Tag Archives: Blue Origin

PTJ 355: The Empire Hacks Back

In this week’s episode of Pop Tech Jam, El Kaiser and J.D. discuss the headlines from the world of tech, including the U.S. government’s own Bitcoin grab as it claws back the Colonial Pipeline ransom. El Kaiser would like Batman to have at least one nice day and J.D. ambles through the major announcements from this year’s Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference. Just push play to hear it all on PTJ 355!

PTJ 281: The Jet Set

In this week’s show, J.D. and an overworked El Kaiser discuss the week’s news, including Google’s big fine and Amazon Prime Day’s big fail. There’s also an exciting turn of events for those wishing rocket jet-packs were real. J.D. also has a (Hopefully) Helpful Hint about making your Windows PC or Mac clean up after itself. Hear it all now on Episode 281!

Links to Stories Discussed on This Week’s Episode

 (Hopefully) Helpful Hint

PTJ 205 News: Grab and Go

fireexWell, it’s a week later and Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7 problem continues to grow.  Two government agencies have now issued warnings about using the new device. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission is urging all Galaxy Note 7 owners to stop using the phones and to power down and stop charging them. And the Federal Aviation Administration is strongly advising passengers not to charge, turn on or even pack any Galaxy Note 7 devices in checked baggage. Samsung, for its part, is stepping up efforts with a quick-fix Galaxy Note 7 over-the-air patch designed to stop charging batteries form overheating by limiting the maximum charge to 60 percent. (And a quick correction to last week’s, it’s not just 1 percent of phones affected by the recall, it’s all of them.)

Could Google be working on a new 7-inch Android tablet to replace the retired Nexus 7 line? Several tech blogs are reporting that’s the case. (“w00t!” say we all!)

Google has also been doing some software updates this week as well. The company updated the iOS version of its Google Photos app to include a feature that turns iPhone Live Photos taken on a 6s or later into animated GIFs that can be shared more widely. And there’s also a new iOS version of the Google Cardboard Camera app for taking 3D 360-degree virtual-reality photos that look cool in your Google Cardboard Viewer. Of course, an Android version of the app has been out for awhile now.

cardboard

Facebook has also updated its Messenger platform to be much more an e-commerce engine. One of the company’s blogs has announced that the site was quote “starting to roll out ads in News Feed that drive people to chat with your bot on Messenger.” You have been warned, people.

Apple doesn’t seem to be sitting still while Facebook takes all the advertising dollars, though. The iMessage app in the iOS 10 software that arrived this week now has its own app store where users can purchase things like stickers and games.

instagramInstagram announced this week that it was adding keyword moderation tool that allows users to block comments using specific words from appearing on posts.  Twitter, are you paying attention?

But speaking of Twitter, The Verge and other blogs are reporting that the bird-themed microblogging service’s previously announced plan to stop counting links, polls and other media in the 140-character limit will go into effect on September 19th.

In Windows 10 news, Sling TV has an official Windows 10 app available in Microsoft’s Windows Store. The app allows the streaming TV service to work with Windows 10 and the Cortana virtual assistant to organize one’s television watching on the PC.

Blue Origin, the space exploration company owned by Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, showed off some new rocket designs to the public this week. The designs were very nice.

And finally, NASA is working on that problem that another asteroid may smash into the earth and wipe out more than dinosaurs this time around. We need more knowledge on the topic, so last week, the agency launched a robot explorer craft called Osiris-REX (short for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer) toward the asteroid Bennu, where it will orbit for two years. Before they part ways, Osiris-Rex will use its robot arm to reach out and take a piece of the rock before it turns around and comes back to each with the sample in tow. Talk about your takeout…

PTJ 205: Throwing Sevens

After a week to process the big iPhone 7 announcement last week, technologist Don Donofrio returns to the show to discuss the good, the bad and the stuff Apple skipped this time around. In the news segment, El Kaiser and J.D. bring updates on the increasingly combustible Samsung Galaxy Note 7 situation, rumors of Google doing another 7-inch tablet and plenty of other non-Apple news from the geekosphere. Let’s roll the dice!

