I’m back after a weekend away. Did you miss me? I had a wonderful birthday and vacation and now I return to judge your creations for our latest contest. I asked you folks to throw me some video game parties and most of you did just that.
Source: Kotaku – ‘Shop Contest: Happy Birthday, Winners!
A grieving police detective receives a mysterious call from the past in Don’t Let Go from Blumhouse Productions.
A cell phone connection serves as a link between the past and present for a police detective and his dead niece in Don’t Let Go, a new supernatural thriller from Blumhouse Productions that debuted at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival earlier this year. It’s a little bit Frequency, a little bit Looper, with a smidgen of good old-fashioned crime drama thrown in for good measure.
(Mild spoilers below.)
The film stars David Oyelowo (Selma) as Detective Jack Radcliff, who looks out for his young niece Ashley (Storm Reid, A Wrinkle in Time, Euphoria). Ashley’s father (and Jack’s brother), Garrett (Brian Tyree Henry, Atlanta, Joker), is bipolar with a history of drug and alcohol abuse, as well as the occasional bit of drug running. He’s been on the straight and narrow for several years now, but Jack still gives Ashley a cell phone so she can call him if she needs him—like when her dad forgets to pick her up from the movies after dark. One day Jack gets a panicked phone call from Ashley, and rushes to his brother’s house, only to find Garrett has shot his wife and daughter, and then himself, apparently in the midst of a manic episode. It’s ruled a murder/suicide, but something about the case feels wrong to Jack and he starts poking around, to the annoyance of his boss, Howard (Alfred Molina, Species, Da Vince Code).
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Source: Ars Technica – Part sci-fi thriller, part crime drama, Don’t Let Go is an understated gem
Someone from the Rust language governance team gave an interesting talk at this year’s Open Source Technology Summit. Josh Triplett (who is also a principal engineer at Intel), discussed “what Intel is contributing to bring Rust to full parity with C,” in a talk titled Intel and Rust: the Future of Systems Programming.
An anonymous reader quotes Packt:
Triplett believes that C is now becoming what Assembly was years ago. “C is the new Assembly,” he concludes. Developers are looking for a high-level language that not only addresses the problems in C that can’t be fixed but also leverage other exciting features that these languages provide. Such a language that aims to be compelling enough to make developers move from C should be memory safe, provide automatic memory management, security, and much more…
“Achieving parity with C is exactly what got me involved in Rust,” says Triplett. Triplett’s first contribution to the Rust programming language was in the form of the 1444 RFC, which was started in 2015 and got accepted in 2016. This RFC proposed to bring native support for C-compatible unions in Rust that would be defined via a new “contextual keyword” union…
He is starting a working group that will focus on achieving full parity with C. Under this group, he aims to collaborate with both the Rust community and other Intel developers to develop the specifications for the remaining features that need to be implemented in Rust for system programming. This group will also focus on bringing support for systems programming using the stable releases of Rust, not just experimental nightly releases of the compiler.
Last week Triplett posted that the FFI/C Parity working group “is in the process of being launched, and hasn’t quite kicked off yet” — but he promised to share updates when it does.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Intel Engineer Launches Working Group To Bring Rust ‘Full Parity With C’
Enlarge / You really can find anything in a stock image library: “Antennas of mobile cellular systems with Wi-Fi hot spot repeater and blue sky.” (credit: Just_One_Pic / Getty Images)
Cell phone signal boosters are powerful devices. Installed in a home or office, they can potentially amplify one signal bar into five. In rural areas with poor cell coverage, or in buildings where signals have trouble penetrating, they can be lifesavers, providing reliable access to communication networks and emergency services.
But boosters also have a dark side: If misconfigured or poorly manufactured, they can knock out service for everyone who happens to be nearby. That’s why the Federal Communications Commission began regulating the devices five years ago. Today, all consumer signal boosters sold and marketed in the United States must meet the agency’s strict technical standards. Doing so can get expensive, and many FCC-authorized boosters cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars. Ecommerce sites like Amazon offer cheaper options. The only problem is, they’re not always compliant.
