A recent Twitter viral video introduced us to an unfortunate motorist who was unable to figure out how to properly line up her gas tank with the pump, to the amusement of a couple of onlookers in the parking lot nearby.
Source: LifeHacker – How to Always Know Which Side the Gas Tank is On
In Netflix’s upcoming adaptation of Frank Miller and Tom Wheeler’s Cursed, the legendary sword Excalibur is a burden to be bared by Nimue, one of the last remaining magical beings fighting to survive her kind’s ongoing extermination at the hands of religious zealots. Though Nimue’s the hero of this particular tale, a…
Source: io9 – Cursed’s Latest Trailer Spotlights the Boy Who Could Be King and a Magic Sword
Amazon’s streaming service is introducing a co-viewing option to stream movies and TV shows with up to 100 other Prime Video account holders, a nifty feature that’s already officially available on platforms like Hulu and HBO.
Source: Gizmodo – Amazon Prime Adds Watch Party for Co-Viewing With Up to 100 Friends
The PHP project has released the first alpha of PHP 8, which is slated for general availability in November 2020. This initial test release includes many new features such as just-in-time (JIT) compilation, new constructs like Attributes, and more. One of twelve planned releases before the general availability release, it represents a feature set that is still subject to change.
Source: LWN.net – [$] First PHP 8 alpha released
Enlarge / UC graduate student Brian Lane climbs out of the Perdido Reservoir. (credit: Photo/Nicholas Dunning)
For centuries, Tikal was a bustling Maya city in what is now northern Guatemala. But by the late 800s CE, its plazas and temples stood silent, surrounded by mostly abandoned farms. A recent study suggests a possible explanation for its decline: mercury and toxic algal blooms poisoned the water sources that should have carried the city through dry seasons.
Tikal’s Maya rulers built the city’s reservoirs to store water from rain and runoff during the winter months. The pavement of the large plazas in the heart of the city tilted slightly, helping funnel rainwater into the reservoirs. Over the centuries, dust and litter settled into the bottom of the reservoirs, too, providing a record of what the environment around Tikal was like—and what was washing into the city’s water supply. University of Cincinnati biologist David Lentz and his colleagues sampled layers of sediment dating back to the mid-800s, and they found that two of Tikal’s central reservoirs would have been too polluted to drink from.
An X-ray fluorescence spectrometer (which identifies the chemicals in a sample based on how they react to being zapped with an X-ray light) revealed that the sediment on the bottom of the reservoirs was laced with dangerous amounts of mercury. Lentz and his colleagues also found ancient DNA from blue-green algae, or cyanobacteria, which can produce deadly toxins.
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Source: Ars Technica – Mercury and algal blooms poisoned Maya reservoirs at Tikal
Marine biologists from Japan say whale sharks have eyeballs coated in tiny teeth, in a discovery unique to this hulking but gentle aquatic species.
Source: Gizmodo – Whale Sharks Have Eyeballs Covered in Tiny Teeth
Min Min ruined my Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, and I’m completely fine with it.
Source: Kotaku – Min Min Kicks Off Super Smash Bros. Ultimate’s Second DLC Pass With A Helluva Punch
If you’re making a McMuffin-type breakfast sandwich, a circular sausage patty makes sense. But say you want your breakfast sandwich on toast—what then? A sausage circle leaves the corners un-sausaged, and I don’t think anyone here wants to start their day with un-sausaged corners. (Plus, some of those pre-shaped…
Source: LifeHacker – Shape Your Breakfast Sausage to Fit Your Bread
House Democrats want to eliminate the US economy’s greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Two ways they hope to achieve this are: reaching 100 percent electric vehicle sales by 2035 and 100 percent clean electricity by 2040. Today, House Speaker Nancy Pel…
Source: Engadget – House Democrats’ climate plan calls for 100 percent EV sales by 2035
The Crust CRM suite that aims to compete with Salesforce has been open-source under an Apache 2.0 license but now its paywall has been dropped to make it more compelling as a free software CRM suite…
Source: Phoronix – Crust Drops Paywall For Open-Source CRM Alternative To Salesforce
A model shows off a prototype form factor for a holographic VR display. [credit:
Facebook Research
]
For all the advancements in virtual reality technology in recent years, one major factor still holding the space back is the size and relative discomfort of current headset design. Even the most compact and comfortable VR headsets today still resemble something like a cross between ski goggles and a motorcycle helmet, requiring massive headstraps to secure a heavy display that protrudes multiple inches away from the face. Reference designs for “eyeglasses” style VR displays help a bit, but they still look like coke-bottle spectacles from a steampunk cosplay event (and provide a limited field of view, to boot).
Now, researchers at Facebook Reality Labs are using holographic film to create a prototype VR display that looks less like ski goggles and more like lightweight sunglasses. With a total thickness less than 9mm—and without significant compromises on field of view or resolution—these displays could one day make today’s bulky VR headset designs completely obsolete.
