In a world where there’s always enough money to spend and enough companies to buy, leave it to Amazon to buy one of the biggies. News broke late last week that the World’s Largest Bookstore has acquired iRobot, the company that makes the Roomba. The price tag? A cool $1.7 billion. Brian Heater at TechCrunch has more. “Since we started iRobot, our team has been on a mission to create innovative, practical products that make customers’ lives easier, leading to inventions like the Roomba and iRobot OS,” CEO Colin Angle said in a release. “Amazon shares our passion for building…
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Animals and internet videos are a great mix. Nothing new there. We’ve had countless animal videos go viral over the years. This time around we have an unusual species gain the TikTok spotlight: Emmanuel the emu. Taylor Blake runs a hobby farm called Knuckle Bump Farm. She has a variety of animals there and that includes Emmanuel the emu. Blake has posted over 200 videos to her TikTok account. Lately Emmanuel has decided to crash the party and hog the spotlight. @knucklebumpfarms Emmanuel and I wanted to pop in and say THANK YOU for all of the love and support!…
A terrible loss in the sci-fi world this past weekend as Nichelle Nichols has beamed up to join some of her fellow Enterprise crewmates. Nichols, best known for playing Lieutenant Uhura, was active throughout the years between Trek shows and movies. Nichols was a groundbreaking performer, sharing American television’s first scripted interracial kiss with “Star Trek” co-star William Shatner, who played Captain Kirk, in the 1968 episode “Plato’s Stepchildren.” Nichols also used her celebrity to shed light on the civil rights struggle in the 1960s. In an interview for the Archive of American Television, Nichols explained how she wanted to…
The Nissan Leaf was one of the first electric cars to sell en masse. The automaker made a big splash in 2011 with a car that was somewhat affordable, but also had decent styling. Now, the Nissan Leaf is no more. The company has announced they will be phasing out the car by 2025. Nathan Bomey at Axios has the story. After its debut in 2011, the Leaf quickly became the best-selling EV in the world. But it soon ceded the throne to Tesla, and never came close to achieving the vision laid out by former Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn:…
It’s no secret that Amazon is pushing hard into grocery. Here on Long Island, there are no less than six Amazon Fresh stores under construction. One innovative aspect of Amazon stores are their “Just Walk Out” system that tracks your items and auto-bills you for them when you leave. That works great for convenience store items, but what about grocery? That’s where the Amazon Dash Cart comes in. James Vincent at The Verge has more about this. The cart’s main feature is a sensor array in the rim that uses AI-powered cameras and barcode scanners to identify whatever you put…
Over in Littleton, Colorado they’re doing something I strongly believe should be adopted worldwide: they elect a dog mayor. The winner of this race is a 5-year-old Basset Hound named Murdoch. Donning goggles and some antlers on a headband, his job is to bring joy and awareness to the small town. KMGH has more of this tail. It was a contest to bring attention to historic preservation within the city. “We wanted to heighten awareness,” Roxborough said. Each dog candidate posed for photos in front of historic sites in Littleton. Voters responded, casting a total of more than 6,000 votes.…
Once considered the future of aviation, the Concorde is now a notable part of flying history. However, it doesn’t stop the fascinating impact it had on air travel. Over on YouTube, the Imperial War Museum channel has a great video going over the history of the Concorde’s testing phases. The video interviews some of the original engineers of the airplane. Originally it was supposed to need a year of testing. It ended up taking eight before it was ready for commercial use. In that span, the cost and environmental blowback led to only Air France and British Airways taking their…
Sometimes the way the web used to be is something we long for. That looks to be the concept behind Plain Text Sports. This website does one thing and one thing only: show sports scores in plain text. I came across Plain Text Sports on Twitter when apparently the developer CodeIsTheEnd decided he could do it better than ESPN, Yahoo, or even the leagues themselves. And honestly, I think it’s awesome. The page is sparse and laid out in a very simple fashion. But, as advertised, there’s no nonsense to be found. The developer’s code has all you need to…
I’m a big fan of electric vehicles (EVs). I used to talk about them extensively in my previous days as a podcaster. With the past decade ushering in actual EVs people can buy, some attention has been put on infrastructure. Some geniuses in North Carolina don’t like the idea of public charging. Now they are looking to stop those pesky chargers in their tracks. Nico Demattia at The Drive has more. Republican North Carolina State Representative Ben Moss has introduced a new bill, H.B. 1049, that would ban free public electric vehicle chargers, unless free gas and diesel pump alternatives…
If there was a Dollar Store for the internet, Wish would certainly be it. Cheap, sub-par, sometimes knockoff goods, Wish is the place where you can buy weird stuff and things that end up looking nothing like the images on the site. At the NY Times, Tiffany Hsu and Sapna Maheshwari report on how Wish, once flush with cash, has stumbled so hard they’re barely keeping afloat. There were unbelievable bargains on “bestdeeal9,” a store hosted on the e-commerce platform Wish, including a $2,700 smart TV being sold for $1 and a gaming computer advertised for $1.30. But none of…
One of the most infamous Apple products to hit the market in the first Non-Steve-Jobs Era was the Newton. This PDA (remember those!?!?) was Apple’s attempt to make a device that could be portable, useful, and have some amazing technology in it. The Newton was an absolute failure for Apple. Now, 30 years later, Jeremy Reimer at ArsTechnica looks back at this device with so much wasted potential. The Newton MessagePad 100 went on sale for $900 in 1993 dollars, or about $1,800 today. For that money, you received a device that was absolutely innovative and different but which still…
Spoiler Warning if you’re not caught up on Stranger Things 4. If you haven’t watched it yet, skip this story. Back in 2016 the kids were doing an interview for the show. At one point, shown below, Gaten Matarazzo who plays Dustin, speaks of a fan theory as to what is going on in the Upside Down. Now here in 2022, it seems this was very much spot on. You can view the video directly on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAuN5yVFkfQ Well played 2016 Stranger Things fan who nailed this. Well played indeed.
