In an announcement last Friday, Mozilla’s Vice President, Johnathan Nightingale, announced that he had pulled the plug on the Windows version of his company’s popular Firefox web browser, citing evidence that nobody is using that version of the product. Mozilla’s withdrawal is yet another vote of...
http://qz.com/188794/if-microsoft-doesnt-loosen-up-firefox-wont-be-the-last-to-abandon-it/
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Apparently Facebook's found the silver bullet for developing its Android apps: crowdsourcing bug testers. In an effort to make Messenger more stable for everyone, Zuckerberg and Co. are asking adventurous Google fans to help work out the application's kinks before new features are released to the general public. The process essentially mirrors what we saw with the open beta for its main app last year. Just sign up for the related Google Group, tick the "become a tester" box in the Play store, download the app, turn on automatic updates and voila you're getting early access to new features. Should a glitch pop up, Facebook asks that you report it with the in-app dialog box. Simple enough, right? Naturally, as is often the case with beta tests, those new bells and whistles might make the app a touch less stable than you're used to.
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2014/03/18/lg-g-pro-2-asia/
If you love your screens large but hate the bezel, LG's G Pro 2 smartphone has arrived to Asia, replete with a 5.9-inch, IPS 1080p display and meager 3.3mm side frames. It also sports cutting-edge niceties like 4K video recording and the drum-to-unlock Knock Code, along with a 13-megapixel camera, Snapdragon 800 chip and 3GB of RAM. It'll hit Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and Vietnam in the coming days, with North America and Europe to follow at an unspecified date. There's still no word on pricing, but given those specs, it's not the budget phone you've been looking for.
Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, LG
Source: LG
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Source: http://gizmodo.com/this-sneaky-trash-can-lid-lures-flies-to-their-death-1545492426
Just like Romeo and Juliet, flies are tragically destined to crave their one true love: Pungent, moldy, rotten garbage. And thanks to this ingenious trash can design that traps flies only to have them starve, the flies' love can prove just as fatal as Shakespeare's.
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drag2share - drag and drop RSS news items on your email contacts to share (click SEE DEMO)
Last month, the Nationals were seen using a four-rotor drone to take publicity photos. The FAA took issue. "No, we didn't get it cleared, but we don't get our pop flies cleared either and those go higher than this thing did," a team official told the AP afterward. Which pretty neatly sums up the FAA's conundrum with regulating drones in the wild.
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Source: http://gizmodo.com/poke-out-parts-of-this-perforated-lamp-shade-to-make-yo-1544099587
This Take-Off light shade comes in a single perforated sheet, and you poke out the teensy shapes to make whatever the heck pattern you want. It's like the design equivalent of popping bubble wrap—everyone likes popping bubble wrap!—except you've got to be pretty precise. Once false move and you've got a wackadoo motif to live with… forever.
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Source: http://gizmodo.com/this-digital-sundial-tracks-the-sun-through-a-laser-cut-1545753402
Sure, sundials are totally impractical in the age of precise atomic clocks, but this digital sundial cube is still the coolest. Made out of 59 plates of metal cut to match the angle of the sun at different times of the day, the Sun Cube casts a dot-matrix number to mark each hour.
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Source: http://gizmodo.com/this-treachorous-hanging-staircase-doubles-as-shelving-1545728028
Here's a great space-saving idea for anyone living in a small home with multiple floors who also happen to be incredibly sure-footed. Mieke Meijer's designed this completely unorthodox staircase called the Object Élevé for a home in the Netherlands to maximize space, functionality, and wow factor.
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Source: http://www.engadget.com/2014/03/17/amazon-streaming-gaming-dongle/
We've been hearing rumblings about Amazon's set top box plans for quite a while now, and according to the folks over at TechCrunch, that gadget more closely resembles Google's Chromecast. The possibility of a USB-style product should come as no surprise given the popularity of the aforementioned $35 option and Roku's recent release. In addition to the dongle form factor, the report also suggests that the device will feature support for streaming PC games in order to compete with the likes of Xbox, PlayStation and Steam for all types of living room content consumption. The gaming aspect is said to closely resemble a service like OnLive, which allows cloud-based streaming. Details are scare in terms of titles, but the library has been tipped to include "top-tier games" beamed from Amazon at 30fps. This reported union of the online retailer's set top and console plans comes just days after a controller broke from cover and weeks out from a report that gaming plans were alive and well.
