Taking notes by hand is generally preferable to using tech, both because it’s better for retention and also because so many of the best note-taking methods are designed for notebooks. But sometimes, you just need to the utility of digital notes, and if you don’t want to digitize what you’ve already written, you…
Source: LifeHacker – Use the Boxing Method to Take Better Digital Notes
The Marvel Cinematic Universe is back on the smaller screen to tell the larger story of how the Time Variance Authory operates outside of the Sacred Timeline in Loki season two.
Source: Gizmodo – Loki Season 2 Brings New Faces and New Dilemmas to the Sacred Timeline
samleecole writes: Tickets for rapper Travis Scott’s upcoming tour sold out fast. Check StubHub right now, however, and you can find thousands of tickets to “sold out” shows in many cities for between $10 and $20, far below the face value for his cheapest tickets at $61.50 before fees when they first went on sale. In ticket reseller lingo, Scott’s tour is a “bloodbath,” the result of overzealous brokers and noobs “overbuying” tickets based on a miscalculation of the likely value of his tickets on the secondary market. Many brokers now stand to lose a lot of money on Scott’s shows. At least part of this buying frenzy was fueled by a bet placed by PFS Buyers Club, a credit card maxing site I wrote about earlier this week that has recently pivoted from buying rare coins to buying concert tickets. PFS told its members to buy as many tickets to Scott’s shows as possible, according to emails viewed by 404 Media.
PFS itself stands to lose more than $1 million on Travis Scott alone when all is said and done, it told members. The entire situation, which has become a complicated mess, sheds light on a little-known segment of the ticket broker industry, where resellers partner with credit card “buyers clubs” to obtain tickets. The fiasco also highlights the risks associated with ticket reselling and shows how Ticketmaster profits from the secondary market, helping it sell out artists even before their ability to sell out venues is guaranteed, and passing that risk on to resellers.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Low Demand For Travis Scott Creates Liquidity Crisis In Ticket Reselling Economy
Tracking your fitness and health just got easier if you use MyFitnessPal and Google’s Wear OS. The MyFitnessPal smartwatch app offers a way to keep track of your health stats, including calorie intake and gym gains. While this worked well, it has also been limited since you couldn’t edit or input your data directly on your wearable device. However, the latest app update changes things for the better.
In a recent blog post, MyFitnessPal announced updates that will make tracking and logging easier on Wear OS. Now, users can track and log without pulling out their phones. When wearing compatible Android smartwatches, users will have access to new watch tiles and complications — which will give them the ability to log foods they eat regularly while keeping track of daily nutritional intake, like sugar, fiber, fats, calories and even hydration. Users will also be able to see a quick snapshot of their entire day right from their wrists.
This feature will be available to users with a smartwatch running Wear OS, like the new Pixel Watch 2. The MyFitnessPal app is available for download from the Google Play Store.
While this feature isn’t entirely new to the MyFitnessPal app on smartwatches — Apple Watch users have had this option for a while — it’s good news that people using Wear OS have another way to track. Monitoring our health and wellness is important and can be easily neglected when we just don’t have the time. Any innovation, big or small, that makes keeping up with health stats easier is always a good move. Now if only they could figure out a way to burn and log calories without the exercise.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/myfitnesspal-update-lets-users-track-meals-or-workouts-on-wear-os-watches-195919769.html?src=rss
Source: Engadget – MyFitnessPal update lets users track meals or workouts on Wear OS watches
A lot is happening in the world of entry-level GPUs right now. Intel is reportedly finally launching its Arc A580 graphics card despite announcing the model a year ago. The Arc A580 is expected to target RTX 3050 performance levels. Meanwhile, NVIDIA appears to be releasing a competitor to the Arc 580 in the form of an even less powerful RTX
Source: Hot Hardware – NVIDIA May Counter Intel’s Arc A580 GPU With A Cut Down GeForce RTX 3050 6GB SKU
Enlarge / 2023 has been a remarkable year for Antarctic sea ice. (credit: National Snow and Ice Data Center)
Sometimes, data points deemed to be “outliers” are met with suspicion—possibly the result of an error in the measuring process, for example. But outliers can also represent a puzzling thing that really happened. This year’s floating sea ice cover around Antarctica falls into that latter category.
