Three out of your four top front pocket wallet picks were new-fangled minimalist wallets, but all the cool features and unique ideas in the world couldn’t buy them enough votes to overcome Saddleback’s old school leather wallet, which took nearly 50% of the vote all by itself.
Source: LifeHacker – Your Favorite Front Pocket Wallet Is Saddleback’s Leather ID Wallet
You don’t need someone to point out to you that you probably spend too many hours on the internet. Maybe it’s your job, maybe it’s a growing habit, maybe it’s both of them. An anonymous reader shared a link on Business Insider, in which an author named Roy Hessel shares what happened after he started to force himself to go offline for 24 hours every week. (He chose the duration between sundown on Friday to sunset on Saturday as the time for disconnect.) From the article:No emails, no calls, no Tweets, no tech, no matter what. For anyone who’s struggling with finding time for self and family, I’d like to share what I’ve learned. For health, sanity, and happiness, I think it can make all the difference. It’s not enough to carve out time in your schedule. You need to approach this blackout period with an unwavering belief in its benefit and a commitment to see it through. For me, this means abstaining from work and, in the deepest sense, simply resting. It grounds me and allows me to re-energize and focus on what’s really important in my life. The key is to be unapologetic rather than aspirational about unplugging. As soon my family and I get home from our workweek, there’s nothing, with the exception of a life and death situation, that would cause me to compromise that time. As far as business and my income is concerned, it can wait.We understand that not everyone wants or afford to go offline for a complete day, but do you also ensure that you are offline for a few hours everyday or every week or every month? Paul Miller, a reporter at The Verge, went offline in 2012 for a complete year and shared his experience when he got back. You might find it insightful.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Author Says Going Offline For 24 Hours a Week Has Significantly Improved His Health, Sanity and Happiness
The microUSB cable that came with whatever gadget you need to charge every night probably works just fine, assuming you take care of it. But ThinkGeek still makes a strong argument for replacing it with this electroluminescent cable that makes the Millennium Falcon on the end look like it’s making the jump to hyperspace.
Source: Gizmodo – This Millennium Falcon Charging Cable’s Got It Where It Counts, Kid
Enlarge / Leonardo DiCaprio signs autographs for fans during the Tokyo premiere for “The Revenant” in March. (credit: Yuriko Nakao via Getty Images)
The pirate who in December leaked The Revenant and The Peanuts Movie days ahead of their US releases has been ordered to pay $1.2 million in restitution to 20th Century Fox and was also handed eight months of home confinement, federal prosecutors said.
The defendant, William Morarity of the Los Angeles suburb of Lancaster, was working for an undisclosed studio lot when he unlawfully accessed watermarked, screener versions of the films and uploaded them to a private BitTorrent site “Pass the Popcorn,” according to his guilty plea (PDF). The Revenant was downloaded more than 1 million times and The Peanuts Movie more than 220,000 times, according to court documents. (PDF)
Deirdre Fike, the assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles field office, said the defendant’s behavior is a killer of creativity and jobs. “Mr. Morarity used his position of trust to gain access to sensitive intellectual property, then shared that content online and incurred large-scale losses to the owner of that property,” Fike said. “The theft of intellectual property—in this case, major motion pictures—discourages creative incentive and affects the average American making ends meet in the entertainment industry.”
Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Source: Ars Technica – Leaker fined .2 million for uploading screener of The Revenant
Yesterday, we asked you, the Gizmodo readers, what problems you’re having with the iPhone 7
so far. We’ve received tons of emails so far, and we’re still taking submissions so email me. The most annoying issue to date appears to be problems with the new phone’s Bluetooth connectivity.
Source: Gizmodo – The iPhone 7’s Bluetooth Is Totally Screwed Up for Some Users
This is the 2017 Dragon Sex Calendar, a monthly wall calendar featuring steamy scenes of dragons doing it or about to be doing it. It’s the perfect gift for absolutely every single person on your shopping list. Don’t even bother going to the mall, just buy a ton of these. And you know what the best part is? Even if somebody else has the same idea, a person can never have too many Dragon Sex Calendars. I want one in the kitchen, one in my home office, one in the garage, one for my cubicle at work, I’m thinking about hanging one from the rearview mirror in my car, shit, I might even staple one to my belly so I can peek down my shirt collar for a little pick-me-up no matter where I am. Dragons and dinosaurs are cousins, after all.
Keep going for several more shots.
Source: Geekologie – Finally, The Dragon Sex Wall Calendar You’ve Been Waiting For
Back in the mid to late-90’s, Naomi Chiba expressed her die-hard Nintendo fan love in the pages of Nintendo Power magazine. And many young Nintendo fans, myself included, looked forward to seeing her latest drawings.
Source: io9 – Back In The ’90s, Nintendo Power Helped A Shy Fan Show Her Envelope Art To The World
Back in the mid to late-90’s, Naomi Chiba expressed her die-hard Nintendo fan love in the pages of Nintendo Power magazine. And many young Nintendo fans, myself included, looked forward to seeing her latest drawings.