PTJ 195 News: Living On the Edge

Not everyone likes new stuff. Still, Microsoft took to one of its own blogs recently to make a push for its spiffy new Windows 10 browser Edge, trying to show that the software provided better battery life when surfing compared to those other companies’ browsers (Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Opera). However, in the latest survey of desktop browser market share from Net Applications, Google Chrome version 50 was in first place with 22.65 percent of users, with two versions of IE and an older edition of Chrome right behind. Edge appears in fifth place with about 4.46 percent of users, so perhaps this battery tip hasn’t gotten around.

Also from the Department of Microsoft News, the company announced a new version of its signature game console called the Xbox One S that starts at $400 for the two-terabyte model. The S-model is smaller than the earlier Xbox One and supports 4K video; the older Xbox One now sells for $280, so up yours, Sony PlayStation.

Microsoft also bought the LinkedIn social professional network last week for $26 billion dollars, which took many people by surprise, especially because LinkedIn was not profitable and was losing a reported $150 million dollars a year. The Guardian’s opinion section didn’t think the purchase was a great idea, but others ran with it.

Facebook has had suicide-prevention resources available to users for years. This month, the site is adding even more time-saving tools designed to help friends help their friends and also offers tips from the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.

Google has added a new feature of its own to its app: Symptom Search. Yes, now when you type in specific health woes you’re feeling like headache or foot pain, Google returns a list of medical conditions that may include your symptoms. Doctor Google advises you not to use use this in place of actual medical care.

Twitter just bought itself a $150 million dollar pony — or, more precisely, the Magic Pony Technology company, a London-based firm uses neural networks and machine learning to understand images and enhance them for a variety of uses.

pony

Video is also on Twitter’s mind this week, as the company announced that clips posted on the site can now be 140 seconds long instead of just 30 seconds. (Everybody’s got to have live-streaming service and now Yahoo’s Tumblr site is jumping into the mix with its own version of the feature.)

China is still winning at supercomputers. The new top performer, the Sunway TaihuLight, is capable of performing some 93 quadrillion calculations per second (petaflops, dudes). The TaihuLight is roughly five times more powerful than the fastest supercomputer in the United States.

Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos backs a little rocket company called Blue Origin, which had a successful test flight of a rocket and capsule landing out in Texas last weekend. Blue Origin is developing flights for space tourism that could begin blasting off in 2018.

The Federal Aviation Administration has finalized its rules for commercial drone operators. In other government news, Reuters and other organizations are reporting that Republicans in the United States Senate have set up a vote this week to expand the surveillance powers of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Instagram announced it hit the 500-million-user mark this week. And remember, you don’t have to use only square photos anymore.

Those who do not know Internet history are doomed to…try and read it on outdated formats and dead links. It may seem like it’s been around forever, but the concept for what was then called the Intergalactic Network came into focus in the early 1960s and picked up steam in the early 1970s when Vint Cerf of Stanford co-created the TCP/IP protocol that let different computer networks talk to each other. These days, Mr. Cerf (shown here), now working for Google as Chief Internet Evangelist, is working to create a decentralized backup of the Web so that the Wayback Machine over at the Internet Archive is not the only repository for our accumulating collective digital history.

VCerf

Cerf, who has previously warned of an Internet Dark Age where data is lost because systems become obsolete, was part of the Decentralized Web Summit conference earlier this month in San Francisco. Wired has the story on the backup and preservation efforts.

And finally, the summer box office is heating up and Pixar’s latest production, Finding Dory, just broke the box office record for the highest-grossing animated film debut. The sequel to 2003’s Finding Nemo  made with the voice of Ellen DeGeneres as Dory, melded to Pixar’s cutting-edge, state-of-the-art animation technology — made more than $136 million dollars at the box office. Finding Dory passed the DreamWorks film, Shrek the Third, as top-earner. Pixar’s former top debut Toy Story 3 debuted with about $110 million back in 2010, but it looks like Dory will give a lot of people the urge to go fishing in the next few weeks.