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Showing posts from February, 2025

Reviewing the Pixelbook Go after 5 yrs | Software that is outpacing the hardware

  No doubt, the Pixelbook Go has served me well in my 5 yrs with the laptop. This is not necessarily a review of the features on the laptop but a review of the PBG hardware and its usability in 2025. I acknowledge that I am a part of a very small club of users that still have and use this device but I must say that I still enjoy using the PBG every single day. Now, to the review. Hardware Right off the bat. The hardware is probably the least compelling aspect of the PBG. When the laptop was first released in 2019 it was already a year or two behind the competition with the onboard soc. Surprisingly, this has not negatively impacted using the laptop with most tasks. Web surfing is a breeze and most Android apps run pretty effortlessly. The 8th Gen i5 Intel soc paired with 8GB of RAM is well optimized and I feel that Google is getting as much as it can out of the chip.  Where the PBG falls short is with video editing apps. I've tried several Android apps and a couple of Linux ap...

Just got Google's new experimental AI feature News Briefs on my Google TV Streamer

Google is always experimenting with AI and one of those new features I really hope sticks around is now available on my Google TV Streamer. News Briefs is an AI experiment that Google is rolling out to a small group of users as part of a test of the feature. When I turned on my TV this evening I quickly noticed the News Briefs feature. It looked similar to any other option on the Google TV home screen but with News Briefs for 5pm so assume there are News Briefs created throughout the day. The picture below is displayed at the end of the News Briefs. The feature is very reminiscent of what NotebookLM does with the two AI hosts that talk in what sounds like a podcast. News Briefs only has one voice that is somewhat similar to the Google Assistant voice on Android devices. I have only used this feature once and I already see the potential here. What was shown to me as part of the News Briefs was actually relevant and current news. The news discussed was very surface level, however, a YouT...