NBA and Google partner up to produce VR talk show with NBA greats

Get in the game like never before!

It’s the NBA All-Star Weekend and, this year, the NBA is allowing fans more access to their favorite athletes, by working with Google to create new virtual reality experiences for fans. One of the more interesting ideas that’s rolling out this weekend is called House of Legends, an episodic sports talk show hosted by retired NBA players such as James Worthy, Bruce Bowen, Chauncey Billups, John Starks and others, and presented in virtual reality via Google’s Daydream platform.

Fans will have the opportunity to virtually sit down with these NBA greats as they share stories from their careers and discuss league happenings and other topics of conversation. To get in on the fun, you’ll need a Daydream View and a Daydream-compatible phone, then it’s simply a matter of downloading the NBA VR app from the Google Play Store. Expect weekly episodes to pop up in the app over the remainder of the NBA season.

The NBA VR app will also be packed with highlights and other content available on demand. If you can’t make it down to New Orleans for the festivities in person, VR might just provide the next best experience.

This isn’t the first time the NBA has dipped it’s toes into the world of VR, as the Association has been incorporating VR experiences throughout the 2016-17 season. Through a partnership with NextVR, NBA League Pass subscribers have the option to live stream preselected games every week in 360-degree VR with either a Google Daydream or Samsung Gear VR headset. You get a court side seat for the game right by the scorer’s table, which is as good as any seat you’d find on StubHub. Again you need to be an NBA League Pass subscriber for access and local blackout restrictions do apply.

You can find more information along with the remaining schedule of games here, and you’ll need the NextVR app for either Oculus (Samsung Gear VR) or Google Play (Daydream) to buy your virtual seat for the game.

How Android theming helped me find my inner artist

I’m all about expressing myself.

I’m the girl with the Disney shirt on every day, with a beautiful case for my phone, my headphones on top of my jeep cap, and a song in my heart, if not on my lips. I spent some of my schooling years hiding who I am as a means to escape bullying, and I’m done with that. I’m done with hiding. I believe in being who I am and I believe in showing who I am in the technology I rock.

And this is why I theme.

Your smartphone is one of the most basic and personal extensions of your body in the “post-PC age”. I was the kid in school that would spend hours editing tons of awesome wallpapers for my desktop, and when I got an Android phone, you bet your sweet ass I scoured the internet for awesome wallpapers to put on it. But we don’t have to stop at the wallpaper on Android. We’re not Apple, for Duarte’s sake, we’re Android, and Android is all about personalization!

Some of my early themes. Go easy on me, my tastes were still developing.

When I got an Android phone, you bet your sweet ass I scoured the internet for awesome wallpapers.

Believe it or not, for the first couple of years on Android, I didn’t bother with icon packs for my themes. I would find a good wallpaper, and then I would create dock icons to match the theme, since my dock was all folders anyway.

Then I’d get together about a dozen ringtones and notification tones to give to my starred contacts and favorite apps, expressing my musical tastes as well as telling me who or what was calling before I pulled my phone out of my flares.

Things were fine… then I found Nova Launcher. And Android was suddenly brand-new.

Nova Launcher was my first custom launcher, and it’s the one I’ve stuck with. I dabble with Action Launcher and others from time to time for specialized projects and to see how green the seaweed is in other lakes, but Nova was where I had my theming revelation, and it’s where I gladly build (almost) all my themes to this day.

Icon packs were easy to apply and easy to tweak individual icons on, folders were bigger, more functional, and more beautiful than ever, and then there were the gesture actions. I was in love.

When I build a theme, there’s always an instinctive desire to share them. Call it the digital version of showing your parents your school art project. I was sharing them on social media years ago, and after writing for Android Central, I decided to share my themes with our readers.

It’s a bubbly little feeling to hear people are trying out my themes, that my themes can spur them to make their phones look better and feel better for them. It’s why I’m always hunting for good theme ideas and great wallpapers to build them on.

I love to share my themes because my themes are an extension of myself and my style. I love to build my themes so that I can try new styles and new workflows in pursuit of the perfect home screen. And I’m about to dive into some wicked Beauty and the Beast themes, so if you know any characters or wallpapers you want to see me use, holler at me!

