Geekly Update - 25 April 2018

The AskBobRankin Geekly Update

Chipmaker AMD has released a BIOS update that, along with a recent Windows 10 patch, eliminates the Spectre vulnerability that afflicts every CPU made in the past several decades.

This just in from the "Here's Your Exit" department: Is mobile tech getting a little too convenient? A tourbus driver in New York City was caught watching TV on his smartphone while driving. "And if you look out the left side of the bus, you'll see that the Robinson family has just crash-landed on an alien planet…" The driver was fired.

If you love motorcycles and Twitter, but couldn't figure out how to make money from your hobbies, here's the answer. Harley Davidson is seeking paid interns to ride all summer and post photos of the fun to social media. Lucky participants get paid, and get to keep the bike.

Patch My PC is a small, smart, and free app that can update more than 300 application programs for you automatically. It could allow you to kill all those “update monitor” applets that chew up system resources.

Soylent Brown? Artificial intelligence software helps a Chinese cockroach farm maintain ideal conditions for the six billion bugs it breeds annually. The horrible beasts are processed into a “health food” beverage.

Sarco (short for “sarcophagus”) is a souped-up suicide machine. Visitors to this provocative exhibit at Amsterdam’s “Funeral Fair” can enjoy a virtual reality experience of how Sarco ends a life painlessly using nitrogen gas to induce hypoxia.

It’s dead simple to free up storage space on your Android device using Google’s new Files Go app. It quickly identifies junk files, apps that you have not used in a long time, old photos, and other wastes of space, then lets you erase them all with one tap.

A robot passed the ultimate test in Singapore recently: planning, organizing, and executing the assembly of Ikea furniture.

Did you know that Amazon handles nearly HALF of all online sales in the USA? And for the first time, Amazon has revealed the official number of Prime subscribers: 100 million at roughly $100 per year. I'll spare you the math, that's $10,000,000,000 -- ten billion dollars.

This story is getting old: a database of 48 million in-depth profiles of Americans was left on an Amazon Web Services server without even password protection, allowing anyone who could read the server’s directory to swipe it. The new outrage is Localblox, a Bellevue, Wash.-based firm that compiled this “3-dimensional” profile of hapless victims by scraping data from Facebook, LinkedIn, Zillow, and countless other sites without anyone’s permission.

Paint your walls with festive touchkey arrays and brightly colored sensors, and they will actually work! That’s according to a paper issued by a research team from China. The new conductive paint can create sensors capable of “smelling” indoor air quality or detecting the locations of electronic devices in a room.

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