After ten years, South Korea is ending its “shutdown law” that banned children under the age of sixteen years old from playing video games for a six-hour block after midnight.
Source: Kotaku – South Korea Abolishing Controversial Gaming Shutdown Law
Enlarge / Damaged left behind by flooding in the Ahr valley. (credit: Picture Alliance / Getty Images)
The backdrop of a steadily warming climate has frequently raised questions about whether any given extreme weather event could have been influenced by climate change. It’s a natural question to ask, but answering it in peer-reviewed detail usually takes months or years. In response, researchers started the World Weather Attribution program, which has developed a streamlined analysis pipeline that lets them address questions of climate influence before the public has forgotten the event happened. This technique allowed the group to rapidly determine that climate change played a key role in this summer’s Pacific Northwest heat wave.
Now, the group has attempted to tackle this summer’s European floods, which destroyed communities in Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands. And here, the answer was a lot more complicated. The floods hit a small area and were extreme enough that they destroyed some of the monitoring equipment that would otherwise have told us just how bad they were. Nevertheless, the team found the climate change likely boosted the chances of an event like that in northwestern Europe.
The weather pattern that produced the rain wasn’t particularly exceptional, and it consisted of a low-pressure system that parked over Europe for a couple of days. The warm, moisture-rich air this drew from the Mediterranean ended up rotating around the low pressure. The Mediterranean air crossed a number of ranges of low hills in northwestern Europe, which caused the sort of atmospheric disruptions that trigger rainfall for a couple of days.
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Source: Ars Technica – Europe’s July floods: So rare and extreme, they’re hard to study
Typical motifs for kimono include things like plum blossoms, sakura, maple leaves. They do not include Pocket Monsters, which is a shame because they definitely should.
Kimono creator Misamaru takes her love of Pokémon to a new level by showing it off in traditional Japanese wear. “I decided to make a Pokémon kimono…
Source: Kotaku – Pokémon Kimono Are A Very Good Idea
AMD engineers continue working on preparing the Linux kernel for the Frontier supercomputer…
Source: Phoronix – AMD Posts Latest Linux Patches For Supporting The Frontier Supercomputer
Thousands of customers across the country have lodged complaints against Coinbase.
CNBC reports that thousands of customers have reported that their accounts have been hacked and drained of funds.
The company did not respond to the complaint, according to a popular analyst Kaleo who told his 360,000 followers that the exchange had shown an “absolutely embarrassing display of care for customers” on his Twitter account.
The tweet was posted less than a day ago, which had already attracted a stream of responses from other users that had similar problems with support or had been hacked or had their account locked up for almost four months or had no help.
In April, CEO Brian Armstrong somewhat ironically told CNBC, “People no longer need to be scared of it [crypto] like in the early days.”
In March, the New York Times ran a piece on a Coinbase customer who eventually sued the company after losing $100,000 worth of cryptocurrency.
Source: TG Daily – Coinbase users angry with the lack of customer support after funds disappear from accounts
Enlarge / Take the Google Messaging quiz! Can you name all the icons? (credit: Ron Amadeo)
Google Talk, Google’s first-ever instant messaging platform, launched on August 24, 2005. This company has been in the messaging business for 16 years, meaning Google has been making messaging clients for longer than some of its rivals have existed. But thanks to a decade and a half of nearly constant strategy changes, competing product launches, and internal sabotage, you can’t say Google has a dominant or even stable instant messaging platform today.
Google’s 16 years of messenger wheel-spinning has allowed products from more focused companies to pass it by. Embarrassingly, nearly all of these products are much younger than Google’s messaging efforts. Consider competitors like WhatsApp (12 years old), Facebook Messenger (nine years old), iMessage (nine years old), and Slack (eight years old)—Google Talk even had video chat four years before Zoom was a thing.
Currently, you would probably rank Google’s offerings behind every other big-tech competitor. A lack of any kind of top-down messaging leadership at Google has led to a decade and a half of messaging purgatory, with Google both unable to leave the space altogether and unable to commit to a single product. While companies like Facebook and Salesforce invest tens of billions of dollars into a lone messaging app, Google seems content only to spin up an innumerable number of under-funded, unstable side projects led by job-hopping project managers. There have been periods when Google briefly produced a good messaging solution, but the constant shutdowns, focus-shifting, and sabotage of established products have stopped Google from carrying much of these user bases—or user goodwill—forward into the present day.
