Day: March 7, 2020

A Calculator in 2020?

This week, Al Williams wrote up an article on what might be the last scientific calculator. Back in the day, the fanciest of scientific calculators had not just sin, cos, and tan, but were also programmable so that you could code in frequently used formulae. And the calculator that he reviews is certainly powerful: with…


Coming Soon: Open-Source Blueprints for a Tiny Nuclear Reactor

“A nonprofit startup is offering an open-source nuclear plant plan,” reports Popular Mechanics: A mechanical engineer-turned-tech entrepreneur has plans to, well, empower people around the world to build their own 100-megawatt nuclear power reactors. That’s much larger than some of the modular reactors designed by nuclear startups, but still much smaller than operating nuclear power…


Oppo Find X2 Pro hands-on: 120Hz screen and a superb 10X zoom camera – CNET

The company abandons the no-notch display and adds a 120Hz refresh rate, superfast charging and 5G. …read more Source:: CNet


iPhone 11 vs. iPhone XS: Should you upgrade now? – CNET

Is it time to ditch 2018’s iPhone XS for the newer iPhone 11? Not exactly. …read more Source:: CNet


Best Buy’s weekend sale: Here are the best deals – CNET

Save $100 on the HomePod, $50 on a great massage gun and hundreds on Apple and Dell laptops. …read more Source:: CNet


Scam Call Center’s Own CCTV Gets Breached

A call center scammed 40,000 people over the last 14 months, bringing in $8 million. But within four months their own computer system had been remotely breached by “online vigilante” Jim Browning, according to the BBC. He secretly tapped into the call center’s own closed-circuit TV cameras, and eventually tipped off the police, leading to…


If every company is a software company, then UX design is everyone’s job

An insightful analysis​ of the work of more than 350,000 designers reveals a growing movement toward design-driven thinking, but there’s still a lot of work to be done. …read more Source:: ZDNet


AMD processors from 2011 to 2019 vulnerable to two new attacks

Academics disclose new Collide+Probe and Load+Reload attacks on AMD CPUs. …read more Source:: ZDNet


Edge Browser Scores Worst in Test of Telemetry Privacy

“New academic research published last month looked at the phone-home [telemetry] features of six of today’s most popular browsers and found that the Brave browser sent the smallest amount of data about its users back to the browser maker’s servers,” reports ZDNet: The research, conducted by Douglas J. Leith, a professor at Trinity College at…


Vanquish Your Foes With Lego Playing Card Machine Gun

There was something exceptionally satisfying about those playground games of cops and robbers when we were young, but they were missing something in that a pretend gun made with your fingers lacks a certain Je ne sais quoi. Our youthful blood-lust demanded something a bit more real, and though the likes of NERF and other…