On September 25, the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) published preliminary dates and numbers for the annual maximum sea ice coverage in the Antarctic and minimum coverage in the Arctic. With the last few days of September in the books, NSIDC noted Wednesday that those determinations have held.
Arctic sea ice coverage hit its end-of-summer low point on September 19, the sixth lowest in the satellite record that started in 1979. The average across all of September was fifth lowest. The record is still held by an unusual 2012 season, but sea ice is steadily declining over time.
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Source: Ars Technica – Bizarre year for sea ice notches another record
A fix has made its way into the Linux PCI subsystem’s power management branch to address various AMD Ryzen Rembrandt and Phoenix generation laptops failing to resume from suspend when external USB devices are attached for initiating the system resume…
Source: Phoronix – Linux Fix Queued For Recent AMD Laptops Failing To Resume From Attached USB Devices
It’s time once again to pay tribute to the utmost of ursines. That’s right, it’s yet another annual installment of Fat Bear Week. People will get the chance to vote for 12 of the plumpest brown bears living at the Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska all through next week. The contestants include grizzled…
Source: Gizmodo – Let’s Get Ready to Jiggle: Fat Bear Week Is Here Again to Soothe Your Soul
Never mind that Google took over the week with its Pixel device announcements. Samsung held a keynote for its developer’s conference today, and it announced its new soundbar, the HW-Q900C, which can act as a centralized SmartThings smart home hub.
Source: Gizmodo – Samsung Adds SmartThings to Its Soundbars and Smart TVs
Enlarge / An FBI agent takes a photo of a memorial for victims of a mass shooting at Robb Elementary School on May 27, 2022, in Uvalde, Texas. Police were criticized for delaying for more than an hour confronting the shooter. Such criticism has led some police to respond more aggressively to hoax school shooting calls. (credit: Michael M. Santiago / Staff | Getty Images North America)
Within the past year, there have been approximately five times more school shooting hoaxes called in to police than actual school shootings reported in 2023.
Where data from Everytown showed “at least 103 incidents of gunfire on school grounds” in 2023, The Washington Post recently uncovered what seems to be a coordinated campaign of active shooter hoaxes causing “swattings”—where police respond with extreme force to fake crimes—at more than 500 schools nationwide over the past year. In just one day in February, “more than 30 schools were targeted,” The Post reported.
Education safety experts and law enforcement officials told The Post that this “wave of school shooting hoaxes” is unprecedented. And Drew Evans, the superintendent of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, warned that just because there’s no shooter, that does not mean these schools aren’t endangered by the hoaxes.
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Source: Ars Technica – Hundreds of US schools hit by potentially organized swatting hoaxes, report says
Your ring camera is not only going to be the source of an Amazon-fueled Big Brother dystopia—it may also capture evidence of extraterrestrial life. On the off chance that you record an alien being on your Ring camera, the tech company is willing to pay you for it.
Source: Gizmodo – Amazon Will Pay You Million for Alien Footage From Your Ring Doorbell
No matter how dedicated you are to responding to and archiving all your emails, there will always be one villainous monster preventing you from hitting true inbox zero: mailing lists. These horrors come in at all hours of the day, clogging things up and making it harder to spot the truly important messages—and it’s…
Source: LifeHacker – The Easiest Way to Filter Junk Out of Your Gmail Inbox
President Joe Biden is suspending 26 environmental laws to build a border wall in south Texas, a move announced by the Department of Homeland Security on Wednesday. The laws include the Clean Air Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, Endangered Species Act, and National Environmental Policy Act—all waived in favor of…
Source: Gizmodo – Biden Suspends 26 Environmental Laws to Build Border Wall
The global average temperature for September broke records by such an absurd margin that climate experts are struggling to describe the phenomenon. From a report: “This month was — in my professional opinion as a climate scientist — absolutely gobsmackingly bananas,” Zeke Hausfather, a researcher with Berkeley Earth, said on the social media platforms Bluesky and X. The numbers are stark. September 2023 beat the previous record for the month, set in 2020, by 0.5C (0.9F), according to data sets maintained by the Japan Meteorological Agency and the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. The temperature anomaly for the month was roughly 1.7C above pre-industrial levels, which is above the symbolic 1.5C mark set as the stretch goal in the Paris Agreement.
