The Rushpack may be the last water bottle you ever buy

Keep your important items on hand while you work out and stay hydrated with the Rushpack water bottle!

The way we work out sure has evolved in the 21st century. Used to be that you’d just go out for a run or hit the gym and that was that. These days, you’d be a fool to leave the house without all your essential daily carry items likely includes your phone, your credit cards and ID, your keys, a pair of headphones and more. Ideally, you’d like to keep all those crucial items on you or nearby as you work out, but who wants to run with full pockets?

No one, that’s who.

Enter the Rushpack: a water bottle designed to carry all your stuff so you don’t have to. I mean, think about it — you need to stay hydrated while you work out, so why juggle another item when you can instead keep all your stuff together on the water bottle. That’s smart.

If you’re tired of strapping your phone to your arm with a sweaty armband case, the Rushpack offers an elegant solution with a rugged sleeve made of industrial grade neoprene complete with pockets built in to carry your cards, keys, and most importantly your phone — stretchy enough to expand and accommodate even the largest phones.

The water bottle itself is available in 32oz or 62oz sizes and is made of premium stainless steel and is vacuum-insulated to prevent condensation. The lid features a convenient flip-up straw along with a spot for connecting a carabiner. If you’ve ever struggled with carrying around all your essential items during a workout at the gym you’ll know the value of this water bottle. It’ll also work great with a pair of Bluetooth headphones as you’ll be able to keep your phone close without having to keep it on your body.

Interested in backing this project? Perks start at just $25 for a RushPack sleeve — compatible with most 64oz or 32oz water bottles — or pledge $59 to get the 32oz Rushpack in your choice of camo or black. Want to double up the volume? Pledge $69 and get the 64oz Rushpack. As with other Kickstarters, the perks continue to scale up as you pledge more money. If you’ve got some fitness freaks on your holiday shopping list, you may want to consider the Double or Triple Rushpack perk which will save you over $100 in the long run.

This is the first Kickstarter campaign by the Sweat Rush team, but they’ve already surpassed their funding goal with more than a week remaining in the campaign. They expect to start delivering perks to backers by December making the Rushpack a great gift option for the holidays.

We know it can be risky to back Kickstarter projects, but the Rushpack is one that we’re confident to share with our readers. We’ll be periodically sharing more awesome Kickstarters in the future that are as awesome as this one.

See the Rushpack on Kickstarter

Facebook slips a screen-sharing feature into Live videos

Facebook has quietly launched a new feature for Live videos that makes sharing your screen a painless experience. Instead of downloading a third-party service, you can now simply click the “Share Screen” button that appears once you enter the Live module on desktop. TheNextWeb’s Matt Navarra has discovered the new sharing option, which doesn’t seem to be experimental, because we were able to activate the feature for our account even outside the US.

When you click on the Share Screen option for the first time, a pop up will ask if you want to add the “Facebook Screen Sharing” extension. We tested it out and successfully installed it on Chrome. After that, a module will appear asking if you want to share your entire screen or if you just want to share a specific tab or a specific application. As TheNextWeb said, it’s pretty basic — you can’t insert a video of yourself on the lower corners while you stream your screen, for instance. It doesn’t produce the clearest videos either, but if you don’t stream for a living anyway, the option looks good enough to use whenever you want to share with friends.

NEW! Facebook screen sharing option on FB Live via https://t.co/Luozcvmz9G (desktop / laptop) pic.twitter.com/1CN2nsaUrT

— Matt Navarra ⭐️ (@MattNavarra) October 17, 2017

Source: TheNextWeb, Matt Navara (Twitter)

Earbud translators will bring us closer: The Future IRL

The moment Google Pixel Buds were used earlier this month to demonstrate real time translation from Swedish to English, people started freaking out about potential use cases for this kind of technology. But the thing is, Google isn’t the only company taking this on.

Doppler Labs offered me a chance to try the beta version of its translation software, used inside of its existing Here One earbuds. It plans to release the translation feature in a software update early next year. I jumped at the chance, and first exchanged pleasantries with a fluent Cantonese speaker, then let folks in San Francisco’s Dolores Park use the buds to translate Spanish. Everyone that tried them in front of me loved them, but that doesn’t mean they’re perfect. Proper nouns are enormously difficult to translate with ease across languages, and that was apparent when we asked one person in Spanish whether she preferred House Stark or House Targaryen in Game of Thrones. The translation spit out mostly gobbledygook. I struggled similarly when trying to understand where my conversational partner lived (Near Ocean Beach in San Francisco, from what I could tell) but it took about three tries to get there.

