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Apple’s next iPhone reportedly ditches the headphone jack

Apple’s quest for ever-thinner , ever-smarter devices may produce another casualty: your iPhone’s headphone jack. A rumor at MacOtakara claims that the next iPhone might drop the 3.5mm port and use the Lightning port for audio instead. The move would let Apple slim its phone even further (reportedly, over 1mm thinner than the iPhone 6s ) and take advantage of Lightning’s features, such as headphone-based DACs and app launching. You’d have to use an adapter for any conventional wired headphones, or else make the leap to Bluetooth. Via: MacRumors Source: MacOtakara (translated)

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Apple’s next iPhone reportedly ditches the headphone jack

E-paper sneakers change your style on the fly

If you’re the sort to buy multiple pairs of sneakers just to make sure your footwear is always fashionable, you might soon have a way to save a lot of money. David Coelho is crowdfunding ShiftWear , or sneakers that have color e-paper displays in their sides. You only need a mobile app to change your look at a moment’s notice (there are promises of a shoe design store), and you can even use animations if you’re feeling ostentatious. The shoes are machine-washable, and the e-paper consumes virtually no power if you’re using static imagery — there’s even talk of walk-to-charge tech that would save you from ever having to plug in or swap batteries. Source: Indiegogo

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E-paper sneakers change your style on the fly

Unofficial app makes PlayStation 4 to PC streaming a reality

Sony’s had its Remote Play tech in one form or another since the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable, but it didn’t truly take off until its implementation on PlayStation 4 and the PS Vita handheld. But that’s kind of wasted when nobody is buying the Vita and it’s getting zero love from its parent company . Remote Play PC is exactly what its name implies: an application that tricks the PS4 into thinking a PC is a Remote Play device. Microsoft changed the game (sorry) with the ability for the Xbox One to stream its games to Windows 10-based hardware and until Sony catches up we’re just going to have to settle for an unofficial app that costs money to perform the task. Via: Kotaku Source: Tmacdev

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Unofficial app makes PlayStation 4 to PC streaming a reality

Amazon Video gets a bunch of new features on iOS

Amazon has released a ton of new features for its Video app. The update includes 3D touch support, Next Up (which is basically auto-play), picture-in-picture and X-Ray, which offers a wealth of IMDB information and trivia at the touch of a button. Even though some of these features are iPad exclusive (like picture-in-picture) they can help Amazon stand up against competition like Netflix when content alone won’t carry the day. The 3D touch option is only available on Apple’s latest smartphone offerings, the 6s and 6s Plus, and lets you access a number of features faster, but offers nothing in the way of exclusive functionality. Also, the app has been customized for the iPad Pro , meaning Amazon-exclusive content is bigger and better than it’s ever been before. What more could you ask for? [Image credit: AOL] Source: iMore

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Amazon Video gets a bunch of new features on iOS

Jeff Bezos beats Elon Musk’s SpaceX in the reusable rocket race

Blue Origin, the private space firm owned by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, has just dropped a huge, unexpected gauntlet in the race to develop a reusable rocket. In video released by the company (below), it managed to launch its New Shepard space vehicle consisting of a BE-3 rocket and crew capsule to a height of around 100.5 kilometers (62 miles). Minutes later, the capsule made a controlled landing beneath a parachute, but more importantly, the BE-3 rocket started its own decent when rockets fired at 5, 000 feet. From there, it made a a controlled vertical landing and touched down at a gentle 4.4 mph. Source: Blue Origin , Blue Origin

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Jeff Bezos beats Elon Musk’s SpaceX in the reusable rocket race

Google Street View gives you a tour of ancient Jordan landmarks

Jordan is home to some extremely significant historical and religious sites. However, visiting those landmarks in person is no mean feat — which is why Google just added many of them to Street View. Fire up your web browser and you can get virtual, 360-degree tours of more than 30 ancient locations, including the city of Petra (above), Jerash and legendary castles from the Crusades. We suspect that this will pale in comparison to the grandeur of seeing these relics first-hand, but you should at least have an inkling of what the experience would be like. Source: Google Maps

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Google Street View gives you a tour of ancient Jordan landmarks

Square’s new reader arrives to accept mobile payments and chip cards

We’ve known about Square’s new NFC-friendly reader for a while, and now the point-of-sale gadget is available for use. Starting today, 100 merchants in “select cities” (quite a few, actually) will begin accepting NFC-driven payments like Apple Pay , Android Pay , Samsung Pay and those newfangled chip credit/debit cards . The reader is a square pad (of course) separate from the company’s usual POS setups and sliding readers, allowing you to hover your phone or insert a card to complete purchase. The unit is wireless and pairs with either a countertop system or Square’s free mobile app to handle the transactions. However, the new reader itself will set businesses back $49 in order to get started. For the initial rollout, look for the device at businesses in the following cities: Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Nashville, New Orleans, New York, Miami, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Sacramento, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Seattle, St. Louis Tampa, and Washington, D.C.

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Square’s new reader arrives to accept mobile payments and chip cards

Shazam’s song recognition just got a lot faster

Shazam is doubling down on what it does best with its latest update: Recognizing songs when your memory (or pop cultural knowhow) fails you. And, for the first time, the app now highlights a search feature on its main page, which lets you dig for more information about songs and artists. The goal, naturally, is to convince you to stay within Shazam rather than hopping over to the web for music research. In my brief testing, the new Shazam app recognized songs from television and radio in a few seconds — at times it even found a result in under a second. It feels significantly faster than previous versions of the app, which sometimes took over five seconds to lock onto a song. That’s not a huge difference, but given that Shazam has been around for years (it was one of the first killer apps back when the iPhone’s App Store launched in 2008), it needs to keep improving to keep up with competitors like Soundhound. Via: TechCrunch Source: Shazam

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Shazam’s song recognition just got a lot faster

Oddball machine makes ‘analog’ techno music with vinyl records

Many techno DJs are used to playing music on vinyl , but creating it? That’s another matter. However, Graham Dunning has found a wonderfully strange way to make that idea work. His Mechanical Techno device produces full-on dance tracks by driving several heavily modified records at once with a turntable, with each record relying on unique triggers to produce a sound. Electrical contacts will produce a synth sound as one record spins around, while piezoelectric triggers create that all-important beat on another disc. The result is techno that’s at once analog and not. It sounds digital, but it has the imprecision and unpredictability that you’d never get from software. Via: Boing Boing , Nerdcore Source: Graham Dunning

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Oddball machine makes ‘analog’ techno music with vinyl records

Google now lets you join Hangouts as a guest, no account needed

The worst thing about organizing an online meeting is squabbling over platform. Should you choose WebEx? Skype? Google? Your decision just got a little easier. As of today, you no longer need to have a Google account to join a meeting Hosted on Hangouts — just a link.