In the newly published ACM Siggraph paper Holographic Optics for Thin and Lightweight Virtual Reality, researchers Andrew Maimone and Junren Wang detail the optics behind their lightweight prototype. The key to the thinness is a series of flat, polarized films that use a “pancake optics” light-folding technique to reflect the displayed image multiple times in a small space.
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Source: Ars Technica – How holographic tech is shrinking VR displays to the size of sunglasses
This is the story of a microvlogging app that nobody had heard of two years ago, and how it lured the world’s teens with karaoke, gobbled up their data, ballooned to monstrous proportions, and, finally, became a geopolitical bargaining chip in an escalating feud between the world’s two most-populous countries. The…
Source: Gizmodo – India Finally Popped the Ban on TikTok and 58 Other Chinese Apps
Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa apologized for problems with the Switch’s Joy-Cons during a recent Q&A. Furukawa acknowledged a class-action lawsuit filed in the US over Joy-Con issues, which complainants say causes the controller’s analog s…
Source: Engadget – Nintendo makes vague apology for Joy-Con drift issues
At the beginning of the pandemic, when millions of Americans found themselves confined to home, women across this great nation waged war on the oppressor in the underwear drawer. The opportunity to stay indoors meant that many women ditched the bra and never looked back. Bras were cast aside in favor of fresh air on…
Source: LifeHacker – Bras Are Good: A Manifesto
Enlarge / CCTV security guard in the mall building.
Detroit’s police chief admitted on Monday that facial recognition technology used by the department misidentifies suspects about 96 percent of the time. It’s an eye-opening admission given that the Detroit Police Department is facing criticism for arresting a man based on a bogus match from facial recognition software.
Last week, the ACLU filed a complaint with the Detroit Police Department on behalf of Robert Williams, a Black man who was wrongfully arrested for stealing five watches worth $3,800 from a luxury retail store. Investigators first identified Williams by doing a facial recognition search with software from a company called DataWorks Plus. Under police questioning, Williams pointed out that the grainy surveillance footage obtained by police didn’t actually look like him. The police lacked other evidence tying Williams to the crime, so they begrudgingly let him go.
Now Vice’s Jason Koebler reports that Detroit Police Chief James Craig acknowledged the flaws with its facial recognition software at a Monday event.
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Source: Ars Technica – Detroit police chief cops to 96-percent facial recognition error rate
While accelerometers and gyroscopes are generally how smartwatches detect hand movements, a newly-released patent hints that Apple may be considering scanning veins in your wrist via the Apple Watch to detect non-touch gestures in the future.
Source: Gizmodo – Future Apple Watches Could Scan Your Veins to Detect Gestures
Amazon.com is boosting efforts to lure military and commercial space organizations as major users of its cloud-computing services, hoping to benefit from rising government spending and burgeoning private investment. From a report: The move by Amazon Web Services, the online retail giant’s cloud-computing arm, comes during a multiyear surge in U.S. military and civilian agency spending on space projects, with NASA, the Pentagon and their largest contractors — including Lockheed Martin — benefiting from hefty appropriated or proposed budget increases. Lockheed Martin already is an Amazon customer. Capitol Hill is pouring billions of dollars into new boosters and the next generation of superfast missiles, driven, in part, by White House and intelligence community warnings about Chinese and Russian advances in space. Commercial companies are building or planning to deploy swarms of small satellites encircling the globe, though the Covid-19 pandemic has dimmed the immediate outlook for many private space projects.
Amazon is anticipating a huge increase in space-related cloud-computing contracts globally with a market size estimated at hundreds of billions of dollars, said Teresa Carlson, AWS’s vice president in charge of public sector business. “There’s a need for a more modernized approach to this industry,” Ms. Carlson said. AWS will formally announce it is establishing a dedicated segment, called Aerospace and Satellite Solutions, at an online summit focused on business with the public sector on Tuesday. The group will be run by retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Clint Crosier, who, until recently, was in charge of planning to set up the Space Force, the newly created branch of the military. The initiative comes as AWS faced increased pressure from cloud-computing rivals for public sector business. Last year, AWS lost out to Microsoft in a high-profile competition to provide the Pentagon cloud-computing services. The program, known as JEDI, could be worth up to $10 billion over 10 years. Amazon has challenged the outcome.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Amazon Launches Space Push To Drive Cloud-Computing Growth
Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition (PC) | $3 | Amazon
Source: Gizmodo – The PC Version of Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition Is Down to
When Dark Sky announced it had been sold to Apple earlier this year, a million Android users cried out in… dismay, because their beloved weather app would soon become iOS-only. The Dark Sky app was pulled from Google Play immediately and the websit…
Source: Engadget – The best weather apps for Android
It’s a weird situation when the second largest smartphone maker in the world is treated as persona non grata, but that’s precisely what Huawei is facing when it comes to selling gadgets in the U.S. And based on the current political climate, there’s very little chance that will change between now and November.…
Source: Gizmodo – What You Get with a World-Class Phone That Can’t Access Google
