Author: batteryforpc

Smart home assistants need smarter timers. Today, you can use Alexa, Google Assistant, or Siri to set timers. You can use all three smart assistants to control your smart home gadgets. But frustratingly, you cannot use the two features together: setting your lights to arbitrarily turn off in 30 minutes is impossible with today’s most sophisticated, cutting-edge smart home technology.

Now, you could use a pre-programmed routine, but that’s not the same thing. You can set your lights to go on when a motion detector goes off, have your motorized shades close at sunset, or have your air conditioner turn on at exactly 12:53PM on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. But with all three smart home platforms, you need to set up those routines in advance — they’re not the sort of thing you can just attach to a timer.

More importantly, they’re not the sort of thing you can actually do with voice commands — you have to go into a companion app and configure them, which means knowing beforehand exactly what you want to turn on and off and when you want it to happen. And if you have to go into an app to use a voice assistant properly, something in that process isn’t working right.

As far as I can tell, there’s no technical reason that all of these systems don’t allow this, and yet, you just can’t do it. And yes, natural language processing is incredibly complicated, but I don’t think that’s the issue: the smart assistants themselves explicitly say that the software doesn’t allow it. Siri, for example, gives a response letting you know that it can’t schedule commands. That means that someone at Apple was aware that a user might want to do this, and then specifically coded in a response to say that you can’t. The issue doesn’t seem to be one of comprehension.

Furthermore, you can set a timer like this for part of one function: all three companies offer a sleep timer specifically for listening to music, ostensibly for when you’re falling asleep. But the net result is that you can ask Alexa or Siri to play music or audio playback to a timer, and shut it off when that timer ends. It’s great! I wish I could do it with my lights, my TV, my fan, my air conditioner, and every other gadget plugged into my smart home setup, too.

Sleep timers aren’t new technology, either. Home appliances like TVs and air conditioners have had them for decades, which leads to some weird setups. For example, at home, I have an AC unit hooked up to a smart plug. The Wi-Fi-connected plug can turn the AC on or off from anywhere in the world, but it’s not smart enough to understand the idea of “run for two hours and then turn off.” The IR remote that came with the unit does it just fine, though, assuming I can find it.

None of this is the end of the world: I can remember most of the time to turn off my lights, or deal with the occasional annoyance of waking up to realize that the AC is still running and that my room is an ice box. But it’s yet another example of how for all their intelligence, smart assistants still can often fall short in the small ways when it comes to actually fitting into our lives.

Apple this week began stocking a new 4K 23.7-inch LG UltraFine Display, which replaces the original 21.5-inch 4K LG UltraFine Display that was pulled from retail stores and the online Apple Store earlier this year.

We picked up one of the new 23.7-inch UltraFine Displays and thought we’d check it out to see if it’s worth the $700 price point.

The new 4K display looks quite similar to the prior-generation 4K and 5K UltraFine displays with a black plastic body with relatively thick bezels and a black aluminum stand. Like prior models, it can be VESA mounted if you prefer.

It’s larger than the original 4K UltraFine display as it measures in at 23.7 inches instead of 21.5 inches, but it features a 3840 x 2160 resolution rather than a 4096 x 2304 resolution like the first model. That’s still considered Ultra HD, though, and qualifies as 4K.

Though this display has a 4K resolution, it’s not meant to be used at the full 3840 x 1260 resolution given its 23.7-inch display size because everything on the display would be super small. Instead, it’s meant to provide retina clarity when downscaled to a more reasonable resolution like 1920 x 1080 or 2560 x 1440, which is what we have it set to.

Along with the larger display size, the new UltraFine Display features two Thunderbolt 3 ports instead of a single Thunderbolt 3 port, which means you can daisy chain two of these monitors together. We didn’t have a second on hand, but used daisy chaining with a different 4K LG display, which worked well.

You can also connect other Thunderbolt 3-enabled accessories directly to the display if preferred, and there are also three additional USB-C ports. Both a Thunderbolt 3 and USB-C cable are included. There’s no webcam, but there are built-in stereo speakers available, much like the prior version of the LG UltraFine displays available from Apple.

The display is crisp and vivid, rivaling the Retina display on Apple’s Macs, and we liked the high gloss finish despite the fact that it tends to add more glare. With 500 nits brightness, it’s fairly bright, and because it has P3 wide color support, all the colors are rich and true to life.

All in all, we came away with a positive impression of this display. Since you can daisy chain two of them together, it might be nice to have two of them if you can given the smaller size and the $700 price point, which is half of the price of the 5K UltraFine display.

With the 4K LG UltraFine Display having been replaced, Apple may also have a replacement for the 5K UltraFine monitor on the horizon. The 5K monitor is sold out on Apple’s site right now, though the listing for it hasn’t been removed entirely.

Apple is also planning to get back into displays with rumors suggesting a 31.6-inch 6K display is in the works and set to be released alongside a new Mac Pro that’s coming this year. Unfortunately, Apple’s 6K display is rumored to be super pricey, so it may be out of range for a lot of Mac users who will instead need to rely on other options like the UltraFine displays from LG.

A week after Sonos added long-promised Google Assistant integration to a pair of speakers, Bose is following suit. The company’s bringing the popular smart home AI to a trio of existing models, the Home Speaker 500 and Soundbar 500 and 700. The forthcoming, pint-sized Home Speaker 300 will be hitting the market with the feature built-in.

