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There are a handful of brand names out there that are commonly mispronounced. A lot of it has to do with a mistranslation between languages, but it’s still interesting to learn which brands you might be saying incorrectly. This infographic lays them out.

The infographic, from UK brand Made By Oomph, lists 30 brand names that are commonly mispronounced and tells you how to pronounce them properly. Keep in mind, the infographic is from the UK, so if you’re in the US, there are some brands you might surprised to learn are commonly mispronounced in other parts of the world. Check out the infographic, then head to the full post below.

Have You Been Pronouncing These 30 Brand Names Incorrectly? | Made By Oomph

The Atlantic had the excellent idea of commissioning Sarah Jeong, one of the most astute technology commentators on the Internet (previously), to write a series of articles about the social implications of technological change: first up is an excellent, thoughtful, thorough story on the ways that the "cashless society" is being designed to force all transactions through a small number of bottlenecks that states can use to control behavior and censor unpopular political views. (more…)

Yes – he did it! Go Elon!

Last Decembers SpaceX landed the rocket on land.

 A draft version of a bill on encryption sponsored by Senators Burr and Feinstein has made its way to the internet, and it’s exactly as bad a proposed law as everyone worried it would be. The suspiciously (but mercifully) brief Compliance with Court Orders Act, as it stands in draft form, is the technological equivalent of requiring all pigs to fly. Read More

 There’s a new bot in town (Tokyo, specifically), and while it might not be as cute as Nao, as creepy as Spot and BigDog, or as anthropomorphic as Atlas, it might be more practical than all of them. It walks on two legs, but not like a man, or even a bear. This one, designed by Alphabet-owned Schaft Inc, has its own uniquely robotic form of locomotion. Read More

While pirates may not appear to be the most organized people, the groups that make up the top of the piracy pyramid abide by strict rules.

Every so often they agree on a new set of standards, which determine what a proper release should look like. Most recently, new changes were announced for TV show releases, and these are set to go into effect this coming weekend.

The new rules are announced in lengthy documents, one for HD and one for SD TV-releases.

“Since the last revision of this document in 2012, TV-X264-SD has grown and become a major section that many people contribute to and depend on. This new revision aims to update the standards from 2012 to standards suitable for 2016 and the future,” the intro to the SD version reads.

The rules are intended for Scene groups only. These groups don’t share their work directly to the public, but between themselves on so-called “topsites”. However, most of the time their releases are also the source of TV-shows that end up being shared on public pirate sites.

This means that hundreds of million of people around the world will be affected by the changes, albeit indirectly.

For the most part the rules deal with technicalities regarding release formatting, tagging and various audio, subtitle and video settings. These changes are hardly noticeable to outsiders, except for the “container” part.

Instead of using .MP4 as the file format, all releases will be .MKV moving forward. This is the Matroska container which has been the standard for HD releases in recent years.

Some groups have already made the switch over the past few days, causing confusion among BitTorrent users.

“SUDDENLY everything (well many things) is MKV instead of MP4,” one downloader writes, adding “There is no way a way a whole bunch of encoders woke up today and suddenly decided to use MKV instead of MP4. Does anybody have any idea Whats going on?”

Others complain about not being able to watch MKV files on their video players, or branding MKV as inferior.

“All I can figure is that since things were just fine the way they were, a couple of people decided to screw everything up for everyone else,” another frustrated TV fan notes.

Several P2P TV-distribution groups, which are not part of the Scene, were also taken by surprise. However, TorrentFreak is informed that they won’t convert their releases to MP4, as some people have recommended.

Instead, the ETTV group advises TV-show downloaders to convert the videos to MP4 themselves if they want, pointing them to the free Rebox tool that can do this in a few seconds.

“SD tv shows will soon be released in mkv containers. If you’re an mp4 fan you can remux the mkv files to mp4 in 2 simple steps in less than 30 seconds with the app link below,” ETTV writes.

Interestingly, there were also massive complaints in 2012 when the SD standards changed from .AVI to MP4. At the time some people were literally outraged, vowing to ban certain sites and groups.

Whether we will see a repeat of this backlash will become clear after April 10, when the rules go into effect.

This time around it may not be as bad. Many video players support the MKV format and a lot of downloaders were already familiar with it, since HD shows have been released this way for years.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Neven Mrgan takes a prescription drug called Cuprimine. Without it, he would slowly die from liver disease. Unfortunately, the price of Cuprimine has gone from $400-$1,700/month to $44,000/month. Curprimine is made by Valeant Pharmaceuticals, run by billionaire J. Michael Pearson. He's stepping down, not because he jacked up the price of Cuprimine and other medications, but because the company's misstated earnings hurt its stock value.

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It sometimes may feel like the Google Photos web app gets a little left behind in the wake of its Android brethren, but today is the day: a post on Google+ from the Photos team has detailed the latest update, which brings improvements in the upload procedure and all-new keyboard shortcuts.

Photos can now now be uploaded directly to an album, instead of having to upload photos and then add them to an album after they've uploaded.

