Nerdly News Curated from Interesting Sites
Steve Roe is a street photographer who specializes in stylized shots of Asian cities at night. He’s been experimenting with some crowdfunded fractal lenses that add neat effects. (more…)
theodp writes: “Long before phone addiction panic gripped the masses and before screen time became a facet of our wellness and digital detoxes,” begins Katie Reid’s article, How the Shared Family Computer Protected Us from Our Worst Selves, “there was one good and wise piece of technology that served our families. Maybe it was in the family room or in the kitchen. It could have been a Mac or PC. Chances are it had a totally mesmerizing screensaver. It was the shared family desktop.” She continues: “I can still see the Dell I grew up using as clear as day, like I just connected to NetZero yesterday. It sat in my eldest sister’s room, which was just off the kitchen. Depending on when you peeked into the room, you might have found my dad playing Solitaire, my sister downloading songs from Napster, or me playing Wheel of Fortune or writing my name in Microsoft Paint. The rules for using the family desktop were pretty simple: homework trumped games; Dad trumped all. Like the other shared equipment in our house, its usefulness was focused and direct: it was a tool that the whole family used, and it was our portal to the wild, weird, wonderful internet. As such, we adored it.” Did you have a shared family computer growing up? Can you relate to any of the experiences Katie mentioned in her article? Please share your thoughts in a comment below.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Football season is almost here, and Bud Light has put together something special for the fans of the eternally suffering Cleveland Browns: Cleveland Browns Victory Fridges, a bunch of custom-made, internet-connected fridges that will only open when the Browns manage to snap their winless streak (currently at 17 games and counting).
Its a fun promotion with some impressive technical effort behind it, but theres just one problem: those fridges will never need to open.
Bud Light claims that the fridges are kept shut with an elaborate locking system whereby the chains holding the doors closed (and the beer inside) are help up by an internal magnet, synced together with the other Browns Victory…
To find the right opportunity around which to build an AI business, startups must apply the Goldilocks principle to find the sweet spot that is just right.
Humans already find it unnerving enough when extremely alien-looking robots are kicked and interfered with, so one can only imagine how much worse it will be when they make unbroken eye contact and mirror your expressions while you heap abuse on them. This is the future we have selected.
Two or three years back you would see a handful of really interesting unofficial badges at DEF CON. Now, there’s a deluge of clever, beautiful, and well executed badges. Last weekend I tried to see every badge and meet every badge maker. Normally, I would publish one megapost to show off everything I had seen, but this year I’m splitting it into volumes. Join me after the break for the first upload of the incredible badges of DC26!
The Telephreak party at DEF CON is a gathering of a tight knit group of phone phreakers who spend …read more
Starting today, youll be able to send polls through direct messages in Instagram. It works the same as adding the poll sticker to your stories, but now, youll be presented with the option to send the story to your own selection of users. Everyone in the group chat will be able to view the poll results as they vote in real time. Its not as groundbreaking of an update as, say, the ability to mute your friends posts, but its still a useful tool for when you just want to poll a small group of relevant people, like a dinner party or family members.
The poll sticker has been available for Stories since last October, and since then, it has been joined by the Emoji slider and the Questions sticker. Instagram is going full-force to increase…
Heres one way to get kids off the phones they wont put down: hide them in a high-tech box.
TechDen, which is currently being funded through a Kickstarter campaign, claims to help kids develop healthy screen habits, by combining an app to manage your childs screen time with a literal white box that stores and charges up to two phones or tablets. It can also recognize each device, and send parents notifications about which devices are charging and which are currently in use.
Parents can create designated sessions routine windows of time where their kids can use their phone and set up a maximum allowable screen time within each of these windows. For example, a session could be an hour before bedtime, and the maximum amount of…
Little Pyongyang made the festival rounds and his been picked up by The Guardian. It tells the story of how one soldier made his way to Europe’s largest community of North Korean nationals after escaping the brutal regime.
Joong-wha Choi, a former soldier in North Korea, lives today with his wife and children in a sleepy London suburb, home to Europe’s biggest North Korean population. Despite enjoying the new found comforts of his British life, and being emancipated from the pressures of the North Korean state, he has a desire to return to the land that betrayed him, and feels like his true home. Joong-wha reflects on both why he left North Korea and the state of his day to day life over the course of several months, in a portrait of loss, longing, and the complexities of healing from trauma.
