Radio
βA fool with a tool is still a foolβ
— Grady Booch
If you have experienced problems with Google Home playing content from Spotify, you may find this article very useful.
The problem may manifest itself like your Google Home device not playing anything when you ask it to play music from Spotify, or even worse start and stop playing without any explainable reason. Maybe it is not even a problem and you just need to change its account linked to your Google Home. It may look impossible to find all the options and therefore we wrote you a guide to help.
In most normal cases for adding or removing Spotify as a music service on your Google Home ap you would do the following:
2. Open the Settings menu.
3. Open the Music menu.
Now you have a list of music services in your Google Home.
It is now clearly visible that there is no Spotify service available
This can happen because you live in or travel to countries where Spotify is not available. For example, a lucky relative that lives in a civilized country ( π ) shares a family account with you. Of course, you would want to enjoy Spotify no matter what, therefore we go to the other steps needed to achieve that goal.
Google assistant account on a computer. You do this by logging on to any Google service like Gmail or whatever and then in the same browser window just paste this URL: https://assistant.google.com/explore. Or just open URL and login, whatever works. It should look like this:
Then you enter Spotify in a search, and you will get its options. It should look something like the picture below.
Click on its icon and there it is. Option to unlink an account.
So, this part is for you if you want to change/unlink the Spotify account to your Google Home. Another part involves enabling it to actually work like it should on your Google Home device. So when you finished all the steps above, here is another round.
Do this by going to https://www.spotify.com/us/account/apps/
Then again open your Google Home app on your phone and chose no default provider under music settings if it is not already selected.
The next step is to reboot your phone. Most importantly, do not skip it, because the next step is not gonna work. If you do not have any VPN service installed, get one before the reboot. After the reboot, use a VPN service to connect to one of the countries where Spotify is available. I used FreeVPN and connected to the USA. If you for some reason want to VPN to country other than the USA, you need to check two things:
The country of your choosing has to bee on both lists.
After connecting to VPN service open Google Home again, and go again to the settings, music. As a result, you get an option to select it or Pandora, or Deezer as a default music provider. It will ask for credentials for your account and permission to link it.
Besides the fact that the beer is in order, the final step is to reboot your Google Home device. Just unplug it from the power and wait a few seconds before plugging it again. That should do the job, and as a result, your Google Home will now play music from the desired music provider without problems or interruptions. And in the end, thank dr Kosh for great contribution to solving this problem.
Thank you for reading,
Posted in *.*
It is a service in which hosting provider offers IT infrastructure and on top of its web services for rent.
Usually, it is some sort of web server that provides services needed so that web documents can be accessed, viewed and in some cases edited by web browsers. Simplified, when you enter the web address in your browser or click a search result in your favorite search engine, it is a link to the website. Service called DNS than translates that name to IP address and that is how your device (computer, smartphone or any other web-capable machine) knows where to go. What waits at the end is a web server.
It cost anywhere from 0 to hundreds of $, or even more, depending on what kind of service do you want. Don’t get scared, if you need just a regular website for a project, small company or personal blog it is just a few bucks per month. There are even “free” options, but you will get commercials on it since there is no such a thing as a free lunch.
This is very important,
so pay close attention to the following. There are many traps that hosting providers use to catch new customers. When you purchase web hosting and build your site or even worse, sites, it can be a real pain in the ass to change hosting provider. They all make it sound so easy, and even offer so-called “migrating” tools designed for migrations from other providers to your new shiny and best, most reliable and cheapest provider.
They made it sound so great – Unlimited. No limitations for traffic, databases, websites, domains……… no boundaries at all. When you think of it that way, you could host service like Facebook on that kind of hosting, right? Wrong. The thing is that they moved limitations from the main description of service to the “terms of use”. There you will find some shady info about what “unlimited” really means. Here is the example fro iPage hosting.
Let`s dig a little deeper, and see what do they mean by unlimited.
Of course, more details are on next link.
So, the real question is why do they sell it as unlimited if in fact there are so many limitations. It`s simple, it is a marketing trick. It`s stated that files must be used for websites and not for storage. So if we install an app like Own Cloud on our hosting and use it for uploading our pictures and videos on our hosting, those files are part of a website, yes? Correct, but the hosting provider will not allow you to do that. Yes you have an unlimited hosting plan, and all your files are part of a website, but if you go to tens of Gigabytes, you will be asked to reduce the number of files. If you do not comply very fast, they will shut you down. That is the fact. As I mentioned before, it is a marketing trick. It doesn`t mean that it is a bad product that should be avoided. On the contrary, few regular websites or blogs will fit and work like a charm. You just need to know what to expect.
Many hosting providers are “fishing” their customers by price. It is often to see that you could get the great hosting plan for few bucks.Or even for a 1 $ price. Comparing to other products on the market it is much better and cheaper. You are so happy that you found that deal and you take it. You build your websites, set up your email accounts, and everything is just perfect. Then comes time to renew. Price now is doubled or even tripled. You start looking around and found plenty of cheaper products. But you already did set up everything and don’t know how to migrate everything to another provider. So you decide to pay your old hosting only this time.It will get you enough time to plan and migrate everything. Another year passes. Again it is a time to renew. Now price went even more up. You pay again swearing to yourself that this is the last time. Been there, know how it feels.
Here is an example. At least they stated that on renewal it will be a different price. Sometimes it is not stated at all, and you do not know until renewal time when you get the invoice.
Look at this next example. You can figure out that something fishy here only by this little * after the price. On next page if you have a magnifying glass you can find this:
So you can start with 6 $ per month but you will end up with around 15 $. Great service!
