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Earlier this year, Microsoft invited a group of science fiction writers into its research department, giving them unfettered access to its people and resources with the purpose of inspiring a collection of short stories. That collection — titled Future Visions: Original Science Fiction Stories Inspired by Microsoft — is now out, featuring stories from nine award-winning authors on topics from translation to teleportation.

Among the authors invited was Ann Leckie, who won a suite of awards for her debut novel Ancillary Justice in 2013, David Brin, a longtime sci-fi writer who has also served on the advisory board of NASA's Innovative and Advanced Concepts group, and Robert J. Sawyer, whose novel FlashForward was the basis for the show of...

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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.

Featured App

DigiCal Calendar & Widgets

Today's roundup is presented by DigiCal Calendar & Widgets from Digibites.

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18 New And Notable (And 1 WTF) Android Apps And Live Wallpapers From The Last 2 Weeks (11/3/15 - 11/17/15) was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Oddworld is a series of games in a variety of genres, all united by the core element of... well, oddness. If you played Stranger's Wrath, the last Oddworld port to reach Android about a year ago, you know what I mean: that game was a third-person action title in which you shot tiny adorably creatures out of a double-barrel crossbow. Munch's Oddysee is an even older game, originally released on the Xbox (the one that isn't the One) back in 2001.

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Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee Brings Its Uniquely Weird 3D Platforming To Android For $5 was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

 Google+ has always been a project for Google, regardless of what you’ve read in the media. With projects, come changes…and there have been quite a few for Google+ this year. The Photos product that got pulled out of G+ is doing pretty damn well, and YouTubers were happy when the service was unbundled from the video-sharing site. The shift continues today with a complete redesign… Read More

If you head over to Google+ today, you’ll see that things look a little different.

Since we last posted, we’ve spent a lot of time listening to what people using Google+ had to say. There were two features they kept coming back to: Communities, which now average 1.2 million new joins per day, and Collections, which launched just five months ago and is growing even faster. Whether it’s the Nonfiction Addiction Community, where people can be found discussing the best in Crime or Travel storytelling, or the Watch Project Collection, where more than 40,000 people are following an antique watch hobbyist, these are the places on Google+ where people around the world are spending their time discovering and sharing things they love.

And so we’ve reimagined Google+ to help them do that. Today, we’re starting to introduce a fully redesigned Google+ that puts Communities and Collections front and center. Now focused around interests, the new Google+ is much simpler. And it’s more mobile-friendly—we’ve rebuilt it across web, Android and iOS so that you’ll have a fast and consistent experience whether you are on a big screen or small one. You’ll need to opt-in to this new version of Google+ on the web to see the changes—check out our Google+ post for more on how to give it a try.
Creating great products that solve real needs and make life easier for people is something Google is always striving for. Your feedback got us this far—as we continue to refine Google+, we’d love to keep hearing from you. In the meantime, we look forward to seeing how today’s changes help kickstart even more conversations around everything from Zombie Cats to Vintage Calculators.

Posted by Eddie Kessler, Director of Streams

Everyone at The Verge thinks I'm crazy for continuing to buy phones with only 16GB of storage, but the trick to living on a tiny hard drive is expeditiously backing up and removing the many gigs of photos that quickly fill it all up. Google Photos is a huge help in doing that — it automatically backs up every photo you take, with no storage limit — and now it's starting to help get rid of photos once they're backed up, too.

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The UK Prime Minister has seized on the tragic deaths and injuries in Paris as an excuse to terroise Britons into allowing him to pass his Snoopers Charter, a sweeping, badly written surveillance bill that will end security research in the UK, cause Internet bills to soar, and riddle critical software with back-doors, threatening anyone who reveals these vulnerabilities, even in court, with a year in prison. (more…)

When you have a lot on your mind at the end of the day, it can be tough to fall asleep. If this is a familiar annoyance for you, try a brain dump before bed.

Most of us have a ton of thoughts buzzing around our heads at bedtime. These might be reminders, ideas or just random interesting things you’ve been thinking about. In an interview with Tim Ferris, philosopher Alain de Botton explains his strategy for quieting these thoughts before bed. He tells Ferris he spends a few minutes quickly writing down all of his random thoughts before bed.

An end of the week brain dump can be useful, but doing one before bed is a great way to clear your head and still make sure your thoughts are processed. Of course, if you explore these thoughts too deeply, that can backfire and keep you awake thinking about them. To combat this, de Botton simply writes down a few short phrases or words to represent those larger ideas. This helps him make the ideas tangible so he can get them out of his head and onto paper, then revisit them later.

http://lifehacker.com/the-value-of-a...

