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Windows 10 is mostly a step up from previous versions, but it also comes with a bunch of annoyances. For example, all of the bundled apps that Microsoft includes with it. Or the fact that some users are seeing those apps re-installed after a big update.

Microsoft’s big Anniversary Update earlier this month was the first big upgrade to Windows 10 since it came out. According to a post on tech site Ghacks, Microsoft took this opportunity to reinstall some of the built-in apps that users had previously removed.

It’s unclear if this was an intentional decision to override user choice, or if Microsoft simply neglected to leave out any bundled apps in the upgrade that the user no longer had installed. Either way, the result is one more annoying thing to get rid of.

Windows 10 Annoyance: Apps get re-installed after updates | Ghacks

Nobody wants to spend time scrubbing toilets, but you also don’t want to subject guests (or yourself) to a grimy bowl. These DIY pods are an easy way to keep your toilet clean without a lot of work.

Mix together baking soda and citric acid (available almost anywhere, even at Amazon,) then slowly add in dish soap until you get a consistency similar to dough. Fill an ice cube tray (silicone works best) with the mixture and let it dry for a couple hours. Pop the “pods” out and put them in a jar in your bathroom.

Then your guests, or you, can just drop one in after they’re done and the pod takes care of cleaning the bowl. These dissolve pretty quickly so you can drop one in after you’re done but before you flush, wait a couple seconds and then flush. Or you can drop one in after you flush, leaving the toilet ready for the next person. While these pods will keep your bowl looking good, you’ll still need to do a deep clean every once in awhile to clean under the the rim and the outside of the toilet.

DIY Toilet Cleaning Pods | Nifty (YouTube)

Impulsive spending can be a sneaky little budget-destroyer. We all know that, and there’s no shortage of tips for eliminating it. If you want to get to the root of your impulsive spending problem, though, focus on the space between the impulse and your action.

Certified Financial Planner and money expert Carl Richards breaks this concept down in the above video. Personal finance focuses on two things when it comes to impulse spending: stimulus and response. For example, stimulus-focused advice might be to delete your saved payment info or stay away from deal sites. Response-focused advice might be to cut up your credit card, use only cash, or constantly monitor your spending.

http://lifehacker.com/delete-saved-p…

That’s all great advice, but as Richards points out, “there’s a third way that deals with both.” Focusing on the space between a stimulus and your response might be more effective. Within that space lies your power to choose your response. Richards expands on this idea in a recent post at the New York Times:

In his book “Man’s Search for Meaning,” Frankl, an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist, also appears to have given us this bit of insight: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response.”

Whoa! There is a third element to this little dance with stimulus and response. To break this frustrating spending cycle, we can focus on creating space between the two of them.

One practical way to implement this is to sit on a purchase and wait before you buy. Yes, that’s an incredibly simple, no-brainer tip. The point is that tips like these, the ones that focus on expanding that “space” might be the most effective.

A sense of control is absolutely crucial when it comes to managing your money. This advice focuses on control. Rather than punishing yourself or eliminating your stimulus altogether, it forces you to deal with your behavior and make better, more empowering financial choices.

http://twocents.lifehacker.com/focus-on-these…

Richards has a lot of additional insight on this topic, and you can check out his video above, or read his article at the Times below.

One Secret to Cutting Spending: Wait 72 Hours Before You Buy | The New York Times

G’morning all! It’s time for another great way to start to your Friday in this weeks Open Thread for Hackerspace, brought to you by Lifehacker in association with CEO, COO, CFO & Founder of stuff we don’t know about Mr. Andy Orin.

Elena is monitoring her online profile. Is she a spy trying to cover her tracks? CIA? NSA? KGB? Don’t know, but she’s always welcome here and we appreciate her. She’s always giving us practical advice.

Moon has these tweaks for his tech gear that he shares with us. This week, he told us about his ringtones and notifications. And, we finally got Moon onto Twitter, with great reluctance on his part.

Speaking of Twitter, follow us on Twitter @hackerspaceblog. We’d love to see you there.

