Technology Simplified

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With Dorian , co-founder and CEO Julia Palatovska said she’s hoping to empower fiction writers and other storytellers to create their own games. The startup is announcing that it has raised $3.15 million in seed funding led by March Capital Partners, with participation from VGames, Konvoy Ventures, London Venture Partners, Michael Chow (co-creator of the Twitch series “Artificial”), Andover Ventures and talent management company Night Media. Palatskova previously worked in gaming as the head of business development at G5 Entertainment, and she said she’d also become entranced by narrative games and interactive fiction. And while there are existing interactive fiction platforms, she saw “an opportunity that I felt was missing,” particularly in the fact that those platforms are “entirely single player, with no opportunity to play and collaborate with other people.” So she gave me a quick tour of the Dorian platform, showing me how, without coding, a writer can essentially design ch

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High-tech tracking reveals ‘secret world of birds’ 6 by pseudolus | 0 comments on Hacker News.

Tech my dad banned in our house when I was a kid 4 by BerislavLopac | 0 comments on Hacker News.

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Good vibrations: acoustic technologies in cars 11 by sohkamyung | 0 comments on Hacker News.

Epic Games has been removed from Apple’s App Store. If you’ve already downloaded Fortnite to your Mac or iOS device, it should still work, but Epic’s termination means the Fortnite developer will no longer be able to submit new apps or updates. MacStories Managing Editor John Voorhees noted the termination on Twitter , as well as the fact that the App Store is currently featuring Fortnite competitor PUBG. Apple confirmed the move in a statement: We are disappointed that we have had to terminate the Epic Games account on the App Store. We have worked with the team at Epic Games for many years on their launches and releases. The court recommended that Epic comply with the App Store guidelines while their case moves forward, guidelines they’ve followed for the past decade until they created this situation. Epic has refused. Instead they repeatedly submit Fortnite updates designed to violate the guidelines of the App Store. This is not fair to all other developers on the App Store

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The front-facing camera has been a pretty constant bugbear for phone makers for a number of years now. Xiaomi certainly isn’t the first to offer a clever technological solution to the problem — and it’s also certainly not the only company to have show off under-screen camera tech — but next year, it’s committed to bringing that technology to market. The manufacturer noted its plans today as part of its earnings report, stating that it will begin manufacturing handsets using the latest version of the technology it’s been working on for a number of years now. This actually represents the third generation of the tech. The first didn’t exist outside of the lab and the second was shown off to the public but never made it into production. There are no doubt all sorts of practical reasons for that. Among them seems to be the issue of pixel density. For reasons that ought to be pretty obvious, there’s a big question of how to maintain a consistent pixel density in the area of the screen th

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Technical Debt Doesn’t Exist 9 by user5994461 | 10 comments on Hacker News.

Turmoil continues at TikTok, Salesforce lays off 1,000 people and Warby Parker is now valued at $3 billion. This is your Daily Crunch for August 27, 2020. The big story: TikTok’s CEO resigns Kevin Mayer, the former Disney executive who joined TikTok as CEO just over 100 days ago, announced yesterday that he’s resigning . While Mayer was likely brought on to reassure U.S. legislators about the app’s Chinese owners, it seems he wasn’t expecting this level of conflict, with President Donald Trump signing an executive order that would ban TikTok in the U.S. unless it’s sold to another company. “We appreciate that the political dynamics of the last few months have significantly changed what the scope of Kevin’s role would be going forward, and fully respect his decision,” a TikTok spokesperson said in a statement. “We thank him for his time at the company and wish him well.” As for which company might acquire TikTok, Walmart has confirmed that it’s interested in teaming up with Micro

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I’d been asking for something like the reMarkable for a long time before it showed up out of the blue a few years ago. The device was a real treat, but had a few problems and an eye-popping price tag. The reMarkable 2 builds on the first with a more beautiful, streamlined device and several key new features, but keeps many of the limitations — some deliberate, some not so much — that make it a refreshingly specialty device. Costs a lot less this time around, too. The reMarkable is intended to be a tablet for consuming and creating black and white (and grey) content: PDFs, sketches, jotted notes, that sort of thing — without all the distractions and complications of a full-on tablet or laptop. I certainly found that when I had a lot of content to get through and annotate, the device helped me focus, and it was useful for light note-taking and and other purposes ,like DMing a D&D game or sketching out a woodworking project. With $15M round and 100K tablets sold, reMarkable CEO