It’s worth a try if you have trouble falling asleep due to racing thoughts. Check out the interview for yourself at the link below.

How Philosophy Can Change Your Life | The 4-Hour Workweek via Business Insider

Photo by Joi Ito.

Asus and Google have finally started selling the Chromebit, a candybar-sized Chrome OS computer that retails for a measly 85 bucks. You can plug it into any HDMI port, hook up the power cable and a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, then kaboom: instant computer.

We've become familiar with Chromebooks. On the low end, they offer a cheap and easy way to get a browser and web-based apps without having to hassle with keeping the thing up to date. The Chromebit is the same idea, only smaller. Basically, take a cheap Chromebook and remove the expensive parts: the screen, the battery, the keyboard and trackpad. What you're left with is Asus' cute little stick.

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You never needed to phrase a search as a question in order for Google to provide an answer, but that didn't stop many of us from doing so anyway. And this was before smartphones and tablets started prompting us to ask questions using our voice. Fortunately, the habit hasn't stopped Google from telling us what we want to know, and now the search engine is becoming smart enough to understand some of our more complicated questions.

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The Google Search App Can Now Answer More Complex Questions was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

If you want to change your financial situation, control is key. But it’s not always easy to feel in control, especially if you’re, say, drowning in debt. But writer Trent Hamm explains how one little word can make a difference.

Over at the Simple Dollar, Hamm says that by embracing the word “if,” you start to see what’s possible for your financial situation. He explains:

“If” is the single most important word in personal finance.

It’s the word that everything hinges on, and it’s also the reason that, in the end, your personal finance success rides on your shoulders, not anyone else’s.

That can be a difficult thing for many to hear, but it’s true. Every situation you’re in is a mix of factors that you control and factors outside of your control. If you take charge of a situation and make the most of the factors you can control, you maximize your chances of success. It’s never a guarantee, of course, but over time it makes all of the difference in the world.

This can work even if you’re in debt. What if you tossed ten extra bucks at your debt every month? You can ask yourself that question, then do the math to see how that’d add up over time. And what if you were out of debt completely? I like this exercise because it focuses on possibilities, not what’s holding you back. Those possibilities put you in control, and control is essential to managing your money. Hamm offers more insight on this topic, so be sure to read the full post at the link below.

Photo by PublicDomainPictures.

If…| The Simple Dollar via Rockstar Finance

 Portable air quality tracker Atmotube aims to be the Waze for air quality tracking in your city. The device is a tiny tube that you can carry around in your pocket or put on a key chain to monitor the air in your environment. Atmotube links to a smartphone app that tells you if the air you are breathing is toxic. It measures a number of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), carbon monoxide, and… Read More

 No sooner did I out Valk Fleet, Delivery Hero’s new B2B startup that lets take-outs and restaurants outsource delivery, another London competitor lands on my radar. Delivery Cube, which is currently operational in part of South London and launched before Valk Fleet, pitches itself as “B2B technology driven logistics solution”. Read More

 French hardware startup Withings has released two smart-ish watches so far — the Activité and the Activité Pop. Today, the company is releasing a new model sitting between these two options, the Activité Steel. Read More

Amazon Prime's free shipping is always most useful when you've got a lot of shopping to do, so luckily, ahead of Black Friday and Christmas, the retailer is offering UK customers Prime for £59 instead of £79. It's a decent saving for a year's worth of Prime membership, which includes not only free two-day shipping, but also access to Amazon's various music and video streaming platforms, and the opportunity to use Prime Now — the company's one-hour delivery service (available only in London and Birmingham at the moment).

New Prime members will also get early access to Amazon's Black Friday and Lightning deals. (Although, these deals tend to be a bit hit and miss — it's not always saving money on a new iPad, for example, as much as it is...

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 LoveCrafts, the crafting community, marketplace and e-commerce startup, has knitted together a $20 million Series B round. The funding is being led by Highland Europe, with participation from existing investor Balderton Capital. Read More

The Koenigsegg Regera is inarguably one of the most ridiculous supercars ever imagined, much less made: the latest project from Swedish performance wizard Christian von Koenigsegg and his company is said to offer 1,500 horsepower through a combination of electric and gasoline powerplants. There will only be 80 made, and they'll cost nearly $2 million each when deliveries start next year.

