HP is announcing a bunch of really nice new Windows devices today, but it's also announcing one really weird one: the Envy Note 8. The Envy Note 8 is an 8-inch Windows 10 tablet that's pretty unremarkable on its own. It has a dull 1920x1200 display, a generic black front, and an Intel Atom x5 processor — a low-end tablet by all means. But what's interesting about the Envy Note 8 is that it can be bundled with a keyboard dock, and that dock is way bigger than the tablet itself.
Google Creative Lab has released a few apps thus far that are described as "Android Experiments." Apps like Lip Swap were just for fun, but Meter is theoretically useful, and that's not something you can usually say about a live wallpaper. Meter shows you your signal strength, notification count, and battery life using colorful geometric shapes.
You apply Meter like any other live wallpaper, but you'll have to grant it notification access for full functionality.
Read MoreGoogle Creative Lab Releases The 'Meter' Live Wallpaper For Real-Time Stats On Your Homescreen was written by the awesome team at Android Police.
You can eat well and exercise, but to round out your identity as a Person Who Makes Healthy Choices you may feel like you need to drain a large water bottle a few times a day. The benefits of chugging H2O are myriad and legendary, but are they real?
It seems every week somebody is proposing a new gadget or app to track how much water you drink (and prod you to drink more). Maxing out your water intake is a simple and actionable thing to do, but we know that focusing on small easy changes can backfire if they’re a distraction from the meaningful improvements you want to make in your life.
If tracking your water keeps you motivated for other changes, and you don’t feel like it’s sapping your willpower, keep on keepin’ on: a few extra glasses a day won’t hurt. But if you’re beating yourself up about missing your “water goal” every day, let’s take a look at when water does and doesn’t matter.
http://lifehacker.com/when-every-lit...
Here’s the worst argument for drinking more water: We are 75% water, or maybe 45%, or somewhere in between. (The exact number depends on body fat and other factors). Sure, water helps your blood flow, lubricates joints and other tissues, and is necessary for lots of the chemical reactions that keep us alive. When you zoom in to the molecular level, water is crucial for keeping our proteins and membranes in shape. We are water-based creatures. No doubt about that.
But that doesn’t mean more is always better. As one group of dermatologists wrote:
If this kind of logic were applied to gasoline and motor vehicles, the reasoning would be: because gasoline is essential for the car to function, we need to maintain large amounts of gasoline in our car’s tank, and the more the better.
Clearly, it’s bad to run out of gas. Losing a significant amount of your body’s water can lead to consequences ranging from headache and nausea to, in extreme cases, kidney failure and death. Losing a little bit can leave you with bad breath and dry skin. But are you dehydrated right now? Probably not.
Most of us already get more than eight glasses a day (although, as we’ve discussed before, eight glasses is not a magic number.) You might not feel like you’re getting that much if you’re using a strict accounting that only includes water, but when it comes to hydration, your body doesn’t know the difference between water you drink and water you get elsewhere.
We get roughly half of our daily water intake as food: watermelon and soup are more than 90% water, as you may have guessed, but even a cheeseburger is 42%. We also get water from other drinks like soda and coffee, even if they have caffeine. (While caffeine can act as a diuretic, your body adapts to that effect over time.)
Meanwhile, you’ll recall that being thirsty on occasion is normal, and doesn’t mean that you’re dehydrated: thirst appears around a 2% loss in body water, but you’re not dehydrated in a medical sense until you’ve lost about 5%. (Likewise, as much fun as it is to match your pee to color charts, medium to dark yellow urine is still well within the normal range.)
http://vitals.lifehacker.com/4-myths-about-...
If you’re already at a normal hydration level, the myriad benefits of water start to fade away. It’s still a great choice of beverage, but in many cases the actual health effects don’t live up to the ballyhoo.
There’s no evidence that chugging water all day long contributes to weight loss, but water can be strategic in at least one way: swapping it for calorie-containing beverages at meals. A review of the effects of water on weight loss, published in Nutrition Reviews, concluded that such a swap is “promising,” but that more research is needed to figure out whether it works well as a long-term strategy or if we end up compensating for the lost calories somewhere else in our day.
