Gone but never forgotten, Quentin Coldwater continues to leave echoes on the latest season of The Magicians. Now it’s Alice and Eliot’s turn to take their final steps toward healing in what originally felt like a weird, unlikely team-up. But by the end, you realize it may have been the most natural and necessary thing…
Source: io9 – In a Powerful Episode of The Magicians, Eliot and Alice Try to Pick Up the ‘Beautiful Pieces’
The high end 2-in-1 notebook market is pretty crowded with entrants from Microsoft, Dell, Lenovo, HP, ASUS and others. As a result, it’s pretty tough to make a convertible laptop that stands out from the rest. HP’s doing its best, however, with its new Elite Dragonfly line of lightweight, 2-in-1 hybrid PCs. What we have on hand today…
Source: Hot Hardware – HP Elite Dragonfly Review: A Super Stylish 2-In-1 Laptop
Nintendo may have take a swing and a miss with the Wii U, which failed to recapture the magic of the Wii and ranks as the company’s worst selling console of all time, but the same is not true of the Switch. It continues to sell like gangbusters—Nintendo sold an additional 10.81 million Switch systems during the last quarter, and 52.48 million
Source: Hot Hardware – Nintendo Switch Cumulative Sales Finally Surpass Legendary SNES
Google has announced that it will be making its Nest Thermostat smarter by adding new features to the device. Specifically, it has begun testing a new feature that is designed to alert homeowners to issues with the heating and cooling system. The feature will learn how to identify unusual patterns related to the HVAC system in the home and
Source: Hot Hardware – Google’s Nest Thermostat Can Now Warn You If Your HVAC Is Failing
As part of my role as a senior product marketing manager at an enterprise software company with an open source development model, I publish a regular update about open source community, market, and industry trends for product marketers, managers, and other influencers. Here are five of my and their favorite articles from that update.
Source: LXer – What 2020 brings for the developer, and more industry trends
Sometimes your computer breaks. It happens. You spill something, or drop something, or you try to boot up and nothing happens. Many of us resolve the issue with a liberal use of Google, and others take the failing device to a person trained to fix computers. And some people thoroughly screw up their device trying to…
Source: Gizmodo – Five of the Worst Ways People Have Tried to Fix Their Computers
As of this writing, 4,726 non-merge changesets have been pulled into the
mainline repository for the 5.6 development cycle. That is a relatively
slow start by contemporary kernel standards, but it still is enough to
bring a number of new features, some of which have been pending for years,
into the mainline. Read on for a summary of the changes pulled in the
early part of the 5.6 merge window.
Source: LWN.net – [$] The 5.6 merge window opens
Australia just can’t seem to catch a break. The Bureau of Meteorology issued a severe weather update Thursday noting that the current heat wave that began on the northwestern part of the continent earlier this week is making its way southeast, toward the region where the bushfires continue to burn.
Source: Gizmodo – An Intense Heat Wave Has Fire Danger Rising Again in Australia
We’re all a little Neanderthal. That’s the conclusion of a study that used a new statistical technique to revise estimates of the degree to which modern humans have retained Neanderthal DNA. The research suggests that even people of African descent have Neanderthal heritage, something that was previously in doubt.
Source: Gizmodo – All Humans Are a Little Bit Neanderthal, According to New Research
The rumors of GM resurrecting the Hummer were on the mark. Its GMC brand has teased the rebirth of the Hummer as an all-electric truck, with a full reveal due on May 20th. The company isn’t showing much of the EV at this stage, but it’s already willi…
Source: Engadget – GMC will revive the Hummer as a 1,000HP electric truck
Ian Jackson posted a note to the xen-announce mailing list with the sad news that Xen community manager and project advisory board member Lars Kurth has died. “I’m very sad to inform you that Lars Kurth passed away earlier this
week. Many of us regarded Lars as a personal friend, and his loss is a
great loss to the Xen Project.
We plan to have a tribute to Lars on the XenProject blog in the near
future. Those who are attending FOSDEM may wish to attend the short
tribute we plan for Sunday morning:
https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/vai_memory_of_lars_kurth/“
Source: LWN.net – Lars Kurth RIP
Enlarge / An artist’s concept of how Gremlins would fill the skies, launched from manned motherships. (credit: DARPA)
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has been conducting research into a number of types of swarming drones that could be used on the battlefield. The latest of these is the “Gremlins” program—an effort to build relatively low-cost unmanned aircraft that can be launched from a “mothership” transport aircraft and then be recovered by the mothership after their mission is complete.
This past week, the Defense Department conducted the first airborne launch test for the Dynetics X-61A Gremlins Air Vehicle, a jet-powered drone that can be launched from the rotary weapons bays of the B-1 and B-52, from wing pylons, or from a C-130—and then recovered by a C-130 equipped with a docking cable and a crane-like recovery arm.
A DARPA video describing the Gremlins program.
The first flight of the X-61A took place in November, but the test this week—at the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah—was the first air launch of the drone. While the 101-minute flight was successful, the parachute system intended to allow for a soft ground landing failed, and the drone was destroyed in the unexpected hard landing that followed.
Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Source: Ars Technica – DOD launches swarming drone in test of C-130 “drone mothership” concept
Directed by Sean Dacanay, edited by Jeremy Smolik. Transcript is still in progress and will be ready in the next few hours.
In December, we ran a “War Stories” video on the Oddworld series, an unusual 90s-era adventure/platformer title that sees the player inhabiting the role of escaped factory slave Abe in his quest to avoid being turned into canned food. Filmed with the help of Oddworld creator Lorne Lanning, the video turned out to be very popular—doubtless because Lanning makes for a damn compelling interview subject.
We’ve gotten a lot of feedback on the video since it aired, primarily asking for more Lorne, and so we’re going to try a bit of an experiment: rather than try to scrub through the original and pull out some more highlights, we’ve just exported the whole nearly-three-hour shoot for you guys.
Highlights for the full interview here include a fuller origin story for Abe, crazy stories from Lorne’s father about disappearing world leaders and famous people on Arctic submarines, and some discussion about drug-fueled motion graphics design.
Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Source: Ars Technica – An extended interview with Oddworld’s creator, Lorne Lanning
The plan to ban private cars from Market Street — one of the city’s busiest and most dangerous downtown thoroughfares — enjoys a remarkable level of local support. From a report: In a city known for stunning vistas, San Francisco’s Market Street offers a notoriously ugly tangle of traffic. Cars and delivery trucks vie with bikes and pedestrians along this downtown corridor, as buses and a historic streetcar clatter through the mix. Dedicated lanes for transit and bikes end abruptly several blocks from the street’s terminus at the edge of the San Francisco Bay. But the vehicular frenzy is ending, in part: Starting Wednesday, private vehicles — meaning both passenger automobiles and for-hire ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft — may no longer drive down Market, east of 10th Street. Only buses, streetcars, traditional taxis, ambulances, and freight drop-offs are still allowed. The closure to private vehicle traffic heralds the start of a new era for the city’s central spine, and perhaps for San Francisco at large, as it joins cities around the world that are restricting cars from downtown centers.
“We need to do better than use Market as a queuing place for the Bay Bridge,” said Jeffrey Tumlin, the newly arrived executive director of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. “Today represents the way the world is finally changing how it thinks about the role of transportation in cities.” After decades of debate, the vision for a car-free Market Street has arrived at a remarkable level of support among activists, politicians, planners, and businesses. (Especially compared to the rancor and legal challenges that greeted New York City’s long-delayed effort to create a car-free busway along 14th Street in Manhattan.) In October, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s board of directors voted unanimously in support of a $600 million “Better Market Street” capital construction plan. Ground is set to break on construction for a protected bikeway, repaved sidewalk, fresh streetscaping, and updated streetcar infrastructure by the start of 2021.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – The Spine of San Francisco Is Now Car-Free
This is a CBS news video from Altadena, California of a 69-year old woman (*Italian chef kiss* great age) being snatched by a helicopter rescuer just as she lets go of the cliff she’s been hanging on to. Obviously, this woman is not going to be bringing home any gold medals in cliffhanging. Also, as far as exercise goes I’m thinking maybe walking around the mall before the stores open might be more her speed.
Keep going for the full video, including the news anchor getting “moments ago” and “months ago” confused.
Source: Geekologie – Just In The Nick Of Time: Dramatic Rescue Of Woman Hanging Onto Cliff
In 5 To Watch, writers from The A.V. Club look at the latest streaming TV arrivals, each making the case for a favored episode. Alternately, they can offer up recommendations inspired by a theme. In this installment: With BoJack Horseman ending this week, The A.V. Club digs into the episodes that gave each of the main…
Source: Kotaku – 5 episodes of BoJack Horseman that each spotlight a main character
We’ve reviewed a lot of products on Engadget, from drones to automobiles, but the Sonos-powered SYMFONISK were the first IKEA products we’ve officially ranked and scored. The two models of speakers — one that doubles as a lamp and the other designed…
Source: Engadget – How would you score IKEA’s Sonos-powered smart speaker?
As someone who writes about parenting a lot and with the exact goal of helping to make all aspects of this monstrous, daunting task a little easier, I did a little double-take when I saw this headline in Today’s Parent: Does Parenting Even Matter? It better matter! Otherwise, why am I sitting here writing about potty…
Source: LifeHacker – How You Parent Probably Doesn’t Matter as Much as You Think
George Monbiot says you don’t set targets in an emergency, you act.
Source: TreeHugger – Forget 2030 or targets; we need to reduce our carbon emissions right now.
In 1849, Ephraim Wales Bull strolled through rows of wild grapes in his Concord, Massachusetts yard, each plant’s bare limbs spread out as if shrugging. After more than a decade experimenting with Isabella grapes that wouldn’t ripen outdoors and musty-tasting wild grapes that ripened too late, most people would’ve…
Source: Gizmodo – The Agony and the Ecstasy of the Concord Grape