Doppler Labs plans to up their earbud ante even future in Q3 of 2018, when an updated earbud will give even longer battery life and power for translation, enabling some compute either on the earbuds or on a paired phone, without having to touch the cloud for translation, a pretty common occurrence in most products like it now.

The wise gadget lover might wait for that updated bud, or for that matter, v.2 of Google Pixel Buds or other competitors. But if you imagine yourself an intrepid explorer of the world, translation earbuds are probably already on your wish list. You could wait for generation two or later products from Google, Doppler, Bragi and more, but let’s be real: This technology is simply too life-changing to make yourself wait.

Facebook and Google reportedly helped set up anti-Muslim election ads

It looks like Russia wasn’t the only one buying ads online to help sway the election last year. Facebook and Google worked closely with conservative non-profit Secure America Now and advertising firm Harris Media on ad campaigns targeting swing state voters with anti-Muslim and anti-refugee messages, and linking Democratic candidates to terrorists, according to a report from Bloomberg. “Unlike Russian efforts to secretly influence the 2016 election via social media, this American-led campaign was aided by direct collaboration with employees of Facebook and Google,” the publication says.

One ad is a mock tourism video titled “Book Your Trip to the Islamic State of France.” It features an Eiffel Tower with a crescent moon and star atop it, terrorist training camp footage and Muslims praying while a narrator describes a burka-clad Mona Lisa as finally looking “how a woman should.”

“Under Sharia Law, you can enjoy everything the Islamic State of France has to offer, as long as you follow the rules,” the narrator says.

The ads apparently ran in Nevada and North Carolina during the final weeks of the election, and caused at least one Harris Media employee to feel uncomfortable about their content.

Bloomberg’s sources say that Facebook’s and Google’s sales team worked closely with Secure America Now to improve their multimillion dollar ad campaigns. Google eventually pulled a number of the ads because they violated the company’s policies.

Facebook’s “eager” sales team supposedly went as far as using Secure America Now’s ads for A/B testing a new vertical video format at scale:

“The video they used was ‘Are We Safe?’, which contrasts colorful scenes of Main Street America with black-and-white pictures of Muslims who have carried out attacks in the US. Facebook tested 12 different versions of the video.”

Facebook also worked with a Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany party, also a Harris Media client, to target voters with anti-immigration ads in the country this year.

This report comes after it was discovered that Russia bought some 3,000 ads and cut Facebook a check for over $100,000 during the 2016 election. It was found that Russian agents also purchased ads with Google leading up to last November.

We’ve reached out to Facebook and Google for more information and will update this post should it arrive.

Source: Bloomberg

YouTube says it spots most terrorist videos before they’re flagged

Last year, tech giants started working together to combat the spread of terrorist content online. One of them is Google-owned YouTube, which began implementing stricter measures in June in an effort to get rid of extremist videos that tend to pop up on the platform. According to the video streaming website, its flagging technology is now good enough that over 83 percent of the terrorist-related videos it removed over the past month didn’t stay online long enough to get a single flag from a human user. That’s apparently up eight percent from August.

YouTube upgraded the technology by feeding it a huge volume of new training examples. The company tasked the people working on the feature to review over a million videos and find the right ones. To ensure that the team is updated on issues regarding hate speech, radicalization and terrorism, YouTube has also teamed up with 35 more non-government organizations, including the International Center for the Study of Radicalization from King’s College London and The Wahid Institute in Indonesia. Both of those groups focus on counterterrorism and counter-radicalization.

In addition, YouTube is now looking into expanding Jigsaw’s Redirect Method to cover more languages. The method redirects people watching terrorist propaganda videos to ones that offer an opposing viewpoint and ones the debunk their message. Since fighting terrorist propaganda online is an ongoing process that needs constant enhancement, YouTube promises to continue working with counter-terrorist NGOs and to continue improving its flagging technology.

Source: YouTube

Best Buy 3-Day Sale Launches With Early Access Discounts on Latest MacBook Air and 4K TV Sets

Best Buy today launched an early access sale for members of the My Best Buy program, marking the first day of a new 3-Day sale that’s gearing up this week. Only one Apple product has an early access discount — the mid-2017 refresh of the MacBook Air — but there are a few other deals on 4K television sets and Bluetooth headphones. As the week progresses and Best Buy opens up the sale to more users and adds new products, we’ll be sure to share any notable discounts.

