Shared posts

03 Feb 00:48

You Have Nine Days of Free Subway Footlongs Ahead of You

by Daniel Oropeza

Gone are the days when you could walk into a Subway confident of what your sandwich would cost you: Whether you blame inflation or corporate greed, the $5 footlong is a deal long gone, even if the jingle will never truly leave your brain. But all hope is not lost for sandwich artist patrons: For the next nine days,…

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24 Apr 02:05

The 'Chunks' in This Recalled Peanut Butter Could Be Metal Fragments

by Elizabeth Yuko
Andrew

Creamy > Crunchy

If peanut butter is a staple in your kitchen and pantry, check the brand and the label to see if it’s part of the voluntary recall issued by Skippy Foods, LLC. According to a release from the company—which was also published on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) website—the products are being recalled…

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31 Aug 19:06

Google’s New AI Photo Upscaling Tech is Jaw-Dropping

by Michael Zhang

Photo enhancing in movies and TV shows is often ridiculed for being unbelievable, but research in real photo enhancing is actually creeping more and more into the realm of science fiction. Just take a look at Google’s latest AI photo upscaling tech.

In a post titled “High Fidelity Image Generation Using Diffusion Models” published on the Google AI Blog (and spotted by DPR), Google researchers in the company’s Brain Team share about new breakthroughs they’ve made in image super-resolution.

In image super-resolution, a machine learning model is trained to turn a low-res photo into a detailed high-res photo, and potential applications of this range from restoring old family photos to improving medical imaging.

Google has been exploring a concept called “diffusion models,” which was first proposed in 2015 but which has, up until recently, taken a backseat to a family of deep learning methods called “deep generative models.” The company has found that its results with this new approach beat out existing technologies when humans are asked to judge.

The first approach is called SR3, or Super-Resolution via Repeated Refinement. Here’s the technical explanation:

“SR3 is a super-resolution diffusion model that takes as input a low-resolution image, and builds a corresponding high resolution image from pure noise,” Google writes. “The model is trained on an image corruption process in which noise is progressively added to a high-resolution image until only pure noise remains.

“It then learns to reverse this process, beginning from pure noise and progressively removing noise to reach a target distribution through the guidance of the input low-resolution image.”

Before (left) and after (right) upscaling with SR3.

SR3 has been found to work well on upscaling portraits and natural images. When used to do 8x upscaling on faces, it has a “confusion rate” of nearly 50% while existing methods only go up to 34%, suggesting that the results are indeed photo-realistic.

Before (left) and after (right) upscaling with SR3.
Before (left) and after (right) upscaling with SR3.

Here are other portraits upscaled from low-resolution originals:

A selection of portraits upscaled from low-res originals by AI.
A selection of portraits upscaled from low-res originals by AI.

Once Google saw how effective SR3 was in upscaling photos, the company went a step further with a second approach called CDM, a class-conditional diffusion model.

“CDM is a class-conditional diffusion model trained on ImageNet data to generate high-resolution natural images,” Google writes. “Since ImageNet is a difficult, high-entropy dataset, we built CDM as a cascade of multiple diffusion models. This cascade approach involves chaining together multiple generative models over several spatial resolutions: one diffusion model that generates data at a low resolution, followed by a sequence of SR3 super-resolution diffusion models that gradually increase the resolution of the generated image to the highest resolution.”

Google has published a set of examples showing low-resolution photos upscaled in a cascade. A 32×32 photo can be enhanced to 64×64 and then 256×256. A 64×64 photo can be upscaled to 256×256 and then 1024×1024.

As you can see, the results are impressive and the final photos, despite having some errors (such as gaps in the frames of glasses), would likely pass as actual original photographs for most viewers at first glance.

“With SR3 and CDM, we have pushed the performance of diffusion models to state-of-the-art on super-resolution and class-conditional ImageNet generation benchmarks,” Google researchers write. “We are excited to further test the limits of diffusion models for a wide variety of generative modeling problems.”

