Not far from Tel Aviv a drone flies low over a gritty landscape of warehouses and broken pavement. It slowly approaches its home – a refrigerator-sized box inside a mesh fence, and hovers, preparing to dock. It descends like some giant bug, whining all the way, and disappears into its base where it will be cleaned, recharged, and sent back out into the air. This drone is doing the nearly impossible: it’s flying and landing autonomously and can fly again and again without human intervention and it’s doing it all inside a self-contained unit that is one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a long time.
The company that makes the drone, Airobotics, invited us into their headquarters to see their products in action. In this video we talk with the company about how the drones work, how their clients use the drones for mapping and surveillance in hard-to-reach parts of the world, and the future of drone autonomy. It’s a fascinating look into technology that will soon be appearing in jungles, deserts, and war zones near you.
Need to resize a video for IGTV? Add subtitles for Twitter? Throw in sound effects for YouTube? Or collage it with other clips for the Instagram feed? Kapwing lets you do all that and more for free from a mobile browser or website. This scrappy new startup is building the vertical video era’s creative suite full of editing tools for every occasion.
Pronounced “Ka-pwing,” like the sound of a ricocheted bullet, the company was founded by two former Google Image Search staffers. Now after six months of quiet bootstrapping, it’s announcing a $1.7 million seed round led by Kleiner Perkins.
Kapwing hopes to rapidly adapt to shifting memescape and its fragmented media formats, seizing on opportunities like creators needing to turn their long-form landscape videos vertical for Instagram’s recently launched IGTV. The free version slaps a Kapwing.com watermark on all its exports for virality, but users can pay $20 a month to remove it.
While sites like Imgur and Imgflip offer lightweight tools for static memes and GIFs, “the tools and community for doing that for video are kinda inaccessible,” says co-founder and CEO Julia Enthoven. “You have something you install on your computer with fancy hardware. You should able to create and riff off of people,” even if you just have your phone, she tells me. Indeed, 100,000 users are already getting crafty with Kapwing.
“We want to make these really relevant trending formats so anyone can jump in,” Enthoven declares. “Down the line, we want to make a destination for consuming that content.”
Kapwing co-founders Eric Lu and Julia Enthoven
Enthoven and Eric Lu both worked at Google Image Search in the lauded Associate Product Manager (APM) program that’s minted many future founders for companies like Quip, Asana and Polyvore. But after two years, they noticed a big gap in the creative ecosystem. Enthoven explains that “The idea came from using outdated tools for making the types of videos people want to make for social media — short-form, snackable video you record with your phone. It’s so difficult to make those kinds of videos in today’s editors.”
So the pair of 25-year-olds left in September to start Kapwing. They named it after their favorite sound effect from the Calvin & Hobbes comics when the make-believe tiger would deflect toy gunshots from his best pal. “It’s an onomatopoeia, and that’s sort of cool because video is all about movement and sound.”
After starting with a meme editor for slapping text above and below images, Kapwing saw a sudden growth spurt as creators raced to convert landscape videos for vertical IGTV. Now it has a wide range of tools, with more planned.
The current selection includes:
Meme Maker
Subtitles
Multi-Video Montage Maker
Video Collage
Video Filters
Image To Video Converter
Add Overlaid Text To Video
Add Music To Video With MP3 Uploads
Resize Video
Reverse Video
Loop Video
Trim Video
Mute Video
Stop Motion Maker
Sound Effects Maker
Kapwing definitely has some annoying shortcomings. There’s an 80mb limit on uploads, so don’t expect to be messing with much 4K videos or especially long clips. You can’t subtitle a GIF, and the meme maker flipped vertical photos sideways without warning. It also lacks some of the slick tools that Snapchat has developed, like a magic eraser for Photoshopping stuff out and a background changer.
The No. 1 thing it needs is a selective cropping tool. Instead of letting you manually move the vertical frame around inside a landscape video so you always catch the action, it just grabs the center. That left me staring at blank space between myself and an interview subject when I uploaded this burger robot startup video. It’s something apps like RotateNFlip and Flixup already offer.
Beyond meme-loving teens and semi-pro creators, Kapwing has found an audience amongst school teachers. The simplicity and onscreen instructions make it well-suited for young students, and it works on Chromebooks because there’s no need to download software.
The paid version has found some traction with content marketers and sponsored creators who don’t want a distracting watermark included. That business model is always in danger of encroachment from free tools, though, so Kapwing hopes to also become a place to view the meme content it exports. That network model is more defensible if it gains a big enough audience, and could be monetized with ads. Though it will put it in competition with Imgur, Reddit and the big dogs like Instagram.
“We aspire to become a hub for consumption,” Enthoven concluded. “Consume, get an idea, and share with each other.”
