Gab, the Facebook/Twitter knockoff historically popular with white supremacists, is hopping mad that Donald Trump chose video site Rumble instead of it as the ex-president’s new social media destination.
Source: Gizmodo – Far-Right Site Gab Is Very Mad Their Favorite One-Term President Passed on Them
Until very recently, I avoided the world of barbecue. Getting up early? Being outside? Asking men for advice? None of this sounded all that appealing, but here I am, showing you pictures of some pulled pork I smoked for my family, and I fully “get it.” Getting up early mean you get a little bit of peace and quiet, and…
Source: LifeHacker – How to Smoke Your First Pork Shoulder on a Charcoal Grill
In 2018, Google launched the Android App Bundle, a new publishing format that “offers a more efficient way to build and release” an app. Since then, Android developers worldwide, like those at Adobe, Duolingo, Netflix, and Twitter, have taken advantage of this with approximately 1 million different apps. Now, Google wants to bring the benefits
Source: Hot Hardware – Here’s Why Google Is Phasing Out APKs In Favor Of Android App Bundles
The heat is expected to continue for several days in some parts of British Columbia, according to weather warnings from the government. From a report: Vancouverites were frying eggs on pans placed on their terraces. One man checked into an air-conditioned five-star hotel, after the five fans aimed at his bed at home and the seventh cold shower failed to bring relief. Lettuce plants shriveled in the Okanagan Valley, British Columbia’s picturesque wine region. Flowers wilted. People wilted. The heat wave across western Canada has much of a country known for its sweater weather sweating. Canada broke a national heat record on Sunday when the temperature in a small town in British Columbia reached almost 116 degrees Fahrenheit, breaking an 84-year-old record by nearly 3 degrees, with dangerously hot weather expected to continue for several more days.
“This is a complete shock to a Canadian — this feels like Las Vegas or India — not Vancouver,” said Chris Johnson, a criminal lawyer who on Monday was heading to an air-conditioned hotel room as temperatures inside his home reached 90 degrees Fahrenheit. Tying any one weather event to climate change requires extensive attribution analysis, but heat waves around the world are growing more frequent, longer-lasting and more dangerous, experts say. David Phillips, a senior climatologist at Environment Canada, a government agency, said the early timing of this one, its intensity and its duration, could all be attributable to rising global temperatures.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – At Nearly 116 Degrees, Heat in Western Canada Shatters National Record
One of the exciting initiatives taking place recently within the CentOS camp has been the CentOS Hyperscale special interest group that is backed by engineers from Twitter and Facebook along with other organizations. They’ve been making more progress on offering their hyperscaler-focused packages/updates and even onto publishing a CentOS Hyperscale Workstation operating system image for testing…
Source: Phoronix – CentOS Hyperscale Workstation Sees Experimental OS Builds, More Changes Coming
You know how Disney owns everything now? Here’s another chance to see it on display in The Simpsons’ latest Disney+ animated short, which sees Tom Hiddleston’s Loki taking a break from, well, Loki to visit Springfield and do things with Bart Simpson.
Source: Gizmodo – Loki and The Simpsons Team Up in Disney’s Latest Corporate Synergy Stunt
Maine has passed the strongest statewide law regulating government use of facial recognition to date. The state’s House and Senate voted unanimously in favor of rules that prohibit law enforcement from using the technology unless they have probable cause that an unidentified person in an image committed a serious crime. Once the law goes into effect later this year, it will also limit how police conduct facial ID searches. They won’t have direct access to the tech. Instead, they’ll need to go through the FBI and Maine Bureau of Motor Vehicles (BMV) in the few instances where they’re sanctioned to use it.
Additionally, the law affords citizens the right to sue the state if they believe a government agency has used the technology unlawfully. It also prohibits Maine from deploying facial recognition systems in schools, and mandates that both Maine State Police and the BMV will need to maintain public records of search requests from law enforcement.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said the bill “stands in sharp contrast” to Washington state’s SB 6280, the only other statewide law in the US governing the use of facial recognition. That bill was sponsored and primarily written by a current Microsoft employee. It has also been criticized by privacy advocates for giving police too many opportunities to use the technology for surveillance purposes.