04 Apr 07:07

This AI Camera Yells Compliments at Dogs

by Jaron Schneider
Andrew

"I LIKE YOUR DOG"

Looking at photos of dogs and cats can apparently make you feel happier, and self-proclaimed “depressed millennial” Ryder of the YouTube Channel Ryder Calm Down decided photos weren’t good enough and developed a camera that recognizes dogs and alerts him so he can spot them out the window.

As Gizmodo puts it, procrastinating by looking at real dogs is a lot better than procrastinating while looking at photos of dogs. Ryder’s system is built on the Raspberry Pi camera and a Raspberry Pi, which work together to analyze subjects using a pre-programmed machine learning system that is able to recognize about 80 different objects including people, cars, and dogs as demonstrated below.

Ryder injected a bit of custom code to get the camera operating to his specific desires which you can download here. When it’s fully set up and pointed out his front window, Ryder’s machine-learning-powered camera can recognize when a dog passes into frame and will alert him via an attached megaphone using an admittedly creepy robotic voice.

“There is a dog outside.”

But what if Ryder wasn’t home? If they weren’t going to be there to appreciate the dogs, they thought that letting dog owners, and therefore the dogs, know that their animal looks nice would be another fun use of his creation.

“We can use the same technology to tell people that have a cool-looking dog even though we can’t really tell,” Ryder says. “So I turned the megaphone around and opened up the window.”

When the Raspberry Pi camera sees a dog, it can yell (in Ryder’s voice), “I like your dog!” The results are about as hilarious as you might expect, but a compliment is a compliment, right?

The screenshots above beautifully illustrate how unsettling it is to hear the voice shouting at you, as the person depicted looks around frantically in an attempt to figure out where the loud, disembodied voice is coming from, and why.

“I do feel better, but I’m not sure if it was the dogs or building something that actually worked for once,” Ryder concludes.

Whatever the case, what Ryder has built here is just the latest example that shows machine learning algorithms paired with cameras can have both practical uses as well as fun, if not somewhat silly, ones.

09 Feb 15:44

A theory about PHP

by CommitStrip
30 Nov 06:34

Parler’s Lead Investor Is Rebekah Mercer

by John Gruber

Jeff Horwitz and Keach Hagey, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (News+ link):

After The Wall Street Journal reported on the Mercers’ ties with Parler, Chief Executive John Matze confirmed that Ms. Mercer was the lead investor in the company at its outset and said that her backing was dependent on the platform allowing users to control what they see.

Some of the people familiar with the matter said Parler was a Mercer family investment. Ms. Mercer, in a post on Parler after a version of this article was published, said that her father had no involvement or ownership of the company. Mr. Mercer couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.

Ms. Mercer said in a separate post that she and Mr. Matze “started Parler to provide a neutral platform for free speech, as our founders intended.” She said the effort is an answer to what she called the “ever increasing tyranny and hubris of our tech overlords.”

The Journal doesn’t link to Mercer’s posts (perhaps because Parler makes them very hard to find permalinks to if you’re not signed in), but they are here and here. The Mercers, if you’re not familiar with them, are the money behind Breitbart and other wingnut propaganda efforts.

The whole thing boils down to a “if you’re not with us, you’re against us” mentality. You’re either on board with spreading any and every bit of wingnut propaganda (pre-election: Hunter Biden’s laptop was a major scandal being overlooked by legit new media who were in the bag for Biden; post-election: the election was rigged against Trump, but, somehow, not rigged against House, Senate, and state legislature Republicans) or you’re the enemy. Thus Twitter and Facebook are the enemy. This, despite the fact that Facebook is such a conservative echo chamber that its list of top-performing link posts, day in and day out, is dominated by pro-Trump voices.

It’s not enough. Fox News isn’t enough for these lunatics, because however conservative Fox News’s opinion slant is, their news is still actual news, like, for example, that Biden soundly beat Trump in the election. So, now they have Parler — a Twitter-like social network funded by the family that funded Cambridge Analytica. To say these people operate in bad faith is to give “bad faith” a bad name.

