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Wonderful examples of pareidolia, the fun psychological phenomenon of seeing a familiar pattern or shape (like a face) when none exists. Read the rest

Sewing a button seems like a simple task, but if you’re not careful, sewing it on without spacing it properly will make your clothes tight and the button difficult to open and close.. Make sure your buttons always lay correctly by using a toothpick to add the right amount of thread slack.

Next time you’re sewing a button onto a jacket or shirt, place the toothpick in the middle of the button. Then, sew between the holes on either side of the toothpick so that the thread loops over the toothpick. When you’re done, slide the toothpick out from under the thread and gently pull the button forward. Now the thread that was being held in place by the toothpick is behind the button. This gives you just the right amount of slack in the thread. Your buttons should sit perfectly, and your clothes should fit nicely too.

The Best Way to Sew on a Button | Apartment Therapy

“Drop the cup, ma'am.” (more…)

Denver feels about ear medicine the way I feel about eye-drops.

Associated Press and British Movietone are uploading more than a million minutes of footage to YouTube that documents the most momentous and historic events of the last 120 years. Two channels will feature more than 550,000 videos, including clips that capture first hand the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the effects of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and Tiananmen Square's "Tank Man."

AP has built up a staggering archive over its 120 year lifespan. Alwyn Lindsey, AP's director of international archive, said that the channels would stand as a visual encyclopedia of perhaps the most turbulent century in human history. "At AP we are always astonished at the sheer breadth of footage that we have access to, and...

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Authorities are asking people in Florida to refrain from shooting and eating armadillos, and to resist the urge to handle them or keep them for pets, because they are responsible for a leprosy outbreak in the state.

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The 12 Greatest Fictional Detectives (Who Aren't Sherlock Holmes)

Nigel Richards of Christchurch, New Zealand won the French-language Scrabble world championship yet he doesn't actually speak the language. Richards, a former US and World Scrabble Champ simply studied the dictionary for a couple months.

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 Microsoft today is introducing a new application aimed at reducing the time it takes to check and respond to email while on your smartphone. With Send, as the app is called, the idea is to make email perform more like instant messaging, as it does away with more formal email constructs –  like the subject line, for example – in favor of quicker, shorter messages that you can dash… Read More

As the streaming service playing field continues to expand and crumble, companies will keep trying almost anything to differentiate themselves from the competition. Maybe that's why Spotify, a streaming service, just partnered with Beatport, another streaming service. The two companies recently inked a content distribution deal that will bring some of Beatport's curated playlists and exclusive content to Spotify.

The move may sound like a strange one — Beatport is, ostensibly, a Spotify competitor — but each service has something the other wants. Spotify has reach; Beatport has insider status and a human touch. Beatport has been around since 2004; it began as an online download store aimed at dance music aficionados, and has since...

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 Since live streaming from mobile phones came roaring back in the era of social media, major celebrities have been courted by platforms like Meerkat and Periscope for their crowd pulling power. Now another one of those stars is putting his money where his mouth is. David Beckham, the well known athlete and megabrand, has become a founding investor in a new British startup which plans to take… Read More

In case you haven't noticed, there's a new button at the bottom of each post on Android Police these days. The green "subscribe" button appearing across from tags brings new Pushbullet integration to the site, and who doesn't love Pushbullet?

As you've probably already gathered from the gif above, the button slides out a panel that will let readers subscribe to any specific category or tag assigned to that story, all from one centralized location. Whether you want to subscribe to every post under the topic of Apps, Design, or News, or just to things tagged with "cats," the handy subscribe button has you covered.

