Funimation is launching its own streaming anime service

Funimation announced on Thursday that it is partnering with Sony DADC to create its own ad-free Crunchyroll-style streaming platform, called FunimationNow . The new service will begin rolling out in February and complement the company’s existing streaming offerings through its website. It will be available through not only iOS, Android and Kindle apps as well as directly through the Apple or Amazon Fire TVs. Subscribers will have access to more than 400 titles from the studio’s expansive archive including full series of Dragon Ball Z, Attack on Titan, Fairy Tail, One Piece, Tokyo Ghoul and Space Dandy . There’s no word yet on pricing. [Image Credit: Funimation]

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Funimation is launching its own streaming anime service

Use These Secret Codes to Unlock Netflix’s Hidden Categories

Here’s a trick that’s been around for a while but may have passed you by: secret category codes added by Netflix engineers that can help you narrow down your on-demand video choices. From classic war movies to Brazilian dramas, here’s how to dig deeper into the Netflix library. Read more…

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Use These Secret Codes to Unlock Netflix’s Hidden Categories

Intel’s next NUC will be a quad-core mini PC with Iris Pro and Thunderbolt 3

Andrew Cunningham The Broadwell NUC (left) and the new Skylake NUC (right). 4 more images in gallery Last night, Intel’s opening-day CES keynote focused mostly on wearables and Internet of Things things, the sort of forward-facing, maybe-useful, possibly-vaporware technology that characterizes CES. But in a small meeting this morning, we were able to get more information on less zeitgeist-y but more practical gadgets like the Compute Stick and the NUC mini desktops. The basic NUC boxes have been around for four generations now, so their Skylake refresh is predictable. They still use low-voltage U-series dual-core Core i3-6100U and i5-6260U CPUs like the ones you’d find in Ultrabooks. The i3 versions come with Intel HD 520 graphics, while the i5 boxes have Iris graphics—non-Pro Iris GPUs in the Skylake generation get 64MB of eDRAM cache to help add memory bandwidth, so graphics performance should be quite a bit better than the HD 6000 GPU in the equivalent Broadwell NUC. Intel has dropped the mini HDMI port on the back of the PC in favor of a full-size HDMI port, and it’s added an SD card reader on all models. Otherwise input and output is the same: four USB 3.0 ports (two on front, two on back, one yellow one that can charge devices when the NUC is powered off), a mini DisplayPort 1.2 port, gigabit Ethernet, and an IR receiver and a headphone jack on the front. The lids are still interchangeable, and they can connect to a USB header on the motherboard to extend the capabilities of the box. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Intel’s next NUC will be a quad-core mini PC with Iris Pro and Thunderbolt 3

‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ overtakes ‘Avatar’ as highest-grossing film in US history

“Star Wars: The Force Awakens” just pushed James Cameron’s “Avatar” aside as the top-grossing film in North America. In just 20 days of release, the seventh installment in the space opera saga has earned more than “Avatar’s” $760.5 million lifetime gross. From Variety : One important caveat is that this massive haul does not account for inflation. When pricing increases are factored in, “Gone With the Wind” remains the highest-grossing film in history with $1.7 billion and the first “Star Wars” is runner-up with $1.5 billion. “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” is in 21st place behind classics such as “The Sound of Music,” “E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial” and “Titanic.” Globally, “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” ranks as the fourth highest-grossing pic in history, having earned $1.5 billion worldwide. It opens this weekend in China, the world’s second-biggest market for film. Depending on how enthusiastically it is received in the People’s Republic, “The Force Awakens” could shoot past “Avatar’s” record $2.8 billion global haul.

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‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ overtakes ‘Avatar’ as highest-grossing film in US history

Razer’s gaming Ultrabook lets you bring your own video card

If you’re a gamer, you don’t have it easy when buying laptops: you may want a sleek, lightweight Ultrabook when you’re traveling, but you also want the big, powerful desktop replacement when you’re home. What to do? Razer thinks you can have both. It’s launching the Blade Stealth , a 12.5-inch ultraportable with some proper gaming cred. Its centerpiece is an optional Thunderbolt 3 -powered dock, the Core (below), that lets you use most any modern desktop graphics card when integrated video won’t cut it — if you just have to play Battlefront at max detail with a GeForce GTX 980 Ti , you can. It has Ethernet and four USB 3.0 ports, too, so you only need to plug in one cable to get all your usual peripherals. It’s still a solid machine even if you’re more interested in Facebook than Far Cry . The base $999 Blade Stealth begins with a dual-core 2.5GHz Core i7, 8GB of RAM, a 128GB solid-state drive and a quad HD (2, 560 x 1, 440) screen. It’s light at 2.75 pounds, and you’ll even see Razer’s multi-hued Chroma lighting on the keyboard. Spring for higher-end models (which top out at $1, 599) and you’ll score up to a 4K display and 512GB of flash storage. The Blade Stealth ships this month, and you can get it at Microsoft Stores in February if you need to see it in person. However, the Core doesn’t have either a ship date or a price. That makes it a real wildcard: if it’s expensive or takes forever to ship, the combo won’t be quite so alluring. Nonetheless, this may be your best shot at a best-of-both-worlds laptop. Source: Razer