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Source: Ars Technica – A decade and a half of instability: The history of Google messaging apps
Loongson this summer rolled out their 3A5000 processors built on their own “LoongArch” ISA. While the company continues claiming that LoongArch is “not MIPS”, the Linux kernel code they continue proposing for the mainline Linux kernel points to it being a close facsimile to MIPS…
Source: Phoronix – Loongson Continues Working On LoongArch For Linux, But It’s Mostly Copying MIPS Code
Akihabara News (Tokyo) — According to the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport, and Tourism (MLIT), drones which are tethered to a wire or string will no longer require permission or approval to fly during nighttime and in densely populated areas.
The Civil Aeronautics Act previously banned flying drones near airports and in the flightpath of planes.
In April 2015, Yasuo Yamamoto flew a drone carrying sand that contained traces of radiation onto the roof of the prime minister’s office in an act of protest against nuclear power.
The incident was followed by Yamamoto’s arrest as well as revisions to the Civil Aeronautics Act in December 2015, banning flights by drones weighing over 200 grams in urban areas, altitudes of 150 meters or more, and near airports. This meant that drones were banned in all of the 23 central wards of Tokyo.
In June 2020, the act was revised in June to make it mandatory for those who possess drones for flight purposes to register with the national government. A punishment of imprisonment for up to one year, or a fine of up to ¥500,000 (about US$4,650) was listed for those who fly unregistered drones.
Now, with the struggle between technological advancements and security beginning to tilt more towards the side of technology, the act is being revised once again to allow more freedom with drone usage.
Official permission will no longer be required in cases where drones are tethered by wires or strings of thirty meters or less. By limiting the range of the drones in this way, and with reasonable monitoring the airspace against the entry of third parties, officials will soon allow flights even in urban areas, at nighttime, and beyond visual range.
The amendment of relevant parts of the Civil Aeronautics Act will be amended and applied in October.
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The post Japan Easing Up on Drone Laws appeared first on Akihabara News.
Source: Akihabara News – Japan Easing Up on Drone Laws
Lonboarder Josh Neuman put together this compilation of his ten closest calls while filming his longboarding over ten years. What he says about his number one closest call:
What Happened: While on a production shoot we had one of the crew members drive down before us and block off the road for one minute at a time while we skated down the mountain. We were rushing to beat the sunset and get as much footage as possible while the lighting was good so our communication about where exactly the car was supposed to be blocking off the road was subpar. As you see in the video, the result is us having to swerve off to the side of the road to avoid hitting the car that was parked roughly 200 feet closer than it should’ve been. We never go into the opposite lane on a blind turn unless we have walkie talkies and/or a spotter letting us know the road is clear
It’s good to know he actually has a team and spotters and all that, but it’s still crazy how little protection he’s wearing. Even with all the precautions, there’s no way I would be doing this without wearing full motorcycle armor and wrapping myself with enough pillows to look like Michelin Man cosplay.
Keep going for the full video.
Source: Geekologie – A longboarder’s closest calls over 10 years of filming
We came across this ‘Top 15 Raspberry Pi Zero Projects’ video and realised that it’s been a while since we showed our tiniest computer some love on this blog.
The compilation features full build videos for 15 Raspberry Pi Zero projects. Too many to go into detail about here, so we’ve picked out a few of our favourites to share.
This Sunrise lamp doubles as a psychedelic night light, and is built with snapology origami. Raspberry Pi Zero W powers an Adafruit NeoPixel ring and does a great job of letting maker Russell Eveleigh sleep in past 5am.
Russell coded different sequences to make the NeoPixel lights turn to a calming blue at bedtime, and then brighten up to sunshine yellow when it’s time for the kids to wake up.
How could we not share a retro gaming device hidden in an Altoids tin? Raspberry Pi Zero runs RetroPie software, and gameplay lasts up to five hours!
mintyPi is a nice simple do-it-yourself project, and you can find links for the parts at sudomod.com. Good luck finding an Altoids tin in the UK though. If you’ve found a good alternative, let us know in the comments.
We picked this project because Raspberry Pi Towers coffee drinkers have been thinking about making something similar.
Caleb Brewer made his office coffee machine smart by building an alert system that sends notifications when someone brews a fresh pot. A waterproof temperature sensor constantly monitors the coffee pot, and Raspberry Pi Zero W turns on an alert light and sends a Slack notification when a new hot tasty brew is ready.
If you’re into compilation videos featuring Raspberry Pi and Arduino projects, follow Top Projects Compilation on YouTube, Facebook or Instagram for more.
The post Top project ideas for Raspberry Pi Zero appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
Source: Raspberry Pi – Top project ideas for Raspberry Pi Zero
Earlier this year when Clang LTO support was added for Linux 5.12 that link-time optimization support wasn’t done solely for squeezing out greater performance but also because it’s a prerequisite for making use of Clang’s Control Flow Integrity (CFI) functionality. Google engineers have now sent out their latest set of patches for bringing up Clang CFI support within the Linux kernel…
Source: Phoronix – Clang CFI Patches For The Linux Kernel Updated To Beef Up Security
Psychonauts 2, the long-awaited sequel to Psychonauts, is a bright, frothy, wholesome game about deep, dark, unspeakable things. Trauma, PTSD, depression, anxiety, loneliness… beneath the squeaky-clean formica and bakelite of Psychonauts HQ lies a world humming with energy, and a story laced with profundity.
