Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Article: How Facebook plans to make internet.org happen

As part of its idealistic — or cynical — quest to connect the world, Facebook, Ericsson and Qualcomm released a hefty white paper Monday as part of their internet.org program. The goal of internet.org is to provide connectivity to everyone in the world by reducing the cost of delivering data and ...

http://gigaom.com/2013/09/16/how-facebook-plans-to-make-internet-org-happen/

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Article: Twitter Users Seeing Influx of Spam Accounts Adding Them To Lists

Twitter users are finding themselves dealing with a new, but ambiguous onslaught from spammers. But instead of directly getting your attention with a mention or a direct message, they're hoping to entice you by adding you to lists. This isn't a new tactic being utilized by those with malicious in...

http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2013/09/17/spammers-are-back-on-twitter-and-this-time-theyre-coming-after-you-through-lists/

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Article: Facebook explains secrets of building hugely scalable sites

Facebook, which joined up with Ericsson, MediaTek, Nokia, Opera, Qualcomm, and Samsung to launch Internet.org a few weeks ago, has already produced something for the ostensibly public-minded initiative.

It has published a white paper detailing some of its secrets to success.

Internet.org laun...

http://venturebeat.com/2013/09/16/facebook-explains-secrets-of-building-hugely-scalable-sites/

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Monday, September 16, 2013

Six Sweet Things You Can Automate With NFC and Your Android Phone

Source: http://lifehacker.com/six-sweet-things-you-can-do-with-nfc-1323120090

Six Sweet Things You Can Automate With NFC and Your Android Phone

You know NFC. It's that feature on your phone that you insist is really cool and some day you'll totally find a use for it. Well, today is that day.

Most modern Android handsets have an NFC antenna built in (sorry iPhone users, but once again, Apple has said no). However, for most of the things we'll be talking about here, you'll need some form of NFC tag. You can buy them online for fairly cheap. For example, Tags for Droid sells packs of NFC stickers and keychains, but any tag with a writeable chip will do. If you need a primer on how to get started, check out our previous post on how to automate your phone in every room of your house.

Turn on Your Computer When You Get Home

Six Sweet Things You Can Automate With NFC and Your Android Phone

Waiting for your computer to start up when you get home is yet another drag in an evening that's already wearing you down. However, leaving your machine on all day just to save yourself a few seconds will cost more than it's worth. Reddit user Captainmathmo solved this problem with an NFC tag he can tap to remotely turn on his computer as soon as he gets home.

The process requires Tasker, a Wake on LAN Android app, and a PC that has support for Wake up on LAN. You can find the detailed instructions over on the reddit thread here. Once that's done, set an NFC tag somewhere inside your home that you can tap as you enter.

Activate Wi-Fi Tethering

Six Sweet Things You Can Automate With NFC and Your Android Phone

Sure, it might not be that difficult to dive into your phone's settings and activate Wi-Fi tethering (if you have it available), but who has the time? If you want to make it a little easier to work remotely, you can create an NFC tag that will automatically launch tethering, and then stick it to the edge of your laptop. NFC Task Launcher can be used to write to a tag for this purpose.

Share Your Wi-Fi Password with Guests

Six Sweet Things You Can Automate With NFC and Your Android Phone

If you're like me, your Wi-Fi password is as long and complicated as your sordid and mysterious past. Rather than hand your guests a slip of paper with a bunch of case-sensitive characters scribbled on it, write the password to an NFC tag.

There are a couple of ways to go about this. InstaWifi can be used to easily share Wi-Fi passwords directly via NFC. The downside is that this requires all your guests to have InstaWifi installed. Downloading an app just to share a bit of text is a drag, so this really only works if everyone you know is doing it, too. Alternatively, you can embed a single tag with your Wi-Fi password and your guests can read it with most NFC read/write apps. If your friends don't have one of those (like the aforementioned NFC Task Launcher), that should at least be an easier sell.

Enter Driving Mode When You Dock Your Phone

Six Sweet Things You Can Automate With NFC and Your Android Phone

Car docks are a relatively cheap way to make your phone easier to use for things like navigation while you're behind the wheel. An NFC tag can be stuck to the dock so that it automatically launches tasks or apps you need. You can use NFC Task Launcher (again!) to automatically trigger navigation to a pre-specified address, or to launch your music app and set the media volume to a preset level.

