5 ways to stop wasting printer ink and money
Jun05

5 ways to stop wasting printer ink and money

Quick: What’s the most expensive liquid you have in your house right now? If you’re thinking wine, gasoline or perfume, think again. Your printer ink is way, way, way more expensive. Printer ink can range from $13 to $75 an ounce. To bring that home, you could buy more than 2,000 gallons of gas for the cost of a gallon of ink. With that in mind, I’m betting you’ll cringe when I tell you that your printer wastes ink every day – I know I don’t like to think about it. Here’s how that waste happens: Very small amounts of ink evaporate inside the cartridge and through the print heads Some ink sticks to the cartridge and will never find its way to paper Most ink loss happens when your printer automatically performs maintenance on the print heads You can hear this maintenance happening whenever you turn on your printer. That loud sound is your printer shooting tiny jets of ink through the head to clean out dried ink and get ready for the new job. Unfortunately, there isn’t much you can do about that. Consumer Reports found some printers waste more ink than others – Brother printers don’t use much ink and HP’s Envy printers are decent, but the HP Photosmart models tends to be ink hogs, for example. Of course, printer models come and go regularly and keeping track of ink hogs is tough. Consumer Reports also found that ink cartridges vary wildly with how much they hold […]

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New Chrome extension can pinpoint your Facebook Messenger locations
May27

New Chrome extension can pinpoint your Facebook Messenger locations

Stalkers are likely in for a treat as a new app is going to help them creep up on their Facebook friends. As if Google wasn’t enough. A new Google Chrome extension called Marauders Map, inspired by the map in the Harry Potter franchise, will allow users to see exactly from where their contacts are messaging them, without their permission or consent. Created by a student developer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Aran Khanna, the extension will grab a user’s location data from Facebook Messenger and will quickly plot it out on a map. The location is said to be extremely precise and makes it super easy to stalk a person’s vicinity. To make things more easy, it can fetch location data from the past as well as long as location sharing was enabled, which is mostly on by default on iOS and Android apps. Aran Khanna mentioned in a blog post on Medium, “Everyone I have shown this extension to has been anywhere from surprised to appalled that this much of their very personal data is online for their friends (and even complete strangers) to access.” A report by Engadget points out that this is not real-time tracking method by any means. The extension simply compiles the embedded data into a cohesive map. Read more: New Chrome extension can pinpoint your Facebook Messenger locations

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5 ways Windows 10’s new Edge browser beats Internet Explorer
May04

5 ways Windows 10’s new Edge browser beats Internet Explorer

Farewell, Internet Explorer. Make way for Microsoft’s next browser, Edge. Windows users may not know Edge now—in early development it was called Project Spartan—but they will soon, because it will be the default browser for Windows 10. Edge, which won’t run in older versions of Windows, is a radical break from IE, despite sporting a similar logo. “We needed to do more than produce the next version of the browser. We needed a new way of doing things,” explained Charles Morris, Microsoft principal program manager lead on Edge, in a presentation at the Microsoft Build conference last week in San Francisco. Here are five ways in which Edge promises to be a superior browser to the IE warhorse. 1. No legacy support (mostly) Around since the dawn of the Web, IE carries a great amount of baggage in the name of backward compatibility. IE 11 comes with a variety of legacy modes, mostly to support enterprises who built internal applications around IE6 or some other older version. The company needed to make a clean break, especially given how quickly Mozilla, Google and Apple were updating their own browsers with little worry about supporting older, outdated technologies. “It wasn’t a fair game,” said David Catuhe, Microsoft principal program manager, in another Build talk on Edge. Edge will not support Microsoft’s ActiveX, Browsers Helper Objects (BHOS), VBScript and third-party toolbars built for IE11, all of which could crimp performance and bring security woes. It will support Adobe Flash and Personal Document Format […]

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A new, cheap battery that charges in a minute could be the future of cell phones
Apr07

