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The report hasn’t stated what cryptocurrency was being mined, or for how long the farm had been operating. It’s also unclear why, or for how long the farms were abandoned. “Two of these Bitcoin farms have been identified, with a consumption of one megawatt,” Arash Navab, a power official in the central province of Yazd, told state television. The news comes just days after local media reported that Irananian officials were blaming the country’s recent increase in energy consumption on cryptocurrency mining....

Don’t know your truck from your deck? Well, this guide will get you started. In fact, much of the information comes from eskaters themselves, who kindly shared their knowledge with me. What is an electric skateboard and how do they work? Electric skateboards, also known as eboards and often written as esk8 [god, I feel old] are powered by an electric motor and typically controlled using a wireless hand-held remote controller that communicates via Bluetooth between the controller and the board....

We knew one of the key specs, the mid-premium Snapdragon 765 in particular, but today’s announcement also confirms that the phone will have: 8GB of RAM 128GB of storage MicroSD support 6.8-inch display 20.5:9 aspect ratio A 48 MP primary camera with pixel binning 8MP ultra-wide 5MP depth camera 16MP selfie camera 4,300 mAh battery Stereo speakers 5G support Headphone jack The phone will also support a similar dual-screen case to the G8X and V60, as well as an optional stylus (fun fact: the V60 has been shown to work with Wacom pens)....

Windows and Mac. Mac and Windows. When the discussion comes to operating systems, it feels like those two titans are the only ones anyone ever brings up, consuming all the oxygen in any OS conversation. That makes sense to a degree when you consider the two make up about 97 percent of the market share when it comes to OS usage. But in that remaining 3 percent lives Linux. Versatile, easy to understand,and open sourced, Linux has been constantly modified and improved over the past 30 years, making it the operating system serious programmers use when they don’t want to hassle with all of Microsoft or Apple’s proprietary hurdles....

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The feature is available in the latest developer and canary builds of Edge – that is to say, the new Chromium-powered version. When you select some text, right click it, and tap ‘read aloud selection,’ you’ll be able to choose from a variety of voice options. While some of these still sound robotic, others are powered by neural networks, making for “the most natural sounding voices available today.” It requires an internet connection – the voice will have ‘online’ in its name, but if you’re browsing the web in the first place, that probably won’t be much of a problem....

Fret no more: today Microsoft publicly released the first unified Office app for Android. The app was previously only available for Office Insiders during a preview period that began in November with a small group of users, according to Thurrott.com. Now it’s available publicly right in the Play Store. The app does much more than let you read and edit documents from those three apps though. Some other features include:...

Microsoft Office’s correction tools, which most might associate with bad grammar or improper verb usage, secretly have options that help catch non-inclusive language, including gender and sexuality bias and ethnic slurs. They’re not easy to find though — so here’s how you find them. Editor > Settings > Inclusivity. Tick the boxes. Your spellchecker will now help you to start overcoming your subconscious biases. (It’s a brilliant feature. I wish they’d make more noise about it)....

I haven’t had a chance to spend much time with the new Microsoft Office, but I was quite impressed with how much you can do with your phone camera from this app.It’s quite easy to turn one or many pictures into PDF or a Word document. I even scanned a table from a user manual of an earphone to turn it into an Excel spreadsheet – the text recognition was spot on....

Those invited to partake of the preview will be able to play a few Microsoft games, such as Gears 5, Sea of Thieves, and Halo 5, on their mobile devices. As the moniker “cloud gaming” suggests, you don’t have to download the titles, but simply stream them from Microsoft’s servers. Early reports from Reddit users claim the preview works fairly well, with some delay between input and action. — Paul Thurrott (@thurrott) October 14, 2019 xCloud’s primary rival, Stadia, launches next month, so it’s probably a good moment for Microsoft to remind everyone about xCloud’s existence....

This week, the tech giant published a filed patent, called “Smart fabric that recognizes objects and touch input.” In other words, Microsoft is developing fabric that can recognize and identify objects nearby. So what do you mean by smart fabric? Smart fabric refers to textiles that embed technology such as sensors and conductive thread into the structure and function of the material. In the case of Microsoft, the patent is for fabric in a jeans’ pocket....

