A university’s prediction that the Northern Lights would be widely visible turned out to be a mistake caused by a lawnmower. The Aurora Watch service, based at Lancaster University in the UK, forecasts likely sightings of the Aurora Borealis, a natural colored light show caused by solar winds disturbing the Earth’s magnetosphere. Forecasting is of […]
North Korea’s government appears to have launched an internet Video on Demand service. It’s got limited content and an unfortunate name for English speakers. It seems the service was intended to have a name conveying that the content is available in “every direction” or “everywhere” but the Korean word for that meaning is pronounced “Manbang.” […]
The Tolkien movies seem to lend themselves to collector editions, but the latest version goes to a whole new level – with a jaw-dropping price. Released under the title “Middle Earth”, the standard Theatrical Versions Collection is simple enough: the three Hobbit and three Lord of the Rings movies on Blu-ray with no extras, with […]
The US government will give up control of the internet’s domain name system on October 1. It’s a largely symbolic move at this point though has provoked some political criticism. Since 1988, DNS – translating web addresses to IP addresses – has been overseen by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. That’s a department of the […]
Three new Harry Potter books are on the way. They’ll be collections of short pieces from the Pottermore website and sold as low-priced e-books. The Pottermore Presents series will combine archive material from the site along with new writing from JK Rowling: Hogwarts: An Incomplete and Unreliable Guide is a collection of pieces about the school […]
Avoiding USB chargers that might fry your motherboard could be easier with a new certification program. There’ll be a special logo to show chargers meet the required specifications. It affects Type-C connectors, introduced in 2014 with the killer feature of being symmetrical and ending the dreaded under-the-table plug flipping (along with the gag about USB’s […]
Overwatch is getting a revamp of its competitive online mode. There’ll be no more sudden death and the rankings system is being tweaked to be more informative about a player’s level. The changes will take effect in the second “season” of competitive play. One big difference is to the scoring for rankings. For season one, […]
Google is working on a new, non-Linux operating system that may be designed specifically for the Internet of Things. For now it appears the system is at an early development stage only. The system is named Fuschia, which is a play on words that comes from fuschia and magenta being two names for the same […]
Facebook is polling users on how informative they find stories linked to on the site. It’s another attempt to cut back on clickbait. The move follows several recent changes to the algorithm for the News Feed, the default view on Facebook by which status updates, links and other content appears in a perceived order of […]
Batman’s recruitment of The Flash was one of the highlights of the Justice League trailer, but this animation by Dorkly shows things might have been very different…