Light Start: Hiding Facebook likes, Starship will carry people to Mars, new Galaxy Fold symptoms and WhatsApp will stop working on these phones
Marcé
Image from TechCrunch review
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Facebook will start hiding your precious likes this week
If you don’t know the thrill of racking up likes on your social media post, we feel you. Starting this week, Facebook will hide the number of likes posts receive for a trial period. This exercise should help those individuals who don’t get as many likes as they would… ahem… like. The trial will launch this week Friday and will only happen in Australia, according to reports. Facebook said in a statement to Cnet: “We are running a limited test where like, reaction and video view counts are made private across Facebook… [we will] gather feedback to understand whether this change will improve people’s experiences.” The company ran a similar test earlier this year where it tested hiding likes on Instagram, a platform that is notorious for its ‘influencer’ culture. Which is mainly based on follower counts and likes. It looks like users will know how many likes their posts receive, but it won’t be displayed to the public.
SpaceX’s Elon Musk unveils new reusable Starship vessel
This weekend we saw Elon Musk announce SpaceX’s newest member, a spacecraft called Starship. It is specifically designed to carry crew to outer space and will carry out missions to the moon and Mars, for example. Starship is expected to do its maiden voyage in about two months and will have the capacity to reach 19,800 meters before returning to Earth and landing. This is particularly important, as Musk sees a future where spacecraft are reused and not discarded in space. In the briefing, Musk said Starship’s rocket, called Super Heavy, will be the most powerful rocket engine in history with up to 37 raptor engines aboard. The craft itself will 50 meters long and 8 meters wide, and will have the capacity to carry a total of 100 humans. This is the first step in Musk’s space tourism project. And yes, we can’t wait to go on an interplanetary tour bus.
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The Galaxy Fold has new symptoms, and we’re losing hope
Image from TechCrunch review
After its glorious display of faults and hardware issues earlier this year, the Samsung Galaxy Fold was sent back to the bench. This time, they wanted to make sure everything’s ready for the big launch almost half a year later. Now the Galaxy Fold has finally reached the hands of thousands of users who were keen to try the latest foldable display tech. But it seems the Fold just won’t hold up. A reviewer at TechCrunch got the new and improved Fold to test, and all was going well until a few pixels spontaneously died on the display. The reviewer doesn’t recall using excessive pressure or damaging the display in some other way, but the dead pixels are all located close to the ‘foldy’ part of the screen, which is a bit concerning. “There was nothing inside the device while folded. I didn’t get it wet or feed it after midnight, and there’s no visible damage to the laminate layer, so I can’t really say definitively what happened here,” the reviewer said. Although the device still works fine, we would be pretty bummed if a $2,000 phone had small issues like this.
There are a few things that go with being a responsible smartphone owner and user. One of those things is periodically checking for updates, and making sure you download them. This is especially true when it comes to running certain apps on that device. Apps like WhatsApp. In February 2020, WhatsApp will stop working on iPhones that still run iOS 8 (and earlier). If you’re still running iOS 8, do an update as soon as possible, yo. “On iOS 8, you can no longer create new accounts or reverify existing accounts. If WhatsApp is currently active on your iOS 8 device, you’ll be able to use it until February 1, 2020,” WhatsApp said in a statement. If you’re still rocking an iPhone 4s or 5, make sure to download iOS 9 before April of next year. From this week, however, anyone using Whatsapp on iOS 8 or Android 2.3.7 or older won’t be able to create new accounts or verify existing accounts.
