A new Android 14 update is now available for Chromecast with Google TV
The update is landing on devices that are still on Android 12 and those that already have the initial Android 14 update installed.
The initial update was pulled due to reported issues.
After missing the intended 2024 deadline, Google finally started rolling out Android 14 to Chromecast with Google TV in March. That rollout was halted, however, after users reported issues. But as the saying goes, the second time is the charm. Google is now rolling out a new Android 14 update for these devices.
If you own a Chromecast with Google TV device, be on the lookout for version UTTC.241218.008.H1 (via 9to5Google). This Android 14 update is landing on Chromecasts that still have Android 12 installed. It will also replace version UTTC.241218.004 for those who installed the initial Android 14 update.
In addition to Android 14, this update brings: Support for Find My Remote and Customizable Button on the Google TV Voice Remote
January 2025's security patch
System stability and improvements
For those moving up to Android 14, the update will be a hefty 809MB. It should be a smaller update for those who installed the initial software.
Before the initial OTA was pulled, there were reports claiming that external drives had stopped working. Users also claimed that USB devices and Ethernet adapters weren't working either.
Got a tip? Talk to us! Email our staff at
Email our staff at news@androidauthority.com . You can stay anonymous or get credit for the info, it's your choice.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
CNET
28 minutes ago
- CNET
Save an Extra 50% on Tech, Furniture and More During Hammacher's July 4th Sale
Summer is in full steam and that means we're getting closer to Fourth of July sales events that can help you save. We're also getting ever closer to this year's Amazon Prime Day deals. However, Amazon isn't the only retailer competing for your attention or offering hefty deals. Hammacher is offering an extra 50% off on all of their current sale items when you use the coupon code EXTRA50 at checkout. This offer is live until July 8, but we suggest acting quickly to score your top picks. Savings apply even to items that have already been heavily discounted, such as this cordless portable blender that's down to just $8 after you apply the coupon code EXTRA50. It's available in three colors, charges via a USB-C cable and can blend in as fast as 20 minutes. The coupon and other discounts mean you save a massive $62 over its usual asking price. Hammacher also has deals that can help you get dorm-ready or add a personal touch to your laptop, such as this wireless color-changing typewriter keyboard for just $19 after you use the coupon code EXTRA50, which saves you a total of $131 over the usual asking price of $150. The coupon applies even to items that are already up to 96% off and items in Hammacher's under $10 final sale category. Items on sale include apparel, bedding, electronics and more. On top of their coupon code, you can also save $15 on orders valued at $99 if you text HELLO to 48186. Signing up for Hammacher's newsletter can score you a discount of $10 on orders valued at $99 or more. We're keeping up with all Fourth of July and early Prime Day deals, so check back often if you're looking for savings on appliances, tech and more. We even have lists of the best back to school supplies if you want to expand your shopping options. Why this deal matters Amazon, Walmart and other major retailers tend to get the most attention when it comes to big savings across all categories. Hammacher has offers across multiple categories, which could be a great way to save on back-to-school or summer clothes, computing accessories, novelty accessories and more thanks to their coupon code EXTRA50. Their Fourth of July deals last until July 8, so it's wise to act fast.
TechCrunch
29 minutes ago
- TechCrunch
Google's data center energy use doubled in four years
No wonder Google is desperate for more power: the company's data centers more than doubled their electricity use in just four years. The eye-popping stat comes from Google's most recent sustainability report, which it released late last week. In 2024, Google data centers used 30.8 million megawatt-hours of electricity. That's up from 14.4 million megawatt-hours in 2020, the earliest year Google broke out data center consumption. Google has pledged to use only carbon-free sources of electricity to power its operations, a task made more challenging by its breakneck pace of data center growth. And the company's electricity woes are almost entirely a data center problem. In 2024, data centers accounted for 95.8% of the entire company's electron budget. Image Credits:Tim De Chant/TechCrunch The company's ratio of data-center-to-everything-else has been remarkably consistent over the last four years. Though 2020 is the earliest year Google has made data center electricity consumption figures available, it's possible to use that ratio to extrapolate back in time. Some quick math reveals that Google's data centers likely used just over 4 million megawatt-hours of electricity in 2014. That's growth of seven-fold in just a decade. The tech company has already picked most of the low-hanging fruit by improving the efficiency of its data centers. Those efforts have paid off, and the company is frequently lauded for being at the leading edge. But as the company's power usage effectiveness (PUE) has approached the theoretical ideal of 1.0, progress has slowed. Last year, Google's company-wide PUE dropped to 1.09, a 0.01 improvement over 2023 but only 0.02 better than a decade ago. It's clear that Google needs more electricity, and to keep to its carbon-free pledge, the company has been investing heavily in a range of energy sources, including geothermal, both flavors of nuclear power, and renewables. Techcrunch event Save $450 on your TechCrunch All Stage pass Build smarter. Scale faster. Connect deeper. Join visionaries from Precursor