The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

Play Super Mario 64 in your browser now Posted: 27 Mar 2015 03:07 PM PDT Take the edge off of a full work week with a bit of Super Mario 64, available for download or playable right in your browser thanks to ingenious Unity developer Roystan Ross. He calls it Super Mario 64 HD, and it features the original game's first le...

Slack beefs up security after data breach with two-step authentication Posted: 27 Mar 2015 02:09 PM PDT When you've got a hot new online platform, you inevitably become a target for hackers. That's the lesson Slack, a popular business collaboration tool, learned when it discovered an intrusion in its systems last February. As a result, the company is n...

Pocket camera helps the visually impaired navigate the world Posted: 27 Mar 2015 12:59 PM PDT This might be one of the least invasive sight aids for the visually impaired that we've spotted: it's a camera that sits in the shirt pocket, Her-style, and uses auditory alerts to warn when the user approaches obstacles. The idea here is to help fol...

Tiny 3D-printed retro TV set plays B-movies for your Barbies Posted: 27 Mar 2015 12:19 PM PDT The Philco Predicta television is a 1950s design icon and one of the most easily recognizable television models in history, what with its detached picture tube and nearly flat screen. Unfortunately, finding a working example these days is nearly impo...

Vine's six second slices of life get a big video quality bump Posted: 27 Mar 2015 11:43 AM PDT Artists and comedians have been doing some truly amazing things with Vine since it launched as a Twitter product two years ago, but those mesmerizing slices of life that eat up your day in six second increments have never really looked all that great...

HTC, Valve offer free Vive VR dev kits to select developers Posted: 27 Mar 2015 11:15 AM PDT Valve, the company that spawned Steam, Team Fortress 2, Portal and Half-Life, will hand out dev kits of its Vive virtual reality headset to select developers at no cost, company spokesperson Doug Lombardi tells Ars Technica. Valve plans to launch a n...

Google teams with Johnson & Johnson for robotic-assisted surgery Posted: 27 Mar 2015 09:58 AM PDT Google's mysterious facility, Google X, is churning out next level technologies -- a self-driving car, delivery drones and Internet balloons. Its Life Sciences division is now teaming up with Ethicon, one of Johnson & Johnson's medical device compani...

Sony drops PlayStation TV price to £45 in the UK Posted: 27 Mar 2015 09:52 AM PDT Sony's PlayStation 4 is selling incredibly well, but an early price drop suggests its smaller cousin isn't doing so well in the UK. The PlayStation TV has always been a peculiar proposition, offering an easy way to play some, but not all PlayStation ...

Virgin Media claims its new wireless hub is the fastest in the land Posted: 27 Mar 2015 09:09 AM PDT Even if your home is in the best area for fibre broadband, and you're paying for the fastest speeds, a cheap router can let you down. Slow and patchy wireless connectivity is commonplace in the UK, in part because internet service providers (ISPs) gi...

The best cheap router (for most people) Posted: 27 Mar 2015 09:00 AM PDT This post was done in partnership with The Wirecutter, a list of the best technology to buy. Read the original full article below at TheWirecutter.com If I wanted the cheapest good WiFi router I could get, I would buy the TP-Link TL-WDR3600. It's a ...

How Russia's 'troll factory' pumps out online propaganda Posted: 27 Mar 2015 08:44 AM PDT Russian blogger Marat Burkhard told Radio Free Europe that working in an infamous "troll factory" generating fake internet posts and comments was "Orwellian." "Whatever we're told, that's what we'll write about, no questions asked, and we don't want ...

Apple CEO Tim Cook plans to donate his fortune to charity Posted: 27 Mar 2015 08:21 AM PDT Tim Cook has big plans for his vast wealth: It's all going to philanthropy, he revealed in a Fortune interview. The Apple CEO -- who's currently worth around $112 million, and holds restricted stock that could be worth up to $665 million -- said he's...

