We’ve all been there; you are on Netflix trying to find something to watch and can’t make a decision. It can be frustrating, and sometimes you just want to watch something. A report is making the rounds that Netflix is testing a “Random Episode” button that will choose something and play it.
The test is said to be seen on the Android app only right now. It appears that when the button is picked it just grabs a random episode of a show that is popular and plays it reports MacRumors. That sounds marginally useful as it would likely grab an episode of something you have never seen, in the middle of the series leaving you with no idea what is going on.
I guess if that random episode hooks you, you can go back and watch the whole series. It will be a bummer if the random episode spoils something important for you and ruins the entire series.
There is no indication of if the button will make it out of testing or if testing will happen on other devices. I think I’ll stick with searching Netflix until I get sick of it and giving up to play Red Dead Redemption 2.
via Legit Reviews Hardware Articles http://bit.ly/2BUcaU4
A recent Buzzfeed article points out that several popular Android apps available on the Google Play Store have been collecting and storing sensitive user data without encryption or permission.
This particular instance is more alarming than previous—not only are some of the most-downloaded apps on the Google Play Store implicated in the report, they also happen to be developed by Chinese companies that may be sharing collected data with the Chinese government.
Which apps to delete right away
These are the apps that have been implicated in Buzzfeed’s investigation. If you have any of these installed on your phone, delete them now:
Selfie Camera
Total Cleaner
Smart Cooler
RAM Master
AIO Flashlight
Omni Cleaner
WaWaYaYa
Emoji Flashlight
Samsung TV Remote Control (via Peel Technologies, Inc.)
How to avoid apps like these
Don’t feel bad if yours were among the nearly 100 million combined downloads for these apps. The developers obfuscated otherwise damning information—such as country of origin and the company who owns the app—that would normally raise red flags.
However, as Buzzfeed’s investigation points out, each app asked for way too many app permissions, including “dangerous” permissions like location data, access to phone sensors, or personal contact information. This is an indicator of a suspicious app.
Google blacklisted six of the above apps—Selfie Camera, Total Cleaner, Smart Cooler, RAm Master, AIO Flashlight, and Omni Cleaner—in response to Buzzfeed’s reporting, and updated how it will evaluate permissions and developer accounts going forward, but even so, it seems to be far too easy for malicious developers to dupe the Google Play Store.
Here are our recommendations for staying smart about your app downloads:
Use a trusted mobile anti-virus app to scan apps and files before you install them.
Don’t download apps with overwhelmingly poor reviews.
Furthermore, pay attention to what the reviews are actually saying; companies can inflate their ratings with fake reviews to drown out the negative ones. If you see any reviews calling out shady behavior, false advertising, etc., steer clear.
Look out for apps with a high number of permissions, or permissions that don’t make sense for the app. For example, the AIO Flashlight app asked for 31 total permissions. No legit flashlight app requires anywhere near that many in order to run.
Review an app or app developer’s security policy. This can often be found with a quick web search if none is openly provided. If the policy seems flimsy, is hosted from a dubious location (like Selfie Camera’s random Tumblr page), or if there doesn’t seem to be a security policy, period, skip the download.
In general, do not download apps from devs you don’t recognize. If you do, search the app online and seek out professional reviews and user feedback from tech sites and forums.
Be extremely cautious when downloading APK files from unofficial sources.
An app may pass several of the above parameters, but utterly fail others. For example, the Selfie Camera app boasted a 4.5-star rating on Google Play and had over 50 million downloads, yet it was asking for 50 permissions and its privacy policy was hidden on an unrelated Tumblr blog. It’s the perfect example of why any third-party apps from developers you don’t already trust need to be scrutinized.
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Do you need to connect your Magic Keyboard and your Magic Trackpad together into one seamless slab? No. Did Jony Ive design them with the exact same profile so that you could, even if Apple would never actually sell you an affordable accessory that would do it? Almost certainly.
Twelve South’s MagicBridge normally sells for $35, but today on Amazon, it’s down to an all-time low $25.
This is a video of several different LEGO climbing robots constructed by Japanese LEGO builder muniment Bekkan, who likes to "perform physics experiments using LEGO." First up are a couple variations of pole-climbing (but not dancing) LEGO robots, then one that continuously builds and climbs a taller and taller tower using quadruple stacks of DUPLO blocks. That one is particularly clever. Obviously, now you need to construct a giant version and– "Rebuild Notre Dame." Too soon — way too soon. What’s the matter with you? Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to spot-clean my sofa so I can offer Quasimodo a place to crash for a little while like an actual decent human being.