If you don't want to stick an NFC tag to your car dock (for example, if you happen to share the car with another person), this is also a great time to use an NFC keychain. It doesn't require you to carry any extra items, and placing the keychain against your phone on the way to the car couldn't be easier.

Share Contact Information

Business cards are so 20th century. With modern smartphones and constant data sync across virtually everything we do, there's almost no reason for us to manually enter phone numbers anymore. You can share your own contact info with another Android device by opening up your contacts app, tapping on your own entry (if your phone's app doesn't use one, create one), pressing your phone against the other, and "beaming" it across.

While this method is hardly time-consuming, there are still occasions where you don't want to stop someone and explain why they need to press their phone against yours. In that case, you can pass off NFC tags pre-programmed with your contact info and let them input it at their own pace. On a very simple level, you can buy NFC tags in bulk for cheap. If you want to get fancy, though, you can get business cards with NFC built in. While this may seem redundant, it can be a nice way to grab someone's attention, as well as add include a bit more info than you'd otherwise be able to print on a card.

Launch Tasker Actions

It would be outside the scope of this article to go over everything that you can do with Tasker, but I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that you can trigger all of them with NFC tags. To do this, you'll need to create tasks in Tasker and enable "Allow External Access" in Tasker's preferences (under Misc). Once that's done, you can use (care to take a guess?) NFC Task Launcher to trigger any named task.

All of these actions can make NFC useful on your device. However, don't forget that even basic Android functionality allows you to pass links, photos, contact info, or just about anything else between two devices simply by tapping them together. We may forget it's there, but NFC is a handy little thing to have around.

Photo by Lucy Fisher, Jason Tester Guerilla Futures, and Danny Choo.

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Block Ads on All Your Devices with a Raspberry Pi

Source: http://lifehacker.com/block-ads-on-all-your-devices-with-a-raspberry-pi-1325298085

Block Ads on All Your Devices with a Raspberry Pi

Ads can be one of the internet's more annoying things, and there are few things worse than watching a flash animation for deodorant suck up all your bandwidth. While you have plenty of software solutions to block ads, you can also do it on a deeper level with a Raspberry Pi.

This projects turns your Raspberry Pi into a wireless access point, then installs software that makes ads time out. Then, you route your traffic through the Raspberry Pi and that blocks ads on all your devices, from your tablet to your game console. Head over to Adafruit for the full guide.

Raspberry Pi as an Ad Blocking Access Point | Adafruit

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The Best Web Browser for iPhone

Source: http://lifehacker.com/the-best-web-browser-for-iphone-5831636

The Best Web Browser for iPhone

While mobile Safari does most of what you'd need from a smartphone web browser, and there are many alternatives that fill in the gaps, we prefer Chrome. Google's browser offers excellent features, synchronization, and simplicity at no cost.

Google Chrome

Platform: iPhone (and iPad)
Price: Free
Download Page

Features

  • Unlimited browser "tabs"
  • Syncs with your Google account to provide you with Chrome data from other browsers, including passwords, bookmarks, and more
  • Saves sessions so you can access sites on your mobile on the desktop, and vice-versa
  • Instant search
  • Easily navigate with helpful gestures
  • Private browsing mode

Where It Excels

Google Chrome for iPhone inherits the goodness of its desktop counterpart. Chrome's syncing abilities truly make it wonderful, allowing you to take pretty much any data associated with Chrome and your Google account and have it on every single device the browser supports. That means you always have your bookmarks, passwords, history, search shortcuts, and so on. Google really does sync well, and that's where Chrome shines beyond Apple's Safari. That said, its other features pretty much stack up evenly. You might prefer its user interface or that of any other browser. Its feature set doesn't set it above a variety of other third-party options. When you want to know why Chrome is the best, just look at its syncing abilities. That's where it wins.

Where It Falls Short

Chrome doesn't have a lot of features. It doesn't beat out mobile Safari in a variety of areas for this reason. As mentioned in the previous section, we like Chrome because it syncs so well. No other browser—including Safari—does such a great job. If you use Chrome on the desktop, you'll probably want it on your mobile. If you don't, however, you lose its main advantage. When it comes to a mobile browser, you generally want to match yours with your choice on the desktop to keep data in sync. We think Chrome does the best job on the desktop so naturally we feel you ought to make it your browser of choice on your iPhone as well.

