December 12, 2013

The Top 10 iPhone Apps I Like To Use The Most

By James Bruce-
We’re in the habit of reviewing hundreds of new apps here at MakeUseOf, and though most of us probably have pages and pages of random apps on our iPhones, how many of those can we honestly say we use on a regular basis – like at least once a week? Once I took a cold hard look at my home screen, I narrowed it down to the following 10.
I’m not including built-in system functions like Mail, Safari, camera, iBooks, and Google Maps – although those are all daily use apps for me. Though if you want to be pedantic, add those to the list and call it my top 15 then.
In no particular order whatsoever…



Byline [iTunes link - $1.99]

Although Reeder is my RSS reader of choice for my iPad and Mac, I prefer the speed and simplicity of Byline for my iPhone. I don’t need an elaborately designed experience with masses of functionality – just a way to drill through the 300+ stories a day that come in from my feeds (link) and mark some off for further reading. Byline syncs well with Google, and provides a basic and speedy interface, as well as caching images when I’m not looking.




top free iphone apps



BBC News [iTunes link]

I must admit, having a free, non-biased news source makes me proud to be British. The BBC News app not only provides a simple breakdown on various customisable categories of news (so you can hide the pointless entertainment “news” for instance), but also allows users to watch around-the-clock video streams from the BBC News TV channel on Wi-fi or 3G data connections.




free iphone apps



Sleep Cycle [iTunes link]

I was using this as my main alarm clock, but it doesn’t work so well with our new foam mattress. Still, I thought it was worth mentioning. After learning the characteristics of your sleep movements and cycles, this app will continually monitor your sleep and wake you up at some point during a set window of time when you’re in the lightest sleep cycle – thereby avoiding that groggy feeling and instant need to hit the snooze button for another 10 minutes.
As I said, it’s not going to work with very stiff mattresses like foam, but for the most part this app really does work, and 90% of the time it will wake you up feeling fresh and ready.




free iphone apps



Find My iPhone [iTunes link]

Armed with my wife’s iCloud login data, I use this to see if she’s on the way home from work, and if not, I send a barrage of non-silencable messages reminding her that she technically finished 30 minutes ago.
Before you accuse me of being something horrible, know that mostly I use it to see when she’s getting close to the house so I can go and greet her with a big welcome home hug. Awww. I also described in a previous post how we used it to trace her phone when it was stolen.




free iphone apps



BoardGame Companion [iTunes link]

Despite development having been seemingly abandoned on this app, I still use it regularly to calculate scores in Agricola games, and for that single purpose it works beautifully. For those of you who don’t know, Agricola is a board game in which you try to build the most varied and efficient farm, and as fun as it is, counting your score can be tiring.




best iphone apps



Amazon [iTunes link]

Perfect for when I’m out and about and see something I want – a quick price check using the barcode scanner tells me if it’s cheaper on Amazon, and I can save it to my basket right there with a single click. Great for the money saving tactic I described before of leaving it in your basket for a month before you’re allowed to buy it.




best iphone apps



eBay [iTunes link]

I do try to follow the “buy nothing new” movement, and for that eBay is a lifeline. The iPhone app gives me on-the-go mobile notifications for auctions I’m planning on sniping at the last minute, all with a nice mobile-optimised interface. It also makes selling a breeze.




best iphone apps



Ticket To Ride Pocket [iTunes link]

A perfectly executed board game to iPhone conversion from Days of Wonder, with local multiplayer to other iDevices and vs AI modes. A great little diversion when my wife and I are travelling.





Trillian [iTunes link]

I recently switched my desktop messaging client from Adium to Trillian, a free IM client which integrates pretty much every kind of messaging platform you could hope for – including Facebook. The iPhone version is also the most reliable way I’ve found to get all sorts of IM messages on the go – previously I’d used BeeJiveGT and other iOS clients, but found there was a short delay in receiving messages.
I’m pleased with Trillian so far, and it means I never miss a message from either of my awesome bosses.





Tumblr [iTunes link]

I maintain a Tumblr blog as a single-purpose photolog which I then import as a widget to my Self Sufficiency blog. The Tumblr app is fast, easy, and works with minimal fuss. Simple, effective – I love it.



top free iphone apps


Those are my top 10, but how about you? Care to share a few absolute essentials that you use on a daily basis? Are you an obsessive app downloader but never actually use them? Let us know in the comments.
Don’t forget to check our full Best of iPhone Apps and Best of iPad Apps pages too for loads more hand picked app recommendations.

Source: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/top-10-iphone-apps/

November 26, 2013

Screenshot Tour: 10 New Features and Changes in Android 4.4 KitKat




Don’t let the version number trick you, Android 4.4 KitKat isn’t a minor release. This isn’t a small update like Android 4.3, but a big new release with lots of important features.
Google’s changed the way Android looks, created their own new launcher, made the dialer much smarter, further consolidated their messaging services, given the Email app loved, and added many new features for app developers to take advantage of.
The Google Experience Launcher may not technically be part of Android 4.4, but it debuted along with Android 4.4 on the Nexus 5. On Android 4.4, the Google Experience launcher has a partially transparent status bar and navigation bar on the home screen, showing off your wallpaper and hiding those black bars.

You can easily install the Google Experience Launcher on any Android device running Android 4.1 or later. Google is currently only officially offering the Google Experience Launcher on the Nexus 5, so you’ll have to activate it yourself on other devices — even other Nexus devices, like the Nexus 4 and Nexus 7.



Dialer Search

Android 4.4′s new dialer also allows you to search for businesses and dial their phone numbers — right from the dialer. For example, you can open the dialer, search for “pizza,” and quickly call a nearby pizza place.


Whenever you get a phone call, Android can now query Google’s servers to provide caller ID information for you. This feature is enabled by default, but you can disable it if you like. The dialer is now powered by Google search.



