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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 week or so.

Apps

Google Lens

Android Police coverage: Google releases standalone Lens app in Play Store

Google Lens is a service available on most Android phones in some sort of fashion, and now we have another way to access the vision platform with a little more ease by installing this stand-alone Google Lens Android app.

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16 new and notable Android apps from the last week including Google Lens, CARROT Weather, and Clean Share (5/29/18 -6/9/18) was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

No narration, no chyrons, no ads. Just a 10-hour loop of sea creatures living their lives in a world that seems light years away.

[via Kottke]

Water & Light contains astonishing images of waves. Last year, Armand Dijcks turned some of Ray Collins' shots into cinemagraphs. The two collaborated again in Elemental, a languid meditation on the power and beauty of water. (more…)

Microsoft has confirmed reports that it is acquiring software development platform GitHub. The firm is paying $7.5B in stock …

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Ugears makes gorgeous wooden puzzle toys made from laser-cut plywood that snap-fits to create beautiful, retro machines and sculptures with meshing, working geared mechanisms. (more…)

Disneyland employees' average hourly wages have decreased in real terms every year for more than 15 years, while the company has taken in record municipal subsidies from the city of Anaheim and soared in profitability, returning high dividends to its shareholders. (more…)

Private equity's favorite shell game is to take over profitable businesses, sell off their assets, con banks into loaning them hundreds of millions of dollars, cash out in the form of bonuses and dividends, then let the businesses fail and default on their debts. (more…)

The UK consumer review magazine Which? (equivalent to America's Consumer Reports) has published a special investigation into the ways that Internet of Things smart devices are spying on Britons at farcical levels, with the recommendation that people avoid smart devices where possible, to feed false data to smart devices you do own, and to turn off data-collection settings in devices' confusing, deeply hidden control panels. (more…)

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.

Featured Product

BESTEK Gooseneck LED Desk Lamp

Today's roundup is presented by BESTEK.

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24 new and notable Android games from the last week including Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth, Sir Questionnaire, and Dragon Nest M (5/28/18 - 6/3/18) was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

• Update 1: 2018/06/02 9:11pm PDT
  It's back

Google has been doing an impressive job of pretending Android tablets don't exist for the last few years, and now it's done pretending. Google has updated the Android website to remove the tablet section entirely. You can now use that site to learn all about Android on Phones, Wear, TV, Auto, and Enterprise. That's it. RIP Android tablets.

^{The new site nav.}

As of yesterday, the tablet section still existed.

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[Update: It's back] Google unceremoniously removes the tablet section from official Android website was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Earlier this week, the tablet section mysteriously (but not surprisingly) disappeared from the official Android website. It’s back now, and its removal appears to have been a mistake.

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It was once the standard that firms that performed well would give all their employees an annual raise, in part to acknowledge workers' contribution to the business's fortunes, in part to ensure that wages kept pace with inflation (otherwise workers would be suffering a real-terms pay-cut every year). (more…)

Microsoft announced that it would be killing its Groove Music streaming service last year, but promised it would continue investing in its Windows 10 application. However, that didn’t extend for Android and iOS.

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Swimming pigs, splashing horses, and diving bulls await in this lovely roundup of animals swimming, some of whom are a bit surprising to see taking to water so eagerly. (more…)

jamaps created a map that shows all the main roads in Britain and nothing else, giving the vague impression of something weirdly biological.

Data: Ordnance Survey (2014) Tools: QGIS

Mesmerizing and anxiety-inducing at once, this short clip of Kimi Werner descending into a cave has an otherworldly feel thanks to the stabilized camera used by Justin David Baluch. (more…)

A team led by Jean-Yves Rauch at FEMTO-ST demonstrated the μRobotex nanofactory's capabilities by building a tiny origami house from silica membranes. (more…)

Coquina clams are so attuned to life in the foreshore that they all know exactly when to dig into the sand and exactly when to pop up. (more…)

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 week or so.

Featured App

Smart Plug by BESTEK

Today's roundup is presented by BESTEK.

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11 new and notable Android apps from the last week (5/22/18 - 5/28/18) was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Enigma's Sadeness (part 1) was riveting when it appeared in 1991, a peak of remix culture that transported millions to another place, the old world and the new age meeting in a feast of futuristic EDM. But it also encompassed musical tropes (Gregorian chants, appropriated "world music", new age spirituality, that drum loop) that were quickly and thoroughly debased. Within a few years, Sadeness and its sequelae seemed not only cheesy but vaguely problematic, other histories fed pell-mell into a white guy's synthesizer. The criticism is a little unfair, given that other similar projects -- Deep Forest, Adiemus -- were much grosser on that front.

Anyway, as Trump sailed into the White House in November 2016, Enigma finally released Sadeness (part 2) to little public attention or acclaim.

It's a slow electronica mashup of Bach's Toccata and Fugue. It's all that was good and bad and very bad about the "sampler mannerism" that followed the second summer of love and acid house and "techno" and that book by the KLF. Especially the setting of esoteric imagery against electronic beats that you can't dance to and the echoing murmur of Poe's law. It's unexpectedly obvious.

