Archive for October, 2017

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Windows 10 Fall Creators Update… Here’s What To Expect

Posted in Commentary with tags on October 18, 2017 by itnerd

Microsoft started rolling out the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update yesterday. This is the latest major update to its current desktop operating system. Here’s what you can expect from the Fall Creators Update:

  • Microsoft now has “OneDrive Files on Demand”, which allows some files to be stored in the cloud and available to you without being synced on your local device.
  • Microsoft has a new design language named “Fluent Design“. It uses more light, depth, motion, and transparency. It’s more related to “material” objects and incorporates “scale” more, according to Microsoft. This sounds like the final name of Project Neon, a new visual design language Microsoft has been working on, but it’s more than that. It’s a new interaction model, according to Microsoft.
  • Better inking and handwriting features for tablet users.
  • The task bar shows GPU usage. That will be handy for gamers.
  • A new touch keyboard which is based on Swiftkey and WordFlow
  • Music apps Spotify and iTunes Will Be Available in the Microsoft Store which used to be called the Windows Store.
  • Microsoft Edge gets a bunch of enhancements and features.
  • Cortana gets smarter.
  • VR support appears along with mixed reality support
  • Better battery life is on tap
  • Protection from ransomware is on tap.
  • Microsoft is making a ton of privacy related changes.

There’s a lot here on tap and I’ve only scratched the surface of what is on offer. Thus I’ll direct you to this blog and this video:

To get your hands on the Fall Creators Update, here’s a link that will walk you through how to get it.

1 Comment »

Toronto To Be Home To Alphabets Biggest Smart City Project Yet

Posted in Commentary with tags on October 18, 2017 by itnerd

Sidewalk Labs, the smart city subsidiary of Alphabet (the parent company of Google) with the stated goal of “reimagining cities from the Internet up,” now has a very big sandbox in which to conduct its high-tech experiments:

That’s obviously an ambitious project, but some of the groundwork is already being laid: Alphabet’s Google will be the flagship tenant for the new neighbourhood, anchoring the easter waterfront, to be called “Quayside,” and Sidewalk Labs has committed $50 million to kick off pilot testing and planning in partnership with the City of Toronto. Sidewalk Labs won the contract through its response to a Request for Proposals issues by Waterfront Toronto, and organization created by the Canadian federal government, the Ontario provincial government and the City of Toronto together to foster development of Toronto’s lakefront areas in ways that address urban sprawl while respecting the realities of climate change and taking into account the ability of the city’s residents to get around efficiently. The area involved in the RFP that Sidewalk Labs will work with the government coalition to develop spans around 800 acres (though 12 acres are specified for the initial project), and is one of the largest underdeveloped urban areas in any North American city, making it a good target for Sidewalk’s ambitious vision, which involves building smart cities holistically from the very start. Ultimately, the partners hope to turn the area into a “place for tens of thousands of people to live, work, learn and play — and to create and advance new ideas that improve city life,” according to a release from Sidewalk.

Now being from Toronto, I should be happy about this. But to be honest I am not sure about this. Sidewalk Labs thinks it can use new technology and great reams of data to create a neighbourhood that demonstrates innovative solutions to problems that cities like Toronto suffer. I’d be interested to know what else Sidewalks Labs will do with that data besides building a smart city. After all, Alphabet AKA Google makes piles of cash from data. That’s why I will reserve judgement on this for now and take a wait and see approach.

1 Comment »

Green Tech Start-Ups Pitch Investors At Innovation4D Event In Mississauga

Posted in Commentary with tags on October 17, 2017 by itnerd

Xerox.jpg

Mississauga Mayor Bonnie Crombie presents a certificate of recognition to executives of GreenCentre Canada (GCC), the Research Innovation Commercialization Centre (RICC) and the Xerox Research Centre of Canada (XRCC) at the inaugural Innovation4D event at the XRCC’s Innovation Hub in Mississauga on Monday, October 16.

Innovation4D was organized by the Innovation Hub and partners to provide Ontario green tech start-ups with the opportunity to pitch venture capitalists on their innovations. The Hon. Reza Moridi, Minister of Research, Innovation and Science, along with Mayor Bonnie Crombie were on hand to open the event. The Innovation Hub was recently cited as one reason for Toronto’s place on the list of Top 10 Cities for Corporate Innovation.

Pictured left to right are Sunil Selby, Trellis Capital and Chair of RICC; Mayor Bonnie Crombie; executive directors of RICC and GCC, Pam Banks and Pete Pigott; the Hon. Reza Moridi, Minister of Research, Innovation and Science; and, XRCC vice president, Dr. Paul Smith.