For the past two decades we’ve lived cable hell. It’s the place where everything we own has a different charger cable and one where there are so many “standards” that never make things easier. It has gotten a bit better in recent years, but now the US is working to push it even further. Jenny Zheng at GameSpot has more on how there is a big push for “the one plug to rule them all”. A group of US lawmakers are urging the Department of Commerce to establish a standardized common charger for all mobile devices. Spearheading the appeal are…
Leave it to the Wide World of TikTok to showcase Austin & Marideth (@Cost_N_Mayor). This pair has come up with a stellar video of dance moves… set to iPhone text tones. There’s 40 in all and this pair certainly has the moves. I don’t know about you, but I find this fun an wildly impressive. It’s also not the first time I’ve seen awesome mixing of tech and music on the platform. @cost_n_mayor Reply to @krustykrustykrab ♬ original sound – Cost n’ Mayor Here’s a link to their video.
One thing I love about retro gaming is the efforts to preserve history. There are many instances where someone stumbles upon a prototype or unfinished game and the community jumps on it to copy the code. Game preservation is super important because this software can be lost to time. Equally important is the literature surrounding those games. Now, thanks to Twitch streamer “Peebs”, every single English manual for the SNES has been scanned and archived for preservation. Luke Plunkett at Kotaku writes more about this achievement. I’m happy to report that, as of July 2022, the project has now completed…
Facebook Meta has been hard in their efforts to get you to know about “the metaverse”. Basically it’s VR. That’s it. That’s their plan. Yes, this is a simplification of what Zuckerberg is doing, but they are investing a ton of time into this. Over at The Verge Adi Robinson, who usually handles anything related to VR, goes through all the prototypes that have been developed. There’s 24 in all. Most are just proofs of concept. None will ship. All are efforts to be a leader in what they think is the next “big thing”. Meta described Half Dome’s tech…
I’ve been saying it for a while now: you never truly own something that is purely digital. We have been sliding into a culture of renting for many years. Now Jon Porter at The Verge has a scoop about Sony’s PlayStation store removing PURCHASED movies from people’s libraries. The shutdown will come into force on August 31st, exactly one year after Sony discontinued movie and TV show purchases through its digital store. At the time Sony said that its customers will still be able to access previously purchased content. Notices posted on the PlayStation website blame “evolving license agreements with content providers”…
Somewhat of a moral dilemma over in Chile wherein a man was paid three hundred times his salary and decided to keep it. This surely takes the “bank error in your favor” Community Chest card and tosses it into a real-life scenario. Jasper King at Metro has more. The unnamed staff member at Consorcio Industrial de Alimentos in Chile did initially raise the eye-watering overpayment for May with his manager who then flagged it to HR. He agreed to return the cash and promised to go to the bank the following day. But instead of giving it back, the man…
I came across this fun video last week that visualizes the most popular websites using data going back to January 1993. In only two minutes and thirty-seven seconds, James Eagle’s video shows how much the web has changed in 29 years. Some notable items that caught my eye were just how dominant Yahoo was for a LONG TIME after it was considered subpar to Google. Yahoo held the top spot starting in July of 2000 when it overtook AOL. It took six years for Google to unseat Yahoo in May of 2006. I also love seeing the variety of search…
Stranger Things is all the hype once more. Season 4 has dropped, bringing the next chapter to completion. Two episodes clocking in at 4-hours is certainly a lot of Hawkins kids to watch. However, one thing that makes a great season even better is the incorporation of music this time around. The Duffer Brothers have not shied away from bringing iconic 80’s music into the Stranger Things universe. It’s always been prominent. But, Season 4 took it to a new level. Without giving anything away, music is a means of survival. To help celebrate this deep interweaving of music into…
There is a fascinating time between January 2007 and January 2010 in the world of smartphones. This short 3-year span was one where Apple was blazing a trail with the iPhone and other manufacturers responding in kind. One standout is the BlackBerry Storm phone. It was a revolutionary failure. Rewinding to Steve Jobs’ unveiling of the iPhone, we were told something we’d never considered as consumers prior: the buttons on a phone were set forever. The iPhone could change or hide buttons whenever. At this time the BlackBerry line was THE smartphone to own. Many came for it and it…
