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Show Notes – July 13th, 2015

 

It’s Somehow Completely Legal to 3D Print This Poison Dart Gun In an attempt to circumvent proposed regulations that would make it illegal to share or distribute blueprints for any kind of home made gun, Peter Alaric DeSimone has designed a completely legal 3D-printed alternative that shoots .40-caliber blowgun darts instead.Because the term ‘firearm’ only covers weapons that fire a projectile through the use of an explosive charge, airguns, like DeSimone’s c

This Graphic Shows the Effects Texting Has on Your Body Texting too often can take a toll on your body. While it might seem like it’s not a big deal, the physical posture you take on when you’re staring at a tiny device in your hands can have serious negative health effects. This graphic shows what can happen.We’ve known for a while that spending too much time assuming the texting position can cause health problems. While your mileage may vary, and thi

6 Free Android Math Apps to Help You Survive Math Class Do you want to be an astronaut? You’ll need strong math skills. How about a scientist? An engineer? An accountant? A meteorologist? All of these careers — and a lot more — will require you to have an excellent mathematical ability. Jobs that are in some way linked to math typically pay more, are better for your brain, and have fewer potential applicants. There’s just one problem: for the vast majo

Are Beats Headphones Really Designed To Trick You? Last month, Beats by Dre headphones went in for a thorough slagging across the internet, and on this here blog, on the basis of a teardown of the flashy cans. The exercise, conducted by a venture capital outfit called Bolt that focuses on hardware startups, seemed to prove that the headphones were a sham. It turns out that the teardown itself was based on a sham: The headphones were counterfeit. B

Google Maps Can Now Send Directions From Your Desktop to Android Android: A while back, Google added the ability to type “send directions” into Google to automatically forward directions to your phone. Then it added the much more useful ability to send directions from Google Maps to your iPhone. Now, the latter feature finally works for Android phones as well.As long as you have the latest version of Google Maps installed on your Android device, when you look u

Learn to Code for Free While Building Apps for Nonprofits Learn a highly valuable tech skill and build a portfolio of apps while helping a nonprofit? There’s a lot to like about Free Code Camp.The online camp offers free, self-paced coding challenges online that will help you learn HTML, CSS, JavaScript (and jQuery), Node.js, database usage, and more—hundreds of hours of practice and learning projects that by the end should have you not only ready for a

This Software Designs Furniture That Fits Together Like a Puzzle — Design News Pin it Ever get the wrong bag of screws and bolts in a flat pack furniture box? A team of researchers have created software that designs furniture so that it fits together like a puzzle, without hardware. READ MORE »

LA Residents Try to Hide Hollywood Sign From Tourists, Except on Airbnb Last year, a group of homeowners who live in the Hollywood Hills had directions to the Hollywood Sign changed on Google Maps to keep tourists away from their streets. All the tourists, that is, except for the ones who rent their properties on Airbnb. They want those tourists to know exactly where the Hollywood Sign is.When I last checked in with the great disappearing/reappearing Hollywood Sign, r

Microsoft Thanked For Its “Significant Financial Donation” To OpenBSD Foundation McGruber writes: Microsoft has donated a considerable amount of money to the OpenBSD Foundation, becoming its first-ever Gold level contributor in the process. From the OpenBSD Journal: “The OpenBSD Foundation is happy to announce that Microsoft has made a significant financial donation to the Foundation. This donation is in recognition of the role of the Foundation in supporting the OpenSSH

New York is getting a crowdfunded, sunlit underground park New York City has its share of famous parks, but they don’t pepper the landscape like they do in other big cities. The non-profit group Lowline may have a technical solution to that lack of greenery, however. It just crowdfunded preliminary work on a…

Fired Reddit Administrator Victoria Taylor Finally Breaks Her Silence After Reddit effectively consumed itself this weekend over the firing of beloved AMA coordinator Victoria Taylor, redditors have been clawing at themselves for a chance to hear Taylor’s side of things. And now, at long last, the ex-employee has made her first public statement since the real chaos began. http://gawker.com/reddit-in-chao…Posting on the subreddit /r/self, Taylor wrote:All of which

Hacking Team’s Lame Excuse for Selling Digital Weapons to Sudan Hacking Team, the company now equally known for selling intrusive spyware to governments and getting royally hacked, has words for people who disagree with its habit of peddling powerful cyberweapons to regimes with terrible human rights records: What’s a “repressive” regime, anyway? I asked Hacking Team if someone would speak directly to its reputation for selling its remote access spyware—which

Gmail’s “Undo Send” Button Graduates from the Experimental Labs Undo send, one of Gmail’s best experimental features, is officially available to all after being a Gmail Labs feature for many years. Just head to Settings > General and scroll down to “Undo Send” to turn it on. [via Gizmodo]
Okay, So Maybe You Won’t Get Windows 10 on July 29th Are you entitled to a free copy of Windows 10? There’s a flowchart for that. However, there’s no flowchart to tell you when you might actually get Microsoft’s new operating system. Officially, Windows 10 is coming July 29th, but not everyone will get it that day—now, says Microsoft, it will roll out in waves.The official Windows Blog explains:Starting on July 29, we will start rolling out Windows

5 Ways to Stop Your Chromebook Slowing Down Has your Chromebook crawled to a halt? Is it slow to load pages? Is it slowing down generally? Time to speed up Chrome again. I’m an avid Chromebook user myself, and despite advocating their usage as cheap, reliable laptops, I found my own Chromebook was slowing down enormously. Until I finally sorted things out, my pages were loading incredibly slowly and I had no idea why. I went as far as delet

Russia fights ‘death by selfie’ Russian police are warning the public of a new danger: Death by selfie.