That puts the Regera squarely out of reach for most of us, but at least Koenigsegg is giving us some good footage of the prototype: two recent tweets demonstrate the car's "Autoskin" feature, which can electrically raise and lower practically every body panel. There's nothing that crazy going on here — it's just the hood, rear decklid, spoiler, doors,...

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Activating your copy of Windows 10 has gotten far less tedious in Microsoft's first major update for the operating system. You no longer have to start by upgrading from a previous install of Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 to get Windows 10 properly activated under Microsoft's free-for-a-year policy. Now, the company will recognize any valid activation key from those prior versions (or Windows 8) and grant you a "digital entitlement" that makes your install of Windows 10 fully legitimate.

Technically, Microsoft says this is meant to work only when Windows has previously been activated on the same device that Windows 10 is being clean installed on. But testing of recent Insider builds has revealed that the company — at least for now — is being...

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Take This Test To See How You Perceive Color

Yesterday YouTube launched its much-awaited YouTube Music service for iOS and Android. I wasn’t expecting anything spectacular — Google doesn’t do spectacular anymore — and yet, a few seconds after downloading the app and singing with my Google account, I was enjoying the feeling I had from bootleg video tapes I would rent from a local video parlor back in India. The app is well-designed and easy to understand. It focuses mostly on the cool, trendy and popular, and, most importantly, it includes videos. Damn, I watched so many videos yesterday that I was late for a dinner hosted by my friend Chris Michel. Fan versions of Adele’s “Hello” from South Korea and the Middle East: brilliant. It was like watching the MTV of yore.

There are programs (aka playlists) like Daily 40, the new HipHop, Electronic, etc. It is very much the feeling of a video mixtape. The red color is bold, the navigation is smooth and well-thought-out, and every Like makes the service better. The interface has energy and yet it doesn’t overwhelm. The search works — like it should. The background play is great. What I really like about this service is that it never diverts from its DNA: a video-first service. Sure, YouTube can make improvements, but this is a great debut, way better than Apple Music.

And no, it isn’t a Spotify killer, but it will be a tough competitor. But don’t count on me to give up on the depth of choice and flexibility I get with Spotify. I don’t want to abandon the ability to play my music on any device, like the new Sonos 5, which has just arrived. I want Spotify because I follow so many people — friends, strangers and musicians — on the network. Of course, I’ll keep trying YouTube Music for free for another 13 days.

YouTube Music will mainly be interesting to its core demographic: the young people who love using YouTube. It is perfectly built for them, because it focuses on the brand new. The only fly in the ointment? They won’t pay for the subscription. It is a quandary YouTube will have to solve. But at least it has Google bucks to burn for now!

The post A Quick YouTube Music Review  appeared first on Om Malik.

At the 56th Battery Symposium in Japan, Huawei showed off its next generation of quick charging batteries. Huh? Yes, there's a Battery Symposium in Japan, and yes, there have been fifty-five of them in the past. Stay focused here.

Huawei says its new lithium-ion batteries can achieve charging speeds ten times faster than normal batteries.

The company has shared videos of two types of batteries. One has a 600mAh capacity and can reach 68% capacity in two minutes.

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Huawei Develops New Lithium-Ion Batteries That Charge Crazy Fast, Possibly Ten Times As Quick As Normal Batteries was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Some guys may be surprised to hear this, but bras are a pain in the butt to wash, and many of us put off the chore for as long as possible. (We wash everything else though, we swear.) That’s gross, but is it actually bad for you?

Isha Aran at Fusion sent her bra to a microbiologist to find out. The results, she says, were “both comforting and horrifying” because it really was full of germs—but they were mostly the harmless species you already have on your skin. Here’s what happens, according to Michael Schmidt, a microbiologist at the Medical University of South Carolina:

[With] daily wear for months—the garment will become soiled with the oils of the wearer that in turn will serve to support the growth of microbes from the skin, that have transferred to the fabric...If the skin of the wearer is unbroken, and they are healthy, the ‘new microbes/opportunists’ should not cause any problems…as long as the wearer has hygienic practices.

“Opportunists” are bacteria that don’t normally cause a problem, but that could cause infection if they got into an open wound, especially if your immune system isn’t working very well due to another illness. Aran’s bra did house some of these germs, including coagulase-negative staphylococcus.

Fortunately our friends at Jezebel have a complete bra washing guide, in case you’re feeling a sudden need. In the meantime, check out Aran’s article at the link below for more on what happens to unwashed bras.

How Often Do You Really Have to Wash Your Bra? | Fusion

Photo by keri.