Keep going for the video.
Thanks to Jeffrey S, who agrees even if you build it, he may not come, but he’ll at least watch the video on Youtube.
via Geekologie – Gadgets, Gizmos, and Awesome https://geekologie.com/
Steve Kovach of CNBC had his Galaxy Fold die right along the display crease.
The Verge’s Galaxy Fold review unit had something press against the back side of the screen, killing several rows of pixels.
A tweet from Mark Gurman: “The screen on my Galaxy Fold review unit is completely broken and unusable just two days in. Hard to know if this is widespread or not.”
Gurman says, “The phone comes with this protective layer/film. Samsung says you are not supposed to remove it. I removed it, not knowing you’re not supposed to (consumers won’t know either). It appeared removable in the left corner, so I took it off. I believe this contributed to the problem.”
From YouTuber Marques Brownlee: “PSA: There’s a layer that appears to be a screen protector on the Galaxy Fold’s display. It’s NOT a screen protector. Do NOT remove it. I got this far peeling it off before the display spazzed and blacked out. Started over with a replacement.”
Samsung’s futuristic Galaxy Fold is launching this month, and the device has already made its way to a select group of reviewers and influencers. During the run-up to the device’s launch, there were concerns about the durability of the folding display, and now after just a few days with the public, the device is already experiencing problems. There are numerous reports of Samsung’s $2,000 device breaking after a single day, sometimes due to poor durability, other times due to user error.
the Galaxy Fold display (possibly through the hinge?) and press up against the back of the display. In addition to causing an unsightly bump in the OLED panel, it eventually pressed against the display enough to break it, killing a few horizontal and vertical rows of pixels.
Since the Galaxy Fold folds in half, the flexible OLED display quickly forms a visible crease in the middle. People were worried about the durability of folding a display in half like this, and it looks like Steve Kovach of CNBC has experienced everyone’s worst fear: his Galaxy Fold display broke right along the fold crease—all the pixels in the folding area went black and the screen started flickering like crazy.
We’ve also seen some reviewers peel off a layer of the display on purpose, thinking it was a removable protective layer that many phones ship with. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman shared a gruesome photo of a removed layer of display film, saying, “The phone comes with this protective layer/film. Samsung says you are not supposed to remove it. I removed it, not knowing you’re not supposed to (consumers won’t know either). It appeared removable in the left corner, so I took it off. I believe this contributed to the problem.” The “problem” Gurman is referring to is his totally dead Galaxy Fold display. After removing the layer of the display, first the left half of the display died, then the display completely died.
YouTuber Marques Brownlee also tried peeling off this protective layer, thinking it was just a display protector for shipping. After picking at the layout a bit, Brownlee says “the display spazzed and blacked out. Started over with a replacement.”
Right now we’re at the very edge of viability for folding smartphones, and the Galaxy Fold is the first device from a serious manufacturer that is reaching the hands of the masses. For this first year, foldables are definitely first-generation, early adopter devices, with delicate plastic screen covers, visible display creases, radical new hinge designs, and a variety of competing form factors in development. So far Samsung has been suspiciously protective of the Galaxy Fold, and despite announcing it in February alongside the Galaxy S10, people haven’t gotten to even touch the device until this week.
The early hype for the Galaxy Fold seems to have struck a chord with consumers, with Samsung.com citing “overwhelming demand” and selling out of Galaxy Fold pre-orders in just a day. Devices ship to the general public April 26, so if the final production units have the same problems, we’ll see a lot more reports then. So far, Samsung has not commented on these durability problems. Place your bets on where this issue will rank among exploding smartphones or S-Pens jamming in devices.
The Apple II, one of the myriad personal computers used to play Infocom games years ago.
The source code of every Infocom text adventure game has been uploaded to code-sharing repository GitHub, allowing savvy programmers to examine and build upon some of the most beloved works of digital storytelling to date.
There are numerous repositories under the name historicalsource, each for a different game. Titles include, but are not limited to, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Planetfall,Shogun, and several Zork games—plus some more unusual inclusions like an incomplete version of Hitchhiker‘s sequel The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Infocom samplers, and an unreleased adaptation of James Cameron’s The Abyss.