Blue is Out, Gray is In

The most immediately noticeable change is the shift from the Tron-like neon blue of Android’s Holo interface to a new, neutral gray color. The battery, Wi-Fi, and cellular icons on Android’s status bar, for example, are now gray. The options in the quick settings panel are also gray, as are the accents on the official Google Keyboard.


In theory, this will provide a more neutral canvas for app developers. For example, Netflix’s red app will look better with gray system icons than blue ones.



Hangouts SMS Integration

Google’s Hangouts app — the replacement for Google Talk –  now has integrated SMS support, eliminating the need for the separate Messaging app. This feature also isn’t exclusive to Android 4.4, but is also available on older versions of Android along with a recent update to Hangouts.



On Android 4.4, Hangouts registers itself as a “SMS provider.” Any other SMS app can also choose to register itself as an SMS provider, becoming the default messaging app. Any app can listen for incoming SMS messages, but only a single app — the user’s default SMS app — can send SMS messages.



Printing

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Android now includes a printing framework. It’s a built-in system feature that supports both Google Cloud Print and HP ePrint by default, but developers can add support for new types of printers using the API. This means you should be able to install support for other printers via an app from Google Play and they’ll integrate with Android’s printing system.
You’ll find a new Printing option on Android’s Settings screen and many built-in apps support printing. For example, you can tap the menu button in Chrome and tap the Print option in the menu to print a web page.


File Picker



KitKat includes a new way to browse for and pick files. This file picker supports both local, on-device storage and cloud storage services like Google Drive. However, any cloud storage service can integrate with it. Support for Box is already offered, while other cloud storage services like Dropbox or SkyDrive could implement a “document provider” and appear in this list. Whenever you use the file picker, you’ll be able to choose a file from any local source or cloud storage service.



Immersive Mode

Android now also offers an “immersive mode” feature that allows apps to hide the status bar at the top of the screen and the on-screen buttons at the bottom of the screen on Nexus devices. This means that apps like games, video players, and eBook readers could use the entire screen for content. This won’t happen automatically; it’s up to app developers to choose whether this is right for their app.


To go along with this, Android includes two new edge gestures. When immersive mode is enabled in an app, a swipe from the top or bottom edges will reveal the hidden status bar and navigation bar.



Email App Improvements

The included Email app has finally seen some love. The Mail app now looks almost like the Gmail app and shares many of the same navigation features and settings. It no longer feels like a forgotten relic.



Tap and Pay

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KitKat includes a “Tap & pay” option on the Settings screen. Thanks to “host card emulation,” any app on Android can now emulate an NFC smart card. In the near term, this means that any device with NFC should be able to use the Google Wallet app. In the long term, this means that there’s an integrated way for various apps — such as loyalty card apps and competing digital wallets — to work with NFC point-of-sale terminals.
Android now also allows apps to use “Reader Mode” and function as NFC readers.



Decreased Memory Usage

This isn’t a great feature for showing off in screenshots, but the most significant change in KitKat is the amount of optimization that’s gone on. Android KitKat can now work on devices with as little as 512MB of RAM. This means Android should perform much better on low-end devices and any manufacturers still using Android 2.3 Gingerbread on their cheapest devices should finally be able to upgrade. On higher-end devices where it already performs well, Android should perform even better.
There’s a new Process stats option on the hidden Developer Options screen that displays more information about each running process and its memory use. This should give developers more information they can use to optimize their apps’ memory use.




Google’s Android KitKit page for developers lists many more features. Many of them are intended for developers — that’s because developers will need to integrate these features into their apps for them to be actually useful for the rest of us.

Source: http://www.howtogeek.com/176312/screenshot-tour-10-new-features-and-changes-in-android-4.4-kitkat/

November 22, 2013

Leaked document shows when certain Samsung models will get the Android 4.4 update

Posted: , by Alan F.
Leaked document shows when certain Samsung models will get the Android 4.4 update
A leaked Samsung document allegedly shows off the expected time frame during which certain models will be receiving the Android 4.4 update. The devices in question are the international version of the Samsung Galaxy S4 (GT-I9500), Samsung Galaxy Note 3 (SM-N900), Samsung Galaxy S III (GT-I9300) and the Samsung GALAXY Note II (SM-N7100).

If the document is genuine, the Samsung Galaxy S4 and the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 will be updated to Android 4.4 in January 2014. The Galaxy S III and the GALAXY Note III will each be updated sometime in the March-April 2014 time frame. Carrier branded models will take longer since each operator will need to test the update for each device. Android 4.4 will make each model smoother and more responsive with Project Svelte, the successor to Jelly Bean's Project Butter.

As usual, with such a high-profile rumor, we suggest you cast a cynical eye on the story.

Leaked document shows alleged time frame when to expect Android 4.4 update for certain Samsung models
Leaked document shows alleged time frame when to expect Android 4.4 update for certain

Source: http://www.phonearena.com/news/Leaked-document-shows-when-certain-Samsung-models-will-get-the-Android-4.4-update_id49623

The Best Video Chat Application for Android




Video chat on smartphones has come a long way in a relatively short amount of time, and the tools available for Android have matured from gimmicky to genuinely useful. You have a lot of great options, but we think that Google Hangouts deserves the crown for the overall best and most well-integrated method to see and talk with friends.
It's been a while since we updated this post, and in the time since we last selected Skype as our favorite video chat application for Android, the arena has shifted entirely. Lots of people went from not using their phones for video chat or video calls at all to having a best-in-class tool built in that they use on the reg. Here's our new favorite pick, along with where the competition stands today.

