Wednesday, December 18, 2013

Real Racing 3 finally gives players a taste of live competition on iOS

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/12/18/real-racing-3-real-time-multiplayer-ios/

Real Racing 3's time-shift multiplayer mode was a great addition to the game, but the latest update for iOS makes playing with friends even better. Now, aside from being able to face the car ghosts of your friends' pasts to beat their records, four players can hit the virtual tracks for some real-time racing. As a nice plus, both the refreshed Android and the iOS apps now include playable digital counterparts of the McLaren P1 plug-in hybrid and the next-gen Lamborghini Veneno, though they cost a pretty (in-game) penny. If you're hankering to digitally drive certain BMW and Ford models, it may be best to look elsewhere -- otherwise, head over to iTunes where the game remains free to download and play.

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Via: iMore

Source: iTunes, Firemonkeys (1), (2)

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Tuesday, December 17, 2013

drag2share: Now iOS users can control Google Glass remotely with MyGlass companion app (update)

source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/12/17/google-glass-my-glass-apple-ios/?utm_source=Feed_Classic_Full&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Engadget&?ncid=rss_full

For a while there, Google's Glass was really only for the Android population since the eyewear required compatible devices running the MyGlass app for activation and the full suite of features. Not so anymore, as the company's just released that companion app to Apple's App Store making it possible for iOS users to set up the device, manage contacts and Glassware apps, view texts, as well as remotely navigate with turn-by-turn directions right from their smartphones. You'll need to be running iOS 7, however, in order to run the app and take advantage of the screencasting possibilities. And before your itchy trigger finger hits download, heed Google's oft-repeated advice: "If you ! don't have Glass, then downloading this will be a waste of time." That's right from the mouth of Mountain View itself. Consider yourself warned.

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Facebook and Google Are Buying Up the Cables That Carry the Internet

Source: http://gizmodo.com/facebook-and-google-want-to-control-the-cables-that-car-1484955396

Facebook and Google Are Buying Up the Cables That Carry the Internet

It can get a little bit annoying when people ramble on about how Facebook and Google are taking over the world. They're just websites! But when those websites start to buy up other things, say, the very cables that connect the people of the world—well that's actually pretty alarming.

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LG launching its first 4K monitor in January with 31-inch ultra-widescreen panel

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/12/17/lg-4k-ultra-widescreen-monitors/

LG's monitor division has been zigging lately while it's competitors zagged, skipping regular widescreen in favor 21:9 ultra-widescreen models. It's now made another interesting choice for its first 4K monitor, the 31-inch 31MU95. It'll feature a so-called DCI or Real 4K (4,096 x 2,160) IPS panel with a 19:10 ratio -- similar to a screen it demo'd at CES last year. For comparison's sake, most Ultra HDTVs and monitors like ASUS's first 4K model display 3,840 x 2,160 pixels at 16:9. Interestingly, the new offering conforms to the 4K format recorded by RED's Epic and Scarlet cameras and also packs a Thunderbolt 2 port with 20Gbps throughput. LG claims that'll let you monitor 4K footage and archive it up at the same time -- ideal for on-set movie playback or post-production, for instance.

LG will also offer 34-inch and 29-inch UM95 models with 3,440 x 1,440 resolution at 21:9, which will display 99-percent of the sRGB gamut and come with LG's True Color calibration software. There's no pricing on any of the new monitors yet, but Dell's recently launched 32-inch 4K Ultrasharp model is running $3,299, by way of reference. The high-res panels and other ultra-widescreen business models from LG will arrive at CES 2014 in January -- naturally, we'll be there to fill in the wider picture.

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Source: LG

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Samsung's HomeSync media hub will play nice with non-Samsung Android devices

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/12/17/samsung-homesync-media-hub-compatibility/

If ever a product needed to work harder to justify its price tag, it'd be Samsung's new $299 HomeSync box. Fortunately, the manufacturer seems to be self-aware enough to make some changes: the Android-powered storage, streaming and mirroring hub will soon offer full support for Jelly Bean phones and tablets even if they're outside of the Galaxy stable. This should allow an average household with numerous, diversely-branded devices to store and share their photos, music and videos using the HomeSync's 1TB "personal cloud," while also using their handsets as remote controls and as sources for mirroring via the box's HDMI input. As things stand, however, only a handful of non-Samsung phones, like the Sony Xperia Z and HTC One, are listed as compatible over at the Google Play store, and it could be a while before the HomeSync becomes truly brand-agnostic. In the meantime, there are plenty of other mobile-friendly NAS solutions around that are worth a look.