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Vitals is a new blog from Lifehacker all about health and fitness. Follow us on Twitter here.

https://youtu.be/6GYc0ragGOI

A Virginia man who died in police custody was tased 20 times in 30 minutes, according to a civil rights lawsuit filed by his sister.

Linwood Lambert, 46, was tased 10 times within 2 minutes at one point during his arrest, racking up a total of 87 seconds of electrical discharge: enough, according to federal guidelines, to inflict serious injury or death.

Lambert was detained after officers responded to a noise complaint and found him to be delusional, according to police reports. Transported to hospital, however, he became aggressive, kicking out a car window and "sprinting roughly 20 feet towards the ER entrance and crashing into the building’s glass doors."

Video footage acquired by MSNBC shows what happened next: the officers tased him over and over again, then decided to arrest him and leave instead of taking him into the hospital.

During the incident, Lambert appears subdued on the ground and tells police he used cocaine earlier in the night. As Lambert lies on the ground outside of the hospital, police arrest him for disorderly conduct and destruction of property. Instead of taking him into the hospital to receive care they put him back into the police car.

During the incident Lambert repeatedly asked police to stop. "Why are you trying to kill me man," Lambert said in the video. "Please don't do this to me."

During the ride to the police station, Lambert appears to be unconscious and the officers realize he is in distress. An ambulance is called to take him back to the hospital and he is pronounced dead at 6:23 a.m., according to MSNBC.

The medical examiner ruled that he died of a cocaine overdose, despite an autopsy finding "less than 0.01 mg/L" of the drug in his system. No-one has been disciplined or charged in connection with his death.

Police video shows Lambert shackled and subdued in the car, apparently restrained, as officers warn him again and tell him to sit up.

“Act like you got some sense,” says one officer. Another warns, “sit up or I’m going to tase you again.” Reaching into the car with two Tasers, the officers tase Lambert as he slumps down in the seat.… In addition to the video, nurses on the scene say they saw “three officers” tasing Lambert “at one time,” according to hospital records obtained by MSNBC.

South Boston Police Chief James Binner wrote that it was an appropriate use of force.

"The deployments of Tasers when a subject has become violent, causing damage to property and placing the safety of persons at risk, as was the case with Linwood Lambert Jr., is appropriate and necessary use of force," according to [his] response.

This week on dPS we’re featuring a series of articles about composition. Many different elements and ways to compose images for more impact. Check out the ones we’ve done so far:

• Using Framing for More Effective Compositions
• 7 Tips to Improve Your Skyline Photos

Here’s how some other photographers do it and work with various compositional elements.

Lines

Color

Framing

Perspective

Simplify

The post 33 Images that Exemplify Compositional Elements by Darlene Hildebrandt appeared first on Digital Photography School.

Coming across a genuinely new launcher interface and paradigm on Android is rare. Most third-party clients try to emulate the default Android launcher and add some customizations and improvements here and there. Not to undermine the power of something like Nova Launcher, but there's only so many times you can swipe left and right between homescreens or tap to open and close an app drawer before you wonder what that new launcher you installed does differently.

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HomeUX Review: A Fresh, Elegant, And Unique Take On Android Launchers was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Between April 2012 and May 2015, a handful of international rightsholder groups went to the UK High Court to obtain blocking injunctions against some of the world’s most popular ‘pirate’ sites.

In response to these blockades, dozens of alternative domains appeared. Some simply provided a new way to access an existing site while some were clones or mirrors offering a similar experience to the original. However, the vast majority were proxy-style operations, ones which allowed users to bypass blockades by visiting a new URL.

This appearance of new domains epitomized the “whac-a-mole” analogy so often referenced in connection with pirate sites. When one gets struck down, another appears. It’s a neverending game for rightsholders but in the UK it seems to be one they’re willing to play.

As recently as October, dozens of new domains were added to the UK’s blocklist adding to the hundreds already present. And now, during the second week of November, around 170 more have been silently tagged on.

The full list can be found below and it contains many familiar names. The vast majority are connected, however loosely, to sites covered by earlier court orders. As is usually the case, many of the targeted URLs are Pirate Bay proxies, mirrors and/or clones, with the same holding true for KickassTorrents.

One ‘sleeper’ site definitely worth a mention is PirateProxy.la. According to Alexa, from a standing start in September the site has grown to become the 278th most popular site in the UK overall. That growth will almost certainly come to an abrupt end with the latest block.

Popular MP3 sites also get a look in (MP3Bear, MP3Clan, MP3Lemon, MP3Monkey, MP3Raid, MP3Skull etc) but at this point it’s almost impossible to say with any certainty how or if they are connected to the original sites. It’s a situation playing out across the whole file-sharing site spectrum and is potentially putting users at risk.