P.S. The best Enigma track is Out From The Deep, a one-off psychedelic rock trip to Atlantis that doesn't sound remotely like anything else they ever did.

DERCETUS
I say, O Caesar, Enigma released part II of Sadeness.

CAESAR
The breaking of so great a thing should make
A greater crack. The round world
Should have shook lions into civil streets
And citizens to their dens. The release of part II of Sadeness
Is not a single doom. In the beat lay
A moiety of the world.

Once again, the future has been unevenly distributed: Makita's coffee machine was available in Japan years ago. I can't wait to have one of these in my kitchen. Asahi Shimbun writes:

Makita's first coffee maker went on sale in 2015. It gained in popularity because the same types of batteries as its power tools also work in the coffee machine.

The new model can make a maximum of 5.3 cups of coffee on one charge, from a dedicated coffee pack as well as instant coffee. It weighs 1.5 kilograms.

The new coffee maker is sold at home center and other locations, costing 11,900 yen ($111.40) excluding tax. The battery charger and battery are sold separately.

MAKITA Rechargeable Coffee Maker CM501DZ [Amazon]

https://vimeo.com/114879061 Built in 718 AD, Hōshi is the second oldest ryokan (hotel or inn) in the world and, with 46 consecutive generations of the same family running it, is hands down the longest running known family business in history. But, after 1300 years of tradition, change is in the air. The Hōshi ryokan, in Komatsu, Japan, is a beautiful space that has a beautiful story, told well, in this short video by filmmaker Fritz Schumann.

PayPal's partnership with Google is "deepening" (as the company puts it) to allow making PayPal payments simpler across Google's multiple products. Soon, adding PayPal as a payment method to one Google service — Google Pay, the Play Store, YouTube, et cetera — will make it available on all of Google's services, including, for the first time, Google Pay Send.

Android Pay (RIP) added PayPal support this week last year, and allowed the addition of PayPal Business Debit Mastercards in January.

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PayPal will soon integrate across all of your Google services with a single sign-in was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

I sleep in late whenever I can, and have felt vaguely guilty about it because everything I've read about sleep says people are supposed to stick to a strict sleep schedule every day. That's not possible for me, because I often get up very early to catch a morning flight. Sleeping in on the weekends always feels great. Well, it turns out I should keeping following my instincts. You actually *can* catch up on sleep by sawing logs on the weekend.

From Shondaland:

Researchers at Stockholm University discovered that adults who logged up to five hours of sleep every night increased their risk of mortality. However, when people who only slept five hours a night during the week compensated by snoozing nine hours a night on the weekends, their risk of death did not increase.

To conduct the study — which was published in the Journal of Sleep Research —scientists looked at data on sleep habits collected from more than 43,000 people under 65 years old. Then, they studied death records taken 13 years after the initial data was obtained to determine if and how sleep habits impacted mortality. Of course, other factors like education, body mass index, and smoking can take years off your life, so they accounted for those, too. Their conclusion? "Long weekend sleep may compensate for short weekday sleep."

Image: By Alena Ozerova/Shutterstock

This is Fred. Fred is free again.

They may not be from space, but octopuses are still incredible, intelligent creatures. One California fishmonger in Morro Bay certainly thinks so.

Earlier this month, Giovanni "Gio" DeGarimore, owner of Giovanni's Fish Market, bought a 70-pound octopus -- who has been named "Fred" -- for "a couple hundred dollars" just to release it back into the wild. And he says he'd do it again.

The San Luis Obispo Tribune reports:

DeGarimore said he didn't intend for his action to get as much fanfare as it has, but said he would be happy "if my little contribution can make a bigger difference in the world." That contribution includes no longer selling any octopus-related products on his website, which serves customers across the country, he said. "It'll hit me in the pocket, but I'd rather stand for something," he said.

(SFGate)

image via Giovanni's Fish Market Facebook page

Thanks, Laura!

You might think you're smooth. But you'll never be as smooth as this black cat redirecting a robotic vacuum with its back leg WHILE continuing to aggressively stare down another cat. I mean, it doesn't even move its head as the vacuum approaches. So good.

Previously: If you watch one cat video this year, let it be this one

(Robbie Lockie)

• Update 1: 2018/05/24 2:57pm PDT
  An official Essential spokesperson responded to our request for comment. Here's what we got: "We always have multiple products in development at the same time and we embrace canceling some in

According to Bloomberg, Essential, an up-and-coming phone manufacturer, is reportedly calling it quits, canceling its second phone and putting out a "For Sale" sign. The company, founded by Android's creator Andy Rubin, has supposedly hired an outside firm to advise it on a potential sale, with one suitor allegedly showing interest.

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Essential reportedly cancels second phone, puts itself up for sale was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Project Chimps put chimps in a ball pit and the chimps were happy: "Chimpanzees love ball pits too!"

You're reading a gripping article or story on your phone and suddenly, the display goes a little dim. You know the 30 seconds or 1 minute display timeout you've set is great for regular use, but for reading stacked pieces of text, it's not nearly enough to get through one screen. So you touch the display a little, maybe swipe up and down, just to keep it from sleeping and you continue reading.

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On Android P, touching the fingerprint scanner will prevent the phone from going to sleep was written by the awesome team at Android Police.