Does water make you feel more full? The research flip-flops on this question, with plenty of studies on both sides. The latest, published in Obesity, falls on the “yes” side. Drinking water before meals seemed to help weight loss in the short term: the water drinkers lost an average of about three pounds over three months. There was plenty of variation though, with some subjects even gaining weight, so this isn’t an ironclad conclusion.
If you pinch a dehydrated person’s skin, it won’t snap back into position right away. But does that mean that hydrating yourself extra will make your skin even more youthful and vigorous? That’s the logic behind claims that chugging water is great for skin, but a review published in Clinics in Dermatology couldn’t find any solid evidence for this idea. Drinking an extra two liters of water a day, in one study, resulted in skin changes that could be measured in the lab, but no noticeable improvement in skin roughness or wrinkles.
Does mild dehydration keep your brain from working at its best? The answer is a definite “yes, but”. Yes, dehydrating people changes their mood and makes them perform worse on tests, but the conclusive studies here dehydrated people by having them run on treadmills or sweat out body water in the heat, as the review in Nutrition Reviews points out. That means the effects could be due to exercise or mild heat illness, rather than dehydration. Giving water to thirsty test-takers had inconsistent results: sometimes their scores went up, sometimes down. And, again, there’s no evidence that if you’re already hydrated, that more water would improve anything.
Another common claim is that drinking water helps you “flush toxins” from your body, but we know by now that you don’t need to do anything special to detox yourself: we aren’t full of toxins and the few we encounter are taken care of just fine by our organs’ normal functioning.
http://lifehacker.com/what-happens-i...
But organ function is where we find our true winner: kidney and bladder stones are the only health condition that’s been clearly associated with low water intake over time. That conclusion comes from a (different) review in Nutrition Reviews that was looking specifically for long-term health effects of dehydration. If you are prone to kidney stones, you should absolutely be drinking more water. Lots more water. Chug it.
Here’s where we get into some serious controversy: there are two schools of thought on how much water you should drink during exercise, and both have good points.
First, the basics: you need more water if you’re exercising than if you’re just sitting around. Since you lose water from sweating, exercise intensity and the ambient temperature make a big difference (you’ll need more water running in the heat than taking a walk on a chilly day). But how much is enough, and how much is too much?
http://lifehacker.com/how-much-water...
There’s a rule of thumb that being mildly dehydrated, as little as losing 2% of your body weight, can hurt your performance (making you run slower in a race, for example, or feel terrible during your workout), but a review of recent research in the British Journal of Sports Medicine found that in real world situations, athletes’ performance doesn’t suffer until they lose at least 4%. (That would be 6 pounds’ loss for a 150-pound person, or in other words, kind of a lot.) In fact, mild dehydration may help performance in some cases (and no, it doesn’t cause cramping).
Most of us would prefer to avoid dehydration just to be safe. The question then is whether that means we should drink as much water as possible, before and during and after exercise; or whether sipping when thirsty is enough.
Here’s the disagreement. The American College of Sports Medicine has put out guidelines recommending that you track and measure your fluid intake; they provide approximate numbers, and suggest monitoring your weight before and after exercise to figure out if you’re drinking enough. “Thirst alone is not the best indicator of...the body’s fluid needs,” they said in a statement.
That was in response to a competing set of guidelines from the Institute of Medicine, which clearly state: “The vast majority of healthy people adequately meet their daily hydration needs by letting thirst be their guide.” Sports scientists in this camp are concerned that fear of dehydration has led too many people to over-hydrate, which can result in its own set of health problems (including potentially fatal complications).
The latest consensus statement on overhydration concludes that athletes should drink to thirst, except in extreme situations like a marathon on a hot day, when a little pre-emptive guzzling may be necessary.
While it’s possible to drink too much water, that’s only likely if you’re downing liter upon liter (as some people do during exercise when they’ve been told to push fluids). For everyday purposes, it doesn’t hurt to drink a few extra glasses a day. Just don’t stress out about how much you’re drinking, don’t worry about tracking every drop of water intake, and don’t worry about dehydration unless you actually feel it.
http://gizmodo.com/stop-trying-to...
Illustration by Sam Woolley.
Vitals is a new blog from Lifehacker all about health and fitness. Follow us on Twitter here.
I’ve seen thousands of people attempt a weight loss regimen, and there is one common trait shared by people who fail fast. It’s not bad genetics, lack of time, or a penchant for fine wines. It’s stubbornness.
