How To Save Money With Nest Rush Hour Rewards

Get paid by your energy company by letting Nest manage your temps during high-usage times.

Heating and cooling both pose a significant cost to homeowners every year. A great way to cut down on those costs is by using a smart thermostat like a Nest that can keep a tight schedule that matches yours or even build one around your life with its learning features. You can add to those savings by signing up for Nest Rush Hour Rewards and have your utility company pay you for managing your usage during peak times. You probably won’t even notice the difference in temperature, but you will definitely notice the savings at the end of the year.

More: Nest Thermostat Gen 1 through Gen 3 and Nest E: Comparison and main differences

What is the Rush Hour Rewards program?

At certain times, the demand for energy gets extremely high. Sometimes high enough that your utility company struggles to meet the demand. These are known as rush hours because of the way they resemble traffic patterns on busy streets. Rush Hour Rewards is a program from Nest and your utility company that will make a small adjustment to your temperature settings before and during these rush hours, and in return your energy company will pay you in real dollars for the help.

The adjustments in temperature are small, usually around 3 degrees or so. It doesn’t take much of a change to cut down on how much energy you’re using. It’s all automatic, and if you’re not home during a rush hour there may be a larger temperature swing. If you are home and feel uncomfortable you can adjust the temperature yourself at any time.

There are both summer and winter rush hours, and to participate you’ll need a Nest Thermostat E, 3rd gen Nest Learning Thermostat, 2nd gen Nest Learning Thermostat, or 1st gen Nest Learning Thermostat paired with a central air system or a central heating system. You can see if your utility company participates in the program on Nest’s Rewards page, and learn more details about the program here.

How to sign up for Rush Hour Rewards

You can sign up for the program through the Nest app on your phone or through the company’s website. Either way gives the same result and both are easy to do.

Sign up through the website

• Go to the Nest Rebates and Rewards page and enter your ZIP code to see what programs are available in your area. Choose the one you’d like to enroll into Rush Hour Rewards.
• Click Sign Up at the bottom of the page then sign into your Nest account.
  • If you have more than one home in your Nest Account, you’ll need to choose which one you’re signing up with.
• Enter the basic customer information about your account with the utility company.
• Check the box to confirm you’ve read the terms and conditions, then click I’m done.

Sign up with the Nest app

• Tap Settings on the app home screen.
• Select Home info then Energy programs then Find a participating company in your area.
• Choose the energy company you’re signing up with.
• Tap Sign Up at the bottom of the page then sign into your Nest account.
  • If you have more than one home in your Nest Account, you’ll need to choose which one you’re signing up with.
• Enter the basic customer information about your account with the utility company.
• Check the box to confirm you’ve read the terms and conditions, then tap I’m done.

Once your energy provider confirms you’re an eligible customer, you’ll get an email from Nest that activates the program and you can start getting cash back. You can unenroll at any time by contacting Nest customer support or your utility company’s billing support staff.

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Social media has a censorship problem of its own making

While YouTube vloggers Diamond and Silk perjured themselves in front of the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday, their preferred social media platform was busy putting out fires of its own. Earlier this week, YouTube mistakenly removed a video by watchdog group Media Matters that debunked claims by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones about the Sandy Hook shootings being faked. Jone’s videos themselves, however, were not removed. This latest takedown is just one in a series of confusing decisions that not only isn’t transparent, it’s causing legitimate concerns about censorship and denying the media the tools they need for accurate reporting.

Of course, some curation is valid. YouTube, to its credit, has become far more proactive in its removal of pro-ISIS propaganda. The platform removed 8 million objectionable videos in the last quarter of 2017. Of those, 6.7 million were flagged by YouTube’s monitoring software, rather than a human. Some 75 percent of those machine-flagged videos were yanked before being viewed.

That said, if you’re looking for unsavory porn on YT, you won’t have much difficulty, like a recent Buzzfeed investigation found. Simply typing “a girl and her horse” into the platform’s search bar would return as many as 20 porn videos within the first page of results — at least it did until the story’s publication on Tuesday. One of the featured videos, published by the ALL ANIMAL channel, clocked a stunning 2.3 million views by the time it was removed.