Source: Engadget – Maine bans facial recognition technology from schools and most police work
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said his company’s Starlink division is trying to cut the price of its user terminal from $500 to as low as $250. Starlink has been charging $99 a month for Internet service during its beta phase, plus $500 up front for the user terminal/satellite dish, and it’s losing money on the sale of each dish.
“We are losing money on that terminal right now. That terminal costs us more than $1,000,” Musk said yesterday during a Mobile World Congress Q&A session (see a YouTube video posted by CNET). “We obviously are subsidizing the cost of the terminal. We are working on next-generation terminals that provide the same level of capability, roughly the same level of capability, but cost a lot less.”
Musk noted that “selling terminals for half price is not super compelling” given that SpaceX is planning for millions of Starlink customers. “Over time, we’d like to reduce the terminal cost from $500 to, I don’t know, $300 or $250, or something like that.”
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Source: Ars Technica – Starlink’s “next-generation” user terminal will cost a lot less, Musk says
Video games have a long and storied history of taking spiders—already an upsetting concept—and making them worse. Diablo IV seems more than prepared to live up to that legacy.
Source: Kotaku – Diablo IV’s Spider Monster Is An Affront To All Of My Senses
Adobe recently announced Photoshop Sketch and Illustrator Draw, two great free drawing apps available on iPad, will be removed from the Apple App Store (and Google Play) on July 19. Luckily, the apps are getting a free replacement in Adobe Fresco, which combines the features of Photoshop Sketch and Illustrator Draw…
Source: LifeHacker – The Best iPad Drawing Apps (That Aren’t Adobe Fresco)
You might not expect Lake Whillans to be a cradle for life, as it’s freezing cold and lies beneath 2,500 feet of Antarctic ice. But as a team of glaciologists recently reported, it is precisely those conditions that nurture microscopic organisms, which feast on the rock beneath the continent.
Source: Gizmodo – Life Under Antarctica Is Surviving on Pulverized Rock
Enlarge / This Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart image was captured while running in the game’s new 40 fps mode. It offers the same amount of resolution, image quality, and ray-tracing fidelity as the prior 30 fps “quality” mode. (credit: Sony / Insomniac)
When it comes to action-filled video games, frame rates matter, and up until recently, traditional “frames per second” wisdom has landed at either 30 fps or 60 fps. Thirty, the rate seen in most standard TV broadcasts, is fine for slower cinematic games, while frantic battles and twitchy fights benefit from a higher rate, since it looks smoother and reduces button-tap latency.
This week, a surprising new number enters the conversation: 40 fps, a standard previously unattainable thanks largely to TV standards. It comes courtesy of a new patch to this month’s Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart on PlayStation 5, which already includes a 60 fps “performance” option. So why would anyone pick 40 fps instead? And how does it work?
Recent titles by Insomniac Games, particularly Marvel’s Spider-Man and the 2016 Ratchet & Clank remake, launched on PS4 with a 30 fps lock, meant to guarantee higher pixel counts and more detailed shadow and level-of-detail (LoD) settings. Both of those games eventually got PS5 versions with 60 fps support, since they could leverage the newer hardware’s power. As a native PS5 game, this month’s R&C:RA launched with both 30 and 60 fps modes on day one. Its menus asked you what you preferred in your gaming: more pixels and higher image quality or more frames?