If you’re trying to lose weight, the reality is that you’ll have many factors working against you: a full schedule, willpower, even family members. Almost all of these factors can be overcome, and we’ve written about them on Lifehacker. Stubbornness, however, cannot be; it’s a trait that corrupts every single fitness effort, even before you make any progress.
http://vitals.lifehacker.com/why-eat-less-m...
Think about a time someone made a statement that every part of your being disagreed with, be it about religion, politics, or sports. How did you react?
Well, you probably felt the immediate need to interject. It probably even elicited physical changes: you tensed up, your heart started beating faster, and you may have even clenched your fists.
Now, maybe you’re solidly confident in the logic behind your choices, but more often than not, this reaction is a method of ego protection–you don’t want to entertain even the possibility that you might be wrong. This is stubbornness: thoughtlessly adhering to your default beliefs without question. And reasonably so. It’s embarrassing to admit that actions you endorsed–and may have even credited your success with–could be wrong. So you choose not to challenge them. In all likelihood, when your views are threatened, you shut down way before listening to the other person’s point of view.
But what does stubbornness—not challenging your default state—have to do with fitness?
First of all, consider that much of what we know about fitness and health is incorrect. For example, some people make better progress when they eat breakfast. Others do better if they skip breakfast. But if you don’t open the mind to the latter possibility, you might never find out it may be the thing that boosts your progress in a positive direction.
Instead, you stick to what you know and take the easy route of blaming “genetics” or “laziness.” Sure, both play a role, but an overwhelming amount of people who blame those two factors actually fail because of stubbornness. They were so certain that their genes are at fault, or that they are too lazy, that they never considered that other, more significant factors could be at play. They thought of fitness as a talent they could never possess, rather than a skill they can develop, and created a self-fulfilling prophecy.
http://vitals.lifehacker.com/why-breakfast-...
Let’s say you plan to go to the gym in the morning, because you love the feeling of starting your day right. You wake up an hour earlier than normal so that you can get in a quick training session before work. On the way to the gym, there is a severe traffic jam. After thirty minutes of being at a standstill, you realize you can’t possibly go to the gym and make it to work in time.
You’re frustrated, pissed off. You think to yourself that some jackass was probably driving recklessly trying to get to work in time, and you wallow in that anger.
If you’re like most of us, this is your default state, and sticking to it yields a predictable set of actions. You feel like your healthy plans for the day are ruined, and your bad mood feeds taints and exacerbates anything else that goes wrong. Anger feeds into more anger, and before you know it, you’ve eaten a bunch of crap because there’s always another Monday.
The act of dwelling is absolutely toxic to making fitness progress. You focus on mistakes–things you can’t change–rather than looking at what you can change in the future. With this frame of mind, fitness is a fixed mindset.
The opposite of this toxic default is compassion. Perhaps the driver wasn’t a jackass, but a new mother who was trying to comfort her baby for a brief moment and took her eyes off the road. Or perhaps you shouldn’t mentally beat yourself and others up for missing your morning workout, because the events were outside of your control. Shit happens. Shrug it off and try to continue your day like nothing happened.
http://vitals.lifehacker.com/stop-focusing-...
There’s a viral article where the host of Dirty Jobs, Mike Rowe, tells the story of his friend Claire, who asks him for dating advice (a conversation we’ve harkened to before):
“Look at me,” she said. “I take care of myself. I’ve put myself out there. Why is this so hard?”
“How about that guy at the end of the bar,” I said. “He keeps looking at you.”
“Not my type.”
“Really? How do you know?”
“I just know.”
“Have you tried a dating site?” I asked.
“Are you kidding? I would never date someone I met online!”
“Alright. How about a change of scene? Your company has offices all over – maybe try living in another city?”
“What? Leave San Francisco? Never!”...
Claire doesn’t really want a man. She wants the “right” man. She wants a soul-mate. Specifically, a soul-mate from her zip code. She assembled this guy in her mind years ago, and now, dammit, she’s tired of waiting!! I didn’t tell her this, because Claire has the capacity for sudden violence. But it’s true. She complains about being alone, even though her rules have more or less guaranteed she’ll stay that way. She has built a wall between herself and her goal. A wall made of conditions and expectations. Is it possible that you’ve built a similar wall?
