Several Asian airlines have tightened restrictions on portable battery chargers amid growing concerns about fire risks, following a January blaze that destroyed an Air Busan aircraft in South Korea. South Korean airlines now require passengers to keep portable chargers within arm’s reach rather than in overhead bins, a rule implemented March 1 to ease public anxiety, according to the Transportation Ministry. Taiwan’s EVA Air and China Airlines have banned using or charging power banks on flights but still allow them in overhead compartments.

Thai Airways announced a similar ban last Friday, citing “incidents of in-flight fires on international airlines.” Battery-related incidents on U.S. airlines have increased from 32 in 2016 to 84 last year, with portable chargers identified as the most common culprit, according to Federal Aviation Administration data. The International Civil Aviation Organization has banned lithium-ion batteries from cargo holds since 2016, though no industry standard exists for regulating power banks.

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The second season of the fantastic detective dramedy Poker Face starts streaming via Peacock on May 8. There’s a trailer and it spotlights the many guest stars that will be showing up as suspects in the second season. These include folks like John Mulaney, playing a cop of some kind, and early 2000s heartthrob Katie Holmes.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Fans of the first season know that Poker Face loves itself some guest stars. Giancarlo Esposito, Awkwafina, Justin Theroux, Cynthia Erivo and Melanie Lynsky will all be showing up in this new batch of episodes.

For the uninitiated, Poker Face is (basically) an old-school “mystery of the week” show, recalling genre classics like Columbo. It stars Natasha Lyonne as a gritty New Yorker (duh) as she wanders the country solving crimes. She has a near-supernatural ability to tell when someone is lying, which helps a lot.

The show was created by Rian Johnson, who polarized the Star Wars fandom with The Last Jedi before going on to make those well-regarded Knives Out movies. Two of those films have already aired on Netflix, with a third on the way. He also made some indie flicks earlier in his career, like Brick and Looper.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/tv-movies/poker-faces-season-two-trailer-features-guest-stars-like-john-mulaney-and-katie-holmes-184741470.html?src=rss

The Federal Trade Commission is moving to push back a trial set to determine if Amazon tricked customers into signing up for Prime subscriptions.

At a Zoom status hearing on Wednesday, the FTC officially asked US District Judge John Chun to delay the trial. According to the FTC’s attorney, Jonathan Cohen, the agency needs two months to prepare beyond the September 22 start date, blaming recent “staffing and budgetary shortfalls” stemming from the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), CNBC reported.

“We have lost employees in the agency, in our division, and on our case team,” Cohen said, explaining that “there is an extremely severe resource shortfall in terms of money and personnel,” Bloomberg reported. Cuts are apparently so bad, Cohen told Chun that the FTC is stuck with a $1 cap on any government credit card charges and “may not be able to purchase the transcript from Wednesday’s hearing,” Bloomberg reported.

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Certainly not Marvel Comics, that’s for sure.

In the wake of the controversy surrounding PayPal’s Honey browser extension, Google Chrome has updated its policies to ban the practices that the extension was observed to be engaging in. Chrome’s updated extension policies for affiliate ads includes wording that seems to be a direct response to many of the tactics Honey was accused of participating in, such as injecting affiliate codes without providing discounts. Given that Chrome powers most browsers available now, expect this to have major ramifications on shopping extensions going forward.

If you’re out of the loop about the Honey controversy, a multi-year investigation by YouTuber MegaLag recently uncovered evidence of unexpected behavior. Honey was accused of allowing retailers to control which discount codes you could access, and as a result, not letting you discover the best available deals, despite advertising to the contrary. The extension was also observed to be inserting its own affiliate codes in every shopping website you visit, and was seen replacing other affiliate codes with its own, which means that it effectively was pocketing others’ commissions. Additionally, Honey actually confirmed to MegaLag that it deliberately engages in some of these practices.

According to Chrome’s updated affiliate ads policy, extensions now cannot add affiliate links, codes, or cookies without providing a tangible benefit to users. Extensions will also have to prominently describe their affiliate policy before installation, in the user interface, and on the Chrome Web Store page. Google described some common violations of this policy to make it clearer for developers too, where the company said extensions can’t insert affiliate links without providing any discounts or cashback offers. It also banned extensions from inserting affiliate links in the background without “related user action”.

According to Google, this means that extensions cannot insert shopping-related cookies while you’re browsing without letting you know. They also can no longer insert or replace affiliate codes or promo codes without the user’s knowledge. Honey, and other extensions that let you find the best deals, will have to change the way they operate in order to comply with these policies.