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Source: Samsung

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PointGrab will let you control devices and appliances by pointing at them

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/12/17/pointgrab-gesture-control/

The future of motion and gesture control is quickly approaching, and a few companies are already working hard to make this kind of a tech not just a reality, but also practical for general consumers. One such company, Tel Aviv-based PointGrab, has maintained radio silence for nearly three and a half years while working on its next-generation product, and it looks like we're finally going to see it at CES next month. Back in 2010, the company began integrating some of its tech into a few specific laptop models, and involved holding the palm of your hand straight up in front of a 2D webcam. PointGrab's next effort, however, takes that concept and refines it so that all you have to do is point your finger at an electronic device or home appliance and mimic touchscreen gestures in order to get it to do your bidding.

The tech, PointGrab tells us, works by "using depth information to create a 'transparent space' in front of the user, enabling a 'touch-like' operation of devices, but from a distance." Below the break you'll find two YouTube videos detailing the ideas. The first one shows off PointSwitch, which focuses on various appliances around your home: for instance, you can do things like dim the lights, pull down your shades, adjust your air conditioning and lock/unlock your door. The second video is for AirTouch, which lets you interact with your computer monitors, HDTV and other consumer electronics. We're still waiting to try it out for ourselves and get more details at CES next month. PointGrab tells us that we can expect to see the new tech integrated with manufactured products sometime in early 2014.

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Article: Silicon Image introduces mobile device cable technology that can transfer 4K Ultra HD video to TVs

The ecosystem that supports the transfer of the highest resolution videos from a smartphone to a TV just got a lot stronger. Silicon Image announced today it has created chips that support MHL 3.0 cables, which can transfer 4K Ultra HD video from a mobile device to a living room television or oth...

http://venturebeat.com/2013/12/16/silicon-image-introduces-mobile-device-cables-that-can-transfer-4k-ultra-hd-video-to-tvs/

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Article: Intel to buy Mindspeed Technologies to go after the telco base station market

Intel today said it would buy the wireless assets of Mindspeed Technologies in a deal whose terms were not disclosed. Mindspeed makes a variety of wireless telecommunications silicon, and on November 5 entered into an agreement to be acquired by M/A-COM Technology Solutions Holdings, a supplier o...

http://gigaom.com/2013/12/16/intel-to-buy-mindspeed-technologies-to-go-after-the-telco-base-station-market/

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Monday, December 16, 2013

drag2share: Here's A GIF Of A Homemade Drone Equipped With A Laser Gun

source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/businessinsider/~3/ldSUReDFlCg/homemade-laser-drone-2013-12

We've officially passed the point where "SkyNet" jokes go from being ironic references to "1984"-style warnings about the future.

Drake Anthony is a 20-year-old chemistry student at Southern Illinois University. Yesterday, he uploaded a video of a "homemade death ray laser drone bot" he built to his YouTube channel.  

The video has approximately 37,500 views, but Anthony really went viral was Reddit, where a GIF of his invention was voted to the top of r/gifs, a subreddit with over 1.6 million subscribers.

While the robot's 2-watt laser is only capable of popping balloons, it's hard to watch the GIF and not think about what full-scale military drones are capable of:

homemade death ray laser drone robot

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drag2share: Cornell 3D prints a working speaker -- coils, magnets and all

source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/12/16/cornell-speaker/?utm_source=Feed_Classic_Full&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Engadget&?ncid=rss_full

From the sound if it, it's not a very good speaker. But then, that's not quite the point. What's particularly cool there is that a team of Cornell researchers created the whole thing using 3D printers -- the plastic shell and conductive and magnetic pieces. The speaker marks a step toward a larger utopian vision where entire products are fabricated using such techniques, not simply shells and other miscellany. That's still a ways off, of course. Aside from the clear (or no so clear) sound issues, there are some roadblocks. For one thing, there's the fact that the job still required two separate printers for different components. Also, the speaker had to be hooked up to wires to play the audio clip of President Obama name-checking 3D printing. Still, it's easy to see in the short clip below where things may be going.

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Five Best Photoshop Alternatives

Source: http://lifehacker.com/five-best-photoshop-alternatives-1483312519

Five Best Photoshop Alternatives

Adobe Photoshop is the market leader when it comes to photo retouching, image editing, or even creating new images from scratch. However, for most people's uses, it may just be too many features to wade through, too much money to spend, or too complicated to use. Thankfully, there are plenty of powerful alternatives that also have tons of features. Here's a look at five of the best.

Earlier this week we asked you which Photoshop alternatives you thought were the best, or which ones you preferred when you needed to do image editing or photo editing. You responded with a ton of great suggestions, but here are your top five, in no particular order.

GIMP (Win/OS X/Linux)

Five Best Photoshop Alternatives

The GNU Image Manipulation Program, aka GIMP, is well known and well loved for more than a few reasons. It's incredibly powerful, packing as many features as Photoshop itself, the fact that it's cross platform and supports Windows, OS X, and Linux machines with ease (and with feature parity across all devices), and of course, because it's completely free. It has a completely modular and customizable interface, so you can keep your most oft-used tools front and center. It also features image correction utilities that make photo manipulation and retouching easy.

