iOS 12.1 will improve selfie quality on the iPhone XS and XR
See the original posting on The Verge
Ever since the iPhone XS came out, theres been criticism of its front camera specifically, that it overly smooths skin. This, of course, was dubbed Beautygate in reference to Samsung-style beautification filters, which Apple has always insisted it doesnt use.
Whatever the case, it was definitely there, but now its going away: during our iPhone XR review, Apple told me that iOS 12.1 will fix a bug in its smart HDR camera system that resulted in smoother-looking photos taken by the front camera on the iPhone XS and XR.
Essentially, Smart HDR was choosing the wrong base frame for HDR processing when you took a selfie. Instead of choosing a frame with a short shutter speed…
Review: Apples iPhone XR is a fine young cannibal
See the original posting on TechCrunch
This iPhone is great. It is most like the last iPhone but not the last “best” iPhone more like the last not as good iPhone. Its better than that one though, just not as good as the newest best iPhone or the older best iPhone. If youre upgrading from an iPhone 7 or […]
Only 24 hours left to buy early-bird tickets to Disrupt Berlin 2018
See the original posting on TechCrunch
A huge shout-out to all the early-stage startup procrastinators out there. Our 24-hour clock is in play, and that means you need to act quickly if you want to save up to 500 on tickets to Disrupt Berlin 2018. And by quickly we mean by tomorrow, 24 October. Thats when the early-bird price flies the […]
HTC opens up early access to its blockchain phone
See the original posting on TechCrunch
After months of talk, HTCs blockchain phone is finally arriving albeit in limited quantities. The hardware maker announced today at a crypto conference in Berlin that its opening up access to an early version the Exodus 1 handset to cryptographers and developers from all over the world through its official site. Of course, early […]
WebDriverManager: How to Manage Browser Drivers Easily and Efficiently
See the original posting on DZone Python
We all know that we need to have browser drivers, .exe files like chromedriver.exe and geckodriver.exe in case of windows environment or binary files like chromedriver and geckodriver in case of Linux distributions, which allows Selenium WebDriver to handle browsers in order to run our selenium webdriver automation scripts on Chrome and Firefox browsers (applicable for other browsers as well).
And, also, we need to set the path of these files in our script, like below, or we need to add the location to the classpath.
$3 Multimeter Teardown
See the original posting on Hackaday
[Diode Gone Wild] and his cat decided to see how a $3 meter worked inside. The meter was marked as a DT-830B and he already had an older one of the same model, and he wondered how they could afford to sell it — including shipping — for $3. You can see a video of his testing, teardown, and reverse engineering below.
What was odd is that despite having the same model number, the size of the meter was a bit different. When he opened the case to install a battery, he noticed the board didn’t look like it had …read more
DIY Minimal React Boilerplate
See the original posting on DZone Python
Build your own production-ready minimalist boilerplate for web apps with:
- Module bundler: Webpack 4
- UI: React 16
- Styles: SCSS
- Transpiler: Babel 7
- Tests: Jest 23
Check out our repo on GitHub.
Real Time Satellite Tracker Shows You Whats Going Over Your Head
See the original posting on Hackaday
Whilst modern technology relies heavily on satellites, it’s easy to forget they’re there; after all, it’s hard to comprehend mostly-invisible lumps of high-density tech whizzing around above you at ludicrous speeds. Of course, it’s not hard to comprehend if you’ve built a real-time satellite tracker which displays exactly what’s in orbit above your head at any given time. [Paul Klinger]’s creation shows the position of satellites passing through a cylinder of 200 km radius above the tracker.
Each layer of LEDs represents a specific band of altitude, whilst the colour of the LEDs and text on the screen represent the …read more
Qualcomm announces Snapdragon 675 with faster cores and triple-camera support
See the original posting on The Verge
Qualcomm has announced the Snapdragon 675, a mid-range smartphone SoC with some high-end features. Perhaps most notable is the fact that its new Kryo 460 architecture is built around ARMs Cortex-A76 cores, which are designed for flagship devices and havent yet made their way into a Qualcomm chip. (The first major SoC with A76 is Huaweis Kirin 980.)
The Snapdragon 675 has two performance-focused cores at 2.0GHz alongside six 1.78GHz cores designed for power efficiency. For comparison, the current flagship Snapdragon 845 uses four 2.8GHz performance cores based on the Cortex-A75, so itll still be a lot faster. The 845 is also built on a 10nm process versus the 675s 11nm. But as Anandtech notes, its unusual to see Qualcomm launch a…
Jump into AI with a Neural Network of your Own
See the original posting on Hackaday
One of the difficulties in learning about neural networks is finding a problem that is complex enough to be instructive but not so complex as to impede learning. [ThomasNield] had an idea: Create a neural network to learn if you should put a light or dark font on a particular colored background. He has a great video explaining it all (see below) and code in Kotlin.
[Thomas] is very interested in optimization, so his approach is very much based on mathematics and algorithms of optimization. One thing that’s handy is that there is already an algorithm for making this determination. …read more
Wave-Powered Glider Delivers Your Message In A Bottle
See the original posting on Hackaday
Setting a bottle adrift with a message in it is, by most measures, an act of desperation. The sea regularly swats mighty ships to their doom, so what chance would a tiny glass bottle have bobbing along the surface, subject as it is to wind, waves, and current? Little to none, it would seem, unless you skew the odds a bit with a wave-powered undersea glider to the help the bottle along.