In case your favorite shopping-related browser extension is affected by Google’s new policies, you can still use other tools for price comparison. Lifehacker’s in-house deals expert Daniel Oropeza has a full list of his favorite price-tracking tools for you to check out. It includes a few browser extensions and even a price-tracking tool by Honey itself (don’t worry, this one is not a browser extension), which are all very useful for deal hunters. My personal favorite is Slickdeals, a site I’ve relied on for over a decade to find great deals. More than its price tracking, I value Slickdeals’ community a lot. The best deals are heavily upvoted and the comments below each deal help me quickly determine whether a deal is actually a steal. 

Global sales of smartwatches have fallen for the first time, new figures indicate, in large part due to a sharp decline in the popularity of market leader, Apple. From a report: Market research firm Counterpoint says 7% fewer of the devices were shipped in 2024 compared to the year before. Shipments of Apple Watches fell by 19% in that period, Counterpoint says. It blames the slump on a lack of new features in Apple’s latest devices, and the fact a rumoured high-end Ultra 3 model never materialised.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hand clapping is ubiquitous behavior for humans across time and cultures, serving many different purposes: to signify approval with applause, for instance, or to keep time to music. Acousticians often use a hand clap as a cheap substitute for pricey equipment to make acoustic measurements in architecture. While the basic physical mechanism is simple, the underlying physical mechanisms are less well-understood.

A new paper published in the journal Physical Review Research provides experimental support for the hypothesis that hand clapping essentially acts like a Helmholtz resonator—akin to the hum generated by blowing across the top of a bottle, or the hiss one hears when holding a conch shell to one’s ear.

In 2020, engineers Nikolaos Papadakis and Georgios Stavroulakis, both at the Technical University of Crete, recruited 24 students to clap their hands once in different venues, varying their hand configurations in 11 different ways—changing the angle of the hands with respect to one another, for instance, or changing how many fingers of one hand overlapped with the fingers or palms of the other.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: New York State has sued Allstate Insurance for operating websites so badly designed they would deliver personal information in plain-text to anyone that went looking for it. The data was lifted from Allstate’s National General business unit, which ran a website for consumers who wanted to get a quote for a policy. That task required users to input a name and address, and once that info was entered, the site searched a LexisNexis Risk Solutions database for data on anyone who lived at the address provided. The results of that search would then appear on a screen that included the driver’s license number (DLN) for the given name and address, plus “names of any other drivers identified as potentially living at that consumer’s address, and the entire DLNs of those other drivers.”

Naturally, miscreants used the system to mine for people’s personal information for fraud. “National General intentionally built these tools to automatically populate consumers’ entire DLNs in plain text — in other words, fully exposed on the face of the quoting websites — during the quoting process,” the court documents [PDF] state. “Not surprisingly, attackers identified this vulnerability and targeted these quoting tools as an easy way to access the DLNs of many New Yorkers,” according to the lawsuit. The digital thieves then used this information to “submit fraudulent claims for pandemic and unemployment benefits,” we’re told. … [B]y the time the insurer resolved the mess, crooks had built bots that harvested at least 12,000 individuals’ driver’s license numbers from the quote-generating site.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It happened again: Across sprawling tabs, dozens of windows, and countless unread messages, you’ve somehow lost your cursor. Maybe it’s hiding in the corner of your screen, but, hmm—nothing seems to be popping out of any of them. What’s more, if you have your Mac connected to multiple monitors on your desk, your cursor could be anywhere. Tell work to push your deadlines; you’re gonna need a minute.

But before you damage your reputation, there’s a better way. Well, a couple of ways, actually—but one of them is far more fun. To save yourself from this grief in the future, try “Googly Eyes,” a free app that adds, yes, a pair of googly eyes to your Mac’s menu bar.

Googly Eyes is the creation of Sindre Sorhus, a developer we’ve frequently covered on Lifehacker. Sorhus has made sticky notes for the menu bar, tools to adjust the spacing of the menu bar, an easy way to switch your default browser on the fly, an app for expanding the number of extensions Shortcuts supports, and a tool for making Finder more like Windows’ File Explorer.

Googly Eyes is a little different, because the premise is beyond simple: Once you install and launch the app, you’ll find a pair of cartoonish googly eyes resting on your Mac’s menu bar. These eyes are trained on the location of your cursor: Move your mouse or glide your finder on your trackpad, and the eyes will follow it.

