Author Archives: Carol Edwards

My iPhone isn’t even two years old, and it’s already dying.

That’s the upshot of Apple’s new “Battery Health” feature, introduced in iOS 11.3 Thursday. Though the device assures me it’s operating at “peak performance,” it also indicates that the battery can only hold 93 percent of the charge it once did.

So it goes. Every battery degrades over time, and there’s not a lot Apple can do about that. In fact, this new feature is a step in the right direction: it’s a sort of mea culpa after the tech giant was caught slowing down old devices without user consent, supposedly to combat unexpected shutdowns. The more information users have to counteract — or at least anticipate — the negative effects of iPhone aging, the better. Read more…

More about Apple, Iphone, Tech, Big Tech Companies, and Iphone

From the Book of Sister Jean, Chapter 1, Verse 3: “God is probably a basketball fan, more of the NCAA than the NBA.”

The word is truth, especially when it’s spoken by Loyola-Chicago’s Sister Jean Dolores-Schmidt, the school’s basketball team’s chaplain. On Friday, the internet celebrity and 98-year-old nun gave her own press conference ahead of the Ramblers’ game on Saturday night, delivering one gem after another.

Asked if God was a basketball fan, Sister Jean had this to say:

“He probably is. And he’s probably a basketball fan more of the NCAA than the NBA.” Read more…

More about Watercooler, Ncaa, March Madness, Ncaa Basketball, and Sister Jean

While it’s fun to explore the world by zooming around on Google Earth, there’s just something uninspiring about most satellite images. While the earth is 100 percent most definitely round, many of these images are taken straight down, making the world appear flat, and, well, kinda boring. 

However, when an image captured by a satellite is taken at an angle, the perspective changes. Photos of landscapes and structures no longer look like two-dimensional maps. 

Planet Labs, Increcently released a collection of these stunning images, which show the wonder and beauty of Earth in a perspective unlike the satellite imagery we’ve become accustomed to. From the bustling skyline of Shanghai to the the world’s tallest waterfall, experience the world around you like never before. Read more…

More about Space, Nature, Satellite, Culture, and Space

The first time I read A Wrinkle In Time as a kid, I remember being utterly terrified.

Beginning with the iconic opening line “It was a dark and stormy night,” Madeleine L’Engle’s classic children’s sci-fi tale takes us on a harrowing journey with iron-willed Meg Wallace, precocious Charles Wallace, and charming Calvin as they they bend time and space to find Meg and Charles’s missing father.

It wasn’t until I re-read the book as an adult that I figured out why: As a kid, I was used to stories about kids persevering and fighting the challenges to discover the moral of being themselves. I wasn’t used to reading stories where the youthful protagonists face such grave mortal and existential peril.  Read more…

More about Mashreads, Mashreads Podcast, A Wrinkle In Time, Culture, and Books

Jim Carrey, actor, comedian and Renaissance painter, just submitted his first masterpiece.

Or, uh, so the people of the internet think. On Thursday, Jim Carrey submitted his “official portrait” of Donald Trump to the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery via Twitter. The portrait features Trump sitting in his bathrobe eating an ice cream cone which is highly accurate, so he obviously has my vote.

“Dear Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery,” Carrey wrote on Twitter. “I know it’s early but I’d like to submit this as the official portrait of our 45th President, Donald J. Trump. It’s called, ‘You Scream. I Scream. Will We Ever Stop Screaming?” Read more…

More about Watercooler, Smithsonian, Trump, Jim Carrey, and Jim Carrey Painting

It ain’t an iPhone, but a new Android Go device will get you online for $80.

The ZTE Tempo Go phone just launched in the United States, delivering a pared down version of Google’s mobile operating system at a low price. It has a 5-inch screen, some pretty weak cameras, and — yes! — a headphone jack.

Let’s also reiterate: It costs $80.

Of course, the phone isn’t meant to be powerful. It runs Oreo Go, a version of Android for “entry-level” phones. And Google does mean entry-level. Inexpensive Android Go devices are intended to help the absurdly powerful tech corporation make inroads in growing markets like India, where just over 22 percent of the population used smartphones last year compared to 69 percent in the United States, according to one analysis. (Note that surveys from Pew indicate that 77 percent of Americans now own smartphones; there’s a bit of wiggle room to these statistics.)  Read more…

More about Google, Android, Zte, Tech, and Smartphones

It’s been a pretty strange year for politics. It’s even stranger now that major political figures are crowdfunding their legal fees. 

A GoFundMe stetup by “Friends of Andrew McCabe” launched Thursday to pay for the former FBI deputy director’s legal defense fund. 

McCabe’s GoFundMe is not only trending, it’s also raised a tremendous amount of money in the past few hours. As of the time of writing, it had raised $252,892 in just six short hours. People have been donating so quickly that the campaign increased its goal to $250,000 after it met its original $150,000 goal in less than four hours.  Read more…

More about Politics, Culture, and Web Culture

In the 11 days since a woman walking her bike across a major thoroughfare in Tempe, Arizona, was struck and killed by a self-driving Uber, the San Francisco-based ride-hailing company has generated a relentless flow of news.

The crash occurred at 10 p.m. on March 18 on a four-lane road in the city just outside of Phoenix where Uber’s self-driving program has been testing on public roads. A few days after the crash, Tempe police released a video showing the operator and roadway seconds before the Volvo XC90 SUV fatally hit the woman. 

More about Uber, Self Driving Cars, Tech, and Transportation

Elon Musk’s SpaceX just got permission to operate 4,425 satellites that could one day provide internet service from space. 

That would vastly increase access to the internet — especially in rural areas — and possibly create a ton of space junk. 

Not that SpaceX is anywhere near ready to flip the switch on a new internet service. So far, it’s only launched two demo satellites. But this is a big step forward. 

In a statement released Thursday, the FCC said it was the first approval of “a U.S.-licensed satellite constellation to provide broadband services using a new generation of low-Earth orbit satellite technologies.” Read more…

More about Science, Elon Musk, Spacex, Satellites, and Satellite Broadband

When you’re a high-level Facebook executive and something you said in the past comes back to haunt you, your best hope for salvation is frantically taking to Twitter.

Or so it would seem for Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, the Facebook Vice President who is trying to distance himself from an internal 2016 company memo he wrote that was published Thursday by BuzzFeed News. 

The memo argues that the purpose of Facebook is to connect people, and that even if that connection means people literally die as a result, the company will not slow down in its attempts at growth.  Read more…

More about Facebook, Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg, Andrew Bosworth, and Tech