The latest Doctor Who Christmas special doesn’t look to have wowed audiences in the UK, but it turns out Americans love combining their Doctors with superheroes. It’s the most-watched episode in BBC America history.
Source: Gizmodo – Doctor Who Superhero Special Is a Smash in the US, But Might Bomb in Britain
You are in luck if you are itching to upgrade your Surface Pro 4, as its successor is due out within months. One of its major selling points may be an Ultra HD display, although I’m not a fan of that decision, with it being a smallish device that should have just kept resolution the same for better performance.
Pegatron will be manufacturing the device. Pegatron is similar to the more infamous Foxconn and they’ve become the preferred manufacturer for a number of other products like the iPhone. The report also says that the Microsoft Surface Pro 5 will feature an ultra-HD (3840 × 2160p) display which is a vast improvement over the Surface Pro 4’s 2736 x 1824p display. This change will see an increase in PPI from 267 to 358 representing a 34% improvement. We may also see a magnetic charging stylus on this generation of the Surface Pro. The rumor further indicates that the launch date for the Surface Pro 5 will be in the first quarter of 2017, which could be as late as March.
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Source: [H]ardOCP – Microsoft Surface Pro 5 Could Arrive Before March, May Have 4K Display
Enlarge (credit: Bezier Games)
Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games. Check out our complete board gaming coverage at cardboard.arstechnica.com—and let us know what you think.
Designer Ted Alspach has something of a reputation when it comes to games about building things. In 2012, he released the city-building game Suburbia, arguably board gaming’s closest equivalent to the iconic video game SimCity. 2014’s follow-up Castles of Mad King Ludwig applied a similar approach to castle construction, and the two titles met with praise from players and critics alike. Now Alspach has returned to similar thematic ground with Colony, a game set in the aftermath of a devastating nanotech apocalypse.
If you’re looking for mechanical similarities to Alspach’s previous tile-laying city builders, though, you won’t find them here. Colony is a card-and-dice game co-created with Japanese designers Toryo Hojo and Yoshihisa Nakatsu. Players control rival settlements attempting to rise from the ashes of civilization, using cards as buildings and dice as the resources required to construct them.
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Source: Ars Technica – Colony: City-building after the nanotech apocalypse
Polarizing filters can be an essential part of a photography tool set, as they suppress glare, make blue skies pop, and offer an additional way to control the light in your scene. And if you have some old electronics that you can mine for spare parts, you might already have a filter.
Source: LifeHacker – Make a DIY Polarizing Filter From an Old LCD Screen
As 2016 comes to a close, many people will countdown the seconds until midnight with friends and family. For some it will be a party, for others, it will be a burial—but they’ll have their loved ones close to experience it together. But many people will be alone, and Facebook has just the thing to bring some New Year cheer to those sadly staring at their news feed.
Source: Gizmodo – Facebook Celebrates New Year’s Eve in the Saddest Way
Today on In Case You Missed It: We are rounding up some favorite stories from the year before it’s lost to us all. When next you see ICYMI, it’ll be from CES.
As always, please share any interesting tech or science videos you find by using the…
Source: Engadget – ICYMI: Say farewell to 2016 with these favorite stories
For those craving some more end-of-year Linux distribution benchmarks, this morning I finished carrying out a fresh Linux distro comparison focusing upon the Intel OpenGL performance when making use of “Skylake” Iris Pro hardware. For this New Year’s Eve benchmarking fun was Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, Antergos, and Clear Linux…
Source: Phoronix – Skylake Iris Pro Graphics: Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, Antergos, Clear Linux Benchmarks
One month from today, KDE Plasma 5.9 will officially meet the world…
Source: Phoronix – KDE Plasma 5.9 Being Released In One Month With Many New Features
ESO
The best observatory in the world is arguably divided among three sites in northern Chile—La Silla, Paranal, and Chajnantor. Each location in the high, arid Atacama desert offers excellent dark and clear skies for the European Southern Observatory’s suite of telescopes. At 2,635 meters in elevation Paranal boasts the best instruments, with four 8.2-meter telescopes combining to make up the Very Large Telescope.
Now more than 50 years old, the observatory has played a principal or significant role in a number of major astronomical landmarks, including the discovery of dark energy, finding Proxima b around Proxima Centauri, the observation of stars orbiting the Milky Way Galaxy, and much more.
