Learn to code your own Android app for less than $40

Google Play is full of great apps, but not all of them always meet your needs perfectly. Ever have an idea for an app that you wish existed, but had no idea how to make it become a reality? Wish that you could make it for yourself, but don’t know where to even begin? Don’t spend all your time researching the things you need to get started, and instead start right here.

Save an extra 10% with code AC10 Learn More

The Ultimate Android N Development Bundle is a great set of resources that will get you right on your way. With five different courses that start you at the beginning and take you through the steps, you’ll be well on your way to coding the app of your dreams, at your own pace.

• Android 7: Master App Development – Beginner 1 – $79 Value
• Android 7: Master App Development – Beginner 2 – $79 Value
• Android 7: Master App Development – Intermediate 1 – $79 Value
• Android 7: Master App Development – Intermediate 2 – $79 Value
• Android 7: Master App Development – Advanced 1 – $99 Value

Learn to develop for much less! Learn More

Normally, this great bundle would set you back over $400 but right now you can pay a fraction of that. You can grab all five courses for just $39 right now, but if you use the code AC10 you can save an additional 10% from that price. This offer won’t last long, so grab it while you can!

Great SAT Prep apps for Android to get you ready for test day

These apps will help you to succeed on the big test day.

For many high school students, one of the biggest tests they will ever take is the SAT. It can cement their chances of getting into the university of their dreams, or derail those plans. While the SAT can be plenty stressful, by employing a solid studying strategy you can do everything to prepare yourself for the big day. These apps will make sure that you have a solid grasp on what you need to know on the big day.

• SAT Vocabulary Flash cards
• Daily Practice for the New SAT
• Ready4SAT
• SAT up

SAT Vocabulary Flash cards

Getting ready for the SAT definitely involves making sure that you have a solid grasp on a wide vocabulary. After all, vocabulary comprises a full third of the test. If trying to make hundreds of flash cards seems daunting, or you want to be able to study up on word meaning by whipping out your phone during a dull moment, then the SAT Vocabulary Flashcard app should definitely pique your interest.

There are 350 flashcards included in this app, and they’re broken down into six categories to make sure you don’t get overloaded while studying. Each flashcard gives you the word itself on the front. When you tap the card it will flip giving you the definition of the word, and use it in a sentence. There aren’t any options other than learning, and reviewing words.

If you like the setup of this app, you can check out more of Magoosh’s SAT prep apps like vocabulary building, and practice testing.

See on Google Play

Daily Practice for the New SAT

This app is ideal for students who are still months away from their actual test day, and definitely follows a slow and steady study pattern. It aims to be a quick daily resource that lets you tap through a few quick questions everyday, without turning your life into something that revolves entirely around studying.

There are four daily questions that you can answer, and if you choose to make an account you’ll be able to track your responses. You don’t need to make an account in order to access the daily practice questions, but without an account you won’t have the ability to graph your progress as you study and learn. If you take a full paper and pencil practice test, you can use the app to scan the test and see your answers. This is a great way to see where you are struggling and what you need to focus on.

Additionally, they have a partnership with Khan Academy, where there are courses to help get you prepped for test day.

See on Play Store

Ready4SAT

Ready4SAT aims to be a complete personalized preparation for the SAT. You start by inputting your goals for the test, including whether you have taken the SAT before, what your ideal score is, and when you plan to take the test. After you set your goals and make an account you’ll be given a roadmap which covers each concept in turn.

Along with learning concepts there are assessment tests, quizzes, vocabulary aids, and more all within the app. As you complete quizzes, and steps on the roadmap the app will provide you with an estimated SAT score. This can help you to see where you are succeeding and struggling. There is also a vocabulary section with 350 words to memorize for use during the test.

While you can get access to tons of features for free, by upgrading to a Pro membership for $4.99 will give you access to practice tests, along with a huge amount of expanded content to make studying for the SAT as easy as possible.

See on Play Store

SAT up

SAT up is a great resource for students who are aiming for a better score than the last time they took the SAT. It starts by having you take a diagnostic test so that the app understands your breadth of knowledge, and so that it can create personalized questions. You’ll be able to see details on where you’re having problems, down to the concept that you are having difficulty with.

If a particular concept is being difficult to wrap your mind around, you can hire a tutor from within the app. This may not be necessary —and will run you $50 an hour— and the app does remind you to try their personalized practice system before ponying up for a tutor. After practicing for a few weeks, you might be inclined to attempt a full practice test, and you can do this from within the app.

See on Play Store

Your turn

Preparing for the SAT can be a daunting task, but instead of getting overwhelmed, take a breath and check out one of the apps we’ve collected here for you. Whether you want to focus on getting your vocabulary up to snuff, you want to raise your score the second time you take the test, or just be as prepared as is possible, these apps can help you to hit those goals.

Is there an SAT prep app that you swear by that we didn’t cover here? Have you used any of these apps? Be sure to leave us a comment below and tell us about it!

What is passthrough mode on Gear VR, and why should I care?