Source: Kotaku – Nintendo Power Helped A Shy Fan Show Her Art To The World
We’ve been throwing out money challenges all year long. This month, we challenged you to find a cheaper cellphone plan. How’d you do?
Source: LifeHacker – How’d You Do During the September Money Challenge?
(credit: Photo illustration by Aurich Lawson)
Today, September 30, Netflix releases its original documentary, Amanda Knox. The film features the now exonerated suspects and the prosecutor who charged them as the piece looks back at a murder trial that grabbed headlines worldwide. As such, we’re resurfacing our piece from October 2011 that examined how DNA evidence put Knox in jail before ultimately rescuing her.
If you watch crime dramas, you’ll be forgiven for the impression that DNA evidence makes an airtight case. And if you do have that impression, you might be confused about the internationally famous case of American Amanda Knox, convicted of murdering her British roommate in Perugia, Italy in 2007. After all, the prosecution’s case was based on DNA evidence; Knox’s genetic fingerprints were found by Italian police on the handle of a kitchen knife, which also had the victim’s DNA on the blade.
But not all DNA evidence is created equal—and Knox walked free last week from an Italian jail after scientists savaged the forensic evidence against her as being wholly unreliable. How did DNA analysis go so wrong?
Read 33 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Source: Ars Technica – How weak DNA evidence railroaded—and then rescued—Amanda Knox
October is National Bullying Prevention month, and as part of their seventh annual initiative to promote awareness, Cartoon Network has announced that it’s recruiting some of its most beloved shows for a month-long block of special episodes to encourage kids to stand up to bullying.
Source: io9 – Steven Universe, Teen Titans Go!, and More Are Teaming Up For New Anti-Bullying Episodes
By Rachel Cericola
This post was done in partnership with The Wirecutter, a buyer’s guide to the best technology. Read the full article here.
After spending over 10 hours pouring water, mopping it up, and changing wet socks to test the performance…
Source: Engadget – The best smart leak detector
Grab the popcorn and pull up a seat, this just got interesting. Attorneys general from four states have filed a lawsuit in an attempt to block the upcoming internet transition saying the move requires congressional authorization.
If you thought the battle over whether or not the “keys” to the internet would be handed over to an international governing body might be over quickly, we’ve got some bad news. Attorneys general from Texas, Arizona, Oklahoma and Nevada filed a lawsuit this week in an attempt to block the Obama Administration’s plan to cede control of the internet to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in October. The group argues that President Obama must get Congressional approval before “giving away government property.”
Comments
Source: [H]ardOCP – States Sue To Block White House Plan For Internet Transition
If cord cutting is costing the cable industry this much money, why aren’t they doing anything about it? You would think that cable companies would be scrambling to make people want to keep cable versus cord-cutting.
Pay-TV providers could lose nearly $1 billion in revenue as 800,000 customers cut the cord during the next 12 months, according to a new study from the firm cg42. The results, which are based on an online survey of 1,119 U.S. customers, estimates that pay-TV providers could lose about $1,248 per cord-cutter annually. That’s because the average cord-cutter saves $104 a month—about 56% of their bill—from dropping cable TV.
Comments
Source: [H]ardOCP – Cord-Cutting Could Cost Pay TV Industry Billion in a Year
If you’re not careful, photography can become a black hole of never-ending accessories and camera gear that you can never escape. You don’t always need to bring along an entire studio’s worth of gear to get a great shot, and Betabrand is making it even easier to travel light with a new camera bag featuring a reflector built right in.
Source: Gizmodo – There’s a Reflector Built Right Into this Camera Bag
Some superheroes’ personalities change over time, especially when many creators work on them over decades of publishing history. But this also creates a multiplicity of possible interpretations for these characters, too. Let’s see what the most telling moments from Luke Cage’s long superhero career actually say about him as a person.
Source: io9 – 15 Comic Books That Show What Kind of Man Luke Cage Is
Mazin Sidahmed and Nicky Woolf, reporting for The Guardian: A male Saudi Arabian teenager has been arrested in Riyadh over a series of online videos of conversations between him and a female Californian streaming-video star that went viral. A Riyadh police spokesperson, Colonel Fawaz Al-Mayman, said the teenager, known online as Abu Sin, was arrested on Sunday for engaging in “unethical behaviour” in videos with Christina Crockett, a popular broadcaster on the conversational live-streaming site YouNow. Abu Sin’s real name is not known. “His videos received many comments and many of the commenters of the general public demanded for him to be punished for his actions,” Al-Maymann added, according to the Saudi Gazette. The two amassed thousands of fans on the YouNow network, and later on YouTube after videos of the two speaking were uploaded there. The videos featured Abu Sin — a nickname given to him for his broken teeth — and Crockett communicating despite their significant language barriers. The popularity of the videos of the two of them surprised Crockett, she told the Guardian in an interview. As a broadcaster on YouNow, she can invite her fans to join her broadcasts on split-screen, which is known as “guesting.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Saudi Arabian Teen Arrested For Online Videos With American Blogger
Most NES games do not hold up very well, but that won’t stop me from getting excited over the Mini-NES, a palm-sized device from Nintendo that gives you 30 classic games for $60. Today’s news: It’ll come with save states, digital manuals, and a selection of graphical settings.
