The former late-night host made his return to his old talk show for the first time after leaving in 2015. He reminisced about his days on the show with Stephen Colbert.
The former late-night host made his return to his old talk show for the first time after leaving in 2015. He reminisced about his days on the show with Stephen Colbert.
The great outdoors can be enjoyed all year round, so we’ve compiled a list of the best gifts for the backyard lounger, patio napper or woodland hiker on your list this holiday season. We even offer help with items to improve your tailgate or next beach trip. With everything from grilling gadgets to drinkware and hammocks to splash-proof speakers, there’s something for everyone – no matter how long or how often they venture outside. What’s more, you don’t have to break the bank.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/best-outdoor-gifts-140004525.html?src=rss
If you’ve read any of my music gear reviews on Engadget, then you probably know that I love all things broken and lo-fi sounding. And you might also know that Chase Bliss is one of the best out there when it comes to making your instruments sound like they’re coughing up digital dust after crawling out of a decades long hibernation. The company’s latest pedal, Lossy, is a collaboration with Goodhertz, a top notch plugin maker that has an incredible lo-fi pedigree all its own. In fact, it’s based on the company’s VST effect of the same name.
Lossy takes whatever you feed it, and makes it sound like a crappy MP3 from the late ’90s. It’s a realtime digital degradation machine that introduces artifacts, resonance and crunch that will bring back warm memories (or chilly nightmares) of waiting hours for a single bootleg to finish downloading from Napster.
The heart of the pedal is the Loss control which has three different modes and determines the overall character of the sound. It can deliver the familiar sound of a low bit-rate MP3 (Standard), play only those frequencies stripped out by compression for an especially tinny tone (Inverse), or spit out washes of out of unsteady glitches (Phase Jitter).
Of course, there’s lots of variety within those three modes depending on how high you have the Loss and Global knobs turned. While Loss determines the total amount of the effect, Global is a macro that sets the intensity of the effect. These two things combined shape the core sound, but the Packets switch is also vitally important. When off you just get the core Lossy sound, but you can turn on Packet Loss for dropouts reminiscent of a bad cellular connection, or switch it to Packet Repeat which fills those spaces with frozen audio for something more akin to a skipping CD. The Speed knob determines how often the effect interrupts your playing.
There’s also a dedicated Freeze function, which is unlike any other I’ve seen on a pedal before. Rather than simply grabbing the last fraction of a second of audio and repeating it ad nauseam, it actually evolves over time. It stretches out notes, changing as you play to create ambient pads, drones and shifting soundscapes.
Rounding out Lossy is a lowpass filter and reverb section to help glue everything together. Plus there is a hidden limiter and auto gain function that brings all the nuances your playing to the fore and ensures the tiny details of the Loss effect aren’t, well, lost.
Last year Chase Bliss shifted to a direct to consumer model so, the only place you can pickup a Lossy is straight from the company’s website. It’s available now, however, for $399 and buying a pedal gets you 50-percent off the Goodhertz Lossy plugin that inspired it, which is normally $79.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/chase-bliss-and-goodhertzs-lossy-is-a-pedal-that-makes-your-guitar-sound-like-a-crappy-mp3-141611147.html?src=rss
Security experts were skeptical about the New York MTA’s switch to an OMNY tap-and-go system when it was first announced years ago. Then, in August, a 404 Media investigation revealed riders were right to be concerned. As it turned out, the ability to check trip history could be used by nearly anyone to follow specific riders’ location patterns. MTA disabled the feature, but it pointed to a deeper problem that exists across modern public transit systems: they make it harder to opt out of having our sensitive data collected,
“You’re building a better system, but you’re also really stepping into a dangerous cybersecurity minefield,” said Brendan Saltaformaggio, associate professor specializing in cybersecurity at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Payment information, location data and trip patterns can all be attached to our ridership data. Agencies say they use it to better understand how riders use the services and make improvements. But the flip side is transit agencies selling user data to advertisers like a lot of private companies do, or sharing it with law enforcement. We submitted Freedom of Information Act requests to several large police departments across the country — including in New York City, Baltimore and Chicago — for more information on requests they had made to local transit agencies for data over the past decade.
