How to super-size the eclipse - sun funnel If you've got a telescope, give the crowd a show next week. Make the eclipse bigger! Eclipse glasses are okay, but the sun is only as big as your thumbnail at arms length. That's not very big. I need something to impress some kindergartners! Hopefully the sun funnel can do it. Practical Engineering @ YouTube
Rapportive founder's new startup Superhuman is what Gmail would be if built today Reinventing the email experience is an area numerous startups have tried to tackle over the years, with some apps focused more on triage, others on making a better desktop alternative to Outlook, and still more aiming to re-envision email as a mobile-first product, among other ideas. A new startup called Superhuman, from the founder of Gmail add-on Rapportive acquired in 2012 by LinkedIn, is different. TechCrunch
Broadcom announces availability of industry's first complete ecosystem of 802.11ax solutions Broadcom Limited continues its historic leadership in Wi-Fi by launching Max WiFi, the industry's first family of connectivity solutions using the next Wi-Fi standard, 802.11ax. The Max WiFi chips enable up to four times faster download speeds, six times faster upload speeds, four times better coverage, and seven times better battery life than similar Wi-Fi solutions on the market today that use 802.11ac. Global Newswire (also, Why 802.11ax is the next big thing in Wi-Fi)
Intel Atom C3000 processor product brief As communication service providers, enterprise IT, and cloud service providers seek to speed new service delivery and handle exponential growth in the number of users accessing their services, it is essential that they optimize infrastructure for density and cost, both in the data center and at the network edge. Inefficient data center scaling drives up space and cost and increases environmental impact, while fixed function, proprietary devices at the network edge hinder the ability of IT and service providers to rapidly deploy and manage new services. Intel
Ethereum sets new transaction record, outperforming Bitcoin Bitcoin is getting most of the attention these days with prices repeatedly hitting new all time highs (although today saw a slight correction). However, Bitcoin is getting beaten on one area. For the first time ever, Ethereum yesterday had more than 400,000 transactions, a record for any public blockchain, and around 40,000 higher than Bitcoin's record day. VentureBeat
Why PS4 downloads are so slow Game downloads on PS4 have a reputation of being very slow, with many people reporting downloads being an order of magnitude faster on Steam or Xbox. This had long been on my list of things to look into, but at a pretty low priority. After all, the PS4 operating system is based on a reasonably modern FreeBSD (9.0), so there should not be any crippling issues in the TCP stack. The implication is that the problem is something boring, like an inadequately dimensioned CDN. Juho Snellman
NBD, just a liquid cooled, Ryzen-powered Hackintosh inside a cheesegrater Power Mac G5 case When you think of Hackintosh build, you may generally think of an Intel-powered rig in a big and bulky PC enclosure. That's not the case for friend of the site Dom Esposito's build, which took over a month to put together. His Ryzen-powered Hackintosh is neatly nestled inside of a custom Power Mac G5 case, providing a unique take on a Hackintosh build both on the inside and outside. 9to5Mac
Do laptops help learning? A look at the only statewide school laptop program It was the year 2000 and Maine's governor at the time, Angus King, was excited about the Internet. The World Wide Web was still relatively young but King wanted every student in the state to have access to it. "Go into history class and the teacher says, 'Open your computer. We're going to go to rome.com and we're going to watch an archaeologist explore the Catacombs this morning in real time.' What a learning tool that is!" NPR
Mozilla will kill legacy Firefox add-ons in exactly three months On November 14 Mozilla will take the biggest gamble in its long history when the organization will ship Firefox 57, the first version of its browser that will stop supporting legacy Firefox add-ons. This means that starting with Firefox 57 the browser will support only new add-ons written on top of the newer WebExtensions SDK. Bleeping Computer
High-quality online video with less rebuffering We've all experienced two hugely frustrating things on YouTube: our video either suddenly gets pixelated, or it stops entirely to rebuffer. Both happen because of special algorithms that break videos into small chunks that load as you go. If your internet is slow, YouTube might make the next few seconds of video lower resolution to make sure you can still watch uninterrupted --- hence, the pixelation. MIT
Titanfall's smartphone game offers a possible insight into why the series is struggling Titanfall 2 is brilliant. Well, Titanfall 1 wasn't bad at all, but Titanfall 2 is actually brilliant:multiplayer that's both fleet-footed and stompy, accompanied by a wonderful, brisk, inventive and explosive single-player campaign that manages to mix things up every 15 minutes and offer a story that serves as a masterclass in bringing a little humanity to the business of shooting indentikit strangers until their hats pop off. Eurogamer
Another million people cut the TV cord last quarter Traditional pay TV providers lost a record 976,000 video customers in the second quarter according to SNL Kagan. While that wasn't quite as bad as many analysts had predicted, the rate of cord cutting still indicates the cable industry is in for "unprecedented annual decline" during 2017. According to the firm, the total number of traditional cable subscribers dipped to 96.1 million in the second quarter, down 1.8 million since last year. Dish, DirecTV and AT&T were hit particularly hard last quarter in particular. DSL Reports (also, YouTube has an illegal TV streaming problem)
Meet the streamers using Twitch to pay for college As she neared 24 straight hours of playing Dead Space, Kaitlyn Richelle watched in shock as a $250 donation flashed across her screen. "That's the goal," she shouted. "That's the tuition." She paused her Twitch stream, struggling to get a full sentence out. She had just raised $5,000 to help pay for medical school. The Verge
Waymo patent shows plans to replace steering wheel & pedals with push buttons Waymo just received approval on a patent for a push-button console that replaces not only a steering wheel in a car but the brake and gas pedals, too. This reflects Alphabet's driverless arm could remain true to its original mantra of developing cars that pilot themselves without human intervention. Driverless
Chip Hall of Fame: Signetics NE555 It was the summer of 1970, and chip designer Hans Camenzind was working as a consultant to Signetics, a Silicon Valley semiconductor firm. The economy was tanking. He was making less than US $15,000 a year and had a wife and four children at home. He really needed to invent something good. IEEE Spectrum
Prey - Free trial available Starting today, the critically acclaimed game from the masterminds at Arkane Studios will be available as a PC trial for the first-time ever. Try the Prey Trial free on PC. Head to Prey's Steam store page and click "download demo" on the right. Steam
VGA RAM prices hike over 30% in August August quotes for RAMs used in VGA graphics cards have risen to US$8.50, up by 30.8% from US$6.50 in July. Both RAM industry leaders Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix have allocated part of their VGA RAM production capacities to producing memories for servers and handsets, fueling the price rally. Digitimes
An intuitive guide to deep network architectures Over the past few years, much of the progress in deep learning for computer vision can be boiled down to just a handful of neural network architectures. Setting aside all the math, the code, and the implementation details, I wanted to explore one simple question: how and why do these models work? Medium
Here Are 6 Used Luxury Cars That Can Make You Look Rich For Cheap While I'm starting to prefer lightly used cars with warranties, people who buy used cars at the very bottom of the depreciation curve can get a lot of car for not that much money – and, if they buy a used luxury car, they can look pretty cool while they're doing it. Autotrader