While rightsholders used to announce blockades when a new court order was won, these days sites are added almost silently to the blocklists operated by BT, Sky, Virgin Media, O2, EE and TalkTalk.

Initially the BPI, MPA, The Premier League and Members of The Publishers Association, obtained more than 20 injunctions against ‘pirate’ sites but now additional domains are simply added to those orders. Pirate Bay proxies, for example, are considered part of the Pirate Bay operation and no new court order is required to have them blocked.

The list of domains blocked in the most recent wave

1337x.unblocked2.bz
bushtorrente.com
dadotorrent.com
emp3world.unblocked.la
emp3world1.com
etmirror.com
ikwilthepiratebay.nl
limetorrenturlx.com
monova.unblocked.la
mp3raid.unblocked.la
mp3raid.work
mp3skull.unblocked.la
mp3skull.wtf
pirateproxy.la
seedpeer.unblocked.la
torrentcrazy.unblocked.la
torrentdb.li
avoidcensorship.com
bayproxy.net
bayproxy.org
beemp3s.org
bittorrent.am
bittorrent.am
bittorrent.pm
bittorrent.pm
btloft.com
bts.ph
bts.to
btscene.cc
btscene.com
btscene.eu
btscene.net
btscene.org
btsdl.cc
emp3world.com
emp3world.so
emp3world.to
etproxy.com
extratorrent.ee
extratorrent.tv
extratorrentlive.com
extratorrentonline.com
fastpiratebay.eu
fullsongs.net
ikwilthepiratebay.nl
ka.tt
kat.sx
katproxy.bz
katproxy.com
katproxy.is
kickass.la
kickassto.co
kickasstorrents.ee
kickasstorrents.to
kickassunblock.eu
kickassunblock.net
kuiken.co
limetor.com
limetor.net
limetorrents.cc
limetorrents.co
limetorrents.in
limetorrents.net
mega-search.me
megasear.ch
megasearch.co
mp3.ink
mp3.re
mp3.supply
mp3bear.biz
mp3bear.com
mp3bear.org
mp3bear.to
mp3boo.com
mp3boo.me
mp3clan.com
mp3clan.mobi
mp3clan.net
mp3clan.ninja
mp3clan.ro
mp3lemon.net
mp3monkey.net
mp3raid.com
mp3raid.info
mp3raid.work
mp3skull.com
mp3skull.cr
mp3skull.is
mp3skull.to
mp3soup.net
mymirrorpirate.com
mypirateproxy.com
myproxypirate.com
newbursalagu.com
outlaw.is
picktorrent.com
pirateahoy.eu
piratebay.net
piratebay1.com
piratebayproxy.be
piratebayproxy.co.uk
pirateproxy.bz
pirateproxy.ca
pirateproxy.in
pirateproxy.net
pirateproxy.nl
pirateproxy.se
pirateproxy.sx
pirateproxy.ws
pirateuropa.net
plixid.com
proxybay.co
proxybay.eu
proxybay.net
proxybay.pl
proxybay.pw
proxybay.xyz
proxytpb.nl
stafaband.co.uk
techtoy.co.uk/pirate-bay-mirrors
thehiddenbay.net
thepiratebay-proxylist.com
thepiratebay.ae.org
thepiratebay.ar.com
thepiratebay.com
thepiratebay.com.ua
thepiratebay.cr
thepiratebay.de.com
thepiratebay.ee
thepiratebay.gb.com
thepiratebay.gg
thepiratebay.je
thepiratebay.lv
thepiratebay.mg
thepiratebay.net
thepiratebay.org.in
thepiratebay.org.ua
thepiratebay.website
thepirateboat.eu
thepiratemirror.com
theproxypirate.com
torrentbit.net
torrentbit.nl
torrentcrazy.ee
torrentcrazy.to
torrentdb.li
torrentdownload.biz
torrentdownload.co
torrentdownload.me
torrentdownload.ws
torrentdownloads.cc
torrentdownloads.co
torrentdownloads.me
torrentdownloads.net
torrentexpress.net
torrentfunk.info
torrentfunk.net
torrentfunk.org
torrents.am
torrentsdownload.org
tpbproxy.cc
uberadserver.biz
uberadserver.com
uberadserver.mobi
uberadserver.net
uberadserver.org
ukbay.co
ukbay.org
unblockthepiratebay.net
xspyz.com
zooqle.eu
zooqle.in
zooqle.net

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