Bring new life to your aging tech with this $10 Aukey Bluetooth receiver

Bring your old tech to the current day.

As the year’s pass technology continues to adopt Bluetooth, but if you have some older gear hanging around you may not be able to take advantage of the wireless future. Luckily there are ways around this, and one of them is Aukey’s Bluetooth receiver. Right now you can grab one for just $9.91 at Amazon when you use the coupon code WYF6SCC5 during checkout. This saves you just over $6 from its regular selling price.

So, what does it do? Well, it’s quite simple. You can plug this device into your car to stream music from your phone through the aux jack in your vehicle, or you can plug your favorite set of wired headphones into it and then stream music from your phone that doesn’t have a headphone jack.

Aukey backs this with a 24 month warranty.

See at Amazon

The Amazon Alexa app now lets you use Alexa voice commands

Alexa’s latest home is the Alexa app.

Up until now, Alexa’s presence on Android has been a bit confusing. Phones like the Huawei Mate 9, HTC U11, and Moto X4 have the assistant built right into them, and last summer, Amazon rolled out Alexa to the Amazon Shopping app. Now, Alexa is getting a more fitting home inside of, well, the Alexa app.

The Alexa app has been a free download on Android since the launch of the first Amazon Echo, but you’ve never actually been able to use Alexa within the app. Instead, it’s always acted as a hub for your Alexa lists, music control, etc. However, according to Android Police, Amazon will soon be updating the Alexa app so that you can tap an icon and perform all of the Alexa voice commands you’ve come to know and love.

This might be exciting news for Amazon superfans, but for most folks, this likely isn’t anything that’ll change your life. You’ll still have to open up the Alexa app and tap the icon as saying “Alexa” doesn’t do anything, and if this is the case, you might as well just use Alexa in the Amazon Shopping app that you probably already have.

Amazon’s adding this new functionality to the Alexa app over the coming days, but I’ve already got it on my Pixel 2 with client version 1.24.3555.0 and bridge version 2.2.1010.0 of the app.

Or, you know, just use Google Assistant.

These are the 20 cities where Amazon’s next HQ could be located

Spotify’s ‘Spotlight’ feature adds a visual touch to podcasts and news

Spotlight adds the visual component to Spotify you never knew you wanted.

Like a lot of you reading this, Spotify is my go-to app for listening to music. However, do a little bit of digging and you’ll see that it has a lot more to offer than just your favorite tunes. Spotify is also home to a wide range of podcasts covering just about every topic you could imagine, and these will soon become even better with a new feature called “Spotlight.”

With Spotlight, podcasts will now feature visual components such as text, images, and videos to give you more context about what it is you’re listening to.

Podcasts using Spotlight will be featured in their own special playlists, and Spotify is first partnering with BuzzFeed News, Cheddar, Crooked Media, Lenny Letter, Gimlet Media, Genius, The Minefield Girl, Refinery29, and Uninterrupted as the brands that’ll help launch it.

Spotlight is launching first in the United States, and “additional markets” will follow in the future.

Spotify is testing a sleeker and less cluttered UI for its Android app

Duncan Jones’ sci-fi movie ‘Mute’ debuts on Netflix February 23rd

Duncan Jones’ next movie won’t be coming to theaters — it’s going straight to streaming. The Moon and Warcraft director has revealed that his long-in-the-making sci-fi film noire, Mute, will premiere on Netflix February 23rd. The movie is set in a future Berlin where a mute bartender (played by Alexander Skarsgård) has to trust a pair of American surgeons (led by Paul Rudd) as he tracks down a disappeared woman. Justin Theroux also stars. There’s no trailer yet, but in many ways the effort taken to release the movie is the hook — Netflix is giving Jones a chance that might not have come up through conventional formats.

As Jones noted, Mute is his “Don Quixote.” It was supposed to be his first movie (he had a first draft in 2003), but it got pushed back for a number of reasons. Sam Rockwell was supposed to play a role, but Jones’ insistence on different casting led him to write Moon to give Rockwell a lead (Mute is a sort of spiritual follow-up to Moon). And after that, it “kept being pushed back to the back burner” — Source Code, the cancers of his dad (David Bowie) and wife, and other factors led him to sideline the movie and try for a Mute graphic novel that itself didn’t pan out.

