When my son started kindergarten a few years ago, I vowed to myself to draw a cute little picture on his foil-wrapped sandwich every day. Just a little something to remind him of home, to let him know I was thinking of him, to make him smile or feel loved.
Source: LifeHacker – Write Notes on Your Kid’s Back-To-School Pencils
With the release of Qualcomm’s surprise Snapdragon 855 Plus SoC comes the announcement of new gaming smartphones using the new chip. The first out of the gate was the ASUS ROG Phone II, and today we’re seeing the announcement of the Xiaomi Black Shark 2 Pro.
In addition to the Snapdragon 855 Plus – which includes loftier CPU and GPU speeds
Source: Hot Hardware – Black Shark 2 Pro Gaming Phone Attacks With Snapdragon 855 Plus And Bargain Price Tag
EA and Respawn are stepping up their esports ambitions for Apex Legends. They’ve announced a Preseason Invitational that will represent the largest volume of talent amassed for a competitive Apex Legends event, with 80 teams of three (that’s 240 peop…
Source: Engadget – EA’s largest ‘Apex Legends’ tournament yet starts September 13th
A new study looks at the non-lethal effects of seabirds’ plastic ingestion.
Source: TreeHugger – Even when it doesn’t kill them, plastic hurts seabirds
You don’t have to make do with on-demand video if you watch Hulu on an Android TV device. Hulu is rolling out support for its Live TV service to Google-powered devices in early August, including TV sets from Sony and Hisense as well as set-tops like…
Source: Engadget – Hulu’s live TV service is coming to Android TV
An anonymous reader shares a report: More than two years ago, Facebook revealed it was working on a project for typing words onto a computer right from your brain, without requiring invasive surgery to make it work. The company has been working with several universities on the effort, including the University of California, San Francisco. Facebook helped pay for UCSF researchers to study whether electrodes placed in the brain could help us learn to “decode” speech from brainwaves in real time. As it turns out, this is possible: A study published Tuesday showed that researchers could instantly see — as text on a computer screen — a word or phrase that a participant was thinking from brain activity, as long as it was a response to a limited set of questions. The study includes three epilepsy patients voluntarily implanted with electrodes.
Facebook is also footing the bill for a new, year-long study that UCSF is currently conducting where it will try to use brain activity to help a person who can’t speak communicate. The social network hopes the efforts could help reveal which brain signals are key for that non-invasive wearable that it’s planning for in the years ahead. “We expect that to take upwards of 10 years,” Mark Chevillet, a research director at Facebook Reality Labs who runs its brain-computer interface group, told CNN Business of the overall project. “This is a long-term research program.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Facebook Gets Closer To Letting You Type With Your Mind
The Nissan Leaf Plus starts at $36,550. [credit:
Jonathan Gitlin ]
Electric vehicles are the future of driving, even if it might take us a few more decades to get there. They were also the past of driving; early automobiles, as often as not, ran on battery power, and even Henry Ford’s wife eschewed one of his creations for a more sophisticated European-made EV. It’s just that right now, EVs aren’t really the present of driving. I’m sure global EV sales will set another new record for year-on-year growth, but 2018’s banner year still represented just 2.1% of global light-passenger vehicle sales.
Of course, people can only buy electric cars if someone builds them. And it has taken a combination of draconian European carbon fines and diesel’s utter disgrace for the world’s biggest car makers to truly catch that religion. But there were some early converts. Like the charismatic car company CEO who bet big on mass-produced EVs and lithium-ion batteries, earning a description from Wired as “either a brilliant visionary or crazy as a loon.”
No, not that one, although I did discover that quote reading Edward Niedermeyer’s forthcoming book on Tesla. I am referring to Carlos Ghosn, former CEO of Nissan and Renault, who wanted his companies building a half-million EVs a year—back in 2013. Obviously, that plan didn’t quite work out, but Nissan sold almost 300,000 Leafs (Leaves?) by the time the second-generation Leaf went on sale in 2017.
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Source: Ars Technica – Nissan’s bigger-battery BEV—the 2019 Leaf Plus review
A system that can distinguish phonons, the smallest units of sound, marks an important milestone in the development of more advanced quantum computers.
Source: Gizmodo – Researchers Build Quantum Vibration Sensor That Can Measure the Smallest Units of Sound
One of the more jarring experiences you’ll encounter when updating your iPad to Apple’s iPadOS 13 this fall—including having to call it that from now on—are the slightly smaller icons now gracing your iPad’s Home screen and pages.
Source: LifeHacker – How to Change the Size of Your App Icons in iPadOS 13
Most glass buildings are a problem, but just banning them is the wrong solution.