For now, take a look at a few of the early access sales below:

• MacBook Air with 13.3-inch Display, Intel Core i5, 8GB Memory, 128GB Flash Storage – $874.99, down from $999.99

• MacBook Air with 13.3-inch Display, Intel Core i5, 8GB Memory, 256GB Flash Storage – $1,074.99, down from $1,199.99

• Sony 1000X Wireless Noise Cancelling Headphones (Black or Grey Beige) – $249.99, down from $399.99

• Sharp 43-inch Class LED 2160p Smart 4K Ultra HD TV – $329.99, down from $349.99

• Samsung 55-inch Class LED 2160p Smart 4K Ultra HD TV – $999.99, down from $1,499.99

For these early access deals, remember that you’ll need to be logged in to your My Best Buy account in order to see the sale prices.

There are also a few discounts on items outside of the 3-Day Sale, ranging from the latest iMacs, to multiple Philips Hue lamps, and even DJI’s new miniature Spark drone. Check them out below:

• Apple 21.5-inch iMac, Intel Core i5 (2.3GHz), 8GB Memory, 1TB Hard Drive (Latest Model) – $999.99, down from $1,099.99

• Apple 27-inch iMac, Intel Core i5 (3.5GHz), 8GB Memory, 1TB Fusion Drive (Latest Model) – $1,899.99, down from $1,999.99

• Philips Hue Lamps and Light Fixtures – Get 20 percent off the Hue White Ambience Wellness Lamp, Wellner Lamp, Beyond Lamp, Phoenix Lamp, and more.

• DJI Spark Quadcopter in Alpine White – $449.99, down from $499.99

• Sphero Spider-Man – $129.99, down from $149.99

It’s worth noting that previous sales on Apple Watch Series 2 and iPad mini 4 remain ongoing at Best Buy, so if you’re interested in those products you still have a chance to purchase them at a discount. There are many more items on sale on Best Buy’s Hot Deals page, including Epson all-in-one printers and select Insignia cables and chargers, so be sure to browse all of the discounts here.

For more of the latest deals on Apple products, accessories, and more, head over to our Deals Roundup.

Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with Best Buy

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Fantastical Maker Flexibits Launches ‘Cardhop’ Interactive Contact Management App for Macs

Flexibits, the company that makes popular calendar app Fantastical, today launched a new contacts management app, Cardhop. Designed to be more than just a simple contacts app, Cardhop is interactive and is designed to be your communications hub, allowing you to email, message, and interface with your contacts from one central location.

When developing Cardhop, Flexibits aimed to do the same thing for contacts that it did for the calendar – turn an app that can be dull, unintuitive, and slow into a robust, streamlined app that offers a lot more utility.

Cardhop imports all of your contacts from your Mac (which are typically also synced with iOS devices using iCloud) and it provides an interface that makes it easy to search for an existing contact or add a new one using the same natural language parsing that’s available in Fantastical.

A search for “Eric” for example, will bring up the card for a contact named Eric, with information like phone number, email address, birth date, home address, Twitter handle, Facebook profile, Skype username, and more. There are dozens of fields that can be added for each contact.

Entering a phrase like “Eric 867-5309 work” will automatically add the phone number you entered to Eric’s contact card under the work heading, and similar phrases can be used to quickly update or remove information for all contacts. Added information will sync to the default Apple Contacts app.

If you start typing a name that’s not already in your contacts list, Cardhop will automatically add a new entry with the information. Groups of contacts are also supported, so you can create a group like “work” to automatically send an email or a message to everyone you work with.

Cardhop’s most useful feature is perhaps its quick actions. Every contact card in Cardhop features four customizable quick action buttons for interacting with contacts and performing tasks like placing a call, sending a tweet, or sending an email. The following quick actions are available: Call, Copy, Directions, Email, FaceTime, FaceTime Audio, Large Type, Message, Skype, Telegram, Twitter, URL, and VoIP.

Clicking on one of the quick action buttons performs the task assigned to the button, but typing a quick action like “Skype Eric” or “Message Eric” also works. When using the call feature, there’s also an option to place the call on your iPhone from your Mac using Bluetooth. Cardhop has the potential to save time in a workflow because it automates tasks that would normally take several clicks.

Cardhop also takes advantage of the underused “note” feature available in the default Contacts app, making a notes section front and center for each contact in the app. Notes can be used to add details about contacts that you want to remember, leading to richer interactions.

