You’ve probably seen a few attempts at recreating worlds in game engines , but never at this level of detail. Artist Jason B is working on the Enterprise-D Construction Project , an Unreal Engine-based virtual tour that aims to reproduce all 42 decks in the Enterprise from Star Trek: The Next Generation . While it’s not quite photorealistic, the attention to detail in this digital starship is already uncanny — the bridge, shuttle bay and other areas feel like lived-in spaces, just waiting for the crew to return. Jason is drawing on as much official material as he can to get things pixel-perfect, and he’s only taking creative liberties in those areas where there’s no canonical content. The project is currently just a hobby, but there might be more in the cards if everything goes smoothly. Jason is considering populating the ship, offering a chance to explore the outsides of other locations (such as Deep Space Nine) and even introducing game mechanics. Whether or not those happen will depend on many things falling into place, however. The creator is thinking about crowdfunding campaigns to help with his work, and there’s the looming question of licensing: he’ll likely need CBS’ approval to release anything, especially if he wants to charge for it. Even if it amounts to little more than some screenshots and video, though, it’s an impressive feat. Via: Road To VR Source: Enterprise-D Construction Project
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‘Star Trek’ virtual tour will recreate every deck of the Enterprise
Chances are if you’ve opted for an ultra-portable laptop , you’ve made a few compromises when it comes to on-board storage. So an external hard drive for archiving your mountains of media is a must, and Samsung’s now squeezed four terabytes of storage inside a housing that matches your computer’s svelte dimensions. Read more… 
When you misplace a credit card, the first thing you usually do is cancel it in case it falls into the wrong hands. But it’s a hassle to wait for a new card and update your information. Discover cardholders can now get around this by temporarily freezing their cards instead of canceling them altogether. Read more… 
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An anonymous reader writes Chrome OS is based on the Linux kernel and designed by Google to work with web applications and installed applications. Chromebook is one of the selling laptop on Amazon. However, devs decided to drop support for ext2/3/4 on external drivers and SD card. It seems that ChromiumOS developers can’t implement a script or feature to relabel EXT volumes in the left nav that is insertable and has RW privileges using Files.app. Given that this is the main filesystem in Linux, and is thereby automatically well supported by anything that leverages Linux, this choice makes absolutely no sense. Google may want to drop support for external storage and push the cloud storage on everyone. Overall Linux users and community members are not happy at all. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
Remember Coin, the card that promised to put all your credit cards on one handy chunk of plastic , and then suffered from substantial setbacks that may make it useless by the time it comes out ? Well now it has a competitor. This is Plastc , another upcoming supercard with some seriously big promises that will be even harder to keep. Read more… 
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