Do you have some computer tasks that you’ve put off? Sometimes it’s tough to find the motivation to work on a big project when you get a free weekend. We’ve covered some of these important projects for Windows users before. But that doesn’t mean that smaller projects aren’t just as important. Let’s discuss some small-scale Windows projects you can complete in an hour or two on the weekend. 1. Remove Bloatware Chances are that your PC came with some junk programs that you don’t use or care about, known as bloatware. These include apps that duplicate system functionality, don’t work...
Imgur has quietly added two new features, one of which, called Snacks, is designed to help you waste your day looking at GIFs. The other introduces a feed full of posts from the people and tags you follow. And lastly, Imgur is rolling out a new homepage design for visitors to the website. GIFs are everywhere you look. Alongside emojis, GIFs have changed the way we express ourselves online, especially when reacting to something. Imgur may have started life as a simple way of sharing images on Reddit, but it’s now so much more. Hence the need for some new...
One of the reasons recently IPO’d Stitch Fix became so popular among female shoppers is because of how it pairs the convenience of home try-on for clothing and accessories with a personal styling service that adapts to your tastes over time. But often, personal stylists bring their own subjective takes on fashion to their customers. A new startup called Lily aims to offer a more… Read More
There are few metrics in the world that offer as much insight into our society as Google’s annual “Year in Search.” More than any of the other year-end download and streaming roundups, Google’s offers a clear snapshot of the things that captured our imaginations and baffled us during what felt like a particularly turbulent year. Read More Read Full Article
From media and documents to applications and system preferences, your Mac Finder eats every kind of data you throw at it. Even when you’re using other apps, Finder is the final destination for data and preferences. No wonder it gets cluttered up so often! A thorough Finder cleanup every now and then is necessary, but it can only take you so far. You need a good strategy for dodging clutter as well as clearing it. Lost files, distracting data, and space-hogging duplicates can really suck up valuable space. Let’s look at five strategies you can adopt to reduce clutter in...
It’s been a long year – it feels like it actually spanned about 50, in fact. But now, at the end, some relief: Mario Bear. Yes, it’s just a bear from Build-A-Bear Workshop. And a ‘brand collaboration,’ that horrific thing that usually just means some executives get a larger Christmas bonus and more people are convinced to part with their hard-earned money on… Read More
Did you know, there are around 1,000 minutes of Star Wars movies for you to enjoy? That doesn’t include the Clone Wars or Rebels TV series or the Star Wars Holiday Special. (It also assumes you’re watching Star Wars in the right order.) But what if you want to go more in depth with your love of the movies? The answer, young padawan, is podcasts. Via your podcast manager, you can engage with many thousands of minutes more of in-depth (and occasionally irreverent) Star Wars material, discussions, interviews, analysis, and more. Unsurprisingly, there are a lot of Star Wars podcasts...
Facebook has provided more details about the extent of Russian digital interference related to the UK’s Brexit vote last year. Read More Read Full Article
Reiterating what we said recently, Android and iOS aren’t as different as they used to be many years ago. Hence, even if both smartphone platforms have their own strengths and weaknesses, choosing between the two has become much harder. Today, we take a look at ten useful features of Apple iPhones that aren’t easily available on Android. Note: Thanks to Android’s relatively relaxed policies, there’s a chance some of these features can be activated via a third-party app or a custom ROM. But often, the experience doesn’t end up being as seamless. Also, some of the features mentioned work in...
Christmas always makes us think of family, warm home full of bright decorations, and a dining table that you get to share with those closest to you. But what if none of your dear people actually happen to be around for this holiday season? That’s It, Christmas Is Canceled! Hang on, no need to be overdramatic. Of course, it’s not nice being away from friends and family at this time of year. However, that’s not a reason to deprive yourself of Christmas cheer, joy, and other magical stuff. It’s not like the rest of the world will stop celebrating just...