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Razer’s gaming Ultrabook lets you bring your own video card

See how much fat you’re burning just by breathing out

Using a weighing scale to keep track of your weight is tricky. Your body can lose water, muscle or fat but the scale simply picks up your overall weight. It doesn’t reflect your gym obsession or fat loss with any accuracy. LEVL is a new portable device that analyses your breath to tell you if your body is in fat-burning mode. A white box holds a proprietary nano sensor that checks your breath for the level of acetone, a molecule that your body releases when it goes into fat burning mode or ketosis. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen tech like this: in 2013, NTT DoCoMo demonstrated something remarkably similar. The process is simple: breathe in, breathe out into the inhaler and place it in a white device for an instant reading of the acetone concentration. There is an accompanying app that tracks your analysis to help you maintain a record of your readings over time. The app provides analysis of the amount of calories (and, by extension, pounds) burned off during the day. In many ways, the only thing that LEVL provides is a vague indication that your weight-loss regime is working, or not. But is that really something you would, or need to monitor to such an obsessive level? We’re not entirely sure. Daniel Cooper contributed to this report.

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See how much fat you’re burning just by breathing out

Lenovo says the Yoga 900s is the world’s thinnest convertible

It’s that time of year again: Lenovo whips out some impossibly thin and light laptop. Last CES it was a 1.7-pound notebook , and this year it’s the Yoga 900s, a half-inch-thick, 2.2-pound machine that Lenovo claims is the world’s thinnest convertible laptop. Indeed, I had a chance to handle it in person and it really is absurdly, impressively thin and light. (I know, we always say that. But still.) Before you get too excited, though, it appears that the 12-inch Yoga 900s is the spiritual successor to a machine that … we didn’t like very much. That would be last year’s Yoga 3 Pro , a super-slim model that ultimately got a lukewarm review on account of its sluggish performance and mediocre battery life. The new Yoga 900s is even thinner and lighter, but it too runs on Intel’s watered-down Core M processors, which makes me think the performance isn’t going to be better. Lenovo says the battery life will be longer (up to 10.5 hours), but that appears to be with a lower-resolution screen, not the QHD (2, 560 x 1, 440) option. One thing you’ll get here that you won’t on the Yoga 3 Pro: active pen support. That’s something you won’t even get on the recent Yoga 900 , Lenovo’s similar but higher-performing flagship machine. If you can do without the pen support, though, and don’t mind a little extra heft, you’ll get better performance from the current Yoga 900. Undeterred? The 900s lands in March for $1, 099 and up. That’s not the only impressively thin and light machine that Lenovo unveiled today. The company also took the wraps off a more mid-range notebook called the 710s, which keeps its weight (and price) down by forgoing a touchscreen. All told, the 13.3-inch system comes in at 2.6 pounds and half an inch thick. And though it tops out at a fairly middling 1080p screen resolution, it makes up for it with up to a sixth-gen Core i7 processor, Intel Iris graphics and a PCIe SSD. Expect that to ship in July (just in time for back-to-school season), priced from $799. I saved the least interesting for last. In addition to those two skinny laptops, Lenovo also announced the Ideapad 700, a beefier machine with either a 15- or 17.3-inch 1080p screen and up to a Core i7 processor, 16GB of RAM and optional discrete graphics (a 4GB NVIDIA X950M on the 15-incher and a 4GB X940M on the 17-inch version). Both are offered with up to 1TB in HDD or hybrid storage, or with a PCIe SSD (128GB or 256GB). As you’d expect for models this size, they’re not particularly light (5.1 and 5.9 pounds, respectively) and the battery life is relatively short: up to four hours. Look for those in June, starting at $799.

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Lenovo says the Yoga 900s is the world’s thinnest convertible

AMD’s new graphics architecture is called Polaris

The rumours were true: AMD’s new graphics architecture is called Polaris (it previously went under the codename Arctic Islands), it’s based on a 14nm FinFET process, and it’ll ship in “mid-2016.” Given that AMD’s GPUs—and indeed Nvidia’s—have been stuck at the larger 28nm process node for several years, the move to 14nm should bring huge improvements in power consumption and performance per watt. Details are thin on the ground—AMD has promised to go into much greater detail at a later date—but for now the company has confirmed that Polaris is the fourth generation of its Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture. The current GCN architecture, GCN 1.2, is used by the likes of the Radeon R9 285 and R9 Fury. Improvements to the command processor, geometry processor, L2 cache, memory controller, multimedia cores, and display engine are promised in fourth-gen GCN, as well as to the all important compute units at the heart of the GPU. Polaris will support hardware 4K h.265 encoding and decoding at 60 FPS, DisplayPort 1.3, and, at long last, HDMI 2.0a. The latter was missing from AMD’s recent Fury and 300-series of GPUs, which instead featured HDMI 1.4a that limited 4K signals to 30 FPS at 60Hz, making them less than ideal for use in the living room with 4K TVs. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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AMD’s new graphics architecture is called Polaris