Year: 2018

 Facebook announced on January 11 that it would change its News Feed algorithm to prioritize posts from friends and family over public content. Say goodbye to never-ending sponsored posts from Tasty, CNN, and other brands that have embraced the platform. Time to say hello to more personal posts featuring commenting and sharing from your friends. Sounds like the original version of Facebook… Read More

 Intel is not having that great of year thus far in the face of a slew of information about security flaws in it hardware coming out — and you can add another new report from The Wall Street Journal today, which suggests that Intel didn’t immediately notify the U.S. government of the issues, to that list. The Journal is reporting that Intel notified some of its customers of the… Read More

 Don’t have a TV or just want to watch Kesha, Cardi B and Lady Gaga walk the red carpet from the comfort of your laptop? Thanks to modern tech, that’s possible tonight. James Corden kicks off the 60th annual Grammy awards this evening, Sunday, January 28, at 7:30 pm EST/4:30 pm PST, which is set to run for three and a half hours (though, fair warning, these types of awards shows… Read More

 At first, I wasn’t impressed by The Shape of Water‘s visual effects. That might seem like a strange thing to say about a movie whose effects  have been nominated for multiple awards (though not an Oscar, despite the film’s 13 nominations). What I mean is this: When I was watching, I never wondered about the technology behind the merman — the sometimes-monstrous… Read More

 One of the great entrepreneurs of the 20th century, Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA, passed away today. As Reuters pointed out in its short biography, Kamprad created a store — as a teenager mind you — that today has more than 400 locations, revenues of $62 billion, and a cultural ubiquity that very few consumer products could ever hope to attain. Having read the IKEA story… Read More

 I don’t like tech conferences. I mean, of course I don’t, they’re not meant for people like me. I’m an introvert, so I find them exhausting, and am (presumably) less likely than an extrovert to meet interesting or contributory people. I read much faster than people talk, so they’re not a good way for me to learn things. But there’s more to my dislike than… Read More

 So that flamethrower that Elon Musk teased The Boring Company would start selling after it ran out of its 50,000 hats? Yeah, it’s real – and you can pre-order one now if you want need a ridiculous way to spend $500. Musk revealed the flamethrower on Saturday, after some digging tipped its existence late last week. The Boring Company Flamethrower is functional, too, as you can see… Read More

 If hardware is hard, robotics are next to impossible. Even so, Sphero managed an impressive feat over its first five years, growing from a small startup with a glowing, smartphone-controlled ball into the maker of the most talked about piece of merchandise for cinema’s biggest blockbuster franchise. But last week, it became clear that not all was rosy with the company, as they cut 45 jobs. Read More

 Facebook Messenger was down for me for about an hour earlier this week. My MacBook Pro randomly kernel panics overnight and restarts. Slack was down, and Github, and AWS. A little more than a year ago, Dyn went down, throwing the DNS layer of the internet into a tailspin. Practically every chip made by Intel has serious security flaws. Equifax leaked 143 million accounts. Tokyo-based… Read More

 SpaceX has set February 6 as the target for its Falcon Heavy launch, the first ever test flight of the new, high-capacity rocket that the company is building to allow it to send nearly three times as much payload per mission into orbit. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted the target date on Saturday, adding that there will be plenty of viewing opportunity for the public from the nearby causeway.… Read More