Budget carrier Ryanair has delayed its move to 100% paperless boarding passes to the start of its winter schedule on November 3. From a report: Media reports had suggested that the change could come in May, ahead of the busy summer season. But the implementation will now begin at the start of the winter season in November, and means Ryanair passengers will no longer download and print a physical paper boarding pass. Instead they will use the digital boarding pass generated in their ‘myRyanair’ app during check-in.
Currently almost 80% of Ryanair’s 200 million annual passengers already use this digital boarding pass. As a result of this initiative, Ryanair expects to eliminate almost all airport check-in fees from November, as all passengers will have checked-in online or in-app to generate their digital boarding pass. The airline said it will also reduce passengers’ carbon footprint by eliminating unnecessary paper, saving more than 300 tonnes in paper waste each year.
Adding to the excitement around the possibilities provided by the in-kernel eBPF Linux tech, Meta shared that their Strobelight software they are working on open-sourcing for profiling across servers has yielded a 20% reduction in CPU cycles and in turn a 10-20% reduction in the number of required servers for Meta’s top services…
With tax season in full swing, it’s prime time for married couples to maximize all the tax breaks available to them. One strategy that you don’t want to leave on the table: making spousal IRA contributions.
If one spouse isn’t employed, they might be missing out on putting retirement assets in their name—not to mention reducing the tax-deferred growth possibilities as a couple.
Spousal IRA contributions can double your retirement tax breaks
The IRA contribution limits for 2024 are $7,000 for those under age 50, and $8,000 for those age 50 or older. To clarify: You can make 2024 IRA contributions until the tax deadline on April 15, 2025. Generally, you can only contribute up to these limits for your own IRA, meaning you must have an income that will allow you to do so. And as always, you can and should max out these limits, if possible. However, with a spousal IRA, your spouse can also contribute up to the limit in an IRA under your name.
That effectively doubles the amount your household can sock away in IRAs (pre-tax or Roth) each year. The only requirement is that the spouse who owns the IRA must have enough earned income to cover both contributions.
For example, let’s say Alex earns $100,000 per year and her husband Kevin is a stay-at-home dad with no income. Alex can contribute $7,000 to her own IRA. She can also contribute $7,000 to an IRA that is under Kevin’s name. That’s $14,000 total that the household can now save in IRAs, rather than just Alex’s $7,000 limit.
How spousal IRAs work
A spousal IRA isn’t actually a separate type of IRA account—rather, it’s just a traditional IRA or Roth IRA set up in the name of a spouse who has little to no income. This may include those who are caregivers for children or other family members, workers who have returned to school, or people who have left the workforce for another reason.
To be eligible for a spousal IRA, you have to meet a few requirements:
You must file taxes as “married filing jointly.”
The earning/contributing spouse must make enough to cover the contributions to both their own IRA and the spousal account.
There are income-based contribution limits for Roth IRAs and tax deduction limits for traditional IRAs based on your tax filing status. These may affect which type of account you select.
One key to a spousal IRA is that ownership stays with the person named on the account, no matter which spouse is contributing the funds. This also means that an existing IRA—funded while the owner of the account was in the workforce—can function as a spousal IRA if that person is no longer earning income and their partner simply contributes to the account on their behalf.
The bottom line
Eligible couples can use a spousal IRA to double their contributions to traditional individual retirement accounts (IRAs) even if only one partner has an income, and deduct a total of $14,000 (rather than $7,000 for the individual income earner) for 2024, as long as they do so by April 15. So there is still time for married couples to make spousal IRA contributions and double their tax-advantaged retirement savings—just be sure to specify which spouse the contribution is for when sending funds to your IRA provider.
With a little planning, a spousal IRA strategy can significantly boost your households’ retirement funds. And you can get an immediate tax deduction on your taxes if you make the contributions prior to tax day—so don’t leave this tax break on the table.
