The Nintendo NES

Nintendo pretty much single-handedly saved gaming with the NES back in 1985, and pop culture has never the same.

Auto Offload on Fire TV

Got this message when I switched to my Fire TV Stick 4K this afternoon.

What's New on Fire TV

"Auto Offload" feature to optimized device storage comes to Fire TV

Here's how it works.  If your device is low on storage, Auto Offload will partially remove some apps that haven't been used on the device in the last 60 days without deleting your login credentials.  When you want to use an offloaded app later, the app will be reinstalled for you along with restoring your log in credentials for that app, just like it was never removed.

This setting is automatically enabled.  To disable it, go to Settings > My Fire TV > About > Storage > Auto Offload > On/Off.

***

This is kind of how Roku does it.  Except Roku doesn't wait 60 days.  It seems only the most recent apps are loaded into memory and the majority are installed from the cloud when needed.

Let's see.  The last time I checked, I had somewhere between 400 MB and 500 MB free.  Let's see how much I have now...   It's taking a little while to get into Settings.  Go to My Fire TV, About,   I currently have 469 MB of 5.28 GB available.  Let's see if this goes higher over time.

global warming to peak in 2050

The world will likely achieve the Paris Agreement target of limiting average global temperature rise to “well below 2°C”, finds a new forecast of global climate policies published today by the Inevitable Policy Response (IPR), a consortium of climate policy experts.

Thanks to an acceleration of policies to curb global warming, the IPR predicts that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions will fall 80% by 2050 and reach net zero by 2080, with warming peaking at 1.7–1.8°C around the year 2050, before declining below 1.7°C by the end of the century.

The report notes that this is a “more optimistic future than many anticipate”, given that Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and UN reports have suggested we are on track for around 2.4–2.8°C of warming by the end of the century, based on current pledges and policies.

Venmo and your privacy

On Apps Like Venmo, You May Be Oversharing

TECHNOLOGY

BRIAN X. CHEN

There’s an app for snooping on your friends, family and colleagues to find out about their dinners, the people they’re dating and the parties they’re attending.

But it’s not Facebook. It’s Venmo, the app that became popular more than a decade ago by enabling people to send mobile payments to one another and to post those transactions.

Even if you seldom use Venmo today, the app may be leaking sensitive information about you to the general public.

I recently discovered that my contacts list, which includes the names of people in my phone book, was published on Venmo for anyone using the app to see.

That’s because more than a decade ago, Venmo made people’s contact lists visible to its users. It created an option to hide the address book only two years ago.

Venmo is a strong example of how even as social norms shift the ways we use technology, the companies and their apps don’t change much. Venmo was founded in 2009 as a music start-up that let users buy songs from bands through a text message. By the time eBay acquired it in 2013, it had become a mobile wallet service that was trendy among younger people who were gung-ho about sharing information about themselves online.

At the time, social media was novel, and posting your thoughts, movements and achievements for everyone to know about was cutting edge, not sinister. Since then, we have learned that sharing such seemingly innocuous information can be hazardous. Stalkers, employers or data brokers can use the data to study our whereabouts and activities.

But Venmo remains an app with a strong social networking element, one of many in a generation of apps that are now nearly 15 years old.

In the early 2010s, Venmo rode the coattails of Facebook and Twitter, which brought the concept of a public timeline into the mainstream. Venmo allowed people to publicly post to a feed details of payment transactions, including the dollar amount, time, date and a description, such as a pizza or taxicab emoji.

Venmo, now owned by PayPal — which spun off from eBay in 2015 — has made some changes over the years to protect its users’ privacy. In 2021, it disabled its global feed, a stream where users could see Venmo transactions among strangers.

But critics say the app still falls short. Today, you can see transactions among people who are not your friends if you visit their profiles.

Venmo is still set by default to publicly share when you receive or make a payment. There’s an option to make the transaction private, but if you don’t notice the setting, you could unknowingly broadcast payments.