Here’s a nice Q&A with the filmmakers
Little Pyongyang (YouTube / The Guardian)
Vue.js has been all the rage lately and is proving to be a strong competitor to Angular and React. When it comes to the mobile development frameworks, we’re lucky that NativeScript allows us to create native Android and iOS applications with Vue.js. A little less than a year ago I wrote a tutorial titled, Using a Mapbox in a NativeScript Angular Application, that demonstrated including feature-rich maps in an application built with Angular.
Being that we’re all polyglots here, wouldn’t it be nice if we could accomplish the same with NativeScript and Vue.js?
HQ Trivia might be waning in popularity, but its not dead yet. Now, its getting an Apple TV app so that you can more easily but less efficiently play with friends, via TechCrunch.
Today we launched our Apple TV app where you can play HQ right on your
Download it from the App Store today! pic.twitter.com/ZwllXmxZAM
HQ Trivia (@hqtrivia) August 14, 2018
Its a move that makes a lot of sense, partly. HQ has always chased the classic game show presentation that shows like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? or Jeopardy made famous. So making the jump to an actual TV feels like a natural extension of that. And playing on a TV, in theory, makes it easier to play HQ with more friends and family members.
But the problem is: if youre…
While the field of VR headsets used to be more or less limited to Oculus and Vive, numerous competitors have sprung up as the technology has matured and some are out to beat the market leaders at their own game. StarVR’s latest headset brings eye-tracking and a seriously expanded field of view to the game, and the latter especially is a treat to experience.
Mariano Pascual has created a delightful nod to classic desktop layouts for his new site, but it’s updated with all kinds of colorful bells, whistles, and Easter eggs. (more…)
For dinner, the Varchetti family ordered a pepperoni pizza from Hungry Howies.
When the 18 year old delivery man arrived at their home, he gave them the pizza, saw the piano in the foyer, and asked if he could play it.
For the next ninety seconds, he played the third movement of Beethovens Moonlight sonata from memory.
Was it Isaac Newton who said he saw further because he stood on the shoulders of giants? APIs are like pithy, epigrammatic quotes for those who write code. They let programmers see further and stand on the shoulders of giants.
To read this article in full, please click here
(Insider Story)
There are plenty of places outside where you may like to have a project requiring electricity that may not get enough sun for solar power to be viable. Perhaps wind power could be used instead? [Greg] has a project to create a platform for using a small wind turbine to generate the power for your projects.
The wind turbine that [Greg] designing is a Savonius-style wind turbine that would put out between 5 and 12 volts. In a Savonius turbine, blades are mounted on a vertical axis allowing for a smaller, less complicated build than traditional horizontal axis wind turbines. …read more
Microsoft started testing its Your Phone app with Windows 10 Insiders last month, and now the company is making it available to all Windows 10 users. If youre running Windows 10 with the latest April 2018 Update, Your Phone is available to install from the Microsoft Store. The app mirrors phone content to a PC, but currently only supports Android devices and the ability to drag and drop photos from a phone to a PC.
Microsoft is also planning to add support for text message sync and notifications from Android phones to mirror to a PC at some point in the future. Microsoft had been testing Your Phone as part of the companys upcoming Redstone 5 update for Windows 10, but it now appears it will be made broadly available without the…
Earlier this summer, at 2018s San Diego Comic-Con, Star Trek: Discovery showrunner Alex Kurtzman confirmed that Spock, the beloved half-Vulcan second-in-command of the original Star Treks U.S.S. Enterprise, would be appearing in the newest Trek series. After much searching, CBS has announced that the show has cast the role. Ethan Peck, whose previous credits include playing Patrick Verona (the Heath Ledger character) in the TV adaptation of 10 Things I Hate About You and who also happens to be the grandson of legendary actor Gregory Peck will fill the TV shoes of the late Leonard Nimoy. (Peck is not related to Zachary Quinto, who currently plays the character in the film franchise, but there certainly is a non-familial…
Beta software always presents a risk going in. Companies usually recommend not installing it in primary devices for that very reason. For those who like to live on the edge, however, the latest beta of iOS 12 presented some very real issues. Reports of buggy performance lag, freezes and crashes were pretty widespread for the […]
To create life-saving drugs or groundbreaking technological advancements, scientists first need the proper lab equipment. Everything from intricate and expensive specialized machines to beakers and rubber gloves must be sourced, price compared and ordered by a lab manager before even the first steps toward discovery can take place. But, says Tom Ruginis, CEO and founder […]