Between promoting scientifically baseless theories that the coronavirus pandemic has triggered “mass formation psychosis” and switching to a fruit and meat diet, wildly popular podcaster Joe Rogan found the time to become active on MAGA-themed social media site Gettr. Surprise, he hates it.
Source: Gizmodo – Joe Rogan Joined Gettr 10-Days Ago and Already Thinks It Sucks
For a spell, it seemed that February would be the busiest month for gaming in 2022, with marquees like Sifu, Elden Ring, and Horizon Forbidden West crowding the calendar. But in recent days, March has officially taken the crown as the best (worst?) month to love video games. Folks, it’s getting pretty ridiculous out…
Source: Kotaku – Uh-oh, March Is Even More Packed With Games Than February
It’s another good year for streaming at the SAG Awards nominations, but who and what got picked is decidedly different this year. Netflix was still the frontrunner with one or more nominations in nearly every category, including multiple picks for The Power of the Dog (three) and Squid Game (four) as well as individual nods for productions like Don’t Look Up, Passing and Halston. However, Apple also fared particularly well this year — Ted Lasso received five nominations, while The Morning Show racked up four. Coda and the not-quite-released The Tragedy of Macbeth also burnished Apple’s image.
Other services also had their due. Amazon had success with titles like Being the Ricardos and The Tender Bar, while Disney’s empire made its presence felt with nominations for The Handmaid’s Tale and Disney+ series like Loki and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.
Netflix also broke a cultural boundary — Squid Gameis the first non-English series to receive a SAG nomination, not to mention the first Korean series. This isn’t completely surprising given Netflix’s eagerness to produce worldwide blockbusters, but it’s notable given how difficult it has been for foreign releases to crack these awards.
Theater- and TV-first material still has a significant presence in SAG’s nominations. Nonetheless, it’s evident the partial return to normalcy in entertainment only had a limited effect — streamed shows are still thriving in the current awards landscape.
Source: Engadget – Netflix and Apple lead SAG Award nominations with ‘Squid Game’ and ‘Ted Lasso’
Enlarge / The Porsche Taycan is one of the few new cars to exhibit anything we might recognize as steering feel. That wasn’t always the case. (credit: Andrew Hedrick)
In almost every regard, new cars are better than they’ve been at any time in their history. They’re safer than they used to be—though that is less true for women. Powertrains, particularly battery electric ones, are more powerful and more efficient, which helps to compensate for the extra weight of that added safety equipment. Vehicles are far more reliable, at least for their first 100,000 miles, and even cheap cars come with standard equipment that would seem like science fiction to drivers from just a few decades ago.
They ride better; they stop better—so everything’s great, right? The problem is that modern cars almost invariably feel a bit boring to drive. The issue is more acute the longer you’ve been driving, as you might expect, since the cause is technological progression—specifically, power steering.
For much of the car’s existence, steering was entirely unassisted. The driver turns the wheel connected to a steering column that, through links and pivots and usually a gear, turns the front wheels in either direction. That setup was marvelous for feedback, but it wasn’t great in terms of the effort required to turn the wheel, particularly at lower speeds.
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Source: Ars Technica – Here’s why modern cars feel so lifeless to drive
If you’ve ever lost even a single precious French fry as a result of a fast food bag tipping over during the ride home from the drive-through, you’ll appreciate the understated brilliance of the BAGO: a seatbelt that keeps all sorts of bags upright even if you’ve got a lead foot or are hard on the brakes.
Source: io9 – Someone Made a Seatbelt for Bags, and It’s Actually Kind of Genius
If you’ve got an NVIDIA SHIELD TV streaming device, there’s a big update waiting for you. It brings Android 11 along with a host of other new features to your SHIELD, including 4K HDR gaming in GeForce NOW.
The update is rolling out to all NVIDIA SHIELD TVs, and it’s labeled as SHIELD Software Experience Upgrade 9.0. Once you perform the
Source: Hot Hardware – NVIDIA SHIELD TV 9.0 Brings Android 11 Features To Our Favorite Streaming And Gaming Box
Webex offers calling, meetings, and messaging in the cloud for teams of all sizes. What are the best free and open source alternatives to Webex?
The post Best Free and Open Source Alternatives to Cisco Webex appeared first on Linux Today.
Source: Linux Today – Best Free and Open Source Alternatives to Cisco Webex
Rochelle Walensky, the CDC director, recently said it was “encouraging news” that most people who have died of COVID-19 had multiple comorbidities. While I’d disagree with the “encouraging” part, I think it’s important to take a look at what comorbidities really are.
Source: LifeHacker – What Are ‘Comorbidities,’ Anyway?
It’s not an area of Linux hardware performance we normally look at, but thanks to a Red Hat engineer discovering very low serial console performance, there is an improvement queued up for introduction in Linux 5.17…..
