Samsungtelevisions offer various intelligent features and image enhancements, but some settings should be adjusted before use. Enabling the correct settings can improve the brightness, speed, and performance of your television.
1. Update Your TV Software First
The Samsung Smart TV runs the Tizen operating system, which controls the apps, menu, and other features of your TV. It is recommended that you always have the latest version of the software installed on your device before streaming any movie or installing an app.
The best way to manually search for updates is to go to Settings > Support > Software Update. Some users disable Wi-Fi after the update is complete, since advertisements, suggestions, and applications can interfere with menu navigation. However, you can still connect the TV to Wi-Fi periodically to install other software updates. Other gadgets, such as Roku, Fire TV, and gaming consoles, can be used as alternatives for app downloads.
2. Turn Off Eco Mode for Better Brightness
If your Samsung TV appears dimmer than you expect due to its energy-saving feature. The Samsung model offers several features, including the Eco Sensor and Brightness Optimization modes, which can be enabled. These modes operate based on environmental lighting information.
To enhance visual quality, the user can disable settings such as Eco Sensor, Brightness Optimizer, and Energy Saving Solution. The features can be found under Settings > General & Privacy > Power and Energy Saving. This is done so the TV can maintain a consistent brightness level, which will improve image quality.
This feature will come in especially handy when watching movies, playing games, or watching sports, since higher brightness is essential for clarity. Users who would like to enhance their HDR settings can navigate to Picture > Expert Settings and select High under Peak Brightness.
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3. Enable Intelligent Mode for Automatic Picture Adjustments
Intelligent Mode is one of the Intelligent Features on the Samsung TV, enabling it to regulate itself. The TV uses Artificial Intelligence, which allows it to adjust brightness, color, and sound based on room illumination and users’ personal preferences.
Furthermore, the Adaptive Picture and AI Customization options are available in Samsung’s Intelligent mode. They allow the television to adjust the image settings differently depending on the content – whether movies, sports, gaming, or regular TV shows. The learning process occurs as the user regularly uses the television, gaining more experience.
This feature is especially useful for users who do not want to spend time manually tweaking multiple picture settings. Intelligent Mode becomes more efficient as the television gets used to users’ viewing habits. The option can be enabled under All Settings > General > Intelligent Mode and may be turned off at any time.
4. Disable Auto Motion Plus for Movies
Samsung also includes an Auto Motion Plus feature that creates smoother motion on the TV screen. The feature inserts artificial frames between scenes to reduce motion blur. While this may improve motion clarity, it often creates the “soap opera effect.”
The soap opera effect gives films and TV series a look that’s too natural and unrealistic. Rather than achieving the desired cinematographic style, the scenes begin to take on a daytime television or live-broadcast feel. Many viewers feel this removes the original film-like appearance from movies and streaming content.
This setting can be turned off by navigating to Picture > Expert Settings > Auto Motion Plus. Turning off this setting makes the picture look more natural for video streaming and films. However, when it comes to gaming, a bit of motion smoothing could still make a difference.
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5. Customize Audio Settings for Better Sound
Samsung TVs have built-in features that enhance sound quality without requiring any additional equipment. Modern TVs are quite thin, which can hamper speaker performance. For this reason, Samsung offers various sound modes and enhancements in the Sound tab.
Among the many attributes, the one that stands out is the Adaptive Sound feature, which automatically adjusts audio settings according to the environment and the media being played. Presets such as Standard, Optimized, and Amplify are provided by Samsung TVs to help users choose the sound profile that suits their needs. Furthermore, there are multiple EQ settings available for bands.
For customers using Samsung sound bars that support Q-Symphony technology, there is no need to turn off the television speakers, as Q-Symphony ensures the two speakers work synergistically to deliver high-quality sound.