I’ve had many interactions with people of this similar mindset who want to change. They have an image of the healthy lifestyle that they should be living: no alcohol, running every day, and other unrealistic things you’ll see on any fitspiration blog. To them, anything outside of the default picture-perfect healthy lifestyle is a failure.
In this case, stubbornness reduces one’s ability to be flexible. It may seem backwards, but flexibility is the key to adherence, and adherence is the number one factor when it comes to being successful on any sort of eating regimen. Sticking to your diet and making the right choices 80% of the time will be better for you in the long run than going gung ho for a few weeks.
http://vitals.lifehacker.com/fitspiration-i...
So how do you stop being so stubborn? Well, remember that stubbornness is the knee-jerk reaction to protect your existing way of life and self-perception. The thing with changing habits is that somewhere, subconsciously, the fear is that anything that threatens this may lead to lower levels of comfort, pride and ego in the future.
You have to accept that you are, from time to time, stubborn, and be mindful of it. Catch yourself the next time you irrationally choose your default thought patterns. You’ll feel a flurry of emotions that fuel your certainty of being correct. Remember this feeling, and be aware the next time it happens.
http://vitals.lifehacker.com/how-to-combat-...
The next time you notice, ask yourself “why do I hold these beliefs and why do I care so much about them?” For example, many people recoil when I tell them that “breakfast is not the most important meal of the day.” Yet, when drilling down into why they hold those beliefs, the answer usually boils down to “because I’ve heard it repeatedly,” or “it’s something I’ve always done.” Is it really worth getting upset about if you are wrong? Probably not.
During one of the times that you are wrong, admit it. Realize that you should feel a sense of accomplishment, not shame; by challenging your default thoughts. It’s a sign you’ve grown as a person, and are better than resigning yourself to the publicly-accepted edicts of activated almonds and gluten-free toast because it’s what everybody else does. Instead, you’ll find what works for you–what pushes you forward in a way that aligns with your habits and lifestyle the most.
This might seem incredibly hard at first, but like anything else, it takes practice. It gets easier. You’ll start to reap the benefits of being less stubborn. Fitness will become less of an obstacle-course full of arbitrary restrictions imposed by the mysterious, all-knowing overlords from health and fitness magazines. Most importantly, you’ll realize that fitness success doesn’t stem from a perfect lifestyle where your actions are never wrong—but embracing what’s wrong and using it to grow.
Vitals is a new blog from Lifehacker all about health and fitness. Follow us on Twitter here.
Your headphones have gone missing. Someone ate your lunch. Your desk chair has disappeared. Thievery thrives at the office and Fast Company explains why.
Basically, even if people think of themselves as honest, humans tend to be very bad at avoiding short-term temptations and thinking about the implications of our actions:
Human behavior is focused on doing things that feel right in the short term rather than things that feel right in the long term. If you need to eat right now, then available food will feel good to eat, even if it is wrong to take food from someone else.
[...]
Most of us hold abstract values like being honest and virtuous. In specific situations, though, we focus more on our actions than on the implications of those actions for our abstract self-concept. That means that petty acts of dishonesty can coexist with people’s broad beliefs that they are honest.
Fast Company goes on to explain that we’re more likely to steal or cheat when the environment makes it easy and we don’t think anybody is watching—no one else by the office fridge, for example, or you’re the only one working late and the supplies closet is open.
The solution to this common problem could be very simple: Post reminders around problem areas (“Please don’t eat someone else’s food”), make it harder for people to steal things (lock away your headphones), and perhaps put up a camera or otherwise make it seem like workers are being watched.
Is it sad that we have to resort to these sort of things? Yes, but sometimes human nature is sad.
The Psychology Behind Why People Steal Their Coworkers’ Stuff | Fast Company
Photo by Lee J Haywood.
Did you see the news that the world is going to end tomorrow? Watch this video and you'll be convinced.
The Chinese government has announced a new universal reputation score, tied to every person in the country's nation ID number and based on such factors as political compliance, hobbies, shopping, and whether you play videogames. (more…)
With the release of Android’s latest operating system, Marshmallow, tons of new functionality is going to be introduced over the next few weeks.
One of the more interesting new features rolling out now is the ability to translate text within popular Android apps like WhatsApp. That’s pretty huge if you only speak English and your friend only speaks Russian, for example.
