You can now buy an unlocked Galaxy S8 in the U.S.

Get an unlocked Galaxy S8 … for a considerable amount of money.

After a few weeks of pre-orders, Samsung has fully opened sales for the U.S. unlocked versions of the Galaxy S8 and S8+.

Samsung had previously confirmed around the time of the S8’s launch in April that it would eventually offer an unlocked model in the U.S., and now we have specific details.

• Prices are $724.99 and $824.99 for the S8 and S8+, respectively.
• They’re only available in Midnight Black.
• They will work on AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, Verizon, US Cellular and most prepaid carriers.
• They’re available with 0% 24-month financing from Samsung.
• Samsung is offering up to $350 off when trading in an old Samsung phone.
• The proper U.S. unlocked model numbers are G950UZKAXAA (GS8) and G955UZKAXAA (GS8+).

Galaxy S8 unlocked

See at Best BuySee at Samsung

Galaxy S8+ unlocked

See at Best BuySee at Samsung

While Samsung doesn’t have a great track record for keeping its unlocked phones up-to-date, the company has said that it will do better this time around. It’s unlikely the carrier and unlocked versions will receive updates at the same time, or the latter with as much frequency, but at least there’s hope. And buying the unlocked model does ensure there’s no carrier bloatware, which is nice.

Are you planning to pick up an unlocked Galaxy S8? Let us know in the comments below!

TweetDeck for your browser now lets you verify images via Google

Knowing where Twitter’s images come from is a good thing.

With the rampant and almost revolutionary spread of fake things across the internet, TweetDeck has announced it’s added a feature that lets you verify the source behind an image before you react.

New! Click the 🔍 icon in the top right corner of an image in detail view to verify the source via Google. pic.twitter.com/w2gLXKuegC

— TweetDeck (@TweetDeck) May 31, 2017

It’s easy to use: hover your mouse pointer over the image in the TweetDeck web app and then click the little magnifying glass icon to jump to a Google Search in another window. Google will fetch results related to that image and verify whether it’s an original photo or a copied one.

This is what the search icon looks like on top of a photo when you hover over it with your mouse pointer.

This is what the Google Search page looks like after you ask for verification from TweetDeck.

The feature is not available for your smartphone yet, but it should be since you can view images through the Twitter app, too. It’s possible that since the ability was originally announced by Twitter’s own account feed, perhaps this is an indication that it’s someday meant to be a part of the Twitter mobile app. This sort of feature could be greatly beneficial to those who only view Twitter through an app, or even through Twitter Lite.

Sorry, Galaxy S8 users: Bixby voice assistant remains delayed

The Wall Street Journal reports we won’t see it until “at least late June.”

There are so many features the Samsung Galaxy S8 has going for it; it’s almost bezel-less, it has the best display on the market, and it’s a wondrous performer. But one thing it does not have going for it is its own virtual assistant. It’s been two months since the launch of Samsung’s big phone release and there’s still no Bixby in sight.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Samsung will miss the “later this spring” window it had originally promised. From the article, which is behind a paywall:

The English-language version of Samsung Electronics Co.’s new voice-activated virtual assistant won’t likely debut in the U.S. until at least late June, according to people familiar with the matter, more than two months after the launch of the South Korean tech giant’s latest high-end smartphone.

The report states that the reason Bixby is delayed is because the English-speaking version is actually struggling to understand its syntax and grammar. In turn, a Samsung spokeswoman told the WSJ: “Bixby Voice benefits from time to further enhance natural language understanding and we are currently growing our user testing in the U.S. to prepare for launch.”

Samsung’s Bixby isn’t entirely useless at present. You can still use Bixby Vision for quick image recognition in the camera app. Or you can use Hello Bixby as your daily contextual feed. It’s highly customizable, and if you prefer to have more immediate hooks into the apps you have installed, Hello Bixby is pretty good at that.

It’s unlikely that the delayed Bixby snafu will affect sales of the Galaxy S8 and S8+. The two handsets are worthy sellers in their own right and it’s highly doubtful that the record-breaking number of preorders were a result of the addition of a proprietary virtual assistant. Perhaps the only bummer of owning a Galaxy S8 at this point, however, is that there’s this extra hardware button that isn’t as useful as you’d hope. Fortunately, you can remap that button if you so please with an app, at least until Bixby’s full arrival.

You can even set it to launch Google Assistant.