Senator Bill Cassidy just lost his campaign for reelection to his Senate seat in Louisiana. With that, his career in federal government is likely over. It’s no secret as to why this happened. In early 2021, Cassidy suffered from a spasm of patriotism and voted to convict Donald Trump during his impeachment trial after the latter spurred on an attempted insurrection in the capitol that left several people dead, scores injured, and became the most famous stain on American democracy since the Bill Clinton era. Trump turned his retribution cannons on Cassidy, pumped the primary cycle full of vitriol for Cassidy, and managed to shove him from office.
But here’s the thing: fuck Bill Cassidy.
In the years since Trump’s second impeachment trial, Cassidy did his absolute best to throw as much unrequited love at Donald Trump as he possibly could. The moment the political realities became evident, Cassidy’s principles melted away. He spoke glowingly of Trump in his second term. He touted how well he and Trump work together, even as he acknowledged that Trump hates him. He was a reliable pro-Trump vote on nearly everything.
And he was the most important vote in confirming RFK Jr. to his current role as Secretary of HHS. And given how his vote to confirm Kennedy gave his colleagues cover to do so means that he may be the man most singularly responsible for Kennedy’s appointment other than Donald Trump.
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Bill Cassidy is more at fault, because he actually knows better. RFK Jr. is an idiot with a brainworm, whereas Bill Cassidy is a doctor. A real doctor who worked in a charity hospital for the uninsured in Louisiana and, to his own testimony, has seen what happens when children don’t get vaccinated. He knew better, and yet he still provided the deciding vote to confirm Kennedy, almost definitely because he saw it as a way back into Trump’s good graces. Clearly, that didn’t happen.
And while he swore up and down that he had given Kennedy a real good talking-to and got all of the assurances that he would not screw with vaccines or change the CDC’s page stating that vaccines do not cause autism, that did not happen either.
He fucked us all to save his own skin, and ended up bloody and skinless anyway. He claimed it would be okay because of said “assurances” and because of his promise to monitor everything Kennedy did.
Monitor Kennedy he did, perhaps, but it certainly didn’t go beyond that. Save for a few contentious congressional hearings and Cassidy occasionally complaining to local news media about Kennedy’s actions at HHS, the man simply didn’t do anything to try to fix the mess he had a heavy hand in creating. He didn’t sign up to help the impeachment effort against Kennedy. He didn’t call for any new legislation to curb the chaos that is happening at HHS and its child agencies right now. He even had kind words to say about Kennedy’s approach to processed foods in the past few weeks.
Taking a moral stand is not a one-time project. Cassidy’s vote to convict Trump in 2021 was the right vote. Nearly everything he’s done since negates that moral stance, as he engaged in the most pathetic forms of boot-licking in an attempt to save his political career.
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It didn’t work. Trump doesn’t work that way. Neither does Kennedy. Once you’re on the enemies hit list, you’re never coming off. The Senate will probably be worse for losing Cassidy generally. The Senate Health Committee certainly will be. And that’s too bad.
But fuck Bill Cassidy for foisting RFK Jr. as HHS boss on this country.
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It explained that it created the new rules due to Stripe’s policy.
Kickstarter
Kickstarter has retracted the new set of rules around mature content that it released last week, following an outcry from creators whose campaigns are affected by the change. While the platform still allowed “romance and spicy literature, including comics” under that policy, it enforced stricter rules around pornographic and sexually explicit content. Now, Kickstarter has admitted that the response it got from its community let it know “loud and clear” that the crowdfunding platform got it wrong, so it’s going back to its previous rules.
It explained in its announcement that it updated its policy because of Stripe, its payment processor that operates under its own set of rules. Kickstarter explained that over the past few months, it has seen a growing number of campaigns that it had already approved get suspended by Stripe mid-funding due to their nature.
The platform would advocate for affected creators whenever that happened, and it was able to get Stripe to unfreeze their funds and to continue accepting money on their behalf so they could finish their campaigns. However, Kickstarter wasn’t always successful in getting Stripe’s decision reversed. It thought that the best path forward was to “close the gap” between its rules and Stripe’s so that creators would only have one set of rules to deal with.
