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Ever wonder what the song "Let it go" from Disney's hit movie Frozen would sound like in Klingon? Me neither but then again, something like that would never even occur to me. But it did occur to Jen Usellis, who performs as the Klingon Pop Warrior.

Listen as she belts out her Klingonese version, called "yIbuSQo'":

Nerdist:

After Reddit user staq16 posted the song to Reddit’s Star Trek subreddit earlier this month, the track quickly earned mad parmaq from the forum’s community. However, while most users thought the song was on point, some took issue with the fact that Klingons are known for not enjoying the cold—nor letting things go. They also apparently don’t do a lot of other things.

(Geekologie)

London real estate has been a favorite place for oligarchs and thugs to safely park their ill-gotten money. This 9-minute documentary takes you on a tour of North London's Billionaires' Row of uninhabited mansions. The structures are decaying, but the owners don't care, because the real value are the lots themselves.

From Amusing Planet:

The entire neighbourhood is owned by the super-rich, ranging from Saudi princes to East European arms dealers to Indian business magnates. Yet, no one ever lives here for more than a few weeks each year. Most have been left to the staff who looks after the properties while the owners are away. Others have never been occupied. Several huge properties have fallen into ruins after lying vacant for more than 25 years. These once expensive homes are in a terribly bad shape with peeling paint, rotting carpets, water streaming down bedroom walls, collapsed ceilings, and ferns growing between broken floor tiles.

The person who made this video said in the YouTube description, "We rarely explore alone but this documentary was filmed single-handedly, with a sharp ear, eye, a suppression of urgent tension, and a constant readiness to run! Hope you find it interesting."

[via Neatorama]

"Improving Automobile Safety by Removing Blind Spots" is 14 year old Alaina Gassler's prizewinning science-fair project, which uses cameras mounted to the exterior of the car and feeding their video to internal projectors, which projection-map them onto the a-pillars that otherwise obscure the driver's view.

The Pennsylvania teen's project won the top $25,000 prize in the Broadcom MASTERS (Math, Applied Science, Technology, and Engineering for Rising Stars) science competition.

I am a giant fan of projection mapping, which makes for eerily cool and wonderful effects, and Gassler's project -- which used 3D printed components to precisely map the projections -- are no exception.

Through her project, Alaina Gassler is seeking to make driving safer by reducing blind spots. She designed a system that uses a webcam to display anything that might block the driver’s line of sight. Alaina was inspired to create her device after seeing her mother struggle with blind spots in their family automobile.

14-Year-Old Genius Solves Blind Spots [Andrew Liszewski/Gizmodo]

• Update 1: 2019/11/02 6:21am PDT
  YouTube has officially announced this feature. I verified it on my end with YouTube v14.44.52 on Android: Muted playback is available in both Home and Subscriptions tabs and can

Media companies want you to consume their content. The more you watch, read, listen, the better it is for them, and it's even best if they can require no active decision on your part to shove content into your ears and eyeballs.

(Update: Official) YouTube ruins the Subscriptions tab with auto-playing videos, but you can disable them was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

The BBC's Szu Ping Chan takes a look at the futuristic technology depicted in 1982's Blade Runner, which was set in November 2019. It now being November 2019, how did it do? We're doing great on telecommunications and despoiling the planet, but not well on the genetically-engineered vat-grown human clones front.

computational photography is becoming the norm, helping our phones take incredible low-light pictures, and automatically blur the background of our portrait shots. But the Esper machine, which Deckard uses to find clues by zooming in on different things within photos, remains ahead of its time. It enables him to see objects and people from different angles, and items which were not previously visible. AI researchers are working on software that can create interactive 3D views from a single 2D source image, but it's likely to be many more years to come before Photoshop gets the feature.

How might Deckard's camera work, practically? The data could only represent what the camera can see at the moment of capture. Recent light-field cameras (with several lenses at different focal lengths) can do the Blade Runner trick, but not enough to offer the shift of perpective Deckard was able to explore on his bulky, single-purpose cathode ray tube photo viewer.

