickets are still available, no typing required. One of my favourite features of Lens is if you were to point it at the back of your friends router, Google will read the network name and password for you and you just have to click connect.

Cloud TPU:
This is Google new processing unit designed specifically for artificial intelligence and machine learning. One of these boards has four chips on-board and each board is capable of 180 teraflops (Trillion Floating Point Operations Per Second). In Comparison the Intel Core i7-6700K is 91.89 gigaflops. If you stack 64 of these TPU’s together they are capable of 11.5 petaflops. These Cloud TPU’s are named because they are available in the Google Compute Engine as of today. Google wants their cloud platform to be the best in the industry for machine learning, these TPU’s are one piece of the puzzle to achieve that goal.

Google.ai:
This is a collection of Google teams that are aimed to bring artificial intelligence to the masses. If focuses on three areas; research, tools and infrastructure, such as the Cloud TPU,s and Applied AI. Google.ai is being used to detect the spread of cancer and used in biology to produce more accurate DNA sequencing results. It is not all so serious however, it can also be used to detect what you are drawing. If you drew a scribble of  a cat face .ai would recognise this and show you a better drawing of a cat face, one that other people can recognise.

S3Stat is an analytic tool for Amazon S3 and CloudFront. It displays easy to read usage graphs, allows you to track individual files and share reports with a password protected link.

It has a wide range of features including:
Hits per file
Total bytes used and bytes used per file
Overall cost and cost per file
IP address logs

Here is how S3Stat helped us to save money:

We had a video on our website homepage that was costing us $10 per day. Using the visitor and IP logs of S3Stat we managed to figure out that a lot of the cost was due to internal staff visiting the website, by utilising this feature we were able to reduce our costs by two thirds. By using S3Stat alongside our usual analytics we were able to figure out the most cost efficient way to host our media.

We find the most useful feature of S3Stat to be the ability to view daily, weekly and monthly averages of our S3 costs, so we know in advance what we will be approximately spending on our cloud storage.

Maybe you need to know if you can install an app that needs a certain Android version to run, or you would like to check if you can get the latest software update. Whatever the reason for needing to find your Android version, here is how you can find out on any device.

I will be using a Samsung device for the purpose of this guide, the names of some menus may differ depending on what make of  phone you have, the steps in this guide should get you most of the way. If the options aren’t easy to find on another manufacturer’s software please leave a comment below and I will try to help.

Step 1:
Open the settings app.

Step 2:
In the settings app, find the menu About Device. It is usually found at the bottom of all the options.

Step 3:
Within the About device menu you will find another menu called Software info. We will need to click on this.
Step 4:
Here you will find your Android version.

Fun Trick: Android is full of surprises! If you click on the Android version quickly and multiple times you will get the Android Easter Egg.

I tried everything – disabling wireless encryption on the router and so on. Nothing made any difference.

I decided to go for a software upgrade on the Kindle. Out of the box it had version 3.03.

I downloaded 3.1 from here, placed the file on the device via USB and then selected update from the Kindle menu.

This took about 10 minutes to run.

Following the update I was able to connect to the WRT160N with WPA encryption enabled.

My position as an IT consultant has given me an birds eye view of laptop lifecycle, a continuous process where a laptop goes from birth to death. The full cycle usually takes about 5 years, which means the average human being will own about 12 laptops in their adult life.

We can draw many parallels between our own lives and that of a laptop. They come in many shapes and sizes, some are small and thin, others are fat and heavy. Some will catch diseases (malware), others will die young (hard drive failure). A few lucky ones will grow to be old and extraordinary slow.

Fortunately the life of a laptop is much less precious than that of a human. Eventually there is a strong enough driver to go and find a new laptop. Experience tells me that the first factor 95% of people consider is price. For example, a large majority of the population want to spend less than £400 (including VAT) on their laptop. Understandably, in tough economic times people want value for money, and even the big manufacturers recognise there is a market for cheap laptops.

However, the market has undergone a substantial squeeze in order to accommodate this price bracket. It might surprise you to learn that the main reason a laptop can be offered so cheap is that many large software firms have effectively subsidised it by paying the manufacturer to have their software pre-installed. This gives the software firm a foothold over their competitors. This is the reason you’ll often receive a free 30 day antivirus subscription. A lot of people will simply renew the product without shopping around. For the software firm, it only takes a small percentage of people to buy their software for the initial investment to pay off. This is just one example. Typically a cheap laptop will come with at least 10 preinstalled unwanted applications – every single one is a revenue generating opportunity for the software firm. To an experienced eye, these unwanted applications can easily removed, but usually people find it hard to identify the wheat from the chuff, and besides they don’t want to spend 3 hours removing software from their brand new computer.

The second most important (and expensive) consideration for a lot of people is Microsoft Office. Your £400 laptop certainly won’t come with bundled with a free copy. In fact you may even cry when you discover this software costs more than a quarter of the total cost of the laptop. There are cheaper Home and Student editions available, but beware these editions only contain the basic applications, such as Word, Excel and Powerpoint. For business you usually want Outlook and that comes at a higher price.

This brings us to another business based consideration. Cheap laptops arrive with a watered down version of Windows. Be warned, this will not work well with a typical business network. The reason being that Microsoft removed several features that allow the computer to be part of a business environment. Most businesses need a laptop with the more expensive Professional version.

People often overlook the core components which go into a laptop – the most significant being the processor. It’s easy to be drawn in by offers of large amounts of storage and memory. Remember that these are upgradable components, where as the processor is not. Within the sub £400 price bracket you can expect to receive a very basic processor. It will likely be produced by AMD who dominate the lower end of the market. The speed (measured in Ghz) is often advertised but this is of limited importance. This makes comparing different models difficult. Generally Intel processors offer as much as twice the performance for around an extra £100. This should be a strong consideration as it could mean the difference between a laptop which runs smoothly over it’s lifetime and one that doesn’t fulfill that dream.

In conclusion, a cheap laptop is often a false economy. The £400 laptop exists to feed a market of people who only vaguely understand what they’re buying. The truth is the cheapest laptop is unlikely to satisfy. Unless you are seriously strapped for cash, go for a more expensive laptop and you will enjoy a better experience over a longer period of time.

In other news, I’ve been working on some new features for the ever popular PHP Unserializer! It will now give you the option to make changes to your data and put it back into a serialized format. Currently it only works with arrays that don’t have any sub-arrays, but I will gradually expand it to cover these too. We hope it’s of some use.

For whatever reason, it’s quite possible to end up with a Symantec AntiVirus client which isn’t talking to the server – You may have accidentally uninstalled Symantec AV from you’re server, reinstalled the server or moved it on to another server. So how do you get those SAV clients to re-register in the console?

Well, I decided to use a logon script to sort out a number of clients in one hit. Download the following av-fix batch file:

Download: av-fix.bat

In the case of SBS 2003 – you need to place this file in the netlogon folder. Once in place, open up the file and place your Symantec server name in the correct place, replacing “\\yourserver”.

To make the logon script silent, I decided to use a small program called hstart. Download it from here and place in the netlogon folder. My script uses the widely available robocopy, so get yourself a copy of that and place it in the same folder.

Now, from your main logon batch script you just need to insert the following line:

hstart /NOCONSOLE “av-fix.bat”

This executes the batch file in hidden mode (the user won’t notice anything)

The av-fix.bat file places a grc.dat in the correct place on your client machines. It also updates the pki directory.

It’s tested to work on XP (but I’m unsure about Vista…)

Sit back and watch the Symantec Console repopulate as the clients login. Beautiful! I hope you find it useful!