NASA has begun shutting down science instruments aboard the twin Voyager spacecraft to extend their 47-year journey through interstellar space, officials said. Voyager 1’s cosmic ray subsystem was deactivated on February 25, while Voyager 2’s low-energy charged particle instrument will be shut down on March 24. Both spacecraft will then operate with just three of their original ten science instruments.
The radioisotope power systems aboard the Voyagers lose approximately 4 watts annually, threatening to end their mission within months without intervention. “Electrical power is running low,” said Voyager project manager Suzanne Dodd. “The Voyagers have been deep space rock stars since launch, and we want to keep it that way as long as possible.” NASA engineers believe these measures could enable the probes to continue operating into the 2030s, far beyond their initial five-year design life.
There’s a reason that the suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona, were home to many autonomous vehicle programs: Driving on wide streets in great weather is easy mode for an AV. But a commercial robotaxi service that only works when the sun is shining is a commercial robotaxi service that will never recoup the billions it would cost to develop. That’s why Moia—Volkswagen’s AV division—has begun testing its autonomous ID Buzzes around the streets of Oslo, Norway, this winter.
For a while, autonomous driving was the hottest thing in tech. That hype has certainly calmed down a lot over the last few years as reality began to bite. Developing an AV that can safely drive around unpredictable humans turned out to be pretty hard, with myriad edge cases needing to be solved differently for each new city.
Because I’m fascinated with skeletons (we all have one) this is ‘Shredding Light’, a stop-motion light painting video created by artist Darren Pearson (aka DariusTwin, previous work seen here) of skeletons riding skateboards. It’s a fun watch, and I can’t even imagine how long it took to make because Darren didn’t care to share that information.
There are hundreds of light painting photographs that make up the project. Each of these long exposure light painting photographs are straight out of the camera and arranged side by side to create motion.
Clearly, a labor of love. Or possibly of black magic to summon an army of evil undead skateboarders to wreak havoc on the planet! Ha, like they could do any better than we are.
Reddit has announced several new tools that seem like they were designed to encourage more lurkers to participate in discussions on the website. One of the new tools called Rules Check will make it easy to see if what you’re posting potentially goes against a subreddit’s rules. Before submitting your post, you can click the wand icon in the lower right-hand corner of the post composer, which you can see in the photo above. Doing that will highlight anything in your post that may be breaking a subreddit’s rules. Reddit will start testing the feature on iOS and Android before giving it a wider release.
Another new tool called Post Recovery will show you a prompt if your post has been removed due to community rules. The prompt will contain a notice of removal, along with a link that will enable you to quickly share your deleted post to a more appropriate subreddit. To make sure you’re posting in the right community in the first place, Reddit will now suggest relevant communities based on what you write through a drop-down menu on the upper left corner of the composer screen. It will now also show you if a community has requirements, such as account age or minimum karma points, before you can post.
The last tool is perhaps most useful if you promote products and services on Reddit. Post Insights will show you how many views, upvotes, shares and crossposts your posts have gotten, giving you an idea on what works when it comes to post engagement. All these tools other than Rules Check are now available on Reddit’s website and mobile app.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/reddits-rule-check-feature-will-help-users-avoid-breaking-subreddit-rules-160001398.html?src=rss
Hazelight Studios has once again brought a whole heap of co-op joy with its newest game, Split Fiction, which sends two players on a high-stakes quest across high fantasy and sci-fi settings. There are plenty of funny and heartfelt moments for you and a friend to experience in this adventure. But if you’re wondering…
YouTube’s recent price hike has clearly left a hole in the market. If you want a fully ad-free YouTube experience, you currently need to pay $13.99/month (up from $11.99) or use a third-party workaround. But now, YouTube has a compromise. The service’s new Premium Lite plan comes in at $7.99/month ($6 cheaper) and is supposed to block ads on most, but not all, content.
With YouTube Premium Lite, YouTube won’t show ads on popular categories of long form video, like gaming, fashion, beauty, news, and more. That’s a bit vague, but in a video with Johanna Voolich, YouTube’s Chief Product Officer, she says this means that all “core creator content“, including podcasts, gaming streams, and makeup tutorials will all be ad-free.
