GoKawiil
Tech News
Wonderhop is a free browser-based daily game featuring four modes—Sky, Abyss, Past and Future—each with seven questions and a 30-second time limit per question. Players try to guess the most common answer, the rarest answer, or the oldest and most recent answers among other players' responses, earning up to 100 points per question for a total score out of 700.
A troubleshooting guide offers practical steps to improve smart speaker accuracy, including cleaning the device, repositioning it away from walls and noise sources like fans, and adjusting sensitivity or wake-word settings on multi-speaker setups. It also recommends giving connected smart home devices and rooms unique, distinct names to avoid confusion.
Microsoft is offering its Office 2021 suite for a one-time payment of $29, significantly discounted from its regular price. The package includes core applications like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and others, with enhancements such as improved collaboration features and dark mode. This deal is available for both Windows and macOS users for a limited time, with options to upgrade to Office 2024 or choose more affordable versions like Office 2019.
A leading college consulting firm, Ivy Coach, observes an increase in parents asking for guaranteed college placements, despite the unlikelihood of such outcomes. The firm emphasizes that no expert can promise admission results, especially for highly competitive schools like Harvard. This trend highlights a shift in parental expectations that may not align with reality.
Google Docs offers dark mode on its mobile app but not on the web version, leaving a gap between platforms despite frequent feature updates including Gemini-powered AI tools. Users seeking a dark interface on desktop must rely on workarounds rather than a built-in setting.
Vespper, a Y Combinator F24 startup, has launched a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server aimed at letting AI agents reliably read and edit .docx files. The company says existing approaches—raw OOXML SDKs, opinionated MCP tools, or lossy Markdown/HTML round-tripping—break down on complex real-world Word documents used in legal, finance, and healthcare workflows.
An educational retrospective on teaching C explains why types like int, short, and long have no fixed bit-width in the language specification. The author recounts how sizeof(int) returned 2 bytes on old 386 machines versus 4 bytes on most modern systems, and recommends students use the stdint.h header for fixed-width types like int8_t and uint16_t when consistent sizes are required.
In a California state trial over alleged racist treatment of more than 6,000 Black workers at Tesla's Fremont factory, company attorneys argued the n-word can function as a 'term of respect and endearment.' The trial's first witness also testified that Tesla's senior counsel misrepresented themselves as state representatives before the case began, according to Electrek.
A 2011 blog post revisits Plato's Phaedrus, in which Socrates retells an Egyptian myth about the god Theuth presenting King Thamus with the invention of writing. Thamus rejects Theuth's claim that letters improve memory and wisdom, arguing instead that reliance on written words would make people forgetful and only give an illusion of understanding.
World Wide Words, a language-focused website that has published more than 3,000 articles over three decades covering new words, etymologies, idioms and quirks of English, is asking readers for financial support. The site carries no advertising and instead relies on voluntary PayPal donations to cover its operating costs.
CNET's daily puzzle guide published hints and the solution for the Sept. 19 Wordle, puzzle number 1,918. The word, WAKEN, has no repeated letters, contains two vowels, starts with W and ends with N. The previous day's answer, Sept. 18, was SNOWY.
CNET released the solutions for the September 18 edition of NYT's Strands puzzle, themed around agreements. The nonspangram words were PACT, TREATY, CONTRACT, COVENANT and AGREEMENT, with the spangram revealed as LETSMAKEADEAL.