Netflix was, effectively, Jones’ savior. He described it as an avenue for making movies that creators are “passionate about,” rather than”homogenous blobs” intended to cater to absolutely everybody. The internet giant thrives on niche productions, and was willing to take a chance. It certainly helps that Jones is an accomplished filmmaker who can bring well-known actors to his work, but it’s clear that Mute’s odds of release wouldn’t as been as high if Jones had pushed for conventional distribution.

Netflix clearly has reasons to be optimistic about Mute’s success. The streaming giant has been making a big push into exclusive movies with top-notch talent, and that strategy has already paid off with the success of Bright. It doesn’t always need blockbuster viewership — it just needs enough interest to recoup its investment and draw in would-be subscribers. Should Mute be even modestly popular, it could also attract other directors who feel that theatrical releases have too many creative and financial hurdles.

So here we are.@mute. Starring Alex Skarsgård, Justin Theroux & Paul Rudd.

Out on Netflix February 23.

Got there in the end! pic.twitter.com/rmCE65ghcN

— Duncan Jones (@ManMadeMoon) January 19, 2018

Source: Duncan Jones (Twitter)

Def Leppard albums you might actually listen to are now streaming

The list of streaming holdouts just got shorter. British rock outfit Def Leppard has made its catalog of older albums available on streaming services for the first time. Until now, only the band’s more recent releases were on the likes of Spotify and others. In other words, the material from the band’s glory days — like Pyromania and Hysteria — weren’t included in music services’ catalogs. Of course, it’s also a nice bit of promotion ahead of the group’s summer tour with Journey.

Def Leppard’s situation was unique compared to some other bands (or the people who owned the rights) who were just cautious to opt in. As Billboard notes, the band was at odds with its former label over licensing, so it was hesitant to even make its older music available for download — let alone streaming. In fact, the rift led Joe Elliot & Co. to re-record some of its older material just to get it on iTunes. It would appear Def Leppard resolved its dispute with Universal Music Group over its biggest hits, since albums dating all the way back to the early ’80s are now available on the likes of Spotify, Apple Music and Google Play.

Via: Billboard

Facebook’s fake war on fake news

It’s hard watching Facebook struggle. Like how for the past two years it’s alternated between looking like it’s doing something about fake news, and actually doing something about fake news.

The company’s latest stab at the problem is saying it will change what people see in their News Feeds. The goal is to show users less posts from companies or brands, and more shares (or posts) from friends, in particular ones its algorithm thinks will get you excited.

They’re not specifically saying this has anything to do with stopping the spread of fake news from virulent racists, politically active conspiracy theorists, or propaganda farms successfully goading our country into tearing itself apart.

No, because that would indicate they’ve identified the problem. Instead, Facebook says this notable change to the News Feed — its cash cow fed by your attention — is to make Facebook feel more positive for users. To bring people closer together.

Wink.

At this stage, Facebook could lead a masterclass on how not to solve the fake news problem. De-prioritizing actual news organizations and instead highlighting that InfoWars story about eating Tide Pods that your racist uncle shared and commented on five times is just the latest hasty missive in what seems like Facebook’s desire to amplify the issue.

While some are stroking their chins thoughtfully and musing unquestionably that Facebook just wants its users to be happy, it’s appropriate to examine the contempt for its users that got us in this situation in the first place.

Right after the November 2016 election, despite being warned by the US government and it being widely reported months in advance that fake news and propaganda were influencing American voters, Mark Zuckerberg flatly denied what everyone was telling him, his users, and the world. “Of all the content on Facebook, more than 99% of what people see is authentic,” he wrote. He also cautioned that the company should not rush into fact-checking.

America began its spin into chaos. Countries around the world, including the US, were seeing racial violence in the streets we now know was directly correlated with racist rhetoric on Facebook.

Facebook had all the data. All the answers.

Facebook treated it like a reputational crisis.

In response the company rolled out a “Disputed” flagging system announced in a December 2016 post. The weight of policing the fake news disaster was placed on users, who would hopefully flag items they believed were fake. These items were then handed to external fact-checking organizations at a glacial pace. When two of the orgs signed off on the alleged fake item, the post got a very attractive “disputed” icon and the kind of stern warning that any marketer could tell you would be great for getting people to click and share.

The “Disputed” flag system was predicted to fail from the start, but Facebook didn’t seem to care.

