As the semi-proud owner of a cracked, dirty, degrading Google Pixel 3 phone, I would never make claims that its night camera is very good for taking pictures of something as fast moving as a meteor shower, let alone my late night, near dark selfie sessions (don’t judge).
Source: Gizmodo – Google Settles With FTC Over Paying Personalities to Promote Phone They Never Used
Netflix has added three new mobile games to its catalog, and they’re eclectic… with a distinctly feline theme. The highlight is Hello Kitty Happiness Parade, a relentlessly cute rhythm game from Rogue Games that has up to three players dance down the street while collecting coins and thwarting the fun-hating Kuromi. It’s not the most complex game by any means, but you might not mind given the kawaii aesthetic.
Another title, Neowiz’s Cats & Soup, tasks you with helping cats make (what else?) soup. Thankfully, this is more a low-key relaxation title than a weird Neko–Atsume-meets-Overcooked crossover. And yes, there is a game for the less cat obsessed. Devolver’s Reign: Three Kingdoms is a card battler that has you waging war and politics at the end of China’s Han dynasty.
As with other Netflix mobile releases, you just need a subscription and an Android or iOS device. The hook remains the lack of sales pitches you frequently find in mobile games — there are no ads, in-app purchases or other rude surprises. If there’s content to earn, you’ll do it strictly by playing.
Netflix has been ramping up its game efforts in recent months. The creators of Downwell and Her Story have contributed to the catalog, and the streaming giant has been establishing in-house studios in addition to buying developers like Next Games (The Walking Dead) and Night School Studio (Oxenfree). The company is also poised to expand beyond mobile with not-so-subtle hints of work on blockbuster PC projects. Gaming certainly isn’t the main reason to subscribe to Netflix, but it may represent a better incentive before long.
Gather round ye gamers, for Nintendo and Illumination Studios have revealed a second Super Mario Bros. Movie trailer for us to gawk at, make memes from, and turn into fuel for our speculations and heated online debates about what next April’s theatrical release may have in store.
Source: Kotaku – Super Bros. Movie Trailer Beats The Absolute Hell Out Of Mario
An irreparable software glitch has put an end to Geotail, a JAXA-NASA joint mission. The satellite observed Earth’s magnetosphere for more than 30 years within an extremely elliptical orbit, but the mission has officially been terminated, according to JAXA’s Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS).
Source: Gizmodo – Japan-U.S. Geotail Mission Officially Comes to an End After 30 Glorious Years
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)
As Elon Musk critics flee from Twitter, Mastodon seems to be the most common replacement. In the last month, the number of monthly active users on Mastodon has rocketed more than threefold, from about 1 million to 3.5 million, while total number of users jumped from about 6.5 million to 8.7 million.
This substantial increase raises important questions about the security of this new platform, and for good reason. Unlike the centralized model of Twitter and virtually every other social media platform, Mastodon is built on a federated model of independent servers, known as instances. In this respect, it’s more akin to email or Internet Relay Chat (IRC), where security depends on the ability and attention of the admin who configured it and maintains each individual server.
The past month has seen the number of instances mushroom from about 11,000 to more than 17,000. The people running these instances are volunteers who may or may not be versed in the nuances of security. The difficulty of configuring and maintaining instances leaves plenty of room for mistakes that can put user passwords, email addresses, and IP addresses at risk of being revealed (more about that later). Twitter security left much to be desired, but at least it had a dedicated staff with a deep background in security.
Read 25 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Source: Ars Technica – How secure a Twitter replacement is Mastodon? Let us count the ways
Even though a second trailer is now here, it’s still a little hard to fully fathom that this is real: Nintendo teamed up with Illumination and made a full-on animated Super Mario Bros. movie. And while the first trailer focused more on the franchise’s villain, Bowser, this one shifts to those lovable Italian plumbers,…
Source: Gizmodo – The Super Mario Bros. Movie Has a New Trailer That Goes Full Mario Kart
Apple Music has finally unveiled the songs and artists that ruled the streaming service this year. Everything from TikTok viral hits from GAYLE and Jack Harlow to veteran Elton John revisiting his own discography in a collaboration with Dua Lipa to the respective comebacks of Harry Styles and Adele, 2022 was…
Source: Gizmodo – These Are the 10 Most Streamed Songs on Apple Music in 2022
Victoria 3 is a political simulation game that plays like accounting software. And currently, apparently even the game’s numbers agree with the so-called radical left that communism is the most economically efficient government system. Victoria 3 players have taken to the internet to complain that there aren’t any…
Source: Kotaku – Victoria 3 Players Think Communism Is Too OP
Exactly 50 years ago today, Atari released Pong. It wasn’t the first video game ever created, nor the original take on virtual table tennis – a fact that would eventually lead to two decades of lawsuits. But in Pong, the early video game industry was born. Released in 1972, Atari sold more than 8,000 Pong arcade cabinets. A few years later, the home version of Pong would become an instant success, with Sears selling about 150,000 units of the console you needed to play the game.
