Bcstevieb

Emma Caresimo, 40, was surprised when a bailiff came to her home in Magor, Wales and put a clamp on her car. When she asked why, he told her she'd failed to pay a fine for dropping a cigarette butt in Wigan, 175 miles away.

"I said 'I have never been to Wigan and I don't smoke' but he wasn't having any of it," she told the BBC. "He didn't believe me and said he'd heard it all before. He said he would take the clamp off only if I paid the outstanding fines of £650."

The woman called the police. When the police arrived, they told Caresimo that the bailiff was following the law. Caresimo ended up giving the bailiff £650 (US$940) to remove the clamp.

It turns out the fine was originally given to an Emma Smith from Liverpool. Smith was Caresimo's maiden name.

A spokeswoman for Her Majesty's Courts and Tribunals Service issued the following heartfelt apology:

"As a result of human error HMCTS wrongly took enforcement action against an individual with the same name and date of birth as an offender. We are deeply sorry for any distress caused by this regrettable incident and have arranged for the money to be refunded. We have taken steps to avoid this happening in future."

[via]

Join me in the liminal space between deep culture horror and ironic satisfaction: Awkward metal band photos

Google has made a small but significant change to Chrome that alters how individual tabs appear on Android. By default, individual tabs will no longer live alongside apps in Android's app switcher; instead, they'll exist entirely inside the Chrome app, as they did before Google broke them out with Lollipop in 2014. Android Central noticed the change, and we've also seen this behavior on new and reset phones.

Continue reading…

Ahead of its May 27th premiere, we're getting another trailer for X-Men: Apocalypse, the followup to 2014's Days of Future Past.

As the title indicates, the X-Men will be squaring off with Oscar Isaac's mutant Apocalypse in a fight for the fate of the planet. The new trailer gives us a closer look at the fallout from the battle, as Apocalypse's "four horsemen," including Michael Fassbender's Magneto, gear up for war.

Continue reading…

 Mondo, the yet-to-launch U.K. banking startup that is creating quite a lot of buzz amongst the London tech scene and beyond, is opening its Beta to the public today — albeit one that is limited in functionality while the company seeks a full banking license. Read More

 The UK government has announced a little extra tax relief aimed at encouraging what the chancellor termed ‘micro-entrepreneurs’ in yesterday’s budget — albeit the other beneficiaries here are likely to be gigantic tech platforms like Airbnb if Brits take up the invitation to rent out their spare rooms for a little tax-free extra income. Read More

http://uk.ign.com/articles/2016/03/16/person-of-interest-coming-to-an-end-with-season-5

Amy Acker stars on the show.

Improv Everywhere (previously) keeps on bringing the hits, but seriously, this one takes the cake. (more…)

Sony just took the wraps off of the final consumer version of its PlayStation VR headset at its event at GDC 2016. The final version looks very similar to the headset Sony first showed off way back in 2014, but it has a slightly different lighting pattern on the outside. Sony says the specs and overall design is the same as the recent prototypes it has demoed. The unit has a 5.7-inch OLED display with 1920 x 1080 resolution split across both eyes, and nine LEDs that let the PlayStation camera provide positional tracking.

Sony says the PlayStation VR will be available across the world in October for $399, which is $200 less than the Oculus Rift and $400 below HTC's Vive.

Developing...

Continue reading…

The Snooper's Charter is the mass-surveillance bill the UK government is trying to ram through Parliament. It's incredibly, irresponsibly broad -- and that's been the conclusion of every independent expert who's looked at it to date. (more…)

Fossil is expanding its Android Wear smartwatch lineup today with two new models: the Q Wander and Q Marshal. The new watches follow the Q Founder that was released late last year and offer alternative designs to the Founder's heavy metal frame. They will be available later this year, starting at $275.

Both new watches are smaller than the Q Founder, with the Wander featuring a 44mm case and the Marshal offering a 46mm case. The Wander has a more feminine design, with a gold finish and softer lines, and interchangeable leather straps. Fossil describes the Q Marshal as having a "rugged case," with a navy blue finish and "vintage-inspired" leather straps.

Functionally, the Q Wander and Q Marshal should be similar to the Q Founder (and by...

Continue reading…

 Do video game geeks want to watch classic cooking shows? A new experiment on the Amazon-owned video game streaming service Twitch is looking to answer that question, as the company today announced the debut of a full-time Food Channel which will include all 201 episodes of Julia Child’s “The French Chef.” Child’s famous show is kicking off the launch of this channel,… Read More

Ten pigeons with tiny backpacks are flying over London for the next two days monitoring the city’s pollution levels. Pigeon Patrol, as they’re called by the companies behind the project, are live tweeting the pollution data at their account @PigeonAir. Meet the squad.

Good day London! Rumour has it that your air is totally toxic, so we pigeons are coming to investigate. #PigeonAir pic.twitter.com/ad1EAHnAcn

— Pigeon Air Patrol (@PigeonAir) March 10, 2016

People can follow along and tweet at them for updates on local pollution data.

Continue reading…

When it’s far too difficult to deny yourself that cigarette, eating that donut, or splurging on a new coat, tell yourself to instead wait just 10 minutes before you give in. This “mini” delay in gratification will help you build more self-control over time.

