Waching daily Mar 21 2018

Erica: Would you like it better if it were your thigh?

Allison: Bitch.

For more infomation >> ☢ Erica & Allison | That girl is a Monster ☢ - Duration: 1:03.

-------------------------------------------

Sony's First Google Assistant Smart Speaker Is A Great Alternative To The Google Home - Duration: 8:28.

I'm a really big fan of the google home mini, I'm also a really big fan of the google

home max… but I'm not the biggest fan go the original google home. It just doesn't

sound good for listening to music. And I think Google really needs to release a redesigned

google home with an emphasis on sound quality, cause I really just use my Google Home for

voice commands and at which point might as well just replace it with a google home mini.

But if you want a mid sized smart speaker, I really think the Sony LF-S50G is an awesome

alternative to the Google Home.

The Sony LF-S50G is Sony's first google assistant integrated smart speaker. When it

was first released it retailed for $199.99 but now you can find it for $149.99 at most

places. During the holiday season I even saw it for as low as $100. But still, if you get

it for $149.99 its just $20 more than the original google home. And it comes in two

colors, black or white. If you want to pick either of the speakers featured in this video

I'll have links in the description below, and if you use the links it really helps out

the channel.

OK, lets get over the obvious… yes the Sony looks almost exactly like an Apple HomePod.

And personally I don't mind, its smaller, a little slimmer, and much lighter than the

HomePod. And it also has a fabric outer shell. But this Sony smart speaker is slightly bigger

than the google home. Just like the google home the Sony has 360 degree sound, but it

also has an led clock display which is something I always thought the google home was missing

and instead of touch controls the Sony uses gesture controls to control your music playback

and activate google assistant. The only buttons this smart speaker has is a bluetooth button,

a mute button, and a dim button to lower the brightness of the clock display on the front.

Unfortunately the Sony LF-S50G doesn't have an aux jack. The only way to listen to music

on this speaker is either through voice commands, if you cast it, or over bluetooth. And theres

also an NFC touchpoint so if you have an android device pairing is a little easier.

Now lets talk about the gesture controls cause those can be very hit or miss if they're

not properly built into the product. If you swipe up you'll play or pause you music,

if you swipe down you'll activate your google assistant, if you swipe right you'll skip

a track and if you swipe left you'll go back a track. And to adjust the volume you

just make clockwise or counter clockwise circles with your finger. In order for the swipes

to work your palm has to be flat and in order to adjust the volume the circles have to be

directly over the Sony logo. And once you get a hang for the gestures they work 9 out

of ten times.

Personally one of my biggest grips with the google home, home mini, and home max is that

you cant physically control your music playback, google forces you to use voice commands. And

only the Google home allows you to touch and hold to activate google assistant where as

with the Mini and Max you're forced to use the hot word. Voice controls are cool and

all but sometimes using manual controls is just the simplest solution, and thats why

I like this Sony speaker so much, I can simply use the voice commands but if I want to I

also have full control with the gestures. And when it comes to voice recognition, the

Sony Smart speaker picks up my voice just as well as my google home and home mini. If

you're playing music at higher volumes either of these smart speakers are going to have

a problem hearing you.

Usually when using a third party google assistant smart speaker it means not having all of the

features found the the google home, home mini, and max. Most notably broadcasting and making

phone calls. Broadcasting works just fine on this Sony speaker, but you cant make phone

calls like you can with either of the first party speakers. This feature could possibly

come in a feature software update.

OK, now lets talk about tech specs and speaker set up. The Sony LF-S50G is rock bluetooth

4.2 and has a stable connection up to 40 feet… pretty standard. Its IPX 3 rated so a little

splash of water wont hurt it and its fabric shell is removable. Inside theres a single

upward facing 1.89 inch diameter speaker, and a downward facing 2.09 inch dimeter subwoofer

matted to a bass reflux duct and between the two theres a diffuser that helps evenly spread

out all of the sound. For comparison, the Google Home has a a single frontward facing

2 inch diameter transducer and dual 2 inch diameter passive radiators. Even though the

google home is a 360 speaker, after living with it for a few months its still pretty

directional, for the best sound you want that transducer firing towards you.

Obviously the JBL Pulse 3 is the best sound speaker here. Its has a far superior speaker

set up. My problem with the google home is that it has way too much bass and it just

pushes all of the mid and vocals to the back. I feel the Google home is only worth using

if you're strictly going to listen to EDM. The Sony on the other hand has a much more

even sound signature. Theres still a good amount of bass but the mids are also very

well defined. But the Sony isn't perfect, it also suffers a good amount of sound distortion

if you get above 85 percent volume.