“It’s not just that I went out to pizza with this person,” said Gennie Gebhart, a managing director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digitalrights nonprofit. “It’s a pattern of who you live with, interact with and do business with, and how it changes over time.”

Last month, The Guardian discovered through a Venmo feed that an aide for Justice Clarence Thomas was taking payments from lawyers who have had business with the Supreme Court, a potential conflict of interest. The aide has since hidden his Venmo activity from public view.

Venmo said in a statement that it had worked to change its privacy measures for customers and that privacy settings could be controlled within its app. “The privacyand safety of allVenmo users is always a top priority,” the company said.

To prevent your day-to-day life from being broadcast on Venmo, click the Me tab inside the app, tap the settings icon and select Privacy. Under default privacy settings, select Private. Then, under the “More” section in Privacy, click “Past Transactions” and make sure to set that to “Change All to Private.”

Venmo has made the contacts list, which can be generated from your smartphone’s address book or your Facebook friends list, viewable to other users.

That can make a lot of information public. In 2021, my colleague Ryan Mac, who was then at BuzzFeed News, used Venmo to discover President Biden’s account and personal contacts list. Mr. Biden later deleted his Venmo account.

On a personal level, a public address book can reveal a new romantic partner to an ex. For professionals, it could expose a doctor’s patients, a journalist’s sources or a salesperson’s clients.

To hide your contacts list from public view, visit the privacy settings, click on Friends List and select Private. Also, toggle off the option for “appear in other users’ friends lists.”

All tech companies change their data-sharing features and settings over time. So take a moment to scroll through your phone and review the settings inside apps you haven’t used in a while to see if there’s something you missed.

-- New York Times (Star Advertiser, August 20, 2023, page E6)

streaming tops cable

Streaming represented 37.7 percent of all TV use in June, a high since Nielsen began releasing its Monthly Gauge reports in 2021. Streamers gained 1.3 percentage points compared to May, while cable (30.6 percent of TV usage) fell by half a point and broadcast networks (20.8 percent) slipped by two points vs. the previous month. Other TV use — including video came console play and physical media playback — increased from 9.7 percent in May to 10.9 percent in June.

Paramount+ made it to 1 percent of total TV use in June, becoming the 11th individual streaming platform listed in the Gauge rankings. Six others hit monthly highs in June: YouTube (8.8 percent), Netflix (8.2 percent), Prime Video (3.2 percent), Disney+ (2 percent), Tubi (1.4 percent) and Peacock (1.2 percent).

Platforms

Streaming: 37.7 percent of TV use

Cable: 30.6 percent

Broadcast: 20.8 percent

Other: 10.9 percent

Streaming Services

YouTube: 8.8 percent of total TV use

Netflix: 8.2 percent

Hulu: 3.5 percent

Prime Video: 3.2 percent

Disney+: 2 percent

Max: 1.4 percent

Tubi: 1.4 percent

Peacock: 1.2 percent

Paramount+: 1 percent

Roku Channel: 1 percent

Pluto TV: 0.9 percent

All others: 5.1 percent

AI startup: xAI

(Reuters) - Elon Musk launched his long-teased artificial intelligence startup xAI on Wednesday, unveiling a team made up of engineers from the same big U.S. technology firms that he hopes to challenge in his bid to build an alternative to ChatGPT.

The startup will be led by Musk, the CEO of Tesla and owner of Twitter, who has said on several occasions that the development of AI should be paused and that the sector needed regulation.

"Announcing formation of @xAI to understand reality," Musk said in a tweet on Wednesday.

The website said xAI will hold a Twitter Spaces event on July 14.

The team at xAI includes Igor Babuschkin, a former engineer at DeepMind, Tony Wu, who worked at Google, Christian Szegedy, who was also a research scientist at Google and Greg Yang, who was previously at Microsoft.

Musk in March registered a firm named X.AI Corp, incorporated in Nevada, according to a state filing.

The firm lists Musk as the sole director and Jared Birchall, the managing director of Musk's family office, as a secretary.