The code was uploaded by Jason Scott, an archivist who is the proprietor of
. His website describes itself as “a glimpse into the history of writers and artists bound by the 128 characters that the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) allowed them”—in particular those of the 1980s. He announced the GitHub uploads
The games were written in the LISP-esque “Zork Implementation Language,” or ZIL, which you could be forgiven for not being intimately familiar with already. Fortunately, Scott also tweeted a link to a helpful manual for the language on archive.org.
Dive in and you’ll find that things are very different now than they were then. At the time Infocom was active, personal computers did not have a widely shared architecture, so the path ZIL’s architects took was to allow game creators to write instructions for a virtual machine called the Z-machine, which was then brought to the various platforms of the day. There are interpreters available today for Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android, among other platforms.
The interactive fiction community is still quite lively, and people are still making games using ZIL and the Z-machine today. But they’ve been joined by creators using new tools for spinning interactive, text-focused games like Twine and Ink, some of which are used as middleware in modern graphical game productions big and small.
The news was reported by Gamasutra, which covers news for the game developer industry. The site also noted that Activision still owns the rights to Infocom games and could request a takedown if it wanted. For now, though, historians, narrative designers, programmers, and gaming enthusiasts alike can benefit from Scott’s effort.
It seems like every day there’s someone in a fancy office talking about how teamwork and collaboration is the key to success. And yet, most of us are still stuck with the same infuriating video conferencing tools that make people want to give up.
But the Microsoft Surface Hub 2S feels a bit different, a bit more advanced, and it might actually deliver on the promise of making collaborating with your coworkers just a bit less painful.
Sporting a big 50-inch screen with a 3840 x 2560 resolution and a 4K webcam, the Surface Hub 2S has everything you need to see up to four teammates at approximately life size all at once in full HD. But the real advancement for the Surface Hub 2S is when you pair it with one of Steelcase’s rolling stands and a built-in battery designed by APC—well-known makers of uninterruptible power supplies. Then, the Surface Hub 2S becomes a portable screen that’s damn simple to drag around to wherever you need it.
Featuring an estimated battery life of around 100 minutes, the Surface Hub 2S should be able to make it through a whole meeting without being plugged in, though in most cases, that’s probably overkill as you’ll only need to unplug it when moving from one conference room to another. And because the Surface Hub won’t shut off when you yank out the cord, you don’t have to worry about losing your work if you need to move that big screen around.
I’m not sure if it takes this long to import images all the time, but regardless, it’s faster than drawing the original picture a second time. GIF: Sam Rutherford (Gizmodo)
But the most impressive thing about the Surface Hub 2S is just how slick it is. In Microsoft’s Whiteboard app, there’s a tool that can automatically read your handwriting, and then automatically “beautify” it so that anyone you work with isn’t forced to try to decipher your chicken scratch. Then there’s another feature that can import a regular picture, and then transform it into a digital drawing, as if it had been inked in the Whiteboard app.
Of course, like the rest of Microsoft’s recent computers, the Surface Hub 2S comes with full precision Windows Ink support and an included stylus. Also, I have to mention I appreciate the Surface Hub 2S’ matte screen, which does a good job of cutting down on reflections while also giving it a nice texture for sketching or jotting down notes.
Here’s a closer look at the Surface Hub 2S’ included battery, which should make moving the thing from one room to another much less of a hassle. Image: Sam Rutherford (Gizmodo)
And in case a 50-inch screen just isn’t enough, there’s also an 85-inch version of the Surface Hub 2S that Microsoft cleverly designed so that when the smaller version is set up in portrait mode, it lines up perfectly with an 85-inch model in landscape orientation.
No, you won’t be able to complain about not having enough screen. Photo: Sam Rutherford (Gizmodo)
That said, I can’t comprehend where this tech finds its market. With a starting price of $9,000 for the 50-inch model, the Surface Hub 2S is anything but cheap, even for large businesses. And that’s before you figure in Steelcase’s wheeled $1,450 Roam stand, which with its built-in storage area for the Hub 2S’ battery, is kind of an essential accessory.
But if you’re an IT manager with a lot of money looking to gear out your office, the Surface Hub 2S might be the most ballin’ collaboration tool Microsoft has come up with yet.