Before anyone gets too worked up about this, [Rulof Maker]’s “Sea Glider” is about a low-tech as a device with moving parts can be. This craft, built from …read more
Asus will soon launch its first 15-inch Chromebook
See the original posting on The Verge
Asus has made a new Chromebook with a 15.6-inch display, the biggest its ever gone for a Chrome OS notebook, according to ChromeUnboxed. Besides the new display size, the rest of the upcoming Chromebook C523s specs sound similar to the companys previous efforts.
The 15.6-inch anti-glare display has a resolution of 1920 x 1080; Asus will also optionally offer a version with a touchscreen. The NanoEdge design allows for slimmed-down side bezels, though the top and bottom bezels are still fairly substantial. Its got a 180 degree hinge so that it can be laid flat down if needed. The Chromebook C523 is powered by an Intel Celeron dual-core processor or an Intel Pentium quad-core processor, depending on which configuration you choose….
Looks like Tiger Global Management just closed the second biggest venture fund this year
See the original posting on TechCrunch
As we noted six months ago, Tiger Global Management, the 17-year-old investment group, is starting to see a whole lot of its venture-related startup investments pay off. We also guessed that because of those wins, the outfit was likely lining up commitments for a new mega fund. It was a safe bet. According to a […]
16-Year-Old Dethrones Tetris World Champion With Difficult Hyper-Tap Technique
See the original posting on Slashdot
Over the weekend, seven-time winner Jonas Neubauer showed up at the Classic Tetris World Championship in Portland, Oregon like he has every year since it moved there in 2011. Instead of adding another championship to his name, he finished in second place this time, bested by 16-year-old Joseph Saelee who went on an amazing three-game tear. From a report: “The kid played with pure heart, the most clutch Tetris that we’ve seen from anyone,” Neubauer said after the dust had settled. “He just really had the ability, had the natural ability, and let it shine as bright as he could in his first tournament. [It’s] truly an honor to pass the torch to the new generation of Tetris players.” The veteran stood on stage holding a silver trophy, his first since losing to Harry Hong in 2014, and the unlikely Saelee, tears still in his eyes, hoisted the gold to applause from the crowd at Sunday’s Retro Game Expo crowd. Though Tetris came out on the NES in 1989, the Classic World Championship tournament as it exists today didn’t get started until 2010 after the game’s competitive scene spent most of the aughts trading strategies, high scores, and footage evidence throughout a scattered network of forums and websites. Now, top players from around the world compete annually at the Expo using the original game and controllers played on old CRTs to see who can get the highest score in individual head-to-head matchups.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Guillermo del Toro is making a stop-motion Pinocchio movie for Netflix
See the original posting on TechCrunch
Guillermo del Toro, the Academy Award-winning director of “The Shape of Water” (not to mention “Hellboy,” “Pan’s Labyrinth” and “Pacific Rim”) is making a new version of “Pinocchio” for Netflix. I’d thought that after del Toro’s awards victory earlier this year he might finally make his long-thwarted adaptation “At the Mountains of Madness.” And while […]
Be More Chill, Broadways unlikely viral hit, is getting a film adaptation
See the original posting on The Verge
Be More Chill the up-and-coming sci-fi Broadway musical based on Ned Vizzinis novel of the same name is getting a film adaptation, according to a report from Deadline. Shawn Levys 21 Laps and Greg Berlantis Berlanti Productions have been tapped to make a movie version of the musical, although the deal is still early on, and no film studio has been chosen for distribution yet.
If youre not familiar with Be More Chill, youre likely not alone: the show first debuted to little fanfare as a regional production in 2015 that adapted Vizzinis young adult novel about Jeremy Heere, an unpopular high school student who takes a pill containing a SQUIP (Super Quantum Unit Intel Processor, which manifests as a smooth-talking,…
Honor teaser knocks the Magic 2 against a table to a beat and its really hard to watch
See the original posting on The Verge
Honor briefly showed off its upcoming Magic 2 phone a few months back, revealing a bezel-less screen and a sliding mechanism that opens up to a camera. The company will unveil the device officially on October 31st, but until then, Honor is teasing the phone with a series of hands-on videos by Chinese celebrities giving their impressions. We can see from the video there are three rear cameras, similar to the P20 Pro by Huawei, its parent company.
Honor is also leaning hard into the clicking sound the slider makes, by releasing videos featuring beats made with the slider. Heres a video featuring a Chinese singer unboxing the Honor 2, and then singing over the beat. Its cringeworthy, but not as difficult to watch as this TikTok video…
Robot + Trumpet = Sad Trombone.mp3
See the original posting on Hackaday
[Uri Shaked] is really into Latin music. When his interest crescendoed, he bought a trumpet in order to make some energetic tunes of his own. His enthusiasm flagged a bit when he realized just how hard it is to get reliably trumpet-like sounds out of the thing, but he wasn’t about to give up altogether. Geekcon 2018 was approaching, so he thought, why not make a robot that can play the trumpet for me?
He scoured the internet and found that someone else had taken pains 20 years ago to imitate embouchure with a pair of latex lips (think rubber …read more
Cardi B doing ASMR is even more amazing than it sounds
See the original posting on The Verge
Cardi B is known for being so lively and boisterous that shes probably the last person youd think of when it comes to the soothing aesthetics of ASMR but thats exactly what makes this new video from W Magazine so good. Behold: the I Like It rapper whispers gently and seductively into not one but two highly sensitive microphones. (As with many ASMR videos, its recorded in stereo and works best with headphones.) If she seems like an ASMR natural, thats because Cardi says that she listens to ASMR videos every night before bed, so she knows all the tricks to make your brain tingle.
For the record, Offset, her husband, thinks her ASMR obsession is weird. Beyond the novelty factor, its trivia like this that makes this video worth…