And if pro-ISIS content isn’t quite your speed, getting ahold of Neo-Nazi propaganda from the Atomwaffen Division, an United States-based hate group, is nearly as easy to find as women and farm animals. As a Motherboard report from March points out, while most of the original Atomwaffen videos have been removed, many of them are still mirrored on YouTube and easily discoverable.

Which brings us back to more recent events. Within hours of her shooting rampage at YouTube HQ in San Bruno, California, Nasim Aghdam had virtually every trace of her presence on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter scrubbed. In fact, this is a fairly regular occurrence in response to acts of mass violence.

Instagram deleted the account of Nicholas Cruz, the Parkland high school shooter, shortly after his arrest. Both Devin Kelley, the guy who shot up the Sutherland Springs church in Texas, and Omar Mateen, the Pulse Nightclub gunman, had their pages removed by Facebook as well. Oddly though, the Twitter account for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, half of the team behind the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, remains active even after he received the death penalty for his role in the plot.

In response to Aghdam’s attack, YouTube claimed that the account had been “terminated due to multiple or severe violations of YouTube’s policy against spam, deceptive practices and misleading content or other Terms of Service violations.” But again, that begs the question, why do Aghdam’s and Cruz’ content violate the platforms’ TOS but Atomwaffen videos advocating that we “gas the k*kes” do not? Unfortunately, social media platforms are notoriously (and often intentionally) opaque when it comes to explaining how their enforcement actions are enacted.

But for as reticent as social media companies seem to be about removing actual examples of hate speech, they clearly don’t suffer the same degree of recalcitrance when it comes to sweeping away posts or accounts that make them look bad. Despite Mark Zuckerberg’s recent assurances to Congress that his site does not host hate groups, the platform didn’t get around to removing two pages associated with white nationalist Richard Spencer until the middle of April.

Frustratingly, there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to the platform’s censorship mechanism. Like the ISIS content, Atomwaffen’s posts arguably violate YouTube’s same TOS regarding hate speech in that the content “promotes violence against or has the primary purpose of inciting hatred against individuals or groups based on certain attributes.”

This isn’t an issue exclusive to YouTube, mind you. Facebook increased its active policing efforts against pro-ISIS posts at the start of 2018, removing 1.9 million pieces of offending content — about double what it removed in the last three months of 2017. Conversely, the social media site has hosted ads for stolen social security numbers and personal information for years.

“I am surprised how old some of the posts are and that it seems Facebook doesn’t have a system in place for removing these posts on their own,” independent security researcher Justin Shafer told Motherboard in April. “Posts that would have words flagged automatically by their system.”

When confronted about the stolen social security number schemes on its site, Facebook took the liberty of deleting the offending ads before the Motherboard piece ran rather than even pretending to take any form of responsibility for their initial placement. And for all the times that Alex Jones has claimed that Facebook would ban him for continuing to refer to transgender folks with a pejorative, he has seemingly suffered few consequences for his xenophobic schtick.

Whether pages are removed as a PR move to distance the platform from unsavory associations with mass murderers or as a public safety service to discourage copycats, these acts of censorship are a relatively new phenomenon with little historical precedent. It’d the online equivalent of having banning the Unabomber letters.

Simply deleting offending pages, rather than locking and archiving them, not only makes contemporary reporting on the subjects more difficult, they serve to whitewash the events that took place. Take the police shooting of Korryn Gaines in 2016, for example. She had barricaded herself in her Baltimore home during a confrontation with law enforcement and had been livestreaming her ordeal until Facebook, at the behest of the cops, cut the feed. Coincidentally, the police decided, immediately after the video was taken offline, to fire on Gaines — killing her and injuring her 5-year-old son.

Facebook pulled the same shenanigans during the Philando Castile shooting, deliberately restricting access to his girlfriend’s livestream as she bore witness to his summary execution at the hands of a white cop.

“News isn’t just getting shared on Facebook, it’s being broken on Facebook,” Reem Suleiman, a campaigner for the SumOfUs consumer advocacy group, told CNET in 2016. Her organization is pressuring the social media site to stop censoring live feeds at the request of law enforcement. “If Facebook is making decisions about how news reaches the public then it needs to be transparent about how those decisions are made.”