But even though I really do like Sony's first smart speaker there is room for improvement.

First up I hate the included power cable. The cable it self is too short and cheap and

the plug is almost twice as big as the Google Home's. Something I've noticed lately

with smart speakers is that their power cables are just as premium as the speaker themselves,

all of google's cable are covered in soft touch rubber, Mini's and Max's plugs are

very small and the Homepod's cable is covered in fabric. This is the same issue I have with

the JBL link 10 and Link 20. Also, I feel Sony should have included an ambient light

sensor so the LED display on the front will automatically adjust itself. I also think

Sony should get more use out of the LED display in general. Right now it only displays time

and volume, I would like to see it be used for timers, notifications, and maybe even

display the current outside temperature.

But still really do prefer the Sony LF-S50G over the Original Google Home. Personally

I think this smart speaker is best suited for the kitchen. It looks good and it has

a very small foot print… I just wish I could use the front display for my kitchen timers

when I'm cooking. Since it sounds way better than the Google Home I do find myself listening

to music again while cooking. If google is working on a next gen google home they should

take this concept and improve on it with better sound, the addition of a USB C port so I can

have the option charge my own device, and maybe a more useful display.

For more infomation >> Sony's First Google Assistant Smart Speaker Is A Great Alternative To The Google Home - Duration: 8:28.

-------------------------------------------

Top 5 Wednesday - Science Fiction/Fantasy that is NOT BOOKS [CC] - Duration: 10:10.

Hi everybody, it's Anna, and welcome back to Top 5 Wednesday! If you are new to

Top 5 Wednesday, I will go ahead and link the Goodreads group down below for

topics, ways to get involved, etc etc. So today's topic is our favorite science

fiction and fantasy in other media. This is a crossover with the Booktube SFF

Awards, I believe they're called "book babbles," so I will also tag some more

information about that. Basically, it is where the booktube community reads and

judges the best science fiction and fantasy of the year. I'm not judging, I'm

just watching all the videos, gladly participating, and ever embiggening my

TBR. So let's go ahead and talk about some of my favorite science fiction and

fantasy and media that is not books. So to start out with, I wanted to tell you

about a couple podcasts that I really love. One of them is called Tanis.

It is in its I think 3rd or 4th season now, and Tanis is a podcast that really

creeped me out when I first started listening to it because I wasn't sure

that it wasn't real. I actually did have to go and look up whether it was a

fiction podcast because it draws just enough from real life and places

near where I live and places that I have gone and people that are important in

history that it really kind of spooked me a bit! Because it is very atmospheric

and very scary. So it takes place in the Pacific Northwest, which is where I live,

and we're sort of following this character, Nic, as he goes through and

tries to investigate these references that he keeps finding, these obscure

references in old texts and things, [to] something that's called Tanis. He's not

sure whether it is a person, a place, some kind of ancient god, maybe the Earth's

way of correcting the damage that humans have done to it because of things like

industrialization and pollution and stuff like that. Not really sure what

Tanis is! This many seasons in, I think I have a little bit of a better idea than

when I started, but I'm not even really sure what Tanis is. It's very spooky, very

atmospheric. It can get a little bit gorey sometimes, but in more of a

psychological horror way than "I'm killing a ton of people."

So, very good podcast. The second podcast that I wanted to tell you about is

Welcome to Night Vale, which if you're on the Internet at all, you're probably

aware of Welcome to Night Vale. As you can see, I have it as my phone background.

[ominous monotone voice] All hail the glow cloud! All hail! [whispering] All hail!

Welcome to Night Vale is a podcast that is done in the style of a small town community

public radio update. It's narrated by Cecil Palmer. It has been going on for....

probably like six years now! I've been listening to it for about four of those

years, I've been current with the podcast. They do live shows pretty frequently,

which is if you've ever heard the live audience for things like

other public radio shows, like Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me! Welcome to

Night Vale really embraces its weird. The show has a lot of great

representation of queer characters, non-traditional families, the human and

the inhuman. It's a lot about community and community building, and it is a place

where the weird is kind of just taken for granted.

It's just delightfully strange! I don't really know how to describe it.

Next is a TV show this is currently my favorite show on television, and that is

The Good Place. It is about this woman named Eleanor who dies-- that's not a

spoiler, she just like, wakes up dead-- and finds out that she has made it: she's

made it to the good place. There's a good place, and there's the bad place, but

Eleanor herself knows that she has been accidentally mistaken for somebody

else because she's really kind of a terrible person. So she knows that she

doesn't belong in the good place because she was not a very good person in her

life, and they're like, "oh, you went on this medical doctors without

borders trip to help refugees!" and she's like, I never did that!

