15 November 2017

How to Create a OneNote Calendar Template


onenote-calendar-template

OneNote is fantastic for taking and organizing notes. If you also use OneNote to manage tasks, you probably wish it included a calendar tool. Unfortunately, that’s one feature it’s missing. While OneNote won’t do reminders, you can still set up a custom calendar. We’ll show you five ways to create a OneNote calendar template. Download: Microsoft OneNote for Windows | macOS | iOS | Android (Free) 1. How to Make a Calendar Template in OneNote First, we’ll look at what’s possible within OneNote itself. This first way to make a calendar is almost as easy as editing a standard Word...

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Google’s jobs search engine gets salary ranges, a better location filter and more


 Google Search’s built-in jobs search engine, which launched earlier this year, is getting an update today. For the most part, these new feature address some basic shortcomings of the first version. This means that in this new version, you can now finally filter jobs by how far away they are from you, not just by what city they are in. The updated “Location” filter now lets… Read More
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LinkedIn rolls out its Career Advice mentoring program to US, UK and India


 LinkedIn, the Microsoft-owned social platform for the working world with some 530 million members, has made a big push in the last couple of years to position itself not just as a place to look for new jobs and network, but as a place for professional development — including services for online learning; steady streams of news and other content to expand your knowledge; and most… Read More
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Call to ban sale of IoT toys with proven security flaws


 Ahead of 2017’s present buying season, UK consumer rights group Which? has warned parents about the risks of giving connected toys to their children, and called for devices with known security and/or privacy risks to be banned from sale on kids safety grounds. Read More

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How to Stop Automatic Chrome Updates in Windows


chrome-extensions-google

Chrome updates are pretty unobtrusive, but if you’ve decided you don’t want to them to run automatically, there’s actually no setting in the browser to turn them off. Fortunately, Windows users can disable automatic updates in just a few easy steps. Method 1: System Configuration Open the Run prompt. You can do this by using the keyboard shortcut Windows key + R or searching for Run using Cortana. Once it opens, type msconfig and hit Enter. In the System Configuration window, go to the Services tab. You’ll want to look for the two following items: Google Update Service (gupdate) and Google Update Service (gupdatem). To find...

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Use eBay for Charity to Donate Cheer This Season


ebay-shop-like-boss

Start Christmas early! Why wait for the end of the year to sprinkle cheer in someone’s life when you can do it right now from your couch? Sites like Amazon and eBay provide guilt-free ways to donate to charitable causes while you shop online. And you don’t need to alter or deviate from your shopping spree in any way. Many know about the AmazonSmile program, but eBay has a similar way to give charitably using its eBay for Charity website. Use eBay to Support a Cause You have good intentions, but you are either too busy or lazy. eBay for Charity uses several tools to help...

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How to Rollback and Uninstall the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update


It’s fair to say Microsoft has largely gotten its act together. Windows 10 is now comfortable, and the biannual update cycle is popular with many users. But maybe you just upgraded and you’re unhappy. If so, Microsoft is flexible enough to let you rollback and uninstall updates. It’s an easy process and doesn’t take a massive amount of time. We’ll show you how to rollback and uninstall the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update: Go to Start > Settings. Open Update and Security. Click on Recovery in the left-hand menu. Head to Go back to the previous version of Windows 10...

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How to Disable Autoplaying Videos in the Microsoft Store


The Microsoft Store, formerly Windows Store, is where Microsoft wants you to download Modern apps, movies, and more. While many people don’t bother with it, there are some solid Windows Store apps worth checking out. With the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update came the rebranding of the shop to the Microsoft Store. But it also includes annoying auto-playing videos, usually on game and app pages. Just like on social media and mobile sites, these videos are a pain. If you don’t realize that your volume is on, you could end up blasting by mistake. Plus, you probably don’t want to...

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Essential offers up an Android Oreo beta for the Essential Phone


 Android smartphone maker Essential promised that it would be releasing an update to Android 8.0 Oreo for its devices soon, and now there’s a beta version of the update available through its developer portal. This is just a beta, as mentioned, but it’s broadly available for anyone interested enough in the Oreo update to try out pre-release software. As mentioned, Essential said it… Read More

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Essential offers up an Android Oreo beta for the Essential Phone


 Android smartphone maker Essential promised that it would be releasing an update to Android 8.0 Oreo for its devices soon, and now there’s a beta version of the update available through its developer portal. This is just a beta, as mentioned, but it’s broadly available for anyone interested enough in the Oreo update to try out pre-release software. As mentioned, Essential said it… Read More

