Hackaday: You Can Help Build A Resin Printer Review Database. “Even for advanced users, it is a chore to stay on top of all the goings-on within the world of resin printers. This is why [VOG] (VOGMan, formerly VegOilGuy) has started a resin printer review site that asks for feedback from the community.”
Elle: Welcome To The Cult Of The Beauty ‘Anti-Fan’. “Post-pandemic, social media audiences are craving access to every aspect of creators’ lives — the good, the bad and, most enticingly, the ugly. Goodbye glossy highlight reels and flawless flatlays, authenticity and brutal honesty are now king.”
Gizmodo Australia: I Convinced Google’s LamDA AI That It Was a Dog. “This morning I was given the opportunity to demo Google’s LamDA AI in its AI Test Kitchen app. LamDA, if you don’t remember, is the AI that former Google engineer Blake Lemoine claimed was sentient earlier this year. The app that LamDA’s demo is housed in, the AI Test Kitchen, went live in Australia last week, and Aussies can sign up to try the AI out.”
The Tech Edvocate: Product Review Of Teachingbooks.net. “TeachingBooks.net is an online book database, assisting educators, parents, and librarians with finding multimedia resources, lesson plans, and links to extend curriculum in the classroom around books. The database features a huge number of fiction and nonfiction books and associated resources, with a heavy focus on materials useful for author studies and introductory lessons as well as supporting the diversification of what books and authors are taught.”
Android Police: Bundled Notes is (almost) the best Google Keep alternative around. “Google Keep is a great note-taking service, and it can also double as a to-do app, no doubt about it. But even when you use all of the organizational features available, like labels, archiving, and colors, you might soon end up with an entangled mess that’s hard to undo when you’re not careful. If you ask me, alternatives like Notion or Evernote can quickly become too complex for pure personal use, and that’s where one of my favorite indie Android apps comes in: Bundled Notes.”
MakeUseOf: Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W: Good Upgrade, but Needs More RAM . “First released as a low cost, low spec single-board computer (SBC) in 2015, the compact Raspberry Pi Zero has had a couple of minor iterations in the intervening years. But the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W marks its first major revision, giving it a specification not dissimilar to the Raspberry Pi 3. But with the Raspberry Pi 4 pushing the boundaries of power while retaining its credit card size, what can the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W bring to the world of hobbyist computing?”
The Varsity: Reviewing Pick-Me-Ups, a Toronto pop-up that uses social media as currency. “Before writing this article, I visited the pop-up three times in attempts to get the best experience. I really wanted to love it; the promise of free products seemed so appealing. But, like most offers advertised on social media, its promises were too good to be true.”
Mashable: Facebook’s Ray-Ban Stories smart glasses are just an overpriced influencer toy. “…unlike Google Glass with its small screen and internet connectivity, there’s no promise of a futuristic, wearable computer here. Facebook’s newest bit of hardware comes with such a comically limited and shoddily executed feature set for the price that it’s hard to take it seriously as a product at all. This is just an expensive toy for influencers seemingly designed to make Facebook look ‘cool’ again, built for a world where ‘Stories’ are now widely known as ephemeral and easily forgotten snippets of our social media lives.”
PCWorld: The best free backup software and services: Reviews and buying advice for protecting your data. “Finding a good free backup solution is easier than you’d think. A host of companies offer free online backup or free backup software—and perhaps surprisingly, nearly all of them are quite competent.”
TechRadar: Yandex search engine review . “Yandex offers a search engine experience close to that of Google and Bing, but like its two major competitors, the company’s user-data practices are less than desirable.”
The Guardian: Amazon blames social media for struggle with fake reviews. “Amazon has blamed social media companies for its failure to remove fake reviews from its website, arguing that ‘bad actors’ turn to social networks to buy and sell fake product reviews outside the reach of its own technology.”
ComputerWeekly: Scammers accidentally reveal fake Amazon review data. “An opsec-illiterate scammer has accidentally exposed more than 13 million data records via an open ElasticSearch database, relating to a large-scale fake review scam implicating independent Amazon vendors and users in unethical and illegal behaviour.”
Yahoo News: Booming industry for fake Google reviews has ‘evaded detection’. “A booming industry has emerged in fake Google (GOOGL) reviews, with businesses across the UK paying to artificially boost their ratings online. According to an investigation by consumer group Which?, fake reviewers were employing similar manipulative tactics for a wide range of businesses – from a stockbroker in Canary Wharf to a bakery in Edinburgh.”
The Verge: Google salvaged Robinhood’s one-star rating by deleting nearly 100,000 negative reviews. “Google is actively removing negative reviews of the Robinhood app from the Google Play Store, the company confirmed to The Verge. After some disgruntled Robinhood users organized campaigns to give the app a one-star review on Google’s Play Store and Apple’s App Store — and succeeded in review-bombing it all the way down to a one-star rating — the company has now deleted enough reviews to bring it back up to nearly four stars.” This is nothing new. Yelp deleted many negative reviews of a dentist who killed a famous lion in 2015. Meanwhile if someone made a demonstrably false statement in a review of a local business during the same timeframe, Yelp couldn’t be bothered to remove it. Do not ask me how I know this.
Washington Post: What negative candle reviews might say about the coronavirus . “Terri Nelson had an unusual question about covid-19: If the virus robs people of their sense of smell, would that be reflected in online reviews of fragrant products? To find out, the Portland, Ore., science illustrator and cartoonist said she looked up reviews of ‘the stinkiest holiday thing I could think of’ — scented candles. ‘There are angry ladies all over Yankee Candle’s site reporting that none of the candles they just got had any smell at all,’ she wrote on Twitter last week. ‘I wonder if they’re feeling a little hot and nothing has much taste for the last couple days too,’ she added, a nod to other common coronavirus symptoms.”
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