Read More

Google Photos Web Update Brings Uploading Improvements And Keyboard Shortcuts was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

 WordPress.com is adding HTTPS support for all its blogs. If you have a custom domain or have a blog under the wordpress.com domain name (like bestcrabrestaurantsinportland.wordpress.com), you’re good to go. While many social services like Facebook and Twitter have supported HTTPS for a while now, WordPress.com was still lagging behind for custom domain names. Since 2014, WordPress.co Read More

Angry people in local newspapers is a blog that celebrates pictures of people posing angrily by unpatched potholes, inadequate signs, dog excrement, etc. This is the prevalent form of local news journalism in the United Kingdom. Previously: Local People, Arms Crossed.

The UK Intellectual Property Office has sent an official notice to Britons warning them that they don't have to pay the copyright trolls who send them threatening letters accusing them of copyright infringement. (more…)

 After John Oliver used humor to tackle the U.S. surveillance reform debate last year, to try to get Americans to care about online privacy — via the mass medium of, er, dick pics — U.K. comedy duo Cassetteboy is attempting something similar, using its trademark video cut-up parody format to slice through all the government spin around UK surveillance legislation… Read More

Try as I might, I can’t just fall asleep to white noise or thunderstorm sounds. I love ‘em but they don’t work for me. This jazz playlist, on the other hand, might knock me out before I finish writing about it.

This playlist, curated by Spotify itself, features a collection of calming jazz songs to help you sleep. The entire list is soothing without drawing much attention to itself, for a perfect night’s sleep.

Welcome to our Featured Playlist series. Each week, we’ll share a new themed playlist, embedded for your convenience! You can copy the track list to your service of choice, or listen right here. Have a sweet playlist of your own? Share it with us in the comments below!

A masterfully told history of the life of John Yudkin, once the UK's leading nutritional expert, turns into an indictment of the nutritional scientific establishment, which coalesced in a cult of personality around Ancel Keys, who was convinced that fat made you fat and cholesterol raised your cholesterol, and belittled and marginalized anyone who disagreed, including Yudkin, who believed that sugar, not fat, was the cause of obesity and heart disease. (more…)

The Volocopter, a helicopter-drone hybrid with 18 rotors, took its first manned flight in Southern Germany on March 30th, the company e-volo announced today. With e-volo's managing director Alexander Zosel in the cockpit, the truly strange-looking aircraft took to the skies above an airfield, hovered for several minutes, and then landed. A video chronicling the feat features heavy electronic dance music, because Germany.

Zosel was excited to have executed the first manned flight. Like very excited. "It was unbelievable," he said, "it hovered totally weightlessly, I mean it didn't at all feel like there were crazy forces at work, it was all just totally light and the Volocopter immediately converted every movement I made with the...

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Mechanical engineering students from The Technion – Israel Institute of Technology built this fantastic Rube Goldberg machine last year to tell the story of Passover, the Jewish holiday starting the evening of April 22 that celebrates the biblical story of the Israelites' exodus from slavery in Egypt. Of course my favorite part of the story, and this video, is the Ten Plagues.

(Thanks, Candy Mabry!)

And here's a behind-the-scenes video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOpryQ_tmUs

Android: Eat This Much, the previously mentioned meal planning app that automatically generates menus and shopping lists for you, used to be iOS only. Now it’s available for Android too, and it’s brought some useful new features along for the ride.

http://lifehacker.com/eat-this-much-...

The app still works the way it always has—you can give Eat This Much some basic information on the type of diet you’re trying to follow, whether it’s high protein and low carb, vegetarian, paleo, keto, and so on, and the service will spit out a grocery list and a meal plan for all of your meals over the course of the week. You can even tweak and customize that meal plan (to some degree, premium users get the most control, and more on that in a moment) to swap in and out foods you don’t like, minimize how often certain items are suggested to you, and even add items to your pantry so Eat This Much tries to use what you have before telling you to buy something else.

Since we last mentioned it, the service has added thousands of new recipes, updated its interface, and added branded foods to its database as well so you can eat your favorites or get some of your favorite meals suggested to you when it builds you menu.

The app is still freemium, meaning a ton of great features are available in the free version, and more now than before. For example, some features like blocking specific foods, custom recipes, and so on used to be premium-only, but they’re available to everyone now. Premium users however get the ability to use the weekly planner, which unlocks the option to plan meals for each day of the week, make grocery lists based on your mix and match menus, and set up leftovers so you don’t get a lunch recipe for the day after you make a big meal. Premium subscriptions are $9/mo or $84/yr, and every user gets a free trial so you can see if premium works for you before you pay. Hit the link below to check out the Android app, or just learn more.

Eat This Much (Free) | Google Play via Eat This Much

Researchers from MIT have used a new 3D printing method that works with both solids and liquids to create a six-legged, hydraulically-powered robot. The team from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) created the bot using a commercially-available 3D printer. Several sets of tiny bellows power the robot's legs, and are filled with liquid deposited during the 22-hour printing process.