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“That was the intent, but the decision we made was an abandonment of the core counterculture, f*ck the establishment spirit of Kickstarter, and it left our community vulnerable,” it wrote in its post.
Under its previous rules, which have now been reinstated, pornography and illegal content are still prohibited. But the rules are less restrictive, as they’re more “bare bones and not as specific.” Kickstarter said that Stripe can still suspend campaigns due to their nature, but it promised to advocate for creators and to help them make adjustments to make their projects acceptable to Stripe. The platform called it an “imperfect temporary solution,” so it could still implement changes surrounding mature content in the future.
Kickstarter isn’t the only website affected by payment processors’ policies. Last year, Steam also started banning games that violate the rules and standards of “payment processors and related card networks and banks,” which affected titles with adult themes. Years before that, credit card companies Mastercard and Visa blocked the use of their cards on Pornhub and even severed ties with the advertising arm of the adult website’s parent company MindGeek.
Fitness wearables today are usually marketed toward marathon runners, cyclists, and people already deep into the fitness ecosystem. But for many talented athletes in India, especially those from remote or underrepresented regions, access to proper training tools remains a major challenge. That’s something Garmin now wants to help address through a new initiative in partnership with MyKrida. The company has equipped seven emerging athletes from tribal regions across India with Garmin Forerunner smartwatches to help them access structured performance tracking and training insights.
Garmin Wants to Bring Data-Driven Training to More Athletes
The idea behind the initiative is fairly straightforward. Garmin’s Forerunner smartwatches can track metrics like heart rate, pace, distance, recovery, sleep quality, and training load. For professional athletes, this kind of data is already standard. But for many young athletes in smaller regions, access to these tools can genuinely change how they train. Garmin says the watches are meant to help athletes train smarter and improve consistency through better recovery and performance monitoring rather than simply increasing training intensity.
According to Deepak Raina, Director at AMIT GPS & Navigation LLP:
India has immense untapped athletic potential, particularly in regions where access to structured training tools remains limited. At Garmin, our focus is on enabling athletes with reliable, performance-led technology that brings clarity to how they train, recover, and improve. Through this initiative, we aim to support long-term athletic development and help these athletes compete with greater confidence and consistency.
The on-ground implementation is being managed by MyKrida, which works across grassroots and elite sports development programs in India. The platform focuses heavily on identifying athletes early and connecting them with structured support systems. According to MyKrida founder Shubham Sharma, the collaboration with Garmin helps bring “world-class performance technology directly to these athletes.”
The Dubai-founded global employment and payroll platform reached profitability in early 2025 before taking the round. EBRD Venture Capital led; 500 Global is the new strategic name alongside.\
RemotePass, the global employment, payroll, and spend platform co-founded by Kamal Reggad and Karim Nadi, has raised $17.4m in Series B funding led by EBRD Venture Capital, the company said on Tuesday. 500 Global joins the round as a new strategic investor, alongside returning backers Oraseya Capital, 212 VC, Access Bridge Ventures, and Khwarizmi Ventures.
The round comes 14 months after the company’s $5.5m Series A in March 2024 led by 212 VC, and takes total funding to roughly $23m on the company’s accounting of prior rounds.
The structural detail in the announcement is the profitability claim. RemotePass reached profitability in early 2025 and reinvested the operating-leverage runway in expansion rather than banking it.
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Profitable HR-and-payroll-tech companies are unusual in the current vintage; the category is dominated by venture-scale platforms (Deel, Remote, Rippling, Velocity Global) operating on negative unit economics underwritten by repeated late-stage rounds. RemotePass is positioning itself as the discipline-led entrant.
What RemotePass sells is a category that has narrowed in the past two years. The platform handles Employer of Record (EOR) services, contractor management, cross-border payroll and compliance across more than 150 countries, with a fintech layer giving workers USD accounts, global cards and health insurance on top.