My cursor disappeared while typing the above paragraph. Rather than scrambling around looking for it, I can glance up at the googly eyes, see they’re focused on the right side of my Mac, then move my mouse to the left, where my cursor will predictably reappear. Click your mouse or trackpad, and the eyes blink. It’s fun and useful.

That’s all there really is to it. If you’re bored on your Mac, you can bring your cursor up to the googly eyes to mess with them a bit. Moving directly between the eyes will cause them to go cross-eyed, while dragging more towards one eye will cause that eye to move away from the other a bit.

Credit: Lifehacker

Now, there is a solution built into macOS for whenever you can’t find your cursor: shake it. Shaking your cursor really fast not only increases the chances you’ll see it buzzing around your screen, your Mac will also temporarily make it huge. It’s a great feature, but it isn’t perfect: Sometimes, shaking your cursor doesn’t pull it up, especially if you’re working across monitors, or the task requires more vigorous shaking than you might expect. In these cases, you might want a pair of helpful eyes to keep watch for you, and clue you into your cursor’s position.

Googly Eyes is a simple setup, but Sorhus does have some troubleshooting advice should you need it: If you don’t see Googly Eyes in your menu bar after opening the app, quit some other menu bar apps, as macOS sometimes hides these apps when there are too many open at once (especially on smaller displays). If your Mac cannot access the App Store, you can download the app directly from Sorhus, but note this method won’t offer automatic updates, and Sorhus will only update the app on his website on an annual basis.

Brendan Carr thinks YouTube TV might be discriminating against “faith-based programming.”

Sink joins the highly anticipated Tom Holland film, though it’s unclear who she’s playing.

The billionaire oligarch effectively controls the federal government right now.

It makes sense that most of us focus on money when it comes to our happiness. Not being able to afford stuff like rent is stressful, and going into debt to feed yourself just exacerbates that sense of powerlessness. Whatever your financial situation, unless you’re oligarch-levels of wealthy you probably focus everything on making, saving, and stretching a much money as possible.

But if you’re not happy even if your bills are paid and your debt is manageable, it’s probably because you’re thinking about money the wrong way. Instead of thinking about being affluent in terms of money, you should be thinking in terms of being affluent in time.

What is time affluence?

Time affluence—the feeling that you have enough time to accomplish everything you want to get done—is a crucial aspect of our happiness and sense of personal satisfaction. Time poverty is the opposite—that stressful feeling you get when there aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done. Between commuting to and from our jobs, the time spent working, then the chores at home, many of us barely have time to eat some dinner and maybe stream a show before collapsing into bed—and starting the process over again the next day.

Then, our weekends are filled with household projects and maintenance and other responsibilities (or second jobs or overtime). We keep telling ourselves that we’ll get back to a hobby, or make time to see friends, or get some extra sleep next week, or next month, or at some unknowable time in the future.

Time poverty has been shown to have an adverse effect on both mental and physical health. The mistake many of us make is thinking that the answer to time poverty is simply having more money—but the key is using money to gain more time. If all you’re doing is selling more of your time (to a second job, or a more demanding position) then you’re actually increasing your time poverty even if your bank account is growing. On the other hand, having more money means you can potentially buy more time for yourself. The trick is to stop thinking solely in terms of how you’re spending your money and more in terms of how you’re spending your time.

How to become time affluent

Time is one of the few resources in our lives we can’t create more of no matter how creative, ambitious, or hard-working we are. You get 24 hours in a day and that’s it—and once those hours are gone you can’t get them back. But what you can do to become more time affluent is manage your time more effectively, treating it like the limited resource it is. You can achieve more time affluence by doing four fundamental things:

• Organize and prioritize. Since your time is limited, stop treating it like an amorphous, infinite resource you always have more of. Make lists of things you need or want to do and prioritize them. Then use time blocking to break each of those priorities into a fixed amount of time needed to accomplish them or at least move them toward completion. This avoids letting tasks pile up, which increases stress and that sense of not being in control of your time, and provides a visual guide to how your day will play out. And having clear times for specific activities to end will increase your efficiency.

• Delegate. Always think about what you can delegate to someone else. For example, if you can afford to hire cleaners for your home you can reclaim the time you would otherwise spend cleaning the house. You’re essentially buying time from someone else.

  But reclaiming that time doesn’t have to mean paying someone. If there are tasks that someone else in your life could be taking on (chores at home or work tasks not officially in your job description, for example) that will also claw back some time for you.

