Spook and be Spooked this Halloween – 3 Must Have Halloween Apps

It’s that time of year again! Time to spook or be spooked… It’s Halloween!!! It’s also a great time to ‘spook out’ your phone. Here are 3 apps you must check out this Halloween:

1. Into the Dead

You have survived in a world overrun with the dead. How long can you hold on?

Into the Dead is a freaky game set in a zombie apocalypse and you must stay alive. Move as fast as you can, protect yourself and when the dead are rising just run!

The app features intense gameplay with stunning visuals, audio and an arsenal of powerful weaponry and tricks to stay alive. The app is free and available on both Android and iOS.

2. Turned: Zombie Effects

It’s Halloween and time to spook up. Turned lets you transform yourself into a zombie with photo-real wounds and effects that move with your facial movements. Basically, Turned turns you into a proper living, talking zombie or a survivor in a zombie apocalypse, whichever floats your boat.

The app is powered by tech previously used exclusively for Hollywood special effects. Now it’s available to anyone who dares to use it. Record and send videos to friends and social media as you battle a zombie apocalypse.

The app is free and available on both Android and iOS. Go ahead, be Turned.

3. Halloween Live Wallpaper World

Have your Android device ‘possessed’ with fun live wall papers from Halloween Live Wallpaper World. Be careful! Your fingers will brush dangerously close to witches, vampires, ghosts and other scary, shady characters as they lurk on your Android screen 😛

All live wallpapers are interactive, letting you control characters and unlock crazy cards to share with friends. It even has an ‘Arachnophobic Mode’ you can use to make friends who are scared of spiders wet their pants and then send them e-cards wishing them Happy Halloween 😉 The only buzz kill with this app is that it’s not free. But at just USD 1.09 it’s damned well worth the fun.

These three apps are sure to keep you entertained and ready to spook or be spooked this Halloween.

Is VR Taking Its Next Step? Led By Google?

It seems Google has recently purchased the virtual reality eye-tracking software developer, ‘Eyefluence’. This could mean rumours that Google is actually working on a still-unannounced wireless VR headset could be true. Eyefluence is known for developing eye-tracking software that can be integrated with head-mounted virtual reality and augmented reality displays.

According to the rumours the new wireless VR headset will not need to be connected to a PC or smartphone to work. The platform is also supposed to be entirely different from Google’s Daydream View VR gear that is supposed to launch in November. If the buzz on the ‘tech-vine’ is accurate, this new VR gear that Google is working on will integrate eye tracking whilst using sensors and algorithms to map out the real-world space in front of the user.

Google has also recently made an FCC (Federal Communications Commission, which is like the TRCSL in the US) application for a new prototype VR device with wireless capability, this further hints at the accuracy of the rumours.

According to an Engadget post, the new VR gear that Google is developing will use augmented reality within the user’s field of vision. This will eliminate the need for tethered devices such as a PC or a smartphone. Google has officially declined to comment on the matter 😉 we all know what that means. We think Google’s rumoured VR device could feature augmented reality tech like that seen on Microsoft’s HoloLens.

It’s really cool to think about what could be going on. It’ll be no surprise if Google’s new device changes the direction of virtual reality and augmented reality technology. After all, that’s what Google does. Imagine if it’s true, these guys are working on their next great project even before their current great project launches!

We seriously think that moving forward into the future, AR and VR will become a big part of daily life. It might even become as prevalent as smartphones and social media are today. VR and AR may actually incorporate those two into something even more spectacular.

Given that we live so much of our lives in a virtual realm, these kinds of tech may bring an exciting reality to our virtual lives, blurring the lines between virtual and reality.

Save the World – With an Old Android Device

Mobile devices become old and not so great pretty quickly and many old mobile devices just lie around. Due to the endowment effect, we don’t like to let go of these devices at prices people are willing to pay for (often badly) used mobile devices. The mobile devices finally end up in a drawer somewhere to be thrown out at some point or smashed to bits by a baby.