Google… Read More
It’s unclear if Apple is setting a precedent, or has only accidentally allowed the approval of a new app, known as “Been Choice,” into the iTunes App Store. The app claims to block advertisements not only in mobile applications, but also in native mobile apps, including Facebook and even Apple’s own News application. To make this work, Been Choice offers a combination of… Read More
A big week for Twitter just got bigger. A day after announcing co-founder Jack Dorsey would return to the company as its CEO, the company is rolling out the product formerly known as Project Lightning to a worldwide audience. Moments, as the new product is called, surfaces the day’s most talked-about stories in a new section of the app. It’s a magazine-like view of Twitter that works even if you’ve never followed a single person. It represents Twitter’s best — and maybe last — hope of attracting a large new base of casual users who want to enjoy the service without having to figure out its unique quirks and lingo.
In April 2012, Apple CEO Tim Cook offered this opinion of tablet–laptop hybrids: "You can converge a toaster and a refrigerator, but those things are probably not gonna be pleasing to the user."
More than three years later, Microsoft's Surface lineup has continued to be a flagship device and a symbol of its goals for Windows. Just hours before its new Surface Pro / Lumia event, Microsoft's head of Windows and devices Terry Myerson tweeted this callback:
It’s hard to believe it’s been almost two years since Nokia first introduced its giant Lumia 1520 Windows Phone. At 6 inches, it was the largest Windows Phone at the time and one of the biggest phones on the market. While bigger phones are becoming more common, Microsoft is stepping back slightly from the huge 6-inch footprint today as the company reveals its new Lumia 950XL with a 5.7-inch display.
It's a bigger version of the Lumia 950, so the two devices have a lot of things in common. That includes what Microsoft calls "tablet-class liquid cooling" to allow these phones to handle more powerful chips, which, at the very least, sounds awesome. The phone has a 20-megapixel camera on the back, and beside it is what Microsoft calls a...
As part of its reveal of the new Lumia 950 and Lumia 950 XL, Microsoft has announced the Display Dock, a hardware adapter that lets you use your phone like a desktop Windows PC with keyboard, mice, and a large display. Originally known as the Continuum dock, the new hardware has three USB ports, including USB Type-C, and both HDMI and DisplayPort. You can also plug in a USB drive.
So how does Continuum look? A lot like Windows 10 PC, in fact, but the taskbar is slightly tweaked and there's a signal bar at the top along with battery and time information. Microsoft showed off the Windows Hello beta run from a new Lumia — that is to say, it's not the full PC experience, but it's PC-esque and runs universal Windows 10 apps.
The second-generation Microsoft Band promises to be both more fashionable and more useful than the original model. Priced at $249, Microsoft has redesigned its fitness-focused wearable with a curved display (protected by Gorilla Glass 3) and stainless steel fasteners. It now tracks more information — like elevation when you're climbing stairs and advanced health metrics the first Band wasn't capable of. Microsoft is also putting a big focus on tracking your golf game.
Putting it on, the new Band still feels slightly bulky. I always had trouble putting on a jacket with the first version and I'm not totally confident that's been resolved here. But it looks far better, and Microsoft says it's also made improvements to the heart rate...
Microsoft is still relatively fresh off the launch of Windows 10, which — as presenter and Windows team head Terry Myerson pointed out — happened less than three months ago. Now, the company is getting ready to release its smartphone variant, Windows 10 Mobile. And while the operating system isn’t out yet, we just got our first look at the phones that will run it: Microsoft’s two flagship Lumias, along with one budget option.
But the most interesting parts of the presentation weren’t about phones. One was a fast-paced shooter played on the HoloLens augmented reality headset — to be clear, it was fairly misleading about the HoloLens’ limited field of view, but that doesn’t make it less cool to watch. The other was Microsoft’s...
Microsoft pretty thoroughly wowed us this morning with its introduction of the Surface Book, a new laptop that can transform into a typical Surface tablet. There's a lot to be impressed with on the new device, but perhaps the most interesting hardware feature — both visually and functionally — is the Surface Book's hinge. It looks weird. And it also looks kind of awesome.