For over a year the production of Back To The Future: The Musical has been running in London’s West End. The production, which was written and handled by Bob Gale, has won awards and overall praise from people who have watched the show. Now, the DeLorean is flying across the pond to New York. Back To The Future: The Musical will be on Broadway in 2023. Jeremy Mathai at SlashFilm has more. The hit time travel movie, starring the unparalleled Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd, has been turned into a musical before, as we previously wrote about here. That…
Leave it to “trends” on TikTok to come up with terrible ideas. The latest viral trend, on the social network that’s definitely not funneling data to China (we promise!), is to buy Kindle books on Amazon, then return them within the allowed window for a full refund. Claire Woodcock at Vice has more of this awful idea. The #ReadAndReturn challenge drew attention to Amazon’s Kindle return policy, which states that readers can “cancel an accidental book order within seven days.” But what’s been presented as a literary community “life hack” is hurting romance-fantasy authors like Lisa Kessler’s bottom line. Vice As…
One of my favorite parts of writing TimeMachiner is finding things that should be on the internet but aren’t. Those little things that fall through the cracks. This video certainly is one of them! Back in the mid-1970s Margaret Hamilton, who played the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz, reprised her role on Sesame Street! Thanks to the incredible efforts of people who unearth these things and put them online, we get to see this amazing footage. According to the poster’s description, this was aired only once but was deemed too scary for children. It was shelved and never…
I’ve been saying it for many months: Apple TV+ is a bonafide hit of a streaming service. But what are the best shows on Apple TV+? Of course, we all know about Ted Lasso. Apple promotes it at every opportunity. However, Severance is the latest show to really knock it out of the park. I cannot state enough how great this show is. It combines great storytelling and visuals that drive the ideas home. There’s a lot more than this pair to watch. Keith Nelson, Evan Romaro, and Milan Polk at Men’s Health breakdown of the top 20 shows on…
In an attempt to combat social isolation amongst the elderly, NY state has decided to begin deploying social robots to people who may be in need. Of course, this program will take money and time in order to see if it is effective, but it’s an interesting take on a big problem. James Vincent at The Verge has more. Intuition Robotics’ claim is that ElliQ can project empathy and form bonds with users. The robot is supposed to remember key details about a user’s life, and shape its character to their own. It will crack more jokes if the user…
It’s 2022 and incredibly it is only this year that we see the closure of the final location of Howard Johnson’s restaurants. Once sporting a thousand locations, “HoJo’s” as many called it, is really gone for good. The final location resided in Lake George, NY which is a popular summer destination. Many visit the area to camp, fish, and boat along the massive lake. With a captive group of vacationers, it makes sense that this location was able to stay open well past the years of all the other HoJo’s. Ed Mazza at HuffPo has more on this and how…
Imaginary “currency” that has no intrinsic value, is wildly manipulated, speculated like crazy, that uses more electricity than many nations, turns out to be a bad idea. Shocker, right? But that’s what is going on in the cryptocurrency world right now. And it’s not just Bitcoin either. For nearly a month, the bottom has fallen out from under the imaginary coins floating around. Bitcoin alone has lost over $2 TRILLION in value since Nov 2021. Being the biggest player in the space, of course, this brought down the value of every other “coin”. It’s losses for everyone who’s involved. Corrie…
Fresh from the sewer and re-emerging from any late-80’s / early 90’s kid’s heart, comes the long-awaited TMNT game for modern game systems. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge is a modern-day take on the classic TMNT video games we saw in the arcade and on home consoles back in the day. Game publisher Dotemu announced the game all the way back in March of 2001. A trailer and some gameplay hit the internet in August and it showed how much effort was going into this game. Emulating a 16-bit style, Shredder’s Revenge takes pieces from all the different Turtles…
Tech events unveiling new software, gadgets, and services are pretty common nowadays. However, back in the earlier times of computers, it was still a nerd’s paradise. Computers were a niche product, existing mostly in professional settings or schools. The Internet was still in its infancy. So, to say that Microsoft’s Windows 95 was a big deal, it’s all true. The Blue OS Museum YouTube account has unearthed and posted the full 90-minute video showing Microsoft’s event. It has everything you could ever want from a company flexing its semi-might at a pivotal point in computing history. From the clothes, to…