Новости за 04.03.2018

Many years ago, in a moment of candid honesty, Nilay Patel described how his childhood was somehow defined and irrevocably ruined by an attempt to set up and use an IR blaster. It might also have had something to do with being a Packers fan? I can’t remember clearly, it was so long ago. The important takeaway was that IR blasters are in some way disastrous and evil.

Smart lighting company LIFX has produced a range of products that you can control from your phone or with a virtual assistant such as Alexa or Siri. Now, Microsoft users can join them: the company announced that users can now control their smart lights with the company’s virtual assistant, Cortana.

This year’s Geneva Auto Show is shaping up to be a blockbuster event, with a whole slate of supercars, ultra-fast racers, and bold concepts for us to feast on. Moreover, this is going to be the European auto industry’s chance to shine, with major electric cars coming from Jaguar, Audi, Volkswagen, and Mercedes-Benz.

The Nintendo Switch and one of its flagship games, Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild turned one year old this weekend. To commemorate the occasion, Nintendo announced (via GameStop) a five-disc, limited edition soundtrack containing hundreds of tracks used in the game. Unfortunately, it’ll only be available in Japan, and it’s pretty expensive.

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It can be difficult to find time to finish a video game, especially if you only have a few hours a week to play. In our new biweekly column Short Play we suggest video games that can be started and finished in a weekend.

The biggest night in Hollywood is finally here. It’s time for the 90th Academy Awards ceremony, aka the Oscars, the magical evening when the biggest names in show business sit down to see who got the industry’s biggest awards, and hope for some timely humor to break up the scripted award speeches and “This show is sooooo long” jokes.

Amazon has unveiled (via Engadget) a new toolset for skill developers: the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) sound library. It’s a free repository of sound clips that developers can use to add enhance the skills that they are creating for the company’s smart assistant.

There are a ton of podcasts out there, but finding the right one can be difficult. In our new column Pod Hunters, we cover what we’ve been listening to that we can’t stop thinking about.

I want to hate the HomePod. Apple’s new $350 speaker symbolizes everything backward and compromising about the iPhone maker’s walled garden: the speaker requires you have an iOS device to use it, and it demands an Apple Music account to make use of Siri-powered voice control playback. It is antithetical to platform-agnostic Sonos and unabashedly so, as if Apple is daring its competitors to try and compete with its hardware prowess and platform lock-in.

When Star Trek: Discovery launched on CBS last September, it went where no Star Trek show had gone before. Instead of focusing on standalone episodes like its predecessors, its first season was a single, extended story arc about a war between the Klingons and the Federation. Rather than scientific exploration, cultural exchange, and diplomatic missions, the USS Discovery’s captain, Gabriel Lorca, was hell-bent on defeating the Klingons, even when it meant venturing into ethical gray areas. Over the course of the first season... Читать дальше...

On August 24th, 1928, a 17-year-old high school kid jumped into the Hudson River and snuck inside a ship that was soon headed to Antarctica. Billy Gawronski, the son of Polish immigrants, wanted nothing more than to go to the ice continent with his hero, explorer Richard Byrd. But he was caught — and sent back home.

Last week, YouTube said that some of the warnings and bans handed down to some right-wing channels might have been mistakes from human moderators, but despite the walk back, some companies have begun pulling ads from Infowars’ The Alex Jones Channel.

I’ve been coming to Mobile World Congress for close to a decade now, and I’ve never seen the iPhone copied quite so blatantly and cynically as I witnessed during this year’s show. MWC 2018 will go down in history as the launch platform for a mass of iPhone X notch copycats, each of them more hastily and sloppily assembled than the next.

The idea of ingesting a Tide Pod used to be a little bit funny.

For example, when The New York Daily News printed a comment from Senator Chuck Schumer under a rudely ageist headline in September 2012. He had recently been informed that 40 children in New York City had eaten Tide Pods and received medical attention for eating Tide Pods in the preceding five months. And he said, mostly unprovoked, “I saw one on my staffer’s desk and I wanted to eat it.” It’s good in print and it’s better out loud. Читать дальше...

Amazon launched the Kindle just after I graduated college in 2007, a device which Walt Mossberg called a milestone for the company. I remember seeing the first devices pop up at the time, but it wasn’t something I was interested in since I was firmly wedded to the paper book. A decade after Amazon debuted its revolutionary device, I finally broke down during last year’s Prime Day sale and purchased a refurbished Kindle Paperwhite.