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It's pretty safe to say that Amazon Prime is a very popular service, what with over 100 million subscribers. Many will call Prime invaluable, from the great shipping options to the wide selection of media to consume. But a change is coming and it's coming soon: Amazon is raising the U.S. annual fee for Prime to $119, versus the $99 it is currently. This price hike will affect new subscribers starting on May 11 while renewals will still get the $99 price until June 16.

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Amazon Prime increasing to $119/yr starting May 11 for new subscribers, June 16 for renewals was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Resistentialism is a theory to describe "seemingly spiteful behavior manifested by inanimate objects," where objects that cause problems (like lost keys or a runaway bouncy ball) are said to exhibit a high degree of malice toward humans. [Wikipedia]

Brandon Hocura of the excellent Seance Centre record label mined his (and his friends') rare and vintage cassette archive to create this sublime guest mix for the Noise In My Head show on NTS Radio. Listen below, preferably with headphones. Turn on, tune in.

Noise In My Head W/ Brandon Hocura (Seance Centre)

Tracklist:

Claire Thomas & Susan Vezey - Bright Waves
Pablo's Eye - Blind And Quiet
Mo Boma - Jijimuge Two (Rebounders / Nanga Ningi)
Robert Haigh - Andante (For Strings, Piano, Percussion)
Sebastian Gandera - Chienne De Viel
The Field Mice - Let's Kiss And Make Up
Richard Truhlar - Portrait Of An Interview
Hearn Gadbois - Gaht Mayh Moh8joh3 Woykihn
John Celono - Instrument Flying
Bruce Russell - Indigo Pool
Joanne Forman - Codex
Antonio Zepeda - Cuando Los Dioses Juegan A La Pelota
Roberto Mazza - Artigli Arguti
Peter Griggs - Fragments
John Di Stefano - Nuage
Philip Sanderson & Michael Denton - Maps (Love In A Cold Climate)
Short Term Memory - Words
Houari Benchenet - Katrouli El Mhaine
Jack Charles - Traverse
John J Lafia - Life Is Short
Short Term Memory - Hysteria
John Di Stefano - Culture Schlock
Smith & Erickson - Blue Skies
Tony Wells - End Collage
Pauline Oliveros - Earth
Ellen Zweig & Gregory Jones - Sensitive Bones

Previously: "Keyboard Fantasies: exquisite New Age music you've never heard"

Last week, the revamped Google Earth celebrated its one year birthday, noting that in the past 12 months Google added updated 3D and 2D imagery for 40% of the world’s population. With a number of exploratory features since the redesign, Google Earth is now adding fun geography quizzes.

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It's one thing to balance four different-sized glass bottles on top of another. It's another to balance them inside of a moving wooden frame which is then spun around. Watch as balancing artist Rocky Byun of South Korea impressively accomplishes the latter.

(The Awesomer)

Two weeks ago, Google informed G Suite admins that a new version of Gmail on the web was in the works, with leaked screenshots quickly revealing the revamp. Google is officially launching that redesign today and taking the lid off a number of new smart features.

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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 300W Power Inverter

Today's roundup is presented by BESTEK.

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22 new and notable Android games from the last week (4/18/18 - 4/24/18) was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Slovenian designer and web developer Sašo Krajnc, aka Cvern, says he has always been amazed by string art. He creates large pieces in round frames that depict eyes, faces, animals, and patterns. (more…)

Since the days of Napster, record labels have recruited recording artists as allies in their fight against unauthorized music services, arguing that what was good for capital was also good for labor. (more…)

I came for one weird trick; I stayed for the laughter.

Two days ago it was revealed that development for Allo was temporarily suspended while Google redoubles its efforts at spreading the gospel of RCS under the more marketable name "Chat." Even so, the company has reassured consumers that it is still committed to supporting Allo. But the news makes it hard not to visualize Allo being sent to the same "still supported" farm where other Google services like Hangouts reside.

While Allo's fate hangs in limbo, let's take a look back at the service since its announcement, and speculate a bit on how it got there. 