Leave a comment »

Cybersecurity is Top Concern in Corporate IoT Deployments: BlackBerry

Posted in Commentary with tags on October 17, 2017 by itnerd

BlackBerry Limited announced findings from a new global research whitepaper, which surveyed IT decision makers on corporate IoT deployments. Conducted by 451 Research, the whitepaper titled, “Securing the Enterprise of Things: Opportunity for securing IoT with a unified platform emerging as IoT popularity grows,” reveals that huge opportunities are balanced against significant cybersecurity concerns.

Survey respondents represent a wide range of vertical industries, including financial services, government and healthcare. Below are some key themes from the research:

  • Seventy-eight percent of respondents indicated interest in a solution that allows them to manage all their endpoints in one place.
  • Sixty-three percent noted that security is the “top” concern regarding digital technologies and processes. However, only a little over one-third (37 percent) actually have a formal digital transformation strategy in place.
  • Organizations are least prepared against external threats, with nearly two-thirds (61 percent) citing hackers and cyberwarfare as top concerns.
  • Thirty-nine percent of respondents from very large organizations (more than 10,000 employees) revealed that a lack of collaboration among internal departments is a potential barrier to unified endpoint management, while 51 percent of mid-sized organizations felt the same way.

The new whitepaper is available for download at www.blackberry.com/enterprise-of-things.
For more information about BlackBerry’s EOT solutions, please visit www.blackberry.com/enterprise.

Leave a comment »

Roku Launches New Roku Express in Canada

Posted in Commentary with tags on October 17, 2017 by itnerd

Roku, Inc. today announced that it is launching the new Roku Express in Canada, which is five times more powerful than its predecessor.The Roku Express is tiny. It comes with everything in the box to start streaming, including a simple-to-use remote control and HDMI cable, and is priced at just $39.99 MSRP.

image005.jpg

Roku devices are powered by the Roku OS and feature a simple home screen. Consumers in Canada can access 4,000+ streaming channels, including 150,000 movies and TV episodes. They can also download the free Roku app for iOS® and Android™ mobile devices which acts as a remote, streams media from a mobile device to the TV, includes a keyboard and features such as voice search and private listening.

The Roku Express is expected to be available in November from Best Buy, Walmart, Amazon, Staples, The Source, London Drugs and other fine retailers at an MSRP of $39.99 CAD.

Leave a comment »

Review: VMware Fusion 10

Posted in Products with tags on October 17, 2017 by itnerd

I’ve been a long time user of Parallels Desktop for Mac as it has been very good to me in terms of being able to run virtual machines on my Mac. But a long time ago, I did try VMware Fusion. I hadn’t really given it another thought until I was approached by VMware to give VMware Fusion 10 a try. Frankly, I’m glad that I did.

First of all, the graphics capabilities in VMware Fusion 10 are outstanding. You can attribute that to the addition of Metal support. This gives the VMware Fusion 10 a serious performance boost, along with increasing the accuracy of rendering and improving power efficiency. I felt this when playing Team Fortress 2 in Windows 10 as it was so good I almost forgot I was playing the game in a virtual machine. It was truly that good. I would imagine that you would get the same experience if you were running something that is graphics heavy such as a 3D modelling application. I’m going to also highlight something else on the graphics front which is the support for retina displays. Parallels Desktop supports retina displays. But it was done in a way that made the virtual machine unusable because the type was so small. Thus I ended up turning that feature off. No so in the case of VMware Fusion 10 where they have fully leveraged the retina display to make the virtual machine more than usable.

There’s support for operating systems including macOS 10.13 High Sierra and the fall updates for Windows 10 and Server 2016. But one trick that VMware Fusion 10 has is the ability to import virtual machines from Parallels Desktop which I utilized to review the product. The process worked fine though I had two hiccups. One was that once the import was complete, VMware Fusion 10 was unable to boot the virtual machine until I chose the virtual hard disk. The second hiccup was I had trouble getting sound to work in the virtual machine once it booted. It was apparently due to the lack of drivers. But if you’re starting from scratch, you can easily create a virtual machine or clone a desktop computer to a virtual machine via easy to understand wizards that walk you through the process. And when I say the words “easy to understand” I truly mean that they are extremely easy to understand.

If you want to get really nerdy, VMware supports features such as NVMe devices, UEFI Secure Boot, UEFI boot, and TPM chips. Why should you care about this stuff? In my case I care because I use virtual machines to replicate customer environments so that I can understand why they are having an issue, and come up with a fix for it. For example, during the testing of VMware Fusion 10, I was asked by a customer to try and help them to replicate an issue that involved Microsoft’s Bitlocker encryption. To replicate this issue properly required me to use the TPM chip that is found in many corporate class PCs. This is something that I would not have been able to do with any other virtualization product, and had I not had been testing VMWare Fusion 10 at the time, I would have to borrow one of their computers and set it up at home to perform this testing. Thus for the first time, I can now replicate environments accurately from a virtual hardware perspective as VMware Fusion 10 supports technologies like these. The kicker is that I didn’t have to use the pro version to get support for technologies like these.

