Pokeball Charger – Pikachu I choose you!… to charge my phone.

Big-Mouthed Floating Thingie Keep your money in one of those big-mouthed floating thingies, and no one will dare mess with it! If only out of fear that they might end up covered in blue blood and guts. $19.99

http://theawkwardyeti.com/comic/what-can-we-do/

If you're an Amazon Prime member, you can buy the BLU R1 HD smartphone for only $50 (or double the memory and RAM for $10 more). The phone is unlocked so you don't need to sign a 2-year phone contract, but Amazon's ads and product offers display on the lock screen (just like they do for the Kindle). According to Joanna Stern at the WSJ, it's no iPhone or Galaxy, but it's great for the price.

No, the R1 doesn't feel or look like a premium phone, but it also doesn't feel like something you'd find on a Toys "R" Us shelf. The metal frame and the touch screen's curved edges give it a weighty feel, while the black plastic casing is more firm Coke bottle than flimsy ShopRite water bottle. Even the power and volume buttons have a satisfying click.

The 5-inch, 720p screen is very bright and viewable at multiple angles, even outdoors. It's not as crisp as the 1080p displays you'll get on $200 Moto G4 or Honor 5X, but again...$50.

In only 9 years, we've gone from smartphones with touchscreens being magical to companies nearly giving them away. Back in 2009, John Walkenbach predicted that Kindles would be free by sometime in 2011.

The price for Amazon's Kindle 2 has dropped again. It started at $359, and then was reduced to $299 last July. Now it's $259.

If this price trend continues, it will be free by June, 2011. I'm actually serious about this. At some point, the Kindle will be free. It will probably be before June, 2011.

The cheapest Kindle is currently $80, so we haven't quite gotten there yet. Which is a bit puzzling now that I'm thinking about it again. Amazon is famous for playing the long game. If compare the cost to giving away a free Kindle (or highly subsidized higher-end Kindle) to every Prime member who signs up or re-ups for two years vs. a) the revenue gained from the ebooks purchased by those customers, b) the revenue from new Prime members, and c) being able to offer a package which is basically free shipping on all Amazon orders + Netflix + Spotify + a ton of free books + a free Kindle...that's gotta make good economic sense for them, right? I mean, unless so many Prime users already have Kindles that giving them to those that don't doesn't make sense.

Anyway, it'll be an interesting race...will the smartphone beat the Kindle to free? (via df)

How many fireflies would it take to match the brightness of the Sun?

Luke Doty

Not that many! I mean, it's definitely one of those gigantic numbers with lots of zeroes, but in the grand scheme of things, there aren't as many zeroes as you might expect.

Our first question: Where does firefly light even come from?

Fireflies may look like they're full of glow-in-the-dark goo, but the light they give off actually comes from a thin layer on their surface.[1]You can see some diagrams of the organs here and here. Lots of insects have glowing surface patches, and some of those patches have been studied carefully to calculate their brightness. A 1928 paper on beetles called "headlight bugs"[2]Such a great name. found that their glowing patches, which were a little over a square millimeter in area, emitted about 0.0006 lumens of light. Fireflies have luminous organs (bright patches) that are about the same size as those of headlight bugs,[3]See this paper on some common American fireflies. and their organs tend to have a similar peak brightness per area, so this figure is a good guess for the brightness of a firefly's lantern.

Firefly lights aren't "always-on." They blink on and off, with patterns that vary from species to species and situation to situation. These flashes carry information, some of which you can decode using this delightful chart.[4]You can also use LEDs to mess with firefly patterns, which feels strangely invasive.

To get the brightest light, let's assume we're using a species with a mostly-on duty cycle—like a headlight bug. How does its 0.0006-lumen light output compare to the Sun?

The Sun's brightness is \( 3.8\times10^{28} \) lumens, so by simple division, it would take \( 3\times10^{31} \) of those fireflies to emit the same amount of light. That's a surprisingly small number; adult fireflies weigh about 20 milligrams, which means \( 3\times10^{31} \) fireflies would only weigh about a third as much as Jupiter and 1/3000th as much as the Sun.

In other words, per pound, fireflies are brighter than the Sun. Even though bioluminescence is millions of times less efficient than the Sun's fusion-powered glow, the Sun can't afford to be as bright because it has to last billions of times longer.[5]If you like Fermi problems—and silly equations—there's an interesting route you can take to this answer without doing any research on fireflies or the Sun at all. Instead, you can just plug this equation into Wolfram|Alpha: (5 billion years / (4 hours/day * 3 months)) / (1% * (speed of light)^2 / (3200 calories/pound)).

Let's walk through it: The first half—the numerator—is a guess for the ratio between how long the Sun has to keep glowing compared to how long a firefly does. I took a wild guess that fireflies have to light up for a few hours each night for one summer, while the Sun has to last another five billion years. The second half—the denominator—is a guess as to the ratio between the stored energy in a pound of firefly vs a pound of star. Nuclear fusion converts about 1% of the input matter to energy, so from E=mc², the stored energy is c² kg/kg, whereas animal matter (say, butter) is about 3,200 food calories per pound. The result should tell us the ratio between a firefly's brightness per pound and the Sun's. And the answer we get says that the fireflies are a few thousand times brighter—which is roughly what we got from working through it the other way!

