Shelly Palmer Digital Living - Blog

Here’s How to Permanently Delete Snapchat Photos

shelly@palmer.net (Shelly Palmer) — Fri, 24 May 2013 21:01:03 +0000

Snapchat has taken the mobile world by storm. The application allows users to send pictures and videos to friends that will self-destruct after a maximum of 10 seconds. Even better, if someone tries to take a screenshot of the image, the sender is automatically notified. Although its founders may not be proud of it, the application has become rather popular among the “sexting” crowd, a practice in which you send naked pictures and videos to another person. The application isn’t perfect, however. As we saw earlier this year, SnapChat videos can be secretly saved. The truth of the matter is that while Snapchat deletes the images from its servers, they are still stored deep inside the receiver’s smartphone and can be retrieved with the proper knowledge. There are ways to permanently delete Snapchat photos, though.

Read the full story at Boy Genius Report.

AT&T Adds ‘Administrative Fee’ to Wireless Bills, Nets $500+ Million

shelly@palmer.net (Shelly Palmer) — Fri, 24 May 2013 21:00:50 +0000

AT&T has introduced a new “Mobility Administrative Fee” to its postpaid contracts. The $0.61 monthly fee ($7.32 per year) is being categorized “below the line” alongside tax and fees as an administrative surcharge. The fee came into effect on May 1st, and applies to all consumer contracts as well as “IRU” business contracts (business accounts where the user pays the bill). It’s a small charge for the individual consumers, but given that AT&T’s postpaid subscriber base stands at over 70 million, the move will net AT&T hundreds of millions of dollars — somewhere around half a billion dollars, in fact. That’s a lot of extra revenue from one little charge. AT&T tells us that the administrative fee will “help cover certain expenses, such as interconnection and cell site rents and maintenance.” It also added that the charge is “consistent with similar fees charged by other carriers.”

Read the full story at The Verge.

Report: iOS 7 Will Be ‘Black, White and Flat All Over’

shelly@palmer.net (Shelly Palmer) — Fri, 24 May 2013 21:00:37 +0000

With the grand unveiling of Apple’s next operating system for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch approaching, sources have provided detailed descriptions of what users and developers alike could expect from the software’s fresh look. As we reported in April, Apple Senior Vice President of Industrial Design Jony Ive has been leading a thorough overhaul for iOS 7 that focuses on the look and feel of the iOS device software rather than on several new features. Sources have described iOS 7 as “black, white, and flat all over.” This refers to the dropping of heavy textures and the addition of several new black and white user interface elements. Sources say that over the past few months, Apple has re-architected iOS 7′s new interface several times, so until the new software is announced at WWDC, interface elements could dramatically change from what Apple has been testing internally in recent weeks.

Read the full story at 9to5 Mac.

Intel’s New Haswell Processor Will Yield 50% Better Battery Life

shelly@palmer.net (Shelly Palmer) — Fri, 24 May 2013 21:00:32 +0000

Intel’s upcoming family of Core processors, code-named Haswell, will offer 50% more battery life in laptops than did their “Ivy Bridge” predecessors, Intel said on Thursday. Haswell chips were designed with laptops and tablets in mind, and the main focus was on lowering power consumption, said Rani Borkar, corporate vice president and general manager of the Intel Architecture Group, in a media briefing. The longer battery life won’t come with a cost to performance, according to Borkar. And in idle or standby mode the chips will do even better, extending battery life by up to 20 times, she said. The improvements are vital for Intel and its PC-making partners. PC sales are in one of their worst slumps ever, with users snapping up tablets and smartphones instead for mobile computing. Any improvements Intel can offer will help keep the PC market alive.

Read the full story at ComputerWorld.

3D-Printed ‘Bionic’ Ear Outperforms Human Ability

shelly@palmer.net (Shelly Palmer) — Fri, 24 May 2013 21:00:23 +0000

Scientists at Princeton University have designed a bionic ear that can hear better than human ears. And get this: It was printed using an off-the-shelf 3D printer. We’ve heard of 3D printers someday building human organs before, but what’s noteworthy about this project is this printed ear intertwines embedded electronics. These Princeton researchers basically 3D-printed cells and nanoparticles, and then combined a small coil antenna with cartilage to create this “bionic” ear, according to the university. The result was a fully-functional organ that can hear radio frequencies a million times higher than our human ears, lead researcher Michael McAlpine told Mashable. “The way that our ear hears now is we pick up acoustic signals and then we convert those into electrical signals that go to our brain,” said McAlpine, who is an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton.

Read the full story at Mashable.