Source: Kotaku – Some Good News And Bad News About The Mini-NES
The USB Implementers Forum this week published the USB Audio Device Class 3.0 specification, which standardizes audio over USB Type-C interface. The new spec enables hardware makers to eliminate traditional 3.5mm mini-jacks from their devices and use USB-C ports to connect headsets and other audio equipment. Makers of peripherals can also build their audio solutions, which use USB-C instead of traditional analog connectors. Developers of the standard hope that elimination of mini-jacks will help to make devices slimmer, smarter and less power hungry.
The industry, led by Intel and some other companies, has been mulling about replacing the traditional 3.5mm mini-jack connector for some time now. The main motives for replacement were necessity to simplify internal architecture of devices by removing analog and some audio processing components from the inside (which leads to further miniaturization), minimize the number of external connectors, improve power management as well as to add smart features to headsets and other audio equipment. We discussed USB Type-C Audio Technology briefly earlier this year and mentioned that this isnot the first time that the industry has tried to use USB instead of the good-old mini-jack. The important difference between contemporary initiative and attempts in the past is the fact that today the primary goal is to replace the 3.5mm jack in portable devices.
As reported, the USB Audio Device Class 3.0 specification supports both analog and digital audio. Analog audio is easy to implement and it does not impact data transfers and other functionality of USB-C cables since it uses the two secondary bus (SBU) pins. Some device makers may find analog audio feature of the standard as a relatively simple way to add certain smart capabilities to their headsets without major redesign of hosts. While analog USB-C audio will not help to shrink dimensions of portables, it could be particularly useful for non-mobile devices, where miniaturization is not crucial, but where port space is at a premium or where additional features either make sense (infotainment, sport equipment, etc.) or are fundamental (VR HMDs).
The USB ADC 3.0 defines minimum interoperability across analog and digital devices in order to avoid confusion of end-users because of incompatibility. In fact, all ADC 3.0-compliant hosts should support the so-called headset adapter devices, which allow to connect analog headsets to USB-C. However, digital audio is one of the primary reasons why companies like Intel wanted to develop the USB-C audio tech on the first place, hence, expect them to promote it.
According to the USB ADC 3.0 standard, digital USB-C headphones will feature special multi-function processing units (MPUs), which will, to a large degree, define the feature set and quality of headsets. The MPUs will handle host and sink synchronization (this is a key challenge for digital USB audio), digital-to-analog conversion, low-latency active noise cancellation, acoustic echo canceling, equalization, microphone automatic gain control, volume control and others. Such chips will also contain programmable amplifiers and pre-amplifiers, which are currently located inside devices. Besides, USB ADC 3.0-compatible MPUs will also support USB Audio Type-III and Type-IV formats (the latest compressed formats), but will retain compatibility with formats supported by ADC 1.0 and 2.0. Finally, among the mandated things set to be supported by USB-C Audio devices are new Power Domains (allows devices to put certain domains in sleep mode when not in use) as well as BADD (basic audio device definition) 3.0 features for saving power and simplified discovery and management of various audio equipment (each type of devices has its own BADD profile).
Over the past few months, Conexant has introduced three USB-C Audio MPUs (1, 2) for headsets, docking stations and other equipment. Assuming that these chips are compliant with the USB ADC 3.0 specs from a hardware standpoint, and the software is ready, actual devices featuring USB-C Audio could arrive in the coming months. Pricing of the first USB ADC 3.0-compliant MPUs is unknown, but in general MPU ICs do not cost too much. Moreover, as developers adopt smaller process technologies and a larger number of such chips hit the market, their prices are going to depreciate. In the end, it will be interesting to see where digital headphone prices end up. The MPUs will definitely add to the total bill of materials for a set of headphones, but at the same time they add new functionality as well, so the big question is how manufacturers then factor all of that into device pricing.
A number of companies, including Apple and LeEco, have already introduced smartphones that do not use traditional mini-jacks, and Google added support for USB DAC devices to Android over a year ago. The finalization of the USB ADC 3.0 spec, introduction of USB-C audio ICs, as well as design decisions of smartphone makers demonstrate that the industry is trying to eliminate 3.5mm jacks from mobile devices. The big question is whether the rest of the industry plans to do the same. It is true that portables are primary devices for music listening for many people. However, there are tens of applications which still rely on analog connectors, and hundreds of millions of people who use them either to consume or create content. To eradicate 3.5mm jacks completely, USB-C Audio promoters will have to work with thousands of vendors and this takes time. Consequently, it is too early to say that this is the end for the good-old mini-jack.
Images by Conexant, USB IF.
Source: AnandTech – USB-IF Publishes Audio over USB Type-C Specifications
While Linux 4.9 will not officially open for development until next week, the DRM-Next code is ready to roll with all major feature work having been committed by the different open-source Direct Rendering Manager drivers. In this article is some preliminary testing of this DRM-Next code as of 29 September when testing various AMD GPUs with the Radeon and AMDGPU DRM drivers.
Source: Phoronix – Early Benchmarks Of The Linux 4.9 DRM-Next Radeon/AMDGPU Drivers