Softbank still wants Sprint and T-Mobile to merge

If at first you don’t succeed …

CNBC reports that Softbank still has goals of a Sprint / T-Mobile merger becoming a valid number three carrier in the U.S. and it has a novel way of getting it to happen this time: giving control of Sprint to Deutsche Telekom and becoming a minor partner in a new combined network.

In 2014, Softbank, which owned Sprint after a $21.6 billion 2013 investment, was set to purchase T-Mobile from Deutsche Telekom. Both parties had agreed on terms and regulatory approval was the last step. The merger was denied by U.S. lawmakers and Softbank set its eyes on making Sprint a profitable and viable third-place carrier with plans to move on AT&T and Verizon’s dominance.

Both companies involved are having a good day in the market with Sprint shares up more than 3.5% and T-Mobile shares up over 4%.

That also didn’t pan out as planned, and now Softbank is discussing an end-around play that would make Bill Belichick proud. The company thinks it can relinquish control of Sprint to Deutsche Telekom (for a healthy sum, no doubt) so the German communications giant can merge T-Mobile and Sprint on its own. Softbank would hold a minority ownership of the company and the assets from both DT and Softbank could be enough to push against the current duopoly in the U.S. telecommunications market.

While both companies declined any official comment to CNBC, Softbank Chief Executive Masayoshi Son told analysts in February, “We may buy, we may sell. Maybe a simple merger, we may be dealing with T-Mobile, we may be dealing with totally different people, different company.”

While Sprint has struggled to gain ground, T-Mobile has made strides with customer growth quarter after quarter since a failed AT&T buyout in 2011. Combining the customer base and network footprint of the two companies would move closer to the big lead Verizon and AT&T hold in the U.S. market. Everyone makes money and all is well in the world of expensive suits and boardrooms.

Of course, there’s no telling how any FTC or FCC ruling would go were this to happen, and as of today, everything is still speculation. We’ll all just have to wait and see how things play out and hope that whatever happens is good for customers as well as corporate bank accounts.

Moto Z Mod puts a walkie-talkie on your phone 

Motorola has been encouraging enterprising hardware hackers to create Mods at contests around the globe for the Moto Z smartphone, though so far results have been somewhat limited. The latest Mod to make its way to an Indiegogo project is the Linc radio — a nifty little walkie-talkie Mod that the creators say will let you stay in touch at a range of up to six miles without cell service.

Linc operates on consumer-level frequencies (GMRS/FRS) with 121 private channels to allow you a chatter-free experience, even in busy areas like a ski resort. The Mod can also send SMS or transmit voice to a single buddy on a ski lift, or to a group of friends waiting for you at the hotel bar. You can even send out your GPS location from your smartphone without cell service. The Mod is water- and dust-resistant, and will act as a NOAA weather radio and emergency beacon. The Linc has its own 1,500 mAh battery for 20 hours of standby time, and can even communicate with other conventional two-way radios.

While the Mod is made to connect “seamlessly” to the Moto Z, Linc says that the unit will work with any smartphone via Bluetooth. If you’re up for supporting the project, you can order one of your own with a pledge of $99 on Indiegogo right now.

Via: The Verge

Source: Indiegogo

Climate change skeptic Scott Pruitt confirmed as EPA Administrator

Immediately after his inauguration, President Trump got to work on his long-anticipated plan to gut the Environmental Protection Agency. His administration wants to review all research coming out of it on a “case by case” basis and placed a gag order on employees, but waited on more until the agency’s new chief made it through the Congressional gauntlet. Despite heavy opposition from Democrats and workers from the department he’d be heading, the Senate confirmed climate change skeptic Scott Pruitt as administrator of the EPA today.

The close 52-46 vote was nearly along party lines aside from aisle-switching by Susan Collins (R-ME) to oppose and Joe Manchin III (D-WV) and Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND), both from coal-rich states, to support. Democrats fought all night to delay the confirmation vote until next Tuesday, after which the Oklahoma attorney general’s office is ordered to release 3,000 of Pruitt’s emails concerning his communications with the fossil fuel industry, according to The New York Times.

