Google’s first-ever smartwatch has a ton of smart tools and Fitbit features on board, but you’ll need a solid charging schedule to make the most of the device. Find out how to charge the Pixel Watch and make sure you’re never out of juice.

Read more: Pixel Watch buyer’s guide

Making narrative film just keeps getting easier. What once took a studio is now within reach of the dedicated hobbyist. And Neural Radiance Fields are making it a dramatic step easier. The guys from [Corridor Crew] give an early peek.

Filming and editing have reached the cell phone and laptop stage of easy. But sets, costumes, actors, lighting, and so on haven’t gotten substantially cheaper, and making your own short film is still a major project.

Enter 3D graphics. With a good gaming laptop, anybody can make a photorealistic scene in Blender and place live action actors in it. But it takes both a lot of skill and work. And often, the scene you’re making is available as  a real place, but you can’t get permission to film or haul actors, props, crew, and so on to the set.

A new technology, NERF, for “NEural Radiance Fields”, has decreased the headaches a lot.  Instead of making a 3D model of the scene and using that to predict what reaches the camera, the software starts with video of the scene and machine learns a “radiance field” – a model of how light is reflected by the scene.

If you use the radiance field to predict the light that falls on a 3D model, the software can render the 3D model as if it was lit inside the scene. So if your actor stands near a red wall, the red reflection will show on their face.

The result is dramatic – live video of actors converted to 3D models by photogrammetry and dropped into the radiance field look like live action video shot on set. 3D models dropped into the scene look eerily real. Camera motion from tracking the actor’s video can be applied to a camera in the radiance field, so the camera can move during the shot.

The elements are CG objects, so they can be moved or scaled. In the video they use this to insert an actor as a giant towering over a warehouse. You can adjust camera motion after the fact, so no more shaky camera moves or regrets.

It’s a powerful new tool for low budget film makers. If you like VFx this is a real advance. NERF is new, but we’ve covered photogrammetry many times, including this neat “donut” version of a turntable.

Wall Street Journal:
How Twitter users in China have been circumventing the nation’s Great Firewall and fighting spam to get footage of protests out to the rest of the world  —  Chinese users employ VPNs to get videos and images out of the country, while fighting spam  —  Why Tesla’s China Ties Could Be a Problem for Twitter

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

One more reason to watch The Game Awards this year: Valve has announced it’ll give away a Steam Deck handheld gaming PC every single minute on December 8th. With a likely runtime of 2.5 hours — last year’s ran three — the company’s probably going to be giving away at least 150 Steam Decks.

It’s the highest-end model with 512GB of solid state storage and the anti-glare screen, and all you have to do to win is sign into Steam here on December 8th and watch the show at Steam.TV or at Steam’s 2022 The Game Awards page.

Well, you do also have to be living in the US, UK, Canada, or the EU, specifically these countries:

Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Germany, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary,…

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Will Douglas Heaven / MIT Technology Review:
OpenAI releases a demo of ChatGPT, a chatbot version of GPT-3 that answers follow-up questions, admits its mistakes, challenges incorrect premises, and more  —  A chatbot version of GPT-3 that admits its mistakes is more transparent than the original.  But it’s still not perfect.

Karissa Bell / Engadget:
Twitter says it’s expanding recommended tweets to all users, including those who may not have seen them in the past  —  Twitter is now pushing more tweets from accounts users don’t already follow into their timelines.  The company revealed that it’s now surfacing recommendations to all its users …

A Eufy security camera, from Anker. | Image: Anker/Eufy

Anker has built a remarkable reputation for quality over the past decade, building its phone charger business into an empire spanning all sorts of portable electronics — including the Eufy home security cameras we’ve recommended over the years. Eufy’s commitment to privacy is remarkable: it promises your data will be stored locally, that it “never leaves the safety of your home,” that its footage only gets transmitted with “end-to-end” military-grade encryption, and that it will only send that footage “straight to your phone.”

So you can imagine our surprise to learn you can stream video from a Eufy camera, from the other side of the country, with no encryption at all.

Screenshot by Sean Hollister / The Verge
P…

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Joseph Menn / Washington Post:
Mozilla’s Firefox and Microsoft’s Edge plan to stop trusting new certificates from TrustCor, after a report revealed TrustCor’s ties to a US defense contractor  —  TrustCor Systems is what’s known as a root certifcate authority, a key position in the internet infrastructure that guarantees a website is genuine

Now that Angular 15 has arrived, the developers of the Google-created, TypeScript-based web framework are eyeing improvements to server-side rendering and runtime performance for a planned Angular 16 release.

Tentatively due in May 2023, Angular 16 would explore hydration and server-side rendering usability improvements, with a first step being non-destructive hydration. This technique would allow reuse of the server-side DOM, and rather than re-rendering it, would only attach event listeners and create data structures needed by the Angular runtime.

To read this article in full, please click here

Today, Apple TV Plus has released the official teaser trailer for Shrinking, a new comedy series starring Harrison Ford and Jason Segel.

