In a new blog post for Virgin.com, billionaire Richard Branson writes about his recent flirtation with death, when he got into a gruesome bike accident while training for the Virgin Strive Challenge in the Caribbean.
Source: Gizmodo – Richard Branson Got In Bloody Bike Crash, Lived to Blog About It
Household essentials, Munchkin: Marvel Edition, and $15 off textbooks lead off Friday’s best deals.
Source: LifeHacker – Today’s Best Deals: Household Essentials, Textbooks, Munchkin, and More
NHK boldly declared it would broadcast the 2020 Tokyo Olympics in 8K (also called Super Hi-Vision), but that’s just four years away now and the grand total of 8K TVs on the market is … one. To get things jump-started, the Japanese broadcaster has t…
Source: Engadget – Sony and Panasonic partner to sell 8K TVs by 2020
It’s hard to decide who’s the worse villain: John Travolta or Nicolas Cage. And that’s exactly why Face/Off is the perfect mid-90s action thriller. Who do you root for? Unclear because the main characters switched faces, and it’s hard to tell who the good guy is. The effect is intoxicating.
Source: Gizmodo – Face/Off Is Like a Fine Wine and I’m Drunk
WhatsApp betrayed their long standing commitment to privacy when it announced the app will now share user data with Facebook for the purpose of selling ads. But existing users have only 30 days to opt out.
Source: Gizmodo – You Should Update Your WhatsApp Settings Right Now
If you’re a Linux fan, then you should know that this week is a very special one. On August 25, 1991 – 25 years ago – Linus Torvalds shot out a simple message to a Minix usergroup which stated that he was working on a Minix replacement. Within, he famously said that his creation wouldn’t “be big and professional like GNU”.
Not even Linus
Source: Hot Hardware – Linux Celebrates Its 25th Birthday This Week
Today on In Case You Missed It: Global pizza company Domino’s is teaming up with drone delivery company Flirtey to launch an actual pie delivery service, via UAV, in New Zealand. The company has passed checks by the country’s Civil Aviation Authori…
Source: Engadget – ICYMI: Stack your dominoes and get the pizza delivered too
A squeeze of lime brightens up beverages, fish, tacos, fish tacos, and all sorts of other things, but preserving them takes their flavorful impact to great new heights.
Source: LifeHacker – Two-Ingredient Preserved Limes Are Easy and Add Bright, Citrus Flavor to Anything
Earlier this month David Herrmann sent out two kernel patches to hide “legacy” DRM drivers behind a new Kconfig switch and make these DRI1 drivers depend upon the kernel’s “BROKEN” option. Not all are happy about these patches…
Source: Phoronix – Marking DRI1 Drivers As Legacy & “Broken” Being Debated
CORSAIR®, a leader in high-performance gaming hardware, today announced the immediate and worldwide availability of its new LUX range of mechanical keyboards. Building on the phenomenal success of the CORSAIR K70, K70 RGB and K65, the new LUX range adds a host of new features and improvements. With enhanced lighting, USB pass-through and a back-lit optimized key cap font, CORSAIR LUX keyboards retain the core-design, premium materials and commitment to quality that has earned the CORSAIR K-series over 300 global media awards, making them the benchmark for high-performance keyboards.
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Source: [H]ardOCP – CORSAIR Announces Full New Range of LUX Mechanical Keyboards
Apparently I’m not the only person that totally forgot there was a free-to-play Halo Online game in Russia. If social media posts are to be believed, it would seem that Microsoft has totally forgotten about the game as well.
It was a game that seemed to mimic Activision’s partnership with Tencent to develop Call of Duty Online for China. In both cases, the developers took a globally popular IP and adapted its gameplay and publishing format for a foreign market. However, according to a member of the development team going by Fogeyman, Microsoft had “failed to [make] decisions on the future of the project” for the last six months.
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Source: [H]ardOCP – Microsoft Cancels Free-to-Play Halo Online
One of the best card games you probably haven’t heard of has a Marvel edition, and it’s marked down to an all-time low $18 today. If you aren’t familiar, Munchkin is a little bit like D&D, but much more approachable and silly, and this version would be a great gift for the Marvel fan in your life, even if that person is yourself.