Facebook characterized its efforts as effective in April 2017 stating that “overall that false news has decreased on Facebook” but did not provide any proof. It said that was because “It’s hard for us to measure because we can’t read everything that gets posted.”

In July, Oxford researchers found that “computational propaganda is now one of the most powerful tools against democracy,” including that Facebook plays a critical role in it.

In August, Facebook announced it would ban pages that post hoax stories from being allowed to advertise on the social network. This precluded a bombshell. In September, everyone who’d been trying to ring the alarm about fake news, despite Facebook’s denials and downplaying, all found out just how right they were.

This was the month Facebook finally admitted — under congressional questioning — that a Russian propaganda mill used the social-media giant’s ad service for political operation around the 2016 campaign. This came out when sources revealed to The Washington Post that Facebook was grilled by 2016 Russia-Trump congressional investigators behind closed doors.

Meanwhile, Facebook’s flag system shambled along like a zombie abandoned in the desert.

In September Facebook’s fact-checking organizations told press they were ready to throw in the towel citing Facebook’s own refusal to work with them. Facebook seemed to be actively undermining the fact-checking efforts.

Politico wrote:

(…) because the company has declined to share any internal data from the project, the fact-checkers say they have no way of determining whether the “disputed” tags they’re affixing to “fake news” articles slow — or perhaps even accelerate — the stories’ spread. They also say they’re lacking information that would allow them to prioritize the most important stories out of the hundreds possible to fact-check at any given moment.

By November 2017 fake news as a service was booming.

The following month, December 2017, Facebook publicly declared that the disputed flag system wasn’t working after all. One full year after its launch.

Its replacement, “Related Articles,” was explained in a Medium post that came across as more experimentation on users and a deep aversion to talk about what’s really going on behind the scenes.

There’s more to this story, but you get the idea. It’s a juggernaut of a rolling disaster capped off by this month’s hand-on-heart pledge to connect people better and cut actual news organizations out of the picture.

“Facebook is a living, breathing crime scene for what happened in the 2016 election — and only they have full access to what happened,” Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google told NBC News this week.

Facebook’s response included the following in a statement:

In the past year, we’ve worked to destroy the business model for false news and reduce its spread, stop bad actors from meddling in elections, and bring a new level of transparency to advertising. Last week, we started prioritizing meaningful posts from friends and family in News Feed to help bring people closer together. We have more work to do and we’re heads down on getting it done.

As my colleague Swapna Krishna put it, “The company is making it harder for legitimate news organizations to share their stories (and thus counter any false narratives), and by doing so, is creating a breeding ground for the fake news it’s trying to stamp out in the first place.”

If only Facebook put as much effort into policing fake news as it does actively stomping on the face of free speech in the form of human sexuality, enforcing extreme, antiquated notions of puritanism with its exacting sex censorship.

Indeed, this week a former Facebook content monitor told NBC News that “Facebook’s team of content reviewers focused mainly on violence and pornography, making it “incredibly easy” for Russian trolls to fly under the radar with their fake news.” They added, “To sum it up, what counts as spam is anything that involves full nudity.”

Thank goodness. I mean, who knows how the world would spiral uncontrollably into chaos and violence if someone saw a boob.

Images: Getty Images/iStockphoto (Holding hands); Simon Potter via Getty Images (Readouts); Getty Images (Mark Zuckerberg)

Netflix orders a weekly show hosted by Joel McHale

Netflix has snagged several former show hosts to head their own programs, from Chelsea Handler to David Letterman. Next on the list is Joel McHale, who notably starred in the priceless sitcom Community but got big helming E! channel’s unscripted pop culture-gouging talk show The Soup. For Netflix, he’ll host The Joel McHale Show Starring Joel McHale…an unscripted pop culture-gouging talk show.

Hey @Netflix: I think you misunderstood when I demanded “a lot of green” for my new show. #JoelMcHaleShow pic.twitter.com/SICdubeL1m

— Joel McHale (@joelmchale) January 19, 2018

In fact, Netflix’s other star-hosted shows are similarly patterned after the programs that got them famous: Letterman interviewed President Obama on his show’s first episode with a list of high-profile celebrities to follow, while Chelsea Handler helmed her own talk show for two seasons.