Source: Phoronix – Linux Serial Console Driver Lands Patch For Possible ~25% Performance Improvement
New research suggests that ketamine may help people struggling with alcohol addiction. The small randomized, controlled trial found that people with severe alcohol use disorder given infusions of ketamine reported more days of abstinence at a six-month follow-up than those in a control group. The benefits also…
Source: Gizmodo – Ketamine Shows Promise for Helping People With Alcohol Addiction
The many Wordle copycats that were flooding Apple’s App Store seem to have disappeared. The apps appear to have been removed by Apple shortly after their existence caused a stir on social media. From a report: Wordle itself doesn’t have an official iOS app so other developers looked to hop on the coattails of the game’s success. But when one in particular started bragging on Twitter about the attention his version of the app was getting, he quickly caught heat, drawing attention to both his app and the many other Wordle clones on the App Store. While there are still a few five-letter word games on the store, they don’t have the name Wordle attached like the most egregious ripoffs from the last few days have. Instead these games have named like PuzzWord. There are still a few games left on the App Store that are actually called Wordle, but one was released three years ago and the other was released five years ago with very different concepts from the surprise hit developed by Josh Wardle. While the apps are now gone from the store, the question of why they’re gone remains open. There’s been no official word from Apple on whether or not the apps were removed because they violated a store rule, or simply because Apple no longer wanted them on the App Store. Either way, for now the only way to play real Worlde on your phone is still to navigate to the website on a browser.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Wordle Copycats Have Vanished From Apple’s App Store
Since the debut of Toy Story in 1995, Pixar’s animated films have helped catapult Disney’s rise to become one of the biggest corporations in the world. Seeing their films in the theater every other year was often an event in and of itself, and that’s led to a powerful, passionate fanbase that’s grown with each sequel…
Source: Gizmodo – For Pixar Fans, Turning Red’s Shift to Disney+ is Turning Ugly
Enlarge / Image from the City of Austin’s warning to ignore QR code stickers on parking meters. (credit: City of Austin)
Scammers in a few big Texas cities have been putting fake QR codes on parking meters to trick people into paying the fraudsters. Parking enforcement officers recently found stickers with fraudulent QR codes on pay stations in Austin, Houston, and San Antonio.
San Antonio police warned the public of the scam on December 20, saying that “people attempting to pay for parking using those QR codes may have been directed to a fraudulent website and submitted payment to a fraudulent vendor.” Similar scams were then found in Austin and Houston.
The Austin Transportation Department started examining their own meters after being “notified of a QR code scam by the City of San Antonio in late December—when more than 100 pay stations were stickered with fraudulent codes,” Fox 7 Austin reported last week. Austin officials checked the city’s 900 or so parking pay stations and found fraudulent QR codes on 29 of them, according to a KXAN article.
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Source: Ars Technica – Scammers put fake QR codes on parking meters to intercept parkers’ payments
We don’t expect a whole lot from a sub-$50 processor, and we most certainly would not anticipate it hanging with a CPU that costs $400 more, let alone beating it. But that’s precisely what a leaked benchmark run shows in regards to Intel’s least expensive desktop processor based on Alder Lake, the Celeron G6900. With a caveat (more on that
Source: Hot Hardware – Intel’s Celeron G6900 Alder Lake CPU Gets OC’d And Then Beats A Core i9-10900K
Enlarge / And you thought the tweets were annoying… (credit: Aurich Lawson)
On Tuesday afternoon, searching for “Wordle” on the iOS App Store turned up a small handful of apps aping the name and gameplay of the simple word game that has gone viral in recent weeks. But none of those iOS apps were made by Josh Wardle, the Brooklyn-based software engineer who created the free web-based game last October.
Today, all of those copycat apps are gone, the apparent result of a belated purge by App Store reviewers following some social media attention. But this likely doesn’t mean the end of Wordle clones. Those quick removals paper over the complicated legal and social landscape surrounding copycat apps and the protections developers can claim on their game ideas.
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Source: Ars Technica – Wordle and IP law: What happens when a hot game gets cloned
The countless delays and cancellations plaguing air travel right now (not to mention the packed planes, the skyrocketing ticket prices, and mask mandates) have left many airline passengers angrier than we’ve ever seen them before. Most air travelers have been seen taking their air rage out on flight attendants or…
Source: Gizmodo – Man Arrested for Storming an American Airlines Cockpit in a Fit of Rage
Tsunamis can be very, very bad. Caused by earthquakes, underwater landslides, volcanic eruptions, or asteroid strikes, these massive waves absolutely devastate coastal areas. They can take out all infrastructure in minutes, and almost everyone caught in a large tsunami’s waters will die. The 2004 Boxing Day tsunami…
Source: LifeHacker – Everything You Need to Know to Survive a Tsunami
Snapchat is ringing in the new year with a bunch of new features. In the coming days, Android and iOS users will be able to reply to individual messages in chats. So, if a group chat is getting a little out of hand, but you want to keep one aspect of the conversation going, Chat Replies will allow you to start a thread by holding your finger on a message and selecting the Reply option.
You’ll soon be able to use Bitmoji reactions in chats. There are seven options to choose from, including thumbs up, thumbs down, a heart, a flame and tears of joy. Again, hold down on a message to add a reaction. Telegram recently added iMessage-style reactions too.
On top of that, Snapchat users can poll friends in snaps and stories. They can respond to your question with an emoji, and you’ll be able to see how everyone voted. You’ll find the option in the sticker folder.
Snapchat says it’s improving the audio and video calling interface too. It should be easier to add lenses and see who has joined a group call before you hop in.
Source: Engadget – Snapchat adds bitmoji reactions and threaded replies to chats
“Can you beat Halo Infinite on Legendary without firing a bullet?” That’s the question posed by Tom, a Halo speedrunner and YouTuber who, like many Halo speedrunners and YouTubers, is on an endless mission to push the first-person shooter to its limits. Turns out, the answer is very much “yes.”
Source: Kotaku – Speedrunner Beats Halo Infinite On The Highest Difficulty Without Firing A Single Bullet
For years, 3D printing has promised to bring about a revolution in manufacturing, but we’re only recently starting to see it trickle down to consumer goods. Companies like Adidas have been pursuing 3D printing as a way to make sneakers that perfectly fit every size and shape of foot, and now Ikea is offering its first…
Source: Gizmodo – Ikea’s Now Selling Incredibly Intricate 3D-Printed Home Accessories
