Samsung thinks the Galaxy S9’s new ringtone will be its best feature

Now we have a reason to be excited about the S9.

It’s hard to believe that we’re just a few short days away from the launch of Samsung’s Galaxy S9. It seems like just yesterday we were swooning over the Galaxy S8, but Samsung is ready to wow us once again and show off what it’s been working on for so many months.

We’re expecting a fair amount from the Galaxy S9, including Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 845 processor, radical new camera tech, and a new face unlocking system. However, above all else and perhaps most importantly, the Galaxy S9 will ship with a new take on Samsung’s “Over the Horizon” ringtone.

Samsung’s been using its “Over the Horizon” tune as the default ringtone for its Galaxy phones since 2011, and with each year that passes, the company slightly tweaks it to ” mirror the aesthetic transformation of the devices themselves.”

This year with the Galaxy S9, Samsung decided to enlist the help of Icelandic composer Pétur Jónsson to recreate the tune for a version that “takes you away on an atmospheric journey of discovery.” I’d try to describe the ringtone myself, but I think Samsung already does a fantastic job at doing so. According to the company —

Listening to this year’s piece by Jónsson, you will find that the notes arouse the most pure, fundamental elements of the human sentiment that often remain hidden in our daily lives. In this way, the latest version of Samsung’s brand sound has the power to relax the mind and heal the soul, thus resonating with all who hear it, regardless of their age.

You can give this year’s “Over the Horizon” piece a listen by watching the video above, but before you do, make sure you’re prepared for what you’re about to experience — a life-changing, heart-stopping, breathtaking, ringtone.

Oh brother.

Samsung Galaxy S9 and S9+

• Latest Galaxy S9 rumors and info!
• Samsung Galaxy S9 launch event set for Feb 25: ‘The camera. Reimagined.’
• The Galaxy A8+ gives us an early look at Galaxy S9 design cues
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• Join our Galaxy S9 forums

How to use Spotify’s radio magic to level up your personal playlists

We never want a good playlist to end, and with Playlist Radio, they never have to.

Spotify prides itself on its playlist prowess. There’s a reason that Spotify’s Home tab is covered in playlists rather than just popular songs and albums like most music apps. A good, long, curated playlist can hit all the right spots even better than Spotify’s radio stations, but if you’re having a little trouble fleshing out your budding playlists, never fear!

Spotify Radio is here to make your playlists pop.

Spotify offers a few recommended songs at the bottom of every playlist but only five songs at a time, and you really only have three options with these recommendations: tap the song to listen to it; tap the Add button to stick it in the playlist; or, hit Refresh at the bottom to replace them with a new set of five. If you want some real recommendations in some real numbers, you should turn to Playlist Radio.

Playlist Radio will turn your playlist into your own personal radio station, playing more songs from the artists and albums in the playlist as well as pulling in music based on the genres of the playlist. While you listen to Playlist Radio, you can judge how the song will sound alongside your playlist’s other tracks, which will occasionally come up in the radio’s rotation.

More importantly, you can thumbs tracks up and down as you go to refine both the station’s algorithms and the recommendations for songs to add to your playlist. If I’m looking to build a playlist out that’s sparse, I’ll start up Playlist Radio and rate each and every song that comes up in the rotation. I may not listen to the whole song each time, but I will rate each and every song, see if it’s worth adding to my playlist, and then keep going until my playlist seems full enough or I’m out of time.

Another benefit of using Playlist Radio to work your way through recommendations is that you get the full menu of options on the playback window, so an album comes up that you want to further explore, you can View Album or View Artist before you Add to Playlist. If you’re looking for more songs to compliment a particular track, you can start a Song Radio and proceed the same way you would with Playlist Radio.

Have you been using Playlist Radio to improve your playlists in Spotify, or do you curate your playlists the old-fashioned way? Have you been perfecting any playlists you’re ready to share with the world? Let us hear them in the comments below.