 

Google Hangouts

Platform: Android (and others)
Price: Free
Download Page

Features

  • Places video calls to desktop and other mobile devices over 3G/4G and Wi-Fi
  • Supports group video calls with up to 10 other people
  • Synchronizes your Hangouts and their history across devices so you can see what you talked about in the past, and review shared photos, links, or other media
  • All video calls to other users are free (excluding data charges)
  • Supports front and rear-facing cameras
  • Supports calls to mobile and landline numbers via Google Voice (or right through Hangouts in iOS)
  • Supports bluetooth and wired headsets for audio
  • Supports chat, SMS, MMS, group SMS and MMS, video and picture sharing, animated GIFs, emoji, and more
  • Supports location sharing
  • Integrates with Google+


Where It Excels





Google Hangouts (formerly Google Talk on mobile devices, and just a web-based video chatting service inside of Google+) has exploded in the past few years it's been around to take the lead among free, web-based and mobile video chat services. It dominated our poll for best video chat service, and the fact that it's essentially rolled in to Android and easily available on iOS makes it easy to get, simple to set up (since all it requires is a Google account), and easy to start using. In many ways, in a few short years Google Hangouts has combined the best things about Google Talk with some of the best things about Google Voice into one application that—while it's not perfect—is hard not to love, or at least use frequently. 

It also doesn't hurt that Google Hangouts is completely free. Video hangouts, chats, picture and video sharing, all of it is completely free from the desktop or from your mobile devices, so you don't need to waste limited text or MMS messages from your carrier to communicate with your friends. Just drop your images or your messages into Hangouts, and your friends will get them instantly. They can even see when you're reading their messages, and you can see when they're typing. Still, all of that is great, but video chat is where Hangouts really takes the cake. In iOS and Android, Hangouts supports virtually every device and version, and you have the option of using your front or rear-facing camera in your video chat at any time. 

Since video chats can be held with up to 10 people, you can communicate with large groups and collaborate on files (although this is much better on the desktop), or you can just turn an impromptu conversation into one that's much more personal since you can see the other person's face. Plus, it works like a charm on 3G/4G or Wi-Fi, regardless of the device you're using.


Where It Falls Short

Hangouts is great, but it's not perfect. It's often prone to glitches and strange quirks that can make it work seamlessly one day and then just fail to stay connected or work properly the next. I've seen mobile users with gorgeous camera quality on week, then the next week their cameras look like someone shattered the lens—but if they flip to the rear camera, it looks fine. Plus, Hangouts is very much a work in progress for Google, so if you're looking for an app that won't change a ton between now and the next time you need to use it, Hangouts may not be your best choice. It won't change so much as to be unrecognizable, but Google's iteration process isn't exactly slow, and they've been updating Hangouts regularly with new features, tweaks, and changes designed to improve the product (but could also be a thorn in some users' sides). 
Similarly, if you're looking for a product with robust customer support and the option to get fast and attentive help when you do have a problem, Hangouts isn't that product. After all, most of Google's products are free, and Google Groups does have a wealth of experts and enthusiasts willing to help you out, but there's no one to call if you have an issue or question you desperately need answered.


The Competition


Skype (Free), our previous favorite, is still a more than strong contender. Its user-base is still massive, it's cross-platform and cross-device, and it offers a wealth of tools that let you talk to people face-to-face or via IM, all on your Android phone. It's free to talk to other Skype members, and to video chat with them, but once you start calling landlines and talking to people's phones, you're looking at a few bucks, although nothing serious. However, the days of Skype being pre-installed on most people's Android phones as a video chat option are over, as more people move to Hangouts instead. That doesn't mean Skype isn't worth looking into—it just means it's another great option to have around in case Hangouts doesn't work for you for some reason, or you're talking to someone on the desktop who prefers to use it (or you're calling a friend's TV or something).

Fring (Free) is still a strong alternative to the big names. It supports group video chat, it's cross-platform, it allows you to register with your mobile phone number instead of forcing you into another account you may or may not use, and it also supports free texting, picture and video messaging, and cheap calls to landline phones. It's not quite as feature-packed as the others, but it does focus on the core basics.

Tango (Free) has grown exponentially since we last talked about it. It supports video calls to other Tango users on Android, iOS, Windows Phone, and Windows desktops. Tango lets you place regular voice calls and switch to video calls when you want to share something, and supports text, picture, and video sharing—not to mention audio sharing via Spotify. Video call quality could be better and doesn't seem to have improved terribly much as cameras have improved, but it's definitely serviceable.

Oovoo (Free) offered great video quality in our tests, but you do have to be an Oovoo user to really make the most from the app. That could be a good thing, since a lot of people prefer Oovoo on the desktop (or at least, did a while ago), but the mobile experience is solid too, even with group chat running and a bunch of people talking at once. It doesn't hurt that their app is gorgeous too, with a beautiful design, a speed dial for video chatting your best friends, status messages so you can see if people are available before you ping them, support for picture and video messaging, and the ability to pull in contacts from Gmail, Facebook, and other services you probably already use.

Lifehacker's App Directory is a new and growing directory of recommendations for the best applications and tools in a number of given categories

Source: http://lifehacker.com/5849332/the-best-video-chat-application-for-android?utm_campaign=socialflow_lifehacker_twitter&utm_source=lifehacker_twitter&utm_medium=socialflow

How to change the settings on Samsung Galaxy S-Voice

Galaxy S 4: Change Settings on S-Voice

S-Voice is a voice app on your Galaxy S 4 that can help you dictate and perform other useful functions. As shown in this figure, you can change many settings on S-Voice. Here are a couple options explained.

image0.jpg
The first is to change the wake-up command. The default is “Hi, Galaxy.” Boring. You can change it to any phrase with four or more syllables.
You may as well have some fun with this. S-Voice is your servant. You can name it anything, such as the name of your former gym teacher, a cheating partner, or the love of your life who got away. You get to call it what you want and tell it what to do. There is no one judging you.

