Hasta La Gadget!

Companies like Apple tend to shut down the companies and services that they acquire and fold it into their own products and services. They did this with Workflow, Beats Music, and Texture, just to name a few. Facebook on the other hand seems to be more than happy to let their acquisitions continue operating as it is.

However it seems there is a chance that could change because in a report from the New York Times, it appears that Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg is looking to unify its services. No, it does not mean that Facebook’s services will all be merged into one, but rather the infrastructure will be unified so that they share underlying principles across the various apps like Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger.

One of the things that Zuckerberg is hoping to see is the inclusion of end-to-end encryption across the board. It is unclear what the goal is by unifying the infrastructure, but it has been speculated that it could potentially be to help make these services tied to Facebook even further so that it’s harder for users to quit its platform.

A good example would be WhatsApp, which for the most part has allowed users to use the app/service without necessarily being linked to Facebook. Facebook reportedly plans to complete this by the end of the year or early 2020.

Facebook Wants To Unify Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

The gaming world is excited to play Anthem, BioWare’s answer to Destiny and other big-budget online shooters — but an exclusive preview weekend for the mech-flying game has struggled to get off the ground. Of course, it wouldn’t be a game launch these days without a few hiccups to spice things up, but it is a little embarrassing.

The 40-gigabyte demo was made available today to those who had pre-ordered the game, as well as press and other “VIPs.” The game, announced last year at E3, is a loot-focused shooter where you pilot mechs through a huge open world, engage in cooperative combat and exploration and all that.

At least, so they say. Reports immediately came flooding in on forums and social media that not only was Origin, the service on which the demo is offered, failing to function properly, but that the game itself wasn’t connecting to servers, or if it did, wouldn’t load beyond the intro sequence.

I encountered this myself; after eventually getting loaded and logged in, I managed to get into the starting town area where you will, in the full game, upgrade your gear, accept quests and so on. But when I attempted to launch the first mission or otherwise enter the actual game world, the loading bar would stop about 95 percent of the way done and stay there forever (I waited about five minutes and reloaded a couple times to make sure it wasn’t just my aging rig). Those who made it all the way in complained of lag and glitches.

No one really ever expects a major title, especially one with a major online components, to launch even in a limited way without a few speed bumps, but something like this can really put the brakes on a hype train. Publisher EA admitted to the laundry list of issues from a support Twitter account:

Funnily enough EA Help’s own servers were having trouble as well, so not only could people not play Anthem, they couldn’t report that they couldn’t play Anthem.

Patience is a necessary virtue in today’s AAA game launches, but the people hoping to play this weekend aren’t randos but paying customers; this preview demo weekend was supposed to be a pre-order bonus, but the first day is a bust so far. Considering BioWare and EA knew exactly how many players could be trying to connect today — and those numbers are likely far less than those who will try the open beta or connect on launch day — it’s rather odd that they were seemingly caught so off-guard.

Anthem is certainly promising and the developers have gone out of their way to assure players that many of the hated practices of online games these days would not find a home on their platform. But launch problems always jar the confidence of undecided buyers, and there’s almost no question that the game will be better a month or two after its actual debut. Launch numbers could be affected by players not believing the game is ready to play, and therefore not being willing to pay.

I fully anticipate these issues getting resolved at some point soon, however, and will collect my impressions of the game in a separate post when that happens.

Home is where the photo booth is: How Instagram is changing our living spaces
Alyssa Bereznak,
The Ringer

Backdrops, letter boards and faux patterns. The struggle to upgrade those Instagram-able moments at home is real. The Ringer examines the tre…

“We’ve got Donald Trump and the ‘Nightmare at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,'” the former New York City mayor said.

Growing up in the 1970s, one of my earliest memories of an electronic toy had to be the Speak & Spell. This tablet-sized device helped many of us improve our spelling and vocabulary, playing word games using an early speech synthesizer. I remember there being a myth that the voice used in the sound chip Texas Instruments used samples of Dan Rather’s voice, though if that were true, he must have been abducted by robots.

The Speak & Spell would later end up being circuit bent, and used by musicians ranging from Beck to Kraftwerk to Limp Bizkit. You can still pick up an old Speak & Spell on eBay, but if you’ve got the LEGO bricks sitting around, you could just build one of these instead.

This awesome LEGO Speak & Spell was created by Jtheels, and is a perfect, albeit slightly large replica of the classic electronic toy. Be sure to poke around on Jtheels’ Flickr page, where he’s also got a LEGO Connect Four, a LEGO Mattel Football game, a LEGO Simon, a LEGO Merlin, and a working LEGO TossAcross among his various creations.

[via Brothers Brick]