Geek News

Window Seat over Hudson Bay On the August 18 night flight from San Francisco to Zurich, a window seat offered this tantalizing view when curtains of light draped a colorful glow across the sky over Hudson Bay. Constructed by digitally stacking six short exposures made with a hand held camera, the scene records the shimmering aurora borealis or northern lights just as the approaching high altitude sunrise illuminated the northeastern horizon. It also caught the flash of a Perseid meteor streaking beneath the handle stars of the Big Dipper of the north. A few days past the meteor shower's peak, its trail still points across the sky toward Perseus. Beautiful aurorae and shower meteors both occur in Earth's upper atmosphere at altitudes of 100 kilometers or so, far above commercial airline fights. The aurora are caused by energetic charged particles from the magnetosphere, while ...

* If you have more than one unit selected, and one of those units dies, then the unit that died will be deselected. via Steam RSS News Feed "https://ift.tt/2MSmYWo"

SpaceX chief Elon Musk has tweeted two photos that give us a peek into the company's Martian dreams. One of the images shows the BFR, the massive rocket SpaceX is developing for deep space missions, while the other shows the BFR and what he called "Mars Base Alpha." It's no secret that the private space corporation wants to build a human settlement on the red planet. Back in 2017, it announced its plans to launch two BFR cargo missions to Mars by 2022 to prepare for the arrival of the first Martian settlers by 2024. Before any of that can happen, though, SpaceX has to be able to start testing its BFR system in the first half of 2019. Mars Base Alpha pic.twitter.com/O1llQp8rFY — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 21, 2018 pic.twitter.com/Fn0hKJd3uJ — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 21, 2018 SpaceX also intends to use the BFR to ...

While we wait to see if Apple's AirPower mat will ever make an appearance , owners of new iPhones and Apple Watches who want to charge both at the same time could consider this Belkin dock. The BOOST↑UP Wireless Charging Dock works with iPhone 8 and newer models (including the just-launched iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max ) and all Apple Watches. Belkin Besides a relatively clean design, it promises up to 7.5W for Qi-enabled devices (that should work through cases up to 3mm thick), 5W/1A charging for the Apple Watch, and 1A charging via a USB-A port for another device, all plugged into one electrical outlet. It will be on sale in December at the Apple Store for $160, while a cheaper option at $100 is the PowerHouse Charging Dock with charging and connection via a Lightning plug for your iPhone instead of wireless, now updated to fit the new devices. The PowerHo...

Two US lawmakers have introduced legislation that would help expand the AMBER Alert system to all territories, which include American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Marianas Islands, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. Established nationally in 2003, the system sends alerts over TV, radio, digital billboards and cellphones and has helped find more than 900 missing children across the US. "AMBER Alerts have helped save hundreds of children. There's no good reason for US territories to be excluded from this system," said Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI) , who introduced the bill along with Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK). "With this bill, we can help children and their families quickly end the nightmare that is child abduction." While Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands already participate in the AMBER Alert program, the US government only provided sta...

Ever since Overwatch debuted, Blizzard has continued to poke and prod at the game by adding heroes, game modes, maps and making tweaks to existing content to keep players interested. With a game that functions as a funnel toward its professional esports league, balance is key and that occasionally means big reworks to characters who have been seen as residing outside of the "meta" picks to increase the chance of winning. Blizzard already made major changes to one character who saw little use in its competitive modes, Symmetra, and now it's testing a rework for Torbjörn , a Swedish engineer who built turrets and distributed armor to teammates. As described by the team in a video and patch notes , his armor pack and scrap collecting feature has been removed entirely. Also, his turret no longer requires hammering to build or upgrade, since he can...

An update to Team Fortress 2 has been released. The update will be applied automatically when you restart Team Fortress 2. The major changes include: Added LBTF2 6v6 Season 15 tournament medals Added NewbieDuo Cup Summer 2018 tournament medals Added Ultimate Ultiduo Season 2 tournament medals Added Fresh Meat Prolander Cup Summer 2018 and Autumn 2018 tournament medals Added ETF2L Highlander Season 15, 6v6 Season 30, and Highlander Season 16 tournament medals Added Newbie Highlander Season 4 tournament medals Added RGL.gg Season 4, Season 5, and One Day Prolander Cup tournament medals Added PASS Time Federation Season 1 tournament medals Added Chapelaria Highlander Season 1 tournament medals Added Respawn League Highlander Season 1 tournament medals Added Moscow LAN Summer 2018 tournament medals Community request: player_hurt events are now visible to SourceTV clients Updated the localization files via Steam RSS News Feed "https://ift.tt/2MMU4a5"

Play enough Fortnite and you'll know that audio cues can make all the difference -- footsteps are your cue to get ready for a fight (or, let's be honest, run for the hills). To that end, Epic has offered a sneak peek at the development and testing of Season 6 spatial audio updates that could save your hide. It wants higher-frequency, higher-contrast footsteps that help you pinpoint someone's location, and better spatial audio cues for gliders. It also wants to provide more sounds for in-air movement that doesn't involve a glider, such as falling or launching off a Bouncer pad. Epic also acknowledged that the audio system itself doesn't always help you out. Some sounds either don't play or are "lost in the mix," the company said. It wants to pinpoint those moments and fix them so that you're never caught off-guard. There's ...

Cars It can get to 60 miles per hour in under three seconds. It looks like it's straight out of the '40s, but this limited-edition car is shockingly fast. via Popular Science "https://ift.tt/2xCGWjd"

OnePlus isn't wasting too much time in bringing its version of Android Pie to its phones. A little over a month after Google released the OS , OnePlus is rolling out OxygenOS 9.0, which includes Pie features such as gesture navigation, adaptive battery support and a refreshed user interface. The update also brings OnePlus' own features like customizable accent colors and Gaming Mode 3.0. OnePlus noted that, going forward, its own OS will match Android's version number. OxygenOS 9.0 is rolling out on OnePlus 6 devices, and the OS will be available later on OnePlus 3, 3T, 5 and 5T . With Project Treble , Google is hoping to reduce OS fragmentation across the Android ecosystem (as of earlier this month, around three quarters of devices were running Android 7 or earlier ). So, perhaps that effort has helped OnePlus to roll out its fork of Android Pie so quickl...

Are you frustrated that the FCC has been reluctant to cooperate with investigations into fake anti-net neutrality comments ? So is the New York Times . The newspaper has sued the FCC after the regulator repeatedly refused to provide server logs for its public comment system under the Freedom of Information Act, even after the NYT reduced the scale of its requests. Journalists believe the records will "shed light" on the degree to which Russians interfered with both the commenting process and American democracy at large. The NYT accused the FCC of falsely asserting that it didn't have the "technical capacity" to fulfill requests, and of providing "shifting rationales" each time it shot down demands for information. Lawyers also asserted that the FCC was misusing the FOIA's privacy exemption to "duck the agency's respon...

Rumors of an Instagram regram function have circulated a number of times, and they were renewed this week when The Verge reported that the company was working on a reshare feature. But while Instagram initially told the site that it had no comment about the report, it is now saying that such a function is flat out "not happening." It told both The Verge and TechCrunch that it's neither building nor testing a regram feature. The Verge reported on Thursday that Instagram appeared to be working on a way for users to easily share others' posts in their own feed. The feature would be housed in the menu situated in the upper right-hand corner of each post and would give users the option to "share to feed." A source familiar with the feature provided The Verge with screenshots of posts shared with the feature, which the site noted looked like w...