Like The Soup, which McHale hosted from 2004 to 2015, his new show will feature him talking in front of a green screen to preserve the lo-fi feel. Heck, Netflix even brought The Soup executive producer K.P. Anderson on to The Joel McHale Show Starring Joel McHale, so the new show will likely carry over a lot of the old (and also benefit from producer Paul Feig, the guy behind Freaks and Geeks, Bridesmaids and the new Ghostbusters). McHale’s program will start airing on Netflix on February 18th, with a new half-hour show arriving every week.

Via: Variety

Source: Joel McHale (Twitter)

This chat app only works when your phone battery is low

We spend a lot of time trying to eke out a few more minutes from our smart phones. Apple is offering cheap battery replacements and apologizing for iPhone slowdowns, while Android may update to show you which apps drain your battery the most. It’s not too surprising, then, that a developer might take a darkly humorous approach to the impending loss of battery power. Called Die With Me, this new app offers users a chat room when their phone has less than 5 percent battery left.

As Motherboard reports, the app was developed by Dries Depoorter and David Surprenant, Belgium-based app developers. “We wanted to do something positive with a low battery,” he told the site. “And now we see people happy with a low battery having low battery conversations. We had so much fun creating this.” The app has been in development since 2016, says Motherboard, and is now available (after some delays on the iOS side due to Apple’s struggle with it’s own battery issues) on both the App Store and Google Play.

Via: Motherboard

Source: Die With Me

‘Zikr’ brings transcendental Sufi dancing to VR

Director Gabo Arora has spent the last few years promoting virtual reality as the ideal medium for evoking empathy. He spearheaded the UN’s VR app, which featured two of his films, Clouds Over Sidra and My Mothers Wing. Now with Zikr: A Sufi Revival, his new VR experience debuting at the New Frontier exhibition at Sundance today, he’s also hoping to help people work through their own ingrained biases against Muslims — just as he did.

Growing up in a Hindu family that was forced to flee Pakistan when it gained independence, Arora admits that he picked up plenty of negative ideas about Islam and its followers. But after visiting Sufi shrines in India, and learning about that Islamic sect’s inclusive musical rituals, he was able to outgrow his intolerance. With this VR film, Aurora says, he’s also aiming to give viewers a sense of the transcendental nature of Sufi practices.

“These rituals… I think they transform you, and they have a transformative effect that you can only understand through experience,” Arora tells us. “I just thought, ‘Hey VR, that’s what it’s for!’… Can it work for these types of religious experiences?”

Through a combination of 360-degree video and virtual interactivity, Zikr gives you a front row seat to young singers and dancers, while also letting you partake in the experience. It spotlights the rise of Sufism in Tunisia, as young people look for religious outlets beyond more conservative sects. The film is a co-production between Arora’s company Lightspeed; Sensorium, and its co-founders John Fitzgerald and Matthew Niederhauser; and the creative technology studio Superbright.

It also marks Arora’s first multiplayer VR effort. You’re joined by three other people, and you’re all connected by a chain, which resembles the rope of prayer beads used by Sufi followers. As you move the Vive controllers in your hands, the chain also moves, symbolizing how our actions are all intertwined.

Exploring multiplayer was “fundamental” to this experience, according to Arora. “I think the future of VR is definitely social,” he says. Eventually, he hopes to bring Zikr to Steam to let people from all over the world experience these rituals together from their own homes. During my demo of an early version of the film, I only had one companion, but seeing their movements encouraged me to loosen up and participate in the festivities too.

Sensorium

Compared to other 360-degree video VR films, Zikr stands out by letting you participate a bit in what you’re seeing, rather than just having you sit back and passively view them. It begins with a volumetric, 3D rendered version of a young girl, explaining what Sufi rituals mean to her. And all of a sudden, you’re thrust into the middle of a room, with the girl in front of you and half a dozen women with instruments sitting around you. It’s not long before they’re all performing, with you sitting in the best seat in the house.

Throughout Zikr’s scenes, you can dance to the music, and you’re also given props eventually. First you’ll find a tambourine in your hand, which you can hit alongside the musical performers. And you’ll also end up with a burning bundle of straw, which you can wave around as a devotee dances with two flaming handfuls of straw. There are also hidden interactive features in the film, which will be unlocked when you dance along with the performers.