Those of you who nominated GIMP praised it for coming in at the low low price of $0, but many of you also reported issues with its interface and usability. It's true, the interface certainly leaves more than a few things to be desired, and it can be difficult to get used to if you're more accustomed to other image editing tools. Some people love it, some people hate it, but everyone acknowledges that it's difficult to find a comparable feature-packed utility for free.


Pixelmator (OS X)

Five Best Photoshop Alternatives

Pixelmator is a richly featured image editor for OS X. It'll set you back $30, but it often appears in bundles and app packs along with other useful utilities, so it can be had at a bargain. Pixelmator is remarkably powerful; packing a flexible, customizable interface that's designed for OS X, multiple layer styles and filtering/editing tools, and an adaptive engine that switches to the right tools or features when you need them. It's packed with photo and image editing and retouching features, so if you're looking to clean up photos before posting them to the internet, or getting them printed and framed, this app comes at a fraction of Photoshop's price and offers a ton of useful features.

There's a reason that we said that Pixelmator is a seriously good replacement for Photoshop, and while some people will always have a use case that requires Photoshop specifically, (eg, you need non-destructive editing, channel support, or adjustment layers) for the rest of us, Pixelmator is worth a look. Those of you who nominated it praised its RAW file support, and its depth of features, not to mention its price tag. Of course, it's Mac only, so those folks doing image editing on Windows or Linux machines don't have it as an option.


Paint.NET (Windows)

Five Best Photoshop Alternatives

Paint.NET is one of our favorite image editing tools. Part of it is because the app is feature packed, offering layer editing, a customizable interface with plenty of room to work but also plenty of tools at your disposal, unlimited undo, tons of effects and filters, and a community of passionate users. Part of it is because Paint.NET is completely free, and for the vast majority of people looking to touch up a photo before they post it to the web, resize or crop an image, or do basic image editing, it's more than enough, and it's completely free. It doesn't have the same features as more advanced tools like Photoshop or even GIMP, but not every Photoshop alternative needs to have the same breadth of features—just the ones that matter.

Those of you who nominated Paint.NET noted this explcitly. Advanced users may run up against its limitations after a while, but advanced users probably already know the tools that have the features they need. The rest of us though, who just need to open a tool to do some basic work here and there and want a fast, flexible, and free utility to do it, Paint.NET Is the way to go.


Adobe Photoshop Lightroom (Windows/OS X)

Five Best Photoshop Alternatives

Adobe Lightroom stands out from a number of the alternatives here partially because it's designed specifically for photographers, and has the broad variety of tools and features they need to get their photos edited, retouched, updated, and corrected before they're printed, framed, posted online, or even professionally judged. Color correct your images, remove objects or people, straighten images, and more. Lightroom is part of Adobe's Creative Cloud suite, so you have the option of buying access to it alone, or making it part of a larger subscription to Adobe's other utilities as well. The full version is $149, but it's frequently available with discounts.

We were initially surprised that another Adobe product, much less Lightroom, got the nominations for the top five. However, it makes sense if you're a photographer looking for a great image editing tool that's not quite Photoshop, and it looks like a number of you are doing just that—editing photos specifically, not just images, and not necessarily creating images from scratch.


Pixlr Editor (Web)

Five Best Photoshop Alternatives

Pixlr Editor is actually part of a suite of Pixlr apps, including the previously mentioned mobile appPixelr Express, and photo filter and tweaking app, Pixlr-O-Matic. Pixlr Editor on the other hand is a richly featured webapp that offers a healthy dose of features for editing photos and images. It packs adjustments, layers, filters and effects, basic features like rotation, resizing, cropping and editing, area selection, and so on. It's not as feature-packed or as streamlined as a lot of other tools, but the fact that it's free and runs in your browser alone makes it worth your attention, and your use if you're away from a computer with a tool you already know installed.

Those of you who nominated Pixlr highlighted that fact as well; it does just about everything the average user needs, and while professionals will likely find it lacking, amateurs and everyday users have a lot to like here. Plus, the fact that it's a webapp means it runs in any browser, on any OS, with the same features. Sign up for an account and you can save images for future work.


There you have it, your top five. Now it's time to put them to an all-out vote.

Not much in the way of honorable mentions this week, with the exception possibly of Google Picasa, which some of you noted you use to touch up your images, do some light image editing before sharing them or posting them to the web, and also to organize and manage your photo library. Similarly, we should give a nod to SumoPaint, another free, cross-platform tool that's web-based and offers a ton of useful tools and features.

