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How Amazon Monitors and Fires Its Employees

Charlotte Henry ·

It is great when your Amazon order arrives the next day, but it can be tough for the fulfillment facility worker that made it happen. The Verge has shed a light on just how tough it could be. It outlined how the company monitors and fires workers.

The system goes so far as to track “time off task,” which the company abbreviates as TOT. If workers break from scanning packages for too long, the system automatically generates warnings and, eventually, the employee can be fired. Some facility workers have said they avoid bathroom breaks to keep their time in line with expectations. Amazon says retraining is part of the process to get workers up to standards and that it only changes rates when more than 75 percent of workers at a facility are meeting goals. The bottom 5 percent of workers are placed on a training plan, according to the company. An appeal system is also part of the termination process.

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Apple Watch Returned, Still Working, After 6 Months

Charlotte Henry ·

We all know how painful losing a device is. Well, here is a story to warm the soul. Robert Bainter lost his Apple Watch whilst out surfing. He said the device was his “lucky charm,” reported 9to5Mac. Mr. Bainter turned on Lost Mode, more in hope than expectation. A whole six months later he got a call. Not only was his beloved piece of kit back, it still worked. Truly a lucky charm!

After losing the device, Bainter turned on Lost Mode for his Apple Watch through the Find My iPhone app. This displays a message on the Apple Watch’s screen with the owner’s phone number and a message saying it was lost. Six months went by and Bainter hadn’t been able to locate his watch, but then he received a call from a random number. The person calling had found Bainter’s Apple Watch 3 miles north of where he originally lost it – still in working condition.

Clicker for Netflix Puts Netflix Controls on the Touch Bar
Cool Stuff Found

Clicker for Netflix Puts Netflix Controls on the Touch Bar

Andrew Orr ·

Clicker for Netflix is a cool Mac app that lets you control Netflix right from your Touch Bar. Launch Netflix right from the Dock, control it with the Touch Bar, use Picture-in-Picture to watch while multitasking, prevent trailers from auto-playing, auto-resume your last played video, automatically skip the video intro, automatically advance to the next episode, hide the “Who’s Watching?” popup, and remove the Netflix Originals row. The Touch Bar controls include play/pause, jump back 10 seconds, jump forward 10 seconds, go to the next episode, enable/disable closed captions, and launch Picture-in-Picture. It requires macOS 10.10 Yosemite or higher. Get the app for US$5.

TMO Deals

PDF Reader Pro For Mac: $24.99

Bryan Chaffin ·

We have a deal on PDF Reader Pro For Mac. This app features bookmark and search functions, as well as a night mode that’s easier on your eyes. You can also iInsert, add, and replace images and texts in your PDFs and use markup tools to highlight, strikeout, underline, and more in the PDF file. It’s $24.99 through our deal.

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How Nasa Recorded a Quake on Mars For The First Time

Charlotte Henry ·

Early this month, the NASA InSight probe detected seismic events on Mars for the first time. Wired has a feature on how the Mars scientists achieved this staggering feat.

It took NASA’s InSight probe two long months of listening before it detected the first faint rumblings from the red planet. On April 6, the probe’s seismometer registered what was later confirmed as the first ever marsquake detected by human instruments. But measuring the rumblings of a planet that – at its closest – remains almost 34 million miles away, requires an almost unimaginable amount of patience. Twice a day, a team in Switzerland receives seismic data from the InSight probe, where they perform an initial analysis.