Much like The Last Goodbye, Arora’s last VR film, he’s paying attention to the entire experience around Zikr. Before they hop into VR, Sundance viewers will go through antechambers preparing them for the rituals ahead. There will also be speakers using spatialization technology to play back Sufi music, which will help to set the devotional mood. While the initial set will be limited by space restrictions at Sundance, Arora is hoping to go bigger for future installations. He’s currently in talks with museums, but there aren’t any firm plans to bring Zikr elsewhere yet.

Oculus shows how much VR has evolved at Sundance

Two years into the rise of modern virtual reality, following the launch of the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and PlayStation VR, the medium might seem seem as if it’s losing a bit of its luster. Headsets are cheaper and easier to use, especially with new Windows Mixed Reality devices, yet VR experiences are still a mixed bag. That’s understandable, since we’re stepping into an entirely new art form — but consumer adoption depends on VR creators figuring out their storytelling language soon.

Luckily, that seems to be a trend at the Sundance New Frontier Exhibition this year. We’re moving beyond the initial “wow factor” and towards more mature experiences that take advantage of VR’s unique ability to immerse you.

“When VR started, everyone started these lists of things you can’t do,” Oculus Creative Producer, Yelena Rachitsky told Engadget. “They always talked about explaining who you have to be as an audience. For example, you have to be a dead person, or someone who came out of a coma. The thing with all of these [new experiences] … Each one has you as a role of the audience all being completely different from each other, but they all work in their own way… I think creators are getting that much better at that blend of interactivity and storytelling.”

Oculus shut down Story Studio, its internal VR production outfit, last year — now it’s bringing films from its partners to Sundance. Fable Studio, which is made up of former Story Studio employees, is debuting an adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s The Wolves in the Wall. Additionally, there’s Masters of the Sun, a virtual rendition of the Black Eyed Peas’ comic; Space Explorers: A New Dawn, an episodic series about the next generation of space travel; Spheres, a new experience from Fistful of Stars creator Eliza McNitt, which turns you into a black hole (literally); and Dispatch, which puts you in the shoes of a 9-1-1 dispatcher.

What’s truly interesting about each of these experiences, based on my demos, is that they all bring something new to the world of virtual reality. In the The Wolves in the Wall, you play as an imaginary friend to a young girl named Lucy. She’s not your typical scripted character. Lucy can see where you’re looking, and cater her responses to that. She can hand you objects, and you can interrupt her during the story, based on what you’re doing. Most intriguingly, she can remember what you’ve done in the past. She’s the embodiment of what Fable Studio is aiming for: A truly interactive virtual character.

“[Wolves in the Wall] doesn’t show interactivity in a blatant way,” Rachitsky says. “Instead picking up something or throwing something, it’s much more subtle. There are a lot of things you might not notice… It doesn’t change the course of the story, but it changes your experience.”

Masters of the Sun, meanwhile, takes the narrative of a traditional comic into a virtual world. Instead of flat panels, you have meticulously detailed 3D environments to explore. You progress by looking at specific characters or objects, which is similar to how you’d look for speech or narration bubbles. And it uses the power of VR to put you right into the perspective of certain characters. At one point, I found myself looking through the glasses of a drug dealing comic book store clerk, right before he was attacked by a zombie.

Felix & Paul, the VR outfit behind the excellent documentaries from the Obama White House, is debuting a new episode of Space Explorers at the festival. Honestly, knowing that was enough to spark my interest. They’ve shown a knack for pushing VR filmmaking forward, and that continues to be the case with Space Explorers. It’s a gorgeous look at what astronauts are going through today to train for missions to Mars and elsewhere. Consider it the next best thing to a Space Camp vacation.

Eliza McNitt

And with Spheres, Eliza McNitt manages to bring her VR fascination with space to a completely new level. While her last film showed us how stars are born, this one follows what happens after a star dies: Sometimes they turn into black holes. Spheres lets you do things scientists can only dream of. We see a star go supernova, dive beyond the event horizon of a black hole, then come back out to assume the role of a black hole. By waving your hands, you can devour nearby planets, and eventually you end up joining with a neighboring black hole. Let’s just say they haven’t been this exciting since Interstellar.

The survival of virtual reality depends on artists like these — people pushing a new medium forward in bold ways. There’s also a major difference with every VR film this year: Many more people will actually have a chance to see them, thanks to cheaper headsets. That means it’s more important than ever to wow them from the start.