Passthrough mode on Gear VR lets you see the world around you through a camera

Generally the point of putting on a VR headset like Gear VR is to leave the real world behind temporarily. However, there is a way to see what is going on around you quickly, even if you are wearing your Gear VR. Passthrough mode lets you see your surroundings from the view of the camera on your phone – basically through a grainy square. It’s not something you should need to do often, but you can definitely use it. Whether you want to use it is what becomes the more pressing question to ask.

Read more at VRHeads.com

Push-to-talk: Remember when phones were walkie-talkies?

Gather round kids, and I’ll tell you a tale of a time before text messaging was so ubiquitous, a time where a phone call was so easy, it only took one button… and man, it could be annoying. Not the tech, the people.

I’m Michael Fisher, AKA MrMobile, and I relived the glory days of flip phones and push-to-talk (so you didn’t have to). Join me as I recollect what was great about this feature, what people did to ruin it, and how you too can push a button to awkwardly interrupt your friends and co-workers.

Featured Products

• Kyocera DuraXE
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Our favorite anti-slip car mats for your phone

All the convenience of a car mounts without the hassle.

There’s no arguing that car mounts are a sound investment for anyone who drives a lot and wants to keep an eye on their phone, but they have some drawbacks.

They can be tricky to install in the proper place for optimal operation, they can block some sight lines to the road, and not all car mounts can different sized phones, making them hard to share between family members.

If you’ve encountered some of these problems with car mounts in the past, you should take a look at an alternative option. Maybe your problems will be solved with an anti-slip car mat.

What’s an anti-slip car mat?

A small pad — usually made out of a gel — that you can put on your dash to hold small items in place by using minimal adhesive. It mostly uses the power of static electricity to hold things in place.

They can be installed on any dash, and you can slap your phone on them to keep it in place while you drive. Unlike a car mount, they won’t block any vision through your windshield, meaning you can drive with the full confidence that you’re as safe as possible.

Without further ado, here are some of our favorite anti-slip car mats for your phone.

SlipToGrip Cell Pad

For about $6, you can get two anti-slip car mats, so you have double the sticky space.

Each pad is 5 3/4 inches by 3 1/2 inches, and it comes with an alcohol swab to clean your dash before you install the mats, ensuring they stick to the dash properly.

See at Amazon

Easy Life Care silicone pad

For people who need a larger mat, Easy Life Care offers a 7-inch by 5-inch silicone pad, meaning even the largest phones can hang on.

You can clean the pad use warm water without losing any of its adhesive power, which means you can keep the pad as clean as you keep your car.

See at Amazon

Cautionary tales

If you look at the Amazon review for any of these car mats, you’ll notice some horror stories that usually involve melted gel all over an angry customer’s dash. It’s probably best to avoid leaving a gel pad on your dash in hot sunlight for hours on end.

Needless to say, the reviews are pretty polarizing, and if you’d rather stick with a universal car mount, you can check out our top picks!

Do you have any personal experience with car mats?

Horror stories or enthusiastic praise I want to hear it all! Let me know if you’ve used a car mat before in the comments down below.

(Product)Red iPhone 7 and 128GB iPhone SE expected to launch alongside new iPad Pro models

Rumours of new iPad Pros have been circling for some time. We’re expecting Apple to hold an event some time in March, as it will mark a year since the 9.7-inch version of the company’s powerful tablet was announced.

• Apple iPad Pro 2: What’s the story so far?

It’s thought the iPad Pro 2 will come in the same 12.9in variant that’s on sale now, alongside a new 10.5in model. However the 10.5in model would have the same footprint as the current 9.7-incher, as Apple is thought to be ditching the home button, leaving the entire front of the device to be taken up by screen.

Macotakara has also said Apple may in fact refresh the iPad Air 2 with a new, budget – at least, budget in Apple terms – tablet.

But it may not just be iPads that will be announced at the expected event in March. Macotakara cites an unnamed source as saying Apple will announce a Product(Red) version of the iPhone 7 and an iPhone SE with 128GB of storage.

Macotakara

The Product(Red) devices help to support AIDS charities around the world, and Apple has been supporting the Red charity for the past 10 years. There’s a chance Apple will announce a red colour finish with the launch of the iPhone 7s/8 in September, but introducing it earlier in the year could help to maintain or improve sales until the 7’s successor arrives.

• Apple iPad Pro 10.5 tipped for early 2017, could have A10X processor
• Apple iPhone SE review: Great things can come in small packages

The iPhone SE meanwhile may just receive the boost in storage. It’s marketed as a more affordable iPhone, so is unlikely to get a Force Touch display, as this is reserved for the flagship phones.

Apple hasn’t confirmed an event for March just yet, but now we’re more than half way through February, we could see an invite pop up in our inbox at any moment.

AI can predict autism through babies’ brain scans

Scientists know that the first signs of autism can appear in early childhood, but reliably predicting that at very young ages is difficult. A behavior questionnaire is a crapshoot at 12 months. However, artificial intelligence might just be the key to making an accurate call. University of North Carolina researchers have developed a deep learning algorithm that can predict autism in babies with a relatively high 81 percent accuracy and 88 percent sensitivity. The team trained the algorithm to recognize early hints of autism by feeding it brain scans and asking it to watch for three common factors: the brain’s surface area, its volume and the child’s gender (as boys are more likely to have autism). In tests, the AI could spot the telltale increase in surface area as early as 6 months, and a matching increase in volume as soon as 12 months — it wasn’t a surprise that most of these babies were formally diagnosed with autism at 2 years old.