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Source: Ars Technica – A weird take on frame rate: How PS5’s first “40 fps” game works, runs
The original source code for the world wide web has been sold as a non-fungible token, making $5.4m. From a report: NFTs are certificates of ownership for digital assets, which often do not have a physical representation. They do not necessarily include copyright control — and critics say they are get-rich-quick schemes that are bad for the environment. World-wide-web creator Sir Tim Berners-Lee sold the NFT to an unidentified buyer, through auction house Sotheby’s. The highest bid stood at $3.5m for most of the last day of the auction — but there were a flurry of bids in the closing 15 minutes. The auction began on 23 June, with an opening bid of $1,000. Further reading: Tim Berners-Lee Defends Auction of NFT Representing Web’s Source Code.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Tim Berners-Lee Sells Web Source Code NFT for .4 Million
The latest public code patches on the mailing list today are preparing for newer AMD heterogeneous servers that will have Aldebaran GPU nodes connected via xGMI links to the CPU(s) and the GPU dies in turn having HBM2 memory…
Source: Phoronix – Linux Prepares For AMD Servers With Aldebaran GPU Nodes Sporting HBM2
MIXXX is a powerfull open-sourcce, free DJ software. It has everything you need to start making your best DJ mixes in a tight, integrated package. MIXXX is used by professional DJs and bedroom DJs alike.
Source: LXer – MIXXX: One of the Best Free DJ Software to Perform Creative Live Mixes
A small desktop tripod and a monitor mount are both included with the new UltraSharp, which magnetically attaches to either. [credit:
Dell
]
Dell’s new UltraSharp camera takes aim at Logitech’s high-end Brio with the same $199 price along with 4K resolution and Windows Hello-compatible infrared sensor. But despite sharing a price tag and many of the same specifications, the two high-end webcams diverge noticeably on features.
This 2008-era Apple iSight camera featured a similar “shotgun” chassis design to the UltraSharp—but only at 640×480 resolution, with FireWire interface. (credit: CC BY-SA 3.0)
The UltraSharp’s most obvious differentiator is its vague physical resemblance to the Apple iSight, a discontinued FireWire camera with a similar “shotgun” chassis orientation. As compelling as that resemblance is for some Apple fans, the similarity between UltraSharp and iSight pretty much ends there.
Under the hood, the UltraSharp features a Sony STARVIS 8.3 megapixel primary optical sensor, featuring automatic focus, automatic white balance and light correction, and full HDR. There’s also a Windows Hello-compatible IR sensor for biometric authentication—but, curiously, no microphone. UltraSharp users will need to supply their own mic—which might actually prove convenient for some high-end consumers with studio mics, who will therefore have one fewer useless input to deal with.
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Source: Ars Technica – Dell’s 9 UltraSharp 4K webcam has AI on board—but no microphone
It’s hot outside, possibly hot as hell depending on where you live—but one way to keep cool is to plop down in front of a fan or the air conditioner, or perhaps inside a walk-in freezer, and crack open a fresh new sci-fi or fantasy book. We’ve got you covered this month with palace intrigue, space battles, doomsday…
Source: Gizmodo – 51 New Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books to Add to Your Reading List in July
Season of the Splicer’s long-awaited showdown with the Vex mind Quaria finally happened yesterday and it’s splitting the Destiny 2 community apart. Some players were satisfied with the fight mechanics and visual spectacle while others were disappointed that a character built up for so long in the game’s lore went down…
Source: Kotaku – Destiny 2’s Quaria Is An Underwhelming Boss Fight But A Great Mission
Socrates didn’t fear death. Even though he met a gruesome demise (he was executed by the state for the alleged crime of corrupting Athenian youth), Socrates didn’t flee or plead before his executioner. If we are to take his beliefs and teachings—that death is an inevitability that might be good, actually—to heart, we…
Source: LifeHacker – How to Not Fear Death, According to Socrates
The aliens have invaded Fortnite, and it seems that they have started to abduct people from around the island. One of the Legendary challenges or “Quests” for Fortnite Chapter 2 Season 7 Week 4 is to put up four missing person signs across eight spots in Weeping Woods and Misty Meadows. Completing this task will net you a cool 30,000 XP for
Source: Hot Hardware – Where To Plant Missing Person Signs In Fortnite’s Misty Meadows And Weeping Woods