The FCC requires booster manufacturers to get their products certified as safe, and it publishes each valid certification on its website. WIRED found a number of sellers offering boosters on Amazon that are not listed as certified by the FCC. Their models often cost less than $200, compared to $300 or more for FCC-certified versions. A number of them have been top sellers in the signal booster category, and some are promoted with a badge reading “Amazon’s Choice.”
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Source: Ars Technica – Unlicensed signal boosters get a boost from Amazon
The 5G phones on the market have usually been on the pricey side, including Samsung’s. You’ll spend a pretty penny if you want a Galaxy S10+ 5G or Note 10+ 5G in your pocket. You might not have to shell out quite so much going forward. Well-known…
Source: Engadget – Samsung’s first mid-tier 5G phone emerges in leak
To run Mac apps on Linux, you’ll need some sort of virtual machine or translation layer. You can either make use of Virtualbox, or Darling translation layer
Source: LXer – How to Run Mac Apps on Linux
Mario loves pipes. He travels in them, jumps on them and leaps over them. As a plumber, pipes and Mario are forever linked together. So let’s celebrate Mario and his wonderful pipes.
Source: Kotaku – Mario Maker Contest: Pipes,Pipes And More Pipes
The average American purportedly has more trust in Amazon than their own government, which makes recent reports on thousands of potentially unsafe products making their way onto the company’s online marketplace particularly terrifying.
Source: Gizmodo – Just How Bad is Amazon’s Banned Products Problem?
In 2017 several scientists co-signed a wager at the Aspen Center for Physics that a black hole wouldn’t be discovered between 55 and 130 solar masses.
They may have lost, reports the Atlantic:
Black-hole physicists have been excitedly discussing reports that the LIGO and Virgo gravitational-wave detectors recently picked up the signal of an unexpectedly enormous black hole, one with a mass that was thought to be physically impossible. “The prediction is no black holes, not even a few” in this mass range, wrote Stan Woosley, an astrophysicist at the University of California at Santa Cruz, in an email. “But of course we know nature often finds a way….”
Whereas most of the colliding black holes that wiggle LIGO’s and Virgo’s instruments probably originated as pairs of isolated stars (binary star systems being common in the cosmos), MIT’s Carl Rodriguez and his co-signers argued that a fraction of the detected collisions occur in dense stellar environments such as globular clusters. The black holes swing around in one another’s gravity, and sometimes they catch one another and merge, like big fish swallowing smaller ones in a pond. Inside a globular cluster, a 50-solar-mass black hole could merge with a 30-solar-mass one, for instance, and then the resulting giant could merge again. This second-generation merger is what LIGO/Virgo might have detected — “a lucky catch of the big fish in the pond.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Scientists Excited By Discovery of an Impossibly Large Black Hole
This is my show. It was made for me.
Source: Gizmodo – Toonami and Production IG Are Adapting Junji Ito’s Horror Classic Uzumaki
Instagram is working on a new feature that will give you the power to choose who can send you messages, based on what app researcher Jane Manchun Wong has discovered. Further, one of the options you can choose from is the ability to receive messages…
Source: Engadget – Instagram may help you curb DM spam on a public account
While it’s still difficult to predict exactly where
Hurricane Dorian will approach the coastal mainland of the United States, experts said
early Saturday that the storm’s forecast path had shifted east, meaning
it could travel north of Florida, either making landfall or remaining about 50 miles off the coast…
Source: Gizmodo – Hurricane Dorian’s Path Shifts East to Threaten Carolinas
We all float down here. Rumor has it that Fortnite will celebrate Halloween with an It: Chapter Two crossover. Several leaks were posted on Twitter that hint that the crossover is coming soon.
Data miners discovered sound bites labeled “Illinois Laugh” and they sound eerily like laugh of Pennywise the Dancing Clown. The data miners also
Source: Hot Hardware – Fortnite It: Chapter 2 Leaks Are Delightfully Creepy For The Next Fortnitemares Event
Manors are built to be haunted, so far as TV and film is concerned, and The Haunting of Bly Manor, Mike Flanagan’s awaited follow-up to The Haunting of Hill House, now has a cast to do the haunting.