The company’s own published numbers put it at 35,000-plus workers across the platform and $800m-plus in cross-border payroll facilitated to date. Named customers include Logitech, Tata Group, InDrive, and Careem.
The product expansion, accelerating the company’s growth, is the fintech layer. In late 2025, RemotePass launched SpendCards, embedding corporate expense cards into the same platform that runs payroll. Expense management has been the operational layer cross-border HR incumbents have struggled with the most; finance teams running distributed workforces have historically had to stitch together payroll providers, expense-card issuers and reimbursement systems. RemotePass’s bet is that the integration of those three is itself the product differentiation.
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Chief executive Kamal Reggad framed the round in operational terms: ‘We have the product, the traction, and now the partners to expand properly. Hiring is just the entry point. What companies actually need is a platform that supports their teams end-to-end, including the financial services that make distributed work function.’
The framing is positioning a category convergence as much as a product release. Global employment and embedded fintech, on Reggad’s read, are now the same business; RemotePass is structuring the round around that thesis.
EBRD Venture Capital is the venture arm of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, with a mandate across Central and Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia and the southern and eastern Mediterranean.
Principal Amine Chabane framed RemotePass as ‘building a leading platform from an emerging market, with the product depth and commercial momentum to compete in Europe and the US’. 500 Global managing partner Amjad Ahmad added that ‘the emerging market depth, embedded fintech layer, and early AI investment create structural advantages that are hard to replicate’.
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Deel, RemotePass’s largest competitor, was last reported to be managing in-house payroll teams in over 130 countries and serving 35,000-plus customers. RemotePass’s claim is that the incumbents have underserved cross-border employment cases involving emerging-market entities, banking infrastructure, and compliance complexity.
The MENA-anchored framing is consistent with the wider regional fintech cycle. Dubai has become an increasingly defended fintech hub over the past three years, with the UAE hosting the majority of the region’s most-funded startups and the city itself positioning as a launchpad for emerging-market-founded businesses scaling globally. RemotePass is the workforce-and-fintech variant of that thesis.
The broader labour-market context is tightening. Standard Chartered told investors on Tuesday that the bank would cut more than 15% of its back-office roles by 2030, in part by replacing what its CEO called ‘lower-value human capital’ with AI.
The company has not disclosed post-money valuation, run-rate revenue, or the geographic split of planned commercial expansion. The next twelve months of new-customer logo announcements will determine whether the Europe-US push lands at scale or whether the company remains an MENA-anchored player with international optionality.
A screenshot of TerraByte’s software platform pinpoints cargo ships, warehouses, solar farms, mining sites and areas of deforestation. One complex query generated more than 2,000 results that can be further filtered. Click on the image for a larger version. (Credit: TerraByte AI)
A stealthy Seattle startup called TerraByte AI is unveiling a software platform that uses artificial intelligence to sift through real-time satellite data for geospatial gems.
TerraByte’s “Earth Search Engine” analyzes streams of satellite imagery, recognizes features of interest and connects the dots through natural-language queries. The platform’s key advantage is that its data set doesn’t have to go through the laborious, expensive process of manual annotation.
“We’re just using self-supervised learning techniques to essentially understand the pixels without having to manually annotate it,” CEO and co-founder Rishi Madhok told GeekWire.
“There are many applications that you can do, like identifying power-line segments, finding parking lots near highways without EV charging stalls, watching container ships entering port,” he explained. “If you want to monitor the Strait of Hormuz, you can use our models to do that. Deforestation areas, open-pit mining in Arizona — all of these are very different concepts, but our model is able to understand them because it’s a foundational model.”
TerraByte is laying out its approach this week in Huntsville, Ala., at an ESA-NASA workshop on AI models for Earth observation. A hands-on session is scheduled on Wednesday, and the company’s co-founder and chief technology officer, Fuxun Yu, is due to make an oral presentation on Thursday.
