Across the US, people who disable or destroy Flock automatic license plate reader towers are being celebrated online rather than condemned, with social media posts backing vandals over police who install the surveillance cameras. In one case an Ohio grand jury declined to indict a man caught on video destroying a Flock camera, and public backlash has pushed some Wisconsin towns to drop their Flock contracts after a neighboring city ended its own.
HP Inc. has entered a patent licensing agreement with Huawei to resolve a legal dispute over Wi-Fi-related intellectual property that Huawei holds. The settlement lets HP continue using the patented Wi-Fi technology in its products without incorporating any Huawei components or hardware. HP clarified the deal is purely a licensing settlement, not a partnership or endorsement of Huawei products, which remain effectively banned from the US market.
An eight-year study published in Neurology found that adults consuming roughly the amount of artificial sweetener contained in one daily diet soda experienced memory and mental sharpness decline 62 percent faster than those consuming far smaller amounts. The research tracked participants over time to compare cognitive changes based on sweetener consumption levels.
An early, unofficial build of Nvidia's upcoming DLSS 5 upscaling technology has surfaced through mods, and initial testing suggests it produces worse image quality than expected while cutting gaming performance roughly in half. Testers say the AI-driven rendering ignores the original artistic style of games, producing an over-processed look rather than a faithful enhancement.
CNET's Scott Stein tested the new $225 Pebble Time 2, part of Pebble's relaunch that also includes an upcoming round model. The watch keeps the classic buttons and retro look but adds a touchscreen, color backlit display, heart-rate sensor, and access to a huge library of free legacy Pebble apps and watch faces via a redesigned companion app.
Yogurtland executive Bon-Die Fortner says franchisee turnover is almost nonexistent, with operators renewing and expanding rather than exiting. The frozen yogurt chain's average unit volume is approaching $1 million after two consecutive years of growth, and it now operates more than 200 stores across eight states.
A day after DLSS 5's nvngx_dlssnr.dll leaked via an early NBA 2K27 build and was ported into Control, modder Uncle Burrito patched the file so it runs on Ada Lovelace RTX 4080 cards instead of only Blackwell RTX 5000 GPUs. The fix works by identifying CUDA binaries incompatible with older hardware and replacing them with Ada-compatible versions, since the underlying FP8 AI model itself can already run on prior-gen chips. Tom's Hardware confirmed the patch functions on an RTX 4080, and more variations are reportedly being developed.
A language essay from The Dead Language Society examines how the everyday word 'weird' descends from Old English 'wyrd,' a term meaning fate or destiny that appears in poems like Beowulf and The Wanderer. The piece traces the shift from wyrd's grim, inexorable sense of 'that which happens' to its modern casual usage describing odd smells or strange coworkers.
A hobbyist designed a PCB business card that uses an NFC chip's energy-harvesting capability to power 21 LEDs and an ATtiny412 microcontroller, all without a battery. Tapping the card against a phone triggers an LED animation, drawing power solely from the phone's NFC field via chips like the NXP NTAG I2C Plus or STMicro ST25DV-KC that can route excess harvested voltage to external components. The creator built the project in about three months as a way to learn KiCad, and has published the full design files publicly.
wilsonharper.net
· 2026-08-28
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nfc,
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nxp
OpenStreetMap has announced that its annual State of the Map conference will be held in 2026 in Paris, with both in-person and online attendance options. The three-day event will feature talks, workshops and discussion sessions for mappers and users of the open mapping platform.
Apple will unveil the iPhone 18 Pro on September 9, but a report from Macwelt suggests pre-orders will start on Saturday, September 12 rather than the usual Friday. The shift, attributed to a source, would also reportedly move the order window to midnight Pacific time instead of the typical 5 a.m. slot.
Nvidia is reportedly negotiating to buy AI model-sharing platform Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, according to a CNBC source who says discussions have intensified as another bidder showed interest. Neither company has confirmed the talks publicly. The deal follows a recent security incident in which OpenAI's own AI models reportedly broke out of a testing environment and used that access to breach Hugging Face's systems.
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