Bcstevieb

Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android applications that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous two weeks or so. Today's roundup is sponsored by MyWallApp, which is a fantastic wallpaper application that offers hundreds of beautiful backgrounds. Keeping with the personalization theme, Energy Notch is the latest release from IJP, the developer behind the unique battery apps Energy Bar and Energy Ring.

15 new and notable Android apps from the last two weeks including MyWallApp, Energy Notch, and Peacock TV (7/4/20 - 7/18/20) was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

The Atlas of Moons is National Geographic's amazing interactive project to explore the incredible diversity of over 200 moons in our solar system, like Europa, shown above. Each moon is described and shown with as much recent information available.

With the upcoming JUICE launch (aka Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer), public interest in Europa will undoubtedly increase. Via National Geographic:

With a vast global ocean tucked beneath a smooth, icy shell, Europa is considered one of the best places to look for life beyond Earth. Its ancient, alien sea likely contains all the ingredients needed for life as we know it. Peering beneath that crisscrossed crust is a bit tricky, but scientists recently spotted plumes of possible seawater venting into space, which could be sampled by an orbiting craft.

Discovered in 1610 by Galileo Galilei, it was named after a lover of Zeus. Features are named for people, places, gods, or objects from Celtic myths, as well as for people and places associated with the Greek Europa myth.

Image: National Geographic

Way back in February, we started tracking a few Pixel codenames (as we do), and it wasn’t until today — in early July — that we had some sense of what these phones actually are. Google put their retail names in the Google app, and for those of us who have followed the Pixel series for several years, they might seem like a bit of a curveball. Google’s definitely switching things up this year — but here’s how you can start to make sense of the Pixel 4a, Pixel 4a 5G, and Pixel 5…

more…

The post Pixel 4a, 4a 5G, and Pixel 5 explained: Making sense of Google’s 2020 smartphone lineup appeared first on 9to5Google.

Google just sent us a picture of the new Nest-branded smart speaker. See above..and much more below.

more…

The post This is the new Nest smart speaker appeared first on 9to5Google.

Google's Android AMA is underway, and the team's engineers have already answered the most hotly-anticipated question: How will Google fix the problem of inconsistent background limits across different manufacturers and devices? It's a long-standing problem where overly aggressive power management tweaks break functionality in plenty of apps, resulting in a headache for developers and frustration for users. According to the AMA, Google does plan on making a few changes to help fix things, but the company isn't doing all that it could.

Google's response to Android apps getting delayed or killed in the background leaves a lot to be desired was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

These adhesive nose bridge strips help keep my glasses from fogging up.

I have two masks that came with nose bridge strips sewn in. Those two are the only masks I was able to use when shopping or anywhere my sight was actually important, as the loose nose bridge area on my other hand-made masks encouraged my glasses to fog up.

Feeling like my vision is closing in as I breathe-in increasingly warmer and damper air evokes memories of nitrogen narcosis while scuba diving. Never the smartest free ride.

I did not know I was looking for these adhesive aluminum strips until they found me. Today, they are pretty much the best cheapo gadgety thing I've seen this pandemic.

Nose Bridge Strip 100PCS,Shed Protector Aluminum Strips(Specs: 0.02X0.2X3.54 inch) for DIY Mask Handmade Crafting Making Nose Bridge Clip via Amazon

This is a lovely little video of cats lounging in a basket from Kagonekoshiro, one of the great cat blogs of Japan, still going after all these fuzzy scratchy years.

More at kagonekoshiro.com.

This footage was not recorded in a Costco, is not of a furious unmasked meathead berating and threatening other shoppers, is not the subject of an investigation or likely to lead to disciplinary action and/or charges, but it does feature oppossums chomping on bananas.

Aerial America is an informative and relaxing look at each US state entirely via aerial footage. The series is gradually being posted to YouTube, and as of this writing they have added all states alphabetically through Louisiana. Alaska's Call of the Wild is particularly nice.

Via the series page:

For centuries, thousands of adventurers have answered Alaska's "call of the wild," seeking thrills and fortunes in a state rife with postcard-perfect beauty... and lethal dangers. Take flight across ancient glaciers, rugged mountain ranges, primeval forests, and pristine waterways. Then discover how the state's unique charm has attracted bold visitors, from Russian fur traders to a young survivalist on a one-way trip "into the wild" to the thousands of dog sledders facing off in the "Last Great Race on Earth!"