Years ago, in the heyday of home video, I played a boardgames that used VHS tapes and electronic parts to help spur the action along. From Candy Land VCR to Captain Power, game makers were doing the best they could with a new technology. Now, thanks to Alexa, they can try something even cooler – board games that talk back.
The first company to try this is Voice Originals. Their new game, When In Rome, is a family board game that pits two teams against each other in a race to travel the world. The game itself consists of a board and a few colored pieces and the real magic comes from Alexa. You start the game by enabling the When In Rome skill and then you start the game. Alexa then prompts you with questions as you tool around the board.
The rules are simple because Alexa does most of the work. The game describes how to set up the board and gets you started and then you just trigger with your voice it as you play.
The company’s first game, Beasts of Balance, was another clever hybrid of AR and real life board game action. Both games are a bit gimmicky and a bit high tech – you won’t be able to play these in a cozy beach house without Internet, for example – but it’s a fun departure from the norm.
Like the VCR games of yore, When In Rome depends on a new technology to find a new way to have fun. It’s a clever addition to the standard board game fare and our family had a good time playing it. While it’s not as timeless as a bit of Connect 4 or Risk, it’s a great addition to the boardgames shelf and a cool use of voice technology in gaming.
Posted by Viren Jain, Research Scientist and Technical Lead and Michal Januszewski, Software Engineer, Connectomics at Google
The field of connectomics aims to comprehensively map the structure of the neuronal networks that are found in the nervous system, in order to better understand how the brain works. This process requires imaging brain tissue in 3D at nanometer resolution (typically using electron microscopy), and then analyzing the resulting image data to trace the brain’s neurites and identify individual synaptic connections. Due to the high resolution of the imaging, even a cubic millimeter of brain tissue can generate over 1,000 terabytes of data! When combined with the fact that the structures in these images can be extraordinarily subtle and complex, the primary bottleneck in brain mapping has been automating the interpretation of these data, rather than acquisition of the data itself.
3D Image Segmentation with Flood-Filling Networks
Tracing neurites in large-scale electron microscopy data is an example of an image segmentation problem. Traditional algorithms have divided the process into at least two steps: finding boundaries between neurites using an edge detector or a machine-learning classifier, and then grouping together image pixels that are not separated by a boundary using an algorithm like watershed or graph cut. In 2015, we began experimenting with an alternative approach based on recurrent neural networks that unifies these two steps. The algorithm is seeded at a specific pixel location and then iteratively “fills” a region using a recurrent convolutional neural network that predicts which pixels are part of the same object as the seed. Since 2015, we have been working to apply this new approach to large-scale connectomics datasets and rigorously quantify its accuracy.
A flood-filling network segmenting an object in 2d. The yellow dot is the center of the current area of focus; the algorithm expands the segmented region (blue) as it iteratively examines more of the overall image.
Measuring Accuracy via Expected Run Length
Working with our partners at the Max Planck Institute, we devised a metric we call “expected run length” (ERL) that measures the following: given a random point within a random neuron in a 3d image of a brain, how far can we trace the neuron before making some kind of mistake? This is an example of a mean-time-between-failure metric, except that in this case we measure the amount of space between failures rather than the amount of time. For engineers, the appeal of ERL is that it relates a linear, physical path length to the frequency of individual mistakes that are made by an algorithm, and that it can be computed in a straightforward way. For biologists, the appeal is that a particular numerical value of ERL can be related to biologically relevant quantities, such as the average path length of neurons in different parts of the nervous system.
Progress in expected run length (blue line) leading up to the results shared today in Nature Methods. The red line shows progress in the “merge rate,” which measures the frequency with which two separate neurites were erroneously traced as a single object; achieving a very low merge rate is important for enabling efficient strategies for manual identification and correction of the remaining errors in the reconstruction.
Our algorithm in action as it traces a single neurite in 3d in a songbird brain.
We segmented every neuron in a small portion of a zebra finch song-bird brain using the new flood-filling network approach, as depicted here:
Reconstruction of a portion of zebra finch brain. Colors denote distinct objects in the segmentation that was automatically generated using a flood-filling network. Gold spheres represent synaptic locations automatically identified using a previously published approach.
By combining these automated results with a small amount of additional human effort required to fix the remaining errors, our collaborators at the Max Planck Institute are now able to study the songbird connectome to derive new insights into how zebra finch birds sing their song and test theories related to how they learn their song.
Next Steps
We will continue to improve connectomics reconstruction technology, with the aim of fully automating synapse-resolution connectomics and contributing to ongoing connectomics projects at the Max Planck Institute and elsewhere. In order to help support the larger research community in developing connectomics techniques, we have also open-sourced the TensorFlow code for the flood-filling network approach, along with WebGL visualization software for 3d datasets that we developed to help us understand and improve our reconstruction results.
