Month: April 2023

Prison TV Gets Simple Speaker Mod

American prisons are strict about television use. Typically they’re only to be used with headphones, and their enclosures need to be transparent so they can’t be used to smuggle goods. ClearTech makes TVs that meet these specifications, and when [Steve Pietras] got his hands on just such a unit, he set about modding it for

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Spotify brings its “broadcast-to-podcast” tech, which it acquired from Whooshkaa in 2021, to Megaphone, letting publishers convert radio shows into podcasts (J. Clara Chan/The Hollywood Reporter)

J. Clara Chan / The Hollywood Reporter: Spotify brings its “broadcast-to-podcast” tech, which it acquired from Whooshkaa in 2021, to Megaphone, letting publishers convert radio shows into podcasts  —  Fox Corp. is one partner using the audio giant’s “broadcast-to-podcast” technology to turn existing Fox radio shows into on-demand podcasts.

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WhatsApp rolls out a handful of new verification and protection features, including defenses against SIM jacking and social engineering attacks (Igor Bonifacic/Engadget)

Igor Bonifacic / Engadget: WhatsApp rolls out a handful of new verification and protection features, including defenses against SIM jacking and social engineering attacks  —  WhatsApp has begun rolling out a handful of new security features.  The most notable sees the company doing more to protect users against SIM jacking …

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Meta open sources Animated Drawings, an AI project that turns doodles into animations, with a dataset of nearly 180K drawings (Kris Holt/Engadget)

Kris Holt / Engadget: Meta open sources Animated Drawings, an AI project that turns doodles into animations, with a dataset of nearly 180K drawings  —  Meta has open-sourced an artificial intelligence project that lets anyone bring their doodles to life.  The company hopes that by offering Animated Drawings …

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Toronto-based Kepler, which plans to launch a network of optical satellites to deliver data at 2.5Gbps to satellites in low Earth orbit, raised a $92M Series C (Aria Alamalhodaei/TechCrunch)

Aria Alamalhodaei / TechCrunch: Toronto-based Kepler, which plans to launch a network of optical satellites to deliver data at 2.5Gbps to satellites in low Earth orbit, raised a $92M Series C  —  Toronto-based startup Kepler Communications closed another tranche of capital to continue building out its on-orbit data network.

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Q&A with Substack CEO Chris Best about Notes, asking for investment without sharing financial details, and more, as he evades some content moderation questions (Nilay Patel/The Verge)

Nilay Patel / The Verge: Q&A with Substack CEO Chris Best about Notes, asking for investment without sharing financial details, and more, as he evades some content moderation questions  —  Can Substack handle the wrath of Elon Musk and the pain of content moderation?  —  It is fair to say that Substack …

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Hackathon Wire EDM Build Really Works

If you’ve ever short-circuited a car battery, you’ve seen the pitting and damage a few sparks can cause. Smart minds realised that controlled sparks could erode metal very accurately, in a process now known as electrical discharge machining. [Tanner Beard] decided to build just such a machine for a hackathon, and it works a treat.

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Suicide Squad kills another release date

Rocksteady Studios You could be forgiven at this point for not believing Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is ever coming out. Rocksteady Studios, of Batman: Arkham series fame, has delayed the game yet again. This is the second time the game has been delayed this year and the third overall, taking the release date

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