Introducing Engadget's newest contributor: The Wirecutter! Posted: 27 Mar 2015 08:00 AM PDT Starting today, you're going to notice a very familiar contributor popping up on the pages of Engadget. That would be none other than our friends at The Wirecutter. We've long admired The Wirecutter's ability to review as many products in as many cat...

Watch Periscope livestreams on Windows Phone with unofficial app Posted: 27 Mar 2015 07:13 AM PDT Live streaming apps like Twitter's Periscope and Meerkat are all the rage right now, but so far they've only been accessible to iPhone users. Enter Telescope, a third-party Periscope app for Windows Phone, which opens up the service's live streams to...

Google loses bid to block Safari privacy lawsuit in the UK Posted: 27 Mar 2015 07:05 AM PDT Back in February 2012, the Wall Street Journal revealed how Google was able to quietly bypass privacy settings in Safari and track the sites people were browsing. The company eventually paid a $22.5 million penalty to the FTC, and now a group of Brit...

You'll soon get 10TB SSDs thanks to new memory tech Posted: 27 Mar 2015 06:30 AM PDT SSDs and other flash memory devices will soon get cheaper and larger thanks to big announcements from Toshiba and Intel. Both companies revealed new "3D NAND" memory chips that are stacked in layers to pack in more data, unlike single-plane chips cur...

North Korea's must-have gadget is a $50 media player Posted: 27 Mar 2015 05:53 AM PDT In North Korea, the gadget you'd probably want is a Notel. Or a Notetel, a word that attempts to shoehorn notebook and television together, describing a pretty unassuming, very popular, Chinese-made media player. According to estimates from Reuters, ...

UK report concludes Huawei's no threat to national security Posted: 27 Mar 2015 05:16 AM PDT For years, the UK government has been concerned that Huawei's networking equipment is aiding the Chinese government and threatening national security. In Britain, the company supplies major network providers such as BT, O2 and EE, which only amplifie...

YouTube starts testing silky smooth, ultra HD video quality Posted: 27 Mar 2015 04:43 AM PDT YouTube introduced videos that play at 60 frames per second last year and ones viewable in 4K resolution in February. Now, the website is starting to experiment with videos that are both silky smooth and ultra high-def. TechCrunch has spotted a low-k...

Google, Apple and others list demands for spying act changes Posted: 27 Mar 2015 03:31 AM PDT The US Congress, Senate and White House may be torn on what to do with a key Patriot Act spying clause, set to expire on June 1st. But Google, Apple, Facebook and other tech companies in the Reform Government Surveillance coalition know exactly what ...

Photos purportedly showing the LG G4 leak online (update: nope) Posted: 27 Mar 2015 01:52 AM PDT The phone in these images looks like the LG G3, but you might notice some subtle differences. That's because it could actually be pictures of the brand's yet-to-be-released flagship, the G4. An XDA Developer user called s3rv1cet3ch posted a folder of...

Technology designed for aerospace could improve Parkinson's therapy Posted: 27 Mar 2015 12:28 AM PDT When Rice University chemist Matteo Pasquali set out to to create strong and conductive carbon nanotube fibers, he had aerospace applications in mind. But it turned out his microscopic fibers are also great at communicating with the brain, making the...

DARPA is working on something way better than GPS Posted: 26 Mar 2015 11:02 PM PDT When your location marker on Google Maps is pinging all over the place, it's usually due to temperamental GPS signal. DARPA thinks this isn't cutting it anymore, and is developing a "radically" new tech that will offer real-time position tracking -- ...

The first Apple Watch apps are already here Posted: 26 Mar 2015 09:35 PM PDT You can't actually buy an Apple Watch for another month or so, but Apple has already opened the gate for apps. 9to5Mac points out a slew of freshly updated apps, including Twitter, WeChat, Evernote and the weather app Dark Sky (shown above), among ot...

HTC's lead designer leaves after less than a year Posted: 26 Mar 2015 08:18 PM PDT For a tech company that places so much emphasis on design, we can't help but think something's up when one of the key designers leaves. Today, we bring you the sad news that HTC's VP of Industrial Design, Jonah Becker, has announced his departure on ...