How to create playlists in Kodi

Use Kodi playlists to binge your favorite shows or keep the music going at your party.

Kodi is a great way to organize and enjoy all your favorite media in one convenient place. Better yet, it’s available on so many different devices, from PCs and Macs, Amazon Fire TV to Android phones and Android TV boxes.

For the sake of this guide, we’ll be focusing on Kodi for Android because we’re Android Central and that’s what we do, so we’ll be using touchscreen terminologies (tap, long press etc.), but the steps should be transferrable across all Kodi-supported platforms. For example, a tap will be a left-click on your computer or a press of the select button on your TV box remote, and a long press will be a right-click or a long press of the select button on your remote.

Without further ado, let’s dive in!

How to queue content to autoplay

Looking to binge through a whole season of your favorite show or have Kodi autoplay a series of videos like Netflix does? It’s easy and doesn’t actually require you to go into the playlist menu — we’ll get to that later.

You’re able to have separate queue playlists going for music and video content. We’ll show you how to set one up using video as our example.

Launch Kodi from your home screen or app drawer.
Tap Videos

Tap Files.

Tap the source where you’ve stored your files. In this example, the media was stored on a microSD card.

Tap on the folder containing the files you want to queue up.

Long press on a video file to reveal the context menu.

Tap Queue item.

This will add that video to your active queue playlist, which lives in the Music section of Kodi. You’re able to add entire folders to your queue by following steps 6 and 7 with a folder instead of a file.

How to manage your Queue Playlist

So you’ve added a whole bunch of awesome stuff to your queue playlist but now you want to remove some repeats and re-order things. Here’s how to find and manage your playlist.

Tap Music.

Tap the settings icon. It’s in the bottom-right corner and looks like a gear.

Tap Current playlist. This will bring you to your queue playlist and display the order of all the content you’ve added.

To reorder or remove a file, long press to reveal the Context menu.

Tap Move up, Move down, or Remove

How to save and/or clear your queue playlist

If you want to start from scratch and clear your playlist without removing each file individually…

On the playlist screen, tap the Settings icon, the gear in the bottom-right corner.
Tap save to save the playlist for later (you’ll be prompted to give it a name), or clear to clear all items from the playlist.

Saved playlists will be found in the Music section even if they contain videos.

How to create a permanent playlist

The queue content playlist is great if you’re just wanting to quickly watch some shows back to back or throw on some music quickly, but if you want to build out some playlists to listen to at work or for a party. Here’s how to create your own.

Tap Music.

Tap Playlists.

Tap New playlist.

Tap Files to browse to where your music (or video) files are stored.

Long press on the folder or file you wish to add to the playlist

Tap Add.

When you’ve added all the songs you desire and you’re ready to save, tap the settings icon. It’s the gear in the bottom-right corner.

Tap Save playlist. You will then be prompted to give your playlist a name.

You can use that same settings menu to open an existing playlist for editing purposes.

What are “smart playlists”?

Smart playlists use a set of rules to automatically scan your music or video database and create a playlist based on the parameters you set out. To use these you must first use a scraper addon for Kodi to retrieve standardized metadata information for all of your media. This is a great option if you’ve got a ridiculous amount of music or videos and want to sort them out in different ways, say a music playlist of a specific genre, or a movie playlist of your favorite actor.

Here’s some quick info on some reliable scraper addons for movies, music, and tv shows, which include links to their respective repositories:

• Universal Movie Scraper
• Universal Artist Scraper (Music)
• The TVDB

Lenovo will unveil its ‘next bold phone’ on 1 June, likely Moto Z2 Play

Lenovo is gifting us with a new Moto smartphone tomorrow.

The company’s Motorola Canada Twitter account has teased it will announce its “next bold phone” on Thursday. The tweet includes a GIF of a woman who looks straight out of the 80s. Is it a clue about the phone? Who knows. But we do know Lenovo-owned Motorola has been working on a follow-up to the Moto Z Play, likely called the Moto Z2 Play, thanks to several leaks and rumours.

Motorola introduced the Moto Z Play, an Android modular smartphone, last August. It’s a mid-range version of the Moto Z, which debuted a couple months before the Moto Z Play. It’s mostly known for having a large battery and a headphone jack. For months now, the Moto Z2 Play has been rumoured, with a few leaks indicating it’ll be thinner and have a smaller battery compared to its predecessor.

