January 2020 – Page 31 – news.buyenne.com

Dealmaster: Our favorite Fitbit fitness tracker is 30% off on Amazon today

Plus deals on PlayStation Plus subscriptions, SSDs, SD cards, and more.

In today's Dealmaster, we have a great discount on Fitbit's Inspire HR, which we recently named the best fitness tracker for most people. As part of Amazon's Deal of the Day, the heart-rate-tracking Inspire HR is down to $70 for today only. That's just $1 off the lowest price we've seen from reputable retailers and a good $30 off its usual going rate.

The Inspire HR is essentially an updated version of Fitbit's old Alta HR tracker. It's something like the general-purpose option in Fitbit's lineup: it doesn't have the battery life and altimeter of the pricier Fitbit Charge 3 or the smartwatch-style functionality of the Fitbit Versa series, but it's still good for what most people need from a device like this without breaking the bank.

Compared to the Alta HR, the Inspire HR includes a full-on touchscreen instead of a tap-only panel and a generally more intuitive interface, with the ability to set timers and better change the look of the OS. At its core, it remains a dependable monitor of daily activity, heart rate, and sleep, aided in large part by the ever-useful Fitbit app. Fitbit rates the Inspire HR's battery as lasting up to five days per charge, which is a downgrade from the seven-day rating of the Charge 3 or Alta HR but should still be enough to only require one charge a week.

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Daily Deals (1-23-2020)

Mesh WiFi router systems are designed to do a better job of covering large homes with WiFi. Instead of a single router, you can buy a two or three pack and place them in different rooms to extend your network further. But paying for two or three router…

The post Daily Deals (1-23-2020) appeared first on Liliputing.

DirecTV races to decommission broken Boeing satellite before it explodes

Boeing satellite has irreversible damage to batteries, creating explosion risk.

Illustration of a satellite orbiting Earth.

DirecTV is scrambling to move a broken Boeing satellite out of its standard orbit in order to limit the risk of "an accidental explosion."

As Space News reported today, DirecTV asked the Federal Communications Commission for a rules waiver so it can "conduct emergency operations to de-orbit the Spaceway-1 satellite," which is at risk of explosion because of damage to batteries. The 15-year-old Boeing 702HP satellite is in a geostationary orbit.

DirecTV, which is owned by AT&T, is coordinating with Intelsat on a plan to move Spaceway-1 into a new orbit. DirecTV already disabled the satellite's primary function, which is to provide backup Ka-band capacity in Alaska. The satellite can operate on power reserves from its solar panels, but that won't be possible during the coming eclipse season, DirecTV explained in its FCC filing:

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Satellit: SD-Abschaltung der ARD kommt erst nächstes Jahr

Obwohl kein Geld mehr dafür bewilligt ist, will die ARD die SD-Abschaltung im Jahr 2020 nicht vollziehen. Sie wird wohl auf das zweite Halbjahr 2021 verschoben. (ARD, HDTV)

$220 Hisense A5 E Ink smartphone is probably a better eReader than a phone

Most modern smartphones feature color LCD or OLED displays. But every now and then a phone maker decides to buck the trend and put out a handset with an E Ink display. They’re not particularly common. They’re not usually all that cheap. And…

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Mystery as PortalRoms Disappears Leaving 4 Million Gaming Visitors in the Dark

PortalRoms, a popular index for ROM and emulators for a wide range of gaming systems, has disappeared without trace. Up until a few days ago the site was servicing more four million visitors per month with links to download content via torrents. However, after domain issues hit the site last October, history may now be repeating itself for the ten-year-old site.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

In Internet ‘piracy’ years, PortalRoms.com is pretty old domain, having first appeared as a very basic ROM download site way back in 2004, possibly even earlier.

Over the years it has undergone various transformations and possibly ownership changes too. Its now-dormant Twitter account was created back in 2010 but behind the scenes and after fairly slow initial growth, the last decade saw the site grow negligible traffic to become a decent-sized ROM, retro, and emulator player.

Up until just a few days ago, users of PortalRoms – who between them have been generating around four million visits per month – were able to download ROMs covering everything from arcade games to Dreamcast to Nintendo Switch. Rather than store this content on restrictive file-hosting platforms, PortalRoms created torrents instead, a rare move for a site of this type.