Acknowledgements We would like to acknowledge core contributions from Tim Blakely, Peter Li, Larry Lindsey, Jeremy Maitin-Shepard, Art Pope and Mike Tyka (Google), as well as Joergen Kornfeld and Winfried Denk (Max Planck Institute).
A good playlist can enhance any moment of your life. Whether you’re going wild at a party with friends, feeling awful over a breakup, or just trying to focus on work, listening to the right music can make all the difference.
You can always assemble your own playlists, but that takes time. If you use Spotify, why not jump into the thousands of ready-made playlists put together by Spotify and other users?
We have compiled a list of the best Spotify playlists to soundtrack your summer.
1. Summer Party
Perfect for: When you want to enjoy summer without any fuss.
We start with one of Spotify’s official playlists for summer. As you can guess by the name, it’s full of music perfect for any gathering. It’s a pop-heavy list, with the summer’s newest hits and some old favorites.
2. United States Top 50
Perfect for: Keeping up with what’s hot, or finding out what that song was you heard at the pool.
Here are the hits—this playlist collects the 50 most popular tracks in the United States right now. This is a great way to see what’s hot this summer, as long as you don’t mind pop and contemporary R&B.
Since it’s an official Spotify playlist, you’ll see blue dots next to new tracks and green/red arrows to show how a track’s popularity has recently changed. Spotify also has the top 50 playlists for other countries if you want to discover music from around the world, too.
3. New Music Friday
Perfect for: Catching up on the latest tracks right away.
Do you feel like you need to find more music on Spotify? A good cure for that is this playlist of the week’s best music. It’s updated every Friday to bring you a fresh batch of tunes. If you don’t like the music here, check out your personal Release Radar playlist, which contains music just for you.
4. Summer Acoustic
Perfect for: Lazing around on summer nights or falling asleep on the beach.
While summer lends itself well to beats, it has its quiet moments too. When you need to chill out a bit, give this playlist a try. It has plenty of calm music for those introspective summer moments.
5. Poolside Disco
Perfect for: Dancing into the night.
This playlist is bursting with funky vibes. Mixing some soul in with disco and funk, Poolside Disco brings the energy to any gathering. It would make great background music to a high-energy party, but we won’t tell anyone if you decide to dance like a madman either.
6. Driving Rock Anthems
Perfect for: Cruising along the highway with the top down.
Whether you’re taking the convertible out for a spin or on the way to vacation, you need some driving music. This playlist packs classic rock favorites from Toto, Queen, Tom Petty, and more than you can’t help but sing along with.
7. Summer Throwbacks
Perfect for: Reminiscing of days gone past, or singing along to old favorites with friends.
Want to flash back to the music that made summers gone by so special? Give this playlist a try. Music has a way of transporting you back to the past in a moment, and this is the perfect way to recall your favorite moments from last year or last decade.
This is a genre you might not be familiar with, but it’s perfect for summer. Synthwave is a modern electronic music genre that’s “the musical manifestation of a vintage postcard that says ‘Come to L.A.’ in pink letters above an image of a crowded beach with people on surfboards and roller skates,” according to Synthwave review website Iron Skullet.
Perfect for: Long days spent at the pool, or when you’re feeling a little rebellious.
Pop punk is a perfect genre for summer. There’s something about the power chords of these ’90s and ’00s songs that screams long summer days off from school, being nervous around girls, and jumping into the pool. It’s not the most technically amazing music, but it’s certainly catchy.
10. Country Gold
Perfect for: Long drives to nowhere in particular, or cookouts.
If you love country, then integrate it into your summer with these smash hits. It makes perfect music for enjoying your favorite summer foods, or just relaxing with friends.
11. Beach Music
Perfect for: Basking in the glorious sun as you listen to the ocean.
Headed to the beach this summer? Make sure to take this playlist along. Whether you’re playing volleyball or just soaking up the sun, these tunes are a perfect fit.
12. Timeless Love Songs
Perfect for: Spending time with your sweetheart.
If love is in the air for you this summer, this playlist can provide the perfect soundtrack. Valentine’s Day may be behind us, but that’s no reason to ignore love. Whether you’re kindling a new relationship or celebrating decades with your beloved, these songs should bring out the romantic in you.
13. Pop 4 Kids
Perfect for: Enjoying some time with your kids.
Finding yourself with bored children this summer? Take advantage of the extra time you have while they’re off school with this playlist. It features lots of kid-friendly pop songs that you can have a blast singing along with.
14. Dinner With Friends
Perfect for: Hosting a dinner party, or when you need some easy background music.
This laid-back playlist can set the mood for having friends over this summer. It makes for good background music as you get through other days, too.
