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Tuesday, 30 April 2019

Stanford innovation brings blood test for chronic fatigue syndrome one step closer

Doctors may soon be able to identify sufferers of chronic fatigue syndrome using a blood test

For decades, sufferers of chronic fatigue syndrome have battled to prove this debilitating illness is not a psychological condition, but in fact an actual biological disease. Now a team from the Stanford University School of Medicine has developed an innovative new type of blood test that could offer doctors the first diagnostic tool to identify it.

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Category: Medical

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5 Mars makes a colorful, efficient mini-campervan out of the Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid

Possible color combination for 5 Mars' Illusion Hybrid

After recently covering a convincing little Toyota Sienna minivan camper from Colorado's Oasis Campervans, we figured someone out there must be creating gas-electric mini-campervans built on the Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid. We found one in the Illusion Hybrid from 5 Mars RV. The Quebecois company marries its expertise in creating small, cozy camper vans with hybrid technology, creating a playful but efficient camper van optimized for long-mileage tours.

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Category: Automotive

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Squid-inspired material keeps the heat – or loses it

Alon Gorodetsky and Erica Leung, with a sample of the material

Squids, octopi and cuttlefish are able to change the color of their skin thanks to specialized cells known as chromatophores. Scientists have now replicated the manner in which those cells work, resulting in a flexible material that can either trap or release heat as needed.

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Category: Materials

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Modular screwdriver designed to do it all

The Spinner Drive, with its wheel added for additional torque

Different tasks require different types of screwdrivers. If you don't want to buy all of those types, though, you might be interested in Mininch's Spinner Drive – it's described as the one screwdriver to rule them all.

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Category: Good Thinking

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Stand-up electric saucer is set for the sea

The Wheeebo is due for release in 2020

Perhaps best-known for its diesel engines and robotic agricultural equipment, Japanese company Yanmar also makes personal watercraft. Its latest addition to the latter category is a little something known as the Wheeebo, which is kind of like an aquatic Segway.

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Category: Marine

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Antarctica Ice shelf the size of France threatened by effects of climate change

The wall of the Ross Ice Shelf stretches for a staggering 600 km (373 miles) in ...

According to a new study, a vital section of the world's largest ice shelf is losing ice 10 times faster than the overall melt rate for the structure, posing a potential risk to its future stability. The Ross Ice Shelf stretches out over 500,809 km2 (193,363 miles2), and accounts for 32 percent of Antarctica's total ice shelf area.

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Category: Environment

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Moog's synth family has a new mother

The Moog Matriarch features four analog voltage controlled oscillators

Moog Music hosted its annual music, art and technology expo – Moogfest – at the weekend, and took the opportunity to show off a new four note paraphonic analog synthesizer called the Matriarch.

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Category: Music

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Nubia Red Magic 3 gaming phone packs in liquid cooling and an internal fan

The Nubia Red Magic 3 brings LED lights and internal cooling for your mobile gaming sessions

The gaming phone market is hotting up with models from Razr, Asus and others catching the eye, and now Chinese brand Nubia (part of ZTE) has launched the Red Magic 3 – the first gaming phone we've seen to include a cooling fan actually inside the phone itself.

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Category: Mobile Technology

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Babe Ruth rookie card found in $25 piano sells for $108,378

This 1916 (M101-4) Babe Ruth blank back card shows Ruth as a left-handed pitcher for the ...

The nature of rare finds is that they often turn up in the most unlikely places. After all, if they were sitting in obvious places they wouldn't be such rare finds would they? Such is the case with this 1916 rookie card (#151) for baseball great Babe Ruth which was sold at auction on April 26 for US$108,378 by Goodwin & Co.

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Category: Collectibles

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Scientists identify source of strange glow in the sky

STEVE is made up of a pinkish ribbon and green streaks sometimes described as a "picket ...

It might be hard to believed that a phenomenon as eye-catching as aurora could go undocumented, but in 2016 a new type of sky light was discovered, and given the strange name of STEVE. Exactly how the phenomenon worked was unknown, but a new study has now found some answers.

