TMO Deals

Portable 10,000mAh Power Bank: $15

Bryan Chaffin ·

We have a deal on a portable power bank with a 10,000mAh capacity. It features dual USB inputs for faster charging up, and dual 2.4A outputs for charging your smartphone and other devices at high speeds. And, it’s just $15 through our deal.

Cool Stuff Found

Apple Reality Composer Available on App Store

Andrew Orr ·

The Apple Reality Composer app is now available on the App Store. It’s also included with Xcode so developers can build, test, tune, and simulate augmented reality experiences. Easily prototype and produce AR experiences directly in AR with no prior 3D experience. Drag and drop to place and rotate virtual objects to assemble your scene directly in AR or on the canvas. Build your scene by importing your own .usdz files or take advantage of the ready to use virtual objects in Reality Composer’s built-in AR content library, so you can get up and running quickly. Customize a virtual object’s size, style, and more. Add animations that let you move, scale, and add emphasis like a ‘wiggle’ or ‘spin’ to virtual objects, without having any animation experience. Add spatial audio, all of which can be set up to happen upon a user tapping on those objects, coming in close proximity with them, or other triggers. App Store: Apple Reality Composer – Free

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Streaming 'a Whole New World' in November, Says Netflix Boss

Charlotte Henry ·

Netflix is going to be under a lot of pressure come November when Apple TV+ and Disney+ launch. Variety reported on boss Reed Hasting’s comments to the Royal Television Society Friday, in which he looked ahead to what comes next.

“While we’ve been competing with many people in the last decade, it’s a whole new world starting in November…between Apple launching and Disney launching, and of course Amazon’s ramping up,” said Hastings, who also cited NBCUniversal’s coming Peacock service. “It’ll be tough competition. Direct-to-consumer [customers] will have a lot of choice.” He said Netflix would continue to hew closely to its core strategy of offering content for binge viewing, the phenomenon it helped create. That means the service isn’t moving into live sports, as Amazon Prime Video has, and won’t experiment much with different release models, including for its expanding catalogue of original films. “They may have a qualifying run for theatrical, but it’s fairly small.”

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A Deep Dive Into Apple's A13 Bionic Chip

Andrew Orr ·

Om Malik wrote a great dive into the A13 Bionic chip that powers the latest iPhones.

Apple’s new chip contains 8.5 billion transistors. Also, there are six CPU cores: Two high-performance cores running at 2.66 GHz (called Lightning), and four efficiency cores (called Thunder). It has a quad-core graphics processor, an LTE modem, an Apple-designed image processor, and an octa-core neural engine for machine intelligence functions that can run over five trillion operations per second.

Big numbers are amazing, and I still marvel at the fact that this chip can do five trillion operations per second. That is astoundingly fast. Five trillion seconds is 158,550 years. Just one trillion seconds ago (31,710 years) was before written history, before the pyramids were built.

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Science Journal Admits Those Bone Horns Were Wrong

Andrew Orr ·

Remember the study claiming smartphone usage caused bone horns to grow on millennials? The publisher now admits the conclusion was false. But other scientists say their correction is still false.

While the correction attempts to clarify the record on smartphones, it does not do anything to address the fact that the study’s main finding — that poor posture and age are connected to neck bone spurs — still isn’t supported by the underlying data…

“I actually think Nature should remove the original article as the correction has not proved their point,” said Sara Becker, a bioarchaeologist at the University of California Riverside.