By controlling access to the posts and videos made by society’s monsters, social media companies are effectively controlling the narrative of what transpired and presenting a sterilized version of events wherein they are taken to task over the role that their services played in the shooters’ development and radicalization. History will not look kindly upon them for that.

‘Dinner Party’ tackles alien abduction in VR like an acid trip

When last we saw Dinner Party, the VR experience about the infamous Betty and Barney Hill alien abduction story, it was only half complete. That was enough to get the gist of it at our Engadget Experience event in LA (where it received funding through our Alternate Realities grant), but there was a pretty big cliffhanger just as the couple was about to encounter the unknown. At the Tribeca Film Festival, I had a chance to sit through the entire film, and it was just as trippy as I expected.

I’ll be honest: I spent much of my childhood reading as much as I could about UFOs and the supernatural (I was raised on The X-Files, after all). So the idea of seeing such a widely known story handled tastefully in VR was exciting from the start. Dinner Party, a co-production by Telexist, RYOT and Skybound, doesn’t follow in the footsteps of Communion and Fire in the Sky, popular films that focused on the more horrifying elements of abduction tales. Instead, it’s more of a character piece, giving us a glimpse into how two people ended up with vastly different memories of a mysterious event.

The first half of the film (which I covered in depth here) sets the stage: Betty and Barney are having a relaxed get-together with friends. At first you get a bird’s-eye view, but eventually the VR camera settles into the room and floats through several conversations. Out of nowhere, Betty drops a plate and reveals she has something to share with the party: a recording of a hypnosis session, where she and Barney recounted their brush with the unexplained.

In its second half, Dinner Party transforms into something entirely new. Instead of live actors, we see humanoid CG figures in a void-like environment. Betty’s description of the event is almost pure positivity — she felt connected with the world and everything around her. It was an almost religious experience; one that made her feel more enlightened. But for Barney, it was completely the opposite: he describes feeling a dark, punishing pressure. By the end, it’s as if he experienced the destruction of his entire being at a cellular level.

“We based a lot of the descriptions directly off of Betty and Barney Hill’s own account,” said Sam Gezari, Telexist’s creative director. “But obviously we wanted to make it feel like a powerful experience. What we did was blend in live capture with a mixture of Houdini, Maya and other 3D generated VFX. We were able to achieve something close to what they described — this kind of particlization of their bodies.”

There’s still no release strategy for Dinner Party, according to Erik Donley, co-founder of Telexist. The studio is currently shopping it around as the pilot episode for a series centered on popular supernatural stories. Think of it like the Twilight Zone in VR. Given the appetite for those tales, and VR’s ability to immerse us in entirely new ways, I’m hoping the series finds a home.

Netflix orders sci-fi series with ‘Battlestar Galactica’ actor

Battlestar Galactica’s Kara “Starbuck” Thrace is embarking on another mission. Netflix has ordered a 10-episode season for a sci-fi drama original entitled Another Life, and yes, it stars Katee Sackhoff. The store revolves around Sackhoff’s character, astronaut Niko Breckinridge, as she leads her crew on a journey to investigate the origins of an alien artifact and to search for intelligent life outside our planet.

Another Life was created by Aaron Martin, who was also behind the Slasher TV series, and will have Noreen Halpern of Halfire Entertainment as executive producer. Halpern also produced the Netflix adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s acclaimed novel Alias Grace. Considering the people and production involved, this could be part of Netflix’s pledge to put $400 million towards the development of Canadian programming.

According to Deadline, Niko and her crew will face “unimaginable danger” on what could be a “one-way mission.” It sounds like Alien and Prometheus based on that description — we’ll just have to wait for a trailer or two to get a better feel of the series and to see if it looks like a better watch than Cloverfield Paradox.

Via: Variety

Source: Deadline

Facebook adds donation matching to its fundraising tools

In 2016, Facebook began allowing its users to raise money for 501c3 nonprofits and it expanded that tool last year, giving users the option to create fundraisers for personal needs. Today, the company has announced a few changes to its fundraising platform. First, nonprofit fundraisers will now feature a donation match tool so that the individuals who create the fundraiser can pledge to match donations up to any amount between $5 and $2,500. Currently, this feature is only launching in the US, but it will expand internationally sometime soon.