“Until now, contacts apps were basically boring databases,” said Michael Simmons, Co-founder of Flexibits. “Cardhop is an entirely different approach and we think it’s going to simplify and truly change the way people think about and interact with their contacts.”

Cardhop is normally priced at $19.99, but to celebrate its launch, Flexibits is offering it for $14.99 for a limited time. Cardhop can be downloaded from the Mac App Store.

Tag: Flexibits
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World’s first floating wind farm powers up in Scotland

The blades of five huge turbines have begun spinning on the world’s first offshore wind farm, located over 15 miles off the coast of Peterhead, Aberdeenshire in Scotland. First Minister Nicola Sturgeon is cutting the ribbon on the renewable energy site today — presumably in an on-land ceremony — which is capable of pumping 30 megawatts of clean electricity into the grid. In more human terms, that’s enough to power approximately 20,000 homes. The turbines of Hywind Scotland stand 253 meters tall in total (around 830 feet), with 78 meters (256 feet) of that bobbing beneath the surface, tethered to the seabed by chains weighing 1,200 tonnes.

It’s quite the feat of engineering, with the obvious benefit of floating wind farms being the inhospitable environments in which they can be erected. Energy firms Statoil and Masdar partnered on the Hywind Scotland project, and the plan within the next year or so is to install a huge 1MWh “Batwind” storage battery to better manage the site’s output.

The UK, and Scotland in particular, is no stranger to trend-setting clean energy projects that are contributing towards encouraging renewable milestones. The UK is home to the biggest wind turbines in existence, and after Hywind Scotland, the Irish Sea is expected to host an even bigger offshore wind farm in the future. Then there’s the world’s first lagoon power plants, still in development, and while England doesn’t really have the right weather, windy Scotland has also been earmarked for the world’s first commercial kite-driven power plants.

Via: BBC

Source: Statoil

‘Monument Valley 2’ comes to Android on November 6th

Monument Valley 2, the follow-up to UsTwo’s beautiful and head-turning puzzler from 2014, is almost ready for Android phones and tablets. The London studio announced today that the game will arrive in the Play Store on November 6th, five months after its debut on iOS. The title, if you need a refresher, follows a mother and her child as they traverse a world filled with crisp and colorful M. C. Escher-inspired architecture. Like the first game, your success is dependent on figuring out the different pathways that unlock as you tap, slide and rotate various parts of the environment.

Hopefully UsTwo can earn some money on the platform this time. In 2015, the studio revealed that a mere five percent of Monument Valley installs were “paid for.” The rest, bar a “small number” of exceptions (likely review or promotional copies) were obtained illegally. Piracy isn’t a new problem for Android but does affect the business model and, ultimately, livelihood of small game developers. UsTwo is a little different because its business spans many disciplines, including commercial app development, and therefore isn’t solely reliant on Monument Valley revenue. Still, the sequel is a cracker, and one we feel is more than worthy of its $5 asking price.

Source: ustwogames (Twitter)

London’s new electric black cabs hit the streets

London’s new electric taxis are almost ready for the public. Six test vehicles are being introduced to the city’s streets today ahead of a planned roll out later this year. Participating drivers will be collecting data about potential emissions savings and the reality of using London’s charger network. “We will now be able to accurately quantify the significant improvements these vehicles will make to London’s air quality,” Chris Gubbey, CEO for the London Electric Vehicle Company (LEVC) said, “which will benefit all Londoners, regardless of whether [they] use taxis or not.”

We first saw the new vehicle, known then as the TX5, in late 2015. From the outside, it looks like a regular taxi with its black paint job, large front grille and illuminated sign on the roof. Inside, however, is a 1.3 litre, three-cylinder petrol engine, which acts as a generator for a battery pack and electric motor. As a pure EV, it can go 70 miles on a single charge, but with its gas-guzzling aid that rises to 400 miles. Its green credentials are, therefore, limited, but it does meet the “zero emission capable” requirement that will be introduced for all new taxis on January 1st, 2018.

The taxi’s cabin has been upgraded too. The new TX has six seats, contactless card machines — a requirement in London since October 2016 — onboard Wi-Fi, USB charging and a panoramic roof. Up front, drivers will have access to a sat-nav with information about traffic congestion and electric charger locations. The screen will also integrate with taxi-hailing apps — think Gett, myTaxi and Kabbee — to help drivers compete with Uber (which for now is still operating in London). It is, in short, a long overdue overhaul for one of the city’s most iconic and, for some, beloved vehicles.

Source: LEVC