Nerdly News Curated from Interesting Sites
The freezing waters underneath Antarctic ice shelves and the underside of the ice itself are of great interest to scientists… but who wants to go down there? Leave it to the robots. They won’t complain! And indeed, a pair of autonomous subs have been nosing around the ice for a full year now, producing data unlike any other expedition ever has.
If your company uses a VPN and/or a mobile device management service to give you access to its intranet and internal web apps, then you know how annoying those are. AWS today launched a new product, Amazon WorkLink, that promises to make this process significantly easier. WorkLink is a fully managed service that, for $5 […]
I’ve really been enjoying the new ‘MythBusters Jr’, Adam Savage’s new science exploration show featuring… kids. Really smart awesome talented kids.
Adam Savage will be Tweeting live during tonight’s two premiere episodes, and they start airing an hour early (at 8 pm ET) for parents with wee ones.
Watch it on Science Channel through your cable/satellite provider, or SCIGO, their online streaming service.
Ill be Tweeting LIVE tonight including some BTS photos during our TWO premieres of #MythBustersJr on @ScienceChannel! Tune in this evening at 5 pm PT/8 pm ET! pic.twitter.com/hJBHBJQPgO
— Adam Savage (@donttrythis) January 23, 2019
One of the episodes tonight is ‘Demolition Dominoes.’
Can a single domino start a chain reaction that can crush a CAR? And is it possible to remove the solitary bottom block from a late-game Jenga tower without toppling it? Find out on #MythBustersJr: Demolition Dominos, premiering Wednesday at 8p on @ScienceChannel. pic.twitter.com/BueR1BreEv
— MythBusters (@MythBusters) January 21, 2019
This small-scale test bodes well!
Well, the small-scale test bodes well. But can a domino crush a CAR? Tune in to #MythBustersJr: Demolition Dominoes TONIGHT at 8p on @ScienceChannel. pic.twitter.com/NFxFIsPAUF
— MythBusters (@MythBusters) January 23, 2019
Here’s another show scene, with Adam helping his co-host Elijah test his concept of using bungee to remove the last Jenga piece.
Can you remove the the solitary bottom block from a late-game Jenga tower without toppling it? As his co-hosts build different devices to test this myth, @donttrythis checks in on @NotABombBunkE.
Glass screen protectors have saved me $100s of dollars in repairs. I use them on our cellphones, tablets and now on the Nintendo Switch my daughter and I share.
Simple to apply, these glass screen protectors ward off scratches, scuffs, and sometimes even direct hits. I never mind replacing one, as they are super cheap and the event also presents as an opportunity to clean the device needing service.
This morning our Switch was smacked into the corner of the Hammond organ my kid uses as her charging station. The value of the screen protector was proven. It shattered, the screen did not.
amFilm Tempered Glass Screen Protector for Nintendo Switch 2017 (2-Pack) via Amazon Read the rest
We’ve been told that standing at a desk is good for you, but unless you’re some kind of highly advanced automaton you’re going to have to sit down eventually no matter what all those lifestyle magazines say. That’s where desks like the IKEA SKARSTA come in; they use a crank on the front to raise and lower the desk to whatever height your rapidly aging corporeal form is still capable of maintaining. All the health benefits of a standing desk, without that stinging sense of defeat when you later discover you hate it.
But who wants to turn a crank …read more
[The following Slack log has been lighted edited for content]
Chaim Gartenberg: god i have no idea where to put this but https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id1448272668?mt=8
[Ed. note: The app in question lets iOS users easily type in nearly any text field using the alternating case format, made popular by the Mocking SpongeBob meme that made its way around the internet a few months ago.]
Micah Singleton: Promoting this app should be a crime
Russell Brandom: pRoMoTiNg tHiS aPp sHoUlD bE a cRiMe
Chaim: pRoMoTiNg tHiS ApP ShOuLd bE A CrImE
Micah: I fucking knew it
Micah: ughhh this is awful but probably a good hit
Chaim: it installs as an actual iPhone keyboard too!
Chaim: #5 in Social Networking
Chaim: popular app
Micah: This app will let…
I wanted to love the new Aibo. Really, I did. But once I aactually spent some time with it, it turned out that it was a $3,000 dog with only a handful of tricks. It seems the days of buying true robot dog companionship are still a long ways away. A few months after bringing […]
When [millerman4487] bought a TCS230-based color sensor, he was expecting a bit more documentation. Since he didn’t get it, he did a little research and some experimentation and wrote it up to help the rest of us.
The TCS3200 uses an 8×8 array of photodiodes. The 64 diodes come in four groups of 16. One group has a blue filter, one has green and the other has a red filter. The final set of diodes has no filter at all. You can select which group of diodes is active at any given time.
Sixteen photodiodes have blue filters, 16 photodiodes …read more
When we think of the AI platforms that are shaping how we use voice to interact with phones, home devices and other services, we tend to think of Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Google and Microsoft’s Cortana. But there are other players that may prove to have a compelling value proposition of their own. Sherpa.ai, a […]
We have tacos about once a week, and every time I pull out these stainless steel taco holders, I’m glad I bought them. They make it easy to load your taco with cheese, tomatoes, avocado, and salsa, and they keep your tacos from tipping over and disgorging their contents before you’ve had a change to ingest them. Read the rest
So you just got something like an Arduino or Raspberry Pi kit with a few sensors. Setting up temperature or motion sensors is easy enough. But what are you going to do with all that data? It’s going to need storage, analysis, and summarization before it’s actually useful to anyone. You need a dashboard!
