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How to get free games with Amazon Prime

How did we live before Amazon Prime? We actually had to go out shopping for things instead of having them brought to us at home a mere two days after buying them. Since its creation, Prime has evolved to include Prime Video (a major streaming force like Netflix and Hulu). And now, Prime membership includes a premium Twitch account.

It may be under the radar for now, so Amazon is pushing hard. They are giving away free video games.  We’ll repeat. Free. Games. Free games!

How to get free games with Amazon Prime

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From: Amazon

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Before you start

Before you get started, there’s one critical requirement: you can’t get free video games without an Amazon Prime account. If you click that link above, you’ll get a 30-day free trial. After that, you can pay $12.99/month or $99/year. Considering all the benefits, it’s worth the investment. If you’re not sure, just get the trial and you can cancel. Once you’re all signed up for Prime, you’re ready to play.

How to get free video games

To access the completely free available titles, you’ll need to create a Twitch account. It only takes a few seconds. Once you’ve done that, you’re ready for the important part: linking your Amazon account with your Twitch account. You can sign in using a link on Twitch, or just click here.

Enter your Amazon password and sign into Twitch as well. Once both services are automatically connected, this screen pops up:

Click on “Claim your free loot” to not only see the video games available that month, but also all the rewards the platform offers. Once you do that, you’ll see everything appears under the crown icon in the upper right part of the screen. Click there to access all your content.

The video games available in April are Tales from Borderlands, Steamworld Dig 2, Kingsway, Tokyo 42 and Dubwars. Happy gaming!

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This Black Mirror nightmare is real in China

Source: Fossbytes

Black Mirror, the dystopian Netflix series based on the terrible path that technology is leading us down, has been prescient more than once. Whether it was successfully predicting ex UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s intimate relations with Pigs or showing a driverless pizza van buzzing around town, many things featured in the show have either shown up in popular culture or are well on the way to becoming a reality. Unfortunately for Chinese citizens one of the most terrifying concepts shown in Black Mirror will soon be true for them.

The idea of a social credit score, as seen in Black Mirror, put all citizens at the mercy of a score made up of an amalgamation of ratings that were given to you whenever you interacted with other people. The episode that described this idea showed an unfortunate woman’s life spiral out of control as she stumbled from one social car crash to another. As her social credit score dropped, so did her access to certain products, services, and even social circles. On May 1st, this terrifying concept will become a reality in China when bad social credit scores start having a tangible effect on people’s lives.

China’s social credit score is based on social and financial behavior. The first series of acts that’ll have a negative effect on your score include spreading false information, causing trouble on public transportation, using expired travel tickets, failing to pay social insurance, and smoking on trains. Rather terrifyingly the guiding principle behind the scheme is “Once untrustworthy, always restricted.” Those restrictions become real on 1st May when people with low social credit scores will be unable to travel via plane or train for up to a year.

JFK finally delivers his Dallas speech from November 22, 1963

JFK finally delivers his Dallas speech from November 22nd 1963

Source: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images 

November 22nd, 1963 still lives on in infamy as it was the day John F. Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States, was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. Much is still in doubt about what actually happened on that fateful day, but something that cannot be refuted is the speech the great man was due to deliver before he was shot down on the streets of Dallas.

The speech has been a matter of public record for some time and can read on the pages of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library here. Kennedy never got to deliver his speech of course but, thanks to new voice synthesis technology and some painstaking work from Scottish voice company CereProc, that does not mean you can’t listen to him giving his final speech.

The project was commissioned by The Times and used 831 separate recordings of JFK, each only 0.4 seconds long, to create the illusion of a fluent a fluid recitation of Kennedy’s final speech by the man himself. All in all, it took over two months to complete the work on the speech, but the results are quite stunning. You can hear the speech here (unfortunately, it is behind The Times paywall, so only paid subscribers will be able to hear it).

Big things coming to Netflix

Source: Mark Wilson/Getty Images.

From Stranger Things to releasing an entire TV Series at the same time Netflix has never been afraid to try new things. The strategy has been successful as Netflix has a whopping 117 million paying subscribers. With Netflix flying high, it’ll be no surprise that they’re continuing in their efforts to innovate and bring the biggest names to their online streaming platform.

The latest of Netflix’s new efforts come in the shape of gamification. Netflix has rolled out, to test audiences, the addition of Netflix patches to certain Netflix original shows, namely Netflix Original shows for kids. The idea is to offer kids virtual prizes for watching episodes of certain shows on Netflix. Do you think your kid will want to collect all the Netflix patches?

Another effort from Netflix, which is arguably much bigger than virtual patches, is the streaming service’s attempts to sign Barack Obama to produce a show. Obama has already appeared on Netflix, as a guest on David Letterman’s show My Guest Needs no Introduction, and a Netflix show would give President Obama a chance to communicate with the 117 million people around the world who have signed up to Netflix. We’d love to hear your ideas for Obama’s Netflix show in the comments below.