Have something to say about one of the contenders? Want to make the case for your personal favorite, even if it wasn't included in the list? Remember, the top five are based on your most popular nominations from the call for contenders thread from earlier in the week. Don't just complain about the top five, let us know what your preferred alternative is—and make your case for it—in the discussions below.

The Hive Five is based on reader nominations. As with most Hive Five posts, if your favorite was left out, it didn't get the nominations required in the call for contenders post to make the top five. We understand it's a bit of a popularity contest. Have a suggestion for the Hive Five? Send us an email at tips+hivefive@lifehacker.com!

Photos by Robert Freiberger and Blake Patterson.

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LG launches GX smartphone in Korea with 5.5-inch display, Snapdragon 600

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/12/15/lg-gx-smartphone/

Expecting a lazy Sunday night? You aren't thinking globally: it's midday in Korea, and LG's announcing a new large-screened smartphone. The LG GX features a wide 5.5-inch full HD IPS display, a quad-core Snapdragon 600 CPU, a 13 megapixel camera, 32GB of onboard storage and a 3,140 mAh battery. Don't be too surprised if that sounds familiar -- it matches the LG Optimus G Pro blow for blow, distinguishing itself primarily by design, locality and few updated user interface features. Namely, the GX has adopted the G2's "knock on" feature, which allows users to double tap phone's screen to rouse it from sleep, and it can also integrate with LG smart TVs to display call and text information while you're watching the game. Naturally, the LTE-toting slab is only available in Korea for now, but if you're looking for an eyeful, check out LG's Flickr gallery at the source link below.

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Source: LG (1), (2)

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Sunday, December 15, 2013

drag2share: Michael Bublé's Complete Dominance Of Spotify Right Now Is Terrifying

source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/businessinsider/~3/EyAiMezU4pU/michael-buble-dominating-spotify-2013-12

michael buble

This is not a joke.

We asked Spotify to send us the top Christmas songs getting streamed right now.

Here is what they sent back. Apparently, Spotify listeners only want to spend Christmas with one man, and no one else. 

That man is Michael Bublé.

Basically, listeners have his 2011 smash album, "Christmas," which has sold more than 3 million copies in the U.S, on repeat.

Only Mariah Carey shakes up the list with "All I  Want For Christmas Is You."

In order of most streams (Spotify did not provide raw data):

Michael Bublé – "It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas"
Mariah Carey – "All I Want for Christmas Is You"
Michael Bublé – "All I Want For Christmas Is You"
Michael Bublé – "White Christmas" - Duet With Shania Twain
Michael Bublé – "Jingle Bells" - feat. The Puppini Sisters
Michael Bublé – "Holly Jolly Christmas"
Michael Bublé – "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas"
Michael Bublé – "Christmas [Baby Please Come Home]"
Michael Bublé – "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town"
Michael Bublé – "Cold December Night"
Michael Bublé – "Santa Baby"

They also provided us with a separate list that uses a formula to "de-Buble" the list, at least a little. This is a bit more reasonable.

Mariah Carey - "All I Want for Christmas Is You"
Michael Bublé - "It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas"
Bing Crosby - "White Christmas"
Michael Bublé - "All I Want For Christmas Is You"
Nat King Cole - "The Christmas Song (Merry Christmas To You)"
Elvis Presley - "Blue Christmas"
Andy Williams - "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year"
Eartha Kitt - Santa Baby
Wham! - "Last Christmas" - Single Version
N Sync - "Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays"

We're not sure what Bublé does the rest of the year, but this shows it probably doesn't matter.

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Friday, December 13, 2013

Google optimizes web versions of Play Movies and Music for Chromecast

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/12/12/google-play-movies-music-chromecast-optimized/

The Chromecast is the tiny dongle that just keeps on giving. A mere couple of days after announcing support for a number of new applications, Google has let it be known that its $35 streamer is now compatible with Play Movies and Music on the desktop in a more native way. What this means is you will no longer have to rely on casting a Chrome tab to watch videos or listen to tunes ; instead, a Cast icon shows up within the Google Play web player and allows content to seamlessly be pushed to the device. Of course, there's still a requirement to have the Google Cast extension installed on your Chrome browser -- but this is a small price to pay in exchange for such useful functionality.

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Source: Google

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Google launches Tips to help you get more out of Gmail and its other services

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/12/13/googles-launches-tips/

Though we're sure Google tries to keep its products like Now and Docs as easy to use as possible, who has the time to learn every single feature? That's likely why Google just launched Tips, a site that uses its info card trope to help you dive more deeply into all 13 of its consumer products. For instance, a card for Google+ suggests you can "make your still photos not so still" and reveals a tutorial for supported devices when you click it. You can even submit your own idea for a tip, though you'll need a Google account for that and other functions. It's only available on desktop browsers for now, but if you want to give it a spin and see all the supported products, hit the source.

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Source: Google Tips

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