Bcstevieb

In February this year, it was announced that new EU legislation would abolish roaming charges. Citizens of EU member states, as with anywhere else, have always had to pay exorbitant fees to use their mobiles abroad. Each country has certain networks that offer better roaming deals, but on average the costs have been immense. Thankfully, that all stops today, as the new 'Roam like at Home' law comes into effect.

EU citizens will now be able to call, send texts, and use mobile data in any of the 28 countries of the European Union at no extra cost.

Read More

EU legislation abolishing roaming charges finally comes into effect today was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

With a keen eye for presenting fresh food in tantalizingly ways, the Foodbites Instagram account is a food-lover’s dream.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BVPEOCChUSf/ https://www.instagram.com/p/BUeVkOIBk5F/ https://www.instagram.com/p/BTvm7-1hKZT/ https://www.instagram.com/p/BU8q6HTh3wU/ https://www.instagram.com/p/BU_q63Mhd1j/ https://www.instagram.com/p/BUeCpvhBcSU/ https://www.instagram.com/p/BUYxOk0hVhh/ https://www.instagram.com/p/BUJv5YTBN4H/ https://www.instagram.com/p/BTqV8XYBOOF/

You can see more gorgeous food photography on the Foodbites’ Instagram.

TV's Batman, the recently-departed Adam West, will be honored in a ceremony perfectly fit for a Caped Crusader.

DC Comics has announced that the Bat-signal will shine over the skies of Los Angeles on Thursday night to pay tribute to the late actor.

If fans are not able to join in the tribute Thursday night, the West family encourages Adam’s “old chums” to make a donation to the Adam West Memorial Fund for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and Idaho-based charity for children diagnosed with cancer and their families, Camp Rainbow Gold.

Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti will light the signal at the event which takes place at 9 PM at City Hall. The public is welcome to attend.

(Hollywood Reporter)

The 10 Best Animated Movies Of All Time

Save for the addition of an “Upcoming” tab and Search shortcuts in the past year, Google Now’s design has remained mostly unchanged. However, it appears that a significant revamp, which features a new transparent homescreen page, is now in the works.

more…

From green to red to even black, it turns out your pee can turn a whole bunch of different colors for a whole bunch of different reasons. In this new SciShow video, Hank Green breaks down the ins and outs of strange pee colors. And in case you were wondering, here’s another SciShow video from a few years ago about why your poop is sometimes green:

https://youtu.be/ueOnWXEDBwc

 French startup Shadow, also known as Blade, just raised a Series A round of $57.1 million (€51 million). Shadow thinks your next computer is going to be in a data center. Your existing phones, laptops and Shadow’s own device (pictured above) act as a thin client, a window into your virtual machine running on a beefy server in a data center near you. Shadow had already raised $14.6… Read 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 App

Cubiscape

Today's roundup is presented by Cubiscape from Peter Kováč.

Read More

12 new and notable Android games from the last week (6/7/17 - 6/13/17) was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Brian May, the lead guitarist and composer for Queen, is a multitalented guy. A Guitar World readers poll ranked him as the 2nd greatest guitarist of all time. He also has a PhD in astrophysics from Imperial College London was on the science team for NASA's New Horizons Pluto mission. He also made his own guitar with his father in the 1960s, which he called The Red Special. Hackaday has the build notes.

Every part of the Red Special was a process of trial and error. This is the true hacker spirit behind the guitar. Most trials didn’t work the first time, but Brian and Harold iterated until they reached their goals. An example of this is the pickups. Brian’s experimentation with pickups started with his Egmond guitar. He bought some Eclipse Magnetics button magnets from the local hardware store. These formed the core of the pickup. Harold then helped him build a coil winding machine, which allowed Brian to manually wind thousands of turns of fine copper wire around the pickups. It even had a wind counter built from a bicycle odometer.

Brian didn’t have an amplifier yet, so he plugged into the family’s radio. The pickups worked! They were very bright sounding, but had one flaw. When bending notes, Brian found there would be an odd sound as the string moved across the pickup. He attributed it to the North-South alignment of the disk magnet poles. Cutting the magnets was beyond the tools he had, and custom magnets were out of the budget. The pickups worked, and these were the original devices used in the Red Special. Eventually, though, Brian had to fix the string bending problem. He headed off to the store and bought three Burns Tri-Sonic guitar pickups. He coated these in epoxy to reduce the microphonics and then installed them in the Red Special. These same three pickups still reside in the guitar today. It’s worth noting that the pickups on the Red Special receive an incredible amount of abuse. This has a lot to do with Brian’s choice in plectrum. Most guitarists use a plastic pick. Brian has always used a sixpence coin. It’s an integral part of his style and sound, the serrated edge sure does a number on the pickup covers.