Perhaps the movie-world's cameras spit out little drones, snapping simultaneously from nearby points of view and baking all the data into the original. Or perhaps being a Blade Runner, he has access to encrypted information in the print captured from nearby surveillance cameras. What if the camera is also capturing all sorts of other data--sonar, radar, dim extrapolations from all the other reflective surfaces -- and inferring details?

Or maybe it's pointless speculating how a photo could have gigapixel resolution and the light field of a meter-wide capture surface, yet have the dynamic range of a polaroid (the brand's embossed right there!) and require a machine the size and grace of a photocopier to examine.

I noticed that it was that time of the century and made a mashup up the film's legendary intro, complete with Vangelis's soundtrack, with real contemporary footage of LA. The main difference is, of course, what's on fire. LA, November 2019: smoking hot, yes, flying cars, no.

A report from a few days ago suggested that Google's parent company Alphabet was in talks to purchase fitness tracker manufacturer Fitbit, and sure enough, an official announcement has just confirmed that the deal is going ahead at a cost of $2.1 billion. With confidence in Wear OS seemingly at an all-time low, this latest news could signal that Google's wearable ambitions have some life in them yet.

According to a post by hardware SVP Rick Osterloh on Google's blog, the company "has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Fitbit." He goes on to say that this is an opportunity to invest in the future of Wear OS and also hints at plans to "introduce Made by Google wearable devices into the market." A Pixel watch has long been anticipated and was apparently on the cards back in 2016 before being scrapped.

Google acquires Fitbit for $2.1 billion, hints at future own-brand wearable was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

One of the best features of Google’s new Nest Mini speaker is its ability to support stereo pairing for better sound quality. Now, Google is expanding stereo speaker pairing to the original Google Home and Google Home Mini.

more…

The post Google Home, Home Mini now support stereo speaker pairing appeared first on 9to5Google.

The 11'8" bridge in Durham, N.C., which has brought so much misery to unobservant truck drivers and so much joy to the internet, will be raised to 12'4" this week. Is nothing sacred in the age of Trump?

On October 26, I spent the afternoon at the 11foot8 bridge as the crew was working on preparing the structure for raising it next week. They cut off the rusty steel supports of the old walkway on the southern side of the trestle, and they removed the battered, bent crash beam that was the canopener's "teeth" for taking bites out of many a hapless, overheight truck on Gregson St. I hope you all enjoy the video.

It's only a few inches, but it's the difference between life and death for the standard 12ft high rental trucks that comprise the bridge's normal diet.

Here's a compilation featuring many of the Can Opener's victims:

Welcome to the roundup of the latest Android games that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous week or so. Today I have an F2P King of Fighters sidescrolling brawler, the latest stand-alone expansion for ROME: Total War, and a gorgeous Zelda-like from Devolver Digital. So without further ado, here are the more notable Android games released during the week of October 21st, 2019.

26 new Android games from the week of October 21: The King of Fighters ALLSTAR, ROME: Total War - Alexander, and The Swords of Ditto was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

The Sounds application, which comes pre-installed on its Pixel devices, is stock-full of ringtones, alarms, and notification sounds for you to choose from. The app works on non-Pixel phones too, like the Galaxy S10, but not all. That's why we've decided to share with you all the sound files included in it, so you can use them on any device (including your desktops if you like that).

Without further ado, here are the zipped files you need, with the sounds divided by type and organized by collection.

Download 250 ringtones, alarms, and notifications from Google's Sounds 2.2 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 an in-home delivery app from Walmart, six separate Digital Wellbeing Experiment apps from Google, and a new password manager for T-Mobile users. So without further ado, here are the most notable Android apps released in the last week.