There are also coupons for many providers, and usually, they are baits on providers hook. They just wait for you to take them. Again if you plan to keep the product that you purchase for more than a year, renewal is gonna get you. Usually, coupons work only for a new product and they are worthless at the renewal time, so keep that in mind. They are great for short-term projects that last less than a year.
There are also some honest hosting providers that do the marketing the old way. For example, after more than ten years of struggle with different companies, I found one that sad that they will do their best to keep the same price of the product for as long as I use it. It is the fourth year now, and price did not go up. If you compare the price with others, it was not the cheapest, but when you take out that marketing tricks and calculate what you actually pay in let’s say three years period, it would be among the cheapest. I still pay the same price like I paid for the first time. I did not write this article to be an advertising for anyone, so I will not mention any names ar the addresses, but the Internet is huge, and it is a wise thing to do some research before purchasing a service.
You may also found interesting the article about Cloud computing.
Thank you for reading,
or domain name system. I`m quite sure that you would be delighted to type something like 216.58.201.78 in your browser’s address bar to open google.com. Well, without DNS you would need to. DNS is a service that translates names to IP addresses and vice versa. So, in fact, when you type a website address (for example tehcestigate.com) in your browser and hit Enter, your computer goes to another computer on the Internet, called DNS server and asks a question like: do you know what is the IP address of the techestigate.com? DNS server then searches its internal record list and if it finds the record it answers. If the record is not found internally the same question will be passed to another DNS server on a higher level. Having an answer DNS server passes it to your computer. The answer can be either the IP address of the domain or statement that the domain does not exist. In the first case, your browser will try to open the website, and in a second you will get a message like “This site canβt be reached” from your browser. This is a simplified explanation of DNS. Now to the subject of this article, ME TLD or Top Level Domain.
.me is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Montenegro.
Money always finds the way. The .me domain is definitely being advertised as a personalized domain. Montenegro may be selling its digital heritage but in its own unique way, this actually turned into the win-win situation for everyone. New, short and fun domain extension is out there, registrars are making money. Montenegro is making money. Just keep in mind that this is not the only case of using the language coincidence to monetize domain extensions. The Pacific Ocen island of Tuvalu is another example. Their .tv extension is advertised as domain names for broadcast media. There is also the island kingdom of Tonga with a .to extension used like where.to or go.to.
At the end as Shaldon would say: “Fun with flags.”
Here is the list of the most stupid domains ever:
I hope that this article was interesting and that it provided some fun and useful information. At least next time when you see some of the mentioned domains, you will know what they really stand for and even how do the flags of the originating countries look like.
Thank you for reading.
Posted in *.*, Internet, Tech Tavern Tagged with: .ME, MONTENEGRO DOMAIN EXTENSION, TLD, TOP LEVEL DOMAIN
It’s been more than a decade that “cloud computing” as a modern term is around us. I think that the technology was available and in use for much more time. The example is the good old web hosting. You were able to purchase a domain name and hosting by nothing but a few clicks and a credit card long before anyone even mentioned Cloud computing?! When the industry needed a new racing horse, entrepreneurial marketing gurus and CEO`s seized the opportunity. They made a sounding name and started selling it as a separate and unique technology.
I would make a bold statement and say that cloud computing has its roots in engineers laziness. I mean we do not like repetitive tasks, don’t we? So we started working on automatization in a way that it would do those tasks for us. When enough automation happened, there was a possibility to pack it and sell it as a product or set of products, labeled as Cloud – something.
There goes another bold one. Virtualization was and still is foundation pillar of cloud computing. It made enough difference and free time so smart people were able to do more creative things than just the usual work.
If we talk about the date of origin of the cloud computing as a term in modern days it would be August 9, 2006, when Google CEO Eric Schmidt introduced the term to an industry conference.
It would be using ICT resources from within the organization, or from somebody else’s platform, (typically Storage, Memory, CPU, Networking, OS, and Applications) with a few practical advances. Those advances are: Easiness of use, Self-service, Scalability, Anytime anywhere access, and Pay per use. Cloud services could be divided by type into Public, Private or Hybrid. Next type of classification is by form. There is Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, and Software as a Service or IaaS, PaaS, and Saas. I will not write about those into much details, there are plenty of articles around, so if interested, just Bing it or Google it or research however you prefer. Just a few definitions in the next paragraph.
Cloud computing solution in which organization, in this case, Service provider, offers resources like virtual machines, applications, network or a storage for third party users, like general public typically over the Internet.
Cloud that organization hosts on-premises, for itself and its users. It delivers same advantages of cloud computing like self-service and scalability.
Hybrid cloud is the environment which uses a mix of on-premises, private cloud and third-party, public cloud services with automatic orchestration between the two or more platforms. Regarding user experience, it is a single platform.
It is a form of cloud computing that provides computing resources for free or for rent over the Internet. In this model cloud service provider hosts hardware, servers, networking equipment, storage, software and other infrastructure equipment in order to provide infrastructure service for its users. It is a usually base foundation for other forms of cloud computing like Paas and SaaS.
In this form of cloud computing cloud service provider has hardware (it would be Iaas) and on top of it some software tools, usually needed for application development, and it provides it to its users as a service over the Internet.
Is a cloud computing model for software distribution. It means that cloud service provider hosts applications and makes them available over the Internet. Again IaaS is the foundation and software sit on top of it.
Read more of this article »Posted in Internet, Tech Tavern Tagged with: Automation, Cloud computing, Internet, Virtualization