Surfing through the web back in October, I stumbled upon an odd but genuinely fascinating contraption: a Russian cryptocurrency miner that leverages the heat it generates from stacking Ethereum to keep your room warm. Shortly after I wrote about this unusual device, Comino – the Russian-based startup behind this invention – reached out to us and kindly offered to ship one of its miners for us to test this winter. We gladly took them up on their offer, and a couple of weeks later, the Comino was already installed at our cozy office in Amsterdam.
I must admit, there’s no better feeling than peeling the wrapping off a gift, only to find a brand spanking new shiny tech gadget to start examining. Unfortunately, though, many of these fabulous gizmos are not that great when it comes to being sustainable, both in terms of materials they’re made out of and their typically short lifespan. Thankfully, we’ve got your tech gift list covered with ideas that are both great quality and less harmful to the environment. Becuase why not give both? Thinksound On2 monitor series headphones
Adam Helps is an app that lets anyone living in the Toronto area hire others in their local communities to help them with odd jobs, much like TaskRabbit does (and to a lesser extent, classifieds services like Craigslist, Gumtree, and Kijiji). If you’ve burdened with some fiendishly tricky IKEA flat-packed furniture that needs assembling, or a lawn that needs mowing, you can put out the feelers into your local community and find someone available. You can even use it to find a babysitter, if you want to take the night off. But there are a few key differences between Adam Helps and the competition.
Facebook is quietly testing a new feature that lets users find other people to play videogames with. Some users have reported seeing a new icon, ‘Find Players,’ in the area used to compose statuses and posts. From what we can tell, this is relatively bare-bones. The things you’d expect from such a feature — like integration with PSN, Steam, or Xbox Live — aren’t present. Instead, you’re prompted to give your team a name, a description, a hashtag, and optionally, a photo.
A hidden feature in Facebook suggests the social networking site is experimenting with a new way to tag friends in comments. Let’s recap: currently, to mention someone, you just need to type ‘@’ and then the person’s name. But a new feature, which is buried deeply within the site, takes a different tack and introduces a new “Mention a friend” button to comments. Clicking this brings up your friends list, which you can scroll through. Tags appear wherever your cursor is, or at the end of the post.
Reddit might have occasionally played host to controversial debates and scandals since its inception in 2005, but in a beautiful turn of events, the members of the self-proclaimed “front page of the internet” are standing united against the common evil: the FCC and its non-sensical plan to slay net neutrality. The front page of Reddit has lit up in red with numerous posts encouraging fellow members to take a stance against the impending collapse of net neutrality. At the time of writing, 22 of the 25 posts appearing on the website’s leading /r/all page are somehow related to net neutrality.
Less than two weeks after Bitcoin broke the $7,500 barrier to hit an all-time high of $7,700, the popular cryptocurrency has yet again surged past the $7,000 mark. Despite a bumpy week which saw Bitcoin price drop to below $6,000 at one point, the cryptocurrency fluctuated around the $6,500 mark, until earlier today it passed the $7,000 threshold for the second time ever. Here are a couple of screenshots from Coin Market Cap that will give you a better idea how Bitcoin has fluctuated over the past seven days:
Instagram now lets users post Stories that are older than 24-hours. Now we’ll all be able to bring up old memories straight to our Stories. The magic of Instagram Stories has always been that you can post portions of your day — as long they were captured in the last 24-hours. Now, the app lets you browse through your library and pick any image or video you want, regardless of when it was taken. All you have to do is slide up from the camera and it will open up your library, just like before, only now the range is limitless.
WhatTheFont is a Shazam for fonts — a designer’s dream. The app is a mobile version of the website previously developed by MyFonts, and recognizes any font you point at with your camera, including a variation of similar fonts to go with it. It also lets you buy the fonts you find directly through MyFonts or even share them on social media. According to Seah Chickering-Burchesky, Senior UX Designer at MyFonts, the app can identify 130,000 fonts with the help of machine learning. The latest version of the app can spot multiple fonts in one image, as well as connected scripts.