There’s been a flurry of TikTok news today, and the flood doesn’t seem to be letting up. First was the announcement that Kevin Mayer , who joined the company just a bit more than three months ago, has stepped down overnight. TikTok CEO Kevin Mayer resigns after 100 days Now, we are receiving a bunch of deal-related news as well. Walmart has confirmed to multiple news outlets that it has expressed interest in teaming up with Microsoft in a bid for the fast-growing social app. Meanwhile, entertainment news site The Wrap  reported that Oracle has placed a bid for the company, targeting a price around $20 billion. This is a fast-developing story, and we will have more updates to come as we receive them. TikTok has been heavily in the news since the Trump Administration threatened to ban TikTok from the U.S. market unless it sold its U.S. operations to an American company. On August 6, President Trump signed an executive order that gave TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company Byt

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One of the nice things about virtual events is you can essentially hold as many as you’d like. It’s one thing to ask people to fly across the country or world to attend and another entirely to get them to tune into a livestream for an hour. On September 1 at 10AM ET, Samsung will be holding an “Unpacked Part 2,” focused on the Galaxy Z Fold 2. The second-gen foldable got a little face time during the recent Note 20 event, but a new phone, watch, headphones and tablet ate up most of the alotted time. Honestly, we already know a fair bit about the foldable, which largely seeks to address the numerous shortcomings of the original. For starters, there’s a reinforced screen. The hinge has also been upgraded to prohibit debris from falling behind the display. These (along with a protective layer that looked removable) are the chief reasons for various reports of screen damage with the original. I ended up damaging my own replacement unit , due to the fragile screen. The Samsung Galaxy

News app Flipboard is further expanding into video with Flipboard TV. The company’s curated video service first launched earlier this year as a Samsung exclusive , and is now making its way to all Flipboard users in the U.S. With today’s launch, the service will offer users access to video from hundreds of publishers, including global publishers, local news publishers and, now, select independent video producers, too. Samsung Galaxy device owners will continue to have exclusive access to upgrade to the premium, ad-free version of Flipboard TV. For everyone else, the service will be ad-supported. As of today’s expansion, Flipboard has also lined up a number of media partnerships who will provide their video feeds to Flipboard’s app. This list includes Complex Networks, Minute Media, A360 Media, Group Nine Media, The Recount, Bonnier Corp, Refinery29, Dow Jones, Hearst Magazines, Gannett, Vice Media Group, and Penske Media Corporation, with brands such as Rolling Stone and Variety. Vi

Amazon has introduced an entirely new membership program called Halo today that aims to provide comprehensive personal health and wellness monitoring and advice. The Halo service, which is opening to early access by special request today, includes both the service and a new Amazon Halo Band wristworn activity tracker for $64.99 for a six-month membership. Amazon says that the standard public price of the same will be $99.99 once it’s more generally available. Halo looks to offer more than your standard health tracking gadget/app combo, by taking a comprehensive look at various measures of health, including body fat percentage, as measured at home with just your smartphone’s own camera and the Amazon Halo app. The company says that it was able to make this possible using its own advances in computer vision and machine learning. Amazon employes deep neural network-based processing of your uploaded photos to separate your body from its surroundings, analyze so-called body fat “hot spot

The moonphase watch is a long-standing marvel of the analog watch industry – featuring a complication that allows it to accurately track the phases of the Moon across a long period (provided the watch remains wound). Christopher Ward’s C1 Moonglow  ($1,995) is a fresh, contemporary take on a moonphase that that really puts the Moon front and center, in a design that’s equally comfortable on the wrist for everyday wear, in the boardroom, or at a formal event. Its unique design is also sure to please anyone who likes to watch the stars, and the bourgeoning private launch industry that’s reaching out to them. The basics The C1 Moonglow features a version of Selita’s reliable SW220 automatic movement with that includes an in-house moonphase modification. The in-house customization does more than just add moonphase tracking – UK-based Christopher Ward has made it possible for the moonphase feature to work continually, rather than simply flipping once per day, as do most off-the-self versi

'Vishing’ emerges as new cyber threat: What is it? The FBI and Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) are getting serious about voice phishing, also known as vishing, a new threat to illegally obtain money. via https://ift.tt/3b0jpel

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Dutch social enterprise, Fairphone , has moved a little closer to the sustainability dream of a circular economy by announcing the launch of a modular upgrade for its flagship smartphone. The backwards compatible hardware units mean users of last year’s Fairphone 3 only need swap out a few modules to be holding the Fairphone 3+ in their hand instead of buying a whole new device. Fairphone pulled off a similar feat with an earlier model of its ‘ethical smartphone’ but this time it’s managed to shrink the time it took it to offer ‘plug and play’ upgrade modules for its latest gen device. “What we’ve been able to do is get that whole idea of plug and play to the consumer within the smartphone business,” says Fairphone co-founder Bas van Abel . “That part is not trivial because you have to imagine that getting everything into that module and being able to put it into the old phone… Not only the hardware has to fit and everything has to connect in the right way in that previous kind of