If you ever spend time tweaking the style and formatting of your document, you will love this Microsoft Word feature. Microsoft Word is packed with powerful features, but most users only use a few of them to their fullest potential. We’ve previously highlighted underused Microsoft Word features, such as Table of Contents, and hidden Word features, like tweaks to the Outline view. In this article, we’ll show you how to use the Word Styles feature to automate document formatting. What Is the Styles Feature? In most cases, you’ll see Styles in the Home tab, slightly right of center. This section is the Quick Styles Gallery. Notice the...
You’re probably going to get a better deal when you buy consumer products — like paper towels — wholesale, but at the same time you’re also buying a very, very large package of said consumer products. So, they might not always fit in your apartment. Wholesale goods are the primary play for a startup called Boxed, a retailer looking to play the sort of… Read More
Air purifiers are certainly a luxury, but they’re a luxury you can’t afford to skip or neglect. Even if your home isn’t as polluted as the outdoors, and even if you go to great lengths to keep your indoor environment spotless, you can absolutely benefit from having one. Yes, air purifiers can be pricey. And yes, they aren’t so crucial that you need to go out and buy one right now. You can put it off for a while if necessary, but we highly recommend getting one sooner rather than later. The benefits are real and you’ll kick yourself for...
You’re happily browsing the web, visiting websites, doing a bit of online banking, and perhaps some gaming. Everything is perfect, with your computer secured with a firewall and antivirus software, and perhaps a VPN. No hacker is going to be ruining your day, right? Well, that all depends on how secure your router is. Here are 10 ways your router could be exploited by hackers and drive-by wireless hijackers. 1. Default Admin Password and SSID Millions of routers ship every year, all with an admin password preconfigured, and printed on the side of the device. It doesn’t take a genius...
Christmas is a great time to be a movie lover: there are countless re-runs of classic films on television, lots of “Special Edition” Hollywood flicks being released on DVD and Blu-ray, and near-endless discounts on movie merchandise in stores. But this is the 21st century. No one really buys DVDs anymore, do they? And your 75-year-old granddad probably isn’t interested in a Yoda T-shirt. Match his slippers, it does not. But don’t worry. If you’re buying a present for a film aficionado this Christmas, you’re in luck. We’ve put together the ultimate list of gift ideas for movie lovers of...
Apple announced a substantial investment in Finisar. Apple is giving Finisar $390 million to build a new 700,000-square-foot manufacturing plant in Sherman, Texas. Finisar is going to hire 500 people to work on the laser sensor in the TrueDepth camera in the iPhone X. Today’s investment is part of Apple’s commitment to invest $1 billion in U.S.-based companies with its Advanced… Read More
If there are particular conversations on WhatsApp you want to keep on hand, you can do that by pinning them to your chat list. The process differs slightly between iOS and Android, but in both cases it’s a simple two-step process. How to Pin WhatsApp Conversations in iOS In the WhatsApp app, scroll to the conversation you want to pin. Swipe the conversation to the left and tap the pin button. How to Pin WhatsApp Conversations in Android In the WhatsApp app, scroll to the conversation you want to pin. Tap and hold the conversation and then tap the pin icon that appears...
Android TV is taking the world of set-top streaming boxes by storm. The Nvidia Shield has been grabbing all the headlines, but cordcutting enthusiasts are also buying lesser-known Android TV devices in droves. They’re a perfect way to run Kodi on your TV. Once you’ve installed apps on your device and then made icons for all of them, how do you reorder the apps on your home screen? The feature has been available since 2016, and it’s fairly straightforward to use. How to Reorder Apps on Android TV Power up your device and wait until you see the home screen...
Google has officially announced that it is opening an AI center in Beijing, China. The confirmation comes after months of speculation fueled by a major push to hire AI talent inside the country. Google’s search engine is blocked in China, but the company still has hundreds of staff in China which work on its international services. In reference to that workforce, Alphabet chairman… Read More Read Full Article
Coinbase is growing up fast — or at least trying to. As an emblem of its current effort to accommodate the massive demand on its platform, the mainstream U.S. cryptocurrency exchange just added Facebook Vice President of Messaging Products David Marcus to its board of directors. Read More Read Full Article
If you want to make a living creating white supremacist content, you’re probably not going to do it via sites like Kickstarter and Patreon, which prohibit hate speech. Fortunately there’s Hatreon, a hate speech crowdfunding site that, despite having been booted from the web by a couple hosts, is back online and eager to let you back your favorite xenophobe. Read More Read Full Article
Google has launched three brand new photography apps for Android and iOS. They’re all free, they’re all original, and they’re all well worth trying. These three new apps are the first installment of what Google is calling “appsperiments,” which are experimental apps. Smartphone cameras have improved massively over the years, to the point at which they’re good enough for most situations. Add to that the fact they’re always to hand, and make sharing simple, and you can see why most of us don’t even bother with proper cameras these days. What really makes smartphone photography come to life are the...
Startups die by suicide, not competition. It wasn’t that anyone was stealing SoundCloud’s underground rappers, bedroom remixers, and garage bands. SoundCloud stumbled because it neglected these hardcore loyalists as it wrongly strived to usurp Spotify as the streaming home of music’s superstars. But four months ago after laying off 40% of its staff, SoundCloud scored a… Read More
Training a neural network usually involves defining a loss function, which tells the network how close or far it is from its objective. For example, image classification networks are often given a loss function that penalizes them for giving wrong classifications; a network that mislabels a dog picture as a cat will get a high loss. However, not all problems have easily-defined loss functions, especially if they involve human perception, such as image compression or text-to-speech systems. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), a machine learning technique that has led to improvements in a wide range of applications including generating images from text, superresolution, and helping robots learn to grasp, offer a solution. However, GANs introduce new theoretical and software engineering challenges, and it can be difficult to keep up with the rapid pace of GAN research.
A video of a generator improving over time. It begins by producing random noise, and eventually learns to generate MNIST digits.
In order to make GANs easier to experiment with, we’ve open sourced TFGAN, a lightweight library designed to make it easy to train and evaluate GANs. It provides the infrastructure to easily train a GAN, provides well-tested loss and evaluation metrics, and gives easy-to-use examples that highlight the expressiveness and flexibility of TFGAN. We’ve also released a tutorial that includes a high-level API to quickly get a model trained on your data.
This demonstrates the effect of an adversarial loss on image compression. The top row shows image patches from the ImageNet dataset. The middle row shows the results of compressing and uncompressing an image through an image compression neural network trained on a traditional loss. The bottom row shows the results from a network trained with a traditional loss and an adversarial loss. The GAN-loss images are sharper and more detailed, even if they are less like the original.
TFGAN supports experiments in a few important ways. It provides simple function calls that cover the majority of GAN use-cases so you can get a model running on your data in just a few lines of code, but is built in a modular way to cover more exotic GAN designs as well. You can just use the modules you want — loss, evaluation, features, training, etc. are all independent.. TFGAN’s lightweight design also means you can use it alongside other frameworks, or with native TensorFlow code. GAN models written using TFGAN will easily benefit from future infrastructure improvements, and you can select from a large number of already-implemented losses and features without having to rewrite your own. Lastly, the code is well-tested, so you don’t have to worry about numerical or statistical mistakes that are easily made with GAN libraries.
Most neural text-to-speech (TTS) systems produce over-smoothed spectrograms. When applied to the Tacotron TTS system, a GAN can recreate some of the realistic-texture, which reduces artifacts in the resulting audio.
When you use TFGAN, you’ll be using the same infrastructure that many Google researchers use, and you’ll have access to the cutting-edge improvements that we develop with the library. Anyone can contribute to the github repositories, which we hope will facilitate code-sharing among ML researchers and users.
