jfruh (300774) writes Tech writer Tyler Hayes had never come close to hitting the 250 GB monthly bandwidth cap imposed by Cox Cable — until suddenly he was blowing right through it, eating up almost 80 GB a day. Using the Mac network utility little snitch, he eventually tracked down the culprit: a screensaver on his new Kindle Fire TV. A bug in the mosaic screensaver caused downloaded images to remain uncached. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Bug In Fire TV Screensaver Tears Through 250 GB Data Cap
DroidJason1 writes One of Microsoft’s main goals with Windows 9, the next major version of Windows, is to win over Windows 7 hold outs. The operating system will look and work differently based on hardware type. Microsoft is looking to showcase the desktop for desktop and laptop users, while two-in-one devices like the Surface Pro or Lenovo Yoga will support switching between the Metro interface and the classic desktop interface. The new desktop will allow Modern UI apps to run in windowed mode, and have Modern UI apps pinned to the Start Menu instead of a Start Screen. There will also be a mini-start menu. Microsoft is looking to undo the usability mistakes it made with Windows 8 for those who are not on a touch device. WIndows 9 is expected around spring of 2015. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
If you work in a lab, you’ve probably used lab glass made from quartz. But you probably haven’t realized that the reason those test tubes are so durable is exactly what makes them so hard to mold. These beautiful GIFs, shot at GE’s Global Research in upstate New York, shows exactly what it takes to make those beakers. Read more… 
Dropbox offers an excellent way of syncing files across computers and devices, sharing files with others and automatically backing up your photos. The more you dig into the app , the more features you uncover, and one tool you might not know about is the ability to recover deleted files. Read more… 
An old MUNI bus in San Francisco is getting a second life with a noble cause. Outfitted with toilets and showers, Lava Mae ‘s refurbished bus will bring mobile bathrooms to homeless people around the city. The long-awaited bus will make its first rounds this weekend . Read more… 
In some parts of the world a mosquito bite is a minor inconvenience that might result in a few days of uncomfortable itching. In other parts, though, the pests spread deadly diseases like malaria and dengue fever. So for the 2014 World Health Day, ad agency Leo Burnett created the world’s first mosquito-repelling newspaper in Sri Lanka. Read more… 
The B-side of Chris Sievey’s 1983 single “Camouflage” sounds like an unlistenable malestrom of noise. It’s not an avant-garde song; it’s a program for the ZX-81 computer , and if you could load it correctly, it gave you a ( very rudimentary) computer-animated music video, coded in the grooves of a vinyl record. Read more…