The Competition

Atomic, our previous top pick, has just about every feature you could possibly want in a mobile web browser (or a desktop web browser for that matter). You can clear history, cookies, and all sorts of other crap you don't want lying around on your mobile. In fact, Atomic will do it for you on quit so you don't even have to remember. You get proper tabbed browsing, which can be extended into kiosk mode (full screen) to make more room for the web page. Atomic even has advanced features like a download manager that can decompress zip archives, an ad blocker, and the ability to save web pages locally. It's easy to use, endlessly customizable, stable, and only costs $1 for the full version. It's really a fantastic browser with a great balance of all the things you'd really need, but might feel cumbersome to those who don't want a desktop-like experience.

Perfect Web Browser is a common alternative to Atomic, offering many of the same features and a fairly similar interface. It attempts to provide a desktop experience on your iPhone, but it definitely achieves that better on the iPad thanks to the extra screen real estate. It costs the same as Atomic (unless you want the iPad version, too, in which case Perfect will cost you an extra $4) and there's very little different, but we've used both for some time and just prefer Atomic. You may disagree, and at $1 each there's little risk in trying them both out.

360 Browser has an interesting user interface with lots of navigation shortcuts and adds support for Flash. Yes, Flash—that thing Apple basically banned from your iDevice. It also has support for Firefox sync so you can easily grab all your bookmarks, tabs, and passwords. Like the others, it'll only cost you $1.

Previously mentionedMeteoric Download Manager is technically not advertised as a web browser, but it works as one just the same. You won't get a desktop-like browsing experience, but if your focus is downloading and managing files it is an excellent option.


Lifehacker's App Directory is a new and growing directory of recommendations for the best applications and tools in a number of given categories.

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Flies See the World in Matrix-Style Slow Motion

Source: http://gizmodo.com/flies-see-the-world-in-matrix-style-slow-motion-1325474137

Flies See the World in Matrix-Style Slow Motion

If you've ever sat puzzling over a fly's ability to outmaneuver your swift slap of death almost every. single. time—puzzle no more. According to science, you're just measly Agent Smith to the bug's Neo; new research shows that a creature's perception of time is directly related to its size, meaning flies live in a world where time passes as if in slow motion.

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This Extra Lens Is Like a Megaphone For Your DSLR's Pop-up Flash

Source: http://gizmodo.com/this-extra-lens-is-like-a-megaphone-for-your-dslrs-pop-1325596701

This Extra Lens Is Like a Megaphone For Your DSLR's Pop-up Flash

It might occasionally come in handy as a bit of fill light for a shot, but your DSRL's pop-up flash is a poor substitute for a dedicated flash perched atop your camera. It makes sense why it sucks; it's designed to be small and compact enough to fold away. But with Rogue's Safari Flash Booster added to the mix, all of a sudden your DSLR's pop-up flash isn't so crappy any more.

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Virgin Mobile Is Using A Clever Eye-Tracking Trick To Get People To Watch Its Video Ad

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/virgin-mobile-uses-blinkwashing-to-get-attention-2013-9

Virgin Mobile is using a cool webcam technology to make its latest video ad an interactive experience that encourages viewers not to click away.

With help from creative agency Mother NY and digital production lab Rehab Studio, Virgin Mobile produced an advertisement in which the on-screen video changes every time a viewer blinks. The advertisement uses eye-tracking technology and viewers' webcams to change the video scene. The video shifts between a series of goofy scenes made by production company Greencard Studios.

All of the clips feature the same script about Virgin Mobile's $35 monthly phone plan, with the idea being that making an interactive ad would get people to focus on the YouTube video long enough to hear Virgin Mobile's pitch. Here's what the demo video looks like:

Virgin Mobile is calling its interactive eye-tracking experience "Blinkwashing."

The ad is the final piece of Virgin Mobile's "Retrain Your Brain" campaign, which seeks to draw attention to its low-cost data plans and convince people to switch over. If you have a webcam on your computer, you can try it out for yourself here.

