Awesome Apple CarPlay Apps You Need to Try

Apple CarPlay

Apple CarPlay has transformed the way we interact with our vehicles, seamlessly integrating our iPhones with the car’s infotainment system. This technology has opened up a world of possibilities, allowing developers to create innovative apps that enhance the driving experience. In the video below, HothotTek explores a selection of third-party apps that take Apple CarPlay […]

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How to solve Excel COUNT problems with COUNTIFS Function

Using Excel COUNTIFS Function

The COUNTIFS function in Excel is a powerful and versatile tool for counting cells based on multiple criteria. It offers a significant advantage over the COUNTIF function, which is limited to handling only one criterion at a time. COUNTIFS, on the other hand, allows you to apply multiple conditions simultaneously, providing greater flexibility and precision […]

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Upgrade Your DIY Game with this Ultimate Magnetic Multi-Bit Titanium Screwdriver

In every toolkit, some basic toolsets and an assortment of independent screwdriver attachments are available in case you want handy at any time because you cannot help but notice a loose screw or an awkwardly struck nail. If you’re one such individual; a versatile, compact, and durable screwdriver with multiple bits in the body should be your go-to option.

It all started with the original Ti-Mag project. No wonder, it was successfully funded on Kickstarter before it was delivered to the backers in January earlier this year. Now, after adopter feedback, the makers have upgraded the original Ti-Mag as the Ti Mag V2 with a foldable titanium body. Hence, it’s the perfect companion to tackling DIY projects at home or wherever the need to repair a situation arises.

Designer: Logical Carry

Click Here to Buy Now: $89 $108 (18.5% off). Hurry, only a few left!

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For the enthusiastic DIYer in you, who at any particular time has his/her tiny workspace overcrowded with screwdrivers, pliers, and other tools – some inside, other overflowing – from the toolbox; you know the significance of a toolkit that you can carry along in the EDC pack or in the pocket with comfort, and unfurl it show what you can do!

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Take a bow Ti-Mag V2! The ultimate titanium EDC screwdriver with multi-bits and a pry bar is completely scratch-resistant and designed to reach the narrowest of points you’d want to negotiate. The everyday carry screwdriver combines five interchangeable bits made in different designs and sizes. The screwdriver, in addition to magnetically holding these bits in the womb – within its 180-degree foldable design – also features a box cutter and functions as an incredibly cool fidget toy.

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The versatile new Ti-Mag V2 weighs a fraction over 100 grams (106 to be precise). It is incredibly pocket friendly, and comes with a five-bit compartment in a screwdriver CNC-machined from grade 5 titanium. Designed to address shortcomings of the debut model, the version 2 of the Ti Mag has a folding, 180-degree two-way design, which allows the top handle to wiggle half-way on either side providing an opening to access the assortment of screws residing within.

Pull out any of the five bits – depending on the screw size and type – you want to address. You can choose between Slotted 5.5, Philip’s PHO, Philip’s PH1, Philip’s PH2, or Trox T6, which attaches magnetically to the extending bar that looks in place when the action is in progress. When not in use, the bar remains firmly in place so you can even work in hard-to-reach and narrow work spaces.

With the Ti-Mag V2, you can feel the satisfaction that you have the screwdriver comprising different screw sizes and shapes that can take care of all possible scopes of work it is designed for. Obviously, made for carrying out various tasks, this conversation-starting magnetic bit screwdriver allows its pry bar to be used for removing nails and open boxes. And when all are covered and you don’t have any work; entertain yourself with the fidget toy it can be courtesy of four magnets.

Click Here to Buy Now: $89 $108 (18.5% off). Hurry, only a few left!

The post Upgrade Your DIY Game with this Ultimate Magnetic Multi-Bit Titanium Screwdriver first appeared on Yanko Design.

Robot-looking kitchen air purifier can get close to your stove to absorb smoke

Not all houses have built-in exhaust systems or have space for kitchen hoods so when you cook, it can turn a bit smoky and smelly in there. And of course, we know that the smoke isn’t always that healthy and there may be other harmful elements there. Having an air-purifying product that is small enough to fit in your kitchen but powerful enough to suck out all the smoke would be the ideal solution of course.

Designer: G11 Designs

The Roba is a robot-looking device but is actually an air purifier for your kitchen that can stay as close as possible to your induction stove top. It is able to absorb the smoke that may come as you cook as well as the harmful ingredients that come with it. It has two “legs” that are simple, thin, and hard metals that stand. at a 90-degree angle so it can support the weight of the entire thing and keep it as close as possible to your stove and the food you’re cooking.