Follow the directions in Set Wake-Up Command. It takes you to a new screen and asks you to record your voice saying what you want as your new wake-up command.
Another option you have is on the primary S-Voice screen shown in the figure. Click the following icon (found at the bottom of the primary S-Voice screen) to turn off the female voice that talks back to you. If you do so, you only see typed responses to you questions and requests.

image1.jpg
Some people are annoyed at being talked to by a computer. If you are among that crowd, just let her know that you prefer silence by tapping that icon.

Source: http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/galaxy-s-4-change-settings-on-svoice.html?cid=dn_article

November 11, 2013

5 Great Android KitKat Features You Could Get Right Now



By Justin Denis. 11-09-2013, Android 4.4 KitKat is finally here! But as longtime Android users know all too well, its official rollout will be slow, gradual, and for many, non-existent. That’s why many people don’t wait around for official builds to pass through carriers and hardware manufacturers, instead opting to flash custom ROMs or download leaked APKs. Yes, it’s a tad impatient, but for us techie folk who like to live on the bleeding edge, it’s worth it.
Now, KitKat didn’t introduce that many ground-breaking features, and it didn’t reinvent the mobile landscape; it simply refined what has become a solid operating system. But that’s not to say that it doesn’t have some cool features.
Thankfully, a few of those cool features are available now, either through official APKs or third-party apps.

Google Experience Launcher

The new stock launcher in KitKat is all about Google. Scroll all the way to the left, and you’re making a Google search. Tap on the persistent search bar at the top, and you’re making a Google search. Say, “OK Google” at any time, and you’re making a Google search. I think you get the idea.
But this newfangled launcher is actually a pretty sweet improvement over the stock Jelly Bean launcher. To get it requires installing three different APKs because for the launcher to work, it also needs Google Now to be updated and Play Services.


Launcher-1


You can view some detailed instructions and get help over on the XDA-Developers forum for the topic, but the basic premise is simple: Download this ZIP file (mirror), unzip it, place the three APK files on your phone, and install them. When you press the home button, it should prompt you to select “Launcher” as your default launcher.

Hangouts 2.0

One day, Hangouts will be the amazing, all-encompassing communication app that the world needs, but that day is not today. However, that day is a little bit closer as Hangouts jumps from version 1.2 to 2.0 with the KitKat update, allowing for the app to handle SMS, MMS, animated gifs, and improved Emoji support.
Unfortunately, Android users don’t get the calling features and Google Voice integration that iOS users received recently (Why, Google? Why?), but they have promised to bring those features “soon.” Oh well. In the meantime, you can enjoy using Hangouts as your default SMS app, and don’t forget to snag some awesome animated GIFs to make use of the new feature.


Hangouts-1


To get started, download Hangouts 2.0 from one of the mirrors below, transfer the file to your Android device, and install like normal. If you have any major issues, you can always uninstall it and reinstall version 1.2 from the Play Store.
(Big thanks to Android Police and I.m.prowse for the mirrors.)

Screen Recording

KitKat supports native screen recording! Hooray for all those tutorial makers! But we’ve actually been able to do that for a while as long as you have root access. If you’re new to rooting, be sure to check out our extensive Android rooting guide.
There’s a number of apps that will let you do this, a quick search of the Play Store will show you that, but my favorite is SCR Screen Recorder. It’s simple to use: you just install it, tap record, grant it root permission, and you’re on your way. It also has a settings menu so you can adjust things to your liking if need be.


SRC-Recorder-1


There is a free version as well as a $5.21 paid version that removes the watermark, notification icon, and allows you to record for longer than 3 minutes.

Caller ID

The new caller ID in the KitKat dialer looks awesome. It searches through Google’s databases for people or businesses registered to that number and shows you their name and photo even if they’re not in your contacts. Unfortunately, there hasn’t been a lot of luck getting the dialer to function properly on non-KitKat devices, so you’re stuck with third-party options.


Thread-Caller-ID-1


There are some great choices out there, though! We’ve gone through four great caller ID apps that should tie you over until you can break yourself off a piece of that KitKat. Above are some screenshots from Thread, the best of the Caller ID apps that displays relevant information from whoever’s calling, including their picture, previous text messages, and social media updates.

Gallery

Keeping up with Google’s continued efforts to improve Android’s photo capabilities, the new default Gallery has a quality photo editor built-in. Aside from that, it looks largely the same.
The editor has a few preset filters, preset border options, the ability to manually tweak many aspects of the filters, and options for cropping, rotating, mirroring, and straightening your photos.


Gallery-Editor


There’s even a slide-out menu to the right that displays your edit history, allowing you to revert back to any point at any time. Plus, the photo editor is nondestructive, so any changes that are made are saved as a new photo, ensuring that your original photo is preserved.
You can download the Gallery apk from this XDA thread. To install it, though, you’ll have to use a file browser with root permission to place it under System > Apps and then restart your phone.

Other

KitKat comes with a lot of new features, but most of them are pretty minor. Some of the smaller updates include the stock apps like Email, Clock, Camera, and several new fonts, wallpapers, sounds, and boot animations. All of these can (hopefully) work on your Jelly Bean device thanks to the amazing folks over at Android Police and XDA-Developers. Follow the links for installing/flashing instructions.

Conclusion

This is part of what makes the Android community so great. A new version comes out and suddenly everyone’s up in a flurry grabbing APKs, explaining how to get certain features now, modding, rooting, and flashing everything they can get their hands on. It’s fun, and it also makes for a great smartphone.
What’s your favorite new feature in 4.4 KitKat? Will you be flashing a new 4.4 ROM when it makes it to your device? Let us know in the comments.