The Latest Google Algorithm Creates Video Based On a Few Still Images Google’s engineers can do some pretty incredible things with the consumer technology it has developed—from “dreaming” neural networks based on computer vision to an algorithm that can create video from Street View images.For example, this month we watched as the company’s “dream robot,” also known as its super-advanced artificial neural network, ran wild across the internet. These networks are bei

Linux Creator Linus Torvalds Laughs at the AI Apocalypse Over the past several months, many of the world’s most famous scientists and engineers — including Stephen Hawking — have said that one of the biggest threats to humanity is an artificial superintelligence. But Linus Torvalds, the irascible creator of open source operating system Linux, says their fears are idiotic.He also raised some good points, explaining that what we’re likely to see isn’t som

Gizmodo Where did the word OK come from and what does it actually mean? Gizmodo Where did the word OK come from and what does it actually mean? | io9 The Ten Most WTF Moments from the Penny Dreadful Finale | Jezebel Edward Snowden Might Be Able to Return to the United States | Kotaku Kpop Dance Move Is So Attack on Titan |

This Free Font Automatically Redacts NSA Surveillance Trigger Words Some might see downloading this free font called Seen as the digital equivalent of donning a tin foil hat. Except that we know that security agencies like the NSA are intercepting emails and other communications, scanning for specific trigger words that this font automatically crosses out.But Emil Kozole’s Seen font isn’t necessarily designed to let you slip messages under the NSA’s radar. It’s mo

New Oreo Thin is perfect for people who don’t like Oreos that much “I don’t like Oreos very much.” Try a new Oreo Thin, with a lot less Oreo to dislike! And since they’re for adults, Oreo says they weren’t designed to be twisted open or dunked. Read the rest

Reddit CEO Says Sorry For Screwing Up For So Many Years In a post made on-site after a shitstorm of a weekend, reddit CEO Ellen Pao acknowledged that the company has “screwed up. Not just on July 2, but also over the past several years,” and vowed a change of course. After 180,000+ signed a petition calling for her resignation, the gesture is unsurprising. But it’s mostly a gesture. The reddit rebellion, which raged over the weekend in response to the

Robotic dog pants, dribbles warm saliva, and tries to bite you Here’s some fun: “Place hand in dog’s cage and hold it there for as long as you dare. Dog pants, dribbles warm saliva and other disgusting things.” It’s a coin-operated amusement built by Tim Hunkin, and you can see a customer trying it out in this video. Read the rest

Google-owned Waze launches “RideWith” carpooling app on Android RideWith, seen here looking very, very Waze-y. 5 more images in gallery Waze, the traffic-mapping app that Google acquired in 2013 for upwards of $1 billion, launched its first spin-off app on Monday. The new app, RideWith, sees Waze and Google entering the carpooling business. The app is now live in the Google Play store for Android devices, but it currently only works in Waze’s hom

Eric Holder Says Edward Snowden Could Possibly Work Out a Plea Deal Former US Attorney General Eric Holder—the guy who filed a criminal complaint against Edward Snowden for three felony violations of the Espionage Act—is now hinting that Snowden could strike a plea deal if he came back to the US. In an interview with Yahoo News, Holder acknowledged that Snowden’s whistleblowing started a “necessary debate” about privacy. Asked if that meant the Justice Department

Court orders pirate site owner to pay Hollywood $17.2 million in damages It’s more bad news for Dimitri Mader, owner of a poplar “warez” forum, as a court has ordered him to pay $12.8 million in damages to a collective of Hollywood studios. That’s on top of the $4.4 million award that’ll be split between two music groups and Microsoft. …

Hack Exposes What an Utter Piece of Shit This Spyware Company Is Spyware maker Hacking Team just asked its customers to stop using its software in the wake of a large data breach. Good! Because Hacking Team is a corrupt trashcan company that provides weapons to criminals. The information exposed by hackers this week makes it clear that the Italian company doesn’t give a shit if groups with horrible human rights track records use its software. Of course, Hacking

Nearly 5,000 new Android malware strains are discovered everyday New data from analytics firm G DATA is painting a disturbing picture. Its Q1 2015 Mobile Malware report suggests that nearly a half a million new malware strains were discovered in the first 3 months of this year. That’s a new case of Android malware every 18 seconds, or around…

Gene-modded mosquitoes will fight Dengue Fever in Brazil The Brazilian city of Piracicaba has a potent new weapon in the ongoing fight against Dengue Fever, which infects more than a million people annually: genetically modified mosquito lotharios Created by Oxitec of Abingdon, UK and bred locally within B…

Amazon Celebrates 20 Years with Prime Day — Design News Pin it Amazon is 20 years old, and on July 15, the online
Posted by lena on July 13th, 2015 Posted in Uncategorized

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