Living with the Galaxy S6 Edge: Is that curve worth the cost?

Samsung launched two Galaxy S6 models this spring, but let's face it: The spotlight was really on the curvy, attention-grabbing S6 Edge. I know I was dead-set on trying that one-of-a-kind smartphone as soon as I could. However, I couldn't help but wonder if it was really, truly worth the $100 premium to turn heads and score a couple of clever features. Moreover, would that design actually hold up in the real world? There was only one way for me to find out. I spent several weeks with the Edge to see whether its curved display would grow on me, or if I'd be desperately wishing I had made the safer choice and snagged the regular S6. As it turns out, the answer was a bit of both.

Forget TouchID. The next smartphone security code could come from your ear. Amazon has patented an ear recognition technology that can identify a user based just on ear shape, as seen through a phone'€™s front-facing camera.  

The device, according to the patent, could€œ determine whether the user is holding the device near the user's right ear or left ear, and adjusts functionality of the device based at least in part upon how the user is likely holding the phone when making a phone call or listening to an audio file. That means the technology could adjust the volume based on your position.

Meet the Home Security Camera That Burglars Totally Ignore

For the past eight years, Melanie, whose name has been changed to protect her privacy, shared her Chandler, Ariz. home with several roommates. But when she finally got the place to herself this past spring, she felt her newfound privacy came at the cost of security. So, she decided buy a Canary all-in-one home security device, placing it in the bedroom of her 2,000-square-foot house.
"You don't think you're actually going to use it for home security,” says the 43-year-old. "I called it my puppy cam.”
You can indeed see Melanie's dogs in a video her Canary recorded on May 4. But the device captured something else, too. On that day, a man later identified by police as Brian Pantoja appears to break Melanie's window, climb inside her home, and rifle through her belongings. According to local news reports, thousands of dollars worth of jewelry went missing from Melanie's home that day; the investigation remains open as of May. But before apparently pilfering Melanie's home, Pantoja appears to grab a bottle of water from right in front of the camera that was recording him.
Here's the footage from Melanie's Canary, provided by the company and posted here with Melanie's permission:
"It's so sleek,” says Melanie. "[Pantoja] had no idea — he looked at it a couple of times . . . he just had no clue."

Pluto Probe Suffers Glitch 10 Days Before Epic Flyby

A glitch caused NASA's New Horizons spacecraft to go dark for more than an hour Saturday (July 4), just 10 days before its historic flyby of Pluto.
The probe's handlers lost contact with New Horizons at 1:54 p.m. EDT (1754 GMT) Saturday but were able to restore communications at 3:15 p.m. EDT (1915 GMT).
"During that time, the autonomous autopilot on board the spacecraft recognized a problem and — as it’s programmed to do in such a situation — switched from the main to the backup computer," New Horizons team members wrote in an update Saturday.
"The autopilot placed the spacecraft in 'safe mode,' and commanded the backup computer to reinitiate communication with Earth," they added. "New Horizons then began to transmit telemetry to help engineers diagnose the problem."
Members of an "anomaly review board" are currently investigating the issue and working to get New Horizons back up to speed. Mission officials said the recovery process could take several days, since it takes about 4.5 hours for commands to get to the spacecraft, which is nearly 3 billion miles (4.8 billion kilometers) from Earth.

The Computers of Our Wildest Dreams

One of the first electronic, programmable computers in the world is remembered today mostly by its nickname: Colossus. The fact that this moniker evokes one of the seven wonders of the ancient world is fitting both physically and conceptually. Colossus, which filled an entire room and included dinner-plate-sized pulleys that had to be loaded with tape, was built in World War II to help crack Nazi codes. Ten versions of the mammoth computer would decrypt tens of millions of characters of German messages before the war ended.
Colossus was a marvel at a time when “computers” still referred to people—women, usually—rather than machines. And it is practically unrecognizable by today's computing standards, made up of thousands of vacuum tubes that contained glowing hot filaments. The machine was programmable, but not based on stored memory. Operators used switches and plugs to modify wires when they wanted to run different programs. Colossus was a beast and a capricious one at that.
In the early days of computing, this was to be expected. Vacuum tubes worked in computers, but they didn’t always work very well. They took up tons of space, overheated, and burned out. The switch to transistor technology in the 1960s was revolutionary for this reason. It was the transistor that led to the creation of the integrated circuit. And it was the steady growth of transistors per unit area—doubling every two years or so for three decades—that came to be known as Moore’s Law. The switch from tubes to transistors represented a turning point in computing that—despite the huge strides since—hasn’t had a contemporary parallel until now.
We are at an analogous crossroads today, a moment in which seemingly incremental and highly technical changes to computing architecture could usher in a new way of thinking about what a computer is. This particular inflection point comes as quantum computing crosses a threshold from the theoretical to the physical.

These headphones let you switch between styles in a snap

If you're in the market for a good set of headphones, at some point you have to decide whether you want on-ear headphones or over-ear versions. Either option has its pros and cons: on-ear headphones are smaller, more portable, and can make for a better seal depending on the shape of your ears, while over-ear headphones generally have more presence, better bass response, and can be more comfortable to wear. The new t402v headphones from Torque are different, however, as they don't force you to choose which type of headphone you want when you buy them.