Source: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/dont-wait-5-great-android-kitkat-features-you-could-get-right-now/?utm_campaign=newsletter&utm_source=2012-11-11

November 3, 2013

LG G Pad 8.3" Tablet Unboxing

Aaron unboxes the LG G Pad 8.3, LG's newest tablet - and a device that closely resembles the design language of the LG G2 smartphone.  G Pad 8.3 packs a 1.7 GHz quad-core Snapdragon 600 CPU, 8.3-inch display with 1200x1920 pixels (273ppi), 2 GB of RAM, 16 GB of internal storage, 5-megapixel camera, 4,600 mAh battery, and Android 4.2 Jelly Bean with LG's UI.  The G Pad 8.3 brings a compact tablet to LG's lineup, and from the internals to the software experience, there's a lot to like.  With the Android tablet space growing, is it worth picking LG's newest over competing devices from ASUS, Samsung, and Sony?



November 1, 2013

Google Throws Open Doors to Its Top-Secret Data Center



A central cooling plant in Google’s Douglas County, Georgia, data center.
Photo: Google/Connie Zhou
If you’re looking for the beating heart of the digital age — a physical location where the scope, grandeur, and geekiness of the kingdom of bits become manifest—you could do a lot worse than Lenoir, North Carolina. This rural city of 18,000 was once rife with furniture factories. Now it’s the home of a Google data center.
Engineering prowess famously catapulted the 14-year-old search giant into its place as one of the world’s most successful, influential, and frighteningly powerful companies. Its constantly refined search algorithm changed the way we all access and even think about information. Its equally complex ad-auction platform is a perpetual money-minting machine. But other, less well-known engineering and strategic breakthroughs are arguably just as crucial to Google’s success: its ability to build, organize, and operate a huge network of servers and fiber-optic cables with an efficiency and speed that rocks physics on its heels. Google has spread its infrastructure across a global archipelago of massive buildings—a dozen or so information palaces in locales as diverse as Council Bluffs, Iowa; St. Ghislain, Belgium; and soon Hong Kong and Singapore—where an unspecified but huge number of machines process and deliver the continuing chronicle of human experience.

This is what makes Google Google: its physical network, its thousands of fiber miles, and those many thousands of servers that, in aggregate, add up to the mother of all clouds. This multibillion-dollar infrastructure allows the company to index 20 billion web pages a day. To handle more than 3 billion daily search queries. To conduct millions of ad auctions in real time. To offer free email storage to 425 million Gmail users. To zip millions of YouTube videos to users every day. To deliver search results before the user has finished typing the query. In the near future, when Google releases the wearable computing platform called Glass, this infrastructure will power its visual search results.

The problem for would-be bards attempting to sing of these data centers has been that, because Google sees its network as the ultimate competitive advantage, only critical employees have been permitted even a peek inside, a prohibition that has most certainly included bards. Until now.



A server room in Council Bluffs, Iowa.
Photo: Google/Connie Zhou

Here I am, in a huge white building in Lenoir, standing near a reinforced door with a party of Googlers, ready to become that rarest of species: an outsider who has been inside one of the company’s data centers and seen the legendary server floor, referred to simply as “the floor.” My visit is the latest evidence that Google is relaxing its black-box policy. My hosts include Joe Kava, who’s in charge of building and maintaining Google’s data centers, and his colleague Vitaly Gudanets, who populates the facilities with computers and makes sure they run smoothly.
A sign outside the floor dictates that no one can enter without hearing protection, either salmon-colored earplugs that dispensers spit out like trail mix or panda-bear earmuffs like the ones worn by airline ground crews. (The noise is a high-pitched thrum from fans that control airflow.) We grab the plugs. Kava holds his hand up to a security scanner and opens the heavy door. Then we slip into a thunderdome of data …

Urs Hölzle had never stepped into a data center before he was hired by Sergey Brin and Larry Page. A hirsute, soft-spoken Swiss, Hölzle was on leave as a computer science professor at UC Santa Barbara in February 1999 when his new employers took him to the Exodus server facility in Santa Clara. Exodus was a colocation site, or colo, where multiple companies rent floor space. Google’s “cage” sat next to servers from eBay and other blue-chip Internet companies. But the search company’s array was the most densely packed and chaotic. Brin and Page were looking to upgrade the system, which often took a full 3.5 seconds to deliver search results and tended to crash on Mondays. They brought Hölzle on to help drive the effort.

It wouldn’t be easy. Exodus was “a huge mess,” Hölzle later recalled. And the cramped hodgepodge would soon be strained even more. Google was not only processing millions of queries every week but also stepping up the frequency with which it indexed the web, gathering every bit of online information and putting it into a searchable format. AdWords—the service that invited advertisers to bid for placement alongside search results relevant to their wares—involved computation-heavy processes that were just as demanding as search. Page had also become obsessed with speed, with delivering search results so quickly that it gave the illusion of mind reading, a trick that required even more servers and connections. And the faster Google delivered results, the more popular it became, creating an even greater burden. Meanwhile, the company was adding other applications, including a mail service that would require instant access to many petabytes of storage. Worse yet, the tech downturn that left many data centers underpopulated in the late ’90s was ending, and Google’s future leasing deals would become much more costly.

For Google to succeed, it would have to build and operate its own data centers—and figure out how to do it more cheaply and efficiently than anyone had before. The mission was codenamed Willpower. Its first built-from-scratch data center was in The Dalles, a city in Oregon near the Columbia River.
Hölzle and his team designed the $600 million facility in light of a radical insight: Server rooms did not have to be kept so cold. The machines throw off prodigious amounts of heat. Traditionally, data centers cool them off with giant computer room air conditioners, or CRACs, typically jammed under raised floors and cranked up to arctic levels. That requires massive amounts of energy; data centers consume up to 1.5 percent of all the electricity in the world.