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This morning, a fleet of self-driving trucks arrived in the Dutch port of Maasvlakte, completing a cross-continent journey that organizers say demonstrates the future of transport in Europe. The experiment is known as the European Truck Platooning Challenge, and involved trucks from six different manufacturers traveling in miniature convoys. A driver in the lead vehicle of each convoy sets the speed and the route, while the other trucks follow automatically, a Wi-Fi connection keeping their braking and acceleration (but not steering) in sync.

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Yesterday The Force Awakens landed on Blu-ray and DVD, so it's time to start up the hype machine for this year's Star Wars movie: Rogue One. According to this brief clip posted today, the first teaser for the film will be featured tomorrow, Thursday, April 7th, on Good Morning America — after which we assume it will spread to the internet and every single website known to humanity.

Rogue One is the first of several planned Star Wars spin-offs that take place outside the normal serialized films, each of which will be dubbed "A Star Wars story." Directed by Godzilla's Gareth Edwards, Rogue One follows the adventures of a group of spies out to steal the plans for the original Death Star — the same plans that end up in the memory banks of...

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In this heartwarming example of interspecies friendship, a monkey named Fedor makes haste to visit his pet chickens and goat.

[via]

A decade ago, the release of a new desktop web browser, or even a significant new version, was a big a deal. Consumers and reviewers eagerly waited for more speed, and for cool new features like tabbed browsing or address-bar searching.

But those days are gone. The last major new cross-platform desktop browser to debut was Google’s Chrome, in 2008, which now leads the market. Web browsing itself has moved mostly to mobile devices, where the typical user employs the platform’s built-in browser: mobile Chrome on many Android phones and...

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Paper cutters are precise tools for slicing paper, with one minor deficiency: You can’t always see where the blade will cut. For some models, you can fix this by shining a light beneath the paper.

As reddit user VolcanoHoliday points out in the photo above, by shining a light below the paper, you can see exactly where the edge of a paper cutter ends and thus where the blade will cut. Unfortunately, this only works on larger paper cutters like this one where the blade drops to cut along the edge. Smaller paper cutters like this one where a smaller blade slides along the paper don’t have a drop off edge that you can shine a light behind. However, if you have to use one of those larger paper cutters regularly, mounting a light could help you be more precise.

See exact cut line on any paper cutter. Never going back! | Reddit

Everyone wants more money. More money means less stress, we assume. Except that’s not necessarily the case. If your habits suck, making more money just means you have more to waste.

Personal finance site The Smarter Dollar took a survey of 73 readers and found that 40% said their biggest problem with money was “not having enough of it.” While this is a real problem for many people, the site pointed out that in many cases, not having “enough” money may actually a perception problem:

What exactly is having more money going to bring you? Happiness? Less stress? Pride? “Just having more money” isn’t going to do a damn thing for your happiness and stress level... Want to know how I know? Because I know all of you who responded, and 90% of you make over $50,000 a year.

For reference, the median income in the US is $51,939 as of 2014, though for most states individually, it’s much lower. In fact, $50k is enough to qualify as middle-class in every single state. Of course, everyone’s situation is different—for example, $50k in New York City isn’t going to be a lot, no matter what the median is for the state—but the broader point is that “I don’t have enough money” is just as much of a perception problem as a financial one.

Rather than saying you don’t have “enough” money, The Simpler Dollar suggests taking stock of your situation and finding out what you need. How much money do you make versus your expenses? Where can you reduce your major expenses to increase your savable income. If you’re aiming for a specific lifestyle, how much money will you need to make that work?

Most of us rarely answer these questions, instead pursuing a lifestyle independent of our financial ability to do so. However, once you decide how much life you want to buy, you can determine exactly how much money you actually need. Then you can start solving the problem of making more until you have “enough.”

73 readers’ top financial problems and how to solve them | The Smarter Dollar via Rockstar Finance

Photo by Keith Cooper.

GCHQ, the UK's spy agency, designed a security protocol for voice-calling called MIKEY-SAKKE and announced that they'll only certify VoIP systems as secure if they use MIKEY-SAKKE, and it's being marketed as "government-grade security." (more…)

A Scottish craft brewery has developed "spreadable beer," a marmalade flavored with oak-aged pale ale. To go with it, Innes&Gunn is also selling a marmalade-flavored pale ale.

Dougal Sharp, Innis & Gunn founder and master brewer, said: “Launching in this great city has provided us with an opportunity to do what we do best: push the boundaries of what’s possible with beer through innovation and experimentation.

"That’s why we’ve been hard at work brewing a marmalade IPA and even creating spreadable beer for adventurous foodies.

"We’re proud to be setting up shop in such an innovative and vibrant city, we can’t wait to share our passion for great beer with Dundonians.”

Scottish craft brewer launches 'world's first spreadable beer' (Thanks, Wendy!)

 Atom Bank, which is backed by Spanish banking giant BBVA, has become the first of the four so-called UK ‘challenger’ banks out the gate — sort of. Having secured a much-coveted banking license late last year, the mobile-first bank has made its iOS app available to users who pre-registered their interest. However, this is still a very limited launch, restricted to a single… Read More