TV Time, the popular TV and movie-tracking app whose pending shutdown has prompted more than 25,000 users to petition against its closure, is getting a reboot of sorts.

One of the app’s original founders, Antonio Pinto, says he’s creating a new TV show tracking app, Bingers, which will attempt to rebuild the best features of TV Time while also addressing the issues that bothered him over the years.

Bingers will offer TV Time’s existing users a potential lifeline soon after the original app disappears from the app stores. It also gives the existing social community another place to go to continue discussing TV episodes, something that not all TV show tracking apps offer. According to data from app intelligence provider Appfigures, TV Time has more than 26.4 million lifetime installs, many of those users potentially helping seed the new app’s community.

Pinto, who is based in Paris, sold his app, then called TVShow Time, to Whipclip (now Whip Media) in 2016, after the company promised it could grow the app’s user base significantly thanks to its Los Angeles ties. When he heard the app was being wound down as Whip Media shifted its focus to AI, Pinto said he felt sad.

“Sad because TV Time was part of my life for so many years. And sad because this community was like my other family. Reading the community reactions after each episode became a ritual for me, and for many others,” Pinto wrote in a blog post on the new Bingers website.

“I decided to build the new home where the TV Time community could go. I wanted to rebuild all TV Time[‘s] great features, but also fix everything that always bothered me,” he said.

Notably, the new Bingers app will address TV Time’s performance issues, which often caused the app to load slowly and made it expensive to run. Pinto claims high server costs led to the shutdown, noting that its premium subscription plan only covered about 10% of those expenses due to the size of its community.

Instead, Bingers has been architected it keep its server costs low, making it more sustainable, Pinto claims. It will also allow the app to respond faster when users mark an episode as watched, even when millions of others are connecting at the same time.

The developer tells TechCrunch that the new app will be available on the App Store and Google Play by the end of July 2026. Until then, the website is collecting sign-ups for a waitlist that will alert users when the new app is ready for launch.

Of course, Bingers will also be able to import data from users’ TV Time archives, available through the app’s GDPR-compliant export tool before its removal from the app stores on July 15. By importing users’ archives, Pinto says Bingers will be able to recreate TV Time’s community comments as well.

The archive import is already up and running on the Bingers website, so your TV viewing history will already be available when the app launches on the app stores.

Photo credit: VFX Blog
Dean from Corridor Crew wanted to bring back a clever piece of 1990s visual effects history. The original tool let stop-motion animators work directly with early computer graphics on Jurassic Park. Hardware proved stubborn to rebuild from scratch. The path forward turned into something simpler, cheaper, and more useful for today’s creators.

Back in the early 1990s, Industrial Light & Magic was looking for character animators that knew dinosaurs. The film had recently debuted 3D, a completely new ballgame that few people were familiar with. Stop-motion artists, on the other hand, had perfected their timing, weight, and performance. They saw an opportunity to bridge the two worlds and created the Dinosaur Input Device, or DiD. A skilled puppet maker produced a series of miniature metal armatures that resembled T-rex and raptor bones. Optical encoders were placed at each joint; when an animator moved the physical model, the encoders transmitted movement data to an SGI computer. The computer immediately updated a corresponding digital skeleton in real time. Animators could do what they wanted and then send over the data to digital artists to polish and light it up.

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The DiD received a Technical Achievement Oscar. Later films used it, but the technology soon became obsolete. Computer animation turned toward layered keyframe work, and the hardware was beginning to show its age. The original armatures wound up in museum collections, which provided Dean with a pleasant sense of nostalgia. He grew up doing stop-motion and still enjoys working with physical models. Modern 3D tools are fantastic, but for him, there’s something missing: a sense of distance from performance. He wanted Blender users to experience the spirit of the classic DiD.

First, he followed the original technique and produced a 3D printed armature with encoders at the joints. An Arduino board reads the sensor data and feeds it into Blender. Worked well for precision, but needed some tuning to match the digital characters. The problem was that modern animation rarely occurs in a single continuous take, as it did in the days of stop-motion. The hardware method worked as an idea, but it did not fit in with current pipelines as well as he had planned.

Dean and Ale Alvaro dug deeper, however, as the most recent research on single image 3D posture estimation suggested an alternative path. Why bother adding sensors to each joint when a camera can simply observe the movement and an AI can figure out the pose? The resulting result is PoseCap, a free Blender addon that works in tandem with a small companion software. Simply point any webcam at your subject, let a modern NVIDIA graphics card eat through the frames, and PoseCap will transmit approximated full body positions to Blender at up to 30 frames per second. You can add those poses as keyframes to the character timeline or select individual positions as needed.

The system’s technical heart uses Pearls (the PEAR model) to convert a 2D image into SMPL-X parameters that determine body shape and joint locations. To protect Blender’s UI from stalling, a local socket connection keeps intensive work off the main thread, allowing you to use the interface. This is because, let’s be honest, depth from a single camera is always going to be a little off, so using a position with the pelvis locked in place helps to keep things stable. Future updates intend to include camera tracking, allowing us to move the entire globe.

One of the cool little elements that makes everything work so well is that it recreates the old retro feel of DiD (the digