Kalakshar US

Oura has redesigned its official app with a refreshed visual interface and new health-tracking insights. The company boasts that the app refresh offers “modern visual language with deeper personalization.”

To that end, there are now three main and easily identifiable tabs. The “Today” tab includes only the most relevant data to help inform daily decisions. The “Vitals” tab offers “at-a-glance views of core health pillars.” This includes data on sleep, stress and cardiovascular trends. Colors change based on various biometric indicators to offer quick visual cues.

The “My Health” tab is more interested in long-term health, offering cumulative data on a user’s strengths, traits and opportunities for proactive care. This tab also includes a section about habits and routines to link “daily behaviors to measurable outcomes.”

The new Oura app also offers some increased health-tracking capabilities. The previous version of the app included a view that showed a month of data regarding menstrual cycles and fertility window predictions. This has been increased to a full year. Members also now get personalized cycle phase data from a single night of sleep instead of having to wait two months like before.

The app is launching “in the coming weeks,” but there’s a spot of bad news. It’ll only be available for the Oura Ring Gen3 and the Ring 4. The Ring 4 recently got a hardware update, with an option for a durable ceramic coating

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/wearables/ouras-new-app-brings-enhanced-health-insights-and-longer-fertility-window-predictions-171329174.html?src=rss 

The Sims Mobile is going away as EA will shut it down on January 20, nearly eight years after its debut in March 2018. An update that went live on Monday is the final one and the company is delisting the game on October 21. Since the game requires online servers (game progress is stored there), it’ll no longer be possible to play The Sims Mobile in three months’ time.

“The Sims Mobile and The Sims community as a whole are full of creativity, kindness, and imagination,” EA said in a blog post. “You’ve amazed us with your stories, builds, and Sims. We’re proud to have shared this journey with you, and as a token of our appreciation, we’ve prepared a few surprises as we head into TSM’s final chapter.”

EA will run 14 events, including limited-time quests and treasure hunts, in The Sims Mobile over the next few months. It’s no longer possible to spend any real money in the game, though players can use their existing in-game currency. As of today, players also have unlimited energy, which “should make it easier to complete projects and enjoy the last few months of play,” EA said. On January 6, EA will unlock all of the Build Mode and Create A Sim items so players can fully customize their homes and sims’ looks for a couple of weeks before the grim reaper shows up for The Sims Mobile.

Back in 2022, EA and Sims studio Maxis announced Project Rene, a game that will run across multiple platforms, including mobile. So it’s maybe not too surprising that the company wants to focus its Sims mobile efforts there.

In any case, the shutdown stinks, especially for those who have spent money on The Sims Mobile as well as for the sake of game preservation. The decision to scuttle the game won’t exactly allay concerns that fans of the series, which has a significant LGBTQ+ fanbase, have about the future of The Sims if and when the planned sale of EA to a group that includes Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund goes through.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/ea-will-shut-down-the-sims-mobile-in-january-173958279.html?src=rss 

Spotify just introduced a feature that lets users follow their favorite concert venues. This will provide people with updates and details about upcoming concerts.

Once a venue is selected as a favorite, it gets saved in a user’s library. Browsing each venue provides information on scheduled concerts, general announcements and other stuff. Folks can even filter upcoming shows by genre. Clicking on a specific spot will also pull up “tailored suggestions for other venues” in the vicinity.

Spotify’s new venue-tracking platform will offer links to each location’s “official ticketing partner” to make it easier to scoop up some tickets. The company says it currently tracks over 20,000 venues throughout the globe, from “iconic arenas to beloved independent clubs.”

Spotify also announced a change to its live event feed. This will now update daily instead of weekly. For the uninitiated, this tool tracks when artists are touring and lists nearby live events.

The platform recently added yet another tool for concert discovery in the form of custom playlists that highlight artists with upcoming shows in the area. These playlists update every week and include 30 songs.

These are welcome tools, as artists don’t get paid a whole lot from streaming platforms, instead relying on live ticket sales. The features could also help stem some of the bad press that’s been coming Spotify’s way lately, thanks to CEO Daniel Ek’s involvement with a weapons manufacturing company and the platform going running recruitment ads for controversial government entities like ICE.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/music/spotify-now-lets-people-follow-venues-to-find-out-about-concerts-153836816.html?src=rss 

On this crisp October morning, it feels like half of the internet is dealing with a hangover. A severe Amazon Web Services outage took out many, many websites, apps, games and other services that rely on Amazon’s cloud division to stay up and running.

According to the AWS service health page, Amazon was looking into “increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services” in the US-EAST-1 region (i.e. data centers in Northern Virginia) as of 3:11AM ET on Monday. By 5:01AM, AWS had figured out that a DNS resolution issue with its DynamoDB API was the cause of the outage. DynamoDB is a database that holds info for AWS clients. 

“Amazon had the data safely stored, but nobody else could find it for several hours, leaving apps temporarily separated from their data,” Mike Chapple, a teaching professor of IT, analytics and operations at University of Notre Dame, told CNN. “It’s as if large portions of the internet suffered temporary amnesia.”

As of 6:35AM, AWS said it had fully mitigated the DNS issue and that “most AWS Service operations are succeeding normally now.” However, the knock-on effect caused issues with other AWS services, including EC2, a virtual machine service on which many companies build online applications.

At 8:48AM, AWS said it was “making progress on resolving the issue with new EC2 instance launches in the US-EAST-1 Region.” It recommended that clients not tie new deployments to specific Availability Zones (i.e. one or more data centers in a given region) “so that EC2 has flexibility” in picking a zone that may be a better option.

At 9:42AM, Amazon noted on the status page that although it had applied “multiple mitigations” across several Availability Zones in US-EAST-1, it was “still experiencing elevated errors for new EC2 instance launches.” As such, AWS was “rate limiting new instance launches to aid recovery.” The company added at 10:14AM that it was seeing “significant API errors and connectivity issues across multiple services in the US-EAST-1 Region.” Even once all the issues are resolved, AWS will have a significant backlog of requests and other factors to process, so it’ll take some time for everything to recover.

Many, many, many companies use US-EAST-1 for their AWS deployments, which is why it felt like half of the internet was knocked offline on Monday morning. As of mid-morning, tons of websites and other services were sluggish or offering up error messages. Outage reports for a broad swathe of services spiked on Down Detector. Along with Amazon’s own services, users reported issues with the likes of banks, airlines, Disney+, Snapchat, Reddit, Lyft, Apple Music, Pinterest, Fortnite, Roblox and The New York Times — sorry to anyone whose Wordle streaks may be at risk.

AWS offers a lot of useful features to clients, such as the ability for websites and apps to automatically scale compute and server capacity up and down as needed to handle ebbs and flows in traffic. It also has data centers around the world. That kind of infrastructure is attractive to companies that serve a global audience and need to stay online around the clock. As of mid-2025, it was estimated that AWS’ share of the worldwide cloud infrastructure market was 30 percent. But incidents such as this highlight that relying on just a few providers to be the backbone of much of the internet is a bit of a problem.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/aws-fell-on-its-face-knocking-many-apps-websites-and-games-offline-142935040.html?src=rss