Nerdly News Curated from Interesting Sites
Google gave us a hardware blitzkrieg at CES. Among other things, the company announced a new smart display category, aimed at taking on the Echo Show through sheer, brute force. The new Show Mode Dock isnt a direct response, but its a clever one. Two years ago, Amazon introduced Alexa for the Fire tablet line. […]
$22 is the lowest price I’ve seen for an Aeropress coffee maker. (Just click the the little coupon checkbox on the Amazon page.) It’s a lot of fun to make coffee with the Aeropress — you pour a little water in the piston and put it in the microwave for about 40 seconds. Then you put a microfilter in the cylinder (you get a “years supply” with the Aeropress) and a scoop of ground coffee. The you put the cylinder on top of a cup (the company recommends using a clear mug to make the process even more fun), pour the heated (not boiling — it’ll make the coffee bitter and sour, they say) water, stir for 10 seconds, and press the piston down. A few seconds later, you have a wonderful cup of silky smooth coffee.
[Carson] didn’t know how to use an accelerometer until he wired one up to a Teensy and put it all in a hat. The result is a joystick that will probably cause you neck problems if you play video games for very long. You can see a video of how the device came to be and how it works, below.
We liked the approach of building up the circuit and testing it before integrating it with the hat. He used a small breadboard with half the Teensy pins hanging off. That seems to work, although we’d be worried about something …read more
Hulu has picked up an adaptation of Anne Rices lengthy Vampire Chronicles series, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The classic gothic literature series will join the streaming services catalog of original content, which includes adaptations of The Handmaids Tale and the Stephen King-inspired series Castle Rock, which debuts July 25th.
Paramount TV optioned the entire 11-book series in 2017, with Rice and her son Christopher attached as a writers and executive producers. Star Trek: Discovery and American Gods showrunner Bryan Fuller was attached to the project earlier this year, but has since dropped out to step back from the project rather than step on the toes of [his] longtime friends, according to THR.
You’ve probably seen the video clip from Who Is America? in which comedian provocateur Sacha Baron Cohen easily convinces right wing politicians and lobbyists to express their support for giving guns to four-year-olds. Here’s another clip with Cohen’s character trying to explain a mathematically unsound proposal to Bernie Sanders, who patiently explains why the proposal move the 99% into the 1% won’t work. (more…)
Alabama college student Walter Carr, 20, got a job at a moving company in a nearby town. The night before his new job started, his 2003 Nissan Altima broke down.
There have been a lot of iconic images offering the FEELING of a NYC subway ride.
The goth woman and her raven, and the Ramones and their guitars are the first to come to mind. Taking photos of people riding the subway is likely on par with photographers crapping out another image of San Franciaco’s Golden Gate Bridge. Once in a while tho, we get art.
I have an MTA card in my wallet.
Curlicuecal has a PhD in entomology and did graduate work on ant behavior. Recently Curlicuecal rated ant emojis from Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, and other companies on their Tumblr. Apple has the best ant, and Mozilla had the worst (they use a termite).
Beautiful big almond eye, realistic and full of expression as she gazes gently at you. Elbowed antennae and delicately segmented legs and body. Gorgeous pearlescent sheen like she is glowing. This ant moisturizes. This ant is round and huggable. This ant is a star. 11/10.
Beautifully detailed, lifelike pose but with an unexpected neck and odd antennae, perhaps scared straight. Her eyes suggest she has seen things. Her expression confirms she has seen too much. She is haunted and I want to know more. 7/10.
Mophie, a best-selling manufacturer of stylish battery cases, just announced a range of battery packs specifically built for use with different iOS devices, including the iPhone, iPad, and AirPods.
Its new Powerstation battery packs all charge via Apples Lightning connector meaning the cord you use to charge your phone is the same one that charges the battery, cutting down on wires and making your bag a little more streamlined.
mophie
Each Powerstation includes an LED power indicator and offers anywhere between 20 to 70 hours of extra battery life, depending on the power pack you choose. Broadly, the packs have two different models. The first model is a typical battery pack that powers your phone and charges via…
If your Instagram account is public, theres no real way to stop people from looking at your feed. Even if you block someone, your photos are just a private browser window away. That said, Instagram is at least trying to give users more direct control over their own list of followers; the company has started more widely testing the ability to manually remove followers with a few taps.
Users with private accounts have long had the ability to remove followers and immediately cut off access to their own content. But an increasing number of public accounts have also gained the option to manually kick people out of their pool of followers. Reports of this new remove follower feature have been popping up over the last few months, and it…
Pilot Labs Zeus Battle Robot captured our hearts at CES back in January, because, well, just look at this crazy thing: Seemingly against all odds, the bot is now available for purchase through Amazon. And the price tag is as insane as the rest of it: $1,600 for the kit and $1,700 for a pre-assembled […]
I bought PG Tips for a taste off with my favorite black tea Barry’s Gold Blend. I decided to finish the box, rather than just throw it out, and ended up depressed.