Ventures, NEA, Index Ventures, Underscore VC, and beyond for a day packed with strategies, workshops, and meaningful connections. Save $200+ on your TechCrunch All Stage pass Build smarter. Scale faster. Connect deeper. Join visionaries from Precursor Ventures, NEA, Index Ventures, Underscore VC, and beyond for a day packed with strategies, workshops, and meaningful connections. Boston, MA | REGISTER NOW Geothermal shows promise for data center operations. By tapping into the Earth's heat, enhanced geothermal power plants can consistently generate electricity regardless of the weather. And many startups, including Google-backed Fervo Energy, are making it possible to drill profitable wells in more places. On the nuclear fusion side, Google last week announced it would invest in Commonwealth Fusion Systems and buy 200 megawatts of electricity from its forthcoming Arc power plant, scheduled to come online in the early 2030s. In the nuclear fission world, Google has pledged to buy 500 megawatts of electricity from Kairos Power, a small modular reactor startup. The nuclear deals have yet to deliver power — and they won't for five years or more. In the meantime, the company has been on a renewable energy buying spree. In May, the company bought 600 megawatts of solar capacity in South Carolina, and in January, it announced a deal for 700 megawatts of solar in Oklahoma. Google said in 2024 it was working with Intersect Power and TPG Rise Climate to build several gigawatts worth of carbon-free power plants, a $20 billion investment. The outlay isn't surprising given that solar and (to a lesser extent) wind are the only two sources of power that are readily available before the end of the decade. New nuclear power plants take years to permit and build, and even the most optimistic timelines don't see them connecting to the grid or a data center before the end of the decade. Natural gas, which the U.S. has plenty of, is hamstrung by five-plus-year waitlists for new turbines. That leaves renewables paired with battery storage. Google has contracted with enough renewables to match its total consumption, though those sources don't always deliver electrons when and where the company needs them. 'When we announced to the world that we were achieve that 100% annual matching goal, we were very clear that wasn't the end state,' Michael Terrell, Google's head of advanced energy, told reporters last week. 'The end game was 24/7 carbon free energy around the clock everywhere we operate at all times.' Google has some work to do. Worldwide, the company has about 66% of its data center consumption, matched to the hour, powered by carbon-free electricity. But that average papers over some regional challenges. While its Latin American data centers hit 92% last year, its Middle East and Africa facilities are only at 5%. Those hurdles are part of why Google is investing in stable, carbon-free sources like fission and fusion, Terrell said. 'In order for us to eventually reach this goal, we are going to have to have these technologies,' he said.
Washington Post
32 minutes ago
- Washington Post
Can pizza orders predict military action? One man keeps track.
If foreign adversaries want to predict when and where the United States will launch a military campaign, they might rely on satellite imagery, intercepted communications or AI analysis. But if garden-variety subreddit conspiracy theorists want to gain such insights before news breaks, they might just follow the pizza. Run by an anonymous software engineer, the social media account Pentagon Pizza Report tracks Google data for pizzerias around the military complex in Arlington. (The anonymous Google Maps data is aggregated from 'timeline' or 'location history' on phones, including visits made to establishments.) Often posting multiple times a day on X, PPR frequently singles out spikes in pizzeria activity, allowing its 200,000-plus followers to draw conclusions about what might be happening at the Pentagon. Mostly, it seems, these posts suggest little more than a busy (or slow) night at a pizzeria. But occasionally, the tracker publishes a chart or two implying the Pentagon brass is burning the midnight oil just ahead of a military action, their offices littered with greasy boxes. At around 7 p.m. on June 12, PPR noted that pizzerias around the Pentagon were booming; an hour later, Israel attacked Iran's nuclear program. At 7:13 p.m. on June 21, PPR pointed out the Papa Johns nearest the Pentagon was experiencing 'HIGH activity,' while Freddie's Beach Bar and Restaurant, a straight-friendly gay bar in Arlington with lots of Pentagon customers, was dead. Less than an hour later, President Donald Trump announced the United States had attacked three nuclear sites in Iran. Since its founding in August, PPR has become 'a joke more than anything else,' former Pentagon official Alex Plitsas, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, said in an interview. 'There are people who are still really watching this thing seriously who don't really understand how things work.' PPR has a presence on Bluesky, TikTok, Threads and Twitch but has found its audience on Elon Musk's X, where its fan base goes well beyond the tinfoil-hat crowd. Followers include members of the military and the open-source intelligence community, or OSINT; professors and podcasters; journalists and other information junkies. Edward Byers, a retired Navy SEAL who won a Medal of Honor in 2016, and Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, both follow the account. A man who called himself PPR's founder responded to a direct message from a Washington Post reporter on PPR's Bluesky account and also messaged from its X account. 'I think a large reason for the rapid growth is the OSINT community sharing my reports the past few weeks, which is super cool,' he said in a direct-message chat over Bluesky. 'There also seems to be a lot of Crypto traders very interested in my reports which I didn't really expect.' (The founder agreed to chat on the condition of anonymity because his identity 'would tarnish the spirit of the pizza report.' 