Want to move to Spotify from your current streaming service? Here’s how to get started

Twitch postpones new rules to clarify vague expectations

Twitch is temporarily putting the brakes on its new rules for hate speech, harassment and sexual material. The livestreaming service has postponed the enforcement of new rules from February 19th to March 5th in order to “better explain some sections” in the wake of feedback. The company hasn’t explained just what those sections are (we’ve asked Twitch to elaborate), but there’s a good chance it’s addressing both streamers’ oversight of their viewers as well as acceptable clothing.

As Polygon explained, streamers like Forsen are worried that Twitch’s call for a “good faith effort” to stop viewer-instigated harassment could put them on the hook for whatever fans do, no matter how little the streamer is involved. That’s not likely what Twitch intended (this is mainly to prevent streamers from encouraging or willfully ignoring harassment), but the language doesn’t explicitly state that.

Likewise, some streamers have complained that Twitch is vague in its definition of appropriate attire. You’re supposed to wear clothes that would be suitable for a “public street, mall, or restaurant,” but users have been banned in the past for wearing shorts and a tank top. Are you going to get the boot just because your ordinary clothes show a little too much skin?

Twitch is in a tough spot — it has to establish easy-to-follow guidelines while keeping the rules open enough that it can tackle vile behavior that it hadn’t anticipated. However, the delay suggests that it still hasn’t found that balance. While the initial explanation wasn’t about to trigger a mass exodus from Twitch, it didn’t exactly inspire confidence.

Via: Polygon

Source: Twitch (Twitter)

The WyzeCam gets a smarter sequel that still costs only $20

That the $20 WyzeCam worked as well as it did is still kind of a surprise. It’s no wonder then that the Amazon alums who created it have been working on a sequel: the WyzeCam v2. It’ll still cost $20 when it starts shipping at the end of February, but don’t let yourself be fooled by its almost-unchanged design — version 2 packs a handful of handy extras.

For one, there’s an improved CMOS sensor inside that matte white body, which should help produce crisper images in your 1080p live feed — even when using the WyzeCam in night vision mode. Sound quality should be better too, thanks to a more powerful amplifier and an audio chip tweaked to better resist interference.

The WyzeCam 2’s real value, however, lies in its improved intelligence. Unlike the original, version 2 can highlight people and objects moving in front of the camera — with the first model, you’d get a motion alert and have to sit through motion-triggered clips to figure out what was happening. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but consider my setup: I still have a WyzeCam facing out over my desk at the Engadget office to make sure random Oath employees don’t come over and fiddle with our treasure trove of gadgets. With the original model, I’d have to watch a clip to see if someone was actually at my desk, or just walking down a corridor behind me. WyzeCam 2, meanwhile, will highlight those people with a color so I could more quickly spot false positives.

Still other features will come over time. After all, Wyze team’s M.O. from the outset was to push out cheap, effective hardware and augment it with software improvements, and that hasn’t changed here. We’re told that a firmware update coming in March will allow the WyzeCam to work with IFTTT applets and provide limited support for Alexa. You won’t be able to issue commands to a WyzeCam through one of Amazon’s speaker tubes, but you can view the live feed from a WyzeCam on devices like the Echo Show and Spot. For now, it’s unclear when — or even if — such features will be made available on the original WyzeCam, but at $20 a pop, the prospect of swapping out your entire collection shouldn’t be too expensive.

Source: WyzeCam

A ‘trapped’ atom is visible to the naked eye

The tiny dot in the center of the screen, between the two metal electrodes, is the light emitted by a single atom. The photo, Single Atom in an Ion Trap, just won the grand prize in the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) science photo and imaging contest. “The idea of being able to see a single atom with the naked eye had struck me as a wonderfully direct and visceral bridge between the miniscule quantum world and our macroscopic reality,” said Oxford University quantum physics professor David Nadlinger, who took it.