But even before displaying the data, you’re going to need to store it somewhere, and that means a database. You could just send all of your data off into the cloud and hope that the company that provides you the service has a good business model …read more
Writer/director Harmony Korine (Kids, Gummo, Spring Breakers) is back at the shore for Beach Bum, a stoner burnout comedy starring Matthew McConaughey with Snoop Dogg, Isla Fisher, Zac Efron, Jimmy Buffett, Martin Lawrence and Jonah Hill. The trailer reminds me a bit of Pee-wee’s Big Adventure if the weirdo protagonist was on Sour Diesel instead of Purple Microdot.
Beach Bum will premiere at SXSW and hit theaters March 22.
Say goodbye to all your virtual machines and device laboratories. CrossBrowserTesting is a one-stop solution for all of your testing needs. The tool is quite exhaustive and robust with more than 1,500 real desktop and mobile browsers on its availability list. You can easily execute all of your manual and exploratory test cases on real iOS and Android devices, just like your clients and end-users are going to do. The tool has excellent support for visual testing too and comes equipped with native debugging tools as well.
Test your website on any mobile device quickly using the AI enabled cloud testing solutions by Functionize. The Functionize online testing cloud lets you flawlessly perform visual testing, cross-browser testing, and performance testing along with mobile testing. Use the tool to easily scale from one to many mobile devices. Get access to a large range of Android and iOS versions and smoothly maintain your mobile test cases using their root cause analysis engine. Apart from that, the tool has commendable support for test creation, test maintenance, performance, and analytics.
Amazon is entering the robot delivery game with an electric hamper on wheels its calling the Amazon Scout. The e-commerce giant is the latest company to try its hand at this sort of automated, last-mile delivery solution, following a crop of startups, as well as experiments by larger firms like Dominos Pizza and PepsiCo.
Details about the Scout are thin on the ground, but the design looks similar to existing robots. In fact, the Scout looks almost identical to devices from Starship Technologies, an Estonian startup that was an early entrant to the field.
The Scout has six wheels, is powered by an electric battery, and moves at a walking pace. Just six devices are currently being trialed in a single neighborhood in Snohomish County,…
Warning: spoilers ahead for season 1 of Star Trek: Discovery, and for the season 2 premiere episode, Brother.
When Star Trek: Discovery returned for its second season last week, it came with an insurance plan and a risk.
First, the premiere episode, Brother, welcomed Christopher Pike (Anson Mount), the captain who helmed the original series USS Enterprise in its rejected initial 1965 pilot, before Trek creator Gene Roddenberry was asked to create a new pilot with the now-iconic James T. Kirk in the chair. Whatever grumblings Trekkies may have had about the bald fan-service decision to bring Pike and his first officer, the also-iconic Vulcan Spock, into the picture at the end of season 1, it was an inevitability. As the first new T…
Hard to believe, but were only a few months out from the next TC Sessions: Robotics. As we get ready for our third year, take a trip down robotic memory lane with these highlights from last years big event. Well be returning to UC Berkeleys Zellerbach Hall in April, this time with an added focus […]
The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here: 1. Uber Rewards is rolling out; heres how the perks work Uber Rewards calculates how much youve spent on Uber and Uber […]
Unlike most old consoles, the Vectrex is unique for having a vector-based display. This gives it a very different look to most of its contemporaries, and necessitated a built-in display, as regular televisions aren’t built to take vector signals. Not one to be limited to the stock screen size, [Arcade Jason] decided the Vectrex needed a projection upgrade, and built exactly that.
The build relies on a lens that [Jason] salvaged from an old rear-projection TV. These units used CRTs with big lenses which projected the image onto a screen. That’s precisely what is happening here, with a vector display …read more
Some call it madness. Others call it the next logical step in smartphone evolution. Meizu calls it, fitting, the “Zero.” Its equal parts fascinating and maddening. And while being totally seamless with a truly uninterrupted design is probably not going to enough in and of itself to get people to purchase the thing, its hard […]
What Remains of Edith Finch is free this month from the Epic store. I downloaded it last night and couldn’t stop playing until I was done. It’s a detailed, polished walking simulator that clocks in at 3 hours, so tightly orchestrated it feels like a genuinely interactive movie.
It centers on Edith, a high schooler and the last surviving child of a family “cursed” by generations of tragedy. After her mother’s death, she inherits the cosy yet unsettling manse she grew up in and sets out to uncover the family’s secrets. This is to say, she wants to know why so many Finches died young and why her mother didn’t want the stories told.
It’s obviously from the outset that something is deeply wrong with the family even as it is clearly a family full of love. The wrongness hovers at the margins of reason. It’s reflected in the house, normal at the ground level but an alarming mass of ramshackle additions up top. Surely that would be dangerous, you ask yourself.
Some of the family death vignettes really got under my skin. They’re all elaborated in the telling to the point of magic realism and beyond, but when you sit and think about what was shown they unravel to mundane parenting failures, one after another after another. The elaborations thereby become part of the problem. But now I’m in danger of spoiling the game’s secrets.
Edith Finch maintains a tension between modern gothic mystery and the suggestion of a damaged family that mythologizes its subtly self-destructive currents. Read the rest