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Airborne Drone Deliveries to Start in Dallas-Fort Worth

Jeff Butts ·

Anybody want their prescriptions airlifted to them? Walgreens customers in the Dallas-Fort Worth area will have that option soon. Alphabet-owned drone deployment system Wing has partnered with the drug store chain to make drone deliveries a reality. The drone flights have been in testing out of Fort Worth-based Hillwoods Alliance Texas Flight Test Center. In the coming weeks, the drones will launch from Walgreens parking lots. The’ll initially deliver to a portion of the Dallas-Fort Worth region including Frisco and Little Elm. If successful, the companies plan to roll the drone deliveries out even further after a few months. Alphabet says businesses can also deploy the drones from rooftops or next to buildings. UPS began testing drone delivery in 2018. The company has recently used drones to deliver COVID-19 vaccines, but this is yet another commercial application of the technology.

Until now, this type of service in the United States has been limited to smaller towns, where land usage is less crowded and complex. Wing’s reliable aircraft and advanced flight planning and routing capabilities make it uniquely capable of operating a highly automated drone delivery service in more crowded, complex operating environments.

 

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North Vancouver Plans to Use Electricity From Bitcoin Mining for Heat

Andrew Orr ·

The city of North Vancouver in Canada is planning to use electricity created by Bitcoin mining to heat houses.

The technique will involve using MintGreen’s Digital Boilers, which recover more than 96 per cent of the electricity used for bitcoin mining to heat commercial and residential buildings.

Operating at full capacity 365 days a year, the bitcoin miner will be able to heat 100 residential and commercial buildings in the city, situated in the hills north of Vancouver.

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Facebook is Going to Change Its Name Next Week

Charlotte Henry ·

Facebook is going to change its name next week, The Verge reported. It’s not going to be re-adding a ‘The’ but rebrand in order to reflect Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of a ‘metaverse’.

A rebrand could also serve to further separate the futuristic work Zuckerberg is focused on from the intense scrutiny Facebook is currently under for the way its social platform operates today. A former employee turned whistleblower, Frances Haugen, recently leaked a trove of damning internal documents to The Wall Street Journal and testified about them before Congress. Antitrust regulators in the US and elsewhere are trying to break the company up, and public trust in how Facebook does business is falling.

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The MacBook Pro May Not Get a Cellular Model Until 2024

Andrew Orr ·

For now, photographers and other people in the field will have to tether their MacBook Pro to their iPhone to actually upload their content.

Apple’s 5G laptop strategy right now is to tell you to buy an iPhone. The math is pretty simple: Qualcomm’s modems, which Apple has a deal to use at least through 2022, are a big cost on Apple’s ledger both financially and politically. Sure, Apple could price Qualcomm-packing laptops so it makes a profit, but the company doesn’t want to be even more dependent on its longtime frenemy as a supplier.

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VSCO Officially Launches New Film Effects to Members

Andrew Orr ·

I spotted the new FX toolset a few days ago, and on Tuesday VSCO is officially rolling it out to members of its VSCO X subscription service. These remind of of Mextures, an editing app I used for a a couple years. I don’t use that app anymore but I do look forward to the grain textures in VSCO FX. I had complained about its regular grain tool for a while because it’s too uniform. But these new grain textures look more realistic and film-like, if that’s your style.

Built from actual film stock, these new Texture presets create a Dust, Grain and Scratch overlay for your photos and videos. These subtle effects allow you to add another dimension to your creativity. There are 19 photo and 9 video Textures available.

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Polygon Partners With DraftKings on NFTs and Web3 Technology

Andrew Orr ·

Polygon and DraftKings have “formed a strategic agreement” to adopt NFTs and Web3 technologies with DraftKings Marketplace.

To participate in the marketplace, users can browse listings on the marketplace’s website. Preseason Access Collection NFT drops by Autograph of iconic athletes featuring Tom Brady, Wayne Gretzky, Naomi Osaka, Simone Biles, and Derek Jeter, were sold out almost immediately since the launch of the platform in August.

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Canon USA Hit With Class Action Lawsuit Over Under-Reporting Printers

Andrew Orr ·

Canon faces a class action lawsuit with the accusation that its 4-in-1 printers don’t print documents if an ink cartridge is low.

Further, “There is no reason or technical basis for manufacturing the All-in-One Printers with an ink level detection function that causes the scanner to stop functioning when ink is low or empty. Canon designed the All-in-One Printers in such a way to require consumers to maintain ink in their devices regardless of whether they intend to print.”

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The Story Behind 'Frenzic', a Puzzle Game That Launched in 2007

Andrew Orr ·

Frenzic is a puzzle game from The Iconfactory that launched on Mac OS X in 2007, and came to the iPhone in 2008. Back in July, the team told its story. The original game has been discontinued but a remake called Frenzic: Overtime is now on Apple Arcade.

Our first prototype used a “sweet solution” with Safari’s web technologies. While it was an excellent way to test out game interactions and to get us even more excited about the iPhone, it just wasn’t enough to do the game justice. In retrospect, it is pretty sweet that you can still play Frenzic 1.0 in a web browser.