Secondly, personal cause fundraisers now have more categories. For family categories there are now options like adoption or new baby supplies while faith-focused fundraisers can now be listed under categories such as missions or religious community events. Other new categories include educational trips, travel for medical needs as well as volunteer programs and supplies.

Lastly, Facebook is now removing the platform fee it takes for personal cause fundraisers. At launch, the fee in the US was 6.9 percent plus $0.30, which Facebook said was for payment processing, fundraiser vetting and fraud prevention. Facebook said that there will still be a small fee for payment processing and applicable taxes.

Source: Facebook

Microsoft is also replacing its gun emoji with a water pistol

After Google retired its handgun emoji and replaced it with a friendlier citrus-colored water pistol, Microsoft and Facebook remained the only platforms that still use realistic firearm glyphs. Now, Microsoft has announced that it’s also in the “process of evolving [its] emojis to reflect [its] values and the feedback [it has] received.” The tech giant has previewed its new gun emoji on Twitter, and as you can see above, it’s mostly green in color like Apple’s, Samsung’s and Twitter’s versions.

Microsoft’s design also takes cues from its old ray-gun emoji, which it controversially replaced with a more realistic firearm illustration around the same time Apple switched to its water pistol. The company explained that it had to swap out the ray-gun, because it wanted to avoid confusion by making sure that its icons can be understood across platforms — unfortunately, the ray-gun didn’t catch on the same way Apple’s water pistol did. As for Facebook, the social network hasn’t announced anything yet. According to Business Insider, though, it’s already creating its own take on a friendlier gun icon, which will look similar to Apple’s.

We are in the process of evolving our emojis to reflect our values and the feedback we’ve received. Here’s a preview: pic.twitter.com/BlB3yYTSht

— Microsoft (@Microsoft) April 25, 2018

Via: CNET

Source: Microsoft (Twitter)

UK’s abandoned tin mines could be reopened to help build EVs

The last of Britain’s tin mines were closed in the late 90s due to plummeting metal prices and languishing global demand. Now, with the advent of smartphones and electric vehicles, demand — and prices — are on the up, and these forgotten facilities could be reopened to help the UK gain a stronger foothold in the market.

Tin mines in Cornwall and Devon are being eyed up by some half a dozen companies, which have found tin, tungsten, copper and even small deposits of lithium in the area. According to Reuters, officials say that “the percentages are small, but that does not mean it’s not relevant.” Reopening these facilities represents the UK’s best shot at securing a piece of the supply chain for car batteries, and even though production would be dwarfed by the likes of China and Australia, it would help future-proof the industry in the UK ahead of Brexit.

The government has provided £1.2 million to companies for research, although Canada’s Strongbow Exploration has already made plans to extract tin from the Cornish South Crofty mines. Providing it can raise project financing of around $110 million, it aims to start production in 2021. Australia’s Wolf Minerals, meanwhile, has already begun a mining operation for tungsten and tin in Devon.

Since the last UK tin mine closed in 1998, global demand has risen from 200,000 tonnes a year to more than 350,000, and prices from $5,000 per ton to $20,000, so officials claim the UK is particularly well-placed to capitalize on the anticipated EV boom. Speaking to Reuters, government mining specialist Darry Quayle said, “It’s as if we’ve fallen on our feet. What we have in our own backyard is quite remarkable.”

Source: Reuters

Intel delays its 10-nanometer ‘Cannon Lake’ CPUs yet again

Intel has announced that, once again, mass production of its 10-nanometer “Cannon Lake” chips will be delayed. The company is already building the chips in low volumes (though no one knows what it’s doing with them), but said it “now expects 10-nanometer volume production to shift to 2019 [rather than the end of 2018].” It announced the move in its first quarter earnings report, which saw it collect a record $16.1 billion in revenue and $4.5 billion in profit, a 50 percent jump over last year.

Cannon Lake CPUs, which use Intel’s new 10-nanometer process, were originally supposed to arrive in 2016. Since then, rival TSMC has released 10-nanometer chips and Samsung is pumping out its second generation of 10-nanometer CPUs. Samsung has actually qualified 8-nanometer chips, and by the time Cannon Lake arrives, they might be in production.

Intel has said that its own 10-nanometer tech will be superior to that of Samsung and TSMC, as it will have more features per square inch. However, it’s getting so far behind that even if that’s accurate (and some industry watchers don’t think so), it might be moot by the time the chips arrive.