Data centers consume up to 1.5 percent of all the world’s electricity.
Google realized that the so-called cold aisle in front of the machines could be kept at a relatively balmy 80 degrees or so—workers could wear shorts and T-shirts instead of the standard sweaters. And the “hot aisle,” a tightly enclosed space where the heat pours from the rear of the servers, could be allowed to hit around 120 degrees. That heat could be absorbed by coils filled with water, which would then be pumped out of the building and cooled before being circulated back inside. Add that to the long list of Google’s accomplishments: The company broke its CRAC habit.

Google also figured out money-saving ways to cool that water. Many data centers relied on energy-gobbling chillers, but Google’s big data centers usually employ giant towers where the hot water trickles down through the equivalent of vast radiators, some of it evaporating and the remainder attaining room temperature or lower by the time it reaches the bottom. In its Belgium facility, Google uses recycled industrial canal water for the cooling; in Finland it uses seawater.

The company’s analysis of electrical flow unearthed another source of waste: the bulky uninterrupted-power-supply systems that protected servers from power disruptions in most data centers. Not only did they leak electricity, they also required their own cooling systems. But because Google designed the racks on which it placed its machines, it could make space for backup batteries next to each server, doing away with the big UPS units altogether. According to Joe Kava, that scheme reduced electricity loss by about 15 percent.

All of these innovations helped Google achieve unprecedented energy savings. The standard measurement of data center efficiency is called power usage effectiveness, or PUE. A perfect number is 1.0, meaning all the power drawn by the facility is put to use. Experts considered 2.0—indicating half the power is wasted—to be a reasonable number for a data center. Google was getting an unprecedented 1.2.
For years Google didn’t share what it was up to. “Our core advantage really was a massive computer network, more massive than probably anyone else’s in the world,” says Jim Reese, who helped set up the company’s servers. “We realized that it might not be in our best interest to let our competitors know.”

But stealth had its drawbacks. Google was on record as being an exemplar of green practices. In 2007 the company committed formally to carbon neutrality, meaning that every molecule of carbon produced by its activities—from operating its cooling units to running its diesel generators—had to be canceled by offsets. Maintaining secrecy about energy savings undercut that ideal: If competitors knew how much energy Google was saving, they’d try to match those results, and that could make a real environmental impact. Also, the stonewalling, particularly regarding The Dalles facility, was becoming almost comical. Google’s ownership had become a matter of public record, but the company still refused to acknowledge it.

In 2009, at an event dubbed the Efficient Data Center Summit, Google announced its latest PUE results and hinted at some of its techniques. It marked a turning point for the industry, and now companies like Facebook and Yahoo report similar PUEs.

Make no mistake, though: The green that motivates Google involves presidential portraiture. “Of course we love to save energy,” Hölzle says. “But take something like Gmail. We would lose a fair amount of money on Gmail if we did our data centers and servers the conventional way. Because of our efficiency, we can make the cost small enough that we can give it away for free.”

Google’s breakthroughs extend well beyond energy. Indeed, while Google is still thought of as an Internet company, it has also grown into one of the world’s largest hardware manufacturers, thanks to the fact that it builds much of its own equipment. In 1999, Hölzle bought parts for 2,000 stripped-down “breadboards” from “three guys who had an electronics shop.” By going homebrew and eliminating unneeded components, Google built a batch of servers for about $1,500 apiece, instead of the then-standard $5,000. Hölzle, Page, and a third engineer designed the rigs themselves. “It wasn’t really ‘designed,’” Hölzle says, gesturing with air quotes.

More than a dozen generations of Google servers later, the company now takes a much more sophisticated approach. Google knows exactly what it needs inside its rigorously controlled data centers—speed, power, and good connections—and saves money by not buying unnecessary extras. (No graphics cards, for instance, since these machines never power a screen. And no enclosures, because the motherboards go straight into the racks.) The same principle applies to its networking equipment, some of which Google began building a few years ago.



Outside the Council Bluffs data center, radiator-like cooling towers chill water from the server floor down to room temperature.
Photo: Google/Connie Zhou

So far, though, there’s one area where Google hasn’t ventured: designing its own chips. But the company’s VP of platforms, Bart Sano, implies that even that could change. “I’d never say never,” he says. “In fact, I get that question every year. From Larry.”

Even if you reimagine the data center, the advantage won’t mean much if you can’t get all those bits out to customers speedily and reliably. And so Google has launched an attempt to wrap the world in fiber. In the early 2000s, taking advantage of the failure of some telecom operations, it began buying up abandoned fiber-optic networks, paying pennies on the dollar. Now, through acquisition, swaps, and actually laying down thousands of strands, the company has built a mighty empire of glass.

But when you’ve got a property like YouTube, you’ve got to do even more. It would be slow and burdensome to have millions of people grabbing videos from Google’s few data centers. So Google installs its own server racks in various outposts of its network—mini data centers, sometimes connected directly to ISPs like Comcast or AT&T—and stuffs them with popular videos. That means that if you stream, say, a Carly Rae Jepsen video, you probably aren’t getting it from Lenoir or The Dalles but from some colo just a few miles from where you are.

Over the years, Google has also built a software system that allows it to manage its countless servers as if they were one giant entity. Its in-house developers can act like puppet masters, dispatching thousands of computers to perform tasks as easily as running a single machine. In 2002 its scientists created Google File System, which smoothly distributes files across many machines. MapReduce, a Google system for writing cloud-based applications, was so successful that an open source version called Hadoop has become an industry standard. Google also created software to tackle a knotty issue facing all huge data operations: When tasks come pouring into the center, how do you determine instantly and most efficiently which machines can best afford to take on the work? Google has solved this “load-balancing” issue with an automated system called Borg.

These innovations allow Google to fulfill an idea embodied in a 2009 paper written by Hölzle and one of his top lieutenants, computer scientist Luiz Barroso: “The computing platform of interest no longer resembles a pizza box or a refrigerator but a warehouse full of computers … We must treat the data center itself as one massive warehouse-scale computer.”