Source: Kotaku – Game Night Friends: Assemble! Munchkin Marvel Edition Is Cheaper Than Ever
Roman Seleznev, the son of a Russian parliament member, could face up to 40 years in prison for hacking into point-of-sale computers and stealing millions of credit card details. A federal jury has convicted him of 38 out of 40 counts of wire fraud,…
Source: Engadget – Russian cyberthief convicted of stealing millions of CC info
An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Satellite operator DigitalGlobe is teaming up with Amazon, the venture arm of the CIA, and NVIDIA to make computers watch the Earth from above and automatically map our roads, buildings, and piles of trash. MIT Technology Review reports: “In a joint project, DigitalGlobe today released satellite imagery depicting the whole of Rio de Janeiro to a resolution of 50 centimeters. The outlines of 200,000 buildings inside the city’s roughly 1,900 square kilometers have been manually marked on the photos. The SpaceNet data set, as it is called, is intended to spark efforts to train machine-learning algorithms to interpret high-resolution satellite photos by themselves. DigitalGlobe says the SpaceNet data set should eventually include high-resolution images of half a million square kilometers of Earth, and that it will add annotations beyond just buildings. DigitalGlobe’s data is much more detailed than publicly available satellite data such as NASA’s, which typically has a resolution of tens of meters. Amazon will make the SpaceNet data available via its cloud computing service. Nvidia will provide tools to help machine-learning researchers train and test algorithms on the data, and CosmiQ Works, a division of the CIA’s venture arm In-Q-Tel focused on space, is also supporting the project.” “We need to develop new algorithms for this data,” says senior vice president at DigitalGlobe, Tony Frazier. He goes on to say that health and aid programs are to benefit from software that is able to map roads, bridges and various other infrastructure. The CEO of Descartes Labs, Mark Johnson, a “startup that predicts crop yields from public satellite images,” says the data that is collected “should be welcome to startups and researchers,” according to MIT Technology Review. “Potential applications could include estimated economic output from activity in urban areas, or guiding city governments on how to improve services such as trash collections, he says.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Amazon, NVIDIA and The CIA Want To Teach AI To Watch Us From Space
James Gunn talks about when Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2. is set. Michael Dougherty offers an update on the Trick r’ Treat sequel. Doctor Strange might include some intriguing comic book cameos. Andrew Kreisberg discusses why Supergirl is bringing in Miss Martian. Plus new looks at Scream Queens and Lucifer’s return. Spoilers!
Source: Gizmodo – Barry Allen Might Face a Whole Team of Villains in the Flash Movie
The latest in a series of Japanese promo videos for Nintendo’s mobile social networking app demonstrates Miitomo’s ability to bring plucky teens together in song, which unfortunately isn’t a real thing.
Source: Kotaku – Miitomo’s Japanese High School Rap Song Is Kind Of Catchy
As an Airbnb host, Lyft driver, or anyone else who earns money from the sharing economy, you’ve probably had tax questions at some point. The IRS now has a site dedicated to answering those questions.
Source: LifeHacker – The IRS Has a New Web Page for People Who Make Money From the Sharing Economy
(credit: Andrew Cunningham)
WhatsApp will do what it once said would never happen: let businesses use the messaging app to serve ads to users.
In a move that was inevitable once it was acquired by Facebook for $22 billion in 2014, WhatsApp has put its users on notice that it will soon begin sharing their phone numbers, and selected other data, with its parent company.
This information will then be used to offer customers “more relevant” Facebook ads, new “ways for people to communicate with businesses” via the app, and new friend suggestions, the blurb reads.
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Source: Ars Technica – WhatsApp does about face, will serve ads in Facebook-owned app
The developers within the Sunxi camp working on better Allwinner SoC support under Linux have been reverse-engineering Allwinner’s “Cedar” video engine. Their project is being called Cedrus with a goal of “100% libre and open-source” video decode/encode for the relevant Cedar hardware…
Source: Phoronix – Cedrus Is Making Progress On Open-Source Allwinner Video Encode/Decode
On a typical day, Amazon will run highly discounted Gold Box deals on a handful of diverse and unrelated products. But today, for whatever reason, they’re all about cleaning supplies.
Source: LifeHacker – Amazon’s Deeply Discounting Dozens of Household Essentials You Need to Buy Anyway, Today Only