Do be sure to read Parler’s privacy policy (PDF), which makes Facebook look like it’s fully committed to protecting privacy.

18 Nov 23:33

GitHub Reinstates ‘youtube-dl’ Project After Concluding DMCA Takedown Request From RIAA Was Bullshit

by John Gruber

Abby Vollmer, writing for The GitHub Blog:

Today we reinstated youtube-dl, a popular project on GitHub, after we received additional information about the project that enabled us to reverse a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown.

The “additional information” link is a response to the RIAA’s takedown request by the EFF, acting on behalf of the youtube-dl project. It’d be a shame if there was a Streisand Effect to this abusive attempt by the RIAA to hurt a great project like youtube-dl, which is a terrific utility that lets you download offline copies of videos from YouTube (of course) and a slew of other services.

There are, of course, a bunch of options (youtube-dl is a nerdy command-line tool), but basically you can just type youtube-dl 'URL-TO-VIDEO-HERE' and it just works. You pass youtube-dl a URL to a web page with an embedded video, and it downloads a copy of the video. And you can install youtube-dl on your Mac easily using Homebrew.

Really would be a shame if this just raises awareness of youtube-dl.

11 Sep 04:51

The Winamp Skin Museum lets you relive the wonderful chaos of late-’90s computing

by James Vincent
Just a taste of the riches that await you. | Image: Winamp Skin Museum

Every now and again, individuals of a certain generation (my generation) have a tendency to fall into a catatonic state whenever we remember Winamp skins. There’s just something about them that instantly transports one back to the late ‘90s / early ‘00s, when user interfaces were truly customizable, and your music collection was an endless and engrossing battle against garbled filenames like LINKIN_PORK-IN%THE%END(HQ).mp3.

If any of that is triggering a nostalgic response, then you’ll probably enjoy the Winamp Skin Museum. It’s an endlessly scrolling collection of 65,000 Winamp skins, searchable and fully interactive. There’s a default playlist (which includes the “Llama Whippin’ Intro”), and you can even load audio files into it from...

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24 Aug 15:10

Please remain calm while the robot swabs your nose

by James Vincent

If you’ve been tested for COVID-19 then you’ve probably experienced the unpleasantness of a nasal swab. Someone takes a long-handled cotton swab and sticks it up your nose — way up your nose — until it reaches the back of the mucus-cave that is your nasal cavity. Upon arrival they give the swab a good twirl to collect your secretions and beat a merciful retreat. I can say from personal experience that it’s a uniquely unpleasant sensation. It’s something that just feels wrong, like the opposite of scratching an itch.

That’s perhaps why I was so unsettled by the sight of this autonomous nasal swab robot developed by Taiwanese medtech startup Brain Navi. Of all the entities I don’t want sticking cotton swabs up my nose, an industrial robot...

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24 Jun 13:37

Segway’s iconic (and oft-ridiculed) self-balancing scooter is ending production

by Andrew J. Hawkins
“Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2” New York Premiere - For The Wrap Photo by Taylor Hill / Getty Images

Segway announced Tuesday that it is ending production of its signature self-balancing scooter, the Segway Personal Transporter (PT). Manufacturing at the company’s Bedford, New Hampshire, factory will end on July 15th, and 21 employees will be laid off. The news was first reported by Fast Company.

Since the original Segway’s debut 20 years ago, the market has become saturated with electric-powered two-wheelers of many varieties. Moreover, Segway said the iconic and oft-ridiculed scooter only accounted for 1.5 percent of the company’s revenue. But the coronavirus pandemic and the resulting disruption in global manufacturing and supply chains were not factors, the company said.

“Given our decades-long history, we recognize that this...