The billionaire had said in April that he would launch TruthGPT or a maximum truth-seeking AI to rival Google's Bard and Microsoft's Bing AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe.

Generative AI caught the limelight with OpenAI's launch of popular chatbot ChatGPT, which came in November last year, ahead of the launch of Bard and Bing AI.

Dan Hendrycks, who will advise the xAI team, currently serves as the director of the Center for AI Safety and his work revolves around the risks of AI.

Musk's new company is separate from X Corp, but will work closely with Twitter, Tesla, and other companies, according to the website.

xAI said it is recruiting experienced engineers and researchers in the Bay Area.

the Apple headset

The Apple headset is coming, and it’s called the Apple Vision Pro.

Apple on Monday entered a new category of interest to Hollywood: The virtual reality/augmented reality space, and the Apple Vision Pro is the company’s first product in that sector, as well as the first entirely new product category in nearly a decade.

The headset was announced Monday by CEO Tim Cook during a keynote address at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference. It will “start at $3,499” and launch in early 2024.

And in a sign of how important entertainment will be to the product, Disney CEO Bob Iger appeared onstage during the presentation, calling the product “real life magic” and announcing that Disney+ would be available on the Vision Pro on the day it launches.

“We’re constantly in search of new ways to entertain, inform and inspire our fans by combining extraordinary creativity was groundbreaking technology to create truly remarkable experiences,” Iger said. “And we believe Apple vision Pro is a revolutionary platform that can make our vision a reality.”

The product will “allow us to bring Disney to our fans in ways that were previously impossible,” Iger added, with a sizzle reel showing a user immersed in an NBA game, placing themselves into an episode of Marvel’s What If …? or bringing a Disney World parade into their home.

The Apple Vision Pro is “a new kind of computer that augments reality by seamlessly blending the real world with the digital world. It’s the first Apple product you look through and not out,” Cook said in introducing the product. A dial lets the user decide how much of the world around them they can see, or can choose to be immersed in an app. People around the user can see their face if they can see around them, giving them a vision cue.

The initial pitch also included Apple TV+ shows Ted Lasso and Foundation in the sizzle reel.

And an Apple engineer, En Kelly, showcased cinematic modes, letting users watch content on screens in their homes, in a cinematic mode that places the user in a theater, or in real-world locations like at the foot of a mountain.

Apple claims Vision Pro could become a “personal movie theater” by creating a “cinematic experience” for viewing movies, series and sports. Announced features include 4K, HDR, spacial audio and stereoscopic 3D — suggesting that viewers could immerse themselves in James Cameron’s Avatar movies.

Rumored for years, Vision Pro runs on a new spacial computing platform — “the start of an entirely new platform,” the company claimed during the presentation — and has a 3D interface controlled by face, hands and voice.

With a glass lens and lightweight frame, Apple announced that it is working with lens maker Zeiss to offer vision correction in the headset.

The mixed-reality headset has been rumored for months and puts Apple in direct competition with Facebook and Instagram owner Meta, which currently dominates the (still very nascent) market with its Meta Quest devices.

calibrate your TV with Netflix

Netflix has a range of hidden test screens which let you calibrate your TV display, but enabling them really isn't obvious.

How to use Netflix to adjust your TV's picture quality 

1. Sign into Netflix
2. Select a chart
3. Add it to your list
4. Launch Netflix on a TV
5. Play the test pattern
6. Hone your display calibration

Visit https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/80018499 in a web browser and sign into your Netflix account. When you select your profile, the test patterns developed for Netflix will be available.

Next, select a Season using the dropdown menu and select the Multipurpose Chart which matches your TV's resolution and refresh rate. In this example, we will be using Season 2: Episode 8, which is for a 1080p (Full HD) 60 fps (equivalent to a 60 Hz) television.

Now simply click the + icon to add the test pattern to your list.

Now, launch the Netflix app on your television and go to the My List section. There you will find the test pattern is listed, allowing you to play the pattern on your TV when you open the app there.

You can now begin to alter the settings of your television, adjusting for brightness, contrast, color saturation and sharpness.