Judging by the numbers this quarter, Cannon Lake delays haven’t affected Intel’s bottom line, but most of its revenue still comes from its PC-centric business unit. With impressive reviews for Ryzen 2 chips, however, AMD might start to cut into Intel’s PC sales more over the next year. Given that, and recent problems with the Spectre and Meltdown chip flaws, it seems like Intel can’t suffer any more Cannon Lake delays.

Via: PC Gamer

Source: Intel

Nintendo partners up for a money-printing mobile RPG

With all eyes on the Switch and the console’s new Labo cardboard peripherals, it’s easy to forget Nintendo is now very much a mobile game developer, too. In Nintendo’s latest financials, however, its mobile games received only a passing mention, and Mario Kart Tour is still a ways off. But it turns out Nintendo has other mobile titles in the pipeline. It’s been working with developer Cygames on Dragalia Lost, a Japanese-style action RPG. You may know Cygames as the company behind the digital card game Shadowverse, but otherwise it typically makes titles aimed squarely at the Japanese market, like the hugely popular Granblue Fantasy.

Beyond the trailer showing off a few snippets of gameplay and the cute anime characters that inhabit the world of Dragalia Lost, we don’t know a great deal about it. It will be free-to-play, though, with an in-game currency used to unlock new characters and such.

Nintendo has been pretty diverse in its mobile launches to date, with mixed success. Its first foray into mobile, the quirky social network-esque Miitomo, has already reached the end of the road, and Nintendo has admitted Super Mario Run didn’t prove as profitable as the company would have liked.

Nintendo’s third mobile release, Fire Emblem Heroes, was a free-to-play game based on the company’s tactical RPG series, and it turned into a money-spinner. Even a year after release, it still comfortably pulls in over $1 million per month for Nintendo, as players buy virtual currency at exorbitant prices in the hope of pulling their favorite characters from the game’s slot machine — the hallmark of a gacha game. Despite Heroes’ success, Nintendo’s most recent launch, Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, was a less predatory affair, relying on more traditional currency and stamina mechanics to make money, instead of gambling.

Given Cygames’ background as a gacha specialist, it’s likely Dragalia Lost will have similar gambling-style mechanics to Fire Emblem Heroes. As part of the Dragalia deal, Nintendo is taking a 5-percent stake in Cygames, which signals the company’s intent to continue to pursue the gacha market as part of its mobile strategy. The mobile gaming company DeNA, which Nintendo also has a stake in, already owns a quarter of Cygames.

Dragalia Lost will launch this summer in Japan and some other Asian markets, and Nintendo has also committed to a release in North America and Europe. That’s cool and all, but what we really want to hear about next is the rumored Zelda mobile game, because after Breath of the Wild, the adventures of Link are the only thing that really matters.

Aaron Souppouris contributed to this report.

Via: Kotaku

Source: Cygames, Nintendo

Windows 10’s next major update arrives on April 30th

Windows 10 has seen two major updates since its initial release. The next — the snappily-titled Windows 10 April 2018 Update — will be available on April 30, and includes a bunch of features designed to make your screen time more efficient.

The update’s headline addition is Timeline, which lets you go back in time up to 30 days to find the things you’ve been working on. It works across devices, as long as you’re signed into your Microsoft account, so you could do some research on your phone while you’re out and about, then pick it up on your desktop at a later date.

Another key feature is Focus Assist, designed to eliminate the zillions of web-based distractions that get in the way of productivity. Turn it on and it’ll block emails, updates and notifications, turn it off and it’ll give you a summary of what you missed. It’s customizable, though, so if you’re waiting on a specific email you can choose which stuff can break through.

Other notable features include tweaks to Microsoft Edge, such as tab muting and autofill on web payment forms, and updates to Dictation. Instead of seeking out the voice input app, you’ll now be able to capture spoken word in any text field simply by pressing Win+H. You’ll also be able to use voice features to manage your smart home from your PC, if you’ve got a compatible thermostat.

Other additions include simplified IT management tools for enterprise customers, new photo, 3D and Mixed Reality experiences, safety improvements and gaming enhancements. The update will be available for free as a download on Monday April 30.