Hi-Rez announced at their expo they're bringing a new game, Smite Rivals, to PC and mobile phones. Using the champions from Smite, players will battle on an overhead view...read more on Gametyrant

Permalink

As handy as it is to use your phone as your alarm clock, you may want to buy a real alarm clock and keep your phone away from your bed, especially if you can’t resist using it before bed You’ll be much better rested in the morning.

We’ve mentioned several times that screen time before bed is a bad idea, and yet we all still do it—partially because our phones and tablets are right there on the bedside table, acting as alarm clocks. Now another recent study, published in PLOS, hammers that point home. The simple solution is to keep your phone away from you at night, and just rely on an old-school alarm clock.

Digital lifestyle blogger Carley K. experimented with this setup. She found four major changes once she moved her phone from her bedside:

• She fell asleep faster
• She slept better
• She had less headaches
• She talked to her husband more

Yes, you’ll have to resist the temptation to check your social networks before falling asleep. But in the long term, isn’t a better night’s sleep worth it?

I stopped using my phone as an alarm clock: Here’s what happened | Carley K

S

Airplane seats aren't exactly designed for comfortable sleeping—so if you're on a long-haul flight, a travel pillow is a must. And since the three blankets that most planes carry aren't enough for 100 passengers to share, this clever two-in-one neck pillow has everything you need to at least try and get some shut-eye on a long flight.

Unzipping the $35 Travel Billow reveals a generously-sized 50 x 66-inch fleece blanket that should be large enough to cover even the tallest of travelers while they're seated. And since removing the blanket leaves the fleece neck pillow completely empty, the Travel Billow includes an inflatable ladder, letting you use the pillow and blanket at the same time.

S

The best part is that both the neck pillow and fleece blanket are washable—so the next time you're flying and find yourself a little cold, you don't have to wonder in fear where the airline's communal blanket has been before you use it. [PeachFur Fleece via Lifehacker]

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers.

Phone Keypad

I use one of those old phones where you type with numbers—for example, to type "Y", you press 9 three times. Some words have consecutive letters on the same number. When they do, you have to pause between letters, making those words annoying to type. What English word has the most consecutive letters on the same key?

Stewart Bishop

We can answer that question with the following headache-inducing shell command, which finds all words in a given list which use the same key a bunch of times in a row:

cat wordlist.txt | perl -pe 's/^(.*)\$/\L\$& \U\$&/g' | tr 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ' '2223334445556667777888999' | grep -P "(.)\1\1\1\1\1"

The winner, according to this script, is nonmonogamous, which requires you to type seven consecutive letters (nonmono) with the "6" key.[1]It's actually tied with nonmonotonic. These no doubt both lose to more obscure words which weren't in the wordlists I used.

Phone Keyboard Sentences

It's rare for a word to have all its letters on the same key; the longest common ones are only a few letters.[2]Like "tutu". Nevertheless, using only these words, we can write a high def MMO on TV, a phrase whose words use only one number key each.

There are plenty of other phrases like this, although some of them are a bit of a stretch:

Typing issues like this aren't limited to old phone keyboards. For any text input system, you can find phrases which are weird to type.

QWERTY Keyboards

It's a well-known piece of trivia among word geeks that "stewardesses" is the longest common word you can type on a QWERTY keyboard using only the left hand.

In fact, it's possible to write entire sentences with just the left hand. For example, try typing the words We reserved seats at a secret Starcraft fest. Weird, huh?

Let's take a look at a few more sentences—written with the help of some even messier shell commands and Python scripts[3]I constructed these sentences by searching text logs for sentence fragments that fit a particular constraint, then randomly connecting those groups together using a technique called Markov chaining. You can see the code I used here.—which follow various constraints:

Left hand only

Right hand only

Home row only

Top row only

And lastly, if anyone wants to know why you're not more active on social media, you only need the top row to explain that you're ...

It seems too bizarre to be anything other than a screenshot from your favorite borked mapping app. But this is a real road in Norway, called the Atlantic Ocean Road. It's five miles of sheer insanity and wave-soaked driving.

According to Atlas Obscura:

The curvy road dips and arches over the brutal waves of the Norwegian Sea that often crash over the pavement during storms, and was subjected to 12 hurricanes during construction. A 5.2 mile segment of County Road 64 in Norway, it consists of several causeways, seven bridges, and four viewpoints to take in the scenic views . . .

Driving along the Atlantic Road is like teetering on the edge on the sea. The road's rollar coaster feel, curvy bridges and phenomenal views have made it a favorite of road trippers and motorcyclists.

S

Learn more on Atlas Obscura.

Top photo by Ivan Tsvetkov via Shutterstock. Bottom by Asbjørn Floden.

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers. Five Filters recommends: 'You Say What You Like, Because They Like What You Say' - http://www.medialens.org/index.php/alerts/alert-archive/alerts-2013/731-you-say-what-you-like-because-they-like-what-you-say.html