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Subscribe To All The Things With New Pushbullet Integration On Android Police was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Take a few minutes to let your stress melt away with this gorgeous film about a Japanese ascetic who pursues awakening via Shugendō in a secluded mountain retreat. Read the rest

The Washington Post editorial board lost its mind and called on the National Academy of Sciences to examine "the conflict" over whether crypto backdoors can be made safe: the problem is, there's no conflict. Read the rest

Chinese smartphone maker OnePlus had a big hit last year with the $299 OnePlus One, which offered powerful specs at a bargain price. The company is hoping it can follow this success with the OnePlus 2, which is scheduled to be unveiled later this month. However, Chinese wireless regulator TENAA has published pictures of the device ahead of the launch, showing, well, a rather similar smartphone to last year, albeit with a new, physical home button. This is almost certainly the OnePlus 2's "lightning quick" fingerprint scanner, which the company announced late last month with the claim that the technology is faster than the iPhone's TouchID system.

4GB of RAM, a snapdragon 810 CPU, and a reversible USB Type-C connector

Thanks to various a...

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As sensible and not-at-all-reactionary lovers of tech, we all know that people who record videos vertically are the worst. But astoundingly, despite the opprobrium of millions of nerds, lots of people still shoot footage this way, presumably for the entirely sensible reason that that's the way you hold your phone. Apps like Periscope and Snapchat have embraced vertical footage and now YouTube is recognizing its worth too, fixing the way it shows full-screen vertical videos in its Android app.

Instead of uselessly rotating the footage 90 degrees when you click full-screen, YouTube now actually expands the video to fill your phone or tablet's display. As you can see with screen captures from this video, the new full-screen method (on the...

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Meet the author of all James Bond's pain

We've seen a teaser, a TV spot, some featurettes and some stills, but what we've really been waiting for is a full trailer for the 24th official James Bond adventure Spectre. And the wait is over: that trailer is now upon us, in all its Austrian, Mexican and Rome-ish glory. Check it out below.

So what have we got? Ralph Fiennes' M tells Bond he has "no authority" and berates him over a "holiday" during the Day Of The Dead celebrations in Mexico City. That would be a holiday including a fight on a helicopter and an exploded hotel room.

Then we've got Naomie Harris's Moneypenny saying, "They say you're finished. I think you're just getting started," and Ben Whishaw's Q unveiling a new Aston Martin (the DB10, specially designed for this film) with "a few tricks up her sleeve" - which we later learn include jets of fire at the back.

Bond also asks Q to make him "disappear", which takes us off to Austria to see Mr White and endure a snowy chase with a plane and a jeep and Léa Seydoux. After which we catch a bit of seduction with Monica Bellucci in Rome; some aggression from Dave Bautista's Mr. Hinx; a wall-mounted list of names "in memory of those who died in the service of their country" all linked by Bond; some of that boardroom scene we've glimpsed before; and another chase through Italy's capital.

And of course, there's Christoph Waltz's new villain, Oberhauser. "It was me, James," he purrs, "the author of all your pain." And he's wearing a Nehru jacket, as has been sported by more than one Bond villain in the past, including one Ernst Stavro Blofeld... Is that a clever bluff to make him look like Blofeld and stir up the rumour pot, before the film confirms that he isn't at all?*

We'll find out on October 26, when Spectre gets its world premiere in London and simultaneously opens across the rest of the UK and Ireland. The US and other territories will see it released on November 6.

*The name Oberhauser, incidentally, comes from Ian Fleming's original short story Octopussy. Oberhauser in that instance was Bond's ski-instructor when Bond was a teenager. A father-figure to the orphan Bond, he was murdered at the end of WWII, and his body showed up years later frozen in a glacier.

Chicago's Independent Police Review Authority (IPRA) was formed in 2007 to review police brutality. Since that time, IPRA has investigated nearly 400 civilian shootings by cops.

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Sandra Bland was pulled over for failing to signal a turn in Waller County, Texas. She was arrested and taken to the cells, where she died three days later. Read the rest

[UPDATE: It's not a lemur, it is a slow loris. Also the slow loris is being tortured, according to this (autoplaying) video.

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With millions of new downloads per month uTorrent is without doubt the most used BitTorrent client around.

The software is the main source of revenue for the San Francisco based company BitTorrent Inc. and generates income through advertisements and bundled software.