15. Have a Great Day!
Perfect for: An instant good mood, or keeping the energy while you tackle summer chores.
Summer is a happy time. If you’re not feeling it, try this playlist for a quick boost. It’s not specifically summer-themed, but should get you smiling again on those less-than-amazing summer days.
The Best Spotify Playlists for Summer
These playlists are a great starting place for your summer soundtrack. They’re just a few of the thousands of playlists available on Spotify, so if you prefer another genre you’re sure to find one you like. Whatever you choose to listen to this summer, enjoy it!
Instagram is one of the most popular social networks in the world. Since Facebook purchased the platform in 2012, its growth has been explosive, creating a new industry in the process; the Instagrammer.
With almost a seventh of the entire world’s population now using the platform, standing out from the crowd can be tough. Despite Instagram’s switch to an algorithmic feed, one of the best ways to get noticed is by increasing your follower count.
Instagram’s inbuilt tools for managing and growing your followers are limited. Could the Instagram marketing tool Combin be the solution?
Explosive Growth (And Fake Followers)
If you’ve been on Instagram for any length of time, then you’ll have had at least a few fake followers. Often their goal is to market a service (or to make you buy fake Ray-Ban sunglasses) by getting you to click through on the link in their bio.
These are easy enough to spot, along with the “click-here-for-free-followers” accounts too. Some people choose to use tools which will mass follow people indiscriminately, which is how my account came to be followed by a veterinary practice on the other side of the world.
There’s good reason to increase your followers on Instagram, as so-called good followers are seen as a measure of your influence. If you have 1,000 followers, but only ten ever interact with your account, it’ll be hard to convince advertisers or brands to partner with you. So then, what you need is large numbers of high-quality followers, who share the same interests.
What Is Combin?
Despite being one of the world’s most popular social networks, with hundreds of thousands using it professionally, Instagram’s follower management tools are almost non-existent. The Instagram marketing tool Combin addressed this shortcoming by developing an easy-to-use set of tools to organically boost your following.
The Combin app — available for Linux, macOS, and Windows — brings together these tools for cross-platform Instagram management. Now, this isn’t an Instagram app — there’s no feed for example — but it will enhance your experience, and help you gain credibility and influence on the photo-sharing network.
Key Features
Combin offers free and premium accounts, with many features available across both account types. The current range of tools is focused on growing your followers list and fostering relationships with your most loyal followers.
In May 2018 Combin announced its commitment to new features including post scheduling, messaging, location search, statistics dashboard, and auto-tasks.
Hashtag Search
Across all social networks, hashtags are the best way to follow topics and trends that interest you. In recent years, Instagram has rolled out the ability to follow hashtags in your feed and even add them to your profile bio. This is great if you want to add relevant content to your feed, but Combin’s hashtag search allows you to follow and interact with users who share your interests.
Hashtag searches are saved in the Search tab so you can revisit them at a later date. The search options allow you to specify a time-frame for posts to help you interact in a timely fashion. You can even search by location, allowing you to filter just posts as local, or remote, as you wish. Free accounts are limited to 50 results per search, while premium accounts can access up to 500.
Combin helps you interact with whichever posts you choose by adding comments on your behalf. Some Instagram tools post generic remarks to thousands of posts all at once, inadvertently marking your account as spam. Combin doesn’t fall victim to this trap. Select the posts, click the comment icon, and you can write multiple custom comments that’ll be applied randomly across the posts.
User Search
Instagram’s Discover tab is a great way to find new accounts to follow, but it is based on an algorithm that you can’t control. Using Instagram’s inbuilt features means that you can’t perform follow or unfollow actions in bulk. That’s where Combin comes in. The user search feature lets you find followers based on the account they follow; your own or someone else’s.
A sure-fire way of gaining new and engaged followers is to find users who are already interested in similar accounts. Enter the target account’s username, and Combin will return a list of their followers. If the account you want to search has thousands or even millions of followers, additional options allow you to find your best potential users.
You can also search via location, which is a highly desirable feature for finding people on Instagram. It lets you make sure you’re only finding people who reside in an area that’s useful for your business.
Selecting the “Analyze users when searching” option turns on Combin’s machine learning algorithm to identify and prioritize the accounts most likely to become loyal followers.
Follower Management
Gaining new followers is great, but not if it comes at the expense of your existing users. Fortunately, you can use Combin’s user search tool to your advantage here, too. Creating a new user search with your account as the target will return results for your followers.
If you enable the machine learning option in the search settings, then your most likely loyal followers will be prioritized. You can then use Combin’s like and comment tools to interact with these people.
Spam Protection
To protect the community from spam, Instagram limits the number of comments and likes from any one account. This isn’t a hard limit though. It is based on factors like account age, number of followers, and average activity. Combin sets hard limits on activity to protect your account from being mistakenly labeled as spam.
