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The Morning After: iPadOS 13.4 brings mouse and trackpad support

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A better sensor, better autofocus and very convenient tilt display.The Fujifilm X100V is the best compact street photography camera

Fujifilm’s X100-series compact street photography cameras have always handled well, and the X100V is no exception. However, Fujifilm has introduced numerous technical improvements, including a higher-resolution 26.1-megapixel sensor, sharper lens, tilting screen and stellar 4K video capabilities. As a result, it’s easier to use than ever and takes sharper, richer photos than the last model. Read on for Steve Dent’s full review.

The FlexPai 2 will be the first phone to use Royole’s latest flexible display.Royole’s next foldable phone is much better at bending

Royole was the first out the gate with a foldable phone, and now it’s ready for round two. The FlexPai 2 will include Royole’s third-generation Cicada Wing FFD (Fully Flexible Display), which packs a much-improved bend radius, going from the previous version’s 3mm down to just 1mm, while still lasting over 200,000 bends, according to Royole.

This gives the phone a much better fold — perhaps much closer to, if not better than, Huawei’s Mate Xs which has a similar outward-facing flexible screen. The company is collaborating with ZTE on future phones — so perhaps you’ll be more likely to see one in the wild.

Mojang is offering learning materials to stuck-at-home kids through the Marketplace.‘Minecraft’ takes students on a free tour of the ISS

To help students who are stuck at home keep on learning beyond educational TV and more books, there’s a new glut of free educational material available in Minecraft. Mojang has added an Education category to the Marketplace, which includes a bunch of lessons from Minecraft: Education Edition. These worlds are all free to download as of today on all Bedrock versions of Minecraft, and they’ll be available at no extra cost until June 30th.

How to find help on the internet in a time of social isolation.How to see a therapist when you’re stuck indoors

While the coronavirus outbreak isn’t the first time the world has suffered a global pandemic, we’ve never been as technologically equipped to take on the challenges of avoiding human contact as now. But as we hunker down and stay home to help prevent the spread of COVID-19, we’re all becoming more isolated than before.

Not only can solitude lead to loneliness, but we’re also reduced to communicating with people largely over texts and messaging. We walk through the options of finding professional help and assistance while staying where you need to stay.

Millions of people are stuck inside, and they are using Facebook to cope.Facebook is struggling to keep up with ‘unprecedented’ traffic

In fact, the increase in usage is straining the social network’s own resources — not something you usually hear from an online company. Facebook has decreased video quality in Europe and has pulled back most of the contract workforce who work as content moderators.

The company also warned that its revenue could take a hit, as its ad business has declined in recent weeks due to the pandemic. According to the company’s VP of Analytics, Alex Schultz, and VP of Infrastructure, Jay Pareikh, “We don’t monetize many of the services where we’re seeing increased engagement, and we’ve seen a weakening in our ads business in countries taking aggressive actions to reduce the spread of COVID-19.”

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Samsung is bringing Galaxy S20 features to the S10 and Note 10

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An improved Night Mode is coming to the S10, while Night Hyperlapse for night videos will make its way to both S10 and Note 10 devices. S20’s capability to create custom filters will also be part of the software update, as is the Pro Video feature that lets users adjust settings like ISO, shutter speed and exposure level.

Clean View and Quick Crop are coming to the older phones, as well. That means similar shots will be automatically grouped together in the devices’ Gallery app, and users will be able to zoom in on an image and easily crop it to only show that particular part of the photo. Samsung is also bringing Quick Share to older phones, giving users a way to share photos, videos and other files to people nearby. Finally, the update will include the Music Share feature, which allows a friend to connect to the same speaker a user is connected to via Bluetooth even if they don’t unlink their device.

Samsung doesn’t have an exact date for the rollout yet, but it will be available in the US. A spokesperson said in a statement:

“Samsung continues to add value to users’ devices by helping them discover the newest innovations and features. We are committed to providing the best mobile experience for Galaxy users by bringing together cutting-edge hardware with simple, easy-to-use software. The update will be released in select markets in the coming weeks, including the United States, delivering the latest Galaxy S20 experiences to Galaxy S10 and Note 10 devices.”

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NASCAR’s virtual race was the most-watched esports TV show to date

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Accordingly, Fox has committed to cover the rest of the season, starting with a race at a simulated Texas Motor Speedway on March 29th at 1PM Eastern. It’ll air on both the Fox broadcast network as well as FS1 and the Fox Sports app.

There’s little doubt that NASCAR and Fox had the advantages of both an audience with nowhere to go as well as a bevy of real-world pro drivers, including race winner Denny Hamlin. Viewership might not have been what it was otherwise. All the same, this does show that people are willing to watch esports on TV in large numbers given the right circumstances, and suggests that more than a few people got their first taste of competitive gaming this past weekend.

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YouTube Music brings in-app lyrics to everyone

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A few weeks ago, YouTube Music launched a new playback screen alongside an experimental feature that displays lyrics within the Android app. Now, the feature is making its way to everyone using the application. You’ll now be able to access static lyrics from within YouTube Music’s Android and iOS apps, whether you’re a free or a paying user. Sure, you can always just look up the words to a song, but the feature sounds handy if you want to sing along and don’t want to fire up your browser.

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Streaming giants to help musicians affected by coronavirus outbreak

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The companies didn’t say how much they’re donating to the fund. But MusiCares, the charitable foundation behind the project, already raised $2 million since the initiative was established last week. The fund can provide eligible music industry professionals (artists, production crew members, technicians, etc.) with basic living assistance, such as money for rent or mortgage. Those interested will have to send in an application, along with proof of cancelled work.