18 new and notable Android apps and live wallpapers from the last week including Walmart InHome Delivery, many Digital Wellbeing Experiments, and ZenKey Powered by T-Mobile (10/19/19 - 10/26/19) was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Paying for things is all too easy online these days, and that's why managing your money has gotten so hard. We've all done it: You sign up for a streaming subscription or gym membership, blow past the free trial date, and it becomes a part of your monthly expenses. Some of us juggle so many accounts, we may not even notice.

That's just one example of modern information overload bleeding into actual financial consequences. And as much as money management apps try to help, too often they're just one more account we have to deal with.

There are exceptions, however. Truebill is one notable example. It does all the things you come to expect from a money managing app, like tracking your spending, making a budget, and checking multiple bank accounts. Plus, with 256-bit SSL encryption, the security is rock-solid.

But, it also takes a more active role in your financial health, not just by showing you the drains on your income but plugging them up. Got a subscription you forgot you were paying for? Truebill will highlight it, and cancel it on your behalf. Got a cell service that's gouging you? Truebill will negotiate a lower rate for you. It really takes the petty stuff off your plate and allows you to focus on hitting those savings goals.

All this functionality, and it's free. Check it out now at truebill.com.

Ornithologists have determined that white bellbirds of the northern Amazon have the loudest mating call of any bird. The male white bellbird sounds off to females as close as 13 feet away with a call that can reach 125 decibels at that range. That's louder than what you'd hear holding a chainsaw while not wearing earplugs. From Discover:

The mating call also comes with a strange performance. The males turn their back to the female, lower their tail and head, and puff up. “And then all of a sudden, boom,” Podos says — one note comes screeching out, and the bird flips around dramatically to sing the second tone directly into the female’s face. The researchers think this volume might damage the female’s hearing, but maybe it’s a sacrifice she is willing to make for the sake of a good mate...

Species from the Amazon are under intense sexual selection pressures, so it makes sense that two of the loudest birds on record are from the region. Also, the screaming piha (another very loud bird) and white bellbirds are fruit-eaters, and (study coauthor Jeff Podos of University of Massachusetts Amherst) thinks the wide beaks needed for choking down berries could also help project loud calls.

"Extremely loud mating songs at close range in white bellbirds" (Current Biology)

In 1969, Bob Dylan wrote "Wanted Man" for Johnny Cash who recorded it for his live record At San Quentin. Now though, Dylan has released this killer original demo of the tune as he and Cash played it together in Nashville with Carl Perkins. It's included on the forthcoming box set Bob Dylan (Featuring Johnny Cash) – Travelin’ Thru, 1967-1969: The Bootleg Series Vol. 15.

(Rolling Stone)

The Audubon Society's tribute to John James Audubon's Birds of America (originally published between 1827 and 1838) features all 435 of Audubon's vibrant, beautiful portraits of the birds he studied, along with his notes on their behaviors and other characteristics (the site also includes audio samples of each bird's call).

The collection can be sliced in many ways: chronological, alphabetical or by state.

The illustrations are gorgeous, and the hi-rez scans are enormous -- 11,000+ pixels wide!

John J. Audubon’s Birds of America [Audubon Society]

(via Open Culture)

Two great things that get even better together: Sublime and Hong Kong Phooey.

Penrod Pooch studied the 'Hong Kong Book of Kung-Fu' to no great effect, and Sublime was the only reason I'd go to Long Beach in the late 80s. The cartoon may be dated but the band remains in my rotation.

Thanks, Boing Boing BBS reader GulliverFoyle!

Welcome to the roundup of the latest Android games that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous week or so. Today I have the release of a premium RTS roguelike that sports gorgeous graphics, a new game from Ustwo that takes advantage of Google's new Quick Gestures on the Pixel 4, and the latest Leisure Suit Larry point and click adventure game. So without further ado, here are the more notable Android games released during the week of October 14th, 2019.

25 new Android games from the week of October 14, 2019: Bad North: Jotunn Edition, Headed South, and Leisure Suit Larry - Wet Dreams Don't Dry 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 an exclusive Pokémon release intended for use on the Pixel 4, a new image editor from our very own Corbin Davenport, and a pleasant interval timer designed for high-intensity training. So without further ado, here are the most notable Android apps released in the last two weeks.

