Month: April 2017

Few sad as About.com closure announced

When long-lived websites close down, they often give little notice, sending archivists scrambling to rescue its work for posterity. About.com, the venerable topic-mining hive abruptly put to death, seems to be a counter-example: a faceless mountain of bland, undifferentiated, half-plagiarized content that no-one seems sad to see vanish . Even its own CEO is plainly contemptuous of it. That’s why Vogel tells Business Insider he’s going to shut the site down as of May 2nd. “I got a phone call from Joey Levin, who is the CEO of IAC [About.com Group’s parent company]. He asked, ‘What do you think of About.com?'” Vogel told BI. “My answer — in perfect arrogance — was ‘I don’t.’ Who thinks of About.com? Nobody.” But not all of About.com is going away necessarily. Vogel says he will take parts of the website and turn them into separate niche verticals, then announce a new name for the overarching brand at a conference in New Orleans. “A year ago we were a general interest site,” Vogel told The Drum in March. “We were not growing. In fact, we were kind of shrinking. We had great content, but we were doing the wrong thing.” About.com was one of the earliest big web successes to cash out: to Prime Media in 2000 for $690m, then to the New York Times in 2005 for $410m, IAC in 2012 for $300m, and now to the deep void for sweet fuck all—but also the hope that the staff and infrastructure can be used to launch something new. “I’m not going to be the guy who ruined About.com,” Vogel told Business Inside. “ It’s already ruined, so this is all upside here. ”

More:
Few sad as About.com closure announced

Acer’s new Predator gaming laptop may actually be portable

What’s the point of getting a powerful laptop if you can’t drag it to a gaming party? Acer’s latest back-to-school update for its Predator series of laptops , the Triton 700, may actually be portable enough for those trips. It packs the latest NVIDIA graphics chips and an advanced dual-fan cooling system into a chassis that’s just 18.9mm (or 0.75 inches) tall. Acer hasn’t shared many other details about the notebook yet, except to say that it will be ready for the back-to-school season this summer. Folks who don’t need quite as premium a system can consider the new Nitro 5 laptop, which offers NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 1050 or 1050Ti graphics and the company’s CoolBoost cooling system. Again, at its New York presentation, the company didn’t dwell very long on each product, so other details about the laptop are scant, and we’ll update this post as we get more later from our hands-on. For those who prefer to invest in their at-home battle stations, Acer also unveiled a 27-inch 4K gaming monitor called the Predator X27. It boasts a 144Hz refresh rate, 4ms response time and uses Quantom Dot technology for better image quality while saving energy. The X27, like many of its rivals, supports NVIDIA’s G-Sync HDR technology for smoother streams with higher definition and contrast. We’ll be taking a closer look at Acer’s gaming lineup for 2017 later, so check back here for more information. Edgar Alvarez contributed to this report.

Read the article:
Acer’s new Predator gaming laptop may actually be portable

How to Add Metal Inlay to Wood

Adding metal inlay is a nice way to provide visual pop to wooden objects or furniture: The art of inlay is something that used to take decades to master. Now, with digital fabrication tools–or heck, maybe even a trim router with a downcut bit guided by a steady hand–the cutting part goes a lot quicker. However, that doesn’t mean the work can be taken lightly. As Instructables user Ninjosh shows, there’s still a fair bit of manual labor and finessing involved: “Inlays are a great way to set your work apart in a crowded market, ” writes Ninjosh. If you’d like to give it a try yourself, he’s laid out a comprehensive Instructable listing all the tools you’ll need and offering plenty of helpful advice, including the all-important, time-saving what-not-to-do’s. Check it out here .