But even if the data just sits there, it’s increasingly vulnerable to a breach without secure infrastructure in place to protect it. Most ransomware gangs are motivated by money. So while your data could be at risk, the hackers are actually looking to threaten the public transit agencies into paying up to avoid a data leak or being locked out of their systems. It happened to the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority in Washington, DC earlier this year, and in March a ransomware attack disrupted the Washington state bus system. That said, personal data can still be compromised in the process. Hackers leaked personal data after accessing San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit at the beginning of this year.
“These are organizations that run on shoestring budgets, usually heavily supported by taxpayers, who are probably not going to be very excited to see all of this money being spent purely on cybersecurity with hopes of not having an incident in mind,” Saltaformaggio said.
What exactly each agency does to protect your sensitive information varies widely. The Federal Transit Administration and the American Public Transportation Association both provide guidelines for agencies on how to handle the matter. But experts warn that agencies across the country are still vulnerable to attack, and struggle to keep the data they have access to secure.
Digitizing public transit payments makes sense. But while the public is leaning into going cashless, paper money will always be here to stay. “If an agency tried to get rid of cash payments, they might face some serious backlash because a significant portion of people still use cash to ride transit,” said Joshua Schank, managing principal at transportation and financial advisory firm InfraStrategies. Still, options to pay via an RFID-powered card, an app or even a digital wallet all became popular ways to pay — especially because adoption of these newer methods often comes with perks like allowing riders free transfers between stations or services. Some credit card companies even offer incentives like discounts on rides by partnering with the transit agencies on non-cash payment options.
Using exact cash to ride public transit is still possible in many places, but it means you lose out on the aforementioned perks. There are options to purchase a card with cash and still get those perks, but it’s often much less convenient. To get a ConnectCard in Pittsburgh, I have to go to a third-party location in my neighborhood, buy a card for $1 and have cash out to reload it at that third-party location whenever it’s empty. It costs $2.75 to ride the bus, so that card fare only adds up to about one-third of a ride.In New York, a physical OMNY card costs $5, or one ride on the subway plus most of your next trip. (It’s worth noting that OMNY currently has a deal selling cards for $1 at all OMNY vending machines, but that’s for a limited time only.)
Agencies stack on burdens for the consumer, incentivizing them to switch to data-collecting apps and RFID smart cards, almost punishing people trying to stick to cash — either because they value their privacy, or because they’re among those without consistent access to banking. It shouldn’t have to be more annoying, more expensive, or both just to maintain some anonymity while commuting to work.
There’s not much you can do about it, either. Like most data privacy issues, experts say we need federal regulation to put guidelines in place around how public transit agencies collect and use our data. Until then, it’s just another way we’re stuck exchanging our personal information for marginal convenience gains.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/smarter-public-transit-comes-at-the-cost-of-rider-anonymity-143054155.html?src=rss
Taylor Swift did not let a broken heel stop her from putting on an incredible show at her last night in Rio de Janeiro.
Taylor Swift did not let a broken heel stop her from putting on an incredible show at her last night in Rio de Janeiro.
Date night to support the Canucks! Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were spotted cheering on the Vancouver Canucks during their latest outing together.
Date night to support the Canucks! Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were spotted cheering on the Vancouver Canucks during their latest outing together.
Hulu is offering an enormous discount on its ad-supported plan for Black Friday. The streaming service will give you a year of Hulu (With Ads) for a mere $12. The plan typically costs $80 annually, giving you 85 percent off.
Hulu offers films, current-season episodes of popular broadcast television series and older TV. In addition, the Disney-owned service has original programming, like The Bear, Only Murders in the Building and The Handmaid’s Tale. Remember that the $12 Black Friday sale only applies to the version with advertisements, which doesn’t allow downloaded content for offline viewing.
New subscribers and former members who canceled their plan at least a month ago can take advantage of the Black Friday deal. Everyone who redeems it will pay directly to the streamer (rather than through an app storefront) and convert to a full-priced ($8 monthly) ad-supported plan at the end of 12 months. Hulu also offers an optional Starz add-on for $1 monthly for all new and existing subscribers.
