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Terrace House is a tough show to explain.
Like The Real World and other reality TV, the show puts a group of largely young and attractive strangers together in a house. But that’s about where the similarities end.
On Terrace House, most of the cast members genuinely seem to be rooting for each other. And while there’s drama, it’s scaled way back, so that passive aggressive remarks about soup can end up dominating an episode.
Darrell’s a big fan, so on this week’s ep

Uber is shutting down UberRush, its on-demand delivery service, reports TechCrunch. The company said in an email to customers that it will be ending the program on June 30th, 2018.The company launched the on-demand delivery service in 2014 in Manhattan, which allowed users to hire someone to pick up a package and deliver it to another location. The company later expanded the service to Chicago and San Francisco in 2015, but while it opened its Application Program Interface (API) for private bus

The nominees for the 2018 Hugo Awards were announced today, representing the best science fiction and fantasy literature published in 2017.
The Hugo Awards are one of speculative fiction’s most prestigious prizes. Named for Amazing Stories editor Hugo Gernsback and first handed out in 1953, they recognize the best works in science fiction and fantasy literature each year. The awards are overseen by the World Science Fiction Society and are selected by members of the World Science Fiction

Google announced that it is shutting down its URL shortening service, goo.gl. The company says that new and anonymous users won’t be able to create links through the goo.gl console as of April 13th, but existing users will be able to use it for another year, after which it will be discontinued completely.Firebase Software Engineer Michael Hermanto says that the company introduced the URL shortener in 2009, and that since then, the ways in which people share information on the web has chan

Last year, French filmmaker Luc Besson released Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, a glitzy, CGI-filled summer blockbuster which ended up being a disappointment at the box office for his studio EuropaCorp. According to a report in the French site Capital (via The Playlist and io9), Netflix is “in advanced talks” to purchase the studio.Besson co-founded the studio in 1999, and since then, it’s been known for films such as Lucy, Taken, Lock-Out, The Circle, and Valeria

The world of Mineko’s Night Market is one obsessed with cats. Felines roam freely around its cartoony, cutesy island. Mini-games make sport of their adventures, and occasionally they’ll trail after you like ducklings behind their mother. On Mount Fugu Island, inhabitants even worship cat deities — specifically, the Sun Cat, a portly, upright creature called Abe. Developer Meowza Games has made no secret of its love of one specific animal, but the pleasing aesthetic of its upco

At a time when the models of traditional social networks are being questioned, it’s more important than ever to experiment with alternatives. Arbtr is a proposed social network that limits users to sharing a single thing at any given time, encouraging “ruthless self-editing” and avoiding “nasty things” like endless feeds filled with trivial garbage.
It’s seeking funds on Kickstarter and could use a buck or two. I plan to.
Now, I know what you’re thinking

Maggie Lane ContributorShare on Twitter Maggie Lane is a writer and producer of virtual reality experiences and covers the industry for various publications.
It was barely minutes after the Ready Player One premiere, and texts from my friends and colleagues in the VR community began pouring in…
“How was it?”
Those of us in the mixed reality industries have been waiting for this film like the VR messiah that will deliver us to public mass adoption. And the breathless prayer? &

This morning, Trump once again tweeted about online retailer Amazon.com, alleging that it is scamming the United States Postal Service and that the agency should raise its shipping rates. He also says that The Washington Post — owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos —should register as a lobbyist.Earlier this week, Axios reported that President Donald Trump wanted to take on Amazon. The President followed up with a tweet on March 29th, saying that Amazon was taking advantage of the USPS, pa

A few years ago, the hit Sundance film Tangerine was shot entirely on an iPhone 5S to surprisingly good results. And last year, Steven Soderbergh did the same the same thing while making Unsane, with his only camera being an iPhone 7 Plus.
While a lot more than camera gear goes into making those movies look the way they do, the fact that professional filmmakers are using cameras that many of us keep in our pockets is a pretty encouraging sign when it comes to what we should be able to produce.

At last, a use for that industrial knitting machine you bought at a yard sale! Carnegie Mellon researchers have created a method that generates knitting patterns for arbitrary 3D shapes, opening the possibility of “on-demand knitting.” Think 3D printing, but softer.
The idea is actually quite compelling for those of us who are picky about their knitwear. How often have we picked up a knit cap, glove, or scarf only to find it too long, too short, too tight, too loose, etc?
If you fed

When Facebookloses, who wins?
That’s a question for startups that may be worth contemplating following Facebook’s recent stock price haircut. The company’s valuation has fallen by around $60 billion since the Cambridge Analytica scandal surfaced earlier this month and the #DeleteFacebook campaign gained momentum.
That’s a steep drop, equal to about 12 percent of the company’s market valuation, and it’s a decline Facebook appears to be suffering alone. As its s

The New York International Auto Show opens to the public this weekend, and upon entering the Javits Center attendees will be bombarded with new cars, SUVs, trucks and even a handful of supercars that will most likely be out their price range. Here’s our primer for anyone who wants to cut through the noise and see the stuff that really matters.Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
Most Futurama-ready car: Genesis EssentiaAnyone who grew up on dog-eared copies of Popular Science proba

