In the age of Photoshop, you never know what photos have been edited beyond belief.
But sometimes, weird optical illusions can occur. These photographic tricks leave our brain filling in the gaps in hilarious, weird, and sometimes raunchy ways.
Let yourself do a double take, because not everything is as it seems.
Fun fact: Microsoft Office's Clippy was among the first smart assistants made widely available to consumers. That same technology has since meandered over into the world of audio, where internet-connected speakers are now capable of pairing with other devices and being controlled by a listener's voice.
With more and more electronics companies dipping their toes into the smart speaker marketplace to meet surging public demand, there are a lot of options for consumers to consider. There's tough competition out there, y'all. But it's a newcomer that's got everyone else beat in terms of sound quality and high-tech features: the Apple HomePod. Read more...
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February 10th, 2019 will mark five years since Flappy Bird creator Dong Nguyen pulled the beloved game from the App Store and Google Play, causing worldwide hysteria. Devices with the game pre-installed were even put up for sale for hundreds and thousands of dollars.
Fast forward to 2017, the game has effectively become extinct. iOS 11's shift to 64-bit meant it could no longer support the 32-bit apps. Flappy Bird, as we know it, is now gone...but it will never ever be forgotten.
Convinced you could make a game people would love this much? The 2019 Game Dev & Design Mega Mastery Bundle contains all the tools and training you need to build your very own video game. And you can get it on sale today for only $39. Read more...
More about Gaming, Video Game, Online Learning, App Development, and Mashable ShoppingNintendo has cut its ambitious annual Switch sales forecast despite enjoying a strong Christmas Q3 quarter.
The Japanese games giant recorded a 104.21 billion JPY ($958 million) profit on revenue of 608.39 billion JPY ($5.59 billion) between October and December 2018. Revenue was up 26 percent year-on-year, which is an impressive feature given that quarter was a successful one for Nintendo, yielding its biggest operating profit in a Q3 for eight years.
The Nintendo Switch is now closing down on lifetime sales of the N64. Nintendo shifted a record 9.41 million consoles during the three-month period, up 30 percent annually, to take it to 14.49 million this financial year, which began in April 2018. However, despite a success last quarter, likely helped in no small amount by Christmas, Nintendo has trimmed its ambitious goal to sell 20 million Switch units this financial year. Instead, the target is 17 million, which means it is estimating around 2.5 million sales during January, February and March.
In terms of games, a bunch of new releases performed well in the last quarter. Pokémon: Let’s Go sold million titles since its November release, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate sold 12.08 million since its December launch and Super Mario Party, released in October, reached 5.3 million sales. Total game sales jumped by 101 percent to reach 94.64 million sales during the period.
Nintendo’s retro consoles — the NES Classic and Super NES Classic — sold 5.83 million. But there is bad news for Nintendo loyalists, the upcoming Mario Kart mobile game won’t ship in March — its revised launch date is this summer.
Meet Sencrop a French startup that wants to empower farmers using sensors, a data platform and a service marketplace. The company recently raised a $10 million funding round.
The Series A round was led by Bpifrance with NCI Waterstart, Nord Capital and The Yield Lab also participating. Existing investors Demeter and Breega Capital also reinvested.
If you’re a farmer and are getting started when it comes to leveraging data, Sencrop wants to be a one-stop shop for all your digital needs. The company sells connected stations that can measure temperature, humidity, rainfall, windspeed, etc.
Each station costs between $340 and $570 (between €300 and €500) and you can have as many as you want. You can install the station yourself — it’s as easy as planting a post.
After that, you pay a subscription to access the platform. It costs around $170 to $340 per year (€150 to €300). In addition to live readings of your sensors, Sencrop can help you predict the next steps.
“On the other side of the platform, there are people broadcasting services to farmers,” co-founder and CEO Michael Bruniaux told me. “For instance, we can predict a disease and the farmer knows whether they need a product or not to prevent the disease.”
You can imagine a full-fledged marketplace in the future. For instance, it could be a good way to subscribe to an insurance product, order seeds or contact companies and cooperatives corporations willing to buy your output.