The daily rate is set to 1,500 likes, 1,500 comments, and 1,500 follows — although this is lower for free accounts. Unfinished tasks are stored for later if Instagram limits your activity.
Security
Third-party apps caused the recent troubles at Facebook over the Cambridge Analytica scandal. They accessed Facebook accounts and illicitly stored personal information. So it’s understandable that you may worry about the safety of a third party app like Combin.
Its Privacy Policy shows that the company operates within the recently implemented European GDPR regulations, widely considered some of the strongest consumer-focused data regulations in the world. The app doesn’t use Instagram’s OAuth login, but the company did confirm via email that login details are not stored on third party servers.
Pricing
Combin is available in three price tiers; Free, Personal, and Business. Free accounts currently have access to the same features as the premium ones, but are limited on the number of actions they can perform. Only 50 results are available in search. Free accounts won’t get pending new features.
Personal accounts cost $10 per month (an annual payment tier is “coming soon”) and increase the daily action limits up to 1,500. Searches are expanded to 500 results, with the ability to refresh the search to bring up new results.
Once messaging and auto-tasks are launched, these accounts will get access. Business accounts are $30 per month and include everything from the Personal level, adding support for up to five Instagram accounts and the statistics dashboard when launched.
Is Combin The Instagram Tool For You?
Before Instagram introduced the algorithmic feed, gaining new followers and interacting with other users was a much more straightfoward affair. These days, your content and profile may end up hidden from potential followers with no recourse.
Combin’s Instagram tools are built to help you overcome this setback. User and hashtag searches allow you to be proactive. This means reaching out to potential new followers rather than waiting for Instagram to recommend your account to them.
Where similar tools fail though is by falling foul of Instagram’s spam detection. Combin’s action limits aim to protect your account while helping you interact with as many people as possible.
With a range of new features on the horizon to supplement their existing tools, Combin looks set to become a go-to Instagram management app.
Despite significant improvements over the last couple of years, Windows is still prone to throwing out the occasional error code.
We’ve previously looked at how to fix the critical process died stop code (error code 0x000000EF); now it’s time to investigate error code 0x800F081F. Keep reading to find out what causes it and how you can resolve the issue.
What Causes Error Code 0x800F081F?
Error code 0x800F081F is one of four possible error codes that all point to the same underlying issue. The other three are error code 0x800F0906, error code 0x800F0907, and error code 0x800F0922.
Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 incompatibilities cause all the error codes. Typically, they will occur when you enable the .NET Framework using either the installation wizard, the Deployment Image Servicing and Management (DISM) tool, or Windows PowerShell commands.
You will only see the codes on Windows 10, Windows Server 2016, Windows Server version 1709, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows 8, and Windows Server 2012. On those operating systems, Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 is a “Feature on Demand” (i.e. it is not enabled by default).
When you turn on the feature, Windows Update tries to grab .NET binaries along with other necessary files. If your computer is not correctly configured, you might see the codes.
0x800F081F: Windows could not find the .NET source files for the installation to proceed.
0x800F0906: Windows either could not download the .NET source files, could not connect to the internet, or could not install a role, role service, or feature.
0x800F0907: Either the DISM tool failed, or your network policy settings prevented Windows from connecting to the web.
0x800F0922: The processing of .NET advanced installers or generic commands failed.
How to Fix Error Codes 0x800F081F, 0x800F0906, 0x800F0907, or 0x800F0922 on Windows 10
Thankfully, the methodology for fixing the first three error codes is the same. There are two approaches you can try. For error code 0x800F0922, you need to jump straight to method two.
Method 1: Configure Your Group Policy
It’s possible that your group policy is affecting Windows ability to activate the installation.
Note: Natively, the Group Policy Editor is only available in Windows 10 Pro, Enterprise, and Education. Thankfully, there’s a workaround. You can follow our guide to accessing the Group Policy Editor on Windows 10 Home.
To start, press Windows + R to bring up the Run dialogue. Next, type gpedit.msc and hit Enter. The command will open the Group Policy Editor window.
Once the editor is on your screen, use the left-hand panel to navigate to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > System.
Move your attention to the right-hand panel. Scroll down until you find the entry labeled Specify settings for optional component installation and component repair. You will find it underneath the folders you see at the top of the list.
Double link on the entry to open the Settings window. Finally, in the top left-hand corner, mark the checkbox next to Enabled and click OK.
Method 2: Enable the .NET Framework Using a DISM Command
Note: This is the only method that will fix error code 0x800F0922.
The second approach requires you to use a DISM command to enable the .NET Framework. Don’t worry; it’s not as complicated as it sounds. Follow our guide, and you will be fine.