To give an idea as to scale, the gap between the two needlike-like tips is about 2mm, less than a tenth of an inch, so the image is substantially enlarged. Still, it’s a scale that we humans can relate to, unlike the nanometer size of the atom itself.

Here’s how Nadlinger captured the image: A strontium atom was ionized by a laser, then trapped in an ultra-high vacuum chamber (aka, an ion trap) and hit by a blue-violet laser. It was held firmly in place by four electromagnet needles, including the two shown in the image and two others that are out of view. Those created something called a “rotating saddle potential,” that trapped the atom in much the same way that a real rotating saddle can trap a physical ball.

Once stabilized, the strontium ion was hit by an array of lasers from multiple directions, which took it to near absolute zero. The blue-violet light is also just the right frequency so that the ion absorbs and re-emits the light. While a strontium atom is only about a quarter of a nanometer, the lasers created a glow that’s hundreds of times wider than that (it moves a tiny bit, too). Even that would be barely big enough to see, so Nadlinger used some extension tubes and over-exposed the image in a process called “optic elaboration.” (It was shot with a Canon EOS 5D Mark II and EF 50mm f/1.8 lens.)

Nadlinger noted that he’s not the first to photograph an atom in this way; Nobel laureate Hans Dehmelt photographed a single barium atom in 1989. His effort, however, was better publicized thanks in part to the EPSCR photo contest. That aside, it’s a great photo that literally brought an impossibly small world to light, and Nadlinger is one of the few people that could pull it off.

“A back-of-the-envelope calculation showed the numbers to be on my side, and when I set off to the lab with camera and tripods one quiet Sunday afternoon, I was rewarded with this particular picture of a small, pale blue dot.”

Source: ESPRC

‘Super Mario Bros.’ encyclopedia comes to the US October 23rd

Nintendo did many things to mark the 30th anniversary of Super Mario Bros., but there’s been one you couldn’t usually get your hands on unless you lived in Japan: the Super Mario Bros. Encyclopedia. You’ll be glad to hear that it’s coming to the West, though. Dark Horse Publishing has announced that the official guide to Mario’s universe will be available in a standard edition in the US on October 23rd for $40. Amazon is also hinting at releases in the UK and Europe, although we don’t have official information as of this writing.

The 256-page book is full of information and artwork for 17 games in the Super Mario series, including character info, developer interviews and other tidbits. Just don’t expect it to be up to date. As the dates above suggest, you probably won’t find Super Mario Odyssey or Super Mario Run in the book unless there’s an addendum. And this is going to focus on the core Mario games, not offshoots like Paper Mario. Despite the “encyclopedia” in the title, this is more of a look back at a specific period in the franchise’s history than a definitive compendium.

Via: Kotaku

Microsoft stops pushing notifications to Windows 7 and 8 phones

The end of Microsoft’s Windows Phone project has been a long time coming, and now there’s another nail in the coffin. Microsoft is ending support for all push notifications for Windows Phone 7.5 and Windows Phone 8.0 starting Tuesday, February 20th. According to Microsoft’s blog post, in addition to the discontinuation of push notifications, live tiles will no longer be updated and the find my phone feature will not work.

It’s important to note that this doesn’t apply to newer devices. “Windows Phone 7.5 and Windows Phone 8.0 have reached their end of support dates, and thus services for these versions of Windows will be discontinued over time,” according to the release. Windows 8.1 phones will continue to have notification services. Windows 10 Mobile phones are still fully supported, though Microsoft is no longer building new features for the platform because it’s no longer a “focus.”