Right from the very beginning, PortalRoms operated from PortalRoms.com. However, for reasons that are not clear, last September or October the site made a surprise switch to the Swiss-based PortalRoms.ch domain. As data from SimilarWeb shows, most traffic managed to transfer to the new domain, with little to no disruption.

The same cannot be said of the past few days. With no public announcements to indicate the cause, PortalRoms went dark, leaving millions of users (especially in South America where the site was very popular) without their favorite download portal to fall back on.

When trying to determine the cause of the downtime, the site’s domain entries aren’t particularly useful.

TorrentFreak contacted the registrar in control of the .ch domain but the company advised us that the domain is actually controlled by one of their resellers – 1337 Services LLC. This is the business name of Njalla, the domain company connected to Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde, a company that strives to give up no useful information on any domain.

It remains possible that PortalRoms is experiencing yet another bout of domain problems but whether they are copyright-related is open to question. Indeed, one of the curious things about PortalRoms.com and PortalRoms.ch is that considering its extensive library and visitor count, anti-piracy groups working for gaming companies like Nintendo or Sony seem to be pretty disinterested.

Google’s Transparency Report reveals that PortalRoms.com received only 55 complaints targeting 115 URLs when it was in operation. Companies like EA, Rockstar, THQ and Activision got involved but never on any scale. For comparison, the relatively new PortalRoms.ch domain received only four complaints but those contained just over 1,000 URLs. All but a handful were filed by the Entertainment Software Association.

While it remains to be seen whether PortalRoms will ever return, it’s worth noting that its chosen method of content distribution (torrents, in this case) means that people will still be sharing the ROM and emulator files during the downtime. Indeed, a basic search for ‘portalroms’ on various meta-search engines reveals many active torrents with the phrase “visit www.PORTALROMS.ch for more games _.url” in their file lists.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

Disney+: Darth Maul kehrt in Star Wars: The Clone Wars zurück

Die siebte und letzte Staffel der Animationsserie Star Wars: The Clone Wars kommt im Februar. Fans können sich auf Mace Windu, Obi Wan Kenobi, Anakin Skywalker und andere Charaktere freuen. Ein Highlight: das Duell zwischen Ahsoka Taano und Darth Maul….

Tetris: Anbieterwechsel beim Klötzchenklassiker

Bislang hat Electronic Arts den Klassiker Tetris auf Smartphones vermarktet, nun stehen diese Funktionen vor dem Aus. Stattdessen wird eine neue Version des Kultspiels von einem anderen Unternehmen angeboten – immerhin mit einigermaßen fairem Geschäfts…

Jewel beetle’s bright colored shell serves as camouflage from predators

University of Bristol scientists offer first real evidence for a 100-year-old theory.

The brightly colored shell of this jewel beetle is a surprisingly effective form of camouflage, according to a new study by scientists at the University of Bristol.

Artist and naturalist Abbott Handerson Thayer became known as the "father of camouflage" with the publication in 1909 of a book on coloration in animals. He was particularly fascinated by the phenomenon of iridescence: many species exhibit bright, metallic jewel tones that shift hues depending on viewing angle. While iridescence is often viewed as a means of sexual selection—think the magnificent peacock, shimmering his feathers to attract a willing peahen—Thayer suggested that in some species, it was also an effective means of camouflage.

Thayer endured a fair bit of mockery for his ideas, most notably from Theodore Roosevelt, a big game hunter who thought Thayer had grossly overstated his case. Indeed, there has been very little empirical support for Thayer's hypothesis in the ensuing century. But researchers from the University of Bristol have now uncovered the first solid evidence for this in the jewel beetle, according to a new paper in Current Biology.

What makes iridescence in nature so unusual is the fact that the color we see doesn't come from actual pigment molecules, but from the precise lattice-like structure of the wings (or abalone shells, or peacock feathers, or opals, for that matter). That structure forces each light wave passing through to interfere with itself, so it can propagate only in certain directions and at certain frequencies. In essence, the structure acts like naturally occurring diffraction gratings. Physicists call these structures photonic crystals, an example of so-called "photonic band gap materials," meaning they block out certain frequencies of light and let through others.

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Ratgeber: Mozilla gibt Studenten Tipps in Ethik-Fragen

Die Mozilla-Foundation hat einen Leitfaden für Studenten vorgestellt, der diesen bei ethischen Fragen in der IT-Industrie helfen soll. Das gelte vor allem für den Einstellungsprozess, die Wahl des Arbeitgebers und Organisationsmöglichkeiten. (Mozilla, …