NASA celebrates 16 years of space living with ISS GIFs

On November 2, 2011, Expedition 1 commander William Shepherd and cosmonauts Sergei Krikalev and Yuri Gidzenko appeared on camera to celebrate the first long-duration stay on the International Space Station (ISS). 16 years later, NASA is commemorating that event with the best way to celebrate anything on the internet: With GIFs. Here are some of those images.

The building of the space station took place between 1998 to 2011 and involved the contributions of space agencies from 15 different countries.

Before it was even completed the station was hosting the Exhibition 1 astronauts and cosmonauts. Here is their first on-camera appearance complete with odd triple handshake at the beginning of that mission.

The ISS had a unique view of the terrorist attacks on New York City in 2001. This image was captured by Expedition 3 commander Frank Culbertson.

On May 29, 2009, the first six person crew consisting of astronauts from NASA, CSA, ESA, JAXA, and Russia held a press conference. NASA says this is the only time all the ISS partners were represented at the same time on the station.

Ahead of the 2014 Winter Olympics the torch made an appearance during a space walk.

On July 18, 2014, astronaut Reid Weisman filmed an experiment NASA hopes will lead to better engines. The circle of fire floating in space is something you don’t see everyday and is incredibly mesmerizing.

Watching the sun rise over the Earth.

For more images, check out NASA’s complete list.

Source: NASA

Huawei Nova Plus second opinion: Canada’s best $400 phone

The best value in Canadian smartphones today.

Canada is a strange market for handsets right now. It hasn’t transitioned to financing, so phones are still purchased through carriers on subsidy, and the weak Canadian dollar has actually pushed on-contract prices up over the past few years.

What that means is that Canadians get hosed (see what I did there?) from every angle, since the cost of wireless service has also steadily risen along with the demand for LTE data.

That’s why the Huawei Nova Plus is such an interesting proposition. It’s a $400 phone, free on contract, and available now at Rogers (and soon, Bell). It’s got some blistering specs for the price, and exceptional build quality taken straight from the Nexus 6P, which debuted for $699 last year, when the Canadian dollar was 10% stronger.

In other words, you’re getting a deal.

The deal

But why should you care about a phone that’s $400 outright when phones nearly twice the price are frequently discounted to $0 on contract?

Unfortunately, it’s not more economical to buy a Nova Plus at $0 over, say, a Sony Xperia X Performance which, even with an outright price of $700, is still free on contract. The advantage only comes in when you consider the total cost of the phone.

By buying the Nova Plus at its full retail price of $400, you can then turn around and get monthly discounts on your plan, in the vicinity of $240 over two years ($10 per month), bringing down the overall cost of ownership.

That’s one place to start.

The phone

In a market like Canada, where every good phone appears to be inching towards $1,000, it’s pretty remarkable that this device is only $400.

The other reason is fairly straightforward: the Nova Plus is a pretty great phone at any price. Not only is it the best phone to be released under the Huawei brand in Canada since the Nexus 6P, but it takes a lot of hardware cues from that device as well (though its smaller, cheaper sibling, the Nova looks almost exactly like the 6P).

The metal chassis is robust and fairly seamless, a testament to Huawei’s mastery of materials. This feels like no other $400 phone you can buy today. The glass covering the 1080p screen curves ever-so-slightly into the metal bezel, which gives the display an infinity pool effect and makes it more comfortable when swiping horizontally — something you can do with one hand on this relatively compact body, despite the screen’s capacious 5.5 inches.

On the bottom, a USB-C port brings the phone into the future, while the 3.5mm headphone jack on the top keeps it planted firmly in the present. A fingerprint sensor — likely identical to that of the Nexus 6P, based on its performance and reliability — sits below the 16MP sensor on the back.

In a market like Canada, where every phone appears to be inching towards that $1,000 point, it’s pretty remarkable that this device is only $400. Even the Moto Z Play, which runs on the same Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 platform, costs an additional $250. And let’s talk about this Snapdragon 625 for a moment: in my Moto Z Play review, I praised it for effortlessly powering that phone’s 1080p display, and I’m happy to say the same sentiment applies here. In spite of the slightly more heavy-handed skin with EMUI 4.1, the phone flies in almost every general-purpose task, and I’ve yet to encounter lag or stutter when playing games or operating heavy machinery apps.