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10 Jun 17:14

Teach Kids About Racism With the 'Brown Eye Blue Eye' Exercise

by Meghan Moravcik Walbert on Offspring, shared by Meghan Moravcik Walbert to Lifehacker

Jane Elliot spent her career trying to give white people the slightest taste of the discrimination and racism that people of color experience throughout their entire lives. It started in 1968, in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., when she devised an exercise for the students in her third grade…

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01 Jun 05:22

Don't End Texts With a Period

by Elizabeth Yuko
Andrew

How does Abinadi feel about this?

23 Apr 20:29

Install 'Desktop Goose' to Have the Horrible Goose Mess With Your PC or Mac [Updated]

by David Murphy

Windows / macOS: I love a good geeky prank, and the new Desktop Goose utility from 18-year-old Sam Chiet is the perfect app to bring around on a flash drive. Your friends will hate you. Your school’s IT department will really hate you. But little is more fun, and silly, than watching the star animal of Untitled Goose

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27 Mar 04:20

BBC Dad, the OG of interrupted work-from-home calls, is back with the kids

by Kim Lyons
bbc-dad

Marion Kelly is back and still stealing her dad’s thunder in live BBC interviews. The OG of “interrupting a work-from-home parent’s video call,” Marion and her family appeared on BBC today to share tips for dealing with cooped-up kids while working from home during the pandemic.

As Marion and younger brother James squirmed and protested behaving on camera, her mother Kim Jung-A said the family has tried to get outside as much as possible, while under coronavirus lockdown with the rest of South Korea. “We try to go see the flowers and trees so they can shout and scream.” Dad Robert Kelly added it was tough: “There’s only so many games they can play and puzzles you can do before they just kind of, you know, run around.”

Marion, then four...

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25 Mar 15:49

Plague Inc. Gaining New Game Mode Letting Players Save the World From a Pandemic

by Juli Clover
Plague Inc., a highly popular iOS game from Ndemic Creations that has seen its downloads surge in recent weeks, has announced a major update that will tweak the core gameplay to allow players to work to stop the outbreak of a virus.


Traditionally, the goal in Plague Inc. is to spread an infectious virus across the world, infecting and eventually killing the entire population as an end-game goal.

The new Plague Inc. game mode will let players manage disease progression and boost healthcare systems, as well as control actions like triaging, quarantining, social distancing, and the closing of public services. The new gameplay mode is being developed with the help of experts from the World Health Organisation, the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network and more.

The new update will be available for all Plague Inc. players for free and Ndemic Creations plans to release it as soon as possible.

Along with adding a new option that will let players fight a virus instead of spread a virus, Ndemic Creations has also donated $250,000, which is being split between the Coalition of Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) and the World Health Organization's COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund.
This article, "Plague Inc. Gaining New Game Mode Letting Players Save the World From a Pandemic" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

20 Mar 15:31

Photographer’s Heartwarming Photos Capture 27-Years of Waving Goodbye to Her Parents

by DL Cade

Over the course of 27 years, from 1991 until 2017, photographer Deanna Dikeman has a ritual. Every time she left her parent’s house in Sioux City, Iowa, she would snap a picture of her mom and dad waving goodbye from the driveway.

The resulting photo series—titled Leaving and Waving—is part family photo album, part homage to a parent’s steady affection and unwavering love.

It all began with a snapshot captured from inside her car in the year 1991 as her mother and father waved goodbye from the driveway of their new home. By then, Dikeman was already four years into chronicling the lives of her entire family, and the “leaving and waving” photos happened almost by accident.

“I never set out to make this series. I just took these photographs as a way to deal with the sadness of leaving,” says Dikeman. “These photographs are part of a larger body of work I call Relative Moments […] When I discovered the series of accumulated ‘leaving and waving’ photographs, I found a story about family, aging, and the sorrow of saying good-bye.”

In a sense, Leaving and Waving could be described as one long, extended goodbye. The sorrow that Dikeman describes weaves its way subtly throughout the series, crescendoing in two equally emotional frames. The first, captured in 2009, in which her father is no longer present; the second, the final photograph in the series, shows an empty driveway.