Hulu’s Black Friday sale is live now and runs through the end of the day on November 28.
Your Black Friday Shopping Guide: See all of Yahoo’s Black Friday coverage, here. Follow Engadget for Black Friday tech deals. Learn about Black Friday trends on In The Know. Hear from Autoblog’s experts on the best Black Friday deals for your car, garage, and home, and find Black Friday sales to shop on AOL, handpicked just for you.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/hulus-black-friday-deal-gives-you-one-year-of-the-ad-supported-plan-for-only-12-130023223.html?src=rss
We’ve already seen DJI’s Osmo Action 4 and GoPro’s Hero 12 representing the rugged action cams of 2023, and now, it’s Insta360’s turn to unveil its take on this category — one that focuses more on video quality than, say, its Go series’ versatility. In a nutshell, Insta360’s brand new Ace Pro can be described as a GoPro on steroids, thanks to its handy 2.4-inch flip touchscreen, 1/1.3-inch sensor, Leica tuning and, most notably, 5nm AI neural processor. You’ll also get the usual “FlowState Stabilization,” IPX8 waterproof rating (down to 33ft or 10m) and swappable battery (up to 100 minutes in 4K@30fps Active HDR; fast charging at up to 80 percent in 22 minutes, or to 100 percent in 46 minutes).
Insta360 claims that combining its AI denoising feature with its new image sensor, the Ace Pro produces clearer and more stable low-light results for both videos (up to 4K@30fps in “PureVideo” mode) and stills (up to 48 megapixels). There’s also an “Active HDR Video” mode which turns on automatically when lighting conditions are met, with the company emphasizing on improved color accuracy here — we’ll take a closer look at this in our review later. The camera is also capable of recording at up to 4K@60fps, 4K@120fps (slow motion) or even 8K@24fps, but none of these can take advantage of the AI enhancement nor Active HDR.
The dedicated AI chip isn’t just for enhancing image quality. Over the years, Insta360 has been finding ways to make video editing easier and quicker, and this time, it’s doing so by letting the camera itself do some auto-editing first. Dubbed “AI Highlights Assistant,” this feature analyzes your video while picking out the best bits in real time, then you can review the AI edit on the camera first (and also delete the bits you don’t need to save space). When you next connect your Insta360 mobile app to your Ace Pro, the new AI-generated clip will be automatically pushed to your phone.
Aside from having to test out this feature myself, Insta360 also warned that “AI Highlights Assistant” does require extra power (the company promises to continue optimizing power consumption here), so be mindful of your camera’s battery life when using this feature.
Another fun new feature for making editing easier — though not necessarily limited to the Ace Pro — is “AI Warp,” which can be found in the “Shot Lab” template section in the mobile app. It’s basically Insta360’s first take on generative AI: you can pick a template or type in your own prompt, in order to get the app to transform either the entire video or just the highlighted subject into your desired style — be it cyberpunk, anime, space, superhero costumes or more. The company added that you can look out for even more AI-related effects in its mobile app in 2024.
Insta360 Ace Pro action cam on a multi mount.
The Insta360 Ace Pro is already available for ordering, with the $450 standard bundle including a standard mount and a flexible adhesive mount. There’s also a slightly more affordable Ace priced at $380, and while it comes with the same accessories, it has to make do with a smaller 1/2-inch sensor, a max video resolution of just 6K@30fps, no fast charging and no love from Leica. The rest of the feature list is the same, otherwise.
Optional accessories include a dive case (for down to 197ft or 60m), a quick release mount, a multi mount, a GPS preview remote, a “Vertical-Horizontal Mount” and a mic adapter plus cold shoe module (for use with the quick release mount).
