Sick of paying for Spotify? Hate how hard it is to use Apple Music ? Then you’re going to love what renegade developer and lover of beer Andrew Simpson has built . It’s called Aurous, and it’s basically Popcorn Time for music . Read more…
See the article here:
This Slick New App Is Like Popcorn Time for Music
Facebook’s On This Day tool is a nice feature when it recalls good times that may have slipped your mind. It has a tendency to bring up events and people that you might prefer to forget, though, and the social network added preferences to curtail the sadness. On This Day now has controls that’ll let you filter out specific people and dates so the feature doesn’t remind you of those bits of nostalgia you’d rather not revisit. Facebook has come under fire for toying with our emotions and digging up the past before, and there’s already been some criticism of On This Day since it launched in March. By adding preferences, Zuckerberg & Co. are offering a way to keep those bad memories at bay. It’s a nice touch, since you never know exactly when the memory machine will pop up in your News Feed. If you’ve noticed On This Day posts there, the new controls should be available for you to tweak. Via: The Verge
See more here:
Facebook’s ‘On This Day’ feature has controls to filter out sad times
Relish’s dream to connect London homes with wireless broadband, rather than traditional landlines, could be in trouble. UK Broadband, the company behind the service, has reported losses of £37.5 million for 2014 — almost four times what it was the year before. To make matters worse, turnover slipped from roughly £2 million to £1.5 million over the same period. Relish was launched in June 2014 as a simpler, but capable broadband alternative to the likes of BT, Sky and Virgin Media. Instead of copper and fibre cables, the company relies on 4G connections to deliver the internet to its customers. The advantages are plentiful — you don’t need to pay for a landline, and because Relish’s network is already up and running, you don’t need an engineer to install anything. Once you’ve signed up, a router is sent round within the next working day and you can instantly get online. The concept is similar to the mobile broadband packages offered by EE, Three and other UK carriers, although here there are no restrictive data allowances. So what’s gone wrong? Well, it should be noted that the figures filed by UK Broadband aren’t just for Relish. The company also offers consultancy services and the “provision of wireless solutions, ” including design and the supplying of equipment, for instance. Even so, it’s evident that Relish hasn’t been a runaway success. At least, not in the six months following its launch, anyway. The company has been pushing its offering with ads on the Tube, but Relish still doesn’t feel like a household name. There’s also something of a stigma attached to wireless broadband at the moment. Adopters often tell stories of slow or unreliable connections, similar to those experienced on their phone. Relish promises “up to 50Mbps” speeds, but that’s also dependent on you being inside their catchment area. The company is focused solely on London, but its network doesn’t cover every household — to find out if you’re eligible, you’ll need to submit your postcode into its coverage checker first. Home broadband is still a messy quagmire in the UK, but traditional ISPs are pushing hard to improve speeds and coverage. Relish is an intriguing competitor, and could appeal to Londoners who move a lot and just want a decent, easy to cancel broadband package. Early demand appears to have been low though. Relish hasn’t failed just yet — business could have picked up in 2015 — but this is a worrying sign from the company. Via: ISPreview , The Telegraph Source: Companies House
More:
The company behind Relish wireless broadband makes a big loss
The new subreddit Public Blue Screens of Death. I swiped my credit card at a gas station last week, and as I replaced the nozzle, the pump’s display screen froze, blanked, and then rebooted. I had never seen such a thing before. Not sure if I had actually paid for the gas or not, I went inside and told the cashier. “It happens,” she said. Indeed it does. Thanks to our ever-more-computerized world, crashed software and arcane error messages are a common sight in public-facing displays. A new subreddit called Public Blue Screens of Death aims to chronicle these public crashes, especially those that result in the infamous Windows “blue screen of death” (BSOD). This isn’t the first such collection of BSODs, of course. The Flickr group ” Public Computer Errors ” has been around since 2005 and contains 1,500 images—but its remit extends far beyond the BSOD. More commonly, public BSODs are collected into humorous, one-off roundups . The new subreddit aims to be an ongoing archive of such material, however, and it has been skinned to resemble an old Windows display. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments
See more here:
New subreddit chronicles the most public “blue screens of death”
Eliza writes, “A researcher from Lehigh University has invented a light-based pacemaker for fruit flies, and says a human version is ‘not impossible.’ The pacemaker relies on the new technique of ‘optogenetics,’ in which light-sensitive proteins are inserted into certain cells, allowing those cells to be activated by pulses of light. Here, the proteins were inserted into cardiac cells so the researchers could trigger the contractions that produce heartbeats.” (more…)
More here:
Laser shines through fly’s skin, controls its heart by activating doped cells
Inkcase is exactly what you just guessed it is: a phone case with an e-ink screen that provides a simpler, more economical view on your communications. (more…)
See the original post:
Inkcase is an e-ink display for your iPhone
After reporting 700 pilgrims dead in a stampede near the holy city of Mecca two weeks ago , Saudi authorities have come clean with the true number killed after pressure from investigators: 1,453 were killed and hundreds remain missing. Indeed, Shiite Iran in particular has challenged its Sunni arch-rival’s status as the custodian of Islam’s two holiest sites, warning that if diplomacy doesn’t yield an independent investigation, “the Islamic Republic is also prepared to use the language of force.” Nearly one-third of the deaths in the incident were pilgrims from neighboring Iran. Given all of this, it’s not terribly surprising that a more accurate accounting of the tragedy had to come from an outside source. As Ruth Graham noted last month in The Atlantic, Saudi officials weren’t eager to take responsibility: “In Saudi Arabia, the country’s health minister chalked up the latest incident to a failure to follow instructions, and the head of the Central Hajj Committee blamed ‘some pilgrims from African nationalities.’” In the meantime, hundreds of worshipers still remain missing and so the true extent of last month’s disaster is not fully known.
View post:
Saudis halved the death toll in Hajj stampede: true count is 1453
Horrible browser plugins used to offer extended multimedia features for website, often at the cost of a much worse overall experience — thankfully, they’re going the way of the dodo. Chrome recently banished plugins like Java and Silverlight (and made auto-playing Flash ads disabled by default ), and now Firefox is doing the same. Mozilla just announced in a blog post that nearly all old-school plugins will not be supported in Firefox by the end of 2016. That’s a long ways away, but it’s still good news. Naturally, the impossible-to-kill Adobe Flash platform is exempted from this doom, but everything else will be completely disabled. Mozilla also noted that new platforms, like the 64-bit Firefox for Windows, will launch without plugin support since they don’t have to support a legacy base of users. Let’s take a moment of thanks for standards like HTML5 making the web a better place to browse and start counting down the days until Flash can join Java in the internet’s trash pile. Via: PC World Source: Mozilla
Read the original:
Firefox will stop supporting web plugins (except for Flash) by the end of 2016
Ed Piskor drew this cool pin-up of an X-Men family tree (abridged). Each row represents a decade of the X-Men from 1963-1992.
More here:
X-Men line-up decade-by-decade
In Brazil, a 70-year-old woman was killed when directions she followed from the driving app Waze led her and her husband into a neighborhood controlled by a violent drug gang. The destination they meant to go to? A beach area popular with tourists, which was in the opposite direction. (more…)
More here:
Woman shot dead by drug gang after following Waze app’s directions to wrong destination