Microsoft is referring to this as a "dynamic fulcrum hinge," which is probably the coolest of all branded hinge names. In practice, it just means that the Surface Book's hinge can rotate nearly 360 degrees so that the display can be flipped against the backside of the keyboard.
The hinge also has to support the display and internals of the...
Microsoft today announced a pair of Lumia smartphones: the flagship Lumia 950 and the slightly larger Lumia 950XL. In fact, it's the third major mobile company to do so in the last month — first, Apple with the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus in September, then Google with the Nexus 5X and 6P this time last week. That's six flagship devices across three major mobile platforms; something slightly bigger, something slightly smaller.
At its core, each of these pairs represent the ideal portal into the respective platforms (i.e., iOS, Android, and Windows 10 Mobile). When we talk specs, it's more for sport — the real test will be some combination of the platform itself, its respective ecosystem, and personal taste. Oh, and the camera, too —...
The very concept of a Microsoft hardware event still feels weird to me. Software constitutes half of Microsoft's name and most of its DNA, and yet today we were treated to a 110-minute presentation showing off Microsoft's hardware-engineering acumen. And the whole thing was so breathlessly exciting that it felt more like 110 seconds. The most inspiring, intriguing, and frankly irresistible new hardware today is coming from Microsoft.
With the Surface Pro 4, Microsoft has taken the concept it pioneered — of a tablet with a keyboard cover, a stylus, and a fully-featured OS — and has refined it into an elegant, frightfully efficient productivity machine. Apple's iPad Pro and Google's Pixel C are neophyte reactions to Microsoft's aggressive...
You’ve heard that bringing your own lunch to work can save you money, but how much does it really save? According to personal finance site Money Crashers, it’s a lot.
Money Crashers broke down various categories of food and drink that many of us tend to buy from a store each day. They compared the cost of homemade items to typical store bought prices. Even with fairly generous comparisons (the site assumes a daily coffee from the store costs $2, for example), the amount saved per year easily reaches the thousands:
By bringing in your own coffee, breakfast, lunch, snacks, and beverages every day, you can save anywhere from $2,000 to $4,200 or more over the span of an entire year. And taking your own food to work is not just economical – in many cases, it’s also the more health-conscious option. When you prepare your own meals, you can use healthier, more natural ingredients and reduce your chances of overeating due to better portion control.
You can find the full breakdown at the source below. Depending on how much you actually eat at or on the way to work, you may see a lower savings rate (after all, many of us skip breakfast). Of course, this is a guideline. How much have you saved by bringing your own food to work?
How Much Can You Save by Bringing Your Own Lunch Food to Work? | Money Crashers
Photo by J P.
To promote the upcoming 30th anniversary home entertainment release of the Back To The Future trilogy, Universal is pulling out all the stops, launching a short film featuring Christopher Lloyd (you can see a teaser for that here) and now a funny trailer for Jaws 19.
It’s the film, you’ll likely know, that is playing in “Holomax 3D” in Hill Valley on October 21, 2015 when Marty and Doc arrive in the future during the second film. And as opposed to just mocking up a quick bit of shark footage, the team behind the promo have bitten a page from the book of the 22 Jump Street filmmakers, running through the complete list of fictional Jaws sequels from Jaws 5 until 19. That last film directed, of course, by Max Spielberg.
It’s a nice riff on franchise fever, reboots and tie-ins, even as we worry that it heralds a possible future for the Jaws films with Steven Spielberg looking to take his production company DreamWorks back to Universal.
The studio is releasing several versions of the Blu-ray and DVD collection, one that has the three movies plus extras, another with the animated series on disc for the first time and a third Complete Adventures set that also includes another disc, more bonus features and light-up Flux Capacitor packaging. They’ll be out on October 20 in the US and October 21 here, though it looks like the UK version won’t come with the animated series. Booo!
Finally, getting in on the action is Pepsi, which is putting out limited edition Pepsi Perfect bottles as seen in the film, and has an ad to match.
If you’ve ever signed up for a gym membership, but didn’t end up going that often, you were that gym’s ideal customer. Here are some of the clever methods gyms use hook casual costumers into buying a membership.