Before starting on the main process, you will first need to make sure you have an ISO image of Windows 10 handy. The ISO’s version must exactly match your current operating system.
Once the download has finished, run the tool and click on Create installation media for another PC. On the next screen, choose your language and system architecture, then select ISO file to begin the creation process. Burn the ISO file onto a DVD before continuing.
Ready? Now we can begin to fix the error code.
To start, you need to mount your freshly created ISO image. Open File Explorer and double-click on the file. It should mount automatically. Alternatively, you can right-click on the file and select Mount from the context menu.
If the process was successful, you will see the ISO in a virtual drive in the left-hand panel of the window. Make a note of the drive’s letter.
Note: To unmount the image, right-click on the virtual drive in This PC and choose Eject.
Once the image is mounted, open the Start menu and type cmd. When you see the list of results, right-click on Command Prompt and select Run as administrator.
On the command line, type ism /online /enable-feature /featurename:NetFx3 /All /Source:[Drive]:\sources\sxs /LimitAccess. Replace [Drive] with the drive letter you made a note of previously, and make sure you leave spaces in the correct places. When you’re ready, press Enter.
Try to Reinstall Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5
After you’ve successfully navigated the instructions, it’s time to install .NET Framework 3.5 and see the error code 0x800F081F (or one of its associated error codes) has gone away.
Open the Settings app and go to Apps > Apps and Features. Scroll down to Related Settings and click on Programs and Features. Next, in the new window, click on Turn Windows features on or off in the upper left-hand corner.
Finally, mark the checkbox next to .NET Framework 3.5 (includes .NET 2.0 and 3.0) and click on OK. The installation process will take a few minutes to complete, depending on the speed of your connection.
Did it work? Great, you’ve beaten error code 0x800F081F.
How to Fix Error Code 0x800F081F: A Summary
To fix error code 0x800F0922 on Windows 10:
Open the Group Policy Editor.
Go to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > System.
Double-Click on Specify settings for optional component installation and component repair.
Select Enable.
If that doesn’t work, follow these instructions instead.
Create and mount a Windows 10 ISO image.
Open Command Prompt as an administrator.
Type ism /online /enable-feature /featurename:NetFx3 /All /Source:[Drive]:\sources\sxs /LimitAccess (replacing [Drive] with the appropriate letter).
Uber is aiming to perfect the art of the pick-up with three features it says minimize cancellations. Guaranteed pickup windows boost confidence that you’ll make your flight, and give you a credit of up to $10 if your scheduled ride is late. Pre-written messages let drivers and riders let each other know they’ll “Be right there” or “I’ve arrived” with a single tap.
And most flashily, three years after I suggested Uber let you hold up a colored screen so your driver could find you amidst a crowd of hailers, it’s introducing Spotlight. Each driver gets assigned a semi-unique color gradient to look for. Hit the Spotlight button, that color takes over your screen, and you can wave it to help your driver locate you.
These optimizations show the depths Uber is willing to go to shave seconds off of pickups. That can reduce unpaid waiting time for drivers while boosting the number of rides they complete per hour for the startup. And the peace of mind that they’ll be able to hop in right when they’re ready could lure riders away from competitors as Uber dukes it out across the globe. The updates are rolling out on iOS and Android in the US and Canada today.
“Human-to-human interaction is hard. Driver initiated cancellations after the driver has arrived at the pickup point are particularly stressful” Uber sr. product manager for rider experience Ryan Yu tells me. But in tests of the new quick messages features, “We found cancellations on both sides reduced significantly, especially for drivers after they’ve arrived.”
We can only hope this level of attention to detail will be applied to optimizing its internal company culture — a hope shaken by this month’s resignation of Uber’s head of HR Liane Hornsey after a probe into how she handled racial discrimination at the company, and the NYT’s report of insensitivity complaints about COO Barney Harford.
Uber has been steadily adding little improvements to the pickup process over the years. Here’s a quick, abridged list:
Incentivizing drivers to wait instead of cancelling by starting the meter after waiting at the pickup spot for more than 2 minutes.
Live location sharing so riders can optionally let drivers see where they are as they seek the vehicle
Suggested pickup spots nearby where drivers can safely pull over, and avoid them looping around one way streets
Sequential pickups so you’re assigned the nearest driver, even if they’re still finishing their previous ride
Pick up location changing so you can choose a different spot nearby if you got the address wrong or are on the other side of the building
There are three upgrades in particular that serve as the foundation for today’s updates.
In-app chat between riders and drivers makes it so you don’t have to use SMS. Uber could only anonymize your number in some markets, creating privacy concerns, and SMS could be cost prohibitive in some parts of the world. Uber messaging launched in mid-2017, and could be read aloud to the driver and replied to with a thumbs-up emoji to reduce the chance of distracted driving. Lyft still uses SMS for comparison.