Scroll down to see a selection of our favorite portraits from this equally heart-warming and heart-wrenching project:

1991
1992
1995
1996
1997
1998
2000
2001
2002
2004
2006
2008
2009
2010
2012
2013
2015
2016
2017

A huge thank you to Ms. Dikeman for allowing us to share this deeply personal project. To learn a bit more about her or if you’d like to see more of her work, be sure to visit her website and give her a follow on Instagram.

(via New Yorker)


Image credits: All photos by Deanna Dikeman and used with permission.

18 Mar 04:11

Medical company threatens to sue volunteers that 3D-printed valves for life-saving coronavirus treatments

by Jay Peters
Andrew

Abhorrent.

Image: Massimo Temporelli

A medical device manufacturer has threatened to sue a group of volunteers in Italy that 3D printed a valve used for life-saving coronavirus treatments. The valve typically costs about $11,000 from the medical device manufacturer, but the volunteers were able to print replicas for about $1 (via Techdirt).

A hospital in Italy was in need of the valves after running out while treating patients for COVID-19. The hospital’s usual supplier said they could not make the valves in time to treat the patients, according to Metro. That launched a search for a way to 3D print a replica part, and Cristian Fracassi and Alessandro Ramaioli, who work at Italian startup Isinnova, offered their company’s printer for the job, reports Business Insider.

H...

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14 Mar 04:38

2010 and 2020

2030: "I just bought a house for one bitcoin. No, it's the equivalent of a dollar. Houses are often transferred for a nominal fee because the buyer is taking responsibility for containing the holo-banshees in the attic."
25 Feb 20:29

The makers of Jif peanut butter team up with Giphy to try to settle the GIF/Jif debate once and for all

by Jay Peters

In another twist in the long-running debate about how to pronounce “GIF,” Jif peanut butter wants to make the case that it owns the soft “g” pronunciation while GIF should be said with a hard “g.”

The J.M. Smucker Company, which makes Jif, has teamed up with Giphy to release a special jar of Jif peanut butter that replaces the classic Jif branding on the label with “Gif.” The idea seems to be that the special edition jar should be placed next to a normal jar of Jif, like it is in the picture at the top of this post, to prove that there’s an obvious difference in how each word should be said.

This pronunciation has been a long and dumb internet debate. Facebook poked the beast in 2017 with a poll about the correct pronunciation, and even H...

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17 Feb 15:51

Linux distro review: Intel’s own Clear Linux OS

by Jim Salter
  • Clear Linux came in first on roughly half of the 50 benchmarks Phoronix threw at it. [credit: Phoronix ]

Intel's Clear Linux distribution has been getting a lot of attention lately, due to its incongruously high benchmark performance. Although the distribution was created and is managed by Intel, even AMD recommends running benchmarks of its new CPUs under Clear Linux in order to get the highest scores.

Recently at Phoronix, Michael Larabel tested a Threadripper 3990X system using nine different Linux distros, one of which was Clear Linux—and Intel's distribution got three times as many first-place results as any other distro tested. When attempting to conglomerate all test results into a single geometric mean, Larabel found that the distribution's results were, on average, 14% faster than the slowest distributions tested (CentOS 8 and Ubuntu 18.04.3).

There's not much question that Clear Linux is your best bet if you want to turn in the best possible benchmark numbers. The question not addressed here is, what's it like to run Clear Linux as a daily driver? We were curious, so we took it for a spin.

Read 41 remaining paragraphs | Comments

12 Feb 20:43

Behind the Scenes: Shooting Wet Plate Portraits of the Cast of Little Women

by DL Cade

Now these are some cast portraits we can really get behind. On-set photographer Wilson Webb recently got the chance to photograph the entire cast of Best Picture nominee Little Women, but instead of shooting glitzy studio portraits, he decided to stay historically accurate and capture wet plate collodion portraits instead.