As with other uses of AI diagnosis in medicine, the biggest challenge is likely to be producing additional tests that validate and refine the work seen here. The scientists tell IEEE Spectrum that it’s difficult to obtain brain scans of babies for use in replication tests, and those scans are often expensive. Also, it likely wouldn’t be practical to use this prediction method all the time — it’d most likely be useful if a test suggests that a baby is at high risk of autism. Even so, the AI could be extremely helpful if it either gives the all-clear or helps parents adjust to the special needs of their child.

Via: IEEE Spectrum, Digital Trends

Source: Nature

DNA ‘computers’ could lead to self-activated smart pills

Imagine a pill that knew if you were ill enough to need drugs, and wouldn’t release chemicals if it thought you didn’t need it. That’s the breakthrough that’s been made at Eindhoven University in the Netherlands by a team of researchers ld by Maarten Merkx. The team has harnessed the power of DNA itself to form an organic computer that performs crude calculations on the state of your health.

When you get ill, or suffer from a chronic condition, doctors normally prescribe drugs to help you get better, but this is based on a set of generic guidelines. The idea is that a smart pill will be able to offer specific doses, tailored to your needs, reducing the risk of side effects and waste.

The computation comes in the form of the DNA, which looks for molecules that it can react with as a form of data-gathering. Put simply, the pill will journey inside your body and sniff the local environment to decide if you need more medicine. Of course, like so many things at the bleeding edge of technology, it’s still early days for this form of treatment, but the potential is exciting.

Source: TUE, Nature

‘Final Fantasy XV’ update boosts framerates on PS4 Pro

While the in-game carnival continues, Final Fantasy XV’s latest patch upgrades the graphical options for PS4 Pro owners. While the game launched with a 4K (and HDR) capable version for Pro consoles, the team didn’t have time to repurpose the power for the sake of frame rates. That option arrives in Patch 1.05, alongside a new level cap (up to 125), more camera space (up to 200 snaps), and an MP3 player for the protagonist prince when he’s riding a giant yellow bird. It’s important, okay?

Lite Mode, according to the patch notes, will allow the PS4 Pro to improve the frame rates up to a maximum of 60 FPS. This means the game will try to adjust rates while everything’s running — it’s certainly not going to run at a consistent 60 frames each second. (Courtesy of Digital Foundry, you can see how this works in practice, above.)

Early impressions are mixed: some users on this Neogaf thread suggest the transition between different frame rates is particularly jarring. This update hasn’t affected the “high’ mode, so there’s still some choice for Pro users. Howver, the original fixed 30 FPS “lite” setting has unfortunately disappeared: it’s not as smooth as it used to be.

But hey, you also get some Nier soundtracks added to your in-car playlist: it’s definitely not all bad.

Source: Neogaf

Endless nuclear power can be found in the seas

Climate change is such an urgent issue that despite problems with radioactive waste, nuclear power is once again viable until renewable solutions like solar and wind are more widely adopted. The ocean is a good source of uranium fuel, but it exists in such small quantities that extracting it hasn’t been economically feasible. However, Stanford researchers have developed a new technique that can capture up to three times more, meaning we might soon get a new source of uranium that could help keep CO2 in check.

A surprising amount of uranium exists in the ocean in the form of positively charged uranyl ions (no jokes please). The total is estimated at 4.5 billion tons, enough to power current plants for around 6 millenia. However, there’s only around a grain of salt per quart (three parts per billion) and so far, it’s been too time-consuming and expensive to extract it in decent quantities.

The best way to get uranium out of salt water is to dip plastic fibers coated with an organic chemical called amidoxime into seawater. The uranyl ions stick to the amidoxime, and can later be extracted and refined into uranium fuel. The key to its practicality is how quickly ions can be capture, how much sticks and how often the fibers can be reused.

Researcher Chong Liu examines a carbon-amidoxime electrode (Linda A. Cicero/Stanford News)

The Stanford team came up with a conductive hybrid carbon and amidoxime fiber prototype that’s better in all three of those areas. By sending electric pulses down the fiber, it was able to absorb up to nine times as much uranyl as previous fibers without becoming saturated. Over an 11-hour test at Half Moon Bay, the team captured three times as much uranium and the fibers had thrice the lifespan of standard amidoxime.

In 2012, a Japanese team estimated that their seawater extraction technique, using previous tech, could be developed for about $300 per kilogram. That was about three times the commercial price at that point, but right now, the price is around half of that. “We have a lot of work to do still, but these are big steps toward practicality,” said the paper’s co-author, Li Cui. “For much of this century, some fraction of our electricity will need to come from sources that we can turn on and off. I believe nuclear power should be part of that mix.”

Source: Stanford