All Articles
When Gemini's Activity Setting Won't Change on a Work Account: Three Screens to Check First
If the Gemini app's Activity setting doesn't behave on a work or school account, check three places in order: your own screen, the admin console, and Vault. Includes a short message to send your admin and a line to draw before pasting customer details.
Free Tier Shows Up, but You Get a 429 With `limit: 0` — What to Check in the First Hour of a New Gemini API Project
A new Gemini API project says Free tier, yet the very first call returns 429 with limit: 0. Here is the order I check things in, how to read the error body, and a 40-line script that tests models one by one.
Before You Send a Gemini Draft, Run Double-Check and Fix Only the Orange Sentences
A short routine for using the Gemini app's double-check feature right before you send an email or reply: what green, orange, and unhighlighted sentences mean, the order I use to fix orange ones, and when even green deserves a second look.
Three Lines Decide Who Gets Images in the Gemini App: 13, 18, and Your Administrator
When the image entry point is missing from the Gemini app, a bug is rarely the reason. Here is how the two separate age thresholds and the work or school account rules line up, and who you should actually contact.
Before You Split That PDF: Three Different Limits in the Gemini App
When the Gemini app refuses your PDF, file size is rarely the real problem. Here is how I tell storage, rate limits, and reading capacity apart, and what I trim before I ever reach for a splitter.
I edited the Drive doc, asked Gemini again, and it quoted the old sentence back
When Gemini answers from an outdated version of a Drive file, the file usually isn't the problem — the conversation is. Here's how sources stay attached for the whole conversation, why you can't remove one mid-thread, and what to do about partial reads.
Two dictations on one Fn key — where I let Gemini type, and where I don't
On a Mac, the Fn key now hosts two different dictations: hold it and Gemini drops polished text at your cursor, tap it twice and macOS transcribes you as-is. Here is the boundary I drew before letting either one into my day, and the order I check when nothing happens.
Deleting the Chat Wasn't Enough. There Was a Second Place the Memory Was Coming From
How Gemini's memory of past chats actually works, why deleting a conversation often isn't enough, and how the fact that Gems and Gemini Live ignore that memory can be turned into a simple way to keep separate projects from bleeding into each other.
What decides whether your Gemini API data trains Google's models, and the one exception on the paid tier
Whether your Gemini API prompts feed model training is not settled by the paid tier alone. Here is how AI Studio and the API define paid differently, how dataset sharing reverses the protection, and what changes by region.
The Strongest Gemini Is in Preview and the Cheap One Is GA. That Ordering Should Drive Your Model Choice
Sort the Gemini lineup by release stage instead of capability and the order inverts: the strongest reasoning model sits in preview while the fast, inexpensive Flash models are GA. Here is how a solo developer handles that, plus a 30-line script that counts how many preview models your code already depends on.
"No Watermark Detected" Doesn't Mean It Isn't AI — The Asymmetry of SynthID
Images generated with Gemini carry a SynthID watermark. But a positive result and a negative result don't carry the same weight, and that asymmetry changes how you should track provenance.
Gemini Prompt Engineering Guide — System Instructions, Few-shot & Chain-of-Thought
Get stable output from Gemini through prompt design, using three techniques: System Instructions, Few-shot, and Chain-of-Thought. Includes a real pitfall I hit while auto-classifying images for a wallpaper app.