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1 week ago | 
houstonchronicle.com | Dwight Silverman
At least once a quarter, review the extensions you have installed in your browser. Shown here is a list of extensions installed in Dwight Silverman’s copy of Chrome, some of which have been disabled. ScreenshotChrome has a feature that flags extensions for issues. Safety Check can tell if an extension has violated Google’s store guidelines, is no longer supported or may be dangerous to keep installed.
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2 weeks ago | 
houstonchronicle.com | Dwight Silverman
Google honchos on Tuesday focused the keynote address that kicked off the company’s 2025 I/O conference on its relentless march to offer new products built around artificial intelligence and cramming AI into those that already exist. If you use Google’s stuff – and it can be hard not to these days – AI is increasingly inescapable. Mind if I dredge up a cliched Star Trek reference? Resistance is futile.
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3 weeks ago | 
houstonchronicle.com | Dwight Silverman
Google’s Pixel smartphones typically get great reviews, and with good reason. They are powerful, packed with cutting-edge features and sporting some of the best cameras available. Models in the past couple of years have featured actually useful AI. But still, Google’s handsets have yet to set the world on fire. Fans of Pixel phones were elated to see recent tech-media stories that the devices had reached third place in U.S. market share this April, behind Apple (56%) and Samsung (24%).
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4 weeks ago | 
houstonchronicle.com | Dwight Silverman
Vision Pro. Apple launched its shot at a mixed reality headset early last year. While it bristled with advanced technology unmatched by competitors such as Meta’s virtual reality products, the Vision Pro also came with a painful $3,499 price tag. At its unveiling in mid-2023, Apple executives conceded it was aimed at the earliest of adopters, but sales reportedly fell well short of company expectations.
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1 month ago | 
houstonchronicle.com | Dwight Silverman
The day after I reported about Comcast’s stealth rollout of the latest cable modem standard in parts of Houston, the company announced new plans that promised no price hikes for 5 years, no charge to rent its latest internet gateway, a free year of mobile service and, happily, no data caps. The latter was included as a simple bullet point, but it’s actually a big deal. Comcast’s data cap is currently set at 1.2 terabytes per month.
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1 month ago | 
spacecityweather.com | Dwight Silverman
It’s another just-in-the-nick-of-time edition of the Space City Weather Q&A. If only we could get a few more days added to each month, maybe we’d get this out the door sooner. Or maybe April’s edition would just end up publishing on April 33. Who knows? Anyway, let’s get to it. As always, if you have a question for next month, drop it in the comments below or hit the Contact link on the blog home page. Q. I’ve been noticing over the last few months.
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1 month ago | 
houstonchronicle.com | Dwight Silverman
Deciding when to buy new tech often is not easy. If a phone, laptop, tablet or other bit of kit is working just fine but new capabilities are out of reach, battery life is declining or storage space is dwindling, the equation gets complicated. Big price hikes due to oversized tariffs by the Trump administration levied against China, where most electronics sold in the U.S. are made, add another confounding factor. At the moment, that category is on hold, but that’s not expected to last long.
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1 month ago | 
houstonchronicle.com | Dwight Silverman
Comcast and other cable internet providers started talking up the next generation of cable modem technology in 2022, technology that would bring their internet access offerings up to speed - pun intended - with purveyors of fiber optic internet. That standard so far has been mostly MIA. DOCSIS 4.0, as it's called, has remained just over the horizon. "By the end of this year" became "by the end of next year." And as the calendar rolled over, that cycle would repeat.
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2 months ago | 
houstonchronicle.com | Dwight Silverman
Apple has gotten a lot of grief over Apple Intelligence, the company's drive to catch up to competitors in the AI category. On Monday, it released what was supposed to be the final layer of that cake with a series of updates to its operating systems. The centerpiece is iOS and iPadOS 18.4, along with macOS 15.4, watchOS 11.04 and tvOS 18.4.The biggest disappointment, as I wrote last month, was the company's failure to deliver on a beefed up version of Siri.
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2 months ago | 
houstonchronicle.com | Dwight Silverman
It's been more than four years since Apple released its first computers built around processors it designed in-house. Apple Silicon has dramatically changed the Mac lineup, and not just because it walked away from Intel's inefficient and often overheated platform. Its M-series chips are similar to those that power iPhones and iPads, and that has given the company's complete lineup capabilities its competitors can only dream of.