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/insta360s-ace-pro-is-a-leica-branded-action-cam-with-ai-enhancements-133003809.html?src=rss
Some YouTube viewers who use Firefox or Edge instead of Chrome have reported having to wait around five seconds every time they try to load a video. In screen recordings shared on Reddit and other online forums, users show how their screen goes blank for a short period when they click on a YouTube video before the page loads. But when they switch to Chrome, that waiting period seemed to be non-existent. Android Authority and 404media, which reported on the users’ complaints, weren’t able to replicate the phenomenon. We also didn’t notice any difference in loading times when we accessed YouTube on different browsers.
Based on the code found by some YCombinator and Reddit posters, YouTube has implemented an anti-adblocker mechanism that’s causing the delays. We did find the snippet of code cited in those threads, but it’s not quite clear what it does. In a statement that Google has provided Android Authority, it admitted that it has implemented a system that’s meant to urge viewers to uninstall their ad blockers. The company said that users who have ad blockers installed “may experience suboptimal viewing” no matter what browser they choose to use
“To support a diverse ecosystem of creators globally and allow billions to access their favorite content on YouTube, we’ve launched an effort to urge viewers with ad blockers enabled to allow ads on YouTube or try YouTube Premium for an ad free experience,” the spokesperson said. “Users who have ad blockers installed may experience suboptimal viewing, regardless of the browser they are using.”
YouTube started cracking down on ad blockers earlier this year, but it went all out earlier this month when it prevented viewers around the world from watching videos unless they disable their apps, add-ons and extensions. The video hosting website is hoping to entice users who couldn’t stand watching ads to subscribe to its $14-a-month YouTube Premium service. Multiple ad-blocking companies have since reported experiencing an elevated number of uninstallations per day since then, but Google has yet to reveal whether YouTube Premium subscriptions have also gone up as a result.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/google-admits-youtubes-war-on-ad-blockers-is-resulting-in-suboptimal-viewing-experiences-115041371.html?src=rss
Tinder is adding many new, pretty basic, features, including the profile prompts and basic info tags other dating apps, like Hinge or Bumble, have. Profile prompts, for example, are a long-standing feature on both, with Tinder users now able to share their responses to statements like “The first item on my bucket list is… ” or “Two truths and a lie.”
The dating app points to Gen Z’s responses in its recent Future of Dating report as motivation for the updates, saying: “At Tinder, we understand that connecting today is about authenticity, depth and the desire for connections that go beyond the surface.”
The company calls it a “rizz-first redesign,” which equates to these new prompts, zodiac sign info and… new animations. Is that rizz-first? I’m not sure it is.
— Mat Smith
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Amazon will host free AI Ready courses to boost the AI talent pool
HBO’s Max is offering 70 percent off its ad-supported plan in Black Friday sale
What is going on with OpenAI and Sam Altman?
The James Webb telescope has captured parts of the center of the Milky Way in “unprecedented detail.” This area is about 300 light-years from the galaxy’s supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A, and over 25,000 light-years from Earth. The galactic center is “the most extreme environment” in the Milky Way, according to University of Virginia professor Jonathan Tan.
OpenAI’s corporate drama kept Engadget busy over the weekend, as the company ousted its CEO and co-founder Sam Altman, then reportedly tried to get him back when he was poached by Microsoft — one of OpenAI’s major investors. Now, most of the company’s staff have threatened to quit unless the board resigns and reinstates former CEO Sam Altman and ex-president Greg Brockman. According to Wired and Kara Swisher, around 500 employees signed the letter.
X CEO Linda Yaccarino called a report from watchdog group media Matters for America “misleading and manipulated,” following a large-scale advertiser pullout. In a note she sent to X employees on Sunday night, she said: “While some advertisers may have temporarily paused investments because of a misleading article, the data will tell the real story.”
Major advertisers, including Apple, Disney, Paramount Global and Yaccarino’s former employer, NBCUniversal, pulled their ads from X last week, after the watchdog group’s report found ads from some of these brands ran next to pro-Nazi content on the website. It also came days after Musk publicly endorsed an antisemitic conspiracy theory as a response to a far-right X user.
X filed its lawsuit against Media Matters on Monday.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-morning-after-tinders-rizz-first-redesign-just-ruined-rizz-for-everyone-121537687.html?src=rss