Roba is designed with “flexible and concise movements” that can be adjusted as you cook. It has a height-adjustable pillar and an axis that can both rotate in different directions and also bend its head at different angles so it can adjust as you cook different things on your induction stove. The “friendly look” of the device means it can fit in well with most modern kitchen designs and the parts can be handled “concisely in cylinders”.

This seems to be a concept for now but it can actually be a pretty useful piece of kitchen appliance especially for people like me who have small kitchens and no exhaust system. The fact that it looks like a robot or at least a robot lamp adds to the cuteness factor that makes me want to buy one if it ever becomes available. Maybe I can start cooking regularly as well if I have something like this.

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Turkey unblocks Instagram after talks to address its concerns about crime and censorship

Turkey has restored access to Instagram after the social media site agreed to meet the country’s demands around censorship and crime-related content, Bloomberg reports. Transport Minister Abdulkadir Uraloglu announced the agreement in a post on X. Instagram was blocked for a little over a week; users in the country abruptly lost access on August 2, but no official explanation for the decision was provided at the time.

However, the block came after Turkey’s head of communications, Fahrettin Altun, accused the platform of censoring posts that expressed condolences for Ismail Haniyeh, a Hamas leader who was recently killed. In the post on Saturday, Uraloglu cited concerns over content relating to catalog crimes — which include murder, sexual assault, drug trafficking and torture, according to Reuters — and censorship imposed on Instagram users. NetBlocks, which first reported that Instagram had been blocked in Turkey earlier this month, confirmed on Saturday that access had begun to return.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/turkey-unblocks-instagram-after-talks-to-address-its-concerns-about-crime-and-censorship-212231212.html?src=rss

Plywood desk concepts use waves to create easy-access storage spaces

Just because a design is minimalist doesn’t mean it has to be featureless. Part of the challenge of this design style is to deliver the same functionality that more complicated products offer in simpler ways. A desk, for example, would normally have drawers and shelves to put things in, but drawers often introduce mechanisms that wear down over time, and they often block their contents from view, forcing the person to remember what’s inside or waste time going through each drawer in search for an item. Aalto, which means “wave” in Finnish, removes the blinders and designs an open storage system that uses no extra parts, just the table’s body itself.

Designer: Liam de la Bedoyere

Common desk drawers use a sliding mechanism to move a box in and out of the table. Regardless of the design of the slider, it will eventually fall victim to wear and tear, making it less useful and more stressful. Desks with “open” shelves instead of drawers do remove that variable but doesn’t make it easy to see what’s inside unless everything is at the front or you stoop to take a peek inside.

The Aalto design concept uses a series of undulating forms that create nooks that can become storage spaces. Thanks to the glass (or any transparent material) tabletop, you can immediately see what’s inside, ready to be taken out when you need it. Conversely, you can also easily see which compartments are still unoccupied in case you need an empty space.

The waves can come in different sizes, which makes room for different kinds of stationery and tools as well, like a laptop in the larger space or pens for the smaller ones. What makes the design even more interesting is that it doesn’t use any extra pieces other than the tabletop. It’s a single unbroken form, though sheets of plywood are indeed joined together to create the semblance of a flowing shape. Regardless, there are no moving parts that will break down or extra parts that can get lost. It is minimalism at its finest.

Another version of the Aalto design uses shorter and more uniform waves to address concerns about the troughs hitting people’s knees and legs. That said, it also reduces the flexibility of those spaces to hold objects of any size, but that also becomes a sort of enforced organization system to keep the desk tidy. In exchange, this Aalto variant has a small shelf off to the side, for holding smaller items like books or even a vase. It does have to switch to a polycarbonate material for the tabletop in order to support that bending shape.

The post Plywood desk concepts use waves to create easy-access storage spaces first appeared on Yanko Design.

What to read this weekend: Near-future dystopian fiction and a new approach to explaining life’s origin

New releases in fiction, nonfiction and comics that caught our attention.

The book cover for Hum by Helen Philips, showing green eye-shaped figures arranged against a beige background. One of them has an iris and pupils

Robots have become a regular fixture of the workforce, and humans are losing their jobs to AI. Climate change is wreaking havoc on the planet. It’s getting harder and harder for the average person to make ends meet. Facial recognition technology is being used for surveillance. Sound familiar? In her new novel, Hum, author Helen Phillips paints a picture of what our near-future could look like.

Its main character, May, has lost her job after technology made her role obsolete, and, desperate for money to support her family, she agrees to participate in an experiment that alters her face to make her undetectable to facial recognition. With the extra cushion from the payment, she takes her husband and children on a short, technology-free vacation to the Botanical Garden — but things go dangerously awry. Hum is a captivating, unsettling work of dystopian fiction that makes it impossible not to draw parallels with our current reality.