A great way to utilize an old mobile device is to donate it to someone who needs it. Truth be told, though, we aren’t too altruistic about our electronics. Still, there are ways to donate your old mobile devices without actually giving them away. We’re talking about donating the system resources on your old mobile device to a worthy cause.

This can be done using the internet and an app installed on the old device. The apps only use resources when the device is idle and connected to approved Wi-Fi networks so you don’t have to worry about data quotas. Sharing is not limited to old devices; any internet connected device can be of service.

Here are three great ways to do this:

1. Folding@Home

Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s disease, Parkinson’s and cancer are tragic diseases. Scientists at Stanford University are studying ways of curing and preventing these diseases. Their success will lead to better quality of life for millions. The focus in the search for cures is protein folding. Proteins folding incorrectly result in these terrible illnesses.

To study protein folding they require masses of computing power and look for people to help out by donating system resources to their effort. All you need to do is download the Folding@Home App.  100,000+ devices are already volunteering.

2. BOINC

A massive online platform for research and development, BOINC allows scientists to create volunteer computing projects allowing them to use the processing power of volunteer devices in their research. BOINC is an initiative of the University of California, Berkley.

Best part about BOINC is that you can pick and choose which projects to donate your processing power to. From astrophysics to biology, mathematics to medicine, you can decide exactly what you want to contribute to. Volunteering is simple, just download the BOINC App. 4,000,000+ devices are already volunteering.

3. Rainforest Connection

For this option, you do actually have to give up your device entirely, but it’s for a great effort. These guys will modify your old device and plant it in troubled rainforests around the world to listen for illegal logging activity.

Illegal logging is the leading cause of rainforest decimation around the world and your old device could make a difference.

As a bonus, if you don’t want to donate any part of your device, you can always completely download an app like Google Maps with all of the offline content and use your old device as a standalone offline GPS device. It’ll probably be the cheapest GPS device you’ll ever have.

Microsoft May Lead New Revolution – A Jump from Personal Computing to Personal Super Computing

In its early days, Microsoft revolutionized personal computing with MS-DOS and Windows. Now, they may lead a new revolution, opening the power of supercomputing to the many, instead of the few. They don’t plan to achieve this in the traditional way either, calling for increasing numbers of transistors packed into ever tinier microprocessor chips.

According to Moore’s Law, a term coined after Michael Moore, co-founder of Intel, the number of transistors in a microchip would likely double every year or two, making computers cheaper than ever before. It’s held true for over 50 years but cracks are now appearing as we reach the physical limits of the materials used to build CPUs.

Sure, technological breakthroughs could see Moore’s Law hold into the future, but by the looks of it, we’re pushing the limits. So it’s unlikely that under the present circumstances, Moore’s Law could give us supercomputing power on a conventional CPU. But, Microsoft has a possible workaround.

Last month at Ignite, Microsoft’s IT Workers Conference in Atlanta, Georgia, plans for better, more affordable supercomputing were announced. At the conference Microsoft showed how field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), a type of computer chip that can be reprogrammed for specific tasks after they leave the factory floor, were adding firepower to their network of on-demand computing power.

Over the last couple of years Microsoft has been quietly installing FPGAs into new servers being added to their global fleet of data centres. FPGAs are currently used to rank Bing search results and increase performance of Microsoft’s Azure cloud-computing network.

Microsoft is alone amongst major cloud service providers to deploy FPGAs on their networks, though some other firms have used them on much smaller scales. According to Microsoft, their biggest rival in the cloud space, Amazon.com, can’t match FPGA-enabled horsepower at the same price.

At Ignite, Microsoft showed how, using the combined computing power of all of their data centres worldwide, it was possible to translate all 5 million articles on the English language Wikipedia in less than a tenth of a second. Think about that for a second!

Microsoft says this is only the beginning, FPGAs being currently available only as a network-speed booster for the high-end of Microsoft’s cloud-computing network. Eventually, they’ll help power the rest of the hardware and machine-learning services that Microsoft rents to customers.

If Microsoft is successful, we are looking at supercomputers moving out of well-funded laboratories, government agencies and corporate server rooms into the hands of anyone requiring that kind of computing power. How’s that for empowerment?