Update 2 (11:30AM CEST): A leaked commercial for the console, shared by Twitter user h0x0d points to the Xbox Series S supporting 1440p resolution gaming at up to 120fps. The system will get a 512GB SSD; we don’t know if there’s going to be a way to expand that. — WalkingCat (@h0x0d) September 8, 2020 We’ve updated the image representing this article with the one included in Microsoft’s tweet. Our original report follows below....

Enter memes. Between work, moving the laundry and taking care of my own dogs, I could sneak a peak at Instagram and chuckle at images of very excited pups, psyched that their humans were now home all day, every day. I study media processes and effects, which is the psychology of how media messages can affect you. As the pandemic dragged on, I got more and more interested in how people were using social media – and memes featuring cute and funny pics, in particular – as a way to think and communicate with others about life during a global pandemic....

Location restrictions Prior to Android 10, you could only choose to allow individual apps to track your location all the time or never at all. Starting from this version, you can allow an app to track your location only when the app is in use. The apps will also have to ask explicitly if it needs background location access. Google has followed Apple’s implementation and for good reason. The iPhone maker upped the ante by introducing the “Allow once” option this year with iOS 13 for apps that need location access for a one-time authentication....

Research shows that people with injuries that restrict their upper body movement find reaching and manipulating objects one of their most important challenges. Existing robotic arms can dramatically increase their independence, but the high cost of their parts makes them unaffordable for most of the people who need them. Intel says its neuromorphic computing chip — Loihi — could make them 10 times cheaper. The chip’s comprised of 130,000 artificial neurons that emulate the structure of the human brain....

Rat whiskers can vary hugely. In our recent research, my colleagues and I analyzed 523 whiskers from 15 rats and found that each whisker had a different length and shape. We wanted to investigate more about the shape of these hairs as a first step in understanding what rats feel through their whiskers. We found that rat whiskers can be accurately described by a simple mathematical equation known as the Euler spiral....

Those of us who are not language experts will need a definition for the decorous new word in the title: A skeuomorphism is a design principle in which an object is made to resemble an older version of itself, by retaining attributes that were inherent to the original. Skeuomorphism gained popularity in the past few decades and became especially accepted in UI design. Former SVP of iOS and Steve Jobs protégé, Scott Forstall, was responsible for the well-known skeuomorphic design in early Apple products, from the Newsstand to the sound of the shutter button in the camera....

Back in March, Slack launched a significant update to Slack’s design. It wasn’t just one change, but a constellation of them—some shiny new things (channel sections!), some old things in new places, and a general spring cleaning of information architecture. These changes addressed a basic challenge that had grown naturally with Slack: with size comes complexity. As different product teams added new capabilities piecemeal, Slack started to feel not intuitive for people trying it out for the first time....

Zoom, unlike the rest of us, is having a pretty banner year. As we’ve all become very familiar with the concept of self-quarantining, isolation, and social distancing, video-calling software has become very familiar to many who would otherwise never use it. But, understandably, there are some who haven’t quite mastered the subtleties — like muting. Muting oneself on Zoom is something that sounds like a simple task, but I feel like we’ve all seen at least one video of someone failing to mute themselves with hilarious (or cringeworthy) results....

In our first appointment, the stylist came to my apartment and took pictures of every clothing item I owned. In our second appointment, she met me at Nordstrom’s, where she asked me to try on a $400 casual dress, a $700 blazer, and $300 sneakers. (I never thought to ask if she worked on commission.) But only after our third and final appointment, when she finally sent me a folder full of curated “looks” made from my new and old clothing items, did it finally click: I’d just blown a lot of money....

Whether you are starting a new business or relocating internationally, there are many things to consider when deciding how to choose your company’s global headquarters, such as economic trends, access to talent, marketing trends, and governmental support. Above all, you want to be in a location that enables you to grow quickly while maintaining an edge over your international competitors. Diane Janknegt, Founder & CEO of Wizenoze, a company that combines AI technology with education, told us that she chose to have the strategic office in the UK for three reasons: “The importance of UK education to global learning and development, the maturity of the UK EdTech market means a highly skilled and talented workforce, and the maturity and presence of Global VC’s in the UK market means access to capital....

Declaring variables Nowadays JavaScript has three different keywords to declare a variable — var, let and, const. Each has its own properties and particularities. Let’s start by making a simple comparison table of the three keywords and then dive into the details. Don’t worry if right now you’re not entirely sure what we mean by scope, hoisting, or any of the other attributes. We’re going to cover them in detail next....

Taking care of SEO is something that falls under this category. If you want your app to perform well in search engine rankings, incorporating SEO techniques when developing the application is a necessary evil for every web developer. This essential guide to SEO for web developers will get you up to date on the latest SEO techniques you should be using while developing a web app in less than 10 minutes....

Last year, Google Chrome rolled out its version 75 with a hidden reader mode. It’s quite a nifty feature to read long articles without any distractions. However, you have to enable a special flag to enable that button. Here’s how you can do it. Open Google Chrome browser on your desktop Type “chrome://flags/#enable-reader-mode” in the address bar. Select the Enable option from the drop-down menu Restart the browser [Read: How to use the sleek new version of Facebook Messenger on iOS] Once you enable the reader mode, you’ll see the toggle on the right side of the address bar when you open a page with an article....

When working in agile teams, you can’t be a product owner and a developer i.e. a member of the team. This is because it goes against one of the key principles of scrum, commitment. So, at some stage in your career, you’ll probably have to make a choice. Would you like to make the switch to product owner or stay in the developer realm in the long term? It’s not an easy decision and there are a lot of different factors to consider, that’s where we come in....

One NASA study found that drone sounds were more annoying than those made by road vehicles. And my own research has found that the noise of drones is less preferable than that of civil aircraft – even at the same volume. Part of the problem is that drones often fly at relatively low altitudes overpopulated areas that are not normally exposed to aircraft noise. This is likely to lead to tensions within the exposed communities....

However, even easy-to-use machine learning systems come with their own challenges. Among them is the threat of adversarial attacks, which has become one of the important concerns of ML applications. Adversarial attacks are different from other types of security threats that programmers are used to dealing with. Therefore, the first step to countering them is to understand the different types of adversarial attacks and the weak spots of the machine learning pipeline....

With Gartner’s predicted 20 billion IoT devices by 2020 and 25 billion by 2021 comes not only lack of certification for IoT security (ISO/IEC 27030 is still in draft version and there are no clear dates when it can be released) but also real dangers right now from interconnected, insecurely designed, and not properly updated and maintained IoT. Such constant expansion clearly demonstrates the attitude of those who participate in the IoT market....

Shortcuts app for iOS is a very useful way to automate your iPhone or iPad. In this series, we’ve been looking at different workflows to make your Apple device a lot more powerful to accomplish specific tasks. Another automation that could come in handy is removing metadata from photos. Every photo that you take with your phone (or any camera) comes with a lot of technical information. They might include details like:...

One of the biggest pain points of using WhatsApp for years has been the inability to transfer chats between an iPhone and an Android phone. Till now, if you decided to switch, you had to mostly start over with no chat history on the other platform, or use a bunch of tools to clumsily move your stuff over without a guarantee of success. Thankfully, WhatsApp is now rolling out a feature to easily transfer your chats from iPhones to Android phones....

PowerWash Simulator, an upcoming game from UK-based Futurlab, has a demo out now. It puts a power washer in your hands and lets you loose on a dirty two-storey house to clean up. That’s really all there is to it, and I loved every minute on the job. It’s just so satisfying to blast grime away at my own pace — and it’s fun trying to achieve 100% progress on your task....