This is tremendously empowering for the people who write Google code. Just as your computer is a single device that runs different programs simultaneously—and you don’t have to worry about which part is running which application—Google engineers can treat seas of servers like a single unit. They just write their production code, and the system distributes it across a server floor they will likely never be authorized to visit. “If you’re an average engineer here, you can be completely oblivious,” Hölzle says. “You can order x petabytes of storage or whatever, and you have no idea what actually happens.”

But of course, none of this infrastructure is any good if it isn’t reliable. Google has innovated its own answer for that problem as well—one that involves a surprising ingredient for a company built on algorithms and automation: people.

At 3 am on a chilly winter morning, a small cadre of engineers begin to attack Google. First they take down the internal corporate network that serves the company’s Mountain View, California, campus. Later the team attempts to disrupt various Google data centers by causing leaks in the water pipes and staging protests outside the gates—in hopes of distracting attention from intruders who try to steal data-packed disks from the servers. They mess with various services, including the company’s ad network. They take a data center in the Netherlands offline. Then comes the coup de grâce—cutting most of Google’s fiber connection to Asia.

Turns out this is an inside job. The attackers, working from a conference room on the fringes of the campus, are actually Googlers, part of the company’s Site Reliability Engineering team, the people with ultimate responsibility for keeping Google and its services running. SREs are not merely troubleshooters but engineers who are also in charge of getting production code onto the “bare metal” of the servers; many are embedded in product groups for services like Gmail or search. Upon becoming an SRE, members of this geek SEAL team are presented with leather jackets bearing a military-style insignia patch. Every year, the SREs run this simulated war—called DiRT (disaster recovery testing)—on Google’s infrastructure. The attack may be fake, but it’s almost indistinguishable from reality: Incident managers must go through response procedures as if they were really happening. In some cases, actual functioning services are messed with. If the teams in charge can’t figure out fixes and patches to keep things running, the attacks must be aborted so real users won’t be affected. In classic Google fashion, the DiRT team always adds a goofy element to its dead-serious test—a loony narrative written by a member of the attack team. This year it involves a Twin Peaks-style supernatural phenomenon that supposedly caused the disturbances. Previous DiRTs were attributed to zombies or aliens.



Some halls in Google’s Hamina, Finland, data center remain vacant—for now.
Photo: Google/Connie Zhou

As the first attack begins, Kripa Krishnan, an upbeat engineer who heads the annual exercise, explains the rules to about 20 SREs in a conference room already littered with junk food. “Do not attempt to fix anything,” she says. “As far as the people on the job are concerned, we do not exist. If we’re really lucky, we won’t break anything.” Then she pulls the plug—for real—on the campus network. The team monitors the phone lines and IRC channels to see when the Google incident managers on call around the world notice that something is wrong. It takes only five minutes for someone in Europe to discover the problem, and he immediately begins contacting others.

“My role is to come up with big tests that really expose weaknesses,” Krishnan says. “Over the years, we’ve also become braver in how much we’re willing to disrupt in order to make sure everything works.” How did Google do this time? Pretty well. Despite the outages in the corporate network, executive chair Eric Schmidt was able to run a scheduled global all-hands meeting. The imaginary demonstrators were placated by imaginary pizza. Even shutting down three-fourths of Google’s Asia traffic capacity didn’t shut out the continent, thanks to extensive caching. “This is the best DiRT ever!” Krishnan exclaimed at one point.
The SRE program began when Hölzle charged an engineer named Ben Treynor with making Google’s network fail-safe. This was especially tricky for a massive company like Google that is constantly tweaking its systems and services—after all, the easiest way to stabilize it would be to freeze all change. Treynor ended up rethinking the very concept of reliability. Instead of trying to build a system that never failed, he gave each service a budget—an amount of downtime it was permitted to have. Then he made sure that Google’s engineers used that time productively. “Let’s say we wanted Google+ to run 99.95 percent of the time,” Hölzle says. “We want to make sure we don’t get that downtime for stupid reasons, like we weren’t paying attention. We want that downtime because we push something new.”

Nevertheless, accidents do happen—as Sabrina Farmer learned on the morning of April 17, 2012. Farmer, who had been the lead SRE on the Gmail team for a little over a year, was attending a routine design review session. Suddenly an engineer burst into the room, blurting out, “Something big is happening!” Indeed: For 1.4 percent of users (a large number of people), Gmail was down. Soon reports of the outage were all over Twitter and tech sites. They were even bleeding into mainstream news.

The conference room transformed into a war room. Collaborating with a peer group in Zurich, Farmer launched a forensic investigation. A breakthrough came when one of her Gmail SREs sheepishly admitted, “I pushed a change on Friday that might have affected this.” Those responsible for vetting the change hadn’t been meticulous, and when some Gmail users tried to access their mail, various replicas of their data across the system were no longer in sync. To keep the data safe, the system froze them out.

The diagnosis had taken 20 minutes, designing the fix 25 minutes more—pretty good. But the event went down as a Google blunder. “It’s pretty painful when SREs trigger a response,” Farmer says. “But I’m happy no one lost data.” Nonetheless, she’ll be happier if her future crises are limited to DiRT-borne zombie attacks.

One scenario that dirt never envisioned was the presence of a reporter on a server floor. But here I am in Lenoir, earplugs in place, with Joe Kava motioning me inside.

We have passed through the heavy gate outside the facility, with remote-control barriers evoking the Korean DMZ. We have walked through the business offices, decked out in Nascar regalia. (Every Google data center has a decorative theme.) We have toured the control room, where LCD dashboards monitor every conceivable metric. Later we will climb up to catwalks to examine the giant cooling towers and backup electric generators, which look like Beatle-esque submarines, only green. We will don hard hats and tour the construction site of a second data center just up the hill. And we will stare at a rugged chunk of land that one day will hold a third mammoth computational facility.