Speaking of other places, what other places are you going to see? I’m planning my trip to Mexico in October to go to a friends wedding. Turns out, you don’t need a passport to get into Mexico from the US. But, returning, it’s a good thing to have, or they might stop you and interrogate you for 3 hours before letting you through.

Anything else you have planned? Home projects? Cleaning? Let us know what you are doing with your life and how you are trying to make it go smoothly in the comments below.

[img via reddit/aww_gifs]

Dutch photographer Brian Romeijn takes haunting shots of abandoned buildings, but his striking shots of the famed Orient Express train capture the sense of a lost era. (more…)

 There’s more than one way to monetize your online video content. Sure, you can go the old fashioned route, making ads and clicks and such — but just wait until your preferred platform opens a one-off store front where you can pedal your wares for the real money to roll in. Following the recent unveiling of a space in the UK that provides YouTube stars with a place to record and… Read More

“Nnnnnnoooooooooooooooo.”

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Six weeks after Mother Jones published its explosive undercover expose on the abuses, shortcomings and waste in America's vast private prison system, the Department of Justice has issued a ban on renewal of federal private prison contracts (where they are not able to do this, officials are told to "substantially reduce" the scope of those contracts), with the goal of "reducing -- and ultimately ending -- our use of privately operated prisons." (more…)

 French startup Whyd started off as a social network for music lovers but recently announced that it would switch its focus for a hardware project. The company just unveiled this secret hardware project — it’s a high-fidelity connected speaker that combines voice recognition with all music streaming services out there. The company isn’t doing a Kickstarter. Instead, Whyd is… Read More

At this point we're just waiting for Google to release Android 7.0 (and the new Nexus devices that come with it) to the masses. The company never gives exact dates for this kind of thing, though a vague "fall" pattern generally leads us to expect new Android hardware and software sometime between August and October. According to the official support forum for Telus, an exclusively Canadian cell carrier, Nougat updates will be coming in less than a week.

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Canadian carrier Telus says Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P Nougat updates coming August 22nd was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

 Make way for robot! Two driverless buses will be hitting the streets in Helsinki for some real-world testing for the next month or so. The EasyMile minibuses have previously been tested on public roads in Finland and elsewhere, but this is the first time they’ll be mixing it up with everyday traffic there. Read More

 In an interview with Bloomberg, CEO Travis Kalanick revealed that the company is preparing to introduce self-driving cars to its fleet of drivers in Pittsburgh this month. The company will deploy around 100 modified Volvo XC90s outfitted with self-driving equipment. Read More

 Facebook may try to compete with Steam, or at least win back revenue lost when casual gaming shifted to mobile. Today Facebook formally announced it’s working with game engine Unity to build a dedicated, downloadable desktop gaming platform, plus it’s broadening the Facebook.com experience for gamers. Both will allow publishers the offer their iOS and Android games on desktop in… Read More

With the emergence of industry-changing technologies like all-electric cars and autonomous vehicles poised to take over the roads of tomorrow, it makes sense that as the vehicles we travel in change. So will the roads they travel on and roadsigns you’ll use to navigate them.

This inevitable future inspired the folks at CarKeys.co.uk to create five artist renditions of signs we may very well see on roads in the not-too-distant future.

An e-charging lane?

Electric vehicles are a great opportunity for wireless charging to eliminate the need to stop at a refueling station for busy commuters. Solutions for e-charging lanes are already being developed and trialed, enabling cars to charge while they move down the street. One popular solution involves electronic circuits embedded in the street that enables coils built in to the electronic car to pick up and charge with the electromagnetic field generated by the street’s circuits.

Straddle bus route

Another strong possibile sight in the not-too-distant future is so-called straddle busses, a recent concept introduced at the Beijing International Hi-Tech Expo this year.  The bus is elevated, with the ability to straddle vehicles on the road, eliminating the need to stop during a traffic jam and reducing the negative impact the bus’ frequent stops have on the flow of traffic.