Follow this link:
How to Add Metal Inlay to Wood

Reddit plans to make big changes to how the site looks

Reddit’s default design is a throwback to simpler times on the internet. However, moderators on the site’s numerous subreddits put a bunch of work into making sure their communities stand out from each other by employing CSS (cascading style sheets) to change everything from banner images, fonts, icons and other aspects of the user interface. Reddit’s CEO Steve Huffman said that’s going to change, as the massive discussion board is undergoing an overhaul. Among his reasons — CSS being difficult to learn, and it not translating to mobile where Reddit apparently gets over half its traffic — Huffman also says that the site using the coding language has impeded growth and change. “CSS causes us to move slow, ” he said. “We’d like to make changes more quickly. You’ve asked us to improve things, and one of the things that slows us down is the risk of breaking subreddit CSS (and third-party mod tools).” In the next few months, the site will begin transitioning away from CSS. From the sounds of it, though, a lot of the CSS-powered customization features are going to be built into the site proper. Community calendars and “a lot of the functionality” from sidebars will be available via widgets. The redesigned site will run in parallel with the current version as the changes are implemented. Huffman said the ultimate goal is to replicate what’s already available, and that the dev team will make it easier to use and viewable on the go. Speaking directly to the last point, Huffman said that header images and flair colors will render on both desktop and mobile after the changes. As for mod tools, Huffman said that Reddit is in talks with the developers of third-party mod-tool provider Toolbox to port its functionality into the redesign. Perhaps unexpectedly, Reddit’s users aren’t too excited about the new direction. The big worry is that the changes will strip Reddit’s mods of some of their creative control for their respective communities and that everything is going to look a bit more boring as a result. That might be taking the announcement a little too far. For all we know, there’s a chance that the changeover won’t affect much. Or there’s the other possibility: Reddit will realize how big of an undertaking this is and abandon the refresh — something Huffman hinted at in the comments of his post. Replying to a mod who asked what incentive there was to keep working while the changes were coming, Huffman had this to say: “I would advice [sic] to continue developing until the new stuff is real. Who knows, maybe we’ll screw it up and never release it..” So long as r/CrappyDesign (above) can keep its intentionally awful Comic Sans UI and layout, we’ll be happy. Via: The Verge Source: Reddit

Read more here:
Reddit plans to make big changes to how the site looks

This worm eats plastic bags

Humans discard a trillion single-use plastic bags every year. If you were a wax worm, this statistic would make you drool. The caterpillar loves to eat them. From Atlas Obscura : Frederica Bertocchini, a biologist at the Institute of Biomedicine and Biotechnology in Spain, noticed some wax worms had managed to eat their way through the plastic bags they were being kept in. While other organisms can take weeks or months to break down even the smallest amount of plastic, the wax worm can get through more—in a far shorter period of time. The researchers let 100 wax worms chow down on a plastic grocery bag, and after just 12 hours they’d eaten about 4 percent of the bag, according to findings published Monday in the journal Current Biology. That may not sound like much, but that’s a vast improvement over fungi, which weren’t able to break down a noticeable amount of polyethylene after six months. Image of wax worm: skeeze/Pixabay

View post:
This worm eats plastic bags

NSA backdoor detected on >55,000 Windows boxes can now be remotely removed

Enlarge (credit: Countercept ) After Microsoft officials dismissed evidence that more than 10,000 Windows machines on the Internet were  infected by a highly advanced National Security Agency backdoor , private researchers are stepping in to fill the void. The latest example of this open source self-help came on Tuesday with the release of a tool that can remotely uninstall the DoublePulsar implant. On late Friday afternoon, Microsoft officials issued a one-sentence statement saying that they doubted the accuracy of multiple Internet-wide scans that found anywhere from 30,000 to slightly more than 100,000 infected machines. The statement didn’t provide any factual basis for the doubt, and officials have yet to respond on the record to requests on Tuesday for an update. Over the weekend, Below0day released the results of a scan that detected 56,586 infected Windows boxes, an 85-percent jump in the 30,626 infections the security firm found three days earlier. Both numbers are in the conservative end of widely ranging results from scans independently carried out by other researchers over the past week. On Monday, Rendition Infosec published a blog post saying DoublePulsar infections were on the rise and that company researchers are confident the scan results accurately reflect real-world conditions. Rendition founder Jake Williams told Ars that the number of infected machines is “well over 120k, but that number is a floor.” Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

