Imagine waking up and feeling your dog in your bed. You roll around a little but when you sit up, you see something really weird: the dog laying next to you isn’t yours. Sounds crazy, right? Well, that’s exactly what happened to the Johnsons over in Benton, TN. Here’s more from the CBC. The interloper was “big, brown and furry,” Johnson said, and most importantly, “absolutely not my dog.” “I rolled over and I stared [at my husband] and he stared at me, and we were like, is this going to hurt us? You know, what do we do? Where…
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For fans of The Office (a show I’m just now watching for the first time), there’s a great interview with Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey. Appearing on Seth Meyer’s talkshow, the duo from our favorite paper company talks about how the show was saved by an unsuspecting device. The episode from 2005 revolves around an iPod as a Secret Santa gift. Apple shortly thereafter announces its 5th generation iPod, which can now play video. Part of this enhancement was a new offering to sell individual episodes of TV shows on the iTunes Store. Sure enough, The Office was one of…
Books are in a weird resurgence right now. Barnes & Noble, once the villain of the bookseller world, is seen now as a refuge where books can be given space. Let’s face it, they’re the only bookseller with space large enough to house all these books. Finally, B&N has decided to give the old Nook eReader another try. But they mean it for real this time. Alex Cranz at The Verge has more. The Nook GlowLight 4e charges via USB-C and has 8GB of built-in storage, which is standard for an e-reader at this price. It also has a 6-inch…
With little surprise, Apple held its annual developer conference. Everything we knew was coming was announced: iOS 16, iPadOS 16, watchOS9, and macOS 13 (Ventura). There’s a bunch to break down, including some hardware. I have thoughts. Let’s dive in. If I were to distill iOS 16 to core updates, this version brings improvements to the lock screen and Messages. Basically you get to “un-send” and edit a sent message. You get a 15-minute window to do those things. To me, that’s too long. The other cool thing is the ability to hold on the subject of an image and…
It’s impossible to write TimeMachiner and not talk about the reveal of the “New Delorean”. For a few months the Delorean Motor Company (no relation to the original DMC) has been teasing something new. A couple of silhouettes were put onto their homepage and that was it. Some rumors were floating around on whether it would be stainless steel, how powerful it would be, and what it would price at. Now we have our answers. This new “delorean” is dubbed the Alpha5. It’s a fully-electric car sporting a 100kWh battery pack, a 2.99 second 0-60 and a $175,000 price. From…
Pianist Glaucio Cristelo, who goes by the name “Piano Rock” worked some magic on a piano at a Brazilian shopping mall. With over half a million views, his rendition of the Foo Fighters song Everlong is amazing to hear and watch. His channel is chock full of great songs. I highly recommend checking them out!
Straight from the “How Stupid Can You Be” department is reporting about Chinese company BOE. This supplier for Apple manufactures OLED screens for the iPhone 13. In a massively-dumb move, BOE decided on their own to change the specs of how the displays were made and didn’t tell Apple. Gijong Lee at The Elec has the not-so-shocking consequence of BOE’s stupidity. The company was caught having changed the circuit width of the thin film transistors on the OLED panels it made for iPhone 13 earlier this year, people familiar with the matter said. This was done without Apple’s approval in…
The march of time and technology never stops. The latest item to be reduced to the trash is the final payphone in New York City. In a place where payphones were on every single corner, the city that never sleeps now relies on wireless technology to keep New Yorkers connected. The bank of two phones was on 7th Avenue and 50th Street in Midtown Manhattan. And, as you might expect in Manhattan, graffiti was scrawled on it. The city began removing payphones in 2015 and replacing them with public Wi-Fi hotspots. The removal marks the end of the payphone era…
Google, whose failure to get people to use its various chat apps is well known, has been pushing an SMS alternative for years. RCS was to bring parity to Apple’s iMessage system for non-iPhone users. Google worked tirelessly to get carriers on board with RCS because it’s supposed to be better. And yes it’s better: for spammers. Jon Porter over at The Verge goes over how Android users in India are being flooded with RCS spam that is coming from legit companies. It’s unclear how widespread the issue currently is, but Indian-based Ishan Agarwal — whose recent tweets have drawn…
Microsoft Excel is everywhere these days. It lives on the web via Office 365, in a standalone application since 1992, and has been replicated tons of times. Excel will always be a thing and a commonplace product. But back in 1992, Microsoft tried to wow everyone with what it could do. One elevator, two businessmen, one report they’re trying to complete. It’s a great trip down memory lane.