But now we enter the floor. Big doesn’t begin to describe it. Row after row of server racks seem to stretch to eternity. Joe Montana in his prime could not throw a football the length of it.

During my interviews with Googlers, the idea of hot aisles and cold aisles has been an abstraction, but on the floor everything becomes clear. The cold aisle refers to the general room temperature—which Kava confirms is 77 degrees. The hot aisle is the narrow space between the backsides of two rows of servers, tightly enclosed by sheet metal on the ends. A nest of copper coils absorbs the heat. Above are huge fans, which sound like jet engines jacked through Marshall amps.

The huge fans sound like jet engines jacked through Marshall amps.
We walk between the server rows. All the cables and plugs are in front, so no one has to crack open the sheet metal and venture into the hot aisle, thereby becoming barbecue meat. (When someone does have to head back there, the servers are shut down.) Every server has a sticker with a code that identifies its exact address, useful if something goes wrong. The servers have thick black batteries alongside. Everything is uniform and in place—nothing like the spaghetti tangles of Google’s long-ago Exodus era.

Blue lights twinkle, indicating … what? A web search? Someone’s Gmail message? A Glass calendar event floating in front of Sergey’s eyeball? It could be anything.
Every so often a worker appears—a long-haired dude in shorts propelling himself by scooter, or a woman in a T-shirt who’s pushing a cart with a laptop on top and dispensing repair parts to servers like a psychiatric nurse handing out meds. (In fact, the area on the floor that holds the replacement gear is called the pharmacy.)
How many servers does Google employ? It’s a question that has dogged observers since the company built its first data center. It has long stuck to “hundreds of thousands.” (There are 49,923 operating in the Lenoir facility on the day of my visit.) I will later come across a clue when I get a peek inside Google’s data center R&D facility in Mountain View. In a secure area, there’s a row of motherboards fixed to the wall, an honor roll of generations of Google’s homebrewed servers. One sits atop a tiny embossed plaque that reads july 9, 2008. google’s millionth server. But executives explain that this is a cumulative number, not necessarily an indication that Google has a million servers in operation at once.

Wandering the cold aisles of Lenoir, I realize that the magic number, if it is even obtainable, is basically meaningless. Today’s machines, with multicore processors and other advances, have many times the power and utility of earlier versions. A single Google server circa 2012 may be the equivalent of 20 servers from a previous generation. In any case, Google thinks in terms of clusters—huge numbers of machines that act together to provide a service or run an application. “An individual server means nothing,” Hölzle says. “We track computer power as an abstract metric.” It’s the realization of a concept Hölzle and Barroso spelled out three years ago: the data center as a computer.

As we leave the floor, I feel almost levitated by my peek inside Google’s inner sanctum. But a few weeks later, back at the Googleplex in Mountain View, I realize that my epiphanies have limited shelf life. Google’s intention is to render the data center I visited obsolete. “Once our people get used to our 2013 buildings and clusters,” Hölzle says, “they’re going to complain about the current ones.”
Asked in what areas one might expect change, Hölzle mentions data center and cluster design, speed of deployment, and flexibility. Then he stops short. “This is one thing I can’t talk about,” he says, a smile cracking his bearded visage, “because we’ve spent our own blood, sweat, and tears. I want others to spend their own blood, sweat, and tears making the same discoveries.” Google may be dedicated to providing access to all the world’s data, but some information it’s still keeping to itself.
Senior writer Steven Levy (steven_levy@wired.com) interviewed Mary Meeker in issue 20.10.

Source: http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/10/ff-inside-google-data-center/all/


More info and photos here:
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/138053-a-tour-of-googles-top-secret-data-centers

October 30, 2013

Report: NSA broke into Yahoo, Google data centers


WASHINGTON (AP) - The National Security Agency has secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world, the Washington Post reported, citing documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Left: This undated photo provided by Google shows a Google data center in Hamina, Finland. The Washington Post is reporting Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2013, that the National Security Agency has secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world. The Post cites documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and interviews with officials. (AP Photo/Google)



According to a secret accounting dated Jan. 9, 2013, NSA sends millions of records every day from Yahoo and Google internal networks to data warehouses at the agency's Fort Meade, Md., headquarters. In the last 30 days, field collectors had processed and sent back more than 180 million new records - ranging from "metadata," which would indicate who sent or received emails and when, to content such as text, audio and video, the Post reported Wednesday on its website.

The new details about the NSA's access to Yahoo and Google data centers around the world come at a time when Congress is reconsidering the government's collection practices and authority, and as European governments are responding angrily to revelations that the NSA collected data on millions of communications in their countries. Details about the government's programs have been trickling out since Snowden shared documents with the Post and Guardian newspaper in June.

The NSA's principal tool to exploit the Google and Yahoo data links is a project called MUSCULAR, operated jointly with the agency's British counterpart, GCHQ. The Post said NSA and GCHQ are copying entire data flows across fiber-optic cables that carry information between the data centers of the Silicon Valley giants.

White House officials and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the NSA, declined to comment, the Post said.
At Yahoo, a spokeswoman told the Post: "We have strict controls in place to protect the security of our data centers, and we have not given access to our data centers to the NSA or to any other government agency."

In a statement to the Post, Google said it was "troubled by allegations of the government intercepting traffic between our data centers, and we are not aware of this activity." Getting free access to Google's data center traffic means the NSA has bypassed Google's "gold standard" security, the Post said.

The MUSCULAR project documents state that this collection from Yahoo and Google has led to key intelligence leads, the paper said.

Source: http://apnews.myway.com//article/20131030/DA9OKF003.html