5,000 farmers, winemakers and arborists are already using the platform to monitor their farms. Most of them are currently based in Europe.
Sencrop is slowly building a community of farmers by combining all data points together. For instance, if other people living not far from you are also using Sencrop, you’ll get better forecasts and insights on what to expect.
The company first started with potato crops, vineyards and cereals. But now, you can find all kinds of profiles on Sencrop. Some farmers have a tiny piece of land of less than 100 acres while others have gigantic farms.
With today’s funding round, Sencrop wants to scale the community and expand to new markets.
The decision to move from Copenhagen to London was an easy one. I was 26, recently unemployed, and single. So when I was offered a job in a cosmopolitan city with a population twice that of my home country, I said yes without much hesitation. I didn’t know anyone there, but shaking things up was exactly what I needed, so I rented out my apartment and left. I was excited.
We’re told that making big changes in life is invigorating. That exposing yourself to new things and new people is the only way to really get to know yourself. That to grow as a person, you must challenge yourself. I find this to be mostly true, but I’ve also discovered that actually uprooting yourself, thrilling as it may be, comes with its own set of challenges. Challenges that have taken time to develop coping strategies for. Read more...
More about Moving, Loneliness, Relocation, Lifestyle, and IdentitiesIt’s been a long year for Nintendo fans waiting on Mario Kart to come to mobile and, unfortunately, more patience is required after the game’s launch was moved back to this summer.
Nintendo announced plans to bring the much-loved franchise to smartphones one year ago. It was originally slated to launch by the end of March 2019, but the Japanese games giant said today it is pushing that date back to summer 2019.
The key passage sits within Nintendo’s latest earnings report, released today, which explains that additional time is needed “to improve [the] quality of the application and expand the content offerings after launch.”
It’s frustrating but, as The Verge points out, you can refer to a famous Nintendo phrase if you are seeking comfort.
Shigeru Miyamoto, who created the Mario and Zelda franchises, once remarked that “a delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad.”
There’s plenty riding on the title — excuse the pun. Super Mario Run, the company’s first major game for the iPhone, showed its most popular IP has the potential to be a success on mobile, even though Mario required a $9.99 payment to go beyond the limited demo version. Mario Kart is the most successful Switch title to date, so it figures that it can be a huge smash on mobile if delivered in the right way.
Facebook isn't the only company side-stepping Apple's developer policies in order to conduct paid "research" on people's browsing habits.
Now, TechCrunch reports that Google has also been conducting paid research on people's internet habits through a VPN app called "Screenwise," which also appears to circumvent Apple's developer policies.
The story comes just one day after the publication reported on a shady program called Facebook Research, which used a rebranded version of the social network's banned VPN app to study users' internet habits. The report resulted in Apple revoking Facebook's Enterprise Certificate, effectively bricking all of the company's internal apps. Read more...
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Hanson Robotics, the people who presented the world with the human-like robot Sophia have added a new member to their family. She's called "Little Sophia," and is a 14-inch robot meant to get kids hyped on STEM, coding and AI. Read more...
More about Mashable Video, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Hanson Robotics, and Tech
UPDATE: Jan. 30, 2019, 3:25 p.m. EST The official Xbox Support Twitter account announced that the problems are fixed, about three hours after they were first acknowledged.
The issues surrounding Xbox One console startup, sign-in, title update errors, and our status page have now been resolved. Thank you for sticking with us while our teams addressed these issues and we appreciate the reports. As always, we're here and we're listening.
— Xbox Support (@XboxSupport) January 30, 2019
The original story is below.
Xbox One consoles around the world have stopped working.
Xbox One owners are reporting major problems with their consoles online with displays being stuck on black screens at startup, games not loading, and errors when trying to login to Xbox Live. Read more...
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This post is part of Hard Refresh, a soothing weekly column where we try to cleanse your brain of whatever terrible thing you just witnessed on Twitter.
There's something about going through someone's old belongings that is at once fascinating and eerie. However, there's certainly a fine line between rummaging through postcards at a flea market in Brooklyn and stepping foot into a rotting mansion on Long Island.