“We’ve never really seen a jump anything quite of this magnitude,” Hausfather said. “Half a degree C is analogous to slightly less than half of all the warming we’ve seen from pre-industrial [temperatures].” Carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels are the main driver of rising temperatures. The global average temperature this year has also seen a boost from El Nino, a natural climate shift in the Pacific. Other factors may also be pushing temperatures up incrementally, such as a decline in cooling aerosol pollution from ships. Hausfather said next September may be unlikely to have all the same compounding factors, and consequently may be not as extreme. But either way, he described September 2023 as a “sneak peek” of what the back-to-school month may feel like in a decade as climate change pushes temperatures higher.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – September Broke the Global Heat Record by a ‘Gobsmackingly Bananas’ Margin
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney says the company is adjusting Unreal Engine pricing for non-gaming developers in fields like film / TV and automotive. “We haven’t officially announced this, but in the interest of transparency, we want to put it out there,” Sweeney said in a presentation from Unreal Fest 2023 posted on X (formerly Twitter) by @ImmatureGamerX (via Game Developer). The CEO didn’t mention specific pricing but said Epic’s licensing model would resemble those of tools like Maya and Photoshop.
Sweeney sounded (understandably) determined to differentiate Epic’s price hike from Unity’s. The latter stirred the ire of countless developers as it announced a per-install pricing model that many smaller developers claimed would have put them out of business. Unity ended up walking back many of the plan’s most contentious changes. However, whether the softened stance will prevent a full-on developer exodus remains to be seen. Several months before its pricing fiasco, Unity cut its workforce for the third time in less than a year.
Epic’s CEO briefly addressed his company’s recent layoffs, where it let go of 16 percent of its workforce. “This was a survival move that was necessary,” Sweeney said. He added that Epic began running into “financial problems” about 10 weeks ago, but he sounded satisfied that the move puts Epic back on solid ground. “One thing, we stabilized our finances so we won’t run out of money as we build the metaverse,” he said. Epic has been bullish on constructing a virtual universe, including a partnership with Meta, Microsoft, and others to develop metaverse standards.
Sweeney explained that Fortnite‘s revenue had subsidized other parts of the company and that it was time for change. He claimed aspects of Epic’s business had grown too reliant on the cash cow. “A funny thing about being funded so heavily by Fortnite over the past six years is we’ve had different parts of our business get disconnected from their revenue streams. We have big teams serving different industry verticals, building this and that set of features for custom clients without revenue to support it,” he said.
The co-founder sounded as invested as ever in the Epic Games Store. “We think the Epic Games Store is a cure to a disease that’s impacting a lot of the industry right now, where the mobile platforms have become overlords and are extracting vastly higher payment processing fees than any same payment process around there,” he stated. “And we’re fighting that.” The company has taken on Apple and Google’s stranglehold on mobile payments.
Sweeney’s speech wrapped by framing the moment as a crucial turning point laced with optimism. “In summary, this is a pivotal moment for us,” he explained. “Our commitment now is to operate differently. We are determined to avoid falling back into a precarious position. Through the highs and lows, we promise to support you,” Sweeney said.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/unreal-engine-will-get-more-expensive-but-not-for-game-devs-191959514.html?src=rss
Source: Engadget – Unreal Engine will get more expensive, but not for game devs
Saw X is a film that only works because it’s the 10th film in the franchise. This story could not have been told by the second or third Saw movie; if this movie were to exist at all, it could only come now, and the franchise is better off for it.