Those are modest sales numbers by 2022 standards, but the success of Pong and Home Pong gave Atari the resources and expertise needed to create the Atari 2600. The second-generation console went on to sell more than 30 million units before the end of 2004. All things considered, pretty good for a project that was only meant to be a training exercise for designer Allan Alcorn, who was 24 at the time and had no prior video game experience. And if not for Pong, Nintendo would not exist, and a young Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak may have not gone on to create Apple.
Happy birthday, Pong, and thank you for inspiring countless sequels and knockoffs, as well as the careers of an entire generation of video game designers.
Source: Engadget – ‘Pong’ is now half a century old
TikTok’s meteoric rise is due, in part, to viral challenges that spread on the social media platform. Some of these challenges are not only dumb, but down right dangerous. One of the more recent challenges revolves around a TikTok filter that masks people’s bodies with a blur of color intended to match the background. The new “Invisible Body”
Source: Hot Hardware – How TikTok’s ‘Invisible Body’ Challenge Is Tricking Users Into Installing Malware
As 2022 winds to a close, Apple is ready to reflect on the apps and games that made its tech so fun to use. Today, Apple released its list of the best apps and games from the year, curated by Apple’s global App Store editorial team.
Source: Gizmodo – Here Are the Best Apps and Games of 2022, According to Apple
Enlarge / The Pixel Watch colors and their default bands. There are three watch body colors here: black, silver, and gold.
Google recently launched the Pixel Watch and breathed new life into Wear OS after years of neglect, but how serious is Google about its second swing at the smartwatch market, really? Getting its flagship apps up and running on the platform would be a good sign of support, and a new report from 9to5Google says some heavy hitters are on the way. The report says: “We’ve learned that Google is testing both Gmail and Calendar for Wear OS. The experience has been described as “full” to us, though we weren’t able to find out whether this involves event creation or composing new emails.”
Building any wearables apps would be a big step for the Google Workspace suite, which, for whatever reason, has been very wearable-hesitant over the last eight years. Workspace doesn’t even have apps for the Apple Watch, let alone Wear OS. Google’s biggest productivity competitor, Microsoft, has an Outlook app for both wearable platforms.
Wear OS mirrors your smartphone notifications, so for something like Gmail, you can still see and read a new Gmail message if it arrives in your notifications, and you can send a reply. You can even send a new email by voice if you know the address or have a contact, all without the app. What you can’t do are most of the normal browsing tasks, like looking through your inbox and searching your older mail. It would also be nice to have watch-centric notification options, as opposed to just mirroring the settings for your phone.
Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Source: Ars Technica – Google reportedly has Gmail and Calendar apps in the works for Wear OS
From brutally high inflation to a record-high 7% mortgage rate, it’s been a rough year for prospective homebuyers. A lot goes into understanding this housing market, but in recent months especially, experts have been speculating whether this housing market holds the same ominous signs of a crisis like that of 2008.…
Source: LifeHacker – Why Economists Predict Home Prices Will Fall Next Year
When we’re talking about a memory interface, there are a bunch of salient specifications, but the two most important are generally its width and its transfer rate. Usually, when we hear about new memory, the main marketing merit is its sky-high transfer rate, but Samsung’s taking a different tack with GDDR6W.
Specifically for PC GPUs, memory
Source: Hot Hardware – Samsung Unveils GDDR6W Graphics Memory Enabling 2X Capacity And A Huge Performance Lift
When NASA’s Webb Space Telescope team and artist Ashley Zelinskie wanted to bring space exploration to everyone, they chose Mozilla Hubs, our open source platform for creating 3D virtual spaces right from your browser. Ashley told us that they “didn’t want to cut people out that didn’t have fancy VR headsets or little experience in…
Source: LXer – 3 ways to use Mozilla Hubs, a VR platform that’s accessible and private by design
As of late, concerns about the future of Twitter have caused many of its
users to seek alternatives. Amid this upheaval, an open-source
microblogging service called Mastodon has received a great deal of
attention. Mastodon is not reliant on any single company or central
authority to run its servers; anyone can run their own. Servers communicate
with each other, allowing people on different servers to send each other
messages and follow each other’s posts. Mastodon doesn’t just talk to
itself, though; it can exchange messages with anything that speaks the ActivityPub protocol.
There are many such implementations, so someone who wants to deploy their own
microblogging service enjoys a variety of choices.
Source: LWN.net – [$] Microblogging with ActivityPub
Sure, Marvel Snap is a great game that’s completely taken over my Twitter feed and life. But not everything in Marvel Snap is wonderful. For example, there are some really annoying and terrible zones that can appear during matches. And I’m here to list the worst of ’em.
Source: Kotaku – The 12 Worst Marvel Snap Locations (So Far…)
Many of the traditional companies that jumped into digital streaming to catch up to the likes of Netflix are now finding that the streaming wars haven’t done much to help their business. Like the kingdoms of old regularly found out, wars are costly, and drained coffers won’t do anything to help you stay in the fight.
Source: Gizmodo – AMC Eyes Layoffs as Its Streaming Services Aren’t Making Enough Money