You can cross that line of invasion on YouTube. There, you'll find the corner of lively urban explorers sharing their findings as they explore decaying structures they may or may not have permission to do so. Read more...
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Link up any Bluetooth controller to your iOS or Android device and play the game without touching the screen. Read more...
More about Android, Ios, Mashable Video, Upgrade, and Bluetooth Controller
Facebook and Apple are butting heads again thanks to the social network’s shady “Research” app.
Apple has revoked the certificate that enables Facebook to distribute the app via Apple’s Enterprise Certificate Program, according to Recode. This effectively bans Facebook’s Research app, which was first uncovered by Techcrunch on Tuesday.
Facebook had said it would be removing the iOS app from its program, but it looks as if Apple beat them to it.
According to The Verge, Apple’s ban has also affected all of Facebook’s internal use and pre-release beta iOS applications for not only Facebook, but Instagram and WhatsApp as well. Read more...
More about Facebook, Apple, Iphone, Ios, and Privacy
The barrage of bad news for the iPhone keeps coming.
Reuters has published a semi-worrisome report about how a team of former U.S. intelligence agents working for the UAE used a cyber tool called Karma to spy on iPhones used by "activists, diplomats and rival foreign leaders" simply by "uploading phone numbers or email accounts into an automated targeting system."
SEE ALSO: It's official: iPhones are too expensive
Karma reportedly allowed the UAE to "monitor hundreds of targets beginning in 2016, from the Emir of Qatar and a senior Turkish official to a Nobel Peace laureate human-rights activist in Yemen." Read more...
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Wow, it's almost like Trump made a promise the real world can't support.
In 2017, Chinese Apple supplier Foxconn broke ground on a factory in Wisconsin that it said would bring 13,000 manufacturing jobs to the US. President Trump even marked the occasion with a White House ceremony to hail his ability to return blue collar jobs to the midwest.
Now, Reuters reports that Foxconn is reconsidering plans for its Wisconsin plant.
AMERICA IS OPEN FOR BUSINESS! https://t.co/fuRF2Z6CZl
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 28, 2018 Read more...
Harvey Weinstein and Sundance have a history.
The producer had long been a fixture, picking up future hits and hobnobbing with talent. It was also, we learned in 2017, where he perpetrated some terrible crimes. In 2018, Weinstein sat out the festival for the first time since the '80s.
In 2019, Weinstein had a presence at the fest yet again – but not as a power player on the ground. This year, he is the subject of Untouchable, Ursula Macfarlane's 98-minute documentary about the abuses he's waged on others over the past four decades.
SEE ALSO: 'Bohemian Rhapsody' pulled from GLAAD Media Awards after sexual assault allegations Read more...
If Ted Bundy's real secret weapon was his charm, which helped him reassure people who should've been suspicious of him and win over people who should've hated him, count Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile as just another to fall under his spell.
Directed by Joe Berlinger, who also helmed the upcoming Netflix docuseries Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, Extremely Wicked starts out looking like a fresh perspective on the notorious serial killer, with his girlfriend Liz Kendall (Lily Collins) as his way in.
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Like dogs? Of course you do. You will also love this digital short from the latest Saturday Night Live, which features Pete Davidson, Chris Redd, Kenan Thompson, and host James McAvoy rapping the praises of their main bitches: their dogs.
Has the "dogs/bitches" joke been made before? Absolutely. Has it been made while Pete Davidson is wearing tiny sunglasses and an enormous fur coat? No. So we will accept it, and we will enjoy it, and we will go perform this track for our own dogs after watching. Read more...
More about Dogs, Saturday Night Live, Pete Davidson, Entertainment, and Movies Tv Shows
The latest season of The Bachelor kicked off on Jan. 7, featuring former NFL linebacker and self-admitted virgin Colton Underwood as the object of the 30 contestants' desires. (Or whatever, The Bachelor is weird.)
This Saturday Night Live sketch recasts the show as Virgin Hunk and completely shreds it, taking potshots at the awkward speed dating vibe, the conniving and manipulative behavior it takes to win, and the IRL show's struggles with diversity.
The whole thing only works as a comedy sketch because the women of Saturday Night Live are so damn funny. Read more...
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