Kamen Rider might be one of the biggest tokusatsu shows around in Japan, but it’s taken a very long time for the series to get any traction in the U.S. Not that there weren’t attempts (we see you, very loveably bad Masked Rider), but it’s only been recently that classic Kamen Rider has been officially available…
Source: io9 – Kamen Rider’s Big End-of-Era Team-Up Is Coming to the West, Which Is a Great Sign
A backyard barbecue with the family may be as good as it gets for summer celebrations during a pandemic — thankfully, the tech for it is more affordable than before. Weber is selling its connected SmokeFire pellet grills for $200 off, dropping the EX…
Source: Engadget – Weber’s connected pellet grills are 0 off for July 4th
YouTube channel Things Made out of Cardboard designed this simple cardboard sculpture based on tensional integrity (tensegrity for short) to create the impression that part of it is levitating. There’s a bunk bed application here that somebody needs to get on right away. Does it seem safe? Of course not. But if millions of people have to be crushed when it inevitably fails, that’s a risk I’m willing to take just so I can pretend I’m sleeping in a floating bed.
Source: Geekologie – Floating cardboard sculpture using tensegrity
Enabling Chrome’s bottom tab strip.
Everyone reading this probably uses multiple tabs on a desktop computer, but on mobile, tab management can be tough. On and Android tablet, Chrome looks like a real browser with a top tab strip, but on a phone, you don’t get any kind of tab UI. There is a button that will take you to cascading UI of different Chrome windows, but a one-tap tab strip hasn’t existed on Chrome for phones—until now!
A new Chrome for Android experiment, first spotted by Android Police, will add a tab strip to the bottom of the Chrome window. Tabs take the form of site favicons, and just like on a real computer, a single tap will switch between tabs. The currently active tab gets a little close icon next to it, meaning that tapping the tab again will close it. An “X” button to the left will close the tab bar entirely, while a plus button on the right will open a new tab.
For now, the feature is in Chrome Beta for some people, and you’ll need to turn on a flag to enable it. To turn it on, paste chrome://flags/#enable-conditional-strip into the address bar, hit enter, enable the flag, and restart. Right now it can be kind of finicky to pop up at first. When I first open Chrome, sometimes I have to tap on the old window-switcher button to make the tab strip appear. This is just an experiment, and Android Police says it plainly doesn’t work for some people. So there is probably a server-side switch involved, too.
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Source: Ars Technica – Chrome for Android finally gets a bottom tab bar in new experiment
Apple developers have supposedly started receiving their Apple ARM transition kits, and now a few benchmark numbers of those dev kits have also appeared in the wild. Spotted by 9to5Mac, benchmarks for the Developer Transition Kit seemed to have surfaced on Geekbench, despite strict confidentiality clauses in the…
Source: Gizmodo – A Wild Apple ARM Benchmark Appears
Buying a TV can feel overwhelming, with dozens of models to choose from and a bunch of confusing specs rattling around your head. Couple that with a global pandemic ensuring you can’t even see these TVs in person before you buy, and you’ve got a tough call to make. If you’re on a strict budget, we’ll save you the…
Source: Kotaku – Build Out Your Penny-Pinching Home Theater With These Choice Budget TVs
Dirk Hohndel and Linus Torvalds talked about Linux developers, hardware, and coding in their latest, and first virtual Linux conversation.
Source: Linux Today – Linus Torvalds on the future of Linux kernel developers and development
The pharmaceutical company behind a drug that’s been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for emergency use for covid-19 patients announced today the drug will cost $3,120 per typical treatment course for individuals with private insurance plans.
Source: Gizmodo – Gilead to Charge ,120 Per Patient for Typical Covid-19 Treatment
Developers on the upcoming Harry Potter game have privately expressed concerns over series creator J.K. Rowling’s transphobic comments, according to a new report from Bloomberg.
Source: Kotaku – Report: Harry Potter Game Devs Distressed Over J.K. Rowling’s Rampant Transphobia
Are your voice chat friends getting bothered by your fancy new loud mechanical keyboard? Or perhaps you’re doing an audio recording and need everything in the background to shutup – enter Cadmus.
Source: LXer – Cadmus is a new Linux UI for managing microphone noise suppression
One of the best Amazon Prime perks is its rotating selection of free games on offer each month through the Twitch.tv “Twitch Prime” service. Even better, Amazon now has a new Amazon Games launcher that makes it far easier to claim, download and play these games on a PC—but installing the app in the first place is a…
Source: LifeHacker – Play Your Free Twitch Prime Games With Amazon’s New Games Launcher
Recently AMD posted UVD video decode support for GCN 1.0 with the AMDGPU driver, one of the long holdouts for letting the AMDGPU DRM driver approach feature parity with the longstanding Radeon DRM driver that is the default for GCN 1.0/1.1 era GPUs. That AMDGPU UVD GCN 1.0 decode support is going into the Linux 5.9 kernel later this summer after years ago Radeon driver developers largely dismissed the efforts of porting the UVD decode capability for these original GCN graphics cards over to AMDGPU…
Source: Phoronix – AMD Publishes AMDGPU UVD Firmware For Southern Islands
In a blog post today, Amazon announced it would be distributing “a special one-time Thank You bonus” to its workers, the largest sums of which would go to non-hourly managers.