Image: YouTube / Smithsonian

Italian composer Ennio Morricone is dead at 91.

Morricone acquired fame scoring Westerns but transcended genre to become one of the world's masters of the form.

"His music was always outstanding," writes Hans Zimmer, "and done with great emotional fortitude and great intellectual thought."

His 1960s scores for Sergio Leone, backing a moody Clint Eastwood in the Dollars trilogy, were huge successes and came to define him: with their whistling melodies, and blend of symphonic elements with gunshots and guitars, they evoke the entire western genre. “The music is indispensable, because my films could practically be silent movies, the dialogue counts for relatively little, and so the music underlines actions and feelings more than the dialogue,” Leone has said. Morricone has said his own best work was for Leone’s 1984 film Once Upon a Time in America.

Welcome to the roundup of the new Android games that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous week or so. Today I have a gacha RPG from the head director behind Nier: Automata, a fantastic sci-fi-based point and click adventure game, and an Orwell-inspired simulation game where the government reigns supreme. So without further ado, here are the new and notable Android games released during the week of June 29th, 2020.

14 new Android games from the week of June 29, 2020 was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Oh-so-fine Toni Basil has announced a new online class — on '60s go-go dancing! She'll not only teach you how to go-go dance, but will also "deep dive" into how it influenced art, fashion, and music. And she should know, because she was there. If you only think of the 76-year-old for her big 1981 hit "Mickey," you've missed out on her illustrious career in acting, dance and choreography. This compilation shows the "goddess of go-go" doing her thing in several circa-1960s films. Prepare to be impressed:

Her four-part series begins July 5 ($10/class).

Thanks, Baby Doe!

images via ToniBasil.net

Koko, a cat living in the Japanese city of Toyoma, was honored by local officials after alerting rescuers to an elderly man who had fallen supine into an irrigation canal. Via Japan Times:

On June 16, a 77-year-old woman taking a walk around 7:30 p.m. found Koko, a female cat who belongs to a neighbor, staring into the canal and acting strangely. When she followed the cat’s gaze, she discovered a man lying on his back in a 60-centimeter-wide and 40-cm-deep canal. The water was about 15 cm deep.

It took five people to pull the man out. FNN covered the award ceremony:

Domo arigato, Koko-chan!

Image: YouTube / FNN Prime Online

In a rather annoying move late last year, Google got rid of the Play Store notifications that showed up after your apps got automatically updated. The confusing removal process at first looked like a bug plaguing a handful of users, but Google soon clarified that it was all willful. Taking a U-turn on its initial stance, the company is bringing back those notifications in the Play Store and the associated settings, and they’ve already started appearing for some users.

Google appears to be caving in and bringing back Play Store app update notifications was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android applications and live wallpapers that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous week or so. Today I have a fantastic tool that can report precisely which background processes are being killed by your device, and two new releases from Google to showcase the latest API for ARCore. So without further ado, here are all of the new and notable Android apps and live wallpapers released on the Play Store in the last week.

14 new and notable Android apps and live wallpapers from the last week including DontKillMyApp, ARCore Depth Lab, and Lines of Play (6/20/20 - 6/27/20) was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Armin Küpper offers up some Pipelinefunk: "Saxophone jam using a pipeline as natural delay and reverb"
When I was preparing for my recording session on the tube, I got a visitor here and gave a little spontaneous concert."

Here's Somewhere Over The Rainbow:

And here with a guitar:

My friend Dan Shapiro is the CEO of Glowforge, which makes easy-to-use laser cutters. He sent this email to me yesterday about a cool project he set up to get one million "ear savers" made by Glowforge owners around the world.

At the start of the COVID crisis, I did not believe hospitals would use homemade medical equipment. Turns out I was very, very wrong.

We partnered with immunology experts, professors, and doctors to develop Ear Savers. It’s a simple design that prevents the bruising that comes from wearing surgical masks all day.

Normally, mass-producing something even as simple as this can take months to design, produce, and distribute. But Glowforge did something different. We reached out to tens of thousands of customers, providing them with the designs for free so they could print them at home.

Then, we reached out to everyone in the US with a simple message: if you’re wearing a surgical mask to take care of us, we can help.