Via: The Verge

Source: Microsoft

You get to pick the next free games on Twitch Prime

Twitch has been giving away free games with a Prime membership for awhile now, but now you’ll have a say in what’s handed out each month. With the Indie Amplifier program, users can pick from eight indie games and the one with the most votes will be given away March 15th. Here’s what’s in the running:

• I, Hope – Double Plus Good Games

• Kingsway – Carbon Interactive

• Shadow Tactics – Daedlic Games

• Steamworld Dig 2 – Image & Form

• Tomb of Annihilation – Bkom Studios

• Treadnauts – Topstitch Games

• Tumblestone – Quantum Astrophysicists Guild

Voting opens today and runs through Sunday, March 11th. More than just a free game for you, developers have something to gain as well. According to a press release, there’s a $175,000 prize pool for the winning games. And if you want to see what the games are before you vote, a pair of streamers will be playing the games for the next two weeks.

Sony used to hold voting contests for PlayStation Plus’ giveaway indies, but that hasn’t happened in quite some time.

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Samsung patents a flying screen that could be used for hovering video

Samsung was awarded a patent by the US Patent and Trademark Office last week for what it’s calling a “flying display device.” The patent, spotted by LetsGoDigital, was filed for in 2016 and describes a drone-like device with a screen that could be capable of streaming video, like, for example, broadcast television, but, as The Verge points out, it could also presumably be used as a hovering advertisement display. According to Samsung’s patent, the flying screen would be supported by four propellers and could have features like voice recognition, a vibration system, an obstacle detection unit with a camera or a sensor as well as gyro, motion and accelerometer sensors. And the display could be a range of devices, including a tablet, a laptop or a mobile medical device.

Additionally, the proposed design shows that the drone could be able to track a users’ eyes, head or hands and would be able to be controlled based on movements of those parts. The system may also be able to track a user’s pupils and adjust the position of its screen based on the angle of their gaze. That might be fun when it’s your tablet following you at home so you can watch a movie while you do your chores, but it may not be as great when it’s a hovering ad following you down the street. Luckily, it’s just a theoretical for now, and there’s no guarantee it will ever come to fruition. But at the very least, it gives us an idea as to what directions these companies are considering taking this technology.

Via: The Verge

Source: USPTO

Twitterrific 5 for Mac Drops to $7.99 Following Discontinuation of Twitter’s Main Mac App

Third-party Twitter client “Twitterrific” has dropped the price of the latest Mac app — Twitterrific 5 for Mac [Direct Link] — to $7.99, down from $19.99. The new price tag marks the lowest that Iconfactory’s app has ever been on the Mac App Store, and follows a 50 percent discount to $9.99 that emerged in December 2017.

Twitterrific’s sale for Mac appeared over the weekend on February 17, the day after Twitter announced it would officially stop supporting the main Twitter for Mac app. Twitter said that it plans to focus its attention on a “great Twitter experience that’s consistent across all platforms,” confirming that the Mac app wasn’t on the company’s list of priorities. Beginning last Friday, Twitter for Mac is no longer available to download, and within the next month the company will stop supporting it completely.

While Twitter guided users to the social network’s desktop website for the “full Twitter experience on Mac,” Twitterrific is now a cheaper alternative for those looking for an app to browse Twitter on a Mac. Twitterrific presents Tweets as they were originally seen on the social network, in a chronological order that filters out other extraneous content, like which Tweets your followers like.

Twitterrific 5 also syncs your timelines across devices (including iPhone and iPad), supports mute filters, has multiple font and text size options, integrates with the Voice Over accessibility feature, and more.

Re-imagined from the ground up to be the Mac’s most friendly, powerful and modern Twitter client. Twitterrific makes Twitter fun.

Twitterrific feels right at home on the Mac. Support for Notification Center, Retina displays, built-in sharing, beautiful animations, full-screen mode & more.

With the new $7.99 price tag, Twitterrific has also undercut Tweetbot’s $9.99 price on the Mac App Store [Direct Link]. Thanks to ongoing updates and developer support, both Twitterrific and Tweetbot have been better received on the iTunes and Mac App Stores with 4-star ratings, compared to Twitter for Mac’s 1-star rating at the time of its removal.

Tags: Twitter, Twitterrific
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