If you’ve seen any on-set photography over the past decade, you’ve seen Webb’s work. His portfolio includes work from Little Women, Marriage Story, Baby Driver, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, A Serious Man, Men in Black 3, and many many more. In other words, he’s a seasoned veteran in this industry, so when he was approached to take the cast portraits for Little Women, he knew exactly what he wanted to do.

“As soon as I talked to Greta and she offered me the job I just knew that this was a perfect way to use photography in the period of the film,” Webb told CBC radio program As It Happens in a recent interview.

To capture the actual portraits, Webb got his hands on a 130-year-old Dallmeyer lens that he strapped to a modern large format camera, and set up 25,000 Watt-seconds worth of flash to ensure he had enough light. That’s… a lot of light. So much that Webb says his subjects “can feel a wave of heat and they can also smell the ozone that’s created when the picture’s taken.”

But despite all of this light—which allowed him to capture a much faster “shutter speed” than traditional wet plates—he still had the cast pose in a traditional fashion: facing the camera, stoic expression, sitting still for 30 seconds at a time to capture each individual frame.

Scroll down for a Behind the Scenes peek at Webb in the studio with the Little Women cast, who he says really enjoyed the process:

Interestingly, Wilson says the final portraits he captured would have been “laughed at” in the 1860s. All of the imperfections that we’ve come to treasure would have been seen as evidence of sloppy technique.

“If I was trying to pass as a photographer in the 1860s, I would probably be laughed out of the studio,” he tells the CBC. “All of the things that make them interesting now — the textures and weird shading and bending that you can kind of see in the portraits — are interesting to us now because we’re so desensitized […] But back in the day, those are attributes that would have been seen as a mistake and would not have been presentable whatsoever.”

Scroll down to see all of the final wet plate portraits, shared courtesy of Mr. Webb and Columbia Pictures:

Jo March (Saoirse Ronan)
Jo March (Saoirse Ronan)
Meg March (Emma Watson)
Meg March (Emma Watson) and John Brooke (James Norton)
Amy March (Florence Pugh)
Beth March (Eliza Scanlen)
Beth March (Eliza Scanlen)
Laurie (Timothée Chalamet)
Mr. Laurence (Chris Cooper)
Mr. Laurence (Chris Cooper)
Marmee March (Laura Dern)
Father March (Bob Odenkirk)
John Brooke (James Norton)
Friedrich Bhaer (Louis Garrel)

A huge thank you to Mr. Webb for letting us share these images with our readers. To learn more about how these photos were shot, check out the full As It Happens interview at this link. And if you want to see more of Webb’s impressive on-set photography, visit his website or give him a follow on Instagram.


Image credits All collodion portraits by Wilson Webb/Columbia Pictures, behind the scenes images by Kimberly Scarsella, all images used with permission.

06 Feb 20:52

You Can Buy Over a Pound of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese Powder

by Claire Lower on Skillet, shared by Claire Lower to Lifehacker
Andrew

omg, I need this.

Rejoice, my little garbage pail friends, for our time has come. Kraft Macaroni and Cheese sauce mix is now available for purchase in a large jar, so that you may sauce or sprinkle to your stomach’s content. (And yes, it is the same stuff you get in the blue box.)

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06 Feb 16:06

Liz Plank on Nancy Pelosi Tearing Up Trump’s State of the Union Speech

by John Gruber

Liz Plank, writing for NBC News:

Of course the speaker is getting pushback. Pelosi displaying the tiniest bit of rage exemplifies the scrutiny that awaits her and women in politics — a scrutiny that is even worse for women of color. Women learn early on to mask anger because they know they’ll be punished for it. While Trump gets to have a meltdown almost every day, female politicians have to be much more savvy and calculated when communicating even the slightest bit of emotion.