VMware Fusion 10 is now available from vmware.com for $79 USD. The pro version which is more focused at enterprise users is $179. Fusion 8.5 users can upgrade to Fusion 10 Pro for only $119 and to Fusion 10 for $49 at the VMware online store. And those who purchase Fusion 8 or Fusion 8 Pro between August 22 and November 1 are eligible for an electronic upgrade to Fusion 10 or Fusion 10 Pro, respectively, at no additional cost. No action is required on your part, your licenses will automatically be upgraded in your MyVMware account manager. If you have the need to run virtual machines on your Mac, VMware Fusion 10 should be your first choice. In my case, I am giving serious thought to converting over because VMware is the new champ of virtual machine software on the Macintosh platform.

 

4 Comments »

Canadian Companies Among Finalists For Stevie Awards For Women In Business

Posted in Commentary with tags on October 16, 2017 by itnerd

Finalists were announced in the 14th annual Stevie® Awards for Women in Business, the world’s top honors for women entrepreneurs, executives, employees and the organizations they run.

The Stevie Awards for Women in Business are produced by the creators of the prestigious American Business Awards and International Business Awards. The Stevies are widely considered to be the world’s premier business awards.

Among the finalists of this year’s Stevie Awards for Women in Business are 16 companies and women from Canada that have prevailed over the global competition.

The organization with most finalist nominations from Canada is Pink Elephant from Burlington. The global training & consulting provider is candidate for nine Stevie Awards in different categories including Lifetime Achievement (Business), Most Innovative Women of the Year (Business Services) and Female Entrepreneur of the Year in Canada.

Another company with multiple finalists is The Colony Project from Toronto with four award winning entries in the categories Employee of the Year (Business), Most Innovative Woman of the Year (Advertising, Marketing & Public Relations), Company of the Year (Business Services – 10 or Less Employees) and Female Executive of the Year (Business Products –10 or Less Employees).

Other finalists in the Stevie Awards for Women in Business include Tigris Events Inc. (Pickering), She Takes on the World Inc. (Kitchener), Managing Matters Inc. (Toronto) and Marketing CoPilot (Toronto).

This year’s Gold, Silver and Bronze Stevie Award winners will be announced at an awards dinner at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in New York City on Friday, November 17. More than 500 women and their guests from around the world are expected to attend the presentations, which will be broadcast live on Livestream.

More than 1,500 entries were submitted this year by organizations and individuals around the world for consideration in more than 90 categories including Executive of the Year, Entrepreneur of the Year, Startup of the Year, Women Helping Women and Women-Run Workplace of the Year.

Nominations were submitted by organizations in 25 nations including Australia, Bahrain, Canada, Germany, Iceland, India, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, Lebanon, Mexico, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden, Taiwan, Turkey, United Kingdom and the United States.

Visit http://www.StevieAwards.com/Women for a complete list of finalists by category.

Leave a comment »

Update Adobe Flash ASAP As Exploits Are In The Wild

Posted in Commentary with tags , on October 16, 2017 by itnerd

Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but you need to update Adobe Flash ASAP as there are exploits that hackers are actively using them. The really funny part is that the people who came across this was beleaguered anti-virus company Kaspersky.

Yeah. Those guys.

In any case, this exploit is serious as per this:

The warning came after cyber security firm Kaspersky Lab Inc said a group it was tracking, BlackOasis, used the previously unknown weakness on Oct. 10 to plant malicious software on computers before connecting them back to servers in Switzerland, Bulgaria and the Netherlands.

Kaspersky said the malware, known as FinSpy or FinFisher, is a commercial product typically sold to nation states and law enforcement agencies to conduct surveillance.

Kaspersky said its assessment of BlackOasis shows it is targeting Middle Eastern politicians and United Nations officials engaged in the region, opposition bloggers and activists, and regional news correspondents with the latest version of FinSpy.

The company said victims have so far been observed in Russia, Iraq, Afghanistan, the United Kingdom, Iran and elsewhere in Africa and the Middle East.

Excellent. Here’s what you can do to protect yourself:

Option 1: Download the latest Adobe Flash. Install it and wait for the next Flash based exploit to appear.

Option 2: Uninstall Adobe Flash as there is no real reason to run it. That will make the next Flash based exploit a non-event.

The choice is yours.