Bose wants to augment reality with sound

Source: Raymond Wong /Mashable

These days when people think about augmented reality, they think about Pokémon Go, Google Glass, or even Ikea’s app that lets you see what furniture would look like in your living room. When people think about augmented reality, they think visual augmentation. High-end speaker and headphone manufacturer Bose want to change that. Bose wants to start augmenting reality with sound as well as images.

To do this Bose is developing augmented reality sunglasses that will give the wearer audio cues about whatever it is they’re looking at. What is even more impressive is that the glasses don’t use cameras at all. Instead, Bose’s glasses use onboard sensors and precise GPS data to understand what the user is looking at so that they can then pass relevant information through the two directional speakers built into the stems of the glasses.

As well as the glasses, Bose is also investing $50 million into a fund that’ll promote the development of the AR platform itself. Already signed up to the platform are giants like Srava, TripAdvisor, TuneIn, and Yelp, but Bose also hopes hardware developers will a start looking at making their own accessories that will take advantage of the Bose AR system.

If this catches on, it could be huge!

Oscars honest trailers

Source: Youtube (Screen Junkies)

The Oscars have been and gone, and the results seem to indicate a revolution could be about to grip Hollywood. From the Time’s Up movement to a black man taking home the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay via the Best Film going to a movie about a romantic relationship between a woman and a sea creature; Hollywood seems to be finally waking up to the fact that you don’t need to be a middle-aged white man to be capable of creating beautiful art. Even Netflix took home an Oscar.

This is all great news as it’ll open up new opportunities to artists and creators who have for too long been denied their chance to shine. Let’s not forget to laugh, however, at the pomp and ceremony of it all, and what better way to do it than via the internet sensation that is Honest Trailers. Check out below all of the honest trailers for this year’s biggest Oscar nominees and see if they affect your views on the night’s big winners.

 

The Future is Now

Source: Drone Racing League

Drone racing looks straight up like something out of a sci-fi movie or futuristic video game, and the Drone Racing League (DRL) is all over it, telling us The Future is Now. There have been drone racing events all over the world including at Mardi Gras, Las Vegas, Australia, and Dubai. The World Drone Prix in Dubai offered a prize pot of a cool $1,000,000, with the winning team taking home a whopping $250,000. Not bad for flying your little robot around a fancy obstacle course.

The thing is, drone racing is so much more than buzzing drones and remote controls. The action is fast (reaching speeds of up to 100mph), with neon lights marking out the courses, and races taking place across all three dimensions. The race that took place at the Miami Dolphins’ Stadium saw racers flying not just in the stands and around the field but up over the roof and through the stadium’s many tunnels. The sky literally is the limit for Drone Racing and to top it off, all of the incredible action can be viewed from the first person perspective of the drones themselves, which is exactly how the pilots see the action. Oh yeah, Drone racing also has crashes! Lots and lots of crashes!

Is this the real life Tony Stark?

Is this the real life Tony Stark?

Source: Mashable 

If submarines sailing in freezing oceans on the moons of far-off planets sounds like science fiction to you, then you will be wowed by a cool video by artist Joanie Lemercier. Lemercier has created what he calls no-lograms, and they would not be out of place in Tony Stark’s lab. That is right; Lemercier is playing around with Iron Man level tech!

Lemercier became obsessed with holograms when he first saw R2D2 project Princess Leia’s distress call in Star Wars: A New Hope. He has spent years creating an innovative technique that uses motion sensors and water droplets to create volumetric projections. By simply moving his hands he can manipulate holographic projections just like Robert Downey Jr. in Iron Man or Tom Cruise in Minority Report.

“My works explore geometric patterns, forms that repeat themselves in nature, and the similarities that we can observe when we look at the structure of the universe in its different scales. Volumetric projections are also a great means to question the nature of reality and how technology can change our perception of the world we saw. “

You need to see this to believe it.

Black Panther trolls foiled on Rotten Tomatoes target IMDb

Source: Movieweb

Down With Disney was identified as a hate group and banned on Facebook and elsewhere when it announced plans to attack Marvel blockbuster Black Panther on the Rotten Tomatoes movie website.

But the trolls’ efforts ended in failure, with the movie’s score still in the high nineties.

So they turned their attention to IMDb with a flurry of one-star user reviews that dragged down the movie’s overall score on that website.

None of this seems to be worrying the film’s cast or director much. In addition to great reviews, there is already a slew of sequels and a spin-off planned, and ticket sales promise to be very healthy indeed – in contrast with the mental states of its wannabe hijackers.

Super Mario marches on

Credit: Nintendo

He may be in his thirties, but the bushy be-’stached Italian plumber shows no sign of slowing up or settling down. In fact, he and brother Luigi are more in demand than ever.

The new games keep coming, and moving onto new platforms, with Mario Kart Tour is scheduled to hit smartphones in just over a year.

Meanwhile, the great news for younger fans is that legendary game designer Shigeru Miyamoto is co-producing a Super Mario Bros. movie with the same team that brought Despicable Me and Minions to the big screen.

The film doesn’t have a set release date yet, but we do know that it’s being produced by Universal – which should mean a theme-park tie in, too.