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Category: Physics

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Spoiler alert: This 1,600-horsepower GT-R has a lot of spoilers

Franco Scribante Racing's 1600-horsepower Nissan GT-R will not be lacking in downforce

Is it a snow plow? Did it just crash into the back of two other cars stacked on top of one another? No, it's a specially prepared hillclimb racer that makes so much power that every bit of downforce counts. Meet Franco Scribante Racing's ridiculous-looking Nissan GT-R, featuring three wings bigger than the one on your Civic.

.. Continue Reading Spoiler alert: This 1,600-horsepower GT-R has a lot of spoilers

Category: Automotive

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Existing drug that offers dormancy over death may be better for combatting cancer

An existing drug has been found to be effective at keeping cancer in a dormant state, ...

Part of what makes cancer so formidable is its ability to spread around the body, so that doctors can rarely be completely sure they've killed it all. But that might not be the best way to go about treating the disease after all. Now researchers at Purdue University have identified a drug that could help keep cancer contained in a dormant state – and best of all, that drug is already on the market for other purposes.

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Category: Medical

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Samsung built a vertical TV for (who else?) the millennials [Update]

It's tough to stand out in the TV market, where everyone is shipping beautiful 4K panels in pretty much whatever size you want. Samsung is hoping to turn heads with a few wild "concept lifestyle TV" designs, which it rounded up in a Korean-language press release today. There's the previously announced "The Frame," which looks like a framed picture and displays artwork when not in use. There's "The Serif," which is mounted on four legs, looking kind of like a canvas easel. And then there's the real head-turner, "The Sero," which is a vertical TV.

The Sero isn't vertical all the time. The 43-inch panel is mounted on a rotating stand, allowing you to get up, walk over to the TV, and swing it from landscape to portrait—kind of like working the world's biggest smartphone. Through Google Translate, Samsung's press release tells us it "analyzed the characteristics of the Millennial generation" to come up with the TV design, which is purpose-built for watching the vertical videos you find on services like Instagram. Of course, the scourge of vertical videos was created because people couldn't be bothered to rotate their 5-inch smartphones, so I'm unsure about the idea that people will get off the couch to rotate their 43-inch TV.

Samsung says the TV comes with NFC pairing and a "simple mirroring function" to get your smartphone videos on the TV. Like Samsung's other TVs, this has an ambient mode that can display images, photos, clocks, and more when not in use. There's a microphone with Samsung's Bixby assistant built in.

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2019 Ford Edge review: Ford's redesigned midsize SUV plays it safe - Roadshow

New safety tech and small design tweaks highlight Ford's updated Edge SUV.

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R.I.P., Anki: Yet Another Home Robotics Company Powers Down

A third major home robotics outfit shuts down in a year. Why is it so hard to build a companion droid that everyone wants?

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Airbnb and Marriott Each Want What the Other Has

Airbnb announces a move into hotels, at the same time that Marriott reportedly plans to get into home-sharing.

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Feds Rule That One Company’s Gig Workers Are Contractors

The Department of Labor says workers for one company are sufficiently independent to be considered contractors, in a move that could ripple across the gig economy.

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The Future of Money, Facebook’s F8 Conference, and More News

Catch up on the most important news today in 2 minutes or less.

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A Programmer Solved a 20-Year-Old, Forgotten Crypto Puzzle

A self-taught coder dedicated a CPU core to performing continuous computations for three years to crack the puzzle, beating a competing team by mere days.

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'Game of Thrones': A Case Against Watching the Series Finale

How could anything matter now?

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Tech Lobbyists Push to Defang California's Landmark Privacy Law

Privacy advocates worry that a slate of proposed changes to the California Consumer Privacy Act may impede the law's effectiveness.

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'Game of Thrones' Recap, Season 8 Episode 3: The Problem With Prophecies

Does it really matter if Arya Stark is the Princess Who Was Promised?