I actually wrote a more detailed retrospective of the service last summer for the one year anniversary, but in light of recent developments and the changes since then, we thought that an updated and simplified survey of the app's history was in order.

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Allo, is anybody out there? A brief history of Google's ill-fated messenger was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

My wife -- whose father is a TV director who'd worked for the BBC -- learned as a little girl that the British spy agency MI5 secretly vetted people who applied for work at the BBC and denoted possible subversives by putting a doodle of a Christmas tree on their personnel files; people who were thus blacklisted were discriminated against within the Beeb. (more…)

A draft of the World Bank's annual flagship World Development Report says that its creditor-states (the poorest countries in the world) should eliminate their minimum wage rules, allow employers to fire workers without cause, and repeal laws limiting abusive employment contract terms. (more…)

Flickr exists, in part, because I needed a photo-sharing tool to help me woo my long-distance girlfriend, who later became my wife, and whom I've been with now for 15 years -- so I have watched the service's long decline and neglect at the hands of Yahoo, and then its sale to the loathsome telco Verizon, with sorrow. (more…)

In 1907, pharmacist and photography buff Dr. Julius Neubronner invented the "pigeon camera." Neubronner attached his cameras, with a built-in shutter timer, to his own homing pigeons and let them fly. For most people, the birds' photos provided a previously unseen view on the world. The images are collected in a new book, The Pigeon Photographer. From the New Yorker:

(Neubronner) showed his camera at international expositions, where he also sold postcards taken by the birds. Additionally, he developed a portable, horse-drawn dovecote, with a darkroom attached to it, which could be moved into proximity of whatever object or area the photographer hoped to capture from on high. These inventions represented a breakthrough at the time, allowing for surveillance with speed and range that was previously impossible. (Whether the cameras would actually capture the desired object, however, depended on luck and the whims of the pigeons.) The technology would soon be adapted for use in wartime—the cameras served as very early precursors to drones—although by the time of the First World War, just a few years later, airplanes were allowing people to do things that only pigeons could have done before.

(Thanks, Bob Pescovitz!)

From the 1920s to the 1980s, the United States was the most smoking country in the developed world. In the 1960s, consumption peaked over 10 a day, per capita. But now it's near the bottom of the chart—only Britain smokes less, among rich western countries.

Don't fret for the health of the Tobacco business, though: China's taking up the slack.

Wells Fargo defrauded 800,000 car loan borrowers, forcing 274,000 of them into bankruptcy and stealing ("wrongfully repossessing") 25,000 cars; they also ripped off mortgage borrowers by failing to send them their paperwork until after the deadline for filing it and then fining them for not filing it on time. (more…)

Over a year ago, Google announced that Android Messages would be preloaded by 20+ OEMs as the official RCS client. Now, Google is finalizing its RCS partnerships with carriers and OEMs and will be calling the RCS standard “Chat.”

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Stéphane Pigeon has created Purrli, a web site that generates audio of a cat purring.

It's customizable; I found setting it for "sleepy" and "relaxed" produced my particular fave timbre of cat-purr.

As Pigeon notes:

The sound of a purring cat is one of the most comforting sounds available and can help soothe and calm you down when you're feeling stressed. Naturally, it's not just the sound that is important, but it's also the presence of the warm cuddly cat. Purrli tries to recreate both the sound and the presence of your very own virtual cat through a custom sound engine modelled after real purrs.

With a purr that delicately changes over time, Purrli aims at making the experience as real and lively as possible. Just like a real cat, Purrli will call for your attention. Just be careful when adjusting the last slider, if you don't want to be nagged in the middle of your work.

Scroll down the page and read the testimonials -- it's quite interesting to see the varied reasons people enjoy hearing a virtual cat purr, including:

My cat that grew up with me during childhood died two or three years ago, and whenever I was upset, she would come and lay next to me and purr to calm me down. She would nap with me, and her purring would help put me to sleep. I really miss that. This cat purr generator sounds just like her, and it really helps with my anxiety, especially during large projects.