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Source: Ars Technica – Some perspective on our place in the Universe from the high Chilean desert
Apple’s AirPods launched to some seriously mixed reaction when they were unveiled a couple of months ago, but it’s seemed that since then, some have warmed up to the idea of having a cordless experience when listening to music. Many who’ve adopted AirPods early generally have good things to say about them – at least those who’ve managed to
Source: Hot Hardware – Next Gen Apple AirPods Could Adopt Magnetic Ear Loops To Stay Firmly In Place
A new Microsoft patent has been published that describes a system that would let its HoloLens glasses track small items like car keys, ultimately helping users find their lost belongings. What’s more is that the system can “monitor the status of objects without any instructions from users, keeping tabs on anything that’s important to their lives,” writes Adi Robertson via The Verge. From the report: The patent’s basic idea is pretty simple. HoloLens has outward-facing cameras that can make a spatial map of a room, and machine vision technology can identify or track specific objects in an image. So if, for example, you put your keys down on a table, HoloLens could hypothetically spot them through the camera and quietly note their position. When you’re about to leave the house, it could give you the keys’ last known location, even if they’ve since been covered up by a newspaper or slipped under a couch cushion. But what’s really interesting isn’t the idea of HoloLens tracking an object. It’s HoloLens learning what items matter to you and choosing what to follow, before you ever worry about losing something. To be clear, you could designate objects: one example has a traveler telling HoloLens to track their passport while abroad. In other cases, though, it could check to see how often you interact with an object, or when you move it around, and start tracking anything that hits a certain threshold.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Microsoft Patent Suggests HoloLens Could Keep Track of Your Small Items
A powerful Dremel, the best action camera, and TurboTax discounts lead off Saturday’s best deals.
Source: LifeHacker – The Best New Year’s Eve Deals: GoPro, TurboTax, Dremel, and More
Open-source game engine Godot has been working on a multi-month project to vastly improve (and largely rewrite) its 3D renderer to make it as great as its 2D renderer. This work is being done for the Godot 3.0 engine and so far this 3D renderer is seeing a lot of movement…
Source: Phoronix – Godot Continues Major Work On Its 3D Renderer For Release In 2017
If the recent releases of Kdenlive, OpenShot, Pitivi, and others haven’t satisfied your needs, perhaps you may want to try out the latest build of Avidemux…
Source: Phoronix – Avidemux Open-Source Video Editor Updated To End Out 2016
For those that don’t recall, VDENC is a low-power, high-performance video encode engine added originally to Intel Skylake hardware. That aforelinked article covers the big benefits of using VDENC and the patches published earlier this year for enabling this Intel video encode engine on Linux…
Source: Phoronix – AVC VDENC Video Encoding Enabled For Intel Broxton & Kabylake
At the end of last year was an update on MARS Replication System Still Being Worked On For Upstream Linux Kernel and like clock work, the German web hosting provider has issued another update on the in-development MARS replication system and is still hoping to mainline it, maybe next year…
Source: Phoronix – Germany’s 1&1 Still Working On MARS For The Linux Kernel, Still Hoping For Upstream
It looks as though we’ve come to the end of the road for Microsoft’s Lumia smartphone family. Microsoft has stopped selling the Windows 10 Mobile smartphones via the Microsoft Store, and there’s little chance that they will be restocked.
Earlier this year, during the launch of the Lumia 650, Microsoft made it clear that it would be the
Source: Hot Hardware – Microsoft Ends Sales Of All Lumia Windows 10 Mobile Devices From Microsoft Store
It would appear that Apple is having a tougher time than expected selling iPhone 7 models. This is in part due to a backlog of iPhone 6s models, which has supposedly led Apple to cut production of its flagship handset. As the story goes, Apple gave its suppliers a heads up that it will be slashing orders of its iPhone handsets by around 10
Source: Hot Hardware – Apple Allegedly Cuts iPhone 7 Production By 10 Percent Due To Sluggish Sales
On a snowy winter day in an idyllic Vermont town, Russian malware was discovered on a laptop associated with the state’s power utility. The code is generally associated with hacking operation known as Grizzly Steppe.
Burlington Electric discovered the malware code on laptop that fortunately was not connected to the organization’s grid systems.
Source: Hot Hardware – Russian Hacker Group Grizzly Steppe Accused Of Planting Malware On Vermont Utility Company’s Laptop
Foxconn was in the news recently for plans to “automate entire factories” in China, but the electronics manufacturing company has also announced plans with Sharp to build a $8.8 billion (61 million yuan) factory in China to produce liquid-crystal displays (LCDs). Reuters reports: Sakai Display Products Corp’s plant will be a so-called Gen-10.5 facility specializing in large-screen LCDs and will be operational by 2019, the company said at a signing event with local officials in Guangzhou on Friday. It said the plant will have capacity equating to 92 billion yuan a year. The heavy investment is aimed at increasing production to meet expected rising demand for large-screen televisions and monitors in Asia. Sakai Display Products Corp’s plans for the Guangzhou plant come as Hon Hai seeks to turn the joint venture into a subsidiary, investing a total of 15.1 billion yuan in the company. The venture will also sell 436,000 shares for 17.1 billion yuan to an investment co-owned by Hon Hai Chairman Terry Gou, giving Hon Hai a 53 percent interest in the business and lowering Sharp’s stake from to 26 percent from 40 percent.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Foxconn and Sharp Team Up To Build .8 Billion LCD Plant In China