Since early December when Trump announced Pruitt as his pick to head the agency, reporters and environmentalists were quick to point out his numerous lawsuits against the EPA in his position as attorney general of Oklahoma. This singular drive to challenge national environmental law aimed to return all regulatory power to states — convenient for an AG with such close ties to the fossil fuel industry, as when he reprinted a note from an oil and gas company nearly word-for-word on his letterhead and sent it to the EPA in 2011. Who knows how much of the department will be left now that its frequent enemy is heading it.

Source: The New York Times

Nintendo Switch eShop purchases will be tied to your account

Rejoice, Nintendo fans! Your eShop purchases on the Switch will be tied to your account and not the hardware, according to a new unboxing video.

Unlike Microsoft and Sony, Nintendo currently doesn’t allow you to redownload digital purchases. They’re tied to the piece of hardware you buy them on, not to a unified account system. If you replace your console, those games are lost. Fans have criticized the practice for years, and it appears Nintendo has finally listened.

After NeoGaf user “hiphoptherobot” accidentally received his Switch pre-order early, he agreed to do an unboxing video for fighting game community YouTube channel FloKO.

In the video, at the 2:59 mark, there’s this bit of fine print:

“Your Nintendo Account contains your Nintendo eShop purchase history and current balance. By re-linking your Nintendo Account after initializing the console, it will be possible to redownload any software or DLC purchased using that account. (Software that has been discontinued may not be available to redownload in some cases.)”

Giving gamers an easier way to manage their digital libraries is long overdue. We’ve contacted Nintendo to confirm the change to its online services, and we’ll update this story if we hear back.

Via: Polygon

Source: YouTube

Tesla owners now have an even more obsessive companion app

As the most technologically advanced production cars on the road, Tesla’s vehicles collect a lot of potentially useful data. Unfortunately for Tesla’s diehard fanclub of early adopters, the company’s in-house app doesn’t offer a simple way to get at much of that data. So two obsessive Tesla owners took it upon themselves to build a their own, much more robust companion app called Teslab.

Teslab connects your smartphone to your Tesla Model S or Model X and starts combing through all of the available data to like speed, braking, etc to build a complete picture of your overall driving efficiency. The app will show those efficiency stats overlaid on a map so you can see when your vehicle was efficiently sipping power and when you were just burning through battery range with a leadfoot. The app can show your efficiency for a single trip as well as actual miles vs. battery miles and the amount of money you saved by not using internal combustion, and it will even show how “phantom drain” affected your range while the car was sitting idle.

On the surface, the app aims to at least alleviate range anxiety with a clear picture of the factors affecting that range in the first place. But the co-creators from development studio HappyFunCorp hope that by handing over vehicle data (which includes potentially sensitive location information pulled from the phone) Tesla drivers will eventually help make all connected cars a little smarter. Teslab hopes to use all that information to analyze how things like weather and road conditions affect battery range and eventually make your Tesla talk to your connected home.

“We thought, what if we could build a framework for what the connected car could be,” Teslab co-creater Ben Schippers told TechCrunch. “What if Tesla gave us enough access to our individual cars that we could build a community around what we envision the connected car of the future could be, across all connected cars?”

While the app is still in beta, Schippers says they already have “a huge percentage of the Model X and Model S owners” signed up, and the flood of new Tesla owners expected to come with the release of the Model 3 later this year will add another huge source of data. But the real goal for Schippers and company will be to get all the other big automakers on with a similarly powerful platform.

Via: TechCrunch

Source: Teslap

Civic-planning sim ‘Cities: Skylines’ is coming to Xbox One

The civic-planning simulator Cities: Skylines is making the jump to consoles soon, long after Microsoft teased a port back in August 2015. At an undisclosed date this Spring, Xbox One owners will get their own edition of the game, which comes bundled with the After Dark DLC. Delightful as the title is, how gameplay will make the transition from mouse to console controller is anyone’s guess.

Lest you assume that’s a downgrade and silly thing to wish by console plebes, fans have been wanting controller support since Cities: Skyline first launched in March 2015. And if the Xbox One is your only gaming machine, your urban planning options are pretty slim, so this tranquil successor to the SimCity legacy is a fine option. Get ready to spam your friends list with tilt-shifted pics of your elegantly-constructed utopias.

Source: Cities: Skylines (Xbox)

All opinions are equal in BuzzFeed’s new comment system

President Donald Trump’s election win was shocking to many, which seems to say that Americans understand each other less than ever. Part of this disconnect may be a lack of exposure to opposing viewpoints. That’s what Buzzfeed seems to think, and it’s addressing this problem with something called Outside Your Bubble.