Hyperloop station

When Tesla and SpaceX head Elon Musk started speaking about the potential of a Hyperloop to connect the world with a travel medium that can transport someone across the United States in as little as 30 minutes, a future where you could have a cheesesteak in Philadelphia and barbecue in Texas with as little travel time in-between as it takes some to preheat the oven and bake a batch of cookies appeared possible.

Today, companies like Hyperloop One are rumored to be planning to break ground in Dubai to bring the futuristic travel option available.

Autonomous car lane

With autonomous vehicle technologies advancing at a breakneck pace, the idea of a dedicated lane for these driverless cars doesn’t seem too far fetched. In fact, since these cars are capable of calculating risk and reacting to obstacles in a fraction of the time it takes a human to do so, it stands to reason that things like traffic congestion and stop-and-go traffic issues on our highways could be lessened by allowing these vehicles their own lane to speed down the street and leave more room for human drivers in the remaining roadway.

Robots at work

Our vehicles may not be the only thing changing in this new era of connected autonomous devices. Road construction, which is an often demanding and potentially dangerous job, could soon be performed by networked autonomous robots that don’t need coffee breaks, hazard pay, or overtime.

These machines could even be autonomously driven to the work site and put to work without ever having to by physically handled by a human being. Robots are already being put to work laying bricks for home construction – even at triple the speed and precision of its human counterpart.

With everything that is going on in the tech and travel industries today, the signs we see as we fly down the freeway may soon change. The question is, will there still be human drivers around to read them?

The post Are these the roadsigns of tomorrow? appeared first on ReadWrite.

The vast majority of projectors can't rival televisions in resolution, but LG's new battery-powered LED devices have TVs beat on another point — portability. Where most projectors need to be installed at the back of a room, LG's new PH450U is an ultra-short throw (UST) projector, capable of projecting images from distances of just 33 centimeters (13 inches). Its small size and battery power also means it can be moved around a room, or even be carried around outside, allowing users to watch videos on any flat surface they come across.

LG says the UST projector has a rechargeable battery that will last two-and-a-half hours — just enough time to watch a movie on the side of your neighbor's house — and an LED lamp with a brightness of 450...

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1. Cute. (more…)

Google makes frequent changes to the New Tab Page in Chrome, and they show up first in Chrome Dev. It's looks now like Google is toying with a New Tab Page powered by Google Now, and you can take a look at it right now in Chrome Dev. You might need to toggle a flag, but it seems to be live for everyone. It also works a little bit in Chrome Beta, but not at all in stable.

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Google Now-powered New Tab Page is coming to Chrome was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

http://tvline.com/2016/08/17/marvels-runaways-hulu-series-order-gossip-girl-creators/

Joss had a run on the comic book back in 2007-2008.

Adam West revives his '60s Batman for a new animated movie: Batman: Return of the Caped Crusaders reunites West and Ward as Batman and Robin in a feature-length animated film set in the universe of the '60s TV series. The dynamic duo is also joined by the voice of Julie Newmar, who played TV's Catwoman.

 Uber is taking legal action to try to block forthcoming regulatory changes in London that could impact its ability to recruit drivers onto its platform — including a new requirement for drivers to have passed a written English language test in order to operate a private hire vehicle. Read More

Artist Stephen Byrne apparently lives in a different world from the rest of us. Specifically, the world where everything that fandom loves eventually becomes an animated series. The Irish-born comics artist has been spinning out beautifully drawn pieces of visual fan fiction for years now, like this post-Star Wars: The Force Awakens fantasy where Rey, BB-8, Poe Dameron, and Finn team up to take out evil Sith lord Jar-Jar Binks. Or this nine-page Trinity story, which has dressed-down versions of Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman facing an unexpected enemy, and concluding with an unexpected alliance. But he may be making the biggest splash with his intro segments for theoretical animated TV series we all desperately need.

The latest one,...

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For a long time, it was assumed that the gravitational pull of a black hole was total — that nothing, not even light, could escape the clutches of its event horizon. Then, in 1974, an up-and-coming physicist named Stephen Hawking made the bold suggestion that thanks to the peculiarities of quantum physics, black holes should actually emit a tiny amount of electromagnetic radiation (known as Hawking Radiation) and slowly shrink over time. Now, an Israeli physicist named Jeff Steinhauer claims to have proven Hawking's theory — by creating an acoustic black hole in the lab.