Source: TreeHugger – Forget about banning glass towers, instead demand tough standards like Passivhaus
August’s Xbox Live Games with Gold are a nice mix of action and racing. As always, these games are only “free” if you have an active Xbox Live Gold subscription.
Source: Kotaku – Gears Of War 4 Headlines August’s Xbox Live Games With Gold
When I was in college, I had an adviser who kept telling me to focus on the process, not the product. I wasn’t very good at following that advice, in part because I didn’t really understand what it meant.
Source: LifeHacker – Understand Whether You Should Focus on the Process or the Product
Nintendo Switch AC Adapter | $16 | Walmart
Source: Gizmodo – Play It Safe With the Official Nintendo Switch AC Adapter, Now Nearly Half Off
Enlarge / The Antarctic Ozone Hole on September 13, 2014, as observed by the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) on the Aura satellite. (credit: NASA)
Good news for the ozone layer was widely reported in November 2018: global efforts to phase out ozone-depleting substances had resulted in a slow but persistent recovery. Should that continue, even the worst damage could be on track to be repaired in the next 50 years or so.
But all that good news is not necessarily going to continue. A paper in Nature Geoscience this week identifies quite a few possible spanners in the works, all of which could delay ozone recovery by anything from years to decades.
Roughly 90% of the ozone in our atmosphere can be found between 15km and 35km above the Earth’s surface, in a band that plays a crucial role in absorbing harmful ultraviolet sunlight. In 1985, scientists detected dropping ozone levels in the stratosphere—the layer of the atmosphere that contains the ozone layer.
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Source: Ars Technica – While ozone is recovering, we’re doing things to prolong the process
On Kickstarter: The “Elk” SBC is designed for a decentralized-web IoT applications using blockchain. It runs Linux on an Allwinner H3 and Arduino on an STM32 and supports Ethereum, Whisper, and IPFS. A Cairo, Egypt based startup called Elk has won Kickstarter funding for a tiny (55 x 25.5mm) IoT development board designed for decentralized […]
Source: LXer – Open-spec board supports blockchain-based IoT with Ethereum
That technology might be bad for our health, that it’s manipulating us, isn’t a revelatory take, but it’s one that lawmakers are increasingly becoming intimately entwined with. And a new bill wants to prevent social networks from exploiting us.
Source: Gizmodo – Senator Moves to Make Autoplay Videos and Infinite Scroll Illegal
A new bill, sponsored by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), targets snapstreaks, YouTube autoplay, and endless scrolling that, the bill alleges, are designed in a way to make services “addictive.” Reader Zorro writes: Hawley’s Social Media Addiction Reduction Technology Act, or the SMART Act, would ban these features that work to keep users on platforms longer, along with others, like Snapstreaks, that incentivize the continued use of these products. If approved, the Federal Trade Commission and Health and Human Services could create similar rules that would expire after three years unless Congress codified them into law. “Big tech has embraced a business model of addiction,” Hawley said. “Too much of the ‘innovation’ in this space is designed not to create better products, but to capture more attention by using psychological tricks that make it difficult to look away.”
Deceptive design played an enormous part in last week’s FTC settlement with Facebook, and Hawley’s bill would make it unlawful for tech companies to use dark patterns to manipulate users into opting into services. For example, “accept” and “decline” checkboxes would need to be the same font, color, and size to help users make better, more informed choices. “Social media companies deploy a host of tactics designed to manipulate users in ways that undermines their wellbeing,” said Josh Golin, executive director of campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – New Bill Would Ban Autoplay Videos and Endless Scrolling
These are the Burrito Tortilla Blankets created by CASOFU and available on Amazon. The blankets are available in nine different burrito prints and four different sizes (47-inch, 60-inch, 71-inch and 80-inch — not all burritos are available in every size), and cost between $20 and $25. That’s reasonable. Just FYI though — several of the designs’ toasted areas could be mistaken for food or poop stains (particularly the one being modeled by the first girl on the couch — aka burrito ‘b’ style, picture below). I’d remember that before inviting someone over to Netflix and chill. “I still remember the first time I came over to your place.” Oh honey — the chocolate syrup stains on my duvet? “Were they though?” No….
Keep going for a bunch more shots.
Source: Geekologie – I’m A Burrito!: Finally, Some Decent Large, Round Blankets Printed To Look Like Flour Tortillas
tcpdump is a network and packet analysis utility in linux/unix OSes for performing network and packet sniffing
Source: Linux Today – Network And Packet Analysis Using tcpdump Command With Examples
DC Universe’s Young Justice: Outsiders has been doing important work you don’t always see in DC’s comics, spotlighting its characters of color and queer heroes in a story that brings them to the forefront and doesn’t downplay their identities even though they aren’t integral to the show’s plot.
Source: io9 – Young Justice: Outsiders Would Like to Remind You That Its Hottest Hero Is Queer