WinFuture

• Motorola Moto Z and Moto Z Force: Everything you need to know
• Motorola Moto Z review: A modular muddle
• Motorola Moto Z vs Moto Z Force: What’s the difference?

The phone is expected to feature three different colour variants (black, silver, and gold) and support for Moto Mods. Specs include a 5.5-inch FHD display (1920 x 1080 resolution), Snapdragon 626 SoC, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage, a microSD slot, a 5-megapixel selfie sensor with a flash, a 12-megapixel rear sensor capable of shooting in 4K (will also have a dual-LED flash), and a 3,000mAh battery.

We’ll keep you posted on Lenovo’s announcement and whether any of these leaks are true.

Guess what?! We’re announcing the next bold phone from Motorola on June 1st. pic.twitter.com/SCyEkNtPza

— Motorola Canada (@Moto_CAN) May 30, 2017

Fight on the moon in new ‘Overwatch’ Lunar Base map

Last week, Overwatch celebrated its one-year anniversary by dropping scores of new event-themed character skins and extras to the game. But it also added three new maps for the game’s small-team and 1v1 Arena modes. It seems the title’s team wasn’t done expanding its playable zones: After releasing some mysterious lore about the Overwatch universe’s Horizon Lunar Base days ago, the game has launched it as a full map on the PC’s test realm.

Get ready to journey to Horizon Lunar Colony—our new Assault map coming soon to PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One! pic.twitter.com/RVEaivl152

— Overwatch (@PlayOverwatch) May 31, 2017

Keen fans know that a team of scientists housed their experiments genetically augmenting monkeys and gorillas on the moon base. One of those was our favorite brainy ape, Winston, who took his name from the researcher that raised him. Unfortunately, not all the primates reacted to the gene therapy as positively, the recent lore dump revealed, and tragedy befell the station. Now, players can explore the Horizon Lunar Base to find the story hints tucked within when they aren’t fighting for objective zones on the point-capturing Assault-type map.

Unfortunately, it’s currently only live on the Public Test Region (PTR), a set of PC-only servers used to try out new game elements before they get integrated into the game as a whole. Only well-behaved players get to tinker around on the test areas (learn how to switch over to the PTR here), and you won’t get to keep profile progress or loot box items from playing on the test servers. Stay strong, console players: It typically takes content a few weeks to switch over to the main game.

Source: Overwatch (YouTube)

Take-Two nabs the rights to ‘Kerbal Space Program’

The news about ex-Squad members leaving for Valve was ultimately overblown, but there’s still plenty of drama in the indie developer’s life: Take-Two Interactive has bought the rights to Kerbal Space Program. The move will turn the spaceship building hit into a “long-term franchise.” In other words, you can expect to see spinoffs set in the Kerbals’ universe. Take-Two tells Engadget that it’s currently “focused on the existing game,” though, so don’t expect it to rush out a game right away.

As for what happens to the current game? Thankfully, not much. Squad is promising that it’ll continue developing Kerbal Space Program, including the Making History expansion. If anything, the Take-Two deal gives it a boost — it now has an “experienced publisher” supporting its marquee title.

In that sense, the only question is about the series’ future. KSP built up its reputation based on its combination of (mostly) realistic space exploration with the charm of its panicky Kerbal astronauts. How does Take-Two capitalize on this without diluting what made the first game special? And is there a large audience for the series outside of the fans who’ve been around since the Early Access days? We could certainly see Take-Two turning KSP into a gaming powerhouse, but it may have to walk a fine line between pleasing loyal fans and branching out to rookies who don’t know the first thing about escape velocities or apoapsis.

Via: Polygon

Source: Take-Two, Kerbal Space Program

WSJ: Bixby Voice won’t debut on Galaxy S8 until late June

To hear Samsung’s Galaxy S8 ad campaign tell it, the company’s Bixby digital assistant was already fully featured and ready to go at the handset’s launch. The reality is quite a bit different, however. Bixby Voice, the would-be competitor to Siri and Google Assistant apparently won’t be available until late next month, somewhat narrowing the “later this spring” timeframe from April. Wall Street Journal reports that the cause for tardiness has to do with how the assistant comprehends English syntax and grammar. To be fair, that’s a sore spot for pretty much every artificial intelligence system at the moment.

“Bixby Voice benefits from time to further enhance natural language understanding, and we are currently growing our user testing in the US to prepare for launch,” the company told WSJ.

Last month, Google debuted updates to its own Assistant, including those that mimic or outright surpass Bixby’s computer vision capabilities. We’ve reached out to Samsung for comment.