Steinhauer's black hole is, of course, just a shadow of the real thing. It builds on the proposals of a physicist named Bill Unruh, who suggested in the '80s that...

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From Siri to Alexa, voice interfaces are becoming increasingly common, but for all their recent advances, they often struggle with one of the most basic characteristics of human speech: accents. The problem is so prevalent that computer scientists have identified the existence of a "machine voice," a standardized way of speaking that individuals with accents adopt in the hope of being understood. Researchers even warn about the existence of a "speech divide" that individuals whose accents differ from those the machines have been trained on.

As is often the case with technology built on large data sets, the problem begins with the input. If you only train your interface using a narrow selection of voices, then it won't know how to...

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Kobo has announced the Aura One, a big new e-reader that’s thin, light, and water resistant. It goes on sale September 6th in the US, Canada, and will cost $229 and $249 in those countries, respectively. It will also be released that same day in a number of other regions like the UK, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, Japan, and Turkey.

The first thing you notice about the Aura One is that it’s big for an e-reader. While Amazon used 9.7-inch displays on some of the early Kindles, and more obscure companies like Pocketbook have sold e-readers in that size range in the past, the industry (Kobo included) has since settled on a standard of 6–7 inch screens. But the Aura One sports a 7.8-inch, 300ppi display, which is large enough to...

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Barnes & Noble is back with another co-branded tablet built by Samsung, and this time it's the Galaxy Tab A Nook. The 7-inch tablet is simply a rebrand of the Tab A which was released back in March which features some pretty average specs, but easily enough to satisfy the device's main task as an e-reader:

• 7-inch 1280 x 800 TFT display
• Samsung Exynos 3475 SoC running at 1.3GHz
• 8GB of storage (MicroSD card slot expandable up to 200GB)
• 1.5GB of RAM
• Android 5.1

The Tab A Nook comes with all of the usual Nook features including the digital store, newsstand, and B&N Readouts, which delivers a selection of quick reads to your device every day. The Galaxy Tab A Nook will retail for $139, but current Nook owners who...

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For the last year, Googler Benson Leung has been waging a one-man war on bad USB accessories. Going forward, he'll have some help in the form of the USB Implementers Forum itself. The USB-IF has announced a certification program complete with a handy little logo. If you see that logo, you'll know the accessory in question is in compliance with the spec and won't break your gear.

The USB-IF is a support organization that promotes the adoption of new USB standards.

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USB-IF announces new USB charger certification program was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Krystle Missildine paints delicate animal portraits on feathers, like this robin on a macaw feather.

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 Google is making a number of announcements around its Cloud Platform today. Most of these focus on its various cloud database services, but the company is also making a major update to its low-cost Nearline cloud storage service for cold data, making its disk volumes faster, and allowing its users to bring their own encryption keys to Cloud Storage. The overall message Google is clearly… Read More

 Interested in a lactose-free, animal-free, nut-free nutritional bar made with soy protein, algal flour, and some sort of sugar made from beets? If that sounds delicious to you (???), then you’ll be glad to hear that the Soylent bar is now shipping. The latest in the growing lineup of meal replacement products from the Andreessen Horowitz-backed startup aiming to change the way people… Read More

Ford plans to build a fully autonomous vehicle without a steering wheel or pedals by 2021, the company announced today. The vehicle will be aimed at ride-hailing and ride-sharing fleets.

To get there, Ford is working with a number of startups, including a new investment in Velodyne, a firm that makes LIDAR sensors; the acquisition of SAIPS, an Israeli company that makes computer vision and machine learning software; an exclusive licensing agreement with “virtual retina” technology company Nirenberg Neuroscience, LLC; and a previously announced investment in 3D-mapping company Civil Maps.

The company is also expanding its research and innovation center in Palo Alto and plans to double the size of its team there by the end of next year.

F...

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