But as I watched the twittersphere debate whether Pelosi’s small act of civil disobedience was out of line or not, all I could think about were the Democratic voters I got to interview in Iowa this week leading up to the Iowa caucus. And how desperate they are to win this November. The stakes in the 2020 elections are higher than ever and the voters feel it. Every single caucusgoer I spoke to said the same thing: “We need someone who can beat Trump.”

So will the Democrats continue to play nice? Will they smile through their frustration as the president hurls insults and disgraces the office he is privileged to sit in every day? Or do they want to win?

Pelosi — and I choose this word deliberately — triggers Republicans because she’s (a) a woman, and (b) plays hardball. She’s not fucking around. She was cool as ice as she tore that speech — it was like she was ripping up a junk mail credit card offer. It’s Republicans who’ve flipped out emotionally.

For decades now Republicans have been playing win-at-any-cost hardball politics, while Democrats have played nice. Trump’s presidency has laid bare what should have been obvious to Democrats long ago — they must play hardball too. The difference has been hardball vs. playing-nice-ball. It needs to be win-at-any-cost-including-subverting-democracy hardball (Republicans) vs. hardball with integrity (Democrats).

Pelosi gets that. And it drives Republicans nuts. The Democrats have played nice for so long that Republicans are outraged when a Democrat simply gives them a taste of their own hardball medicine.

31 Jan 18:32

How to Parent Like the Mandalorian

by Meghan Moravcik Walbert on Offspring, shared by Meghan Moravcik Walbert to Lifehacker

The Mandalorian has delighted viewers with its fresh storyline, catchy soundtrack, some droids and a few funky weapons. But all of that was nothing compared to The Child, who we are all calling Baby Yoda even though we know it’s not really Yoda. The Mandalorian, it turns out, is not just another Star Wars saga in a…

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31 Jan 16:27

You can now own a life-sized, screen-accurate Baby Yoda figure... for $350

by Chaim Gartenberg
Photo: Sideshow Collectibles

The picture at the top of this post isn’t a screenshot of The Child (aka, Baby Yoda) from Disney+’s The Mandalorian; rather, it’s an incredibly detailed, 1:1 life-sized replica of the iconic character from Sideshow Collectibles, and it could be yours... for the low, low price of $350. Preorders for the figure open today, but it’s not expected to arrive until August to October later this year.

If that massive price tag didn’t give it away: this isn’t a stuffed toy or action figure, like the official plushies that Disney is selling later this year (or the far cuter but unofficial Etsy iterations that Disney is fighting against). It’s a collectible figurine that mostly just stands around on your desk or counter, with what looks like few...

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21 Jan 19:49

How Modern iPhone Encryption Works

by John Gruber
Andrew

Even on Android - use an alphanumeric passcode.

Great explanation from Jack Nicas, in his column for The New York Times:

Tools like those from Cellebrite and Grayshift don’t actually break iPhones’ encryption; they guess the password. To do so, they exploit flaws in the software, like Checkm8, to remove the limit of 10 password attempts. (After about 10 failed attempts, an iPhone erases its data.) The tools then use a so-called brute-force attack, which automatically tries thousands of passcodes until one works.

That approach means the wild card in the Pensacola case is the length of the suspect’s passcode. If it’s six numbers — the default on iPhones — authorities almost certainly can break it. If it’s longer, it might be impossible.

A four-number passcode, the previous default length, would take on average about seven minutes to guess. If it’s six digits, it would take on average about 11 hours. Eight digits: 46 days. Ten digits: 12.5 years.

If the passcode uses both numbers and letters, there are far more possible passcodes — and thus cracking it takes much longer. A six-character alphanumeric passcode would take on average 72 years to guess.

It takes 80 milliseconds for an iPhone to compute each guess. While that may seem small, consider that software can theoretically try thousands of passcodes a second. With the delay, it can try only about 12 a second.