Source: Gizmodo – Why Saw X Works So Damned Well
Assassin’s Creed Mirage, Ubisoft’s latest entry in the long-running franchise, is out now across Xbox, PlayStation, and PC. And unlike recent games in the series, Mirage isn’t some giant 200-hour RPG. Instead, most players will be able to wrap up the main story and most side content in the game in under 25 hours.
Source: Kotaku – 17 Things I Wish I Knew Before Playing Assassin’s Creed Mirage
Google had a major unveiling event earlier this week, revealing the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro, along with the Pixel Watch 2 and new Pixel Buds. One of the biggest changes from the previous Pixel is the addition of new AI features on the Pixel 8, mainly manipulating images and audio with AI. But these improvements come…
Source: LifeHacker – These Are the Best Preorder Sales for the Google Pixel 8
Google has finally released a version of Gmail for Wear OS to accompany the launch of the Pixel Watch 2, as originally spotted by 9to5Google. The company teased this feature back in May at I/O, but we were left wondering when it would actually launch. Well, here it is, giving you prime wrist access to your emails.
This has been a long-awaited option for Wear OS users, as Google hasn’t offered a direct way to access Gmail with its smartwatches, outside of notifications, until now. Being as how Gmail is one of the company’s tentpole offerings, it’s a mystery as to why it took this long. Still, better late than never.
The app seems robust, with options to refresh your inbox, scroll through emails and even switch between multiple accounts on the fly. You can also adjust the overall settings so new email notifications pop up on the watch’s face as you go about your day. The app works with 2021’s Wear OS 3 and the just-released Wear OS 4, so those with slightly older smartwatches can also read an endless barrage of campaign donation emails. Gmail for Wear OS is available now via the Google Play Store.
Back at I/O, Google also announced that the company’s Calendar app was coming to Wear OS, but that has yet to materialize. Calendar for Wear OS is expected to allow users to check schedules, RSVP to invites, update tasks and to-do lists and more. Additionally, Google’s smart home ecosystem will soon get improved Wear OS integration, letting you answer your Nest doorbell from your wrist.
However, as Wear OS 3 and Wear OS 4 continue to gain new features, the company’s older smartwatch operating systems are losing features. Google recently announced that its proprietary voice assistant would no longer work on watches running anything before Wear OS 3.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-gmail-app-for-wear-os-is-finally-available-185420301.html?src=rss
Source: Engadget – The Gmail app for Wear OS is finally available
Enlarge / “They excised what, now?” Puck is nonetheless intrigued by new findings about the mechanisms behind a cat’s purr. (credit: Jennifer Ouellette)
There are few things more gratifying to cat lovers than a contentedly purring feline. But the precise mechanisms by which kitties produce those pleasant, low-frequency rumblings has been a matter of some debate among scientists. Now a team of Austrian scientists has determined that connective tissues embedded in cats’ vocal cords play a crucial role in this ability, according to a new paper published in the journal Current Biology. The authors argue that their findings call for a reassessment of the current prevailing hypothesis about how cats purr.
Purring is mostly exclusive to cats, although certain other species can produce purr-like sounds, including raccoons, mongooses, kangaroos, badgers, rabbits, and guinea pigs. And cats are usually divided into those that purr (Felinae) and those that roar (Pantherinae); no cat species can do both. The latter category includes lions, tigers, jaguars, and leopards, and scientists have suggested that the roaring capability is due to an incompletely ossified hyoid bone in the larynx. “Purrers,” by contrast, have a completely ossified hyoid, although the purring snow leopard is a rare exception.
We know the fundamental frequency at which cats purr—between 20 to 30 vibrations per second, although purrs can go up to about 150 Hz—but that is lower than expected based on vocal cord anatomy. As a general rule, larger animals have longer vocal cords and thus create lower-frequency sounds. But cats are relatively small, typically weighing on the order of a few kilograms, and their vocal cords are also relatively short. Hence the curiosity about how they produce such low-frequency purrs.
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Source: Ars Technica – We now know how cats purr—why they purr is still up for debate