'I think people have all sorts of different assumptions about the kind of guy that sits and stares at Google Maps data all day long,' he wrote.) He seems to approach the account with the open-mindedness of a scientist — and the perspective of someone who enjoys a good joke. He has no military background, and he can't even remember the first time he heard about the pizza index. He can be as enigmatic as his tracker: He won't be pinned down to a location other than the East Coast, and he won't reveal his age. But he's up-front about one thing: He understands that he's providing entertainment as much as information. 'I wouldn't be surprised if most people follow for the same reason I made the account,' he wrote on the Bluesky chat. 'It's stupid, it's funny, but you can't help but feel there's also something there.' The theory that spawned PPR has been frequently traced back to the Cold War, when Soviet agents allegedly monitored takeout orders to the highest reaches of the U.S. government. Yet it isn't clear the KGB ever relied on such methods. Simon Miles, an associate professor of history at Duke University who has studied Cold War-era spycraft, won't say that he's skeptical of the lore, exactly. 'You can't prove a negative,' he noted. But Miles has seen records from the Stasi, the East German intelligence service that shared information with the Soviets and other Eastern Bloc nations, and nowhere is there a mention of monitoring takeout. 'That's one of these Cold War stories that never goes away,' he said. 'I've never seen documentation to that effect.' Not that Russian spies weren't eyeing the streets around Washington for clues. Documents that Miles studied outlined some of the methods the KGB did use, including whether the government was moving founding documents from the National Archives into secure bunkers and whether many cars were parked past normal working hours at the White House. 'The idea was basically to create a list of indicators which, if enough of them started blinking red, so to speak, you would interpret that to mean that something was actually happening,' Miles said. Pizza, he said, wasn't on the list. Regardless, the 'pizza index' has fascinated people for decades, often fueled by media reports. In 1991, Frank Meeks, then the owner of 43 Domino's outlets in the D.C. area, told the AP that in the days leading up to Operation Desert Storm he had delivered dozens of pizzas to the Pentagon. Fifty-five pies, Meeks bragged, were sent to the White House in the hours before the U.S.-led coalition started an air campaign against Iraq over its invasion of Kuwait. In December 1998, Meeks was quoted by a Washington Post reporter during impeachment hearings against President Bill Clinton and preparations for Operation Desert Fox against Iraq. The White House and Congress broke previous three-day records for pizza deliveries, Meeks told The Post. 'The Pentagon Pizza Index has been a surprisingly reliable predictor of seismic global events — from coups to wars — since the 1980s,' Alex Selby-Boothroyd, head of data journalism for the Economist, wrote in a recent LinkedIn post. 'On the night of August 1st 1990 for example, the CIA ordered 21 pizzas in a single night just before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait (a new record). Who says pie charts aren't useful?' But Pentagon ex-workers say times are different now than in the 1980s and '90s. Since the launch of Uber Eats, Grubhub, DoorDash and other delivery services, a new universe of food options has opened up for workers at the Pentagon, White House or CIA. Why would anyone limit themselves to chain pizza? Besides, as multiple people pointed out, the Pentagon already has plenty of food options inside, including Lebanese Taverna, McDonald's, Moe's Southwest Grill, Panda Express, Panera Bread, Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen, Potbelly Sandwich Works, Subway, Taco Bell, Hissho Sushi and SmokeDatt Barbecue. There's even a pizzeria — Mosaic Pizza Company — but like many of the eateries there, it closes in the afternoon, catering to a rank-and-file staff that's often out the door by 5 p.m. The late-night options are pretty much limited to vending-machine sushi and the Market Basket Basement Cafe. Besides, leaders may not even want to break for food, said a U.S. Army reservist who regularly works in the Pentagon. 'It's just how we're wired,' said the reservist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she wasn't authorized to talk to the media. 'We're just trying to work so we can get it done.' None of the Pentagon workers contacted for this story had ever ordered a pizza at work — cell service is notoriously bad inside the building, one said — nor had they ever seen pizza boxes on a conference room table or in the trash. Which raises the question: Can pizza even be delivered to one of the most secure structures in the country? The Pentagon declined to comment for this story. But the Pentagon Force Protection Agency, its law enforcement agency, said all visitors must pass a background check and have authorized credentials; they and their belongings are also physically screened. All deliveries must be screened and inspected at the Pentagon Remote Delivery Facility just north of the complex. And anything perishable is 'confiscated and discarded,' spokesman Chris Layman noted in an email. But, Layman said, employees may bring in food that they've gotten directly from a restaurant. This appears to include food a staffer might pick up from a delivery driver at, say, the Pentagon Metro. These meals must also be screened and inspected. 'I can see having pizza delivered to a spot outside, but I don't recall we ever did it,' said Philip Greene, a retired U.S. Marine Corps attorney who had an office inside the Pentagon for 12 years. 'It's very anecdotal, but it makes sense. We're going to be burning the midnight oil. Let's get some pizza or Chinese food or whatever.'