Recently, SoundCloud also joined forces with Twitch to give musicians a way to earn some money while staying at home. Under their partnership, SoundCloud Pro, SoundCloud Premier and Repost by SoundCloud creators can get their Twitch Affiliate status fast-tracked. After they become an affiliate, creators can start earning from their online performances streamed on the Twitch platform.

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Royole’s next foldable phone is much better at bending

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The most notable feature about Royole’s third-generation Cicada Wing FFD (Fully Flexible Display) on this device is perhaps its much improved bend radius, going from the previous version’s 3mm down to just 1mm, while still lasting over 200,000 bends. This gives the phone a much better fold — perhaps much closer to, if not better than, Huawei’s Mate Xs which has a similar outward-facing flexible screen.

The panel also benefits from a boost in brightness, contrast, color gamut and viewing angle, all of which are further enhanced by a new custom driver chip. For the display nerds out there, at a 30-degree viewing angle, this panel is apparently rated with a JNCD (Just Noticeable Color Difference) below 0.6, along with 1.5-times better brightness decay.

Royole third-gen Cicada Wing FFD crease optimization

Much like its predecessor, the FlexPai 2 has a 7.8-inch screen with a 4:3 aspect ratio when fully open. Unsurprisingly, this latest flagship is powered by Qualcomm’s latest and greatest Snapdragon 865, which comes with 5G radio, faster LPDDR5 RAM and UFS 3.0 storage. There’s also a set of quad cameras along with stereo speakers, which is what you’d expect on a flagship phone these days. Royole stopped short at providing further information, but with a Q2 2020 launch date set for the consumer market, we’ll be hearing more soon.

Chances are the FlexPai 2 won’t be the only device to leverage the third-generation Cicada Wing FFD. In the same online event, Royole announced that it has entered a strategic partnership with ZTE to explore more use cases with the former’s flexible display technology. Of course, ZTE is no stranger to the foldable phone form factor — you may recall the dual-screen Axon M from 2017, though it was a little ahead of its time.

More importantly, such partnership means Royole has finally reached the stage where it’s ready to work with phone brands, which could lead to a wider variety of flexible phones in the near future. That said, only time will tell whether Royole has the production capability to handle other manufacturer requests, let alone its own phones.

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The first ‘Half-Life: Alyx’ update makes it easier to turn

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A 1.1 patch that came out tonight that addresses those complaints with a new setting called “continuous turn” that lines up with other virtual reality games like Boneworks. There are various turning speed options to keep players comfortable with the new movement, and the old Quick Turn setting has been renamed to Snap Turn. There are a few other tweaks that you’ll find listed below, and the update should be rolling out now via Steam.

Improved turning options in Preferences:
– Added “Continuous Turn”, and associated turning speed options.
– Renamed “Quick turn” to “Snap Turn” to make its functionality clearer.
– Added option to disable controller turning.
Improved hand-over-mouth pose usability for Windows MR controllers.
Improved the resolution of impact decals on enemies.
Improved automatic detection of default Quality settings for some machine configurations.
Fixed an issue where some sounds didn’t play as intended.
Fixed an issue where the main menu could become less responsive if you had many save games.
Fixed several crashes.

Can’t thank you yet from r/valve

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Safari now blocks all third-party cookies by default

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The move should make life more difficult for aggressive advertisers and attackers alike. It should prevent sites from using login fingerprinting or even the state of your anti-tracking prevention to watch your behavior. It should also thwart cross-site request forgery attacks, and prevents the use of auxiliary third-party domains to identify users.

The updated Safari also limits storage for a website’s scripts to one week, and includes counters to sites that try to avoid tracking detection by delaying their redirects.

Apple won’t be alone in the future. Google aims to achieve the same for Chrome by 2022, as an example. The WebKit team also plans to report the results of this change to the World Wide Web Consortium to give other browser developers some assistance. And yes, you can frequently enable this kind of tracking after the fact. It’s still a milestone, though, and could easily force ad creators and site operators to rethink attempts to collect tracking data.

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Bandsintown helps musicians make money with Twitch concerts

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Bandsintown wants to help musicians pull in money during the COVID-19 pandemic in addition to promoting their shows. The discovery service is giving artists free, "fast-tracked" access to Twitch's monetization systems to help them generate money fro…

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Facebook is struggling to keep up with ‘unprecedented’ traffic

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That may seem like good news for Facebook, which has seen growth in its main app slow in recent years. But the company says the usage is straining its own resources. “The usage growth from COVID-19 is unprecedented across the industry, and we are experiencing new records in usage almost every day,” the company’s VP of Analytics, Alex Schultz, and VP of Infrastructure, Jay Pareikh, wrote in a statement. “Maintaining stability throughout these spikes in usage is more challenging than usual now that most of our employees are working from home.”

While Facebook has so far been able to keep its services up and running, the company has had to make some concessions. Facebook has decreased video quality in Europe, and has pulled back most of the contract workforce who work as content moderators.

The company also warned that its revenue could take a hit, as its ad business has declined in recent weeks due to the pandemic. Twitter and other media companies have issued similar warnings. “We don’t monetize many of the services where we’re seeing increased engagement, and we’ve seen a weakening in our ads business in countries taking aggressive actions to reduce the spread of COVID-19,” Schultz and Parikh wrote.

Even as Facebook struggles to keep up with technical challenges posed by the coronavirus pandemic, the company has been steadily releasing updates and new features, which have earned it some goodwill after years of scandals. The company has introduced a range of features meant to combat the spread of conspiracy theories and other potentially harmful misinformation. And Instagram updated its fact-checking rules and added a new Co-Watching feature for video calls. Some of the company’s engineers will also participate in a hackathon to help health organizations, Mark Zuckerberg said.

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