SEE ALSO: Why People Need To Stop Obsessing About The Google Glass 'Pay-Per-Gaze' Emotion Tracking Patent

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Pew survey: 21 percent of US cellphone owners get online mostly through their phones

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/09/16/pew-cell-use-survey-2013/

Pew study finds that 34 percent of Americans primarily use their phones to hop online

There have been signs that Americans are leaning more and more on the smartphone as a primary internet device, and nowhere is that clearer than the latest edition of Pew's Cell Internet Use survey. The research group found that 21 percent of American cellphone owners now get online chiefly through their handset, up from 17 percent last year. Offline users, meanwhile, have been reduced to a minority -- 63 percent of US cell owners have hopped on the internet from their phones at some point. The PC isn't going away anytime soon, but it's clear that the traditional computer is just one internet client among many.

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Source: Pew Internet

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Article: Box launching Notes word processor to close the gap with Google Drive

Box is unveiling an online word processor called Box Notes, in a move that could help to put the cloud storage service's features closer on par with that of Google Drive. Though it's just getting started, it appears that Box Notes should have a fairly mature feature set right out the gate, includ...

http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/16/4736228/box-announces-notes-word-processor-beta

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People With 10k Instagram Followers Stay Free In This Hotel

Source: http://gizmodo.com/people-with-10k-instagram-followers-stay-free-in-this-h-1318364597

People With 10k Instagram Followers Stay Free In This Hotel

A picture is worth a thousand words and having 10,000 Instagram followers is apparently worth more than $150. At the recently opened 1888 Hotel in Sydney, Australia guests can stay one night for free if they contact the media department to show their social media mettle and follow the hotel on Instagram, of course.

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Google Glass no longer requires tethering plan for smartphone data sharing

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/09/15/google-glass-bluetooth-tethering-without-data-plan/

Google Glass no longer requires tethering plan for smartphone data sharing

An Explorer Edition of Glass is already a pricey piece of tech, and smartphone tethering plans required to give it a mobile Internet connection have only made ownership that much more expensive. However, there's good news for Google's guinea pigs: the latest update to the headgear quietly implemented a way around the additional monthly fees. With XE9 loaded onto headsets, the companion Android app pipes data to and from the hardware, bypassing both the smartphone's Bluetooth tethering settings and extra plan previously needed from some carriers. To match the change, the application's notification icon sports two arrows to signify the flow of info. We doubt telcos will be fazed by this development for now, but we don't know if that'll hold once Glass arrives on shelves and hits the streets en masse. We've contacted Google to find out if the feature will make it to retail units.

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Sunday, September 15, 2013

Google Maps updated for Android with sponsored hotel details, better navigation

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/09/14/google-maps-updated-with-sponsored-hotel-details/

Google Maps updated for Android with sponsored hotel details, better navigation

Now that Google has finished updating its Map app's UI, the company can focus on the finer details: navigation, documentation and monetization. The Android app's latest update tweaks hotel search results by adding sponsored rate and booking links, which places a tiny "ad" icon next to services that paid for exposure. Navigation has been also been improved, with better traffic and route information, and the side menu now has a "tips and tricks" option that inelegantly opens a maps help page in your device's web browser. Check out the official update notes at the Google Play link below.

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Source: Google Play

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SanDisk's CFast 2.0 card is the world's fastest memory card of any kind

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/09/14/sandisks-cfast-2.0-fastest-memory-card-ever/

SanDisk's first CFast 20 memory card is the world's fastest,

About a year after the CompactFlash Association announced the CFast 2.0 draft spec, SanDisk has revealed its new Extreme Pro CFast 2.0 memory card. The first of its kind, SanDisk says read speeds of up to 450MB/s and write speeds of up to 350MB/s make it the world's fastest memory card, period. Speed isn't the only improvement either, as the cards claim a tougher, pinless design and even unique serial numbers that owners can register with customer support. For now however, its use is going to be quite limited. The only camera ready for it at launch is the just-announced Arri Amira, although the Arri XT and Classic (with the XR module) cameras can also use it with an adapter. For those still using traditional CompactFlash storage for their 4K shooting the company is stretching the limits there too, with a new 256GB card that it says has the highest capacity ever. That extra storage will cost you however, with a price of $1,809 for the new 256GB version. There's no word on a price for the CFast 2.0 cards or their USB 3.0-equipped reader, but pro videographers in the US and Europe should be able to find them soon at specialty shops and Arri-authorized locations.

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Source: SanDisk (1), (2)

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