There is one strange omissions, though: unlike the Moto Z Play, the Nova Plus lacks 5GHz Wi-Fi capabilities, which translates, in my house where 2.4GHz signals abound, to a poor experience that forces me onto LTE more over than I’d like.

That skin, though

Sorry, I’m just not a huge fan of this phone’s software design choices. Part of it is that I’ve been poisoned (in a good way) by the Google Pixel, but a lot of it has to do with the fact that Huawei has corrected a lot of its past mistakes with EMUI 5.0 which will hopefully be pushed out, along with Android 7.0 Nougat, in an update next year.

There are two main issues, as highlighted in my overview of the Honor 8 which runs the same software: the notification shade makes changes for the worse to the user experience, often squashing or otherwise obstructing expandable notifications like Google Maps’ navigation directions.

And the launcher lacks an app drawer, which would be fine if Huawei didn’t make it so damn difficult to set a new default. Unlike other Android skins, once you install a new launcher like Nova or Action, you actually have to go into Settings —> Apps —> Advanced —> Default app settings and change it through there.

I can look past these things, because on the whole the software is quite functional, if a little drab. There are considerate features, like the option to use the fingerprint sensor as a gesture control for accessing the notification shade, or an easy way to swipe horizontally across the navigation buttons to activate one-handed mode.

The camera

Unlike the Honor 8, which sports two 12MP sensors, the Nova Plus offers a single 16MP shooter. As Alex mentioned in his review, the phone takes great daylight shots, and its f/2.0 lens is fast and accurate, helped by the presence of optical image stabilization — but struggles in low light due to the relatively small size of the pixels.

Further frustrating things is the lack of automatic HDR, which seems to be a significant oversight given how important it has become to companies like Samsung, Google and Apple. There is an option to activate HDR, but you have to manually toggle it each time, similar to the way you’d turn on slow motion or beauty mode.

Huawei Nova Plus (left) / Google Pixel XL (right)

In low light, the sensor picks up more noise than the Pixel XL, and is generally a bit less reliable, but overall the results are extremely encouraging. Low light photography in general continues to be an aspect of mobile optics where Huawei struggles against the big names, but it’s hard to fault this particular phone given the price point. It even supports 4K video, which is a generous bonus.

The battery

Here’s where we end things on a high note. The 3,340mAh cell inside the Nova Plus is large on paper, and forgiving in practice. Coupled with the low-power Snapdragon 625 chip and relatively low-resolution (but still ample) 1080p LCD display, the Nova Plus manages over a day, and often two days, on a single charge.

I used the phone as my daily driver in and around the Toronto area for a week or so, and came away impressed with its longevity.

I used the phone as my daily driver in and around the Toronto area for a week or so, and came away impressed with its longevity. It didn’t reach quite the heights (or lengths, I guess) as the Moto Z Play, but it gave that more-expensive phone a run for its proverbial money, and in practice few people are going to wait until the middle of the following day to charge their device anyway.

Should you buy it? Absolutely

The Huawei Nova Plus is the best $400 phone you can buy in Canada today, and if you’re reading this in a European country where the product is sold you can take this as an additional endorsement. It’s fast, attractive, and has no major flaws. In fact, my only concern is the speed at which it will get EMUI 5.0 alongside Android 7.0, which should make it an even better prospect, and a greater value.

See at Rogers

Dell made its own Surface Studio-like PC with dual screens and a Dial

One week after Microsoft showed up Apple by unveiling a touchscreen, foldable, drafting-table-like PC for creatives, Dell has teased that it made a similar all-in-one machine, and it even comes with a Dial-like input device.

At the Adobe MAX conference, Dell previewed a short teaser that showed its upcoming device. It looks like a Windows 10 PC similar to Microsoft’s Surface Studio, but it’s also different. There doesn’t seem to be any keyboard or mouse, for instance. Instead, you get a touch display that serves as a virtual keyboard. You also get a stylus to sketch and Dell’s own version of the Surface Dial.

Microsoft

Like the Dial, this device sits on the display and provides access to quick actions, such as changing the color of an element in Photoshop. Windows chief Terry Myerson revealed last week that Microsoft is open to letting partners use its technology to develop similar devices, so we’re probably seeing the first results of that now with Dell’s dual-screen, all-in-one.