Source: Kotaku – How Psychonauts 2 Approaches Trauma, Therapy And Empathy
A Yahoo Auctions listing in Japan made headlines in the collecting community recently when it offered for purchase a Nintendo Game & Watch that was so rare many people were convinced it was fake.
Source: Kotaku – Mysterious And Super Rare Nintendo Game & Watch Discovered At Auction
Akihabara News (Tokyo) — Japan Robot Week in Aichi is set to be held from September 9-12 as one of the few technology exhibitions to go forward since the Covid pandemic began.
“With the evolution of robot technology through AI and IoT,” the basic mission statement reads, “the playing field for robots is rapidly expanding from manufacturing sites and into daily life. We are aiming for an exhibition that brings together the latest robot-related technologies that highlights the scenes of the main activities and promotes opportunities to create new robot businesses.”
While it is not clear exactly how many companies and organizations will offer exhibitions or presentations, one of the most enthusiastic participants is the ASK Corporation, which has advertised that it will put on display its HaptX Gloves DK2, a glove-type tactile device for virtual reality and robotics.
The venue for the exhibition is itself of some interest, the Aichi Sky Expo.
Opened only in September 2019, not long before the onset of the global pandemic, its attractive facilities sit next to Chubu Centrair International Airport, an artificial island that is part of Tokoname city. It is Japan’s newest convention center as well being at present its 4th largest.
The Aichi prefectural government studied the possibility of siting an Integrated Resort (IR) including a casino at the same location, though it never actually moved forward with a bid.
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The post Japan Robot Week in Aichi appeared first on Akihabara News.
Source: Akihabara News – Japan Robot Week in Aichi
Enlarge / PALOS VERDES ESTATES, CA – AUGUST 24: A father helps his 4-year-old son with the swab for a rapid COVID-19 test. (credit: Getty | MediaNews Group)
After Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine earned full regulatory approval Monday, pressure is mounting to have the vaccine available to children under 12 years old—and so are concerns that it will be given to them prematurely.
The approval from the Food and Drug Administration covers use of the vaccine in people ages 16 and up, while the agency’s Emergency Use Authorization still allows for its use in adolescents between the ages of 12 and 15. Some experts expect the FDA will grant full approval for use in 12- to 15-year-olds relatively soon.
But many parents and pediatricians are most eager for the green light to offer the vaccine to children under 12. Vaccinating young children has become a particularly pressing issue with the wild spread of the hypertransmissible delta variant, new school terms beginning, disputes over masks, and big holidays just around the corner. In a letter sent to the FDA earlier this month, the American Academy of Pediatrics urged the agency to authorize the vaccine for children under 12 “as swiftly as possible.”
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Source: Ars Technica – Pressure mounts over COVID vaccines for kids; docs warn against off-label use
Crusader Kings III, a game entirely about buttons and menus and likely the last thing you’d ever expect to make the jump from the PC to consoles, is doing just that, with a version announced earlier today for Xbox Series X|S and PS5.
Source: Kotaku – Hahaha Crusader Kings III Is Coming To Consoles
QEMU 6.1 is out as the newest feature release to this widely-used, open-source Linux virtualization component…
Source: Phoronix – QEMU 6.1 Released With RISC-V Improvements, AMD Emulation Fixes
The state of California recently expanded its discrimination lawsuit against Activision Blizzard, Axios reports. In addition to suing the massive gaming conglomerate over its culture of harassment and abuse toward female employees, the Department of Fair Employment and Housing is now also looking into its treatment of…
Source: Kotaku – California Accuses Activision Blizzard Of Shredding Abuse Evidence
Stuffy summer evenings call for dinners that are fast, easy, and require minimal cooking—perhaps a salad, bread, and a charcuterie board piled high with your favorite cured meats. If that’s what’s on your menu though, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suggests a minor modification: Heat that meat.
Source: LifeHacker – Salmonella Has Come for Our Italian-Style Cold Cuts, According to the CDC
Welcome to Hot Chips! This is the annual conference all about the latest, greatest, and upcoming big silicon that gets us all excited. Stay tuned during Monday and Tuesday for our regular AnandTech Live Blogs.
Source: AnandTech – Hot Chips 2021 Live Blog: Graphics (Intel, AMD, Google, Xilinx)