So she's trying to figure out how the mix-up happened, what's going on, where

she is, who's the "real" Eleanor, and she

teams up with this unlikely cast of characters along the

way. Tt is really delightful. Go ahead and do yourself a favor and watch it. I don't

want to say a ton about it because it's a show that's full of

surprises, and I don't want to give any of them away, but it's a really really

fun show. Okay, and then next up is two games. So these are more like general

games and a specific game. So for the general game, I am also a super huge fan

of tabletop RPGs. You can see my lovely little collection of dice here.

More specifically, games like Dungeons & Dragons! I actually just started a

campaign yesterday, and I'm playing as a character named Tam Goodbarrel. She's a

halfling ranger who is also an entertainer, which means that when she's

not stabbing and shooting people with bows and arrows, she likes to put on

funny disguises and play the panpipes. And we had this really interesting

campaign that we did last night where we were trying to recover a stolen

sword, and we ended up helping these little mushroom people--they were

like humanoid, walking-around mushrooms-- defeat a giant crab, and we turned it

into a crab rodeo! Our fighter ended up lassoing the crab, and I was like, wow! I'm

gonna jump on it and stab it in the eye! It's a really fun game, and I think that

it speaks a lot to the power of storytelling and the power of self-

exploration, in the way that our relationships with

characters can kind of affect our relationships with ourselves and our

knowledge of ourselves. So Dungeons & Dragons, other tabletop RPGs: giant yes

in my book! And then the final thing is my favorite game of all time, and that is

Skyrim. I have my little Dovahkiin keychain here with me. Skyrim

is a game that places you in a fantasy world :snowy, cold place, where dragons

have long been absent, but they are now back, and you have something to do with it.

You have to go on this quest to try and

figure out why the dragons have returned to Skyrim, learn the magic of the dragons,

how to fight them, how to protect people from them, and then it just turns into

this wild and ridiculously wonderful open-world odyssey. Skyrim is a game that

got me through a really difficult period in my life.

The details of that aren't really important, but suffice it to say, it was really

helpful for me to play as a character who placed so much focus on getting out

and just *doing*. Didn't think about what she was gonna do, she just *did*. I was

playing as a Breton conjuration mage. The Bretons are humans, but they're a

little bit more short and better endowed with magical abilities than other humans.

And I was a conjuration mage, which means that in one hand, I had a magical

sword, and then in the other hand, I had like... that was my casting hand, so I could

use that to summon up a a creature to come fight for me. I used to summon up

these things that are called atronochs, and they're like these elemental

warriors. So it would be like, a fire warrior would come out of my hand and

help me fight against skeletons or assassins and bandits and things like

that. Some of my favorite Skyrim quest lines were the Dark Brotherhood-- we know.

if you know, we know. Thieves' Guild I never really did finish, but I enjoyed it.

One of my other favorite things that I did in Skyrim was get married to a guy

that I bested in a bar fight. So in order to get married in Skyrim, pretty much all

you have to do is you put on this amulet that is the Skyrim equivalent of "single

and ready to mingle" so other characters will then approach

you, and you have that romance option [in dialogue]. Usually you have to complete some

type of quest for that character in order to win their love. For me, I had to

fight my in-game husband at the bar. I destroyed him, and he was super into

that. And it's kind of funny, when you do get married in Skyrim, your spouse--

because you can marry, regardless of the gender

of your character, the gender of your partner --so I'm just

gonna say your spouse. Your spouse stays at home, and they basically

run their own business, and they cook for you, which is great because my like

bar-brawling husband ended up just becoming this little homebody guy that anytime I

came in he was like, hello darling! I baked you this pie! It's so good to see you!

And Skyrim is just a super fun game. Again, if you've been on the Internet at

all, you probably know something about it, so I won't continue harping on it, but it

is without a doubt one of my favorite pieces of the genre. Okay, so that is all

for Top 5 Wednesday this week. Make sure to comment down below if you also

enjoy any of these things, or if you have any questions about them, because I'm

always really happy to talk about like fandoms and geek out about things. And I

also kind of want to know: how many of you also play video games and

tabletop games, whether it's board games or RPGs? and if so, which ones do

you play? I am thinking about doing some more generally nerdy tags, but I

kind of want to get a feel for how comfortable the people that watch these

videos are with that, like how familiar you are with that, especially since I

know we talk mostly about books. So we shall see. Thank you all so much for

watching, and I'll see you in the next one. Bye!