More:
NSA backdoor detected on >55,000 Windows boxes can now be remotely removed

AT&T’s faux 5G network launches in Austin

At last, 5G wireless is here… sort of. As promised , AT&T has launched its pre-standard 5G network, starting with certain parts of Austin. So long as you have a Galaxy S8 or S8 Plus , you can get speeds that should leave LTE in the dust. Expect downloads about twice as fast on average, the carrier says. Indianapolis is due for the next rollout in the summer, and there will be 20 total areas covered (including Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Nashville and San Francisco) by the end of 2017. And if you’re not inclined to Samsung hardware, you should see “numerous other devices” this year that take advantage of the new network. The launch will certainly give you some bragging rights if you’re an early smartphone adopter, but we wouldn’t quite call it the dawn of the 5G era. As we hinted earlier, the wireless industry is still hashing out the details of 5G . You won’t get “real” 5G until there’s a standard, and that could change both the performance you expect as well as compatibility with early pseudo-5G devices. This doesn’t mean your S8 will lose 5G-like speeds the moment there is a standard, but we wouldn’t count on full support. Arguably, AT&T is launching its 5G network to shout “first!” — it wants to one-up Verizon’s 5G plans and show that it’s ahead of the game, even if it’s only by a matter of a few months at most. Source: AT&T

View article:
AT&T’s faux 5G network launches in Austin

Campy, live-action horror game ‘Night Trap’ heads to PS4

After 25 years, a browser port and a failed Kickstarter , cult classic FMV (full-motion video) game Night Trap is finally getting making its way back to living rooms. Thanks to the folks at developer Screaming Villains and publisher Limited Run Games, the interactive tale of teenage girls stuck in a house under attack by vampires will be released on disc sometime this spring for PlayStation 4 . Based on the trailer below, the video footage isn’t pristine, but it looks about as clean as it probably ever will. Considering that watching video makes up a bulk of the gameplay, that’s pretty important. It isn’t up to the level of the Alien or Jaws remasters on Blu-ray, of course, but the source material wasn’t aiming for high art or box office glory. The “control room” UI (you’re a security guard monitoring the house remotely via closed circuit cameras) you play from looks super slick, too. Our Night Trap release will be available with three different covers, each based on one of the three US Sega CD releases. pic.twitter.com/4fascjPaBq — Limited Run Games (@LimitedRunGames) April 25, 2017 On Twitte r, Limited Run said that its version will be available with three different cover styles based on the trio of US Sega CD releases — replete with the diagonal stripes and off-center art placement. More than that, the cover art is missing one key thing: An ESRB rating. Along with Doom and the original Mortal Kombat , Night Trap and its “violent” content was partly responsible for Entertainment Software Ratings Board and its age-ratings for games. Currently, the remaster is rated T for Teen for violence, blood and suggestive themes. Pricing and an exact release date aren’t known, but based on Limited Run’s previous releases the disc shouldn’t cost more than $25. If you’re itching for something similar, maybe give Until Dawn a shot if you haven’t yet. It’s a slightly different take on teenage horror than Night Trap , but the PS4-exclusive dishes out scares and laughs while serving as a loving homage to the genre. Via: Limited Run Games (Twitter) Source: PlayStation (YouTube)

View original post here:
Campy, live-action horror game ‘Night Trap’ heads to PS4

Mafia used the text-message ticker at the bottom of a sports broadcast to get messages to mob bosses

Quelli che il Calcio (That which is Football) is one of Italy’s top sports broadcasts and it is played in the country’s prisons; it has a ticker that you can send SMSes to that then show up on screen. (more…)

More:
Mafia used the text-message ticker at the bottom of a sports broadcast to get messages to mob bosses