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Madhok and Yu founded TerraByte last year, with operations split between Seattle and San Francisco. Madhok previously led geospatial AI initiatives at Microsoft Planetary Computer, while Yu worked as a principal research manager at Microsoft and led the company’s Geospatial Foundational Model project.
TerraByte AI’s co-founders, Rishi Madhok and Fuxun Yu, are both Microsoft veterans. (TerraByte AI Photos)
On the financial front, Madhok said the venture has received pre-seed funding from Ascend, PSL Ventures and angel investors, though he declined to specify the size of the investment.
Kirby Winfield, founding general partner of Ascend, said in an emailed statement that TerraByte “is building the foundation model layer for satellite intelligence. … They’re creating the foundational API and AI infrastructure that will power the next generation of location intelligence applications.”
Vivek Ladsariya, managing director at Pioneer Square Labs and general partner of PSL Ventures, said his fund invested in TerraByte “because geospatial data is one of the most consequential and underserved categories in enterprise tech.”
“The volume of geospatial data is growing exponentially, yet most organizations still can’t access or act on it effectively,” Ladsariya said via email. “Rishi and Fuxun are rare operators — they’ve lived this problem firsthand and know exactly what it takes to build the infrastructure layer that unlocks it. TerraByte is that layer, and we think it becomes foundational.”
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While single-sensor foundation models already exist to analyze the wide spectrum of sensor data captured by satellite companies, Madhok noted that “TerraByte is the first model layer to natively fuse optical, synthetic aperture radar, thermal and hyperspectral in one foundation model.” That multi-sensor approach could support a rapid response to fast-changing situations such as natural disasters.
“For example, we can work with utility companies or even with first responders, and when there’s a wildfire, they can ask for things like, ‘Show me neighborhoods and power-line segments within one mile of an active wildfire in California or Washington,’” Madhok said. “Because when catastrophes happen, you need to be able to monitor them instantly in real time, and there aren’t a lot of technologies out there which can actually give them the insights.”
Risk assessment is another potential application — for example, addressing the challenges that insurance companies face in evaluating wildfire risk. “If they’re able to characterize the risk well by understanding if there are high-risk things like vegetation encroachment, you’re able to have better pricing on some of those things,” he said.
Madhok said the software could also be installed on orbiting satellites to filter data before it’s downlinked. That could minimize the time delay and costs that might otherwise be associated with downlinking massive amounts of data from an Earth observation satellite or an orbital data center.
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“Our goal is to build a model which not only works on the ground station, but also works on the edge, so that it helps all these time-sensitive applications to monitor things,” Madhok said. He said the company is already working on arrangements for an on-orbit demonstration.
While TerraByte is still refining its commercial strategy, the immediate focus is on enterprise clients. “Our business startup use case is more focused on B2B, so we’re working with large enterprise licenses, but eventually it will be subscription-based,” Madhok said.
TerraByte isn’t the only company offering geospatial data analysis. Other players in the market include Google Earth Engine and BlackSky Spectra. Still more companies, such as Starcloud and Sophia Space, are working on plans to put computing power on the edge in space. Will TerraByte be able to compete?
“I see Sophia Space and a lot of similar companies who have compute up in space as partners,” Madhok said. “A lot of the companies out there, whether they’re building satellites or collecting imagery, are really good at doing what they do — which is building satellites or sending computers up into space. Our DNA is to build the best geospatial models out there, and that’s what our goal is.”
Recently, I wrote about how Apple’s Continuity features keep me locked into the Apple ecosystem because Android and Windows have no answer to Apple’s incredible cross-device seamless integration.
It seems that Android is finally getting started to compete with Apple in this domain. The upcoming Android 17 is bringing a feature that makes switching between your Android devices feel natural. It’s called Continue On, and it lets you start work on one device and seamlessly pick it up on another Android device.
