Apple Music users will now be able to sing along to their favorite songs even if they forget the words. This is thanks to Apple teaming up with Genius—the music encyclopedia and database—to bring song lyrics to the streaming music service.
Music fans are obsessed with song lyrics. It’s why so many song lyric sites exist online. However, with most of us now listening to music through a streaming service, it makes sense to display lyrics in the apps themselves. Cue Apple Music and Genius.
Apple Music Teams Up With Genius
The Apple Music and Genius partnership works both ways. Genius will now provide the lyrics for “thousands of hit songs on the service”. Thus, Apple Music users will be able read along with the lyrics as they listen to their favorite songs.
On the flip side, the Genius website and app now have an embedded Apple Music player. This means (signed in) Apple Music subscribers who visit the Genius website or open the Genius app can listen to the songs without having to open Apple Music.
? GENIUS GETS SMART WITH APPLE MUSIC ?
we’re proud to make @applemusic our first official music player, AND to add the world’s best lyrics to Apple Music’s growing database, providing lyrics to thousands of hit songs ?
more info ? https://t.co/wC1IpYe17Ypic.twitter.com/dhWFAyvGxM
In a post on Genius.com, Ben Gross, Chief Strategy Officer at Genius, said:
“Being able to read lyrics and annotations on Genius while you listen along on Apple Music is a dream Genius experience. We’re proud to make Apple Music our official music player, and we’re doubly excited to bring Genius lyrics to their amazing platform.”
What About Spotify’s Behind the Lyrics?
Interestingly, Genius has an existing partnership with Spotify. This means that for certain songs, you’ll see some of the lyrics and snippets of “Behind the Lyrics” information. It will be interesting to see how Genius’ Apple Music deal affects Spotify moving forward.
Microsoft PowerPoint is the most popular tool to make presentations on a computer. But if you haven’t mastered it, you will need a little help going from a blank page to a stunning slideshow. These free apps and sites will make that happen for you.
Before you jump into any of these, it’s best if you familiarize yourself with the basics of PowerPoint. Our guide will teach you how to use the ribbon or toolbar, how to create slides, add notes, and even how to use templates.
Once you know these basics, you can move on to slightly more advanced PowerPoint principles, like using add-ins to expand its abilities or downloading free templates from other sites.
The Noun Project is a collection of over a million icons and emojis that are available for anyone to use for free. You can even legally use the icons for commercial purposes. And a simple add-in lets you use these in PowerPoint.
It’s simple to install the PowerPoint add-in, after which you can start using it. Start The Noun Project and you’ll see a bunch of icons in the sidebar on the right, Drag and drop as you want, and you can even change the size. All icons also come in nine colors: black, white, and the seven colors of the rainbow.
The free version of The Noun Project add-in gives you access to 100 icons. To access the full library, you’ll need to buy a NounPro account. But that account is valid for more than PowerPoint, and you can use those icons anywhere you want.
You can only use The Noun Project add-in on the Windows and macOS versions of Microsoft PowerPoint. It doesn’t work on Android or iOS.
LiveSlides (Windows, macOS): Embed Any Web Media in Slides
It’s easy to embed a YouTube video in PowerPoint, but Microsoft doesn’t make it as simple to add other types of web-based media. If it’s a tweet or a web page that you want to update live, you’ll need an add-in called LiveSlides.
LiveSlides makes it simple enough for anyone to add a web page by simply copy-pasting the link. It works with a wide variety of sites, including YouTube, Vimeo, Twitter, Poll Everywhere, Google Calendar, Outlook Calendar, Google Maps, Asana, Google Docs, and other popular web apps. And it’s free.
The live nature of the add-in makes it special to embed any media in a PowerPoint slide. You can actually embed your company’s Twitter profile in a presentation, and send a tweet from your phone which auto-updates on the big screen. It also works with websites, in case you want to make changes to the backend and show a client their new web page.
You will need to register to download LiveSlides for Windows or macOS. It also works with Keynote on Mac, but we haven’t tested that.
Microsoft already preloads a bunch of free templates in PowerPoint, but you can always download and add more. Pslides is an excellent repository of different types of templates, most of which are free.
To quickly filter the free ones, click the Free PowerPoint Templates category. There are still about 150 templates of different types. You can get slides to show a beautiful competitive analysis, create Venn diagrams to make your point, or show a simple task planner for how the project will progress.