The basic thing to understand is that there are effectively two systems on a modern iPhone: (1) the iPhone itself, running iOS; and (2) the Secure Enclave. iOS can be hacked. That’s how these tools remove the 10-passcode-guesses-and-you’re-out limit. But it’s the Secure Enclave that evaluates a passcode and controls encryption, and the 80 millisecond processing time for passcode evaluation isn’t an artificial limit that could be set to 0 by hackers. It’s a hardware limitation, not software.

So, if you’re worried about any of this, the answer is simple: use an alphanumeric passphrase to unlock your iOS device, not a 6-digit numeric passcode.

23 Dec 14:11

This flying robot vacuum overcomes the Roomba’s biggest weakness: stairs

by James Vincent

No matter how useful today’s robot vacuums are, they’ll always be defeated by an element common to many households: stairs. That’s why this flying robovac, built by YouTuber and engineer Peter Sripol, is so impressive. By adding a trio of ducted fans to a cheap robot vacuum, Sripol has created a gadget nerd’s dream — and a nightmare for your pets.

A flying Roomba isn’t necessarily a practical tool, though, as Sripol’s video demonstrates. The downdraft created by its fans seems to make more mess than the vacuum itself cleans up, and the flying is not autonomous — you need a human pilot to steer it where you want to go. It’s also pricey, with Sripol noting that the electronics he bought for the project total around $200, more than triple...

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06 Dec 17:13

The version of Star Wars on Disney+ changes the canon once again

by WIRED
Who shot first?

Enlarge / Who shot first? (credit: Lucasfilm Ltd. | Disney)

Drew Stewart got the call at around 2am: They broke the universe again, you should check it out.

So Stewart did something he's done countless times before; he has no idea how many. He turned on Star Wars. But this time was different—literally. The galaxy had changed, like a glitch in the Matrix (if you'll allow a mixed cinematic metaphor). And it wasn't the first time.

As the person behind a Twitter account called Star Wars Visual Comparison, Stewart is a kind of unofficial keeper of apocrypha, of the sometimes subtle, sometimes extraordinary changes wrought by their makers upon three Star Wars movies: A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and The Return of the Jedi. These alterations to the canon are the stuff of many nerd debates, and Stewart has followed them closely. That's why, at 2:50am on the day Disney+ launched with the whole Star Wars catalog in 4K resolution (pretty!), he found himself watching A New Hope yet again. What he found was yet another wrinkle: an all-new, all-different shoot-out between Han Solo and the lizardish bounty hunter Greedo.

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12 Nov 18:05

This wild NES mouse will haunt your dreams

by Bijan Stephen
Andrew

I kinda want one...

Nintendo’s original Entertainment System (NES) is now 34 years old. A millennial, in other words. And since the console debuted in North America in the fall of 1985, its design — the familiar boxy shape; that matte gray, black, and red — has been an inspiration to nerds everywhere. The latest entry into this venerable canon, which includes everything from (fly as hell) Jordans to shelving, is the 8BitDo N30: a 2.4GHz wireless mouse made by the mad scientists over at 8BitDo. You can order one right now for $24.99.

8BitDo is probably best known for its high-end controllers and gaming peripherals. A mouse isn’t totally out of their wheelhouse, though it is a little odd. I mean, look at it.

The design is the brainchild of...

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06 Nov 00:06

Ford made an electric Mustang with a manual transmission

by Sean O'Kane
Images: Ford

Ford has created an all-electric Mustang with a six-speed manual gearbox, a true Frankenstein’s monster of a car that I (and I assume many others) want to drive. The sad thing is it’s just a one-off, built for this week’s annual Specialty Equipment Market Association (SEMA) trade show in Las Vegas.

Dubbed “Mustang Lithium,” and clad in light gray paint with electric blue details, the car can pull enough energy out of the 800-volt battery to make more than 900 horsepower. Ford unfortunately didn’t share too many other specifications, like range or the size of the battery, since this is just a prototype. It does, however, feature a vertically oriented 10.4-inch touchscreen in the dashboard, similar to what Ford did with the 2020 Explorer....

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