Source: Gizmodo – It’s Not a Bonus, and It’s Less Than You Deserve
Microsoft suspended its advertising on Facebook and Instagram in the U.S. in May and recently expanded that to a global pause, according to an internal chat transcript seen by Axios. From a report: Unlike the many advertisers who recently joined a Facebook boycott,, Microsoft is concerned about where its ads are shown, not Facebook’s policies. But the move still means yet another big advertiser is not spending on Facebook right now. “Based on concerns we had back in May we suspended all media spending on Facebook/Instagram in the US and we’ve subsequently suspended all spending on Facebook/Instagram worldwide,” Microsoft CMO Chris Capossela said in an internal Yammer post, responding to an employee’s question. The transcript did not specifically say what content Microsoft objected to its ads appearing next to, but as examples of “inappropriate content” it cited examples of “hate speech, pornography, terrorist content, etc.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Microsoft Pauses Spending on Facebook, Instagram
Calculator musician @atarimae_400 noticed that Japanese railway stations sound similar to certain calculator tones and started playing some of the melodies on his own calculators.
I received comments that the sound that can be played from a calculator is similar to a station melody, so I tried to play it on a calculator!
“For those who live or have lived in the Kanto area, one is a collection of railway station melodies that I have never heard of.”
※ The number of calculators depends on the song.
Apparently there are more calculator musicians out there than you’d think, because if you’re anything like me you thought there were zero. My favorite remains this cover of the Game of Thrones theme being played on four calculators. I used to think the most impressive thing you could do with a calculator was use it to fail math and then spell out 80085. Actually, I’m pretty sure spelling out 80085 is still the most impressive thing you can do.
Keep going for the full video, along with @atarimae_400’s cover of Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You.”
Source: Geekologie – Guy plays railway station melodies on his calculators
Enlarge / Although an undeletion utility may occasionally save your bacon, it’s never been a good idea to rely on one. (credit: AFP via Getty Images / Benjamin Esham / Jim Salter)
Although it isn’t yet built into Windows, Microsoft has finally released its own file undelete tool—it’s called Windows File Recovery, and it works with the newest builds of Windows (variously known as 20H1, 2004, and 19041). We were pretty excited to see this tool has become available—even though proper system administration means frequent backups, which render this tool unnecessary. In the real world, proper system administration and frequent backups are a lot less common than we might wish.
The lack of a proper file undeletion tool in Windows means that many of us have been hoarding one of a handful of old shareware or freemium third-party utilities capable of scanning disks and looking for remnants of deleted files. The “hoarding” part is unfortunately necessary because finding one of those utilities means sorting through stacks of scam apps targeting desperate users—and frequently, you can’t be certain whether you’ve found one of the good ones or one of the scams until after you’ve installed it (hopefully, inside a sandbox or isolated VM).
Microsoft has an advertising problem—searching Bing (the default search provider in Edge, on a brand new 2004 install) for Windows File Recovery gets you buried in pages of ads for other things. [credit:
Jim Salter ]
It’s great news that Microsoft is finally bringing that capability in-house—but the tool certainly could be easier to find. When we looked for Windows File Recovery by name on Bing, in a freshly installed Windows 10 2004 VM, we got buried under pages of ads for other things.
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Source: Ars Technica – Microsoft adds WINFR file undeletion tool to the Microsoft Store
Recently I’ve seen a few recipes for frozen strawberry cocktails (both daiquiris and margaritas) that somehow don’t call for syrup or sweetener of any kind. “Good strawberries are so sweet, you don’t need any sugar!” they say.
Source: LifeHacker – Use Frozen Strawberries Instead of Ice When Making Frozen Strawberry Cocktails
Amazon is paying its logistics workers a one-time $500 bonus as a “thank you” for working on the front lines during the coronavirus pandemic, according to a company blog post. The bonus comes after Amazon’s response to the pandemic prompted criticism…
Source: Engadget – Amazon hopes a small bonus will please staff working through COVID-19
Scientists in the UK think they may have found a cheap, low-tech way to help fight age-related loss of vision. In a small clinical trial, people over 40 who were told to stare into a deep red light for three minutes a day had noticeable improvements to their sight. They reported being able to see better in the dark…
Source: Gizmodo – A Certain Frequency of Red Light Boosted People’s Eyesight in New Study
YouTube has banned the accounts of multiple high-profile alt-right figures, including David Duke, Richard Spencer and Stefan Molyneux (via The Verge). Among other infractions, the company says the channels associated with those figures violated its p…
Source: Engadget – YouTube bans Richard Spencer and David Duke over hate speech