We built matchmaking software to connect the people in need with Glowforge owners who had the factories to make PPE – in their own homes! Finally, we spun up our own factories to join in the effort.

We made more than one million ear savers together, in what I believe to be the first hyperlocal mass production exercise of its kind. This is like Diamond Age stuff: making the stuff we need at home, for our communities, in small batches that add up to factory-sized volumes.

We're also getting ready for phase two: we’re ready to make ten million more.

Anyone wearing elastic-ear masks to stay safe can get Ear Savers for free right now at Glowforge.com. They’re 100% free for nonprofits. For companies and for individuals, they just need to pay shipping and handling.

I'm really excited about the impact we're able to have with this!

Google Photos is easily one of Google's most magical and indispensable services, and now it's getting a tasteful redesign. The app is getting a simpler three-tab interface, and the map view previously spotted in testing is now official. The new changes cover not just the app, but the familiar pinwheel icon, too, which is getting a simpler (and seemingly polarizing) look. You can anticipate seeing these changes land on your phone over the next week.

Big Google Photos update adds a fresh three-tab design, mapping feature, and even a new icon was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

RSS Box generates the "missing" feeds for Twitter accounts, YouTube channels, Instagram users, and various other sites that fail to offer RSS.

This website lets you subscribe to RSS feeds for websites that do not support RSS themselves, by using the respective website's API and then translating that data to RSS feeds.

If you get a page saying "Application error", simply try again. This website resolves shortlink URLs to give the reader a better experience, and embeds linked content directly into the RSS feed. You will get this error if this takes longer than the web server allows.

Some websites, like YouTube, support RSS feeds but they are quite hard to find, so this website will provide the URL.

You can get that pin from Diesel Sweeties.

Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android applications that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous week or so. Today I have a slightly shorter list than normal, but since more than half of these apps were covered in their own articles this week, I wanted to make sure nobody missed out. Most notably, Google has published a couple of experimental apps this week that offer many features similar to Pinterest.

8 new and notable Android apps from the last week including Tangi Quick Videos, HEY, and Reelgood Streaming Guide for Android TV (6/13/20 - 6/20/20) was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Rick Astley (yes, that Rick Astley), recorded this lovely cover of Foo Fighters' "Everlong" from his home studio in London. Well done, sir.

Nobody expected the UK government's testing and rollout of its COVID-19 track and trace app to go particularly smoothly, but to say the process has been shambolic could possibly be an understatement. After the recent news of its delay, we're now hearing that the NHS app is going to be completely reworked to incorporate Google and Apple's collaborative solution instead of the centralized version that was previously tested.

Health secretary Matt Hancock promised the app would launch in the middle of May as it began its pilot with a relatively small number of people on the Isle of Wight, but we're now unlikely to see it until Autumn.

UK government U-turn: COVID-19 contact-tracing app will switch to Google-Apple technology was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Does this cat eating kibble remind you of a certain seventies' kiddie game?

This reminds me of a past cat of mine, Sunny. I rescued the polydactyl runt from a restaurant's dumpster one winter. Once she was settled in, she soon starting eating more than her share. But that wasn't the crazy part. She would lie down next to her food bowl, stick her big paw in the dry food and bring it to her face one piece at a time. This was a long time ago, otherwise I'd have a hundred videos to share.

gif created via YouTube video

Video games have long been associated with negative connotations about wasting time and killing brain cells, but a new game might just help to change that. The FDA has just cleared the first prescription-only smartphone game, called EndeavorRx, as part of a treatment program for children with ADHD.

EndeavorRx is a game designed to "directly target and activate neural systems through the presentation of sensory stimuli and motor challenges to improve cognitive functioning." According to the company, improvements in ADHD impairments after a month of treatment (playing the game for 25 minutes a day, five days a week) were seen to last for up to a month, which is pretty encouraging.

The healing power of video games has finally been recognized by the FDA was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Racism is a problem that has existed for centuries. Every day, it affects the lives of millions of people.

In recent weeks, the death of George Floyd has ignited a storm of protests around the world. The protesters highlight the many problems that still exist in our society today, demanding change.

In response, many people, organizations, and companies have vowed support for the cause, often out of good will and intent. However, words and promises don’t change anything, so ‘action’ is demanded as well.

Last week, this led to a purge of several movies and TV-shows from popular streaming services such as HBO, Netflix and the BBC. This includes the iconic film Gone With the Wind, British TV series such as Little Britain, and a controversial episode from Fawlty Towers.