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Essential offers up an Android Oreo beta for the Essential Phone


 Android smartphone maker Essential promised that it would be releasing an update to Android 8.0 Oreo for its devices soon, and now there’s a beta version of the update available through its developer portal. This is just a beta, as mentioned, but it’s broadly available for anyone interested enough in the Oreo update to try out pre-release software. As mentioned, Essential said it… Read More
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On-Device Conversational Modeling with TensorFlow Lite




Earlier this year, we launched Android Wear 2.0 which featured the first "on-device" machine learning technology for smart messaging. This enabled cloud-based technologies like Smart Reply, previously available in Gmail, Inbox and Allo, to be used directly within any application for the first time, including third-party messaging apps, without ever having to connect to the cloud. So you can respond to incoming chat messages on the go, directly from your smartwatch.

Today, we announce TensorFlow Lite, TensorFlow’s lightweight solution for mobile and embedded devices. This framework is optimized for low-latency inference of machine learning models, with a focus on small memory footprint and fast performance. As part of the library, we have also released an on-device conversational model and a demo app that provides an example of a natural language application powered by TensorFlow Lite, in order to make it easier for developers and researchers to build new machine intelligence features powered by on-device inference. This model generates reply suggestions to input conversational chat messages, with efficient inference that can be easily plugged in to your chat application to power on-device conversational intelligence.

The on-device conversational model we have released uses a new ML architecture for training compact neural networks (as well as other machine learning models) based on a joint optimization framework, originally presented in ProjectionNet: Learning Efficient On-Device Deep Networks Using Neural Projections. This architecture can run efficiently on mobile devices with limited computing power and memory, by using efficient “projection” operations that transform any input to a compact bit vector representation — similar inputs are projected to nearby vectors that are dense or sparse depending on type of projection. For example, the messages “hey, how's it going?” and “How's it going buddy?”, might be projected to the same vector representation.

Using this idea, the conversational model combines these efficient operations at low computation and memory footprint. We trained this on-device model end-to-end using an ML framework that jointly trains two types of models — a compact projection model (as described above) combined with a trainer model. The two models are trained in a joint fashion, where the projection model learns from the trainer model — the trainer is characteristic of an expert and modeled using larger and more complex ML architectures, whereas the projection model resembles a student that learns from the expert. During training, we can also stack other techniques such as quantization or distillation to achieve further compression or selectively optimize certain portions of the objective function. Once trained, the smaller projection model is able to be used directly for inference on device.
For inference, the trained projection model is compiled into a set of TensorFlow Lite operations that have been optimized for fast execution on mobile platforms and executed directly on device. The TensorFlow Lite inference graph for the on-device conversational model is shown here.
TensorFlow Lite execution for the On-Device Conversational Model.
The open-source conversational model released today (along with code) was trained end-to-end using the joint ML architecture described above. Today’s release also includes a demo app, so you can easily download and try out one-touch smart replies on your mobile device. The architecture enables easy configuration for model size and prediction quality based on application needs. You can find a list of sample messages where this model does well here. The system can also fall back to suggesting replies from a fixed set that was learned and compiled from popular response intents observed in chat conversations. The underlying model is different from the ones Google uses for Smart Reply responses in its apps1.

Beyond Conversational Models
Interestingly, the ML architecture described above permits flexible choices for the underlying model. We also designed the architecture to be compatible with different machine learning approaches — for example, when used with TensorFlow deep learning, we learn a lightweight neural network (ProjectionNet) for the underlying model, whereas a different architecture (ProjectionGraph) represents the model using a graph framework instead of a neural network.

The joint framework can also be used to train lightweight on-device models for other tasks using different ML modeling architectures. As an example, we derived a ProjectionNet architecture that uses a complex feed-forward or recurrent architecture (like LSTM) for the trainer model coupled with a simple projection architecture comprised of dynamic projection operations and a few, narrow fully-connected layers. The whole architecture is trained end-to-end using backpropagation in TensorFlow and once trained, the compact ProjectionNet is directly used for inference. Using this method, we have successfully trained tiny ProjectionNet models that achieve significant reduction in model sizes (up to several orders of magnitude reduction) and high performance with respect to accuracy on multiple visual and language classification tasks (a few examples here). Similarly, we trained other lightweight models using our graph learning framework, even in semi-supervised settings.
ML architecture for training on-device models: ProjectionNet trained using deep learning (left), and ProjectionGraph trained using graph learning (right).
We will continue to improve and release updated TensorFlow Lite models in open-source. We think that the released model (as well as future models) learned using these ML architectures may be reused for many natural language and computer vision applications or plugged into existing apps for enabling machine intelligence. We hope that the machine learning and natural language processing communities will be able to build on these to address new problems and use-cases we have not yet conceived.