Last week was a rough week for Netflix. The company that basically invented modern-day streaming, binge-watching, and kicked off the endless rebooting of shows, is in a world of hurt. Last week Netflix officially let go 150 employees. On the surface, this may seem like no big deal. Netflix is a giant company with many thousands of employees. The company is losing hundreds of thousands of subscribers. They’re seeing their stock slide on all this news. However, there’s more to it than that. This is the culmination of a company whose MO led them to catch lightning in a bottle…
Apple has made some big announcements about providing the parts, tools, and manuals to repair their products. This has been due to pressure from governments and Right To Repair making progress on bills in the works. But, Apple never said they had to be nice about it. In a lengthy write-up for The Verge, Sean Hollister goes over the insane process Apple puts a person through in order to repair their iPhone. I expected Apple would send me a small box of screwdrivers, spudgers, and pliers; I own a mini iPhone, after all. Instead, I found two giant Pelican cases…
Straight out of “My Time To Shine” or “Oh Crap” depending on your comfort level comes this story about a passenger turned instant pilot. Darren Harrison was on a small plane when the pilot become unresponsive. Harrison, taking control of the situation, hopped into the pilot seat and got down to business. After leveling out the airplane he radioed Palm Beach Airport for assistance. It was in that tower that one of the controllers walked him through the entire landing procedure. Controller Bobby Morgan is a flight instructor and was able to verbally guide the plane to the airport and…
From the “hell yeah” department, things are looking pretty dire for the town of Passadumkeag, Maine. This small town has had a clerk working in the town’s offices. It’s now in the past tense because she walked off the job over denied vacation. Jhanvi Mehtalia has more of how a single person literally shut a town down. Christen Bouchard was the town clerk in Passadumkeag, Maine, since 2020. She requested a two-week vacation about a month and a half ago. Her plea was denied by the board of selectmen. They claimed that no one was available to step in for…
In an unstable market comes very unstable times. For the past few weeks, everything in the cryptocurrency world is plummeting back down to earth. People who have been heavily invested in coins like Bitcoin and Etherium are taking a bath in losses. Things that claim to be “investments” like NFTs are also being realized as worthless. Over on the trading side, K. Holt at Endgaget writes about how Coinbase has paused hiring. For the record, Coinbase is one of the largest exchanges to trade in crypto and is probably one of the best-known sites out there for it. The company…
The internet is an amazing place to mix two separate things together and create comedy. Over on YouTube, someone took a Legend of Zelda animated short and overlaid it with audio from Beavis and Butt Head. Not only does it work, but it’s quite funny. Back in the 80’s the Super Mario Bros Super Show was a massive hit. Part live action and part animated shorts, the show was a quick pulling-together of work in order to get something related to Nintendo on the small screen. One great part of the show was that on Fridays, the animated short changed…
Vanity Fair’s Anthony Breznican has a huge writeup about the current state of Star Wars, Lucasfilm, and the upcoming Obi Wan Kenobi show on Disney+. It’s a lengthy writeup featuring interviews with many castmembers of various shows. However, this quote from Kathleen Kennedy of Lucasfilm misses the mark. The 2018 movie Solo explored Han Solo’s younger years, with Alden Ehrenreich taking on the role of the smuggler originated by Harrison Ford. The film has its admirers, but it made less at the box office than any other live-action Star Wars movie. Solo’s swagger may be too singular for another actor to replicate. “There should…
60 Minutes has a great interview with a young fellow named Peter McIndoe. On a whim, during a protest he saw, he decided to start his own movement: Birds Aren’t Real. Sounds crazy? Think again. Birds Aren’t Real is a fun way for McIndoe to show the absurdity of many of the conspiracy theories raging through the world today. From vaccines to QAnon to election fraud to 5G, all these cockamamie theories rile up real people to act on real ambitions and beliefs to advance their cause. But McIndoe is different. His goal is to hold up a mirror to…
In a world of Apples, Google wants to be… a Google-type of Apple. That’s my takeaway from the annual Google I/O conference last week. In typical Google fashion, they debuted new hardware, Android updates, and sorta-near-future mind-blowing tech. Let’s dive in. Pixel Watch was not only leaked but something that had been rumored for a while. It’s round, has proprietary bands, and runs Wear OS. It’s hard to leave much to surprise when Google let the cat out of the bag a while back. So far, it looks nice, and honestly, Android users deserve a tightly-integrated wearable experience like Apple…
Scammy call centers in parts of India are notorious for bilking people out of millions of dollars. It’s no secret that people fall victim to these schemes all the time. It makes scammers a lot of money. So it’s not hard to see why they keep doing it. Well, glitter bomb builder Mark Rober decided to have his way with them. Rober, whose YouTube channel boasts 21.8 million subscribers, teamed up with two other channels to exact revenge. The scammers’ locations were revealed with the help of scam-baiter Jim Browning. Armed with this information, the Trinity Media folks flew over…