Source: Wall Street Journal

I bio-engineered glowing beer and it hasn’t killed me (yet)

I’ve been making beer for about 10 years and, in the name of fun and experimentation, I’ve done some weird stuff. Toss some sarsaparilla and birch bark in the pot? Why not? “Dry hop” with a box of Apple Jacks? Try and stop me. But I may have finally gone a bit too far, when I genetically engineered a beer to glow green.

Alright, so how did I do it? With a technology called CRISPR, which is pretty much the belle of the science ball right now. CRISPR stands for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats” and it essentially lets you snip out bits of DNA and replace them with whatever you want. It actually relies on a basic feature of bacterial immune systems.

Bacteria genomes have repeating sequences of DNA with bits of other DNA sandwiched between them. These are the “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats” that give CRISPR its name. What scientists eventually discovered, is that those sequences of unique DNA, in between the repeating bits, matched the DNA of viruses. Basically it’s a gallery of Bacteria’s Most Wanted.

A set of enzymes called CRISPR-associated proteins, or Cas for short, look for these bits of DNA as a way to identify danger when an intruder is detected. When a virus is spotted, the proteins act like assassins, snipping out those offending bits of DNA, rendering the virus harmless. More importantly, it turns out, you can basically train these Cas proteins to look for any sequence of DNA you want. Then it can replace them with another piece of genetic code.

This all sounds pretty complicated, but you can actually do it in your kitchen with a $160 kit from a company called The Odin. The particular kit I used includes everything you need to make baking or brewing yeast glow green under a black light.

To start I prepared a whole bunch of agar plates — petri dishes filled with a nutrient rich gel for the yeast to grow on. Then I had to wake up my dried french saison yeast with a little bit of water and “streak” the little guys out on the plates and put aside for about 24 hours to let them grow.

Once the yeast was healthy and I had full cultures, it was time to prep them for their transformation. I introduced them to a solution of chemicals and salts that weakened the cell walls so that our new DNA can enter more easily. Then it was time to introduce the plasmid (a small molecule of DNA) carrying the genes I want the yeast to adopt. The genetic code introduced in this case tells the yeast to produce Green Fluorescent Protein, which is what causes it to glow. Basically we’re tricking the yeast into thinking the DNA we introduced is it’s own, so that it makes the Cas proteins to cut out the parts we want to replace.

Once it’s all combined the mixture gets incubated in a warm water bath for about an hour, before adding nutrients to the solution and putting the whole thing back in a warm water bath for another 4 hours. This gives the yeast time to recover and replicate the DNA that will make it fluoresce. Then it’s time to streak the modified yeast on some new agar plates and wait again for them to grow into thriving colonies.

A few days later I had yeast that glowed green under a black light.

Now, a petri dish worth of yeast isn’t nearly enough to brew a beer with. So I had to make a starter — a weak proto-beer that the yeast can feast on and build their strength. Eventually I had a one liter Erlenmeyer flask filled with fluorescent French Saison yeast.

Brewing beer itself is pretty straight forward but here’s the TL;DR version of how it works: Grains, such as barley, are steeped in hot water to extract their sugars creating a liquid called wort. The wort is then boiled to sterilize it, break down and remove unwanted proteins, and extract flavors from additives like hops — the little green cones that deliver all that lovely beer flavor and aroma.

Then the wort is cooled, the yeast is added and it becomes a waiting game. The yeast eats away at the sugar converting it to carbon dioxide and delicious, delicious alcohol.

The results of my grand experiment were successful… ish.

The yeast certainly glowed and the first couple of samples pulled from the fermenter did as well. But, as the beer settled and the yeast dropped out of my brew, the glow became more and more faint. By the end it was a pale glimmer rather than a blinding glare.

At the end of the day, my glowing beer was a strange novelty; it’s merely meant to show off the power and simplicity of CRISPR. It’s a technology that could one day lead to a cure for diseases like sickle cell or AIDS, or be used to breed drought resistant plants. But that’s still a ways off. Right now CRISPR is in its infancy, so I’ll just have to settle for yeast that can brew unique looking (if not particularly unique tasting) beer.

New York Times picks an AI moderator over a Public Editor

In a surprising move, the New York Times announced to its staff on Wednesday that it will immediately eliminate the position of Public Editor at its publication. The role will instead be filled by an expanded comments section — one that is moderated by artificial intelligence.