Source: TechCrunch
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We saw a brief demo of Seiki's U-Vision HDMI cable back in January at CES, and now the $50 cable is officially on the market. When connected to your fancy 4K TV, the chord promises to up-convert HD content from your cable box or Blu-ray player to Technicolor-certified 4K Ultra HD. It's also capable of transforming 720p content to 1080p, all while using adaptive sharpening and noise reduction to keep the picture looking its best. The demo we saw at CES was pretty clean, but the reel didn't give us the opportunity to really put it through the paces -- something we'll definitely be looking to do now that it's available. If you want to give it a try, you can pick one up today at Amazon, Newegg and Fred Meyers stores.
source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/businessinsider/~3/uHgdgI3OLOg/quakebot-robot-la-times-2014-3
Whenever there is an earthquake in southern California, a system called Quakebot analyzes notifications from the US Geological Survey and automatically creates a blog post for the Los Angeles Times.
We first noticed this in a post titled "Earthquake aftershock: 2.7 quake strikes near Westwood" in the LA Times today via Gizmodo's Adam Clark Estes.
At the bottom of the post it reads, "This information comes from the USGS Earthquake Notification Service and this post was created by an algorithm written by the author."
That author is Ken Schwencke, a journalist and web developer who lives in Los Angeles.
Schwencke created the Quakebot system about three years ago, but it has been functional for about two, Schwencke tells Business Insider.
Quakebot is an automated system that lives on the Los Angeles Times's servers. The system receives emails from the US Geological Survey, runs through a checklist of where it is, and then determines if it's newsworthy based on the magnitude.
It then parses out content from the email and inputs it into the LA Times's content management service. The post is structured on a formula based on previous posts.
"It saves everyone the initial rush to write something," Schwencke says.
If there's a 6.0 quake in Los Angeles, Quakebot automatically set a post live. But if it's anything smaller than 6.0, Schwen
When it comes to tolerating things that other countries deem illegal, Holland's got previous experience, but this time the nation has approved something that doesn't just benefit glaucoma sufferers. The country has ratified the use of blank SIM cards that aren't tied to a carrier, and can instead be tweaked use whatever network is best for you. The idea is that since you're not tied to an operator, you can switch between providers when your needs change -- allowing you to swerve roaming charges when you're out and about. The move also boosts "internet of things" makers, who can connect devices to cellular networks without signing a long, expensive deal. Of course, the longer-term implication is that smartphone companies like Apple and Samsung could bulk-buy voice and data services and cut out the middle man -- a prospect that would even send John Legere into a cold sweat.
Source: http://gizmodo.com/one-day-your-smartphones-screen-could-be-used-to-test-1545401478
Patients who rely on the use of coagulants to limit the formation of blood clots in their veins also require frequent and regular trips to the hospital for tests to monitor their blood flow. It's a time-consuming side effect that researchers at EPFL hope they've solved with a portable test that relies on a smartphone's display's unique properties.
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Source: http://gizmodo.com/report-apple-healthbook-will-track-your-life-down-to-e-1545455810
For a couple months now we've been hearing about Apple's plans to release a new fitness tracking system in the near future called Healthbook. This morning, 9to5Mac reports a lot of details about the rumored health-monitoring app for iOS. The app is impressively exhaustive. How is all of this possible? We're loathe to say an iWatch might be coming...but maybe?
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The camera-centric Galaxy S5 spinoff could be among Samsung's first to employ its hexa-core processor. The camera-focused Samsung Galaxy S5 Zoom, a variation on the forthcoming Samsung Galaxy S5, could feature a 20-megapixel rear camera and a hexa-core processor, according to new benchmarks. Than...
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