It’s hard to imagine Apple without the iPod. In the Steve Jobs era, the iPod was the device that took them from “doing okay” to becoming a monumental success of a company. Even if you weren’t (or aren’t) an Apple fan, you had or were surrounded by iPods in the early aughts. And now that era is over. On May 10th Apple put out a press release stating what we all knew was coming at some point: the iPod Touch was being fully discontinued. Since its introduction over 20 years ago, iPod has captivated users all over the world who love the…
Autocorrect is both an amazing invention and a royal pain in the ass. Since the original iPhone, users have struggled against the “smart” system meant to fix misspellings and tapping on virtual keys much smaller than our fingers. But what does the inventor of Autocorrect think about the system? Luckily Joanna Stern at WSJ interviewed Ken Kocienda, the person himself. One thing that strikes me the most is how open Kocienda is to improving the system. I personally run into the “We’ll” and “Well” assumptions all the time. Most of the time my phone gets it wrong. Further, her tip…
Apple, who has historically been anti-remote work, has made a lot of headlines in the past months. Their policy has shifted in this COVID reality to one where they will move to a hybrid model. It ramps up with 2-days a week and then to 3-days a week in the office. Many are not happy about it. And how, Apple’s refusal to all fully-remote work has compelled their Director of AI to resign. The story by S. Dent at Engadget has the details. Now, Apple has lost director of machine learning Ian Goodfellow over the policy, according to a tweet…
Bargain hunters should be on the lookout when rummaging through Goodwill or any other thrift store. You may end up with a rare piece of world history in your living room. Sounds crazy, right? Well that’s exactly what happened to Laura Young who purchased a genuine Roman bust from Goodwill. Her cost? $35. Chantal Da Silva at NBC News has more. Laura Young, a Texas antiques dealer, thought she had found a steal when she came across a stunning statue at a Goodwill store in 2018 for just under $35. And while she suspected she had come across something “very…
Passwords are one of the worst inventions in the modern computing age. They’re impossible to remember, places make us change them on a constant basis, and and the requirements get harder and harder. The idea of getting rid of the password has been tossed about for years, but there’s a new effort from the major players to make it happen. Ron Amadeo at Ars Technica has more. The standard is being called either a “multi-device FIDO credential” or just a “passkey.” Instead of a long string of characters, this new scheme would have the app or website you’re logging in…
Ford’s F-100 pickup truck is pretty iconic. The design was one that was around for a long time. It was popular and has a retro-cool look to it that only few vehicles can achieve. Now, Ford is doing something awesome: putting a Mach-E motor into it. Umar Shakir at The Verge tells us more. Ford Performance, the automaker’s motorsports division, designed and commissioned the F-100 Eluminator and was built by MLe Racecars in Washington. And like many of Ford Performance’s other one-off projects, this F-100 won’t be available for purchase. It exists solely as an auto show car that displays…
Some friendly competition is happening with multiple stores over in Christiansburg, Virginia. In recent weeks many local shops have begun flinging lighthearted and funny “insults” toward one another. Jen Cardone over at WHSV has more. The Christiansburg Sign War started as a friendly business sign competition. The first two businesses to fire the first shots were a music and shoe store that inspired others to get into the game. Now, more than 13,000 people on Facebook are sitting on the edge of their seats to see what businesses will post next. The war began when Jim Bohon, a guitar and…
The Kindle is one of the best single-use products on the market. To me, it’s everything a dedicated device should be. It does one thing and excels at it. In fact, anything else the Kindle tries to do (audio, web browsing, etc) is laughably bad. One part of the Kindle that’s been different than other eReaders out there was the lack of support for the common ePub file format. Now, Amazon seems to be finally adopting it. In an Amazon kind of way. Alex Cranz has more. What this has meant in practice is that, for the last 15 years,…
Hotels across the globe provide soap and shampoo to their guests. It’s been a mainstay of hotels since the beginning. For years there was an effort to move away from single-use items. I’ve been to a few hotels with pump bottles in the showers in order to reduce waste. Of course, COVID changed things and single-use items are back in fuller force. But, where does all that unfinished, but used, soap go? Zachary Crockett at The Hustle tells us. Shawn Seipler launched Clean the World and set out on a mission of getting those millions of bars of wasted soap to children…
Yet again we are seeing a car company look to the world of recurring revenue to help boost sales. A GM subscription looks to be on the horizon. I hope like other attempts at a car subscription, it dies in a very large fire. Rob Stumpf at The Drive has more. General Motors expects consumers to fork over as much as $135 per month on top of their car note in the coming years just to pay for subscription features. Previously, General Motors’ Senior Vice President of innovation and growth, Alan Wexler, said that the company’s research indicated that consumers…