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The Battle of Winterfell: A Tactical Analysis

If you're going up against an army of the undead, maybe plan a little better.

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How Tactical Drivers Learn Crazy-Ass Maneuvers

And you thought you could maneuver out of dangerous situations.

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'Avengers: Endgame' Broke Nearly Every Box Office Record

It has made more than $1 billion worldwide already.

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The Physics of Heating Up Water With a Battery

You can make a simple water heater using a battery and a wire—here's how.

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Meet the Pro-Vaxxers Helping to Stave Off the Next Pandemic

As vaccine hesitancy grows, some individuals are responding by volunteering to take part in experimental vaccine trials.

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Don’t See Yourself on Your Emoji Keyboard? Jenny 8. Lee Can Help

Meet Jenny 8. Lee, an advocate who urges inclusion and representation in emoji, and a subject of the new emoji documentary, “Picture Character.”

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Companies Can Predict Climate Catastrophes for You—as a Service

One startup in the growing climate services industry lets you pull up a map and design your own disaster, to help put a price on climate change's impacts.

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Money Management Tips From a Formerly Manic Spender

The strategies I learned to control my spending after I was diagnosed with bipolar II can help anyone crack down on their spending.

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How I Learned to Embrace Venmo's Ever-Evolving Vernacular

Does a shared pizza have the same value, either literal or metaphorical, as a shared mortgage? Not really, but on Venmo they are afforded the same quick tappity tap.

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Should I Spend $1,000 on a Smartphone?

With so many great inexpensive phones out there, it depends on why you want a pricey flagship model. Here are the most common justifications we hear.

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Facebook F8 2019: What to Expect After Facebook's Very Bad Year

Facebook's annual developer conference is Tuesday. Expect news on VR, privacy, and yet another promise to "do better."

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The Penetrating Gaze of the Instagram Shame Silo

That thing you're really into but don't really love talking about? The Gram knows. Oh, it knows.

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No one noticed, but Uber and Lyft stopped accepting new NYC drivers


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Chinese ride-hailing company buys Times Square billboards to shame Tesla


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Laptops and tablets on sale: iPad, MacBook, Samsung Galaxy Tab, ThinkPad, and more


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'Game of Thrones' sets new record by conquering your Twitter feed


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Look at These Teeny Tiny Phones


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Samsung made a TV for vertical video and I actually kind of like it


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Marriott is coming for Airbnb with a fancypants version of homeshare rentals


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Cuisinart's digital toaster is on sale for $20 off at Walmart


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Uber apologizes after racist tweet


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Hamilton Beach’s Belgian waffle maker makes breakfast fun — and it's 50% off at Walmart


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Amazon is testing a Spanish-language Alexa experience in the US ahead of a launch this year

Amazon announced today it has begun to ask customers to participate in a preview program that will help the company build a Spanish-language Alexa experience for U.S. users. The program, which is currently invite-only, will allow Amazon to incorporate into the U.S. Spanish-language experience a better understanding of things like word choice and local humor, as it has done with prior language launches in other regions. In addition, developers have been invited to begin building Spanish-language skills, also starting today, using the Alexa Skills Kit.

The latter was announced on the Alexa blog, noting that any skills created now will be made available to the customers in the preview program for the time being. They’ll then roll out to all customers when Alexa launches in the U.S. with Spanish-language support later this year.

Manufacturers who want to build “Alexa Built-in” products for Spanish-speaking customers can also now request early access to a related Alexa Voice Services (AVS) developer preview. Amazon says that Bose, Facebook and Sony are preparing to do so, while smart home device makers, including Philips, TP Link and Honeywell Home, will bring to U.S. users “Works with Alexa” devices that support Spanish.

Ahead of today, Alexa had supported Spanish language skills, but only in Spain and Mexico — not in the U.S. Those developers can opt to extend their existing skills to U.S. customers, Amazon says.