At its latest valuation, WeWork was worth an impressive $47 billion. It boasts backers as prominent as SoftBank’s Vision Fund. Although it’s not unheard of for companies to IPO while still making continuous, heavy losses (the best example of that being Uber), WeWork will undoubtedly raise eyebrows. In 2018, it lost $1.9 billion on revenues of $1.8 billion. — Jon Russell (@jonrussell) August 14, 2019 Things were slightly, but not much, better in the first six months of this year, with revenues of $1....

That sounds like a lot of science jargon, but the gist is that this could potentially lead to a legitimate ‘dark matter detector,’ and that’s something that could revolutionize humanity’s understanding of literally everything. Up front: Physics is a moving target. Because we are like fish inside an aquarium, we do not know where the water we swim in came from or what lies beyond the blurry images at the edge of our glass-paneled horizon....

You can’t go a week these days without reading the word “disruption” in relation to some new piece of tech that says it’s going to change the way we live forever. Many startups in the mobility tech world profess that very Silicon Valley infused mantra of ‘moving fast and breaking stuff’ — but as regulators and industry watchdogs get involved, the disruptors run the risk of becoming the disrupted. It seems sizeable parts of the mobility space exist either in regulatory gray areas — where they’re subjected to Draconian legislation that inhibits innovation — or are not regulated at all....

While I’ve got you here, props for sticking it out this year, faithful cryptocurrency fan. It hasn’t been easy: Bitcoin sure has copped it this year, and so has pretty much every single altcoin. Anyway, here’s the news. Disney blocks Justin Sun’s TRON trademark Disney has succeeded in preventing blockchain-based network TRON from trademarking its name in the US, Decrypt reports. Three separate applications were rejected after Disney said the trademarks would damage its brand, which started with the 1982 film and since expanded to a sequel, video games, an animations....

Let’s get to it. Security researchers from Trend Micro have uncovered a new type of cryptocurrency mining botnet. The malware targets Android devices by exploiting a debug port normally used by developers to fix defects in apps, CoinDesk reports. So far, 21 countries have been hit, with South Korea the worst affected. Israeli police arrested two brothers in connection with the infamous 2016 hack of cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex, local news reports....

Why do our jobs have to dominate so much of our life? What if there’s another way to look at work? Maybe your job is just a job. I like my job, but the job that I do doesn’t define who I am. As much fun as fussing over words can be, technical writing is not my passion. Given my past jumps across jobs and industries, it may not even be my career....

In case you’re too young to remember, the original Pokémon Snap was a Nintendo 64 game in which you snapped pictures of Pokémon. It was kind of like a combination rail shooter and safari. That’s pretty much all there was to it, but it was so odd and unlike existing games in the franchise that it’s stuck with players since it was released 20 years ago. Fans have been asking for another game like it for as long as I can remember, and it seems The Pokémon Company finally listened....

InSight touched down via parachute and retrorockets on the plains known as Elysium Planitia – lying between the ancient volcano Elysium Mons, and Gale Crater where the Curiosity Rover is exploring. Although it is still trying to find a way to hammer its heat probe adequately into the ground, other aspects of InSight’s surface activities have worked well. Read: [Strange signals coming from space every 16 days are puzzling scientists] For example, it successfully managed the crucial operation of using a robot arm to place a seismometer (a very sensitive vibration detector) on the ground well clear of the landing platform and then to cover it with wind and thermal shield....

Of those surveyed, just 12% of drivers in the US would trust riding in an autonomous vehicle. [Read: British Airways is testing self-driving wheelchairs at JFK and Heathrow] Six in every 10 Americans say they want a clearer understanding of who would be legally responsible in the event of a self-driving vehicle crash. Around half (49%) are still curious about how vulnerable self-driving cars will be to hackers, too. The AAA says that fully automated vehicles are still decades away from hitting the roads....