The latter now appears to be causing trouble as several anti-virus vendors have begun listing uTorrent as a security risk. The scanning result below from VirusTotal shows that at least six anti-virus applications, including ESET and Symantec, have flagged the software as problematic.

The anti-virus scans associate the uTorrent.exe file with Trojan.Win32.Generic!BT and the controversial OpenCandy bundling software. While this isn’t the first time that uTorrent has been flagged in this manner, we haven’t seen it being reported by this many independent tests before.

uTorrent’s Virustotal results

In addition to action by the anti-virus companies, uTorrent is also being blocked by Google in several ways. When attempting to download the latest stable release of the torrent client, Chrome flags the software as malicious and blocks the download, although this only appears to happen sporadically.

Google is also actively blocking several pages that link to uTorrent and other BitTorrent Inc. software. According to Google, parts of the uTorrent website contain “harmful programs.”

uTorrent.com warning in Chrome

The same “harmful software” warning from Google also prevented millions of people from accessing popular torrent sites earlier this month.

A Google spokesperson informed us that this was the result of the company’s increased efforts to block programs that make “unexpected changes” to people’s computers.

“Google Safe Browsing’s ability to detect deceptive software has steadily improved,” the company explained in a recent blog post.

“In the coming weeks, these detection improvements will become more noticeable in Chrome: users will see more warnings about unwanted software than ever before,” Google adds.

These and the other uTorrent threat reports all seem to be triggered by bundled third-party software bundled. There is no indication or evidence that the BitTorrent client itself is harmful.

Update: BitTorrent Inc’s Jordy Berson provided the following comment.

“BitTorrent’s products are developed in a secure environment, are securely signed and virus scanned. Our safety record has been consistently good. We are very conservative with partner ads and offers, using a small subset of available offers that are subject to our security and suitability tests.

Meanwhile, security vendors and browser security teams have the difficult task of tuning their heuristics and their block lists to catch offenders without implicating harmless software. The increase in false positives in recent months is a result of security companies becoming more aggressive with their tuning in the category of “potentially unwanted programs.” The issue is not unique to uTorrent, and we and other desktop software companies report false positives when they are spotted, with excellent cooperation from most security vendors.

We have stated this to our users for some time in the support section of our Web site, located here.”

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and the best VPN services.

Every Frame a Painting looks at how Chuck Jones evolved into the master of comedic cartooning. The conclusions: Read the rest

Instagrammers were up in arms last week after the social media site banned the hashtag #curvy, eliminating pictures associated with that hashtag from its search results. Some female users protested by posting curvaceous selfies using the hashtag #curvee as a workaround, and other hashtags like #bringcurvyback and #stillcurvy gained steam.

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The patent infringement battle between Apple and Samsung has been raging since 2011, and apparently it's still going. Some of Silicon Valley's top companies — Google, Facebook, HP among others — filed a "friend of the court" briefing on July 1st, protesting the decision against Samsung. (The briefing can be found on PACER under case number 14-1335, for those of you who like to peruse legal documents.)

Apple originally accused Samsung of multiple patent infringements, claiming that it ripped off key features of Apple's iPhone, its including rounded corners, multi-touch gestures and tap-to-zoom but according to the "friend of the court" briefing, the Silicon Valley companies argued that the decision against Samsung would "lead to absurd...

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Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android applications, games, and live wallpapers that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous 2 weeks or so.

Games

This War of Mine

Android Police review: This War Of Mine Game Preview: A Dreadful, Soul-Crushing Experience...

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32 New And Notable (And 1 WTF) Android Games From The Last 2 Weeks (7/7/15 - 7/20/15) was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

You won't be able to stubbornly cling to the old Google+ Photos much longer (assuming people are doing that). The official Google+ account has confirmed that August 1st is the shutdown date for Google+ Photos. It won't be a huge adjustment for most users—the new Google Photos already has all your stuff stored and organized.

The shutdown will happen in stages starting on August 1st. The Android app will be the first to go.

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Google+ Photos Will Shut Down August 1st To Complete Transition To New Google Photos was written by the awesome team at Android Police.