The catch is that other content, like music and music videos, won’t be. That said, I am curious where the line between “core creator” content starts and stops—it’ll take some time before subscribers really test the boundaries of this system. What if a smaller creator has a gaming video that doesn’t get flagged as being part of YouTube Gaming?
Missing features
Credit: YouTube
Aside from ad-free play, the cheaper plan misses out on two other big Premium features. Namely, you won’t get offline downloads or background play. There’s no access to YouTube Music either, since that would give you ad-free listening.
YouTube Premium Lite is designed for people who want to watch creator-uploaded long form content in peace, without ads, and who don’t care about supplemental features or YouTube spin-offs. If you instead prefer to watch offline or like listening to long podcasts in the background or have playlists saved in YouTube Music, the $13.99/month YouTube Premium plan will probably still be more up your alley.
YouTube is rolling this out as a pilot test program in the US, so how the subscription works might change in the future. The company plans to expand the testing to Thailand, Germany, and Australia in coming weeks.
Minisforum is making quite the name for itself in the compact PC space, served primarily by an extensive (and ever-growing) range of mini PCs, but also tiny motherboards like its BD795i SE we wrote about earlier this week. Keeping the compact party going, Minisforum has released the AI X1 Pro, yet another promising mini PC that it showed off
Discord has become a central artery for gaming. It’s the default place for companies to build communities around their games and for the people who play them to hang out with one another, coordinate gaming sessions, or just shoot the shit about whatever’s going on in life. It’s one of the least shitty social media…
Animal Company, the free-to-play early access game on Quest, nabbed the top spot for Quest’s highest-earning game this week, overtaking long-time viral hit Gorilla Tag in the weekly charts. Now, developer Wooster Games tells Road to VR it’s not only already profitable, but Animal Company has surpassed one million monthly active users (MAU), cementing its status as VR’s next big F2P game.
Launched in early access on Quest last July, Animal Company takes inspiration from Gorilla Tag by including its arm-powered locomotion mechanic and low-poly animal avatars, but it switches things up by essentially replicating the game loop of Lethal Company—which is where the name comes from.
Like Lethal Company, it’s full of weird places to explore and loot to collect, which can be brought back to base for profit. Monsters and traps are everywhere though, with each creature presenting unique challenges, requiring teams to employ stealth, strategy, and cooperation to avoid or overcome them.
“We took inspiration from viral multiplayer hits like Gorilla Tag, Yeeps, and Among Us VR, and during a hackathon, we prototyped VR experiences influenced by the trends we saw in games like Lethal Company and Content Warning,” Wooster Games tells Road to VR.
And it appears to be resonating with Quest owners, as the game took the number one spot as Quest’s top-earning title this week, passing Another Axiom’s Gorilla Tag. As VR’s most successful game to day, Gorilla Tag has been powerhouse ever since it launched on the main Quest store in late 2022, posting over $100 million in gross revenue last summer.
Image captured by Road to VR
Granted, Meta only calculates the chart on a week-by-week basis, so while Animal Company clearly hasn’t generated more lifetime revenue than Gorilla Tag—that would be a tall order for any game—it’s a sign of things to come.
Like many F2P games, Animal Company’s revenue comes entirely from in-app purchases, which not only includes specific cosmetic items, but also the game’s in-world currency, Company Coins, which can be used to buy a host of seasonal cosmetics.
While the studio isn’t sharing specific revenue numbers right now, Wooster says Animal Company’s recent success has left the studio in “a strong and healthy position,” highlighting its recent updates—Tech Tree, Mining, and the Planetarium—which have all driven “significant growth in engagement and activity.”
“Since launching monetization in September, our revenue has grown consistently month-over-month, more than doubling since December,” the studio tells Road to VR. “The real standout stat, though, is our player base—Animal Company now has over 1 million MAU, a 4x increase since December.”