Now both users and drivers will see the most common messages pre-written and sendable with the touch of a button so they don’t have to type. “Drivers noted that they were more reassured when their rider actually sent them a message” said Yu, which can keep them from cancelling if the rider needs a little more time to get to the pick up spot. I asked if automatic translation would be available here, so if driver in Brazil sent an American user “eu cheguei”, it’d show up as “I have arrived”. Yu told me “Translations are on the roadmap. We’re figuring out how to best pair them alongside voice.”
Uber added scheduled ridesin mid-2016 shortly after Lyft did the same. You can plan a ride up to 30 days in advance, but you’re still subject to surge pricing in the moment. At least now you’ll get $10 credit if the driver is late. But unfortunately, the pickup window Uber showed me in the demo was 15 minutes, though Yu said it may very be region. I sometimes only make my flights by 10 minutes, and since my pickup ETA in San Francisco is typically only 3 to 5 minutes, I’m probably better off just booking the ride when I’m ready.
Uber’s Beacon and Lyft’s Amp are color-coded dashboard lights that help riders find their driver
Back in 2015, I suggested that “Uber could offer some signal on the driver or passenger’s phone to help them find each other”. A week later it announced it would start testing Spot, which let users pick a color that would light up on an LED bar installed on driver’s windshields. In November 2016, Lyft launched its Amp dashboard light that assigned a random color riders could look out for. A month later, Uber’s Spot had evolved into the dashboard Beacon light that lets users pick the color.
Today’s update gives riders a light too, which is great if you’re one of dozens of people waiting outside a concert or sports game trying to find their Uber. Hit the Spotlight button, and you’ll get instructions to wave your colored screen in the air. Drivers are permanently assigned a color that stays constant across trips so they can train themselves to look out for it.
“Spotlight is meant to supplement beacon. Not all drivers will have a bacon, and we want to pass that to two-way communication” says Yu. But since the Beacon dashboard lights are always visible, Uber says that if a driver has one, users won’t see the Spotlight option and will instead just be able to choose the Beacon’s color.
Together, these features should eliminate most pickup problems. We’ll see if Uber’s competitors and international partners like Didi adopt them too. After retreating from markets like China in exchange for a percentage of ownership of the local leader, there’s more pressure on Uber to squash its homeland competitor Lyft, which has been gaining market share. Yet neither has offered an oft-requested feature some users would even be willing to pay an extra dollar for: a ‘quiet ride’ where the driver doesn’t make small talk.
Roku is getting into the speaker business with today’s announcement of Roku TV Wireless Speakers.
Mark Ely, the company’s vice president of product management, said Roku is trying to address a growing consumer problem — the fact that as TVs get thinner, you end up buying “this beautiful TV, but it sounds bad.” To address this, you may end up purchasing a soundbar or creating a more elaborate home theater setup, but Ely argued that many consumers find this process confusing and intimidating.
So as the name suggests, Roku has created wireless speakers specifically for Roku TVs, the company’s lineup of partner-built smart TVs. Ely described them as speakers that deliver “really premium sound in a really compact package,” and at an affordable price. (They’re about seven inches tall and weigh four pounds each, he said.)
Roku says it should be easy to pair these speakers wirelessly with a Roku TV using Roku Connect, and since the company controls both the video and audio experience, it can ensure that they’re sync’d up perfectly, without lag. To minimize those moments when you’re frantically reaching for the remote to adjust the volume, the speakers also come with Automatic Volume Leveling to lower the sound in particularly loud scenes and boost the sounds when it gets too quiet.
“Our fundamental belief here is that by delivering a better sound experience, you get a better entertainment streaming experience,” he added.
The speakers will also come with a new remote called the Roku Touch, which is designed to emphasize voice controls without fully giving up the benefits of a regular remote — you can press-and-hold to deliver voice commands, but it still has buttons for playback control and others that you can preset.
Smart speakers from big tech companies like Apple and Amazon are seen as one main ways to get into the voice-powered home assistant market. Roku has its own voice assistant (which it’s making available to manufacturing partners), but Ely and VP of Consumer PR Seana Norvell said it’s really focused on understanding your entertainment needs — rather than, say, telling you the weather or helping you order products online.
While Roku says the speakers will ship in late October at a price of $199.99, they’re available for pre-order now, with pricing at $149.99 until July 23, and then $179.99 until October 15.
Ely said the company is only selling the speakers from the Roku website, at least initially, because that allows it to “market directly to Roku TV customers” while ensuring that other Roku customers (namely, those who have a Roku streaming device but not a Roku TV) don’t end up buying these speakers, which won’t work for them.