I’ve read a lot of self-help advice on boosting your self-control, but this one from Kelly McGonigal’s The Willpower Instinct can be particularly powerful and put to immediate practice. She calls it the 10-minute delay rule. Any time you have the urge to do something you know is counterproductive to your goals (but you just can’t help it!), delay your gratification by just 10 minutes.

http://lifehacker.com/5802572/how-se...

During what may be the longest 10 minutes of your life, you can distance yourself from your object of desire or keep yourself distracted by chatting with someone. Knowing you have to wait just 10 minutes rather than outright telling yourself “no” also reduces the anxiety you cope with. If you find that the urge is still there after 10 minutes, go for it.

Ten minutes doesn’t seem like a lot of time, but with more practice, 10 minutes can turn into 20, 30, or 60 minutes, and soon you might be able to put off gratification for as long as you want. According to McGonigal, with this strategy the brain treats this like a “future reward” and takes away the overwhelming need for immediate gratification.

So, by the simply telling yourself “wait 10 minutes”, you are training your brain bit-by-bit to delay gratification and help you reach the goals that truly matter to you.

http://vitals.lifehacker.com/think-of-your-...

The Willpower Instinct | Kelly McGonigal

Image by khawkins04.

http://www.amazon.com/Willpower-Inst...

---

Contact the author at stephanie.lee@lifehacker.com.

Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android applications, games, and live wallpapers that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous 2 weeks or so.

Games

DIRAC

Android Police coverage: Mediocre's Latest Game, DIRAC, Is A Scientific Take On Connect The Dots

Dirac is about molecular physics.

Read More

36 New And Notable Android Games From The Last 2 Weeks (3/1/16 - 3/14/16) was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Michael Geist sez, "For the past two and a half months, I have been writing a daily series on the trouble with the Trans Pacific Partnership. The 50 part series wrapped up today with the case against ratifying the TPP. While the focus is on Canadian issues, the series hits on problems that all 12 countries face: unbalanced intellectual property rules, privacy risks, dangers to the Internet and technology, cultural and health regulation, and investor-state settlement rules that could cost countries billions of dollars." (more…)

The Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission was on track to deliver deploy 20,000 MW of grid connected solar power by 2022 ("more than the current solar capacity of the world’s top five solar-producing countries combined") but because India specified that the solar panels for it were to be domestically sourced, the USA sued it in WTO trade court and killed it. (more…)

The CW announced this afternoon that it's ordering new seasons of every scripted show it's currently airing, meaning the network is bringing back almost a dozen shows between this fall and summer 2017. It's a massive show of faith in the network's current lineup, one that's unprecedented in the world of broadcast television.

The CW's biggest rating hits are DC Comics-centric superhero shows like Arrow, The Flash, and Legends of Tomorrow, but its lineup is fleshed out by campy fan favorites like Supernatural and The Vampire Diaries and acclaimed niche comedies like Jane the Virgin. All of those shows are included in this group of renewals. The only scripted CW show that doesn't have a guaranteed future is Containment, a virus drama that...

Continue reading…

Core77 looks at different ways to keep computer cables from falling off our desk and making you go on your hands and knees to retrieve them and disturbing the dust back there so you have a sneezing fit.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/people/2016/03/10/exclusive-morena-baccarin-ben-mckenzie-welcome-baby-girl/81623128/

Congratulations.

You might soon be able to see a movie on opening night without leaving your couch. According to a report from Variety, top studio executives are considering a partnership with Screening Room, a new service that would give viewers at-home access to movies the same day they're out in theaters. The startup is backed by Napster co-founder and former Facebook president Sean Parker.

Continue reading…

• Update 1: 2016/03/09 2:06pm PST
  Here's the OTA zip so you can sideload manually.

Most of the monthly Nexus updates are security patches, but Google is pushing out an OTA to the Nexus 5X right now that's actually got some substance to it. While other phones are just getting the March security update, the Nexus 5X is receiving a raft of bug fixes and tweaks in the update too.

According to a Googler on Reddit, the high points of the 5X update are as follows.

Read More

Nexus 5X Update MHC19J Includes Cooler Color Temp Option, Performance Improvements, And More was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Amendment 90 to France's penal reform bill provides for five year prison sentences and €350,000 fines for companies that refuse to accede to law enforcement demands to decrypt devices. (more…)

Less than a year after it introduced the ability to automatically upload photos from your hard drive, Flickr is removing the feature from free accounts. Flickr users will now need to pay a monthly subscription fee to Flickr Pro to use the Flickr Uploadr desktop tool, a move that effectively marks the death of Yahoo's service as a competitor to Google Photos.

Flickr overhauled its product last May, releasing updated Flickr 4.0 apps and introducing a helpful Camera Roll tool that organized photos in reverse chronological order, but it was Uploadr that made Yahoo's photo-hosting service a particularly enticing prospect in a sea of competitors. After getting it wrong for many years, last year's redesign made Flickr once again a service...

Continue reading…

The UN's aviation agency has announced new regulations that will allow for airplanes to be tracked in real-time, two years after the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370. The International Civil Aviation Organization's (ICAO) governing council adopted the measures on Tuesday, with ICAO council president Olumuyiwa Benard Aliu saying they will help "ensure that similar disappearances never occur again."

MH370 vanished from radar shortly after taking off from Kuala Lumpur on March 8th, 2014. The Beijing-bound plane had 239 passengers and crew members on board. A piece of wreckage from the aircraft was found off the coast of Réunion last year, and Malaysian authorities released a progress report on their investigation yesterday,...

Continue reading…