When I first started drinking Barry’s folks told me it was “a builder’s blend” and that I would “taste the bag.” Folks insisted I try PG Tips. A woman I’d been seeing who claimed deep knowledge of tea was an aficionado of the triangular PF Tips bag. I ignored them as I didn’t care, and liked Barry’s. After enough pressure, I tried PG Tips and wrote a review. I didn’t like it much. The box got put away.
A few weeks ago I put my box of Barry’s in my camper and headed north up the West Coast of the United States of America. When I got home I realized the box must have been left someplace along the way. I was about to re-order when I realized the PG Tips was just sitting there. I’d finish it before reordering and reclaim that tiny bit of cabinet space.
PG Tips tastes like cardboard. Rather than the 3-5 cups of Barry’s I’ll drink in a day, I was having one or less. Unfinished mugs of tea were gently evaporating around my kitchen and office. I was getting less done than I wanted to and felt pretty tired all day. Then I realized what was up!
Quickly I ordered a few boxes of Barry’s Gold Blend. This morning I made my first cup in a few weeks. I was thrilled to look into my cup of Barry’s to see the abyss staring right back!
Americans can find Barry’s Gold Blend readily available via Amazon.
The folks at [K&J Magnetics] have access to precise magnetometers, a wealth of knowledge from years of experience but when it comes to playing around with a silly project like a magnetic koozie, they go right to trial and error rather than simulations and calculations. Granted, this is the opposite of mission-critical.
Once the experimentation was over, they got down to explaining their results so we can learn more than just how to hold our beer on the side of a toolbox. They describe three factors related to magnetic holding in clear terms that are the meat and bones of …read more
Twitch is adding GIF usage to its platform. The company announced today that streamers can now search for and pull animated images using the Giphy extension. GIFs will then post to a pre-determined section of the screen dictated by the streamer.
According to Twitch, GIFs will be queued up and delivered one-by-one. Extensions are a great framework designed to make channels on Twitch more interactive so creators can better engage and retain their fans, said VP of developer experience Amir Shevat in a prepared statement. With GIPHY tapping into their extensive library of animated Gifs for their new Extension, it adds a fun and compelling new element to the social video experience that is sure to resonate with the current meme…
With the upcoming release of iOS 12, Apple is introducing a new app called Shortcuts that will allow users to build custom voice commands for Siri that can be used to kick off a variety of actions in apps. While some apps will directly prompt users to add a Shortcut to Siri, the new Shortcuts […]
One key devops best practice is instrumenting a continuous integration/continuousdelivery (CI/CD) pipeline that automates the process of building software, packaging applications, deploying them to target environments, and instrumenting service calls to enable the application. This automation requires scripting individual procedures and orchestrating the steps from code checkin to running application. Once matured, devops teams use the automation to drive process change and strive to do smaller, more frequent deployments that deliver new functionality to users and improve quality.
To read this article in full, please click here
(Insider Story)
The SPINES (Self-Powered IoT Node for Environmental Sensing) Mote is a wireless IoT environmental sensor, but don’t let the neatly packed single PCB fool you into thinking it’s not hackable. [Macro Yau] specifically designed SPINES to be highly modular in order to make designing an energy harvesting sensor node an easier task. The way [Macro] sees it, there are two big hurdles to development: one is the energy harvesting itself, and the other is the software required to manage the use of every precious joule of that harvested energy.
[Macro] designed the single board SPINES Mote in a way that …read more
The Spotify app on Android and iOS now lets you clear your cache without affecting your downloaded songs. Thats a minor quality of life improvement for users who want Spotify to take up less storage space but still want to be able to listen to songs while offline.
The update appears to have quietly rolled out over the past few weeks to Android users, as spotted by Android Police and confirmed by The Verge. Spotify will also now clarify that downloads arent being deleted when you delete your cache, which could provide additional peace of mind. After all, who wants to be stuck in a dead zone without music?
The new feature is available in the latest version of the Android and iOS apps. For users of either version, they should see the…
Researchers at Purdue University and the University of Virginia are now able to create “tiny, thin-film electronic circuits peelable from a surface,” the first step in creating an unobtrusive Internet-of-Things solution. The peelable stickers can sit flush to an object’s surface and be used as sensors or wireless communications systems. The biggest difference between these […]
Facebook’s virtual reality arm is beginning to sell its Oculus Go headsets directly to business users with a dedicated bundle. Starting today, business users can order a business bundle with a 64GB Oculus Go headset for $299. Oculus isn’t charging much of a premium for business users, tacking on an extra $50 for some added […]