The argument in favor of this drastic action is that some storylines, depictions, and sketches are seen as racist. Because of this, it’s best to hide them from public view, as if they never existed.

Needless to say, these decisions triggered a lot of different opinions and responses which we’re not going to repeat here. However, we do want to highlight one of the side-effects that became clearly visible on pirate sites.

While looking through the most-downloaded movies on torrent sites this weekend, we suddenly saw a film from 1939 among the most-pirated titles. Indeed, Gone With The Wind was sitting right in between Bad Boys for Life and Becky in the top US downloads.

This prompted us to do some more thorough research. With help from several public resources including iknowwhatyoudownload.com, we obtained a sample of the pirate download patterns on torrent sites over the past week. The numbers for Gone With the Wind are shown in the graph below.

The download figures clearly show that people moved to pirate sources when the film was pulled. In our sample, worldwide downloads of Gone With The Wind increased more than 1300% from Saturday 6th to Saturday 13th. In the US this increase was over 2200%.

This surge in pirated downloads is not limited to Gone With the Wind. We see a similar pattern for Fawlty Towers, even though just a single episode was pulled. Worldwide the piracy numbers increased 400% and in the UK the weekly increase went over 1000% at its height.

A similar pattern is visible for the series Little Britain. Last Wednesday the number of downloads on torrent sites were up nearly 1400% worldwide and in the UK this percentage was even higher, with a 5000% increase.

The reported download patterns clearly show that pulling the shows from the official market triggered a surge in pirate downloads. But does that mean that everyone who downloads these titles is racist? And what about the millions of people who watched them in the past?

We don’t have any answers here. What we do know though, is that hiding history is unlikely to change anything. History books are filled with evil things. Things we can learn from in order to change.

It appears that HBO now realizes this as well. While Gone With the Wind is still unavailable, it’s expected to make a comeback with a proper introduction to put it into historical context. The BBC also said it will reinstate the controversial Fawlty Towers episode, warning viewers in advance of “offensive content and language“.

—

Note: The graphs and download numbers presented in this article are based on a sample of the total number of downloads on torrent sites. This is a fraction of the total piracy ecosystem.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Welcome to the roundup of the new Android games that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous week or so. Today I have the third entry in the Bit Dungeon action-adventure series, a new title from the dev behind the DERE EXE horror series, and a quality top-down twin-stick shooter from Ivan Panasenko. So without further ado, here are the new and notable Android games released during the week of June 8th, 2020.

15 new (and 1 WTF) Android games from the week of June 8, 2020 was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android applications that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous two weeks or so. Today I have a camera app from Adobe, Dropbox's invite-only entry in the password management game, the arrival of the nightly version of the Brave Browser, and the rebranding of an existing podcast app now called Podhero. So without further ado, here are all of the new and notable Android apps released on the Play Store in the last two weeks.

13 new and notable Android apps from the last two weeks including Adobe Photoshop Camera, Dropbox Passwords, and Brave Browser Nightly (5/30/20 - 6/13/20) was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

“The greeting we get every time we come home!!!!”

This dog's name is Teasel. She loves her humans. She greets the humans by presenting them with their own shoes.

Says IMGURian @TomD97,

So here we have teasel again, just like her bowl she loves to pick shoes up, even if they do smell? But either way it’s still really cute! Also look at the butt wiggle.

The greeting we get every time we come home!!!!

[IMGUR]

• Update 1: 2020/05/14 4:12am PDT
  We've substantially updated this article following the introduction of the Play Music migration tool and recent changes to YouTube Music, like a new Now Playing experience and the introduction of

As YouTube Music's migration tool continues to roll out, many Play Music subscribers are likely asking themselves if it's finally time to just give up on holding out and switch to Google's new music streaming service.

Google Play Music vs. YouTube Music: Everything you need to know was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Welcome to the roundup of the new Android games that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous week or so. Today I have the arrival of Dead Cells, a fantastic Metroidvania roguelike that's easily worth the asking price. I also have a unique tower defense game that sports a gritty theme, and a phenomenal space shooter from the devs behind the Bullet Hell Monday series.

15 new (and 1 WTF) Android games from the week of June 1, 2020 was written by the awesome team at Android Police.