Bleary-eyed Australian commuters confused by the dark turned out to be victims of a bug in local cellphone towers. Local radio stations reported numerous calls from drivers in Brisbane wondering why traffic was busier than usual before the traditional rush hour. Meanwhile coffee shops reported customers who seemed less amplified than normal, while one radio […]
A project looking for crowdfunding turns bicycle handlebars into a GPS navigation and security device. smrtGRiPS is designed to make it safer to use GPS and other mapping devices on a bike. The gadget comes in two parts: a pair of grips to replace the ones already on your handles, and a pair of waterproof, […]
A copy of one of the rarest ever video games is attracting near six-figure bids on eBay. The listing is for a sealed copy of Stadium Events on NES from 1987. At the time of writing, the highest of 81 bids on the cartridge was $99,850, with three days remaining. That means that unless the […]
Researchers in Canada say they’ve created a computer program that has “weakly solved” a form of poker. It may be the first such solution for a game where players don’t have all relevant information available to them. Cepheus, developed at the University of Alberta, is said to be able to play a perfect game of two-player […]
Netflix says it has not made any changes to the way it deals with users who try to access content from the version of the service in another country. But it’s reiterated that doing so is a violation of the terms of service. Several reports had claimed Netflix was cracking down on people who use […]
The Kepler space telescope has discovered its 1000th exoplanet, including one that’s been described as the most Earth-like to date. Meanwhile astronomers have confirmed the theory that the speed at which a star spins shows its age. Nasa announced this week that Kepler has discovered another eight exoplanets (a planet from outside our solar system), […]
A Pirate Party politician is writing an official review of copyright law for the European Parliament. However, reports that Julia Reda will be writing new rules aren’t quite the case. Reda was elected to the European Parliament last May under Germany’s proportional representation voting system. New rules that removed a minimum threshold meant that although […]
Sony is launching an “all you can play” monthly subscription deal for its streaming service Playstation Now. It hopes the move will attract players put off by the current confusing and often expensive per-game pricing. The service was announced this time last year and launched as an “open beta” in July. It lets player access […]
11 years into its mission on Mars, the rover Opportunity is suffering from bouts of amnesia according to Nasa. It plans to remotely hack Opportunity’s software to fix the problem. In a similar fashion to PCs on Earth, Opportunity has a combination of volatile and non-volatile memory, specifically flash memory and RAM. As with a […]
Concluding our look back at the stories we covered during 2014 and what happened next, we turn to November. The Unicode Consortium, which develops standards to make sure characters appear consistently across different software and systems, unveiled proposals for changes to emoji, a system of characters for expressing emotions. It suggested the option to choose between […]