Monthly Archives: August 2015

Facebook Launches M, Its Bold Answer to Siri and Cortana

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Facebook Launches M, Its Bold Answer to Siri and Cortana
Today, a few hundred Bay Area Facebook users will open their Messenger apps to discover M, a new virtual assistant. Facebook will prompt them to test it with examples of what M can do: Make restaurant reservations. Find a birthday gift for your spouse. Suggest — and then book — weekend getaways.

August 26, 2015 at 03:01PM
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‘Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture:’ Why Do People Hate ‘Walking Simulators?’

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A sleepy English town, mysteriously deserted. You are the player, a nameless explorer, piecing together what’s happened through snippets of dialogue, recordings, long-lost transmissions, the small artifacts of a world that seemed to disappear in an instant. That’s the basic setup to Everybody’s Gone to The Rapture, the new title from the Chinese Room that seems to only be able to be described in short, vague phrases like the ones above, mostly because it is itself only composed of short, vague moments of information. Like many titles before it, there’s no real mechanic or goal besides discovery: the only point of going to this world is to bear witness to it. Some people are getting suspicious, because the reactionary crowd gave this kind of game a name more or less the second it appeared on the scene: “walking simulator.” And that title sure doesn’t sound very complimentary.

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The NVIDIA SHIELD set-top box is now available in the Google Store

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Back in March, NVIDIA officially unveiled the SHIELD set-top box running Android TV. Now, several months later and after launches at other retailers, Google is finally lining its digital storefront with the box.

NVIDIA officially announced today that both versions of the SHIELD set-top box are now available in the Google Store. The base model will run you $199.99 and offers 16GB of built-in storage. The 500GB option is $299.99. For those that buy the box, you’ll find a controller in there along with an HDMI cable, a USB to microUSB cable, and the power adapter to make the whole thing hum along nicely.

If that’s not enough, there are some accessories, too. That includes a SHIELD remote for $49.99, a stand for the set-top box for $29.99, and individual SHIELD controllers for $59.99.

Anyone plan on picking up the SHIELD from the Google Store?

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Cyanogen releases Android 5.1.1 update for OnePlus One, then pulls it

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OnePlus may have already announced its smartphone offering for this year, but many people are sticking with last year’s One. And this news is for them.

The Chinese startup’s first handset is now finally being updated to Android 5.1.1 Lollipop, which is the base for Cyanogen OS 12.1. This is now rolling out to OnePlus One devices worldwide, though in a staged fashion – which means it may take a while for your phone to notify you about the update.

If you’re impatient, however, you can go to the Source link below and download the update – either as a full ROM, or just as an incremental jump from the last Cyanogen OS 12.0 release based on Android 5.0.2 Lollipop.

The new software comes with everything that Google has included in Android 5.1.1 (mostly bug fixes), but also some Cyanogen-specific things. First off, you’ll find out that your Chrome homepage has been changed to Bing. Thankfully though, you can easily get rid of Microsoft’s search engine by using Chrome settings.

Next up is a new Phone app, one that features integration with TrueCaller, a service that lets you identify who’s calling even if you don’t have that number in your phone book. The design is a little different too.

Finally, the built-in launcher has received a new option for the app drawer, namely showing it as a vertically-scrolling list (and this is the new default). If you don’t like the Android Marshmallow-like feature, you can switch back to the paged drawer from the launcher’s settings menu.

UPDATE: The rollout has been stopped, the new software has been pulled by Cyanogen without an explanation as to why. Only 2% of the OnePlus One units out there actually managed to get it. Clearly, some issues were spotted, but what those are is a mystery. Hopefully they will get fixed soon so the rollout can…

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