Wooster says the game’s rapid success came down to a few key factors, including the holiday season bringing more players online, new Quest 3 owners, and a Winter update, which brought new content, such as a new map, items, and exclusive holiday cosmetics. And even coming off the holiday boost, things still seem to be humming over at Animal Company. Wooster says that February, typically a quieter month, saw both a rise in usage and revenue.
Those technical factors would help any game succeed, surely, although one of the biggest boons undoubtedly comes down to how Animal Company co-opts Gorilla Tag’s movement mechanics—something players already implicitly understand, albeit with a fresh and interesting gameplay loop that centers around social, community-driven gameplay.
And like Gorilla Tag—you really can’t talk about Animal Company without mentioning Gorilla Tag—social media influence has been a big part of the game’s rise in popularity, with the studio citing TikTok and YouTube as “a huge driver of Animal Company’s reach.”
“On TikTok alone, the #AnimalCompany hashtags have racked up over 410 million views, with some videos hitting 24M+ views. The game was designed to create ‘viral moments’ that players naturally want to share, and its sandbox-style gameplay—packed with unique items, weapons, and cosmetics—gives creators endless ways to make engaging content.”
To boot, besides a series of small ad tests, which were under $1,000, Wooster says it’s spent substantially nothing on paid marketing, focusing instead on strong relationships with creators, from up-and-coming talent to established names like Jmancurly.
“We’ve found that a game offering content that translates into views is far more valuable to creators than direct sponsorships. Paid promotions often feel inauthentic and don’t drive the same sustained engagement as organic success.”
So far, it’s been less about paid adverts, and more about actively courting its community and the cadre of influencers creating Animal Company content. The studio recently released an invite-only program, called ‘The Drip Department’, which that gives members early access to updates, exclusive content, and more to help them grow their channels alongside the game.
“To validate our ideas, we launched our own TikTok and YouTube channels to test whether we could generate viral moments ourselves. The response was immediate—before launch, we gathered our first 100 community members through social media. A week after launch, that number hit 1,000. Six months later, we had over 100,000 members, and today, Animal Company has organically amassed nearly 500 million views.”
More importantly though, Animal Company is doing all of this at the best possible time, it seems. Last month, Meta confirmed a growing demographic shift amid last year’s release of Quest 3S, which has not only seen a rise in F2P content on the Quest platform, but also revenue generated from in-app purchases.
“With more players engaging in F2P experiences and in-game economies, Animal Company’s growth aligns with this shift,” the studio says. “The success of viral, player-driven games like ours shows that the Quest platform is entering a new era—where social engagement and creator-driven content are just as crucial as traditional game marketing. We expect this trend to continue shaping the future of VR.”
Whether Animal Company will ever surpass Gorilla Tag in long-term popularity remains to be seen. What is clear, however, is that its explosive growth signals a new era for VR multiplayer games—one where social-driven, F2P experiences dominate the landscape. With over a million active players and a fast-growing community, Animal Company has already proven it’s more than a passing trend. The question now isn’t if it will last, but just how far it can go.
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Some more data for context: Gorilla Tag launched on Quest’s main store in late 2022 after driving hype on SideQuest and the now-defunct App Lab for nearly a year. The game exploded in growth in late 2023 when the studio announced it had topped 2.3 million MAU, attracting over 700,000 users on Christmas Day that year.
Last June, the Gorilla Tag team updated that figure, saying the game had then topped 10 million lifetime users, one million daily active users (DAU), and three million MAU. At the time of this writing, Animal Company has garnered over 60,000 user reviews on the Horizon Store, while Gorilla Tag sits above 140,000.
Based on information from a prominent industry analyst, Apple kept mmWave (millimeter wave) 5G support out of its in-house designed C1 modem for a good reason: power efficiency. The C1, by the way, debuted in the iPhone 16e that Apple released last week. Nonetheless, once the kinks are worked out, consumers could see a new iteration (be it
Red Hat is updating its OpenShift platform with a series of capabilities that will provide more advanced networking and virtualization functionality for cloud-native deployments.
