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Cottage Life

Home deals you can score this Black Friday for up to 70 per cent off

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Whether you’re looking to upgrade your kitchen countertop appliances or buy a new vacuum for the cottage, now is the time to make your purchase. You can score some of the top-rated home products from Amazon this Black Friday for up to 70 per cent off. Take a look:

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Mobile Syrup

Telus network outage impacting mobile, home services in B.C.

Vancouver-based national telecom Telus has been dealing with outages in B.C. and Alberta overnight.

Per a tweet from the company shortly after 10pm on October 18th, a network outage impacted home and wireless services in Terrace, Kitimat, and Prince Rupert, B.C. However, the company’s network status page highlights more areas in B.C., including Hazelton, Kitseguecla, Kitwanga, and Kitwancool. The outage was caused by a motor vehicle accident, which damaged a cable.

Telus’ last status update came at 9am on the 19th, noting that “Service restoration efforts continue” and the company estimates it will have things back online by “late morning.”

In total, impacted services include mobile (text, voice, and data), OptikTV, PIK TV, home phone, and internet.

Beyond B.C., several areas around Edmonton, Alberta, are experiencing home phone disruptions unrelated to the above outage. Vegreville, Jarvie, Mundare, St. Albert, and Clive, Alberta, are all listed as having home phone disruptions, with some areas having issues for multiple days.

Telus technicians are investigating, and the status website notes the company suspects the disruption was caused by a hardware issue.

You can view the ongoing outages here, or follow Telus’ status account on Twitter for updates.

Source: Telus (Twitter)

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Mobile Syrup

Google reveals new, more customizable Home app

Google’s smart home hub app is finally getting a facelift.

According to the tech giant, the new app’s goal is to offer users more customization through a new ‘Favourites tab’ that aims to make it easier to access the smart home devices you use the most. As someone with dozens of connected devices in their Home app but only regularly accesses a few of them, I’m looking forward to this feature.

The tech giant is also adding a new feature to Home called ‘Spaces’ that allows you to group several smart home devices under one category. For example, if you have a pet camera and feeder for your cat, you can now create a custom space. Google says that the new Home app also features pre-created Spaces for categories like lights, cameras and thermostats.

Other new features include an in-app media mini player that lets you see what content is playing in your home and a refreshed Nest camera experience that gives you quick information about your device directly in the Home app. For example, you can now find important moments captured by the new Nest Doorbell directly in the Home app.

Finally, Google is also expanding ‘Household Routines’ to support more smart home devices and has plans to launch a detailed Home app script editor in 2023. It’s also worth mentioning that overall, Google’s new Home app looks cleaner and easier to navigate.

The new Home app is coming to iOS and Android through Google’s public preview program in the coming weeks. It’s unclear when the final version of Google’s new Home app will be released.

Google also recently revealed its new Nest Doorbell and Nest Wifi Pro.

Image credit: Google

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Mobile Syrup

Apple refreshes Home app with new design across iPhone iPad and Mac

During its WWDC 2022 keynote, Apple revealed a refreshed Home app with a new user interface.

Along with what seems to be a more user-friendly design, Apple confirmed that the app now supports Matter, a burgeoning smart home connectivity standard. Google made a similar announcement regarding its smart home efforts and Matter at I/O 2022.

The refreshed app is set to feature a new way to access security cameras and seems to be pushing toward smart home devices better understanding what users actually want their devices to be doing rather than just blindly following commands.

More to come…

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Mobile Syrup

How Android 12 blocks group speaker volume control for Pixels, but not Android

Earlier this year, the International Trade Commission (ITC) handed down a ruling in the patent dispute between Sonos and Google. The ITC sided with Sonos, leading Google to make several changes to Nest and Home speakers.

One such change involved removing the ability for people to adjust the volume of a group of Google speakers using the physical volume buttons or rocker on their smartphone. An in-depth analysis of the code behind this change from Esper’s Senior Technical Editor Mishaal Rahman showcases how Google made the adjustment and, interestingly, how the impacts will be worse for Pixel users.

The post is well worth the read, but it is also quite technical. I’ll do my best to simplify below, but if you want to full details, check out the blog post here.

Changing the logic behind volume adjustments

To start, Google began changing how the volume rocker on your smartphone interacts with its smart home speakers when developing Android 12 — developers first discovered the change in September with the release of Android 12 Beta 5. Before the change, Android would check whether media playback was local (on-device) or remote (happening on an external device, such as a Cast-enabled speaker). Depending on the result of that check, Android would automatically adjust volume accordingly when users pressed the buttons on their phone.

Android 12 broke that check, effectively disabling the ability to adjust media volume for remote devices. Shortly after the Beta 5 release, a Google developer hinted that the change was related to an unspecified “legal issue.” Although it wasn’t clarified, that likely referred to the Sonos patent dispute.

According to Rahman, Android 12 release 26 (a.k.a. the January 2022 patch that started hitting Pixel devices this month) introduced new logic to handle local/remote volume control. Devices on this version of Android will check three conditions to decide whether to allow volume adjustments for remote settings:

  1. Whether the active media session uses local playback.
  2. If the flag ‘ config_volumeAdjustmentForRemoteGroupSessions’ is set to true.
  3. If the list of routing sessions for the app contains a single route (apart from the system routing session).

The way it’s set up, if the first or second condition is met, then Android doesn’t check condition three. If both of those conditions fail, then Android checks condition three. This is where things get really interesting.

Android can still change group speaker volume — Pixels can’t

Rahman found that the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) defines the second condition as true. (AOSP, for those not familiar, is the open-source foundation of the mobile OS — most Android smartphones use AOSP plus an assortment of other software like Google Play Services and changes from manufacturers to deliver the user experience you’re used to.) That means Android allows users to adjust the volume of remote media session on a group of speakers by default.

However, Pixel phones with the latest Android update still don’t let users adjust the volume of speaker groups using the physical volume keys. Rahman discovered that on Pixel phones, that second condition is set to false, effectively blocking volume control for remote sessions on groups of speakers. Plus, that means other Android phone makers could allow group speaker management if they want to:

“While the first patch appears to have been more of a “band aid,” the second patch seems tailored to allow Google to ship Pixel phones without the ability to control the volume of remote speaker group sessions. But it also leaves an easy way for OEMs to ship their own devices with the feature enabled.”

Finally, Rahman notes that the new volume behaviour is also present in the Android 12L beta. He outlines a way for users to override that setting, manually enabling group speaker volume control on Pixel phones, but it’s a technical process that requires superuser access.

Despite the complexity of the code, it seems like a simple way for Google to side-step legal ramifications by disabling group speaker volume control for Pixel phones while simultaneously keeping the feature available for Android manufacturers. That said, it sucks for Pixel users who, for now, won’t be able to change the volume on groups of speakers using their smartphone’s volume rocker.

Source: Esper Via: Android Police

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Cottage Life

Drinking glasses you need at the cottage according to a mixologist

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Whether you plan to sit around the fire with an Irish coffee, host an epic meal or simply sip pinor noir solo on the deck, there’s a drinkware option that would likely elevate your experience. We chatted with Mackenzie Putici, a Toronto-based certified sommelier, mixologist, and founder of New World Wine Tours to get a better idea of the drinkware you need for inspired cottage sipping.

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