The position of Public Editor is a relatively new one at the venerable news publication. It was created in 2003 in the aftermath of the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal as a means of facilitating greater transparency and accountability with the paper’s subscribers. There have been six such editors in the 14 years since the position’s creation, though Liz Spayd, the current (and rather unpopular) editor will be its last. “Our followers on social media and our readers across the internet have come together to collectively serve as a modern watchdog,” publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. wrote in a staff memo distributed on Wednesday, “more vigilant and forceful than one person could ever be.”

In its place, the NYT will install a “Reader Center” helmed by editor Hanna Ingber where the staff will be able to “respond directly to tips feedback, questions, concerns, complaints and other queries from the public,” per the memo.

The NYT’s commenting system is powered by Google Jigsaw’s Conversation AI, a neural network that has been trained to find and flag trolling, hate speech and gratuitous shitposts in the paper’s online comments sections. However, the system is currently only working on around ten percent of the sites articles. With Wednesday’s announcement, the program will be expanded to nearly all of the publication’s articles. “This expansion,” Sulzberger Jr. wrote, “marks a sea change in our ability to serve our readers.”

Engadget reached out to Jigsaw for comment, which referred us to the New York Times. The NYT has not responded to comment as of the time of this article’s publication.

You can read Sulzberger’s full letter below:

Dear Colleagues,

Every one of us at The Times wakes up every day determined to help our audience better understand the world. In return, our subscribers provide much of the funding we need to support our deeply reported, on-the-ground journalism.

There is nothing more important to our mission, or our business, than strengthening our connection with our readers. A relationship that fundamental cannot be outsourced to a single intermediary.

The responsibility of the public editor – to serve as the reader’s representative – has outgrown that one office. Our business requires that we must all seek to hold ourselves accountable to our readers. When our audience has questions or concerns, whether about current events or our coverage decisions, we must answer them ourselves.

To that end, we have decided to eliminate the position of the public editor, while introducing several new reader-focused efforts. We are grateful to Liz Spayd, who has served in the role since last summer, for her tough, passionate work and for raising issues of critical importance to our newsroom. Liz will leave The Times on Friday as our last public editor.

The public editor position, created in the aftermath of a grave journalistic scandal, played a crucial part in rebuilding our readers’ trusts by acting as our in-house watchdog. We welcomed that criticism, even when it stung. But today, our followers on social media and our readers across the internet have come together to collectively serve as a modern watchdog, more vigilant and forceful than one person could ever be. Our responsibility is to empower all of those watchdogs, and to listen to them, rather than to channel their voice through a single office.

We are dramatically expanding our commenting platform. Currently, we open only 10 percent of our articles to reader comments. Soon, we will open up most of our articles to reader comments. This expansion, made possible by a collaboration with Google, marks a sea change in our ability to serve our readers, to hear from them, and to respond to them.

We will work hard to curate and respond to the thousands of daily comments, but comments will form just one bridge between The Times and our audience. We also, of course, engage with readers around the globe on social media, where we have tens of millions of followers. We publish behind-the-scenes dispatches describing the reporting process and demystifying why we made certain journalistic decisions. We hold our journalism to the highest standards, and we have dedicated significant resources to ensure that remains the case.

Phil Corbett, a masthead editor, is responsible for making sure that our report lives up to our standards of fairness, accuracy and journalistic excellence. His team listens and responds to reader concerns and investigates requests for corrections. Phil anchors a reader-focused operation intent on providing accountability that is already larger than any of our peers. And we are expanding this investment still further.

As the newsroom announced yesterday, we have created a Reader Center led by Hanna Ingber, a senior editor, who will work with Phil and many others to make our report ever more transparent and our journalists more responsive. The Reader Center is the central hub from which we engage readers about our journalism, but the work will be shared by all of us.

It’s also worth noting that we welcome thoughtful criticism from our peers at other news outlets. Fortunately, there is no shortage of those independent critiques.

We are profoundly grateful to our six public editors ― Daniel Okrent, Byron Calame, Clark Hoyt, Arthur Brisbane, Margaret Sullivan and Liz Spayd. These remarkable advocates tirelessly fielded questions from readers all over the world and have held The Times to the highest standards of journalism.

Changes like these offer the strongest paths towards meaningfully engaging with our growing audience of loyal readers, which rightfully demands more of us than ever before. We are up to the challenge.

Arthur

Source: Huffington Post