At the top-right corner of every Google web page is your profile icon, web app launcher, and notifications. Google is now planning to deprecate the oft-used Notifications Widget from the navigation bar next month.
Back in 1947, decades before cat memes became a way of life, experimental documentary filmmakers Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid gave us a lovely glimpse of the "Private Life of a Cat." From Archive.org:
RECORDS FEMALE CAT & HER 5 KITTENS AS MOTHER CAT APPROACHES LABOR, KITTENS ARE BORN & OBTAIN MILK & MOTHER CAT THEN CARES FOR THEM IN LEARNING & GROWING PROCESS, IN WHICH TOM CAT OCCASIONALLY PARTICIPATES.
In 2006, artist David Hensel, a member of the Royal Society of British Sculptors, submitted a sculpture to the UK's Royal Academy. It was a laughing head made from resin, and he called it "One Day Closer To Paradise." Hensel was pleased to learn the sculpture had been accepted for the Royal Academy's summer exhibition. But when he went to a special preview, he saw only the pedestal for his sculpture along with a small piece of wood that was meant to keep the head affixed to it. BBC News reported: "The Academy said the judging panel assumed the two pieces were separate and decided the support was better." The head had been rejected and was being stored in the basement.
A college student in North Carolina heard rattling in her closet that sounded like a raccoon, but she thought it was a ghost. She'd had other strange things happen in her apartment, like finding strange handprints in her bathroom, and having some of her clothes disappear. She worked up the courage to ask through the closet door, "Who's there?"
And someone answered back, "Oh, my name is Drew."
Turns out a 30-year-old gentleman was hiding in her closet, wearing her clothes.
As horrifying as the whole thing might be, Maddie—who has declined to reveal her last name—apparently didn't think [Andrew] Swofford posed any sort of immediate threat. She reportedly kept up a conversation with him and let him roam around her home while she called for help.
“He tries on my hat," she said. "He goes in the bathroom and looks in the mirror and then is like, ‘You’re really pretty, can I give you a hug?’" According to Maddie, he never actually tried to touch her.
When Maddie's boyfriend arrived, Swofford took off, but was arrested at a gas station shortly after.
Strangely enough, this wasn't the first time she's had an intruder in her place. In December she found two men in her living room. This might explain the mysterious handprints and missing items. And in both cases there were no signs of entry. I'd say it's moving time.
This is Andrew Swofford. A UNCG junior got home on Saturday, to find him in her closet, wearing her clothes. @myfox8pic.twitter.com/n4PFMhtW2b
Keeping your password and private information safe on the internet has never been more fraught. From hackers to identity thieves, it's easier than you think for an account or password to be infiltrated. Google aims to help that problem with its newest Chrome extension.
Google's new Chrome extension Password Checkup aims to ensure that your password is never compromised without your knowledge. If it detects that your password or account is unsafe you'll get an automatic warning informing you that you ought to change your password.
Viber just announced the launch of the latest revision to its mobile messaging app, bringing a new UI and some new group features. The company also claims that the redesign offers users double the performance when sending messages.
Here's a brief rundown of what's new:
Simple navigation: Easily roam the app in a lighter and sleeker interface and get exactly what users need, right where they expect to find it
Easy access: Users get all private and group chats, Communities, chatbots, and favorite public content in one main chat list
Singular calls screen: In the updated “Calls”screen,users can find their most recent calls, access phone book contacts screen and manage their Viber Out subscriptions
Hidden Number Chats: Allow users to engage and message with one another without having to exchange phone numbers, allowing for spontaneous and casual interactions with the new people users meet through Communities, yet ensuring they remain safe
Viber Group Calls: Allow up to five users to initiate a group voice call by adding people to an existing call or by starting one right from an existing group chat
The two major new features that Viber wants to note are the latter couple: hidden number chats and group calls.
Over at Riff Magazine, my old pal David Gill looks back at the birth of distortion and its position as "central to rock and roll as the sex and the drugs." From Riff:
In March 1951, a 19-year-old Ike Turner was recording his saxophonist Jackie Breston’s song “Rocket 88,” an ode to the Oldsmobile 88 (and later inspiration for Public Enemy’s “You’re Gonna Get Yours”). (Listen above.) Turner played his guitar loud, so loud, in fact, that his amplifier couldn’t handle it. The resulting distortion is the stuff of legend in the fable of rock and roll, giving voice to the intensity of the times.
The 1950s in America were the best of times and the worst of times. A victory in World War II and the spoils that came with it led to a baby boom, sprawling suburbia, rising standards of living, and a new thriving middle class, while at the same time racism, sexism and economic exploitation lingered in this landscape of opportunity. America also clung to its puritanical origins, cultivating a Victoria-era disdain for exuberance and physicality into a repressed and buttoned-down society that mocked, scorned and punished deviation from the norm.
As the 1950s progressed, the rising wave of progressive hedonism embodied by the new musical phenomenon of rock and roll crashed on the limitations of American culture. That tension is evident in Turner’s guitar tones, in its refusal to obey or to conform.
Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android games that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous week or so. This week I have a fantastic sci-fi strategy game from the Trese Brothers, Team 17's latest take on their Prison Escape franchise, and an official Tony Hawk skateboarding game. So without further ado, here are the most notable games released this week.
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By now everyone should know that two-factor authentication via SMS is outdated and insecure. But in case anyone needs a reminder, here it is: Metro Bank in the UK was recently the victim of something called SS7 attacks, which basically allow anyone with access to reroute text messages and calls as they please, as well as track the location of a compromised phone. This is far from the first time this has happened, and it seems European banks are more at risk than US banks.
I grew up in Nantong, a beautiful, small coastal city in China, where the Yangtze River flows into the East China Sea. One of my earliest childhood memories was when my parents, during the long winter nights, would entertain me by narrating stories using hand shadows as puppets.
Later, I would see my first traditional shadow puppetry performance during a Lunar New Year family trip to Wuzhen. Over the years as I made my way around the world—whether in Indonesia, Egypt, or Greece—I found a form of shadow puppetry in local cultures, beautifully combining legends and traditions, music and art, imagination and craftsmanship. And it always made me think about those childhood nights with my family, and about passing down stories, connection, joy and love.
With technology, I'm hoping to help connect people to this ancient art form. In September last year, we built an interactive installation that used AI to help people explore shadow puppetry. Though it’s an ancient art, people connected with shadow puppetry in a new way, and after the conference, we decided to bring it online so that everyone could play. So today, we’re making it available as a new AI experiment, Shadow Art.
Shadow Art is a web browser-based game that lets you experience AI and shadow puppetry in a playful way. To bring what used to be an offline experience online, we used TensorFlow.js, a TensorFlow library which makes it easy to build and train a machine learning model directly in the browser.
How does Shadow Art work?
You use your hands to form one of twelve zodiac animals from the lunar cycle in front of your laptop or phone camera, trying to match your hand to the diagram on the screen. The “shadow” of your hands on the screen then transform into a shadow puppet animal. Sounds easy, right? Here’s the catch: we turned it into an interactive game where you have twenty seconds to form each animal. The goal is to go through the full lunar cycle as fast as possible.
The new experiment is now available in eleven language varieties, including English, Chinese, Thai, Bahasa Indonesia, Malay, Japanese, Korean, Spanish and Portuguese. In several countries around the world, our annual Lunar New Year Doodle is also celebrating the ancient storytelling art of shadow puppetry.
It’s been great to see the shadow puppets of my childhood come to life in Shadow Art. I hope you’ll have as much fun with it as we did (my personal record for the full Zodiac cycle? 2:23 mins ;)). Happy Lunar New Year to all of you!
Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android applications and live wallpapers that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous two weeks or so. This week I have wellbeing app from the developer of the Action Launcher, a screen capturing app that has a live cropping function built in, and an app that's perfect for customizing your navigation bar. So without further ado, here are the most notable Android apps released in the last two weeks.
MOOMINVALLEY [YouTube] is a brand new adaptation of the much-loved Moomin stories of Tove Jansson, a Finnish-Swedish writer and artist whose books have been translated into over 50 languages. Directed to a family primetime audience, the drama fantasy series is full of life and laughter for lifelong Moomin fans and complete newcomers alike.
The English-language cast is spectacular: Matt Berry, Rosamund Pike, Richard Ayoade, Will Self, Warwick Davis, Kate Winslet, Akiya Kenry, and starring Taron Egerton as Moonintroll.
One lesson to be learned from this gallery of 50 evil packages is to peer through the transparent parts of the box at an angle to see what's hidden behind the opaque parts.
Many were sad to see Criterion's film collection leave Hulu back in 2016 as the service moved to FilmStruck, its new (and short-lived) collaboration with Turner. Shortly after FilmStruck was wound down, Criterion revealed its plans to launch its own streaming service, continuing the "Criterion Channel" name. Now we've got all the details about the new service, which is scheduled to launch on April 8th for $10-11 a month.
Ultraviolet, the service which first offered a convenient way for you to access your digitally-purchased movies across multiple retailers, is closing …
Author and science fiction fan Jared Gray needed a CPAP machine to treat his sleep apnea so he decided to have some maker fun with the machine. So he carved out a foam replica Aliens Facehugger to integrate his CPAP mask.
"I’m happy with it as a prototype, but I think it would need additional refinement before I started making these things for other people," Gray says."Other than making it even less comfortable to lay on my side, it’s not all that much worse than just wearing the CPAP mask on its own. I could probably sleep with this thing on, at least for a couple hours. If nothing else, it helps keep the light out of my eyes."
On our forum you will find many gifted builders of both trucks and construction equip of all levels of skill and everyone is friendly, outgoing & enjoys helping out newcomers wanting to get involved with the hobby. There's a Vendor's Section of private hobbyists who are willing to put up their skills for hire at a fee that is driven moreso to help others in the hobby, rather than lining their pockets for maxium profit..don't get me wrong, they don't give away their time, but they are priced very reasonably and the quality of their work is carefully monitored by myself & others who are leaders of the forum.