Musk seems to be cooling on a beef with Apple. | Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images

After a conversation with Apple CEO Tim Cook, Elon Musk now says that Apple actually wasn’t threatening to pull Twitter from the App Store. On Monday, Musk claimed that Apple had “threatened to withhold Twitter” from the store, but according to a Wednesday afternoon tweet, Musk said it was a “misunderstanding” and that “Tim was clear that Apple never considered doing so.”

The clarification follows a cryptic tweet earlier in the day where Musk said Cook had given him a tour of Apple’s campus. In a video, you can see a shadow of two people: Musk and someone else that resembles Cook.

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[Giovanni Aggiustatutto] creates a DIY weather station to measure rain fall, wind direction, humidity and temperature. [Giovanni] has been working on various parts of the weather station, including the rain gauge and anemometer, with the weather station build incorporating all these past projects and adding a few extra features for measurement and access.

For temperature and humidity, a DHT22 sensor is located in a 3D printed Stevensen screen, giving the sensor steady airflow while protecting the module from direct sunlight and rain. A mostly 3D printed wind vane is printed with the base attached to a ball bearing and magnet so that the four hall sensors positioned in a “plus” configuration at the base can detect direction. The 3D printed anemometer uses a hall sensor to detect the revolution speed of the device. The rain gauge uses a “tipping bucket” mechanism, with a magnet attached to it that triggers the hall sensor affixed to the frame. The rain gauge (or pluviometer if you’re fancy) needs extra calibration to adjust for how much water the buckets take on before tipping.

An ESP32, with additional level shifters and BMP180 atmospheric pressure sensor module, are placed in a junction box. The ESP32 is used to communicate with each of the sensors and allows for an external internet connection to a Home Assistant server to push collected data out.

[Giovanni] has done an excellent job of documenting each piece, including making the 3D STL files available. Weather stations are a favorite of ours with a lot of variety in what gets collected and how, from ultrasonic anemometers to solar powered weather stations, and it’s great to see [Giovanni]’s take.

Video after the break!

Sergiu Gatlan / BleepingComputer:
LastPass says attackers accessed customers’ data after breaching its cloud storage using information stolen during a security incident in August 2022  —  LastPass says unknown attackers breached its cloud storage using information stolen during a previous security incident from August 2022.

Juli Clover / MacRumors:
Elon Musk says he met with Tim Cook at Apple’s HQ on Wednesday, and that Cook was clear that Apple “never considered” removing Twitter from the App Store  —  Twitter CEO Elon Musk today met with Apple CEO Tim Cook at the Apple Park campus in Cupertino, California, according to a tweet shared by Musk this afternoon.

Jon Fingas / Engadget:
Twitch unveils Shield Mode, which lets streamers and mods activate customizable safety measures with one click, mass ban chatters using specific terms, and more  —  Twitch has steadily added to its streamer safety measures, but they can still be a pain to use if a hate raid or dedicated harasser makes life miserable.

Thomas Germain / Gizmodo:
Pathmatics: Apple’s Twitter ad purchases grew from $989K in October to $1M+ in November; on November 28, Elon Musk said Apple “mostly stopped” Twitter ads  —  Musk tweeted that Apple had all but stopped buying ads on Twitter.  The iPhone maker’s ad purchases had actually increased, according to an ad analytics firm.

Sara Fischer / Axios:
Mark Zuckerberg says Apple’s policies that let the company unilaterally control which apps can be installed are not sustainable and cause a conflict of interest  —  Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday added to the growing chorus of concerns about Apple, arguing that it’s …

Apple has released iOS 16.1.2 which contains “Crash Detection optimizations on iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Pro models.”

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

LastPass has experienced another data breach, but this time, it exposed user data. According to a post from LastPass CEO Karim Toubba, hackers accessed a third-party cloud storage service used by the password manager and were able to “gain access to certain elements” of “customers’ information.”

It’s still not clear what information hackers got access to or how many customers were affected, but Toubba says that users’ passwords weren’t compromised.

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In order to evolve Rellor, Pawmo, or Bramblin, trainers will need to do something very specific. It can take some time, but fortunately there’s a way to make it easier.

Twitter is bringing recommended tweets to everyone. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Twitter is bringing recommended tweets from people you don’t follow to all users, the company announced on Wednesday. Twitter is doing this because it wants to “ensure everyone on Twitter sees the best content on the platform,” so it’s expanding them even to people who “may not have seen them in the past.”

Recommended tweets appear in the “home” — or non-chronological — feed, which organizes tweets algorithmically. For me, the vast majority of those tweets are from people I follow, but every once and awhile I’ll see a tweet from somebody I don’t. I was under the impression that everyone saw recommended tweets, but based on Twitter’s update on Wednesday, people who don’t already see them now will.

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There are a total of 68 wild Tera Pokémon dotting the map in Scarlet and Violet. Here’s where you can find all of them.

Elon Musk has met with Apple CEO Tim Cook at the company’s Apple Park headquarters.

Kingambit is one of the trickiest new evolutions in Scarlet and Violet. But once you know what to do to make Bisharp evolve, you can do it pretty fast.

At The New York Times DealBook summit on Wednesday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had words for both Apple and Elon Musk.