Like Sonos, you’ll get your standard array of Assistant queries, including music playback, Chromecast TV control and the ability to control connected home features like smart lighting. All of that will be accessible through the built-in speaker array. Like Sonos, the aforementioned speakers are also compatible with Alexa.

It’s clearly in the best interest of these third-party manufacturers not to have to play sides. For Google and Amazon, it means bringing their respective smart home ecosystems to a pair of well-regarded brands. Also like Sonos, setup happens in the company’s music app, which means, unfortunately, that you won’t have the full suite of setup options you get with Google’s own Home speakers.

The upgrade is available starting today. Additional features, including news and podcasts, are coming this summer. Ditto for the Home Speaker 300, which is arriving this summer.

Safari on iOS has a surprising number of hidden tricks, letting you manipulate tabs, conduct page-specific searches, and more, and not all of these features are immediately obvious due to the gestures involved.

We’ve rounded up some useful must-know Safari tips that you might not be aware of or may have forgotten, so make sure to check out our video because we bet there’s something here that’s going to be new to you.

Close All Tabs – Have hundreds of tabs open in Safari on your iPhone? You can close them all at once. Just long press right on the “Done” button in the tab view (which you can get to by pressing the little icon that looks like two squares) and you’ll see an option to close all tabs.

Open Recently Closed Tabs – Accidentally closed a tab you didn’t want to close? In the tab view, long press on the “+” button and it will bring up a list of tabs that you’ve closed recently so you can open it right back up.

Search Your Open Tabs – With tons of tabs, you might need to do some hunting around to find the specific tab you’re looking for, but luckily, a built-in tab search feature makes this easier. Just scroll to the top of your tabs view (or tap the top of the screen to jump to the top) and you’ll see a search bar for searching tabs.

Close Filtered Tabs – If you want to close some of your tabs while leaving the rest open, the search feature doubles as a filter. After doing a search in your tabs, long press on the “Cancel” button next to the search interface and you’ll see an option to close only the tabs that match your search.

Find Text on Page – You know how you can use the Command + F feature on a Mac to find something specific on a page? There’s a find feature in iOS too. With a website open, type in a search phrase in the search bar at the top and then scroll down to “On This Page” to search for that term on the website. Alternatively, you can open up the Share Sheet and locate the “Find on Page” button.

Close Tabs on Other Devices – If you have multiple devices and use iCloudalong with the feature that syncs Safari information, you can close tabs on your Mac or your iPad right from your iPhone. To do it, open up the tab view (again, the little icon with two squares), scroll all the way to the bottom of your open tabs, and then you’ll see an interface that lists open tabs on other devices.

Handoff Websites – If you’re looking at a website on your iPhone and then want to open it up on your Mac, you can use Handoff, which is available on most modern Mac machines and iPhones. On the Mac, you’ll see a little Safari icon on your dock with a small iPhone icon, just click on that and whatever you’re looking at on your iPhone can be opened up right on your Mac. You can also open websites from device to device using the same cloud tab interface used for closing tabs on other devices.

Have other useful Safari tips that we didn’t share here? Let us know in the comments and we may include them in a future tips and tricks video.

In a blog post today, Google disclosed that it recently discovered a bug that caused some portion of G Suite users to have their passwords stored in plain text. The bug has been around since 2005, though Google says that it can’t find any evidence that anybody’s password was improperly accessed. It’s resetting any passwords that might be affected and letting G Suite administrators know about the issue.

G Suite is the corporate version of Gmail and Google’s other apps, and apparently the bug came about in this product because of a feature designed specifically for companies. Early on, it was possible for your company administrator for G Suite apps to set user passwords manually — say, before a new employee came on board — and if they did, the admin console would store those passwords in plain text instead of hashing them. Google has since removed that capability from administrators.

Google’s post goes to great pains to explain how cryptographic hashing works, likely in an effort to make sure the nuances surrounding this bug are clear. Though the passwords were stored in plain text, they were at least stored in plain text inside Google’s servers, so they’d be harder to get to than if they were just out on the open internet. Although Google didn’t say so explicitly, it seems like it wants to also make sure people don’t lump this bug in the same category as other plain text password problems where those passwords have leaked out.

And oh, there have been so many of those, as Wired notes. Twitter advised all 330 million of its users to change passwords back in March due to a breach. Facebook stored“hundreds of millions” of passwords in plain text in a way where up to 20,000 of its employees could have accessed them. Instagram had to fess up that Facebook’s breach had actually affected millions of Instagram users (not the previously disclosed smaller number).

For its part, Google didn’t characterize just how many users might have been affected by this bug beyond saying it affected “a subset of our enterprise G Suite customers” — presumably anybody who was using G Suite in 2005. And though Google couldn’t find evidence that anybody used this access maliciously, it’s not entirely clear who would have had access to these plain text files either.

In any case, it’s fixed now and Google is appropriately sorry in its post about the whole issue:

We take the security of our enterprise customers extremely seriously, and pride ourselves in advancing the industry’s best practices for account security. Here we did not live up to our own standards, nor those of our customers. We apologize to our users and will do better.