In addition to Spanish, developers have also been able to create skills in English in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and India; as well as in German, Japanese, French (in France and in Canada), and Portuguese (in Brazil). But on the language front, Google has had a decided advantage thanks to its work with Google Voice Search and Google Translate over the years.

Last summer, Google Home rolled out support for Spanish, in addition to launching the device in Spain and Mexico.

Amazon also trails Apple in terms of support for Spanish in the U.S., as Apple added support for Spanish to the HomePod in the U.S., Spain and Mexico in September 2018.

Spanish is a widely spoken language in the U.S. According to a 2015 report by Instituto Cervantes, the United States has the second highest concentration of Spanish speakers in the world, following Mexico. At the time of the report, there were 53 million people who spoke Spanish in the U.S. — a figure that included 41 million native Spanish speakers, and approximately 11.6 million bilingual Spanish speakers.



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Why did last night’s ‘Game of Thrones’ look so bad? Here comes the science!

Last night’s episode of “Game of Thrones” was a wild ride and inarguably one of an epic show’s more epic moments — if you could see it through the dark and the blotchy video. It turns out even one of the most expensive and meticulously produced shows in history can fall prey to the scourge of low quality streaming and bad TV settings.

The good news is this episode is going to look amazing on Blu-ray or potentially in future, better streams and downloads. The bad news is that millions of people already had to see it in a way its creators surely lament. You deserve to know why this was the case. I’ll be simplifying a bit here because this topic is immensely complex, but here’s what you should know.

(By the way, I can’t entirely avoid spoilers, but I’ll try to stay away from anything significant in words or images.)

It was clear from the opening shots in last night’s episode, “The Longest Night,” that this was going to be a dark one. The army of the dead faces off against the allied living forces in the darkness, made darker by a bespoke storm brought in by, shall we say, a Mr. N.K., to further demoralize the good guys.

If you squint you can just make out the largest army ever assembled

Thematically and cinematographically, setting this chaotic, sprawling battle at night is a powerful creative choice and a valid one, and I don’t question the showrunners, director, and so on for it. But technically speaking, setting this battle at night, and in fog, is just about the absolute worst case scenario for the medium this show is native to: streaming home video. Here’s why.

Compression factor

Video has to be compressed in order to be sent efficiently over the internet, and although we’ve made enormous strides in video compression and the bandwidth available to most homes, there are still fundamental limits.

The master video that HBO put together from the actual footage, FX, and color work that goes into making a piece of modern media would be huge: hundreds of gigabytes if not terabytes. That’s because the master has to include all the information on every pixel in every frame, no exceptions.

Imagine if you tried to “stream” a terabyte-sized TV episode. You’d have to be able to download upwards of 200 megabytes per second for the full 80 minutes of this one. Few people in the world have that kind of connection — it would basically never stop buffering. Even 20 megabytes per second is asking too much by a long shot. 2 is doable — slightly under the 25 megabit speed (that’s bits… divide by 8 to get bytes) we use to define broadband download speeds.

So how do you turn a large file into a small one? Compression — we’ve been doing it for a long time, and video, though different from other types of data in some ways, is still just a bunch of zeroes and ones. In fact it’s especially susceptible to strong compression because of how one video frame is usually very similar to the last and the next one. There are all kinds of shortcuts you can take that reduce the file size immensely without noticeably impacting the quality of the video. These compression and decompression techniques fit into a system called a “codec.”

But there are exceptions to that, and one of them has to do with how compression handles color and brightness. Basically, when the image is very dark, it can’t display color very well.

The color of winter

Think about it like this: There are only so many ways to describe colors in a few words. If you have one word you can say red, or maybe ochre or vermilion depending on your interlocutor’s vocabulary. But if you have two words you can say dark red, darker red, reddish black, and so on. The codec has a limited vocabulary as well, though its “words” are the numbers of bits it can use to describe a pixel.

This lets it succinctly describe a huge array of colors with very little data by saying, this pixel has this bit value of color, this much brightness, and so on. (I didn’t originally want to get into this, but this is what people are talking about when they say bit depth, or even “highest quality pixels.”)