The detailed perfection of the custom-built mini-diggers makes screenshots and some of the videos disorienting, as if we had discovered and begun unearthing vast mysterious monuments that perfectly resembled dingy basements.
Facebook provides a suite of turnkey app-building tools for Android that are widely used among the most popular Google Play apps, with billions of combined installs; naturally, these tools create incredibly data-hungry defaults in the apps that incorporate them, so that even before you do anything with an app, it has already snaffled up a titanic amount of data, tied it into your Google Ad ID (which is recycled by Facebook to join up data from different sources) and sent it to Facebook.
Needless to say, the GDPR made these practices radioactively illegal, but despite two years' warning that the GDPR was coming into effect last spring, Facebook dragged another six months out before updating its tools, and these updates still have propagated to all the apps in Google Play.
The data harvested from phones -- including, for example, which Bible verses you read using a King James Bible app, and which searches you made on Kayak -- is added to your "shadow profile", and no one (outside of Facebook) knows for sure how that's used.
You can practice a little self-defense, but it's cumbersome: root your phone and you can block all network traffic to *.facebook.com; you can also reset your Ad ID and disaggregate the data coming off your phone. I've had a poke around but can't find a tool that resets the Ad ID every 10 seconds -- please leave a comment if you know of one.
Frederike Kaltheuner and Christopher Weatherhead from Privacy International gave an outstanding talk on the subject at the Chaos Communications Congress in Leipzig last month; an accompanying paper gives more detail, including methods.
Kaltheuner and Weatherhead were able to gain insight into the apps' behavior by rooting an Android phone and installing a man-in-the-middle proxy that used forged certificates to intercept and decrypt data on its way to Facebook. Ominously, none of the apps they tested used certificate pinning (let alone certificate transparency) to detect/prevent this kind of man-in-the-middle activity.
It's not clear whether the same conduct is present in apps in Apple's App Store; Apple uses unique Ad IDs that are similar to Google/Android's and could be exploited in the same way. However, Apple's DRM is designed to make this kind of research much harder. I hope the Privacy International researchers take a crack at it: perhaps they could use simulated, cloud-based Ios devices used for developer testing.
John Kapoor (75), the billionaire founder of Insys Therapeutics, ran a bribery scheme to get doctors to prescribe an addictive fentanyl spray, said Assistant U.S. Attorney David Lazarus in Boston federal court on the opening day of a trial against Kapoor and four other Insys executives.
Reuters reports that Lazurus told jurors Insys set up sham conferences and paid doctors up to $275,000 to speak at the poorly-attend fora.
Kapoor and his colleagues have pleaded not guilty to racketeering conspiracy.
Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android games that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous week or so. This week I have a fantastic adventure game where you get to play as a cop in NY in the '80s, an Alien game that picks up where Alien: Isolation left off, and a brand-new Angry Birds release that's all about popping bubbles. So without further ado, here are the most notable games released this week.
Here's another fine development in sleep science today! A new study shows that young adults, like babies, sleep better when rocked. University of Geneva neuroscientist Laurence Bayer and colleagues built a gently rocking bed and used EEG to monitor adults' brain activity as they slept. From Science News:
Study participants fell asleep faster while being rocked, the researchers found. In a stationary bed, people took an average of 16.7 minutes to reach a light stage of non-REM sleep called N2. But when rocked, the young adults hit this sleep stage after an average of 10 minutes. Rocked people also spent more time in a deep non-REM stage of sleep called N3, and had fewer wake-ups. And rocking boosted the number of sleep spindles — fast bursts of brain activity that mark good sleep.
Before people fell asleep, they learned pairs of words, and then were given a memory test the next morning. After a night of rocking, people were better at remembering the words, an improvement that suggested higher quality sleep.
From the YouTube description: "This is the distance between Earth, the Moon and Mars with the correct distances but with Earth, Moon and Mars 20 times bigger (so you can see them!)."
In March 2017, Google announced that Hangouts would split into Meet and Chat apps, kicking off what has been a long, slow road to shutdown for the original version of the platform. Almost two years later, we now have an official timetable for the winding-down of the well-used service as Google attempts to wrestle a bigger share of the team communication market away from competitors like Slack. The timeline begins with the slow transition of G Suite users from classic Hangouts to Chat and Meet this year, followed by a consumer transition, which will likely begin late in 2020.
Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android applications that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous two weeks or so. This week I have a beautiful tasks app from Moleskin, a budgeting app that supplies on-demand access to a team of financial geniuses, and a LEGO-branded video editor for kids. So without further ado, here are the most notable Android apps released in the last two weeks.
Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android games that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous week or so. This week I have a fantastic sci-fi strategy game from the Trese Brothers, Team 17's latest take on their Prison Escape franchise, and an official Tony Hawk skateboarding game. So without further ado, here are the most notable games released this week.
Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android applications and live wallpapers that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous two weeks or so. This week I have wellbeing app from the developer of the Action Launcher, a screen capturing app that has a live cropping function built in, and an app that's perfect for customizing your navigation bar. So without further ado, here are the most notable Android apps released in the last two weeks.