It is inevitable that a great shot gets marred with camera shake. That’s why you should always take multiple shots of the same scene. But if you forgot this basic rule of photography, then Adobe Photoshop CC is here to lend a hand with its Camera Shake filter.
How to Fix Camera Shake With a Photoshop Filter
The Camera Shake Reduction command is a special filter in Adobe Photoshop’s Filter gallery that can reduce the blurriness in any image. Blurred images can be caused by slow shutter speeds, long focal lengths, or unsteady hands.
The filter uses intelligent extrapolation to detect the path of the blur and sharpen the image at those points. The filter’s interface also allows you to control the sharpening for different areas of the image and override Photoshop’s own auto-analysis.
Open the blurred image in Adobe Photoshop.
Go to Filter > Sharpen > Shake Reduction.
Photoshop automatically de-blurs the image and displays the preview in the Shake Reduction dialog box.
The Shake Reduction dialog box gives you advanced controls to fine-tune the blue reduction as Photoshop’s automatic detection may introduce unwanted artifacts or ghosting in the image.
Photoshop places a selection rectangle on a region where it things the pixels have moved the most. You can resize and re-position the box around the image to and create additional areas with the Blue Estimation tool for Photoshop to focus on. Each area selected helps Photoshop create “blue traces” and apply the filter.
Use the advanced control sliders to control the blur correction. You can change the area used to trace the blur with the Blur Trace Bounds slider. You can also increase the Smoothness and Artifact Suppression by moving the sliders to the right.
It is important to check the Preview and select Artifact Suppression as high settings will introduce blockiness in the image. The Adobe Support site has a detailed walkthrough on how to use the different Shake Reduction commands at your disposal.
It can be a painstaking process, so do your best to take noise-free photos in the first place so you don’t need to fix them in Photoshop.
Some people—for whatever reason—are still using Windows 7. If you own a computer running Windows 7 and would like to start afresh with a clean operating system, you’ll need a copy of the necessary installation files.
Keep reading to find out how you can legally download and install Windows 7 OEM.
What Is Windows 7 OEM?
If Windows 7 came pre-installed on your machine when you bought it, you probably didn’t get a copy of the Windows 7 installation DVD. Instead, you received a 25-digit OEM product key. (OEM stands for Original Equipment Manufacturer.)
Using the product key, you can reinstall a clean copy of Windows 7, free of all the bloatware and spyware some manufacturers have packed in.
How to Download Windows 7 OEM
Microsoft used to make Windows 7 ISOs available for download through Digital River. However, since February 2015, they have been unavailable. Instead, the company has made the disk images available on its own website.
Before following the instructions, make sure you have your product key handy. You’ll also need a blank USB with 4GB of memory:
Scroll down to the bottom of the page and enter your product key.
Choose your language.
Select either the 32-bit or 64-bit version.
Download the file.
To install your clean copy of Windows 7, you need to boot from the USB drive. To boot from the drive, open your computer’s BIOS menu during the boot process. The button varies between manufacturers, but it’s typically Escape or one of the Function keys.
Spell check is a blessing, but it’s not perfect. Because it can’t keep up with proper names and technology terms, we often add words to the spell check dictionary.
But what if you accidentally add a typo to your Windows dictionary? You don’t want to leave it there, as it will cause future typos to do undetected. Thankfully, you have a few ways to edit your spell check dictionary in Windows 10.
Note: This only applies for programs that rely on the Windows built-in spell checker. Apps with their own dictionaries, like Chrome and Microsoft Office, don’t use these. Check out our guide to managing spell check in Microsoft Word for more.
How to Edit the Spell Check Dictionary in Windows 10
The first method allows you to access your custom dictionary file. Open a File Explorer window and navigate to this location:
%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Spelling
You’ll then see a list of language/region combos on your device, such as en-US and en-CA. Select your primary one and you’ll see three files. Right-click on default.dic and choose to Open with Notepad or another text editor.
Inside the file, you’ll see a list of words in your dictionary, one on each line. These are words you’ve added to your spell checker. To remove one, just delete it from this file. You can also add new words by inserting a new line and typing the word. Note that they’re case-sensitive, and you shouldn’t delete the first line starting with #LID.
When you’re done making changes, save the file and you’re all set.
How to Remove All Custom Spell Check Entries
If you want a slightly easier way to review and remove all words you’ve added to spell check, head to Settings > Privacy > Speech, inking, & typing. Click the View user dictionary link and you’ll see all entries. For some reason you can’t remove individual items here, but you can click Clear dictionary to remove them all.
Doing this deletes all entire from the default.dic file mentioned earlier. In the future, when you want to add items to your dictionary, just right-click them in your current app and choose Add to Dictionary.
Uber has been steadily adding little improvements to the pickup process over the years. Here’s a quick, abridged list:
