Author: kenmay

Amazon Prime gives you Audible streams for free

Amazon Prime members get a pretty decent bunch of benefits for their $99 a year subscription, and the list of goodies just got a bit longer. The online retail giant now offers its subscribers free access to Audible Channels , a collection of talk show-type streams and audiobooks that would normally cost $5 a month. Prime members can download the Audible app for iOS, Android and Windows 10 to access Channels, which will include ad-free programming and content from The Wall Street Journal , The New York Times , Charlie Rose , Harvard Business Review and The Onion , among others. It’ll also include 20 curated playlists around comedy, meditation and news, as well as a rotating selection of more than 50 audiobooks. In addition to free two-day shipping and now, free Audible content, a Prime subscription also gets you free access to Amazon’s video streaming service , a ton of ebooks, photo storage, early entry to certain deals and a somewhat limited selection of music. But the company could be boosting its library of songs , and that, together with the Audible offering, could really enhance the amount and quality of its content. Source: BusinessWire

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Amazon Prime gives you Audible streams for free

Fury Road before the visual effects were added

They put out a compilation of scenes from Mad Max: Fury Road as they were shot, with no CGI or no artsy color grading. It makes me love the film even more: I want a minimalist cut of the whole thing like this, with the only CGI work being what’s absolutely necessary to make things work (painting out other cameras and wires, adding key explosions, the waterfall…) and CGI-heavy scenes like the sandstorm interior completely removed. One thought, though: this would probably make Fury Road’s sustained, stylized violence (which is rather different from the startling, crude violence of the first two Mad Max movies) less palatable. You’d be surprised how many people already have a problem with it, even if they love the series. It would be an interesting editing challenge. [via io9 ]

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Fury Road before the visual effects were added

Adblock Plus now selling ads

Adblock Plus is to begin reselling the ads it blocks, replacing websites’ original ads with ones under its control—and which it takes a fat cut of the revenue from. The program is meant to be friendly to publishers — it is, after all, letting them display some ads instead of none whatsoever. But there’s still obvious reason for publishers to be unhappy. Acceptable ads [AdBlock Plus’ in-house advertising] are likely to be less valuable than the ads a publisher could otherwise display, limiting what a website can earn. And in setting up its own marketplace, Adblock Plus continues to position itself as a gatekeeper charging a toll to get through a gate of its own making. This was always the gameplan. AdBlock Plus marketed itself as about blocking ads, but it’s really about providing a temporary improvement in user experience to convince readers to insert it as a middleman between them, publishers and advertisers. Once secure, AdBlock Plus can let advertising (and the user experience) creep back to the profitable way it was before, but with it charging rent to everyone. If you block ads, at least block them with something that isn’t taking a shit on both of us: get rid of it and try uBlock Origin . If you don’t like ads but would like to support Boing Boing, buy a t-shirt or an inexpensive gadget from our store. Correction : an earlier version of this post referred to AdBlock Plus as AdBlock. They are different products from different vendors.

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Adblock Plus now selling ads

HP To Buy Samsung’s Printer Business For $1.05 Billion

HP has agreed to a deal with Samsung to acquire their printer business for $1.05 billion, a deal that will be the largest print acquisition in HP’s history. USA Today reports: “The acquisition of Samsung’s printer business allows us to deliver print innovation and create entirely new business opportunities with far better efficiency, security, and economics for customers, ” said HP president and CEO Dion Weisler in a statement. The Samsung deal would give HP access to 6, 500 printing patents as well as 1, 300 researchers and engineers “with advanced expertise in laser printer technology.” While this deal is being negotiated, Samsung’s mobile phone business has been navigating a recall of its Galaxy Note 7 smartphones over issues with batteries catching fire and exploding. One of the most recent accidents reported involved a six-year-old boy in New York, who was using the device when it “suddenly burst into flames.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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HP To Buy Samsung’s Printer Business For $1.05 Billion

Why Bezos’ rocket is unprecedented—and worth taking seriously

Enlarge / Jeff Bezos, founder and Chief Executive of Amazon.com, in May, (credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images) We can say this much for Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com and Blue Origin—he does not lack ambition. First Bezos founded an online bookstore that became the largest retailer in the western world, and now he plans to self-fund a New Glenn rocket that is nearly as tall as the Saturn V launch vehicle and more than half as powerful. As wild as Bezos’ idea sounds, Blue Origin might be able to get the job done. And if Bezos and Blue Origin can fly their massive orbital rocket in the next three to four years, it would be a remarkable, unprecedented achievement in a number of ways that could radically remake spaceflight. Proof of concept First, a few words about why this might really be viable. It is true that all Blue Origin has flown so far is a propulsion module, powered by a single BE-3 engine, and a capsule on a suborbital flight. The company’s New Shepard spacecraft is designed to carry six passengers on 10- to 15-minute hops up to about 100km before bringing them back down to Earth. This is not dissimilar to the first Mercury flights in the early 1960s, hence the moniker New Shepard, named after pioneering astronaut Alan Shepard. Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Why Bezos’ rocket is unprecedented—and worth taking seriously