In 2014, May co-wrote a book called Brian May's Red Special: The Story Of The Home-Made Guitar That Rocked Queen And The World.

It took four years, but the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has finally ruled in favor of 72 year old grandmother Elizabeth Young, whose house was seized by the Philadelphia District Attorney under asset forfeiture rules when her son was caught selling $140 worth of marijuana to undercover agents.

Under civil forfeiture rules, cops and DAs get to steal property suspected of being the proceeds of a crime, then they sue the inanimate objects. The owners of the objects can hire lawyers to represent their property, while the taxpayers foot the bill for the state's side of the suit. If the government wins, it gets to keep the property or sell it and pocket the proceeds.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court blasted the DA for the seizure and reminded the state's lawyers and cops that they can only invoke civil forfeiture when there is good reason to believe that the property's owner "knew of and agreed to the crimes" in question.

The cop who bought the marijuana from Young's son is currently serving a 3.5 year federal prison sentence for planting drugs on suspects.

Young is far from the only person to have her house seized by the Philadelphia D.A. for a minor drug crime that she didn't even commit. In 2013, Philadelphia police seized the house of Christos and Markela Sourovelis after their son was arrested for selling $40-worth of drugs outside of it.

The Sourovelis' sued, with assistance from the libertarian-leaning Institute for Justice, a nonprofit law firm that has challenged asset forfeiture laws in several states. The Sourovelis' plight drew national media attention, and the Philadelphia D.A. eventually dropped the case. However, the city is still facing a class-action lawsuit filed by the Institute for Justice challenging its asset forfeiture program. According to the firm, Philadelphia has seized more than 1,000 homes, 3,000 vehicles and $44 million in cash over 11 years.

Between the new legal standard issued by the Supreme Court, the looming lawsuit, and a potential reformer leading the district attorney's office—Democratic Philadelphia D.A. candidate Larry Krasner vowed to rein in the program in an interview with Reason earlier this year—the salad days of Philadelphia's asset forfeiture machine may be ending.

The Philadelphia police officer who coordinated the undercover marijuana buys at Young's house pled guilty and was sentenced in 2015 to three-and-a-half years in federal prison on corruption charges involving planting drug evidence on suspects.

Court to Grandma: You Shouldn't Lose Your House Just Because Your Dumb Son Sold Some Weed There [C.J. Ciaramella/Reason]

(via Techdirt)

Boring vegetables need better marketing. That's the gist of a new study from Stanford university psychologists who gave cafeteria vegetables more "indulgent" names to see if students would buy them more often. Healthy labels ("wholesome," etc) didn't do well but indulgent labels ("sizzlin'", "dynamite," etc.) boosted vegetable sales by 25%. From the BBC:

The experiment took place over the whole of the autumn academic term. Each day, a vegetable dish was labelled up in one of four ways:

• basic - where the description was simply "carrots", for example

• healthy restrictive - "carrots with sugar-free citrus dressing"

• health positive - "smart-choice vitamin C citrus carrots"

• indulgent - "twisted citrus-glazed carrots"

...The indulgent labels came out top and included "twisted garlic-ginger butternut squash wedges" and "dynamite chilli and tangy lime-seasoned beets".

Seductive names resulted in 25% more people selecting the vegetable compared with basic labelling, 41% more people than the healthy restrictive labelling and 35% more people than the healthy positive labelling.

"Association Between Indulgent Descriptions and Vegetable Consumption: Twisted Carrots and Dynamite Beets" (JAMA)

 Local Guides in Google Maps, Google’s gamified program for getting its users to update data in Google Maps and upload photos of local venues, is getting a bit of an overhaul today. Most importantly, Google is changing how it rewards points and how its leveling system works. Until today, Local Guides users we able to scale the ladder up to the fifth level. Once you hit 500 points,… Read More

Mind Over Munch’s Alyssia offers a guide to some not-completely-terrible-for-you food choices at fast food restaurants like McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Wendy’s, and Dunkin’ Donuts. She also has a guide to vegan fast food options that aren’t just salads:

https://youtu.be/WDQgAh0fOBY

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 week or so.

Featured App

DigiCal Calendar Agenda

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

Read More

10 new and notable Android apps and live wallpapers from the last week (6/6/17 - 6/12/17) was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Lots of languages are hybridized from multiple, overlapping waves of conquerers, "but English’s hybridity is high on the scale compared with most European languages," which gives us a realm of weird pronunciations, weirder spellings, inconsistent grammar, and a near-unique situation whereby speakers of languages that are close cousins to English can more-or-less understand English, too.