Hulu’s Suitors Line Up As First Round of Bidding Begins

shelly@palmer.net (Shelly Palmer) — Fri, 24 May 2013 21:00:15 +0000

The first round of bids were due this week for Hulu, the popular online TV service whose prospective sale has attracted interest from digital media players as well as cable operators. An initial bid has been submitted by the Chernin Group, a next-generation media company founded by longtime News Corp. executive Peter Chernin, which is partnering with Providence Equity, according to several people familiar with the matter. Guggenheim Digital Media, a group headed by former Yahoo Inc. interim Chief Executive Ross Levinsohn, also submitted a bid, say the people with knowledge of the situation who declined to be identified because of the confidential nature of the bidding process. Guggenheim is interested in expanding its media holdings, which include Prometheus Global Media, which owns a number of trade publications, including Adweek, Billboard and the Hollywood Reporter.

Read the full story at the Los Angeles Times.

Newborn’s Life Saved By 3D-Printed Airway Splint

shelly@palmer.net (Shelly Palmer) — Fri, 24 May 2013 21:00:07 +0000

A 3D printer saved the life of a baby boy with a rare disease that kept him from breathing properly, doctors are reporting in the New England Journal of Medicine. The boy, Kaiba Gionfriddo of Ohio, had been diagnosed with severe tracheobronchomalacia, a rare respiratory condition that caused his airways to collapse, blocking the flow of air to his lungs daily. About 1 in 2,200 babies are born with the condition, but only 10 percent of them have cases as severe as Kaiba’s, according to his doctors. The boy’s parents, April and Brian, learned something was wrong when he was 6 weeks old and the infant turned blue while the family was out to eat. By the age of 2 months, Kaiba had to be intubated to breathe. Despite the breathing tube and a ventilator he also required, his breathing could not be maintained sufficiently. He needed to be resuscitated on a daily basis.

Read the full story at CNET.

Report: Windows Phone, BlackBerry Only Offer One-Third of Most Popular Apps

shelly@palmer.net (Shelly Palmer) — Fri, 24 May 2013 20:59:57 +0000

If you purchase a Windows Phone or BlackBerry 10 smartphone, don’t expect to download the same applications your friends are using on their iPhones and Android devices. A new report from research firm Canalys has found that a majority of the top Android and iOS applications still aren’t available on Windows Phone or BlackBerry 10. When combined, the two operating systems were found to only support 34% of the top 50 free and top 50 paid applications in the App Store and Google Play in the United States. The Windows Phone Store offered 16 of the top 50 free apps from the App Store, and 14 of the top 50 paid apps. The operating system fared slightly better when compared to Google Play, offering 22 of the top 50 free Android apps and 13 of the top 50 paid apps. BlackBerry World, on the other hand, contained BlackBerry 10 versions of only five of the top 50 free iPhone apps.

Read the full story at Boy Genius Report.

An 18-Year-Old Figured Out How to Supercharge Your Phone in Seconds

shelly@palmer.net (Shelly Palmer) — Fri, 24 May 2013 20:59:42 +0000

While you are hanging out on the Internet (in your underwear, maybe?) on a Saturday, kids that are smarter than either of us are out there getting ready to change the world. 18-year-old Eesha Khare, for instance, not only invented a supercapacitor that could someday be a phone battery that charges in just a couple of seconds; she also won $50,000 for it. Khare is one of the three big winners from the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. She and 17-year-old Henry Lin—who created a model that simulates thousands of galaxies—picked up Intel Foundation Young Scientist Awards. Meanwhile, 19-year-old Ionut Budisteanu won the Gordon E. Moore Award and $75,000 for his AI model that could lead to a cheaper self-driving car. Khare’s invention is the one with some really immediate potential though, and quick-charging phones is something we all want.

Read the full story at Gizmodo.

Abducted Chinese Man Uses Google Maps to Return Home After 23 Years

shelly@palmer.net (Shelly Palmer) — Fri, 24 May 2013 20:59:28 +0000

Chinese media outlets have reported the (quite incredible) story of a 28-year-old man who found his way home more than two decades after being abducted. At the age of five, while on his way his kindergarten in Guangan City, Sichuan Province, Luo Gang (not his birth-name) was abducted and taken 1,500 kilometers from home to Sanming, Fujian province. There, he received a new set of parents and a new name, and later went on to graduate school, finish military service, and by all accounts, live a relatively normal life for the next 23 years. But he never forgot where he came from. According to Luo, since the day of his capture, every night before bed he would remind himself of what his hometown of origin looked like. As his memories naturally faded with age, the one thing that stood out was a set of two bridges.

Read the full story at The Next Web.