14 new and notable Android apps from the last two weeks including Pokémon Wave Hello, PhotoStack, and Hiitmi - Interval Timer (10/5/19 - 10/19/19) was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Get those sea creatures!

Odin the German Shepherd is an adorable plush coat puppy.

In this video from 2017, his human says Odin had zero interest in bath time.

View this post on Instagram

Get those sea creatures! Anyone have any tips on how I can get him to not freak out when we give him a bath? he's warming up to the kiddie pool but still dreaddddsss a bath, getting rinsed off with a hose, getting water poured on him with a cup to rinse off. Basically anything to try to get him clean! Help!! #dreadedbathtime #gsdstagram #gsdlife #gsdpage #gsdlove #gsdofig #gsdofinstagram #gsdpuppy #gsdpuppies #germanshepherd #germanshepherddog #germanshepherdofig #germanshepherdworld #germanshepherdsofinstagram #gsdlovers #gsdstagram #gsdoftheworld #puppiesofinstagram #puppydog #puppygram #mansbestfriend #petsofinstagram #germanshepherdpuppy #gsdpuppy #odinthegreatgsdnj #odinzms #k9 #odin

A post shared by •ODIN• (@odin.thegreat.gsd) on Jul 8, 2017 at 1:27pm PDT

The kiddie pool was a way to get the little puppy to become more comfortable with getting a bath.

He's warming up to the kiddie pool but still dreaddddsss a bath, getting rinsed off with a hose, getting water poured on him with a cup to rinse off.

This is a newly-viral-again doggie video that actually dates back a couple years. At odin.thegreat.gsd, you can follow how Odin has been growing up, and what became of his initial wariness about water time.

[Instagram, 2017]

Welcome to the roundup of the latest Android games that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous week or so. Today I have a new Digimon game that offers single-player and PvP battles, a fantastic action game themed around Lovecraft's horrors, and the continuation of the Xenowerk series with a competent offshoot strategy title. So without further ado, here are the more notable Android games released the week of October 7th, 2019.

18 new Android games from the week of October 7, 2019: DIGIMON ReArise, Lovecraft's Untold Stories, and Xenowerk Tactics was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

A beloved dog that was lost in 2007 has been found -- over one thousand miles away from home, in Pittsburgh, PA.

After being lost for 12 years, Dutchess finally met her owner again, and Humane Animal Rescue captured the moment on video.

The toy fox terrier disappeared from their south Florida home in 2007, says Humane Animal Rescue, and Dutchess was discovered under a shed on Monday. The 14 year old senior dog was hungry, shaking, and needed some grooming.

The person who found the dog took it to a Humane Animal Rescue location, where staff scanned the dog's microchip, which led to its owners contact information.

Duchess's mom Katheryn Strang drove from Boca Raton, FL to Pittsburgh, PA on Friday.

She couldn’t believe it when she got the call, Strang says in the video livestreamed on Facebook —— she says she kept paing the microchip service fees all those years, hoping one day it'd pay off.

It did.

[via AP]

Mapquest was once the leading map site in the world; they were bought by AOL as part of AOL's decades' long spree of buying successful companies and running them into the ground -- finally, they were sold, and merged with Yahoo's mangled acquisitions, to Verizon, to form a new, doomed division called "Oath" (because thinking about it made people swear).

Verizon has now dumped Mapquest to an ad-tech company called System1 for such a small sum it was "not material enough for Verizon to file paperwork."

This is part of a string of lowball Verizon selloffs of their Oath companies: WordPress parent-company Automattic bought Tumblr in August for "less than $3 million" (actual price undisclosed; Yahoo bought Tumblr for $1.1b in 2013); in April 2018, Smugmug rescued Flickr from Verizon hell.