A new, cheap battery that charges in a minute could be the future of cell phones

Scientists at Stanford University have created a battery that in the future could be a workhorse of consumer electronics such as smartphones. The battery, which is made from aluminum and graphite, is flexible, safe, cheap, and fast-charging—prototypes created by the scientists can charge from empty to full in the span of one minute. Results of the researchers’ work was published online April 6 in Nature. One day, such batteries could pair with flexible screens to power phones that can be folded and charge in a fraction of the time of devices today. Today, the state of the art in consumer electronic batteries are lithium-ion. But Hongjie Dai, a Stanford chemistry professor who is one of the new study’s authors, said that lithium-ion batteries can be volatile, sometimes presenting a fire hazard; the new aluminum-ion batteries avoid that risk. They may also have a longer lifespan. Typical lithium-ion batteries can be recharged roughly 1,000 times without losing capacity. While previous aluminum-ion batteries weakened after just 100 or so charges, the battery created by the Stanford researchers didn’t lose capacity even after 7,500 charge cycles. That longevity, combined with the safety of the battery, could one day make it a candidate for energy storage on the electric grid. It’s important to note that although this is an impressive piece of research, the battery isn’t ready to unseat the lithium-ion variety yet. It only packs about half the voltage (which means you would need more of them to power a device than a […]

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Here are our favorite startups from the Harvard of tech accelerators
Mar25

Here are our favorite startups from the Harvard of tech accelerators

Y Combinator is an accelerator that hosts what are widely considered the most coveted tech startups in the world, and this most recent class is no different. Even with a record 114 startups in its current class, president Sam Altman said they represented “less than 2% of the companies that applied.” Only about four or five would go on to become “big hits,” he added. For every Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe, or Twitch—all of which are Y Combinator alums in the billion-dollar-startup club—there are hundreds of others that fade into oblivion. It’s hard to say which companies will go on to become unicorns (if we had this skill set, we’d be in a much more lucrative industry), but based on their short two-and-a-half-minute presentations at Y Combinator’s demo days this week, we picked six startups that left a lasting impression on us. Standard Cyborg Walking on stage with a $23,000 prosthetic leg, Standard Cyborg founder and CEO Jeff Huber talked about some of the challenges amputees face. Prosthetics are typically very expensive because they’re “designed completely by hand by someone pouring and carving plaster,” and the companies that make them usually discourage wearers from using them in wet environments, like the shower or beach, to avoid rust buildup and the suspension systems jamming. For Huber, whose left leg was amputated at infancy, this meant the mundane task of taking a shower became a daily balancing act. “I’ve definitely fallen lots of times,” he tells Quartz, noting many amputees often rely on […]

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Apple Watch launch signals firm’s transformation into luxury goods brand
Mar09

Apple Watch launch signals firm’s transformation into luxury goods brand

For many Apple watchers, Monday’s launch of its new watch is a significant step in the effort to turn the company into a technology-based luxury brand. The strategy was signalled initially with the hiring of Angela Ahrendts from Burberry a year ago to transform Apple’s retail business. It has since been seen repeatedly in hiring from within the fashion and luxury-brand industries. But it will face its first new product test with the Apple Watch. Led by Apple design chief Sir Jonathan Ive, the 48-year-old British designer who is now effectively the face of the company after recent profiles in the New Yorker and US Vogue, Apple is placing new emphasis on design and style appeal. While the last iPhones came in a range of three colours, according to reports there will be no less than six metal options for the watch – notably including two types of gold, 18-carat yellow and 18-carat rose. There will be six band designs, two face sizes and 11 face designs. Chief executive Tim Cook has said the product will “redefine what people expect from a watch”. Ive says it will be “a move away from what is traditionally understood as consumer electronics”. Ive hired industrial designer Marc Newson to work on the Apple Watch. An intimate of the fashion industry – his wife is Fendi and Victoria’s Secret stylist Charlotte Stockdale – Newson choreographed the initial unveiling of the product for fashion designers and editors during Paris fashion week last September. “The fashion […]

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