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Coinbase Calls on Government to Create Separate Crypto Regulator

Andrew Orr ·

Coinbase wants the U.S. government to create a cryptocurrency regulation agency separate from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Laws drafted in the 1930s to facilitate effective oversight of our financial system could not contemplate this technological revolution. Elements of those laws do not have room for the transformational potential that digital assets and crypto innovation make possible. They do not accommodate the efficiency, seamlessness, and transparency of digital asset markets, and thus risk serving as an unintended barrier to current innovations in the digital asset economy.

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WhatsApp Rolls Out Support for End-To-End Encrypted Backups

Andrew Orr ·

WhatsApp is rolling out support for end-to-end encrypted backups for Google Drive and iCloud. Here’s how to enable the feature.

Make sure you’ve got the latest version of WhatsApp.
Open Settings.
Tap Chats > Chat Backup > End-to-end Encrypted Backup.
Click Continue, then follow the prompts to create your password or 64-digit encryption key.
Hit Done, and wait for your end-to-end encrypted backup to be prepared. You may need to connect to a power source.

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NFT Marketplace 'OpenSea' Has Serious Security Flaws

Andrew Orr ·

OpenSea, one of the biggest marketplaces for NFTs, has security flaws that leave user wallets open to attack.

The researchers stated that the vulnerability allowed hackers to steal users’ entire crypto wallets. As said, OpenSea has been the biggest marketplace for buying, selling, and trading NFTs and other digital collectibles.

CheckPoint came across the vulnerability for the first time following reports of stolen crypto wallets triggered by airdropped NFTs. The Check Point researchers later discovered critical security issues “that, if exploited, could have led hackers to hijack user accounts and steal entire crypto wallets of users, by sending malicious NFTs”.

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Third Generation AirPods Likely to be 'Unleashed' at Apple Event

Charlotte Henry ·

As I, and many others, suspected, it seems we will finally get the third generation of AirPods at the ‘Unleashed’ event on Monday. Leaks from Chinese social media site Weibo, picked up by MacRumors, suggest the earbuds will have an updated design.

Now, as Apple has confirmed its likely last event of the year for this coming Monday, October 18, all the indications suggest that new ‌AirPods‌ will also be announced alongside redesigned MacBook Pros. Weibo leaker @PandaIsBald, which accurately reported the launch of the baseline ninth-generation iPad for Apple’s last event, has claimed that alongside “M1X” Macs, the third-generation ‌AirPods‌ with an updated design will also be announced…The refreshed ‌AirPods‌ are expected to take design cues from the ‌AirPods Pro‌ and leaked schematics and images but appear to confirm those design changes. However, what remains unclear is whether the new ‌AirPods‌ will feature silicone ear-tips, like the ‌AirPods Pro‌, or feature the same in-ear design as the first and second-generation ‌AirPods‌.

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The New York Times Invites Beta Testers for its Audio App

Andrew Orr ·

The New York Times is building an app for audio journalism and it’s inviting beta testers to try it out.

“New York Times Audio” will provide an accessible and authoritative way to understand the world, pulling from Times podcasts, Times articles, premier magazine publishers like New York magazine and Rolling Stone, new audio formats from The Times newsroom and more. The product will also feature the archive of “This American Life,” encompassing 25 years worth of episodes from the iconic show that pioneered a new form of audio narrative journalism.

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Apple ML Study Compares Supervised Versus Self-Supervised Learning

Andrew Orr ·

A research team at Apple published a study in October examining supervised and self-supervised algorithms. The title is “Do Self-Supervised and Supervised Methods Learn Similar Visual Representations?” From the abstract:

We find that the methods learn similar intermediate representations through dissimilar means, and that the representations diverge rapidly in the final few layers. We investigate this divergence, finding that it is caused by these layers strongly fitting to the distinct learning objectives. We also find that SimCLR’s objective implicitly fits the supervised objective in intermediate layers, but that the reverse is not true.

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Time For The Apple Watch to Separate From The iPhone

Charlotte Henry ·

The Apple Watch Series 7 became available to order on Friday. In the latest edition of his ‘Power On’ newsletter, Bloomberg News‘s Mark Gurman noted how the wearable has got closer to breaking free from the iPhone but isn’t there yet.

Seven years into the Apple Watch era, one of Apple’s most promising device categories still does things the old way. As any Apple Watch owner knows, an iPhone is required for activation and setup, syncing data and day-to-day operating. The Apple Watch doesn’t meet the Jobs vision for every Apple device being able to operate and exist on its own. Apple has taken some steps over the years to push the Apple Watch in that direction, though… Despite those enhancements, you still can’t buy an Apple Watch, set it up from the device itself, and move over all of your content from the cloud. That limits the potential user base of the Apple Watch—and excludes people who might want to only own an Apple Watch and a Mac or iPad and no iPhone. Or, one day, people who want an Apple Watch as their only device.

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Sneak Peek of Features Coming With Cryptomator 1.6.0 Update

Andrew Orr ·

Although we don’t have a definite release date, the developers of Cryptomator shared some features users will see in the upcoming 1.6.0 update.

A feature already wished in its earliest days will be present: Auto Lock – the automatic locking of a vault. For every vault you can set up an idle timer after which the vault is automatically locked. If any write or read happens during the time span, the timer is reset.