The amalgam of inconsistently blended Celtic, Norse, French and Latin make English a nightmare to learn, speak and spell -- which makes the language's success in the world something of a miracle.

As long as the invaders got their meaning across, that was fine. But you can do that with a highly approximate rendition of a language – the legibility of the Frisian sentence you just read proves as much. So the Scandinavians did pretty much what we would expect: they spoke bad Old English. Their kids heard as much of that as they did real Old English. Life went on, and pretty soon their bad Old English was real English, and here we are today: the Scandies made English easier.

I should make a qualification here. In linguistics circles it’s risky to call one language ‘easier’ than another one, for there is no single metric by which we can determine objective rankings. But even if there is no bright line between day and night, we’d never pretend there’s no difference between life at 10am and life at 10pm. Likewise, some languages plainly jangle with more bells and whistles than others. If someone were told he had a year to get as good at either Russian or Hebrew as possible, and would lose a fingernail for every mistake he made during a three-minute test of his competence, only the masochist would choose Russian – unless he already happened to speak a language related to it. In that sense, English is ‘easier’ than other Germanic languages, and it’s because of those Vikings.

Old English had the crazy genders we would expect of a good European language – but the Scandies didn’t bother with those, and so now we have none. Chalk up one of English’s weirdnesses. What’s more, the Vikings mastered only that one shred of a once-lovely conjugation system: hence the lonely third‑person singular –s, hanging on like a dead bug on a windshield. Here and in other ways, they smoothed out the hard stuff.

Why is English so weirdly different from other languages? [John McWhorter/Aeon Essays]

(via Making Light)

Back in March, codenames matching the pattern of a smaller and larger phone leaked for Google’s upcoming Pixel successors. A new rumor now suggests that the presumed 2017 Pixel XL has been canned and will be replaced by a third device that previously already leaked.

more…

The fate of the Moto E was not clear after Lenovo took control of Motorola, but the budget-oriented family of smartphones will continue. Motorola just announced the Moto E4 and E4 Plus, which will begin shipping later this month for a downright reasonable $129.99 and $179.99, respectively.

The Moto E4 and E4 Plus are actually very different devices—they could easily be members of different product families. The E4 is a 5-inch handset with a 2800mAh battery, and the E4 Plus is a 5.5-inch phone with a massive 5,000mAh battery.

Read More

Motorola announces the Moto E4 and E4 Plus at $129.99 and $179.99, respectively was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

 Mobike, one of China’s largest bike-sharing companies, will launch in Manchester and Salford, its first cities outside of Asia. The service is slated to arrive on June 29, the Beijing-headquartered company said, and will start with 1,000 bikes. Read More

The High Court of Justice of England and Wales has ruled against Huawei in its fight to avoid paying patent royalties to data software firm Unwired Planet. In an unprecedented move for a case of this kind brought in the UK, the judgment not only applies to sales of Huawei devices in the UK but also globally, which would prove vastly more costly.

Patent litigation of this type is commonplace in the smartphone industry, and Huawei isn't the only company caught up in this particular battle.

Read More

Huawei faces possible UK sales ban unless it agrees to pay patent royalties was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

 At its E3 Xbox One X reveal event on Sunday, Microsoft shared a relentless stream of boundary-pushing system specs for the new console, but it stayed surprisingly quiet regarding the future of virtual reality on the device. Few expected announcements related to a simultaneous VR headset launch as the company had already sought to temper expectations earlier this year saying that VR content… Read More

The Instagram account Gakugakugakugakugaku1 is dedicated to celebrating the beautiful art of Thai fruit and vegetable carving. Here are a few of my favorite examples:

(more…)

A few years back, I was in Sun Valley, Idaho for a conference. I learned Adam West lived in the area and I wondered if he was listed in the local phone book. So, I pulled it out of the nightstand in my hotel room and checked.

Flipping to the the "W" page, I spotted his name. His listing prompted, “See Wayne Bruce (Millionaire)." Ha, game on!

Naturally I flipped to “Wayne Bruce (Millionaire)," which brought me to "Please consult Crime Fighters in the Yellow Pages." 

Ok, that brought me to "See BATMAN - WHITE PAGES"..

Which then circles back to "See West Adam"!

   

Nicely played, Mr. West, nicely played. RIP.

(image link)

When Android O’s third Developer Preview started rolling out earlier this week, we found a decent amount of user-facing changes made to the operating system including some minor UI tweaks to the Google Camera app, as well as a pretty useful new feature.

more…

The 25 Best Films of the 21st Century So Far

The music, as selected by uploader pokedude104, is from Spongebob Squarepants. This is a YouTube microgenre.