Dell didn’t announce the specs, name, or pricing for its device. However, MSPowerUser managed to grab a copy of the 90-second teaser, which you can see below. It ends with a mention that the device will be unveiled soon.

The video also says “welcome to your new workspace”.

LastPass is now free across all your devices

Password manager and two-factor authenticator app LastPass has always had a quirky pricing scheme. While it was free on mobile, syncing all your passwords and logins across devices — one of the key features of a password manager — required a subscription to use. Starting today, however, multiple-device access to LastPass is completely free.

Users who are already have a free LastPass account will now be able to sync between the browser extension and the mobile app. Meanwhile, those users who already pay for LastPass Premium will still have a few extra features like family sharing for up to five users, 1GB of encrypted file storage, YubiKey and other two-factor login integrations, desktop fingerprint identification and the ability to use LastPass for applications. In order to support the freemium model, the unpaid users will see ads showing up in LastPass, so a Premium subscription might be worth the $1 monthly fee just to get rid of the clutter.

Besides saving you the trouble of remembering all your logins and passwords, password managers are an increasingly necessary part of any sane person’s setup now that there seems to be a major password breach nearly every week. Of course, even password managers are not impervious to hacks — LastPass itself was breached last year, but the company has been smart about finding and addressing new security flaws before they cause a problem.

Source: LastPass Blog

Sling TV just added even more kids programming

It seems like every other month, at least, Sling TV brings new content to its video-streaming service. That’s great for those of you who pay $20 (or more) for the monthly subscription. The latest update, announced today, focuses on adding even more programming to the Kids Extra bundle. You’ll now find over 200 on-demand TV shows and movies from Kabillion, Kaboom and Splash, in addition to what’s been available from Disney Junior, TeenNick, NickToons and other similar channels.

As part of this, Sling TV also rolled out a hub called Sling Kids, which makes it easier to find the content you or your little ones want to watch. For example, you can narrow things down by age-appropriate categories, like 5-7 or 8-11 years old. In case you’re not aware, Kids Extra does cost $5 per month to add to your existing Sling Orange or Sling Blue account. Still, not a bad price to pay to keep your kids in a chill mood.

Source: Sling TV

No, US citizens can’t vote by phone

An unsettling series of tweets surfaced on Twitter earlier today advising users to vote by phone. This is, of course, impossible: The voting system in the US requires citizens to register locally and vote either in-person or via absentee ballot sent in over snail mail. The tweets have been removed and at least one account that first sent them has been banned, but the lesson remains: Be smart, ignore trolls.

Twitter just informed me that attempting to disenfranchise voters is not a violation of their Terms of Service. @jack @Support pic.twitter.com/YXVdt8sHwA

— Robert McNees (@mcnees) November 2, 2016

In the end, Twitter took them down. But they originally refused: In a reply to user @mcgee, who had reported the misleading tweets, the social media company stated that they didn’t violate Twitter Rules. They certainly didn’t violate the terms’ guidelines on harassment, impersonation or spam.

But they could have violated the Rules’ prohibition on using their service “unlawful purposes or in furtherance of illegal activities” in attempting to manipulate the election, which is illegal. Assuring citizens that their votes had been counted when they hadn’t is disenfranchisement, and those hoax advertisements were plastered with Hillary Clinton media and loaded with hashtags related to her campaign. It’s not hard to see which users they were trying to fool.

At least one Twitter user who created some or all of the tweets referenced by @mcgee above had their account temporarily suspended. As of publication time, the official reason is unknown.

update: tweets have now been deleted shortly after BuzzFeed News inquired (though their response to McNees was that it didn’t violate rules)

— Charlie Warzel (@cwarzel) November 2, 2016

As WIRED points out, Twitter likely sat out of the discussion to avoid setting any precedent of truth policing on their service, a quixotic endeavor even outside election season. Indeed, they gave no further comment to Engadget aside from pointing out that the tweets had been removed.

You can’t vote by phone, on Twitter or anywhere online — but there are resources to help you on the internet. If you’re not sure where to vote, Google “where to vote in _____”, filling in with your state. Or direct-message the @gov Twitter account. But whatever you do, don’t give in to trolls.

Source: WIRED