Leave a comment »

Microsoft And Apple Have Already Patched “KRACK” Vulnerabilities

Posted in Commentary with tags on October 16, 2017 by itnerd

Good news for those who are running the latest and greatest, or at least the still supported from either Apple or Microsoft. That rather nasty WiFi vulnerability that I told you about this morning has already been fixed. Apple has disclosed via MacRumors that upcoming updates of iOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS will have the fixes on board. Microsoft has told The Verge that if you are running a supported operating system and you installed the patches that came out on October 10th, you’re good to go.

Now that’s great for Apple and Microsoft users. But Android users will have to wait weeks for a patch. Maybe months depending on who’s phone you own. And what happens to those who own IoT devices, WiFi routers, etc.? It’s anyone guess if or when they’ll be patched. That means that this will be a problem for some time to come.

Leave a comment »

Review: The Essential Phone & Essential 360 Camera

Posted in Products with tags , on October 16, 2017 by itnerd

If you’ve heard of Google, you’ve likely heard of Andy Rubin. He was the guy behind the Android operating system. That worked out well for him. For his next trick, he’s making a phone that runs Android. And it’s called the Essential Phone which is being carried by Telus exclusively in Canada. Here’s what you get under the hood:

  • 5.71-inches, Quad-HD display, 2560 x 1312 resolution
  • 8MP Front camera
  • 13.1MP Dual rear camera
  • 128GB storage
  • 4GB RAM
  • Rear Fingerprint Sensor
  • Android 7.1
  • USB-C

First off, this phone feels solid. That’s due to a titanium frame and ceramic back. The flip side is that this phone is a fingerprint magnet. You’ll need to put it in a case if you want to keep it clean. Another point to make. this phone is neither dust proof or waterproof unlike the likes of the Apple iPhone 7 or Samsung Galaxy S8. Nor does it come out of the box with wireless charging. Oh yeah, the memory is non-expandable. Those could be fatal flaws for a smartphone these days. But strangely I can overlook all of that.

Now one thing that is different is the fact that it has a magnetic connector on the back with wireless data transfer. The first accessory that utilizes this is a 360 degree camera which I will get to in a bit. Then next that’s coming soon is a wireless dock that promises cordless charging to address the fact that it doesn’t have it at present.

Back to the phone. The star of the show is the Quad-HD screen which is in a word, stunning. Except for that cutout for the front facing camera that looks kind of weird. But seeing as the iPhone X has a similar cutout, is this a big deal? Likely not. I should note that Google apps like Maps work best with the cutout. However other apps from developers outside of Google are hit and miss. When it misses, there’s a black bar on the top of the screen. You are either going to love or hate that. In terms of the rest of the phone, it’s insanely minimalistic. Power and volume controls on the right. The SIM tray and USB-C connector are at the bottom which is where the only speaker is. In other words, there’s no stereo speakers. There’s also no headphone jack as well. But there’s a USB-C to 3.5″ adapter in the box if you wish to live the dongle life. If you don’t, there are many Bluetooth and the USB-C headphones for you listening pleasure. On the back is the fingerprint sensor. If that doesn’t minimalistic, I don’t know what does. Good thing the battery isn’t minimalistic as it will last almost two days of usage between charges.

The software is stock Android. And I do mean STOCK with the only non stock apps being the Camera app which is made by Essential and the Telus My Account app. That I love. So is the fact that the phone is quick and everything that I did to the phone couldn’t slow it down.

Speaking of the camera, I’ve got two cameras to cover off today. The stock camera is 13.1MP dual rear camera that’s capable of 4K video. To test this out, it required a trip to Pearson Airport in Toronto to get some shots of planes landing:

All these pictures were easy to take thanks to the simple yet effective camera app. There were no issues in quality. And in terms of video, here’s one shot on 4K:

Again, it was easy to get this video thanks to the easy use camera app. No issues here with the video.

Now onto the party trick that the Essential phone has which is the Essential 360 camera.

IMG_0901.jpg

It attaches magnetically and it uses the smartphone to capture 360-degree stills and 4K video using the camera app. While it’s on your Essential phone, you can’t use the built in camera. It features two 12MP sensors, a pair of fisheye lenses, each with a 210-degree field of view. Now to be honest, going into this review, I have to admit that this camera seemed like a party trick to me. But maybe there’s a use case for it given these results, starting with this 360 degree video which you can interact by clicking and dragging the video. For best results, I’d recommend using the Chrome browser:

It’s an interesting feature is easy to use and works well. But I have to admit that I am still undecided if this is a feature that will set the Essential Phone apart from its competition. And I don’t think that the Essential Phone will appeal to everyone the way an iPhone or a Samsung Galaxy will. But I suspect that it will find a market for those who want a powerful yet minimalistic phone that comes with stock Android and a few tricks up its sleeve. Telus is offering up the phone for $1050 outright, or up to $0 on a 2 year term. The Essential 360 Camera goes for $270. Check it out if you want a different sort of Android phone.

1 Comment »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »