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…
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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…
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…
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,…
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…
The internet is a place where people make connections for a variety of reasons. None more odd & interesting was an unknown-to-me way was group chats for people who had the same first name. Incredibly, many of these groups that formed a decade or more ago continue to endure and live on today. Annie Rauwerda at Input has more of these unique groups. Around the world, people are maintaining multigenerational, global friendships with their same-named counterparts — Jake Wright, William Hodgson, Jordan DaSilva, and Josh Brown, to name a few. Sometimes, name twins commiserate about shared experiences: a sixteen-member Council…
We’ve seen a boom in the availability of tiny libraries across the world. These small structures can be found in parks, outside people’s homes and in other public spaces. Often they have clear doors on the front and are stuffed with books to take. The idea is great and it’s also a wonderful way to leave some books you wish to pass onto other readers. A new idea called BookCrossing aims to add to this by becoming a way to share and track your passed-on books. The idea was brought to my attention a while back on Twitter when I…
In what is surely one of the most out-of-left-field announcements from Apple in a long time, they have done something I have never seen them do: They resurrected a product. Specifically, the HomePod smart speaker is back and in its Version 2 form, it is very much similar to the HomePod that was discontinued in 2021. A quick rewind. In 2017 Apple announced a rich-sounding speaker that had Siri built in. The HomePod was designed in the opposite way of Alexa / Amazon Echo where it was for music first and an assistant second. Most of the demo focused on…
In the late 90s and early aughts, it was thought that print was dead and the Internet would replace everything physical. That hasn’t happened and one company has stuck around to this day: Barnes & Noble. The bookseller has outlasted Borders, Waldenbooks, and B. Dalton Booksellers to be the last chain store standing. In the past decade, B&N has felt like it’s teetering on the edge, but recently something amazing has happened: Not only is Barnes & Noble profitable again but they actually plan to open new stores. Sounds crazy, right? Ted Gioia writes about it at The Honest Broker.…
Let’s start with the end of this story first: John Deere sucks. That is the most important part to know because, like others, they have fought tooth and nail to stop people from repairing the stuff they buy from Deere. In a society that’s moving more toward renting everything, being locked out of fixing your farm equipment is nearly the definition of absurd. So what’s the deal? P.j. Huffstutter from Reuters has news about an agreement between these two groups. Equipment makers such as Deere have generally required customers to use their parts and service divisions for repairs and until…
With the incredible computing power we all possess these days, it is infinitely fascinating to see how people can remaster, edit, and recut classic cinema into something more interesting and enthralling. From Thundercats to Terminator 2, there have always been great fan edits put out there. Now comes this 6-minute video from Scene 38 that reimagines the iconic Obi-Wan Kenobi vs Darth Vader lightsaber fight in Star Wars – Episode IV – A New Hope. Here’s what they have to say about this incredible video: “Scene 38 ReImagined” is about the final confrontation between Ben Kenobi & Darth Vader in…
In yet more proof (like we needed any) that Facebook Meta is still falling quite short in making their virtual reality world Horizon Worlds a thing, Wired reporter Eric Ravenscraft tells his tale of trying to hold a holiday party inside that system. Spoilers: it was a big mess. For starters, organizing an event using Horizon Worlds is far from intuitive. I spent a couple of hours trying to figure out how to add people to a group—without having to add coworkers as friends on my personal Facebook account. I eventually found an obscure tool that lets you generate a…
Meetings suck. They’ve always sucked. Generally they go longer than they need, key people can’t attend, and they can easily become unproductive which is the exact opposite of a meeting’s purpose. If you’re an employee of Shopify, your calendar is about to get a lot more open. Because in 2023, Shopify is telling everyone to scrap nearly all their meetings. Matthew Boyle at Bloomberg has more. As employees return from holiday break, the Canadian e-commerce firm said it’s conducting a “calendar purge,” removing all recurring meetings with more than two people “in perpetuity,” while reupping a rule that no meetings at all…