The new feature works like a curated comments section and will be implemented in the site’s most popular news posts (like this one). An area below the story presents a summary of varying reactions from users on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and other platforms. Clicking one of these summaries leads directly to a relevant post so readers can see first-hand what different people are saying.

BuzzFeed Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith wrote that the goal is to give readers “a sense of the context in which news lives now,” which he believes they may not otherwise get due to their social media tendencies.

“We’re all living in filter bubbles, on social media in particular,” Smith told Bloomberg. “Anybody who works in news has spent the last year watching how social media affects people’s views of the world and can close you off to dissenting views.”

A Wall Street Journal project called “Blue Feed, Red Feed” backs up Smith’s claim by emulating the “echo chambers” liberal and conservative Facebook users create for themselves online. The tool divides news sources into “red” and “blue” political feeds based on data from a 2015 study of Facebook user habits. Browsing posts about Trump shows the conservative publications discuss the POTUS with a positive tone. As you’d expect, the liberal outlets take an opposite stance and are more critical.

The timing of this new feature is interesting, given BuzzFeed’s recent history. The site made news in January for publishing unverified information about Trump’s potential connections with Russia, a move that sparked wide criticism of the publication’s journalistic ethics. Perhaps this backlash is part of what inspired BuzzFeed to reconsider the mechanics of balanced news reporting.

Smith referred to Outside Your Bubble as “an experiment,” so it may not be a permanent BuzzFeed fixture. Wishful thinking aside, the feature probably won’t be able to convince people to consider multiple viewpoints before forming opinions. Upending human nature is tough, but at least BuzzFeed readers will have a centralized way to quickly learn about people and perspectives they don’t always hear from.

Source: Bloomberg, BuzzFeed

MacRumors Giveaway: Win an Apple Pencil PencilCozy-S Combo Pack From Cozy Industries

For this week’s giveaway, we’ve teamed up with Cozy Industries to offer MacRumors readers a chance to win a PencilCozy-S stylus cap for the Apple Pencil.

The PencilCozy-S, designed to attach to the end of an Apple Pencil, serves multiple purposes. It makes sure the Apple Pencil’s end cap is never lost when charging, and it also serves as a dedicated stylus that can be used right alongside the tip of the Apple Pencil.

The band of the PencilCozy-S slides over the body of the Apple Pencil, while the cap portion fits onto the Apple Pencil cap, keeping the two pieces attached. It might seem counterintuitive to put a stylus cap on the Apple Pencil, but it can be used on any iOS device in any app, and is not limited to the iPad Pro. There’s one other added bonus — it prevents your Apple Pencil from rolling off of a flat surface.

According to Cozy Industries, the PencilCozy-S took 11 revisions to get the ideal texture for the best possible stylus experience. It’s designed from a proprietary silicone blend that’s meant to be supple enough for writing and drawing but durable enough to stand up to being tossed in a bag.

At $8.99, the PencilCozy-S is a solid deal, especially because it also ships with a rare earth magnet cap in case you lose your original cap, plus it has a LightningCozy that’s designed to attach your Apple Pencil Lightning adapter to a Lightning cable so it’s never lost.

We’re giving away 25 PencilCozy-S accessories to MacRumors readers. To enter to win, use the Rafflecopter widget below and enter an email address. Email addresses will be used solely for contact purposes to reach the winner and send the prize. You can earn additional entries by subscribing to our weekly newsletter, subscribing to our YouTube channel, following us on Twitter, or visiting the MacRumors Facebook page.

Due to the complexities of international laws regarding giveaways, only U.S. residents who are 18 years of age or older are eligible to enter. To offer feedback or get more information on the giveaway restrictions, please refer to our Site Feedback section, as that is where discussion of the rules will be redirected.

a Rafflecopter giveawayThe contest will run from today (February 17) at 11:00 a.m. Pacific Time through 11:00 a.m. Pacific Time on February 24. The winners will be chosen randomly on February 24 and will be contacted by email. The winners will have 48 hours to respond and provide a shipping address before new winners are chosen.

Tags: giveaway, PencilCozy
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