I have fibromyalgia, so I am constantly in pain. This cat purr generator relaxes me and puts me to sleep. When I wake up during the night with pain, it helps me to fall back to sleep. I wish I had this years ago.

I have misophonia and work in an office. The purr generator has been a life saver. Now I can drown out the things like coughs, sniffles, throat clears, etc., that used to drive me nuts! It's comforting and helps me to focus.

Alexa has gobs of skills from companies large and small. Do you have a skill, though? Probably not, but you can in just a few minutes with the new Alexa Blueprints. You can create custom quizzes, FAQs for houseguests, tell your kids interactive stories.

Alexa Blueprints won't let you make just any old thing. It's based on set frameworks, which are the aforementioned Blueprints. You have to follow one of the 20 Blueprints to make a custom skill, but there's a good selection.

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Amazon rolls out Alexa Blueprints for custom skills was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Photographer Pelle Cass takes dozens of photographs of the same location and then combines the people into a single image. His photos of sporting events make the games look much more fun! From Cass's artist statement:

This work both orders the world and exaggerate its chaos. With the camera on a tripod, I take many dozens of pictures, and simply leave in the figures I choose and omit the rest. The photographs are composite,but nothing has been changed, only selected. My subject is the strangeness of time, the exact way people look, and a surprising world that is visible only with a camera.

Pelle Cass: "Crowded Fields" (via Kottke)

Rick Astley is getting around lately. We recently saw him on a Canadian morning show for a live, in-person rickroll. Now he's singing his 1987 hit song, "Never Gonna Give You Up," with Choir! Choir! Choir! in Toronto.

Here's what Choir! Choir! Choir! wrote about it:

In March 2018, we made a video asking pop legend Rick Astley to come sing with us.

We just had a feeling it would be a perfect fit.

HE SHOWED UP two weeks later!!

And guess what?

We were right,

But it was even more incredible than we could have expected.

Rick looks and sounds better than ever.

He's back in a BIG way writing and performing all new material, Slaying it all over again.

He is the real deal, and always has been.

He also challenged another musician to come sing with us,

So look for that at the end of the video...

Rick is back on tour throughout the US right now, and his band is killer, So look out for him making his way to your town!

Now enjoy the best version of Never Gonna Give You Up EVER!

This dog is even worse than my best buddy Nemo. My guy is too lazy to try and catch a snack, he lets it bounce off his big ol' head and then just takes it off the ground.

Amazon announced a new feature today that makes it easier for international users to import goods from the United States. The new service, which Amazon is calling the International Shopping Experience, offers access to a wide selection of products with understandable pricing that includes import fee estimates.

The International Shopping Experience is available in English, Spanish, simplified Chinese, Brazilian Portuguese, and German, and it supports 25 different currencies, with more support coming later this year.

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Amazon's International Shopping Experience makes it easier to import goods from the US was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

The similarities between this gorilla mama gently kissing and holding her baby and that of a human mama is striking.

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Video, via KENS 5, shows a troop of baboons escaping from the the Texas Biomedical Research Institute, evidently the birth place of The Planet of the Apes. The damn dirty apes rolled a 55gal drum to the side of their enclosure, enabling them to briefly climb to freedom.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znqLlkgT-pg

Surprisingly no one in this open carry state shot down the apes, instead some vertical cellphone video was captured.

As of last year, Google Safe Browsing defends 3 billion devices from nefarious links, sites, malware, and more depending on the platform. Starting this month, its protections now apply to the WebView used by Android apps that don’t open a browser or use Chrome Custom Tabs.

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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.

Games

Project Highrise

Android Police coverage: Kalypso Media's skyscraper construction sim 'Project Highrise' is out on Android

Kalypso Media's Project Highrise has been labeled by many as the spiritual successor to SimTower, and rightfully so.

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17 new and notable (and 1 WTF) Android games from the last week (4/11/18 - 4/17/18) was written by the awesome team at Android Police.