Load any template into PowerPoint and you can edit it in the usual ways: click the text boxes, change the colors, add or delete items and images, and so on.
Like Pslides, there are plenty of other places to find free PowerPoint templates, so don’t forget to check the site before you spend hours creating your own slides.
Peetch (Windows, macOS): Free, Customizable PowerPoint Templates for Entrepreneurs
Peetch is a deck of slides for developers and entrepreneurs who want to showcase their big idea in the language that venture capitalists understand. You don’t need PowerPoint smarts if you use Peetch.
The 42 slides are divided into intro, problem, your solutions, market, data, team, and roadmap. Each of the slides has excellent fine-tuning abilities so you can match it to your idea. For example, you can create beautiful mock-ups of how your app will look on a phone, tablet, or laptop screen. You can customize the color scheme to your design principles, or add a bunch of data and turn it into stunning graphs.
While the whole idea of Peetch is about entrepreneurs, the slide deck is actually useful for any manager or project leader. The slides are universally useful, so try them out. And if you want a bit more, check other free templates for project presentations.
No matter which add-ins and sites you use, none of those will help if you don’t know how to make a visually memorable presentation. So Visme, one of the best free PowerPoint alternatives, put together a little guide on how to create a good-looking slideshow.
The 120-page guide takes you through a series of steps on how to think visually when you’re creating your project’s plan, the different ways to present the main message, and how to design the slides.
You can download the full guide as a free ebook from Visme, but you’ll need to sign up for the newsletter to get it. Don’t worry, you can immediately save the ebook and then unsubscribe from the newsletter or send it to the trash folder.
With the help of these sites, guides, and add-ins, you should be able to create a gorgeous presentation that wows your audience. But that’s only one part of a successful presentation. You still need to stand up and deliver the whole thing.
Visme’s ebook guide has a few tips to prepare a professional presentation in person, but the one thing you need to remember above all else is to practice it in advance. Don’t wing it. That practice will help you speak at the right pace and know which slides are good or need to be changed.
It’s 8:00 PM on Friday night and you’re home alone and already drunk. Oh, is that just me? Well no matter. Snapchat has made lenses for your cat now. Yes, that’s right. Your cat! This is what the internet is made for, friends. Not all that fake news and trolling. Not having to read tweets where people use words like “woke” unironically. Cat lenses!
But now you can put a set of matching glasses on yourself and your cat.
Or give you and your cat rainbow unicorn horns.
Or give Mr. Fluffypants some big ol’ googley eyes.
Or put a piece of toast over his face, which makes him look even less amused than usual.
What the actual f***
You can even give you and kitty big, fat lips as you kissy face the camera.
You can be the angel, while the cat gets devil horns and wings, as is – of course, appropriate.
I mean, this may or may not solve Snap’s long list of problems, like its rushed redesign, the mess that’s Snapchat Discover, its inability to attract adult users, falling share price, and ooooh, all that money it’s bleeding. ($353M last quarter!)
In a letter addressed to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Senators Mark Warner and Marco Rubio make a very public case that Canada should leave Chinese tech and telecom giant Huawei out of its plans to build a next-generation mobile network.
“While Canada has strong telecommunication security safeguards in place, we have serious concerns that such safeguards are inadequate given what the United States and other allies know about Huawei,” the letter states. The senators warn Canada to “reconsider Huawei’s inclusion in any aspect of Canada’s 5G development, introduction, and maintenance.”
The outcry comes after the head of the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security dismissed security concerns regarding Huawei in comments last month. The Canadian Centre for Cyber Security is Canada’s designated federal agency tasked with cybersecurity.
Next generation 5G networks already pose a number of unique security challenges. Lawmakers caution that by allowing companies linked to the Chinese government to build 5G infrastructure, the U.S. and its close allies (Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the U.K.) would be inviting the fox to guard the henhouse.
As part of the Defense Authorization Act, passed in August, the U.S. government signed off on a law that forbids domestic agencies from using services or hardware made by Huawei and ZTE. A week later, Australia moved to block Huawei and ZTE from its own 5G buildout.
Due to the open nature of intelligence sharing between the U.S. and its closest allies, the Canadian government would be able to obtain knowledge of any specific threats that substantiate the U.S. posture toward the Chinese company. “We urge your government to seek additional information from the U.S. intelligence community,” the letter implores.
In a video that similar to those videos where humans push around ATLAS, researchers at Delft University of Technology have created a system that will let a quadrotor drone keep flying even if one of the propellers is broken.