Acknowledgments
Yicheng Fan and Gaurav Nemade contributed immensely to this effort. Special thanks to Rajat Monga, Andre Hentz, Andrew Selle, Sarah Sirajuddin, and Anitha Vijayakumar from the TensorFlow team; Robin Dua, Patrick McGregor, Andrei Broder, Andrew Tomkins and the Google Expander team.



1 The released on-device model was trained to optimize for small size and low latency applications on mobile phones and wearables. Smart Reply predictions in Google apps, however are generated using larger, more complex models. In production systems, we also use multiple classifiers that are trained to detect inappropriate content and apply further filtering and tuning to optimize user experience and quality levels. We recommend that developers using the open-source TensorFlow Lite version also follow such practices for their end applications.

You Can Now Use Google Home as an Intercom


Google Home can now double-up as an intercom in your house. And it doesn’t matter whether you’re actually at home or out and about. This should make calling your kids down for dinner simpler. That is unless they’re just as likely to ignore Google Home as they are to ignore you. Whether or not you currently own any smart home devices, these interconnected gadgets are likely to power different aspects of your life in the future. However, it’s still early days, and the likes of Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant are still learning to communicate on your behalf. Broadcast Messages...

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The Complete Windows 10 Creators Update Troubleshooting Guide


The Windows 10 Fall Creators Update has been available since September 2017. If you’ve not upgraded yet, you can grab a copy of the latest build directly from Microsoft’s website. More on this below. As with any operating system update, some users have been reporting bugs and annoyances. If you’re one of the affected users, it can be frustrating. Your productivity will suffer. But don’t worry. Whether it’s a problem with the installation process or an issue that’s arisen after a few weeks of usage, MakeUseOf is here to help. We’re going to investigate some of the most common problems with...

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Mozilla terminates its deal with Yahoo and makes Google the default in Firefox again


 With the launch of Firefox Quantum, Mozilla released what’s probably the most important update to its browser in recent years. It’s faster, lighter and you should give it a try. And as you do so, you’ll notice another change: Google is now the default search engine again — at least if you live in the U.S., Canada, Hong Kong and Taiwan. In 2014, Mozilla struck a deal… Read More
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Firefox Quantum Arrives to Challenge Google Chrome


faster-firefox

Mozilla has released Firefox 57, codenamed Quantum, into the wild. This is the most ambitious version of Firefox released in a long time. It’s faster, better-looking, more streamlined, and more useful, and it may be able to give Chrome a run for its money. It certainly uses less RAM. In terms of web browsers, Firefox was once the big daddy. But now Google Chrome enjoys a 55 percent share of the market, and Firefox is down in third, behind Safari. Rather than carry on releasing incremental updates, Mozilla has taken a risk with a bold new version of Firefox… Firefox...

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Twitter details how it reviews and enforces rules around hate speech, violence and harassment


 Twitter has been under fire lately (slash always) for its methods to deal with harassment and abuse on its platform. In an effort to provide some insight into its thinking, Twitter has added some new articles to its help center that detail how the company reviews and enforces rules, as well as the factors it considers in its decision-making process. In a subtopic on “legitimate public… Read More
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A mesh network spontaneously erupts in the US and helps connect Puerto Rico


 When goTenna put out their Mesh device earlier this year, I thought the off-grid gadgets would be great for an emergency kit or back country hike. But it turns out that I underestimated the demand for a resilient, user-powered mesh network: dedicated nodes now populate cities across the country, and volunteers are using them to get Puerto Rico back online after a devastating hurricane season. Read More

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A mesh network spontaneously erupts in the US and helps connect Puerto Rico


 When goTenna put out their Mesh device earlier this year, I thought the off-grid gadgets would be great for an emergency kit or back country hike. But it turns out that I underestimated the demand for a resilient, user-powered mesh network: dedicated nodes now populate cities across the country, and volunteers are using them to get Puerto Rico back online after a devastating hurricane season. Read More

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Attending CES 2018? TechCrunch Wants To See Your Company


 CES is a horrible, god-awful experience that will shave years off your life. The casinos, the food, the people, the germs. Horrible. All of it. But we love it! And we’re sending a huge contingent to the show again this year and want to see your gadgets, toys and products. TechCrunch cares much more for the hardware startups than the big CE players. We want to see the future FitBits and… Read More

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