When a pet runs away it can be a traumatic experience. A small neighborhood instantly transforms into a vast landscape of places they could go. Sometimes there are happy endings. For the Manuela family and their lost tortoise, theirs did too. However, it took 30 years. Stephen Messenger at The Dodo has more. Flash forward 30 years to 2013. Almeida’s grandfather had recently passed away, and her family gathered at her mom’s childhood home to sort through his possessions. Almeida’s grandfather had left behind a very cluttered attic, and as the the room was cleared and his things moved out…
Video game music is an art form. Composers finally have their own category at the Grammy awards. But watching the music get composed for pinball in the 80s is where some real magic happens. Composer Suzanne Ciani is the main composer in this documentary video showing how she creates music and digitizes speech for Xenon. The table features her voice and original music for all aspects of play. It’s an incredible piece of archival footage; mainly because Ciani talks you through the process every step of the way. From drawings of how the table will look to enthusiastic talk about…
The collection of our personal data to then be packaged and sold is nothing new. TVs do it, websites do it, and companies all over the world do it. It’s why GDPR and CCPA exist. But what do you do if you live elsewhere? That’s where Consumer Reports comes in. A new service + app called Permission Slip is a free offering from the long-trusted review site. In a nutshell it sends data deletion requests to companies on your behalf. Those requests demand those companies comply with the law. And it is pretty seamless. For someone like me who takes…
Read to the end for a post about all the boxes. 👋🏻 Welcome to this week’s edition of TimeMachiner. Thanks for subscribing and checking out my work. I’m so happy you’re here. I’ve been enamored with creature comforts lately. You know, the small things we see or experience from time to time that make life easier. Our lives can fall into a monotinous cycle that repeats daily. However there are innovations that add a small level of relief. I was thinking about this when I went to hand over my email, yet again, to an app I was checking out…
In this ever-evolving world of AI drawing and chat and who knows what else, we find a new realm for computer-generated text-to-voice to apply its skills: audiobook narration. Leyland Cecco at The Guardian has more about how Apple is playing with fire in this experiment. The popularity of the audiobook market has exploded in recent years, with technology companies scrambling to gain a foothold. Sales last year jumped 25%, bringing in more than $1.5bn. Industry insiders believe the global market could be worth more than $35bn by 2030. Apple was due to launch the project in mid-November, but delayed it as layoffs…
YouTube has really taken over our world for entertainment in quick bites, personalities you get to know, and a wealth of knowledge on fixing and operating stuff. YouTube is everywhere and is an important archive of so much information. Now in a super interesting twist, YouTube has announced Study Hall, a collaboration with ASU to earn college credits. Sound crazy? Chase DiBenedetto at Mashable explains why it makes perfect sense. While all Study Hall videos are free to watch on YouTube, individuals can also enroll in associated courses created by Crash Course and Arizona State University educators to earn credits and build…
It’s been an interesting few weeks for Microsoft. After announcing their partnership with OpenAI and incorporating ChatGPT into it, things have gotten… weird. In only a short time it has threatened and insulted users. It has insinuated it spied on its creators via their webcams. To say it’s off the rails is an understatement. Tom Warren at The Verge gives some insight into how Microsoft is trying to reign this in. Reflecting on the first seven days of public testing, Microsoft’s Bing team says it didn’t “fully envision” people using its chat interface for “social entertainment” or as a tool…
Read to the end for an ESP pun. EDITOR’S NOTE: Today’s edition was severely delayed due to an outage with my mail-sending service. I apologize for not being able to get this to you on time. 👋🏻 Welcome to this week’s edition of TimeMachiner. Thanks for subscribing and checking out my work. I’m so happy you’re here. I’m someone who flies a whole bunch throughout the year. Every few months I find myself at an airport and heading toward the skies toward a destination other than NY. When you’re in the skies for enough time you start to take notice…
Forget about eSports and Pay-Per-View boxing. If you’re craving THE thrilling event of the 21st century, look no further than the Microsoft Excel World Championship. Yes, you read that right. Competitors from across the world compete against each other for who can be the winner in a knockout bracket challenge. Even crazier? It is televised on ESPN. Here’s more from Joel Khalili at TechRadar. Organized by the people behind the Financial Modeling World Cup, the Excel “All-Star Battle” took place back in May. It began with eight competitors, who went up against one another in a series of spreadsheet-based challenges…
The saying goes “what’s old is new again” and that really applies to vinyl records. The music format went from the only game in town to a decline with cassettes and CDs to death’s door in less than two decades. The late 90s to early aughts were a time when getting an album on vinyl was near-impossible. Funny enough, it’s also the time when records produced during those days are highly collectible due to the low production runs. The resurgence of records crept in slowly, aided by Record Store Day and a growing interest in the format from people who…
Sonos has always been known for its high-quality audio products. Now they are set to release its newest flagship speaker, the Sonos Era 300. According to a recent report by Scharon Harding at Ars Technica, the Era 300 will focus on spatial audio, offering users a 3D sound experience without the need for additional speakers. Compared to other Sonos speakers like the Sonos One and the Sonos Five, the Era 300 will stand out in key ways. It will reportedly use a combination of sensors and software to create a more immersive audio experience. This looks to be their flavor…
Read to the end to be part of the problem. 👋🏻 Welcome to this week’s edition of TimeMachiner. Thanks for subscribing and checking out my work. I’m happy to have you here. What is it about Bob Ross that lives on so strongly in the modern era? He’s one man who hosted a series on PBS that focused on painting. Not exactly thrilling TV, but on paper that’s all it was. And that is the magic of The Joy of Painting. A quick history: The Joy of Painting aired on PBS from 1983 to 1994. Its creator and host, Bob…
Cute animals never cease to capture attention. And for good reason: they’re cute. With everyone having high-quality cameras in their pockets and the proliferation of cameras set up on people’s properties, there is never an end to seeing nature in action. Dr. Holley Muraco who studies animal behavior posted this gem from her backyard to YouTube. A pair of rescue beavers in a muddy pool of water decided to do their beaver thing and get some work done. It’s four minutes of good stuff.
If a singular game made an impact on the arcade scene in the 90s, it is undoubtedly Mortal Kombat. This game could be the pure definition of Right Place at the Right Time. Arcades were thriving, fighting games were hot thanks to Street Fighter II, and this new game was using digitized actors instead of cartoon characters. Oh and it was gory AF (though tame by today’s standards). MK spawned a ton of sequels and was a key component in the case to form the ESRB. From Nintendo’s decision to remove blood from their port of the game to the…
I don’t mean to brag, but I consider myself an iPhone expert. 😉 Being a fan of Apple and a user of their computers from about 1986 until today, it’s rare for a useful feature to get past me. But, I can’t claim to know it all and in one of those “how did I not know about this?” moments, I’m happy to share a cool feature that’s been out since iOS 14: A personalized daily update by Siri. Since the early days of the Amazon Echo, there’s been a cool feature called the “Daily Briefing”. This was a series…
Deep Culture sends you 10 interesting things every Tuesday. Get smarter each week by clicking here. Read to the end for the most Italian place to eat. 👋🏻 A big hello to everyone who’s new to TimeMachiner this week. Thank you for subscribing and checking out my work. I’m happy to have you here. Sometimes it’s easy to write something in this space to share something that is on my mind. I never want to focus on one thing too much and I do my best to keep things interesting. I could talk about Twitter’s ongoing mess or the depressing…
We tend to think that in this age of digital entertainment that things will always be accessible. But what about things such as video games that were all created before the internet? That’s where two ambitious people come in. Kelsey Lewin and Frank Cifaldi are the heads of the Video Game History Foundation, and these pair are single-handedly working to save games from being lost to time. Bijan Stephen at The New Yorker has more of their herculean efforts. The oldest video games are now about seventy years old, and their stories are disappearing. The companies that created early games left…
For as much flack as I give Amazon for their practices, I will hand one thing to them: they take a page from Google and try lots of things to see what sticks. Not as many as Google but Amazon has its fingers in a lot of areas. Surprisingly, their AWS hosting service is the most profitable part of the company. Now they’re fully expanding into an area they’d dabbled in for a little bit: prescription drugs. The new expansion to “The world’s biggest store” is a simple subscription that can make a big difference for people. Called RxPass, the…
I wish this wasn’t the first time I had to talk about cars with subscriptions to unlock technology already built into your car, but here we are. In the spotlight is once again BMW which is now forcing subscriptions to unlock the stuff in the (very expensive) car you already bought. Brad Anderson at Car Scoops has more. The marque has revealed that five vehicle features are now available through its subscription service, consisting of Remote Engine Start, Drive Recorder, Traffic Camera, Driving Assistance Plus with Stop&Go, and Parking Assistant Professional. Most of these features are available through either a 1-month,…
Get a quick tech tip every Tuesday with Advisorator. Each week, you’ll learn about neat apps, hidden tricks, useful websites, and more, all from a veteran technology journalist. Sign up for free. Read to the end for the person responsible for that U2 album. I’m not much of a mobile game player. In the early days of the iPhone, I played Plants vs Zombies and Angry Birds like many but I never got super into mobile gaming. Occasionally a game would come along that I got obsessed with for a few months. Flight Control was one of those. The concept was simple:…
One oddity of 90s video gaming is Sega’s clandestine work with Michael Jackson. It was rumored for many years that Jackson composed the music for Sonic The Hedgehog 3 along with Sonic & Knuckles. Even more incredible is recently-found footage of Jackson’s work with an unknown Sega simulator game where all the footage has been found. Matt Gardner at Forbes has more. Previously unseen footage of Jackson as the lead actor in the largely unknown Advanced System-1 (AS-1) motion simulator game Scramble Training has finally been made public by a pair of Sega enthusiasts, following the chance discovery of a seemingly forgotten…
Twitter being in the news lately is generally due to some new nonsense by Elon Musk. This time though it’s for bungling their data security. It came out now that 200 million email addresses and other records for Twitter users have been exposed in the endless line of data breaches. Lawrence Abrams at Bleeping Computer has more of the story. Since July 22nd, 2022, threat actors and data breach collectors have been selling and circulating large data sets of scraped Twitter user profiles containing both private (phone numbers and email addresses) and public data on various online hacker forums and…
Mourning the dead is a process that differs by culture, geographic location, customs, and a myriad of other factors. One interesting turn of how technology may augment this process is the work of StoryFile. This company whose purpose is to memorialize Holocaust survivors has been employed at times to let the deceased “attend” and “answer” questions posed to them at their own funerals. Victor Tangermann at Futurism has more. Marina Smith who passed away in June, was able to address the mourners at her own funeral. StoryFile used 20 cameras to film her answering around 250 questions prior to her…
Read to the end for chart manipulation. If you’ve taken even a cursory look at the news in the last week, you have likely seen the headlines. Talk about a bloodbath in tech lately. What do we name this? The Great Backlash? The Great Hiring Miscalculation? Or is it something more simple: The Great Inability To Plan Headcount? I’m not saying staffing a company is easy but look at the numbers courtesy of Daring Fireball: Microsoft: 10,000Google: 12,000Amazon: 18,000 (then announcing 50% of their Comixology division)Facebook: 11,000Salesforce: 7,000 That’s 58 THOUSAND people out of jobs in less than two months.…