The book cover for Sara Imari Walker's Life As No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence. Showing spherical shapes composed of dots in blue, pink, yellow and green on a beige background

There’s so much we don’t know about the origins of life on Earth, and how it could appear on other worlds. Arizona State University theoretical physicist and astrobiologist Sara Imari Walker tackles the enduring question, “What is life?” and so much more in her book, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence. It explores assembly theory, which, as Walker explained recently as a guest on the Event Horizon podcast, states that “life is the only mechanism the universe has for generating complexity. So complex objects don’t happen spontaneously, they only happen through evolution and selection.”

It’s an endlessly fascinating topic that’s spurred a lot of debate over the years, and Walker’s book presents its case in a way that is compelling and readable even for us non-scientists. It’ll definitely give your brain a bit of exercise, though... and maybe spark some (friendly) arguments. Kirkus called it, “Ingenious, but not for the faint of heart.

The cover for Cruel Universe #1, showing a man in a spacesuit with an old-school bubble helmet holding a spear and fighting a T-rex in a futuristic arena

EC Comics’ comeback continues with the release of another new series, Cruel Universe. The recently resurrected publisher dropped the first issue of the science fiction series this week, featuring stories by Corinna Bechko, Chris Condon, Matt Kindt and Ben H. Winters, with art by Jonathan Case, Kano, Artyom Topilin and Caitlin Yarsky. Cruel Universe #1 takes us to an interstellar battle arena, face-to-face with a black hole, on a quest for eternal life and more.

It’s a great followup to last month’s Epitaphs of the Abyss, the new horror anthology from EC. If you liked the old Weird Science comics and EC’s other science fiction series, this is definitely one to check out.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/what-to-read-this-weekend-near-future-dystopian-fiction-and-a-new-approach-to-explaining-lifes-origin-194355528.html?src=rss

Minimal bent tape dispenser is made from a single piece of steel

There’s a meme that says one of the things that you’ll never find when you need it is the tape dispenser. You may own one (or maybe even several) but the moment you actually need it, it disappears. So maybe you need something that’s permanently attached to your work space or also something that’s not so difficult to use since I’ve “destroyed” several out of frustration.

Designer: CW&T

As a stationery lover, I like those simple and minimalist items that are both highly functional but also but also well-designed pieces. The M.R Tape Dispenser is one such item that I’ll welcome on my desk. It is a multi-radius tape dispenser that can hold one or multiple rolls of tapes of different sizes. It uses tension to hold and dispense these pieces of tapes.

The dispenser is made out of just one piece of machined and bent stainless steel. The tape is then fed through an opening and then cut into a polished surface. In order to get maximum adhesion, the space where the tape is held and teared off has a mirror polished finish. The dispenser itself has a rubber bump-on pad on its base so it can grip on to your surface. You can attach it to your wall or to your desk.

It’s a pretty simple piece of stationery but because the designers thought long and hard about it, you get something that’s pretty functional. Hopefully you don’t lose it since it’s a pretty expensive piece of tape dispenser.

The post Minimal bent tape dispenser is made from a single piece of steel first appeared on Yanko Design.

Former Twitter chairman is suing X for $20 million over pay he says was ‘wrongfully withheld’

Omid Kordestani, who was Twitter’s executive chairman from 2015 to 2020 and served on the board until Elon Musk acquired it in 2022, is suing X over $20 million worth of shares he says the company is refusing to pay. Kordestani filed the lawsuit on Friday with a California superior court.

Per the lawsuit, Kordestani left a high paying job at Google to join Twitter, which offered him a “significantly lower” salary of just $50,000 but sweetened the deal with stock options, performance-based restricted stock units and restricted stock units. These — amounting to $20,112,000 — were supposed to have been paid out when Musk acquired Twitter and replaced the board, but X has failed to do so, according to the lawsuit. “X Corp. seeks to reap the benefits of Mr. Kordestani’s seven years of service to Twitter without paying him for it, despite clear contractual language requiring X Corp. to do so,” it says.

Multiple lawsuits have been filed in the wake of Musk’s Twitter acquisition from employees alleging they were not paid properly after they were laid off or fired. Former Twitter executives sued Musk and X earlier this year, claiming they were fired “without reason” and are owed millions of dollars in unpaid severance. The latest lawsuit says that “Mr. Kordestani is one of many former Twitter employees whose compensation has been wrongfully withheld by X Corp. following Elon Musk’s purchase of the Company in October 2022.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/former-twitter-chairman-is-suing-x-for-20-million-over-pay-he-says-was-wrongfully-withheld-155407305.html?src=rss