It's true that we got lucky with some of our guesses, but since we made errors in both directions, they tended to cancel out. This kind of thing works more often than it seems like it should!

But wait! A mass of fireflies that big would run into problems. Besides the obvious problems with gathering that many animals in one place, the fireflies would block each others' light. The inner fireflies would be hidden behind the outer ones, and the total brightness would be limited.[6]But the light from the core fireflies wouldn't just vanish. After bouncing around a few times, it would be absorbed by neighboring fireflies, which would get warmer. This is sort of like how radiation makes its way out of the Sun's core—but in the case of the fireflies, they'd die from the heat before the process got very far.

Since the only light that matters is the light at the surface, we could imagine arranging the fireflies in a hollow sphere, with their lanterns pointing outward. Or, to make thing simpler, we could imagine a single giant firefly. How big would it need to be?

Since we know our firefly will need to give off about \( 3\times10^{31} \) times as much light as a normal firefly, it will need a glowing patch \( 3\times10^{31} \) times larger. Since surface area is proportional to length squared, our firefly will have a body length \( \sqrt{3\times10^{31}}=5\times10^{15} \) times longer than a normal firefly, which would make it about the size of the Solar System.

Since mass is proportional to length cubed, our firefly would weigh \( \left( 3\times10^{31}\right)^{\tfrac{3}{2}}=1.6\times10^{47} \) times as much as a normal firefly, which works out to about half as much as the entire Milky Way galaxy.

Such a firefly would immediately collapse under its own weight and become a black hole. In fact, given the distribution of galaxies in our universe, there's an upper limit to how large black holes can grow, and this firefly would be bigger than that limit. That means our firefly would become the largest black hole in the universe. It would give off a lot of light as it devoured our galaxy, and then, eventually, it would give off none at all.

Black holes last a long time, but they eventually evaporate through Hawking radiation. When the black hole era of our universe comes to an end, black holes will evaporate one by one, with the smallest evaporating faster. Since our firefly's black hole would be the largest one in the universe, it would be the last to evaporate—a final outpost of irregularity in a universe fading toward heat death.

We should probably add that to the identification chart, just in case.

When it comes to downloading apps to your Android device, you’re free to get them anywhere. The Play Store is the most popular source and likely the safest, but you can use any store or even download APKs and install them directly.

However, downloading apps from outside of the Play Store presents risks. Many APKs can be tampered with, so getting malware is a real possibility. With Android 7.0 Nougat, you can see exactly where your apps came from.

Under App Info, you will now see where your app has come from. It uses the getInstallerPackageName method, which works with the Play Store and Amazon Appstore. If the app was downloaded outside of those two stores (or other stores that fill out that string), you’ll just see “Package Installer.”

This will be a good way to diagnose problems with someone’s smartphone. You can now see if your grandma has been downloading Candy Crush from shady websites rather than the Play Store. Will Google use this for evil? Will it track where we download our apps? Leave your thoughts in the comments!

This is how we work.

image / twitter / facebook / patreon

http://theunderfold.com/2016/07/19/politics/

Enjoying life is for young people and retirees. Those of us in the middle… way too busy for that.

Spider-Woman (Dennis Hopeless, Spider-Women Omega)

Texts From Superheroes

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Bored of running Chrome OS on your Acer C720 Chromebook? Want to turn it into a ‘hackintosh’ Mac Laptop?

Well, now you can.

CoolstarOrg, a genius at getting other OSes up and running on Chrome OS hardware, has written a detailed guide on how owners of the Acer C720 can install Mac OS X 10.11 ‘El Capitan’ on their Chromebook.

A timely “hackintosh” report, all told. It was just over a year ago that we reported on CoolStar’s effort to get OS X 10.9 Mavericks up and running on an the exact same Chromebook.

Sure, there are caveats and practicality issues, but it’s a great case of “…because why not?”.  Chromebooks are basic Intel-based PCs: they can run Linux, they can run Windows, so it’s no surprise that they can also run Mac OS X.

El Capitanbook

You will need an Acer C720 with an Intel Core i3-4005U and 4 GB RAM to follow along, as this chipset is the one most compatible with OS X (requiring only a few minor tweaks).

You’ll also need a a user-upgraded 64 GB (or higher) SSD and a legit copy of Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan ready to boot from a USB.

Don’t expect miracles once you’ve jumped through the required hoops, either. Trackpad scrolling is described as “poor and choppy”, and hackintoshers report patchy Wi-Fi issues.

Check out Coolstar’s full guide over on Reddit, and bookmark this page of his website for further details.

[Guide] Install OS X 10.11.5 El Capitan on Acer C720 Chromebook from chrultrabook

The article Acer Chromebook C720 Hacked To Run Mac OS X was first published on OMG! Chrome!

A fine day of shopping @8dcomix http://ift.tt/29PExXV