Nerdly News Curated from Interesting Sites
After years of buildup, 5G is finally here albeit more as a trickle than a deluge. These things take time, of course. Carriers are adding coverage, city by city, promising dozens by years end. And as for hardware, early adopters have somewhere between one and three handsets to chose from, carrier dependent. 5G is […]
Bottled water is bullshit. Its production and transport to market are sucking the marrow out of our planet and the majority of the disposable bottles that it comes in wind up in landfills instead of recycling centers. What’s more, in most parts of the world, when you buy bottled water it’s pretty much the same shit that comes out of your tap that you’ve already paid your taxes (I assume: do what you feel and keep both knees on the wheel,) to get.
Carrying a reusable bottle with you is a very small way to slow the pillaging of our planet and a big way to stick it to the water-for-money-grubbing corporations that are taking advantage of us all. There’s just one problem: where to fill up. There’s a good chance that you can trot into a coffee shop where you’re known to top off your canteen. If you’re feeling daring, you could even brave the sink of a public restroom for a bit of water. Things get more complicated, however, when you’re out of town, say in a foreign country where you don’t speak the language as well as you should. When I went hiking across Spain a few years back, there were days when I had no choice but to buy una botella de agua because I couldn’t find the community faucet in the village I was passing through. That sucks. Fortunately, there’s a new app out there to help you sort your hydration situation out:
Tap is a simple, effective app that does one thing very well: points out the places in area around you where you’re invited to fill up water bottle up. Read the rest
T-Mobiles 5G network is now up and running in several US cities. This initial phase of the carriers 5G strategy uses the same sort of high-frequency millimeter wave spectrum as Verizon, resulting in download speeds that far exceed what LTE phones can reach today. The biggest problem with millimeter wave is range: to cover a whole city, you need to have 5G nodes the things that beam out the millimeter wave signal all over the place. In Verizons case, things are still spotty. As I keep saying, 5G speeds are there on one street and gone the next. Walls and windows are also fatal for millimeter wave, so it doesnt extend indoors.
T-Mobile says it will overcome these challenges by augmenting the millimeter wave side of its 5G network…
In this review we are taking a look at the Bullet Hunter MK6, a mechanical gaming keyboard with RGB backlighting by 1STPlayer, a peripherals manufacturer based in China. The keyboard is fully programmable and comes with removable OUTEMU Blue switches, which are a clone of Cherry’s MX Blue switch.
It’s pop art! It’s furniture! It’s a stack of plastic coat hangers! Yep, the frame of this chair stacks plastic coat hangers. And not just stack them, Designer Joey Zeldon‘s Coat Check Chair isn’t a chair without them.
By bringing the elements of the closet into the foreground of a persons daily routine, the Coat Check Chair offers a unique design and a gentle encouragement to stay neat. The hangers flexible plastic makes the chair surprisingly comfortable, while its impermanent construction lets users customize in terms of hanger color and pattern. Timeless and practical, the Coat Check Chair can fit in your studio, home, boutique, hotel or gallery, letting your closet join the party.
He reports that the chair can withstand at least 170 lbs., which is what he weighs:
You can get the Coat Check Chair through Kickstarter for the early bird price of $449.
Remember Polaroids? The tactile joy of waving around one of those little plastic pictures, the anticipation of waiting for it to develop: These have been pleasures that some of us thought we’d only be telling our confused children about. But think again. Polaroid’s got a batch of great new bundles and special editions for its innovative OneStep 2 that are guaranteed to get you snapping and sharing pics all over again.
Polaroid Originals OneStep 2 Camera: Stranger Things Edition + Film Bundle
Created “in collaboration with Hawkins National Laboratory,” this camera not only honors the popular Netflix show with red and blue colors and a clever “upside down” design, it boasts an extra powerful flash that’ll send any extra-dimensional monsters packing. You’ll also get an iType film pack that frames your photos in one of 16 Stranger Things logos and designs. The Polaroid Originals OneStep 2 Camera: Stranger Things Edition + Film Bundle is now $126.99, down 5% from the original price.
Polaroid OneStep 2 Camera Graphite with Photobox
As fun as it is to share Polaroids with your friends, you’re going to want to keep some of them. This bundle makes that easy with a premium cardstock photo box that holds up to 40 pictures. Pick up the Polaroid OneStep 2 Camera Graphite with Photobox for $99.99, more than 15% off the list price.
Polaroid Originals OneStep 2 Camera: Summer Blue Edition + Film Bundle
This Summer Blue edition of the OneStep 2 has great looks outside and in, with a film pack that gives you the choice of 8 different cool blue frames. Read the rest
For whatever reason, the Video Graphics Array standard seems to attract a lot of hardware hacks. Most of them tend to center around tricking a microcontroller into generating the signals needed to send images to a VGA monitor. We love those hacks, but this one takes a different tack – …read more
Using an Arduino, a bunch of code and a little machine learning, Benn Hamm created a cat door to keep his cat from bringing dead–and sometimes live–rats and birds into his home in the middle of the night. It’s not often that I’m down with bringing surveillance technology into homes but, as a former cat owner who’s had to clean bird shit off a flat-screen TV, I have nothing but love for this project.
Image via Wikipedia Commons Read the rest
There have been times where I’ve seen an experienced automation tester taking a longer route for finding an element as they have a habit of sticking to their favorite locator. This is why I thought I would come up with a tutorial series for CSS locators in Selenium to help budding automation testers come up with a strategic implementation of these locators. And to those of us who are experienced, it should be a quick and good recap.
This article will represent the practical implementation of link text and partial link text, as we perform automation testing with Selenium. The links on any web application can help in locating an element with either exact match of the text or through partial matching. Using link text and partial link text in Selenium, we will be able to locate both of these matches. This is the last article of my tutorial series on CSS Locator in Selenium.
Sometimes a hack isn’t about building something cool. Sometimes it’s more tactical, where the right stuff is cobbled together to gather the information needed to make decisions, or just to document some interesting phenomenon.
Take this impromptu but thorough exploration of basement humidity undertaken by [Matthias Wandel]. Like most people …read more
Amazons Fire TV Recast, its Alexa-enabled take on the Slingbox, is currently discounted from its regular price of $230 down to $130. Youll need to be a Prime subscriber to take advantage of the deal, but if thats the case then you can get the device at its cheapest price ever. According to the price tracker CamelCamelCamel, the cheapest the Fire TV Recast has been previously was $180, and that was back in November.
When we reviewed Amazons DVR last year we generally liked its user interface, but we werent fans of the mobile app, and its limit of two concurrent streams felt too low. That made the device hard to unambiguously recommend at its $230 starting price, but with a $100 discount these limitations could be glossed over by…