On a recent episode of NPR’s Planet Money podcast, hosts Caitlyn Kenney and Stacy Vanek Smith spoke with gym architect Rudy Fabiano and behavioral economist Kevin Volpp about the ways gyms entice new customers sign up. Here are some of the clever strategies they uncovered:
In general, the consensus is that gyms don’t actually want you to use their facilities. They just want you to think that you will so that you’ll pay for the privilege every month without filling up their space or wearing down their machines. If you plan to sign up for a gym membership, make sure it’s something you actually plan on using. If you’re not 100% sure, you might be better off doing your workouts at home. To hear more clever ways gyms get people to buy memberships, listen to the show at the link below.
Episode 590: The Planet Money Workout | NPR’s Planet Money Podcast via Business Insider
Photo by istolethetv.
Good news for impulsive Amazon Prime shoppers in London today as the online retail giant has announced expanded coverage that increases the supported postcodes five-fold. Thanks to a new depot in Wimbledon, Prime customers in Merton, Wandsworth and Sutton can get one-hour delivery slots while those in Kingston, Sunbury and Croydon can get a still pretty speedy two-hour slot.
Jack Dorsey manages to represent the modern tech industry ethos in all of its complexities. He is visionary, enigmatic, and revered while also being a self-styled icon and a central player in one of the most bloodthirsty corporate narratives of the last decade.
Today, the interim Twitter CEO became the official permanent chief executive of the social network he helped create almost ten years ago, echoing a Silicon Valley myth cemented by the late Steve Jobs. And in another tip of the hat to industry lore, Dorsey will try to do what only the most influential leaders in tech — like Jobs, as well as Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk — have accomplished: successfully run two companies at the same time. Dorsey will simultaneously run Twitter and...
Reddit, the social aggregator countless publishers already crib news from, is starting its own news site. The new venture is called Upvoted, and when it launches on Tuesday, will dig out interesting comments, pictures, videos, and other posts from Reddit itself, providing more context on their background through interviews with the Reddit users behind the stories. But while Reddit will be the source for Upvoted's posts, the new site won't copy its structure — comments aren't enabled, and there's no way to actually upvote (or downvote) Upvoted's stories.
Sony has announced a restructuring of its devices division that underlines the success and importance of the company's image sensor operations. The devices segment is mainly comprised of Sony's storage, battery, and semiconductor businesses, but the latter of those — which is primarily focused on image sensors — is being spun off into a new company called Sony Semiconductor Solutions.
The divisions that currently handle semiconductor manufacturing and design, Sony Semiconductor Corporation and Sony LSI Design, will both become subsidiaries of the new company. Sony's storage media operations will fall under manufacturing arm Sony Storage Media and Devices Corporation, meanwhile, and the battery business will fall to Sony Energy Devices...
Europe's highest court today ruled that Facebook cannot send personal information on European users to data centers in the US, invalidating a 15-year trans-Atlantic data transfer agreement. In a decision that could have far-reaching implications for many US tech companies, the European Court of Justice said that the EU's Safe Harbor agreement with the US is "invalid" because the country does not guarantee adequate privacy protections. The agreement allows technology companies to transfer data from Europe to the US, provided that certain privacy requirements are met. According to The Wall Street Journal, today's ruling could impact around 4,500 companies that currently rely on the laws to transfer data to the US.
The case was brought...
When Pepsi managed to get its brand of sugar water in 1989's classic Back to the Future II, it surely wasn't anticipating being able to cash in on that product placement more than two decades later. But that's exactly what's happening this month, as the company featured in Marty McFly's fictional 2015 is releasing a real product based on the movie: the Pepsi Perfect bottle. Limited to a release of 6,500 and set to go on sale on October 21st, 2015 — the date to which Marty and Doc Brown traveled forward in time — the Perfect bottles will cost $20.15 each. Using the year to set the price is a nice touch, and even though that's a high price to pay for 16.9 ounces of Pepsi Made with Real Sugar, the collectible value of the thing will likely...
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.
Looking for the previous roundup editions? Find them here.
This week's roundup is brought to you by Currency FX - Exchange Rates from HandyApps.
Read More19 New And Notable Android Apps From The Last 2 Weeks (9/22/15 - 10/5/15) was written by the awesome team at Android Police.
For most of a decade, government negotiators from around the Pacific Rim have met in utmost secrecy to negotiate a "trade deal" that was kept secret from legislatures, though executives from the world's biggest corporations were allowed in the room and even got to draft parts of the treaty. (more…)