But this also means that there are only so many gradations of color and brightness it can show. Going from a very dark grey to a slightly lighter grey, it might be able to pick 5 intermediate shades. That’s perfectly fine if it’s just on the hem of a dress in the corner of the image. But what if the whole image is limited to that small selection of shades?

Then you get what we see last night. See how Jon (I think) is made up almost entirely of only a handful of different colors (brightnesses of a similar color, really) in with big obvious borders between them?

This issue is called “banding,” and it’s hard not to notice once you see how it works. Images on video can be incredibly detailed, but places where there are subtle changes in color — often a clear sky or some other large but mild gradient — will render in large stripes as the codec goes from “darkest dark blue” to “darker dark blue” to “dark blue,” with no “medium darker dark blue” in between.

Check out this image.

Above is a smooth gradient encoded with high color depth. Below that is the same gradient encoded with lossy JPEG encoding — different from what HBO used, obviously, but you get the idea.

Banding has plagued streaming video forever, and it’s hard to avoid even in major productions — it’s just a side effect of representing color digitally. It’s especially distracting because obviously our eyes don’t have that limitation. A high-definition screen may actually show more detail than your eyes can discern from couch distance, but color issues? Our visual systems flag them like crazy. You can minimize it in various ways, but it’s always going to be there, until the point when we have as many shades of grey as we have pixels on the screen.

So back to last night’s episode. Practically the entire show took place at night, which removes about 3/4 of the codec’s brightness-color combos right there. It also wasn’t a particularly colorful episode, a directorial or photographic choice that highlighted things like flames and blood, but further limited the ability to digitally represent what was on screen.

It wouldn’t be too bad if the background was black and people were lit well so they popped out, though. The last straw was the introduction of the cloud, fog, or blizzard, whatever you want to call it. This kept the brightness of the background just high enough that the codec had to represent it with one of its handful of dark greys, and the subtle movements of fog and smoke came out as blotchy messes (often called “compression artifacts” as well) as the compression desperately tried to pick what shade was best for a group of pixels.

Just brightening it doesn’t fix things, either — because the detail is already crushed into a narrow range of values, you just get a bandy image that never gets completely black, making it look washed out, as you see here:

(Anyway, the darkness is a stylistic choice. You may not agree with it, but that’s how it’s supposed to look and messing with it beyond making the darkest details visible could be counterproductive.)

Now, it should be said that compression doesn’t have to be this bad. For one thing, the more data it is allowed to use, the more gradations it can describe, and the less severe the banding. It’s also possible (though I’m not sure where it’s actually done) to repurpose the rest of the codec’s “vocabulary” to describe a scene where its other color options are limited. That way the full bandwidth can be used to describe a nearly monochromatic scene even though strictly speaking it should be only using a fraction of it.

But neither of these are likely an option for HBO: Increasing the bandwidth of the stream is costly, since this is being sent out to tens of millions of people — a bitrate increase big enough to change the quality would also massively swell their data costs. When you’re distributing to that many people, that also introduces the risk of hated buffering or errors in playback, which are obviously a big no-no. It’s even possible that HBO lowered the bitrate because of network limitations — “Game of Thrones” really is stretching the limits of digital distribution in some ways.

And using an exotic codec might not be possible because only commonly used commercial ones are really capable of being applied at scale. Kind of like how we try to use standard parts for cars and computers.

This episode almost certainly looked fantastic in the mastering room and FX studios, where they not only had carefully calibrated monitors with which to view it but also were working with brighter footage (it would be darkened to taste by the colorist later) and less or no compression. They might not even have seen the “final” version that fans “enjoyed.”

We’ll see the better copy eventually, but in the meantime the choice of darkness, fog, and furious action meant the episode was going to be a muddy, glitchy mess on home TVs.

And while we’re on the topic…

You mean my TV isn’t the problem?

Couple watching TV on their couch.