Apple Music has been in fierce competition with Spotify since the launch of Cupertino’s service. Aside from Spotify Wrapped (which Apple greatly improved their version in ’22), there are few differences in services. It really comes down to personal taste and preference rather than which is ‘better’. Because both are damn good. Apple is looking to up its game with the rollout of its new Sing feature, which is essentially karaoke for your devices. The best part? It’s included with an Apple Music subscription and all you need is a supported device. Here’s more from Apple’s Newsroom announcement. What Apple…
Even though it’s 2023 and we think the world is extremely connected, there are still parts of the globe that are not only disconnected but visiting these locations could be deadly. YouTube channel RealLifeLore documents Sentinel Island, an isolated piece of land that is part of the Andaman Islands, and the local population is one that voluntarily isolates from the world. The Sentinelese protect their land from visitors by force and it’s even been recorded in the news how visitors will kill intruders. The fascinating part to me is how this (and other voluntarily isolated groups) on Earth are aware…
With the massive proliferation of Amazon Echo / Alexa devices, Amazon found a gaping hole by which to get their hardware into people’s houses. For years Amazon has generally released shoddy, commodity (AKA crap) they sell at a loss in order to get you to use their services more. The Echo was a hit, mostly due to its incredible speech recognition and speed with which it could reply. When Amazon first introduced the Echo, the question was “what do you do with this thing?” but it quickly became a perfect Kitchen computer for setting timers and reminders. Alexa was the…
When science fiction becomes science fact, it can be awesome. Other times it can be really bad. In the case of “Asimov’s Laws of Robotics”, it has become reality to examine the first law “A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.” because, in a whirlwind of decisions, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors first approved the use of deadly force by police robots but then reversed that decision. Judy Serrano at Gizmodo has more. San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors voted 8-3 on a revised version of the policy, which now prohibits police from using…
One of the greatest achievements in the past decade has been the ability of local public libraries ability to shift to offering more and more digital items. In a world where many of our books, movies, music, and other things are digital they have kept up. Now in a very cool twist, some libraries have launched their own music streaming service for patrons. Claire Woodcock at Vice has more. Over a dozen public libraries in the U.S. and Canada have begun offering their own music streaming services to patrons, with the goal of boosting artists and local music scenes. The…
With people looking for Twitter alternatives, because… you know why, there have been many giving Mastodon and others a try. One that has come up is called Hive, a social network I’d never even heard of a month ago. The influx of people has been so massive though that this 2-person company is feeling the crunch. So much so, they were forced to offline the entire service to fix security issues. Sarah Perez at TechCrunch has more. The company has now taken the fairly radical step of fully shutting down its servers for a couple of days in response to…
We all know dogs get excited when they see us, but is that because they miss us or know we’re going to feed them? It’s been speculated that dogs are pretty damn smart, but we need the science to back that up. So leave it to 60 Minutes’ 2014 story about Chaser: the smartest dog in the world. The part that surprised me the most is the lack of scientific research into the mental ability of dogs in general. To think that it’s only been a few decades since work has been done with dogs is incredible. If you want…
Anker, whose sub-brand Eufy, has built a ton of goodwill in the decade-plus it’s been in business. They’ve created many sub-brands with Eufy being one for the home and consisting of cameras. They’ve promised zero-subscription, zero-cloud, encrypted video since Day 1. Imagine my surprise when news broke that data is going to the cloud. Oh, and video streams aren’t encrypted at all. Sean Hollister at The Verge has more. This week, we repeatedly watched live footage from two of our own Eufy cameras using that very same VLC media player, from across the United States — proving that Anker has…
You know we’re firmly in December when you begin seeing the plethora of people sharing their year-end Spotify Wrapped. This compilation of listening stats has been awesome to see but has always made me, an Apple Music subscriber, a bit sad that I haven’t had anything similar. Apple has finally fixed this egregious error by completely revamping its year-end Replay feature. And it’s awesome. Hartley Charlton at MacRumors has more. The overhauled experience puts the new highlight reel feature at the forefront of the Replay webpage, which users are encouraged to interact with before delving into more detailed information and…