The Red Hat Linux distribution is turning 25 years old this week. What started as one of the earliest Linux distributions is now the most successful open-source company, and its success was a catalyst for others to follow its model. Today’s open-source world is very different from those heady days in the mid-1990s when Linux looked to be challenging Microsoft’s dominance on the desktop, but Red Hat is still going strong.
To put all of this into perspective, I sat down with the compan

Washington recently became the nation’s first state to pass net neutrality legislation, a law in which violations by all internet service providers (ISPs) are enforceable, under Washington’s Consumer Protection Act. Net neutrality, or the principle that all internet data must be treated and delivered to consumers equally, was repealed at the federal level and remains a source of great debate across the tech industry.    Several states are already exploring passing similar

The CEO and COO are at their desks when I knock on the door, intently assembling robots to fulfill the company’s latest order. Tapster is about as lean as startups get. Founded three years ago (on Star Wars Day), the company’s two-person staff is half the size it was at its height, but a third employee moved on, and the fourth was more of an intern, really.It’s a humble operation headquartered in nondescript strip of stores in Oakpark, a quiet suburban village just outside of C

At some point in the not-so-distant past, April Fools was about pranks and hoaxes, but given that we apparently have enough of those on the web, the day has somehow morphed into a celebration of random jokey things. This year’s GoogleMaps gag is no exception.
Starting today, when you open Google Maps on your phone or desktop, you’ll see Waldo in his trademark red and white sweater, waving at you you from the side of your screen. That’s because Waldois sharing his location

Starting today and continuing on for the next week, Google is bringing Where’s Waldo? to Google Maps. On Android, iOS, and the desktop, you’ll see Waldo pop up in his signature red and white stripes and give you a friendly wave. From there, just tap or click on him and you’ll see the option to play a game that’s straight out of the classic children’s puzzle books. This is one of Google’s annual April Fools’ Day jokes, but the Maps integration is actuall

Starting today you can use Google Maps on Android, iOS, and desktop to assist you in finding everyone’s favorite hide-and-seek champion, Waldo. To start the search, you’ll need to update the mobile app (or visit Google Maps on the web) and press play when presented with a waving Waldo. For Android users, you can also ask Google Assistant “Where’s Waldo” to start. Once spotted, you’ll be transported to various locations around the globe where you can win badge

Spring has sprung. You might not be able to tell with the weather, but the calendar says so. For this weekend only, Microsoft is marking down some of its most popular PCs to celebrate the change in season. Until Monday April 2nd, laptops like the newest Surface Pro and the Dell XPS 15 256GB Laptop are both being marked down hundreds of dollars. There are more than 80 deals and PCs on sale for all price ranges.
In other deals news, Amazon is discounting some of their Alexa-enabled devices until

At the Blockchain Africa Conference held in Johannesburg, South Africa, prominent bitcoin and security expert Andreas Antonopoulos criticized banks and technology firms for treating the term “blockchain” as interchangeable with public blockchain networks – bitcoin in particular. This is highly erroneous because the blockchain is just one of many technologies that supplement the bitcoin network and allow it to function as a decentralized, distributed, and peer-to-peer financial

Today was the official deadline for the now-defunct Google Lunar X Prize competition — an international contest to send the first private spacecraft to the Moon. There is no winner; no one got to the Moon in time. But many of the teams that competed in the Google Lunar X Prize say they are still forging ahead, even without the promise of millions of dollars in prize money.
The rules of the competition were relatively straightforward: build a robotic lander, using mostly private money, tha

I’m a big fan of Ian McDonald’s science fiction novels. The Dervish House and Luna: New Moon are complicated, intelligent stories about how societies cope with advanced technologies. McDonald’s next (and final) novel in the Luna trilogy, Moon Rising, isn’t hitting bookstores until 2019, but we will have a new story from him to tide us over while we wait: Time Was.This book is a novella from Tor.com about Ben and Tom, two engineers who fall in love while working on a secr

For the bolson pupfish, a good fart can be a lifesaver: These little fish live in shallow pools in Mexico where they slurp algae off of rocks and burrow into the sediment to hide from predators. When temperatures rise in the summer, the algae squirt out gas bubbles that the pupfish suck down when they eat — making them bloated, and, worse, buoyant.
The puffed-up pupfish float back to the water’s surface where they’re easy pickings for predators. But that’s not even the w

How many websites are you familiar with that are truly global? You can probably think of a few, and some of the largest online companies will likely come to mind including Facebook, Amazon, eBay, a couple of travel sites and maybe a few others. There’s a lot of potential in specific local markets throughout the world, but expanding it to a global scale can help you reach a much wider audience and grow significantly faster. Why don’t we see many more companies succeed at going global

This article was originally published on NoCamels. Cleaning the toilet bowl is not for the faint of heart. One must usually brave the strong chemicals of cleaning products while wielding a sloppy, germ-infested toilet brush to get the job done. Now, two Haifa-based Israeli entrepreneurs have taken it upon themselves to help people take action against the dirtiest of dumps with just the press of a button. They came up with Toibot, the world’s first motorized toilet bowl cleaning robot

Early sharing economy enthusiasts had a clear vision for the peer-to-peer marketplace: path towards sustainability, empowerment of individuals, and new job opportunities for the disadvantaged. However, the sharing economy’s giants such as Uber and Airbnb quickly overtook the marketplace, painting a vastly different picture. While they provide convenience and efficiency, there’s a price to pay: low wages and job insecurity. As a result, we’ve seen a number of workers across the