Source: io9 – Here Are All the Casting Announcements for Netflix’s The Haunting of Bly Manor
“A type of intermittent fasting that calls for eating nothing one day, and then whatever a person wants the next, can be done safely for several months and comes with a number of health benefits, a study has found.”
An anonymous reader quotes Today.com:
Alternate day fasting improved cardiovascular markers, reducing blood pressure and heart rate after four weeks, researchers reported in Cell Metabolism on Tuesday. People who followed the plan for six months also had lower levels of LDL “bad” cholesterol and triglycerides compared to those who ate normally. Overall, they ate about 37% fewer calories, lost weight and had an “improved fat distribution,” reducing the fat in their trunk and abdomen by about 14% on average.
Researchers saw no adverse effects from alternate day fasting even after six months, concluding the strategy seems to be as beneficial as daily calorie restriction, but easier to stick with.
Humans can easily tolerate skipping food for an entire day, said Dr. Thomas Pieber, one of the study authors and chair of the department of internal medicine at the Medical University of Graz in Austria. “The truth is that our organism is ready to fast for much longer,” Pieber told TODAY. “Ten thousand or 100,000 years ago, we didn’t have breakfast, lunch and dinner and some cake in-between with our coffee. You just have to train your organism to get adjusted to that short-term fasting and after a few days, most people can adjust….”
One reason fasting may be so beneficial for the human body is that it can activate autophagy, a mechanism that helps to regenerate cells, Pieber said. The first two weeks can be a challenge, but hunger or the lightheadedness that can come with not eating for an entire day actually wasn’t a big issue for the participants after a while, Pieber noted. People often feel “very energetic” on fasting days, he added.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Intermittent Fasting May Be As Beneficial As Counting Calories
Free/Open Source software (FOSS) and (GNU/)Linux don’t quite change the world as much as they’re being changed by monopolies (software, hardware and entertainment) to suit their agenda and eliminate any remnants of freedom
Source: LXer – Linux is Not Free/Libre If DRM is Adopted and Open Source is Meaningless in the Age of Openwashing
I’m a sucker for those “On This Day” reminders from social media sites. Without fail, I’m delighted when Facebook resurfaces a picture I posted a decade ago of friends, and I like it when Instagram reminds me of a picture I posted a few years prior.
Source: LifeHacker – Rewatch the Most Popular YouTube Videos From Exactly a Decade Ago Using This Site
Sometimes space ninjas want to take a break from shooting and killing. Instead, they want to create sweet music. The latest Warframe update gives players that ability, adding a fully playable guitar-like instrument into the game.
Source: Kotaku – Warframe’s Latest Update Adds Playable Guitars
Some of the tech you like is about to get more expensive — at least for the companies that design them, if not you. True to earlier plans, the Trump administration has formally enacted a new round of tariffs against China-made products that will ta…
Source: Engadget – Tariffs hit Apple and other tech companies tomorrow
Wave723 shared this article from September’s issue of IEEE Spectrum about an usual project by a leading group of cognitive biologists and computer scientists:
Dubbed the Interspecies Internet, the project aims to provide intelligent animals such as elephants, dolphins, magpies, and great apes with a means to communicate among each other and with people online.
And through artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and other digital technologies, researchers hope to crack the code of all the chirps, yips, growls, and whistles that underpin animal communication.
Oh, and musician Peter Gabriel is involved. “We can use data analysis and technology tools to give non-humans a lot more choice and control,” the former Genesis frontman, dressed in his signature Nehru-style collar shirt and loose, open waistcoat, told IEEE Spectrum at the inaugural Interspecies Internet Workshop, held [in July] in Cambridge, Mass. “This will be integral to changing our relationship with the natural world.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – The Internet Is Coming To the Rest of the Animal Kingdom