At launch, the feature focuses on mobile-to-tablet transitions. When you open your tablet, you will see a suggestion in the taskbar for the most recently opened app from your phone. One tap, and you are right back where you started. It’s similar to how Apple’s Handoff feature works.
How does it work?
Google calls the device you start on the sender and the one you switch to the receiver. The handoff, which is the transition, happens in the background, so you don’t have to do anything complicated. The app just picks up where you left off.
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Google
There are a couple of ways this can go, depending on how the developer builds the app. If the app is installed on your tablet, it will deep-link you directly to the activity you were in. Think of opening a Google Docs tab on your phone and having the same document open on your tablet.
What if the app isn’t on your tablet?
If the app is not installed on the tablet, developers can set up a web fallback. So even if the app isn’t installed on the receiving device, it will open the equivalent web experience in your browser instead. Gmail, for example, can hand off from the Android app on your phone to the full Gmail web experience on your tablet, opening the same email thread.
Developers also have the option to skip the app entirely and send users straight to the web version if that is the better experience for a larger screen. Continue On is available in Android 17, and developers can start building support for it now.
It’s highly likely that Google will also add this feature to its upcoming Googlebook laptops, finally providing users with a competitive ecosystem to Apple’s offerings. It’s still early days, but it’s a step in the right direction.
Nintendo plans on getting real weird with it, bringing a new WarioWare-style collection of microgames to mobile platforms just as summer starts.
If you’re a fan of Nintendo’s IP, chances are you’re aware of their propensity for what the publisher calls “microgames.” Mario Party is one famous example, as are games in the WarioWare series.
Microgames are exactly what they sound like.
They’re very, very short games; I’d argue that calling them “minigames” is fairly inaccurate. Each game is designed to be played in mere seconds and is often reaction-time based.
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In late May, Nintendo is bringing a new microgame collection to iPhone, iPad, and Android. Dubbed Pictonico!, players use photos they’ve taken for a personalized spin on the genre.
According to Nintendo, you’ll be able to do all the weird things you’d expect. Pluck nose hairs, walk the red carpet, feed your family and friends, strike body building poses, and more.
Nintendo says the game is “free to start,” which means you’ll be able to demo a handful of the games for free. Additional games, of which Nintendo says there are 80, are available as in-app purchases.
If you want to play Pictonico, you can preorder it now ahead of the May 28 launch date. According to the App Store page, your photos are not sent to Nintendo.
In memoriam
We’re not entirely sure how long Pictonico! will last on the App Store. Nintendo has an interesting habit of killing off many of its mobile titles a few years into their lifespan.
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Miitomo, Nintendo’s social networking game, made its debut in 2015 and shuttered in very early 2018.
Dr. Mario World suffered a similar fate, launching in 2019 only to be unceremoniously discontinued in 2021.
Perhaps the title with the shortest lifespan of all was Pokemon Rumble Rush, which barely made it past its first birthday before Nintendo pulled the plug.
Of course, sometimes Nintendo doesn’t fully kill off its titles, either.
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Mario Kart Tour, for example, launched in 2019. While the game is still available, no major additions have been unveiled since 2023.
Nintendo released Animal Crossing Pocket Camp in 2017, a free-to-play social game for mobile platforms. Seven years after that, the company decided to end its run.
However, instead of simply letting the game go dark, Nintendo created an offline-only version, which is still available.
Custom printed circuit boards have become more and more accessible to the average hobbyist over the last decade. But one problem still remains: your circuits will take at least a couple days to make. But what if you needed some really rapid prototypes? [The Raccoon Lab] shows us how to do it with a 3D printer.
You start with the usual hobby PCB pipeline: take your idea, make a schematic, and then lay it out in KiCad. That’s where the changes start: to keep traces strong, they are made very thick. The PCB is then exported and opened in 3D CAD software, where the traces are extruded to be 2 mm tall. Off to the printer! The newly printed “circuit board” is made conductive by applying copper tape to it, and traces are cut out along their raised edges.
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