Well… to be honest, it might be that too. What I can tell you is that simply having a “better” TV by specs, such as 4K or a higher refresh rate or whatever, would make almost no difference in this case. Even built-in de-noising and de-banding algorithms would be hard pressed to make sense of “The Long Night.” And one of the best new display technologies, OLED, might even make it look worse! Its “true blacks” are much darker than an LCD’s backlit blacks, so the jump to the darkest grey could appear more jarring.

That said, it’s certainly possible that your TV is also set up poorly. Those of us sensitive to this kind of thing spend forever fiddling with settings and getting everything just right for exactly this kind of situation. There are dozens of us! And this is our hour.

Usually “calibration” is actually a pretty simple process of making sure your TV isn’t on the absolute worst settings, which unfortunately many are out of the box. Here’s a very basic three-point guide to “calibrating” your TV:

  1. Turn off anything with a special name in the “picture” or “video” menu, like “TrueMotion,” “Dynamic motion,” “Cinema mode,” any stuff like that. Most of these make things look worse, and so-called “smart” features are often anything but. Especially anything that “smooths” motion — turn those off first and never ever turn them on again. Note: Don’t mess with brightness, gamma, color space, pretty much anything with a number you can change.
  2. Figure out light and color by putting on a good, well-shot movie the way you normally do. While it’s playing, click through any color presets your TV has. These are often things like “natural,” “game,” “cinema,” “calibrated,” and so on, and take effect right away. Some may make the image look too green, or too dark, or whatever. Play around with it and whichever makes it look best, just use that one. You can always change it again later – I myself switch between a lighter and darker scheme depending on time of day and content.
  3. Don’t worry about HDR, dynamic lighting, and all that stuff for now. There’s a lot of hype about these technologies and they are still in their infancy. Few will work out of the box and the gains may or may not be worth it. The truth is a well shot movie from the ’60s or ’70s can look just as good today as a “high dynamic range” show shot on the latest 8K digital cinema rig. Just focus on making sure the image isn’t being actively interfered with by your TV and you’ll be fine.

Unfortunately none of these things will make “The Long Night” look any better until HBO releases a new version of it. Those ugly bands and artifacts are baked right in. But if you have to blame anyone, blame the streaming infrastructure that wasn’t prepared for a show taking risks in its presentation, risks I would characterize as bold and well executed, unlike the writing in the show lately. Oops, sorry, couldn’t help myself.

If you really want to experience this show the way it was intended, the fanciest TV in the world wouldn’t have helped last night, though when the Blu-ray comes out you’ll be in for a treat. But here’s hoping the next big battle takes place in broad daylight.



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Is this the vertical-folding Motorola Razr?

This could be the upcoming Motorola Razr revival. The images purporting to be the upcoming smartphone appeared online on Weibo and show a foldable design. Unlike Galaxy Fold, though, Motorola’s implementation has the phone folding vertically — much like the original Razr.

This design offers a more compelling use case than other foldables. Instead of a traditional smartphone unfolding to a tablet-like display, Motorola’s design has a smaller device unfolding to a smartphone display. The result is a smaller phone turning into a normal phone.

Pricing is still unclear, but the WSJ previously stated it would carry a $1,500 cost when it’s eventually released. If it’s released.

Samsung was the first to market with the Galaxy Fold. Kind of. A few journalists were given Galaxy Fold units ahead of its launch, but a handful of units failed in the first days. Samsung quickly postponed the launch and recalled all the review units.

Despite this leak, Motorola has yet to confirm when this device will hit the market. Given Samsung’s troubles, it will likely be extra cautious before launching it to the general public.



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See What Could've Opened Deep Space Nine Season 8 in an Exclusive Clip From What We Left Behind

It’s a miracle that Deep Space Nine got to do what it did with the Star Trek franchise for seven seasons. But what if the series had continued on in the wake of the Dominion War? Part of the incoming extensive documentary What We Left Behind wants to give you a hint—and we’ve got an exclusive look at it in action.

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