The whole ignominious tale is a perfect parable about market concentration and antitrust: AOL and Yahoo were allowed to make all these acquisitions because of Reagan-era reforms to antitrust enforcement, and it was a catastrophe for dozens of promising startups (though it certainly transferred a lot of money to Yahoo execs and shareholders). Then AOL and Yahoo sold those holdings to Verizon for $4.48b, and Verizon has since written down those assets by $4.45b (that is, more than 99%). They even lost Shingy.

Mapquest claims a (dubious) 38m monthly users. The company blamed its precipitous fall on getting downranked by Google, whose competing Google Maps product claims 154.4m monthly users. Google insists it downranked Mapquest results because no one clicked on them.

It's clear that Google's attempt to corner the whole online vertical was bad for its competitors, but it's also obvious that AOL and Yahoo were the poster-child for diseconomies of scale, a place where good companies went to die, helmed by inverse King Midases who turned everything they touched to shit.

A eulogy for Mapquest [Greg Sterling/Search Engine Land]

(via Beyond the Beyond)

Oregon Zoo posted a collection of X-ray images of animals taken at its Veterinary Medical Center, reavealing "the inner gothy beauty of animals." [h/t Steven Glista]

See if you can guess the beasties; then hit the Zoo's Twitter thread for answers (and more beasties).

The getaway goat's name is 'Big Boy.' “He’s never done anything like that before,” his owner said when finally reunited with the goat.

“I think he was drinking too much that night. I’m really sorry it happened but there wasn’t much I could do. I wasn’t there.”

In an Ohio town, a teen got home from school last Friday to discover the family dog barking outside, and a sliding glass door shattered.

The kid's mom called the Ashland County Sheriff’s Office after they figured out a goat had crashed into their family home.

Keathley said she and the deputies called vets, animal control and the local Humane Society for advice. She said everyone laughed at them and they laughed too but they really needed help. Finally, the deputies decided to attempt corralling the goat out themselves. They tried tying a rope around its neck, enticing it with carrots, dog bones, grass.

At one point, the goat turned around and ran back into the bathroom. Eventually, the two deputies each grabbed a horn and managed to lead the goat outside and into the German Shepard’s cage.

On local Facebook pages, Keathley asked, “is anybody missing a ram? Please contact me ASAP.”

She said she didn’t want to include what the male goat had done in the post or else the owner might not claim him.

More:
Goat breaks into Ashland County home, falls asleep in bathroom [times-gazette.com, video courtesy Jenn Keathley]

This adorable 12-week-old kitten needed a snooze during their little 'coffee break.'

View this post on Instagram

Monday mornings be like... #ugh #mondays # #yoda

A post shared by taro + zippo (@taroandzippo) on Sep 30, 2019 at 8:03am PDT

Too much cuteness in this video.

You can follow @taroandzippo on Instagram.

[@TaraAndZippo via Reuters]

Welcome to the roundup of the latest Android games that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous week or so. Today I have the official release for Call of Duty Mobile, a new Clash Royale clone from Sega, and an adorable perspective-based puzzler staring an octopus. So without further ado, here are the more notable Android games released the week of September 30, 2019.

19 new Android games from the week of September 30, 2019: Call of Duty: Mobile, League of Wonderland, and Takoway was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

He calls his cat Number One.

I also dig Riker's 'Stringfellow Hawk' dock on the lake.

Imagine sitting on the couch sippin ur drink and... pic.twitter.com/ipAYrWiNOx

— Dj Candlestck (@candlestickem) October 6, 2019

Holy cow! Thank goodness no one was hurt!

(h/t @NekoCase)

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 two weeks or so. Today I have a snapshot release for the Vivaldi Browser, a new messaging app from Instagram, and a new release from Duet that makes it easy to turn your Android device into a secondary display. So without further ado, here are the most notable Android apps and live wallpapers released in the last two weeks.

19 new and notable Android apps and live wallpapers from the last two weeks including Vivaldi Browser Snapshot, Threads from Instagram, and Duet Display (9/21/19 - 10/05/19) was written by the awesome team at Android Police.