• Automate. Are there aspects of your life you can automate? Bill paying is an easy example of this: Instead of spending an hour every week paying bills individually, setting up automatic payments gets you that hour back. Think about any opportunities you have to automate stuff—prescription refills, meal plans (if it’s in your budget), even grocery shopping can be automated these days through weekly subscription platforms.

• Monotask. Finally, be aware of what’s known as “time confetti”—the way we spend little bits of time on a seemingly infinite scroll of activities, most of them online. Jumping from thing to thing can feel like multitasking, but it isn’t an efficient way to get stuff done.

  Instead, monotask, which means focusing on a single task until it’s done. It’s an extremely simple concept, but it requires discipline, like sticking to the time-blocking schedule you created, eliminating distractions, and forcing yourself to focus.

Having more money can make some of these steps easier or even possible, surely—but you can apply these four principles to your time management no matter what your financial circumstances are, and improve your time affluence to poverty ratio at least a little bit.

The Federal Trade Commission asked a judge in Seattle to delay the start of its trial accusing Amazon of duping consumers into signing up for its Prime program, citing resource constraints. CNBC: Attorneys for the FTC made the request during a status hearing on Wednesday before Judge John Chun in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington. Chun had set a Sept. 22 start date for the trial. Jonathan Cohen, an attorney for the FTC, asked Chun for a two-month continuance on the case due to staffing and budgetary shortfalls.

The FTC’s request to delay due to staffing constraints comes amid a push by the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency to reduce spending. DOGE, which is led by tech baron Elon Musk, has slashed the federal government’s workforce by more than 62,000 workers in February alone. “We have lost employees in the agency, in our division and on our case team,” Cohen said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Many people using older Chromecast devices experienced a shock in recent days when their units lost the ability to cast content. The company ended the brand last year, which led folks to think that this was a planned obsolescence of some kind. Here’s some good news. It’s just a software issue and Google is working on it.

The company sent an email to users to say that its engineers are “working to resolve this as soon as possible, and will keep you updated when there is more to share.” Google was fairly vague in its wording here, but at least we know a fix is coming.

The issue primarily impacts older Chromecasts and the Chromecast Audio device and prevents them from casting. Google says the cause of the problem has been identified but didn’t reveal any specifics.

However, it has cautioned users to not factory reset impacted Chromecast devices. This will lock users out of the gadget entirely. Google has suggested it would help these people, because performing a factory reset would likely be one of the first troubleshooting steps, but hasn’t provided a time frame.

One Reddit user claims to have found the problem that caused the devices to lose functionality, noting that it was “most definitely due to the certificate baked into the Chromecast having expired.” This person said that the certificate specified it would no longer be active after March 9 and, well, that’s the day before many models started failing.

For the uninitiated, the issue causes an “untrusted device error” whenever someone tries to cast on certain models. The only option is to dismiss the error, which disables casting. Impacted units include the 2nd-gen Chromecast from 2015 and the Chromecast Audio.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/google-apologizes-for-chromecast-outage-and-promises-a-fix-172103579.html?src=rss

Most new AI models go big—more parameters, more tokens, more everything. Google’s newest AI model has some big numbers, but it’s also tuned for efficiency. Google says the Gemma 3 open source model is the best in the world for running on a single GPU or AI accelerator. The latest Gemma model is aimed primarily at developers who need to create AI to run in various environments, be it a data center or a smartphone. And you can tinker with Gemma 3 right now.

Google claims Gemma 3 will be able to tackle more challenging tasks compared to the older open source Google models. The context window, a measure of how much data you can input, has been expanded to 128,000 from 8,192 tokens in previous Gemma models. Gemma 3, which is based on the proprietary Gemini 2.0 foundation, is also a multimodal model capable of processing text, high-resolution images, and even video. Google also has a new solution for image safety called ShieldGemma 2, which can be integrated with Gemma to help block unwanted images in three content categories: dangerous, sexual, or violent.

Most of the popular AI models you’ve heard of run on collections of servers in a data center, filled to the brim with AI computing power. Many of them are far too large to run on the kind of hardware you have at home or in the office. The release of the first Gemma models last year gave developers and enthusiasts another low-hardware option to compete with the likes of Meta Llama3. There has been a drive for efficiency in AI lately, with models like DeepSeek R1 gaining traction on the basis of lower computing costs.

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Rian Johnson’s mystery show starring Natasha Lyonne returns for season two on May 8.