The video above – which is, arguably, pretty boring – shows the drone fighting against both structural damage and wind and most definitely winning. The fact that it is able to stay airborne under such wild conditions is the real draw here and it’s a fascinating experiment in robust robotics. In other words, this drone routed around damage that would destroy a normal quadcopter.
According to IEEE the system works by adding a multiple subsystems to the drone in order to manage the position and altitude. The system uses the built-in gyro and accelerometer readings to keep itself in the air and lots of processing power to keep it moving forward even as it seems to careen into the wild blue yonder. Further, the system manages motor power to ensure that the propellers aren’t “saturated.”
The researchers, Sihao Sun, Leon Sijbers, Xuerui Wang, and Coen de Visser, presented their paper in Spain last week at IROS 2018.
In April, TechCrunch broke the news that some of Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook messages were deleted from recipients’ inboxes in what some saw as a violation of user trust. Then, Facebook suddenly announced that it would actually build this Unsend functionality for everyone. Then six months went by without a peep about the feature, furthering suspicions that the announcement that it would release an Unsend button was merely a PR driven response to the scandal.
Late last week, TechCrunch asked Facebook about its progress on Unsend, and the company told us “Though we have nothing to announce today, we have previously confirmed that we intend to ship a feature like this and are still planning to do so.”
Now we have our first look at the feature thanks to TechCrunch’s favorite tipster Jane Manchun Wong. She’s managed to generate screenshots of a prototype Unsend button from Facebook Messenger’s Android code. Currently, you can only delete messages from your own inbox — they still remain in the recipients’ inbox. But with this Unsend feature, you’ll be able to remove a message from both sides of a conversation. However, the code indicates that in the current prototype there’s a “time limit”. That may mean users would only have a certain amount of time after they send a message to unsend it. That would essentially be an editing window in which users could take back what they said.
In response, a spokesperson confirmed that “Facebook internally tests products and features before they ship to the public so we can ensure the quality of the experience.”
The Unsend feature could be useful to people who say something stupid or inappropriate, disclose a secret they shouldn’t have, or want to erase evidence of their misdeeds. That could make users more comfortable speaking freely on the app, since they know they can retract their texts. Snapchat’s messages self-destruct unless purposefully saved to the thread by a user, permitting more off-the-cuff chatting.
But Unsend could also open vectors for abuse, as users could harass people over Messenger and then delete the evidence. Facebook will need to ensure that Unsend doesn’t accidentally become a weapon for bullies. That might mean allowing users to turn off the ability for their conversation partners to Unsend messages on a thread by thread basis, and/or a report button specifically for flagging messages that have since been retracted.
Facebook’s acquisition Instagram already lets users Unsend messages. But that chat product is more designed for having fun, discussing memes, and sharing photos with close friends. Messenger has positioned itself as a core communications utility for the world. Messing with the permanence of messages could make it feel less reliable or truthful to some users. When we talk in person, our conversations aren’t written in stone forever…but there’s also no way to force someone to forget what you said.
Scroll down to the section “Is my Facebook account impacted by this security issue?”
Here you’ll see a Yes or No answer to whether your account was one of the 30 million users impacted
If Yes, you’ll be in one of three categories:
A. You’re in the 15 million users’ whose name plus email and/or phone number was accessed.
B. You’re in the 14 million users’ who had that data plus account bio data accessed including “username, gender, locale/language, relationship status, religion, hometown, self-reported current city, birthdate, device types used to access Facebook, education, work, the last 10 places they checked into or were tagged in, website, people or Pages they follow, and the 15 most recent searches”.
C. You’re in the 1 million users whose access token was stolen but your account was never actually accessed with it.
So what should you do if you were hacked?
You don’t necessarily have to change your Facebook password or credit card info as there’s no evidence that data was accessed in the attack
Watch out for spam or scam calls, emails, or messages as your contact info could have been sold to unscrupulous businesses
Be on alert for phishing attempts that may try to email you and get you to sign in to one of your online accounts on a fake page that will steal your data. If you get a suspicious email that looks like it’s from Facebook, you can check here to see if it’s legitimate
If you’re in group B who had their bio info accessed, you may want to contact your bank or cell phone provider and add additional security layers such as a pincode since hackers may have enough biographical info to perform social engineering attacks where they pretend to be you and use stolen data to answer security questions and gain access.