Samsung loses $26 billion of market value after Note 7 recall

Samsung was having a great year , thanks to the S7 and S7 Edge, enticing investors to toss their money into the pool. Unfortunately, the rest of 2016 hasn’t been going according to Samsung’s forecast. The Korean chaebol has lost a whopping $26 billion (with a B) of its market value since it announced the Galaxy Note 7 recall, according to financial data provider Factset. Its shares apparently dropped 6.9 percent between the Korean Exchange’s close on Friday (September 9th) and Monday, and its stock is currently priced at a bit above $1, 300. That’s the lowest it’s been in months, although as you can see in the graph below the fold, the company has recovered a bit since yesterday. Since around 2.5 million devices were shipped before the recall started, it might have alarmed investors and made them question Samsung’s future in the mobile business. Perhaps in an effort to assuage their fears, the company announced on Monday that Vice Chairman Jay Y. Lee will officially take over his father’s role as the company’s chief. Samsung expected to maintain its high-end smartphone sales in the second half of 2016 with the Note 7’s release. And it probably would have succeeded — we called the latest in the series the “best phone Samsung has ever made.” However, the corporation had to issue a recall after reports came out that some units’ batteries were faulty, making them prone to overheating and exploding. There are now over 70 reported cases of Note 7 devices overheating in the US alone. The government even stepped in and asked people to stop using their phones until they get safe replacements scheduled to come out on September 19th. Ordinary consumers have become so wary of the device, tech analyst Rod Enderle told Inquisitr that the company might have to announce the Note 7’s successor ahead of time in order to bounce back. Source: Quartz

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Samsung loses $26 billion of market value after Note 7 recall

This Is Why Your Credit Card Transactions Take So Long to Clear

When you swipe a credit or debit card at the store, your done with the transaction instantly. So why can’t your account statement keep up? If you’ve wondered why it takes so long for purchases to show up on your credit card statement or withdraw from a bank, it’s because of a long, complicated process behind the scenes. Read more…

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This Is Why Your Credit Card Transactions Take So Long to Clear

Hands-on: Blue Hydra can expose the all-too-unhidden world of Bluetooth

The SENA UD100 Bluetooth adapter, plus a slightly larger antenna, allows Blue Hydra to peer deep into the Bluetooth world. Sean Gallagher My new neighbor was using AirDrop to move some files from his phone to his iMac. I hadn’t introduced myself yet, but I already knew his name. Meanwhile, someone with a Pebble watch was walking past, and someone named “Johnny B” was idling at the stoplight at the corner in their Volkswagen Beetle, following directions from their Garmin Nuvi. Another person was using an Apple Pencil with their iPad at a nearby shop. And someone just turned on their Samsung smart television. I knew all this because each person advertised their presence wirelessly, either over “classic” Bluetooth or the newer Bluetooth Low Energy (BTLE) protocol—and I was running an open source tool called Blue Hydra , a project from the team at Pwnie Express . Blue Hydra is intended to give security professionals a way of tracking the presence of traditional Bluetooth, BTLE devices, and BTLE “iBeacon” proximity sensors. But it can also be connected to other tools to provide alerts on the presence of particular devices. Despite their “Low Energy” moniker, BTLE devices are constantly polling the world even while in “sleep” mode. And while they use randomized media access control (MAC) addresses, they advertise other data that is unique to each device, including a universally unique identifier (UUID). As a result, if you can tie a specific UUID to a device by other means, you can track the device and its owner. By using the Received Signal Strength Indication (RSSI), you can get a sense of how far away they are. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Hands-on: Blue Hydra can expose the all-too-unhidden world of Bluetooth

A Very Detailed Dissection of a Frame From DOOM

DOOM 2016 “cleverly re-uses old data computed in the previous frames…1331 draw calls, 132 textures and 50 render targets, ” according to a new article which takes a very detailed look at the process of rendering one 16-millisecond frame. An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: The game released earlier this year uses the Vulkan API to push graphics quality and performance at new levels. The article sheds light on rendering techniques, mega-textures, reflection computation… all the aspects of a modern game engine. Some of the information came from “The Devil is in the Details, ” a July presentation at the SIGGRAPH 2016 conferences on graphics by Tiago Sousa, id’s lead renderer programmer, and senior engine programmer Jean Geffroy. (And there’s also more resources at the end of the article, including a July interview with five id programmers by Digital Foundry.) “Historically id Software is known for open-sourcing their engines after a few years, which often leads to nice remakes and breakdowns, ” the article notes. “Whether this will stand true with id Tech 6 remains to be seen but we don’t necessarily need the source code to appreciate the nice graphics techniques implemented in the engine.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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A Very Detailed Dissection of a Frame From DOOM

Build a Wi-Fi Walkie Talkie-Like Device With a Raspberry Pi

Walkie talkies are awesome, but what’s even more awesome is one you build yourself. DIYer Daniel Chote’s kids wanted a pair of walkie talkies, so he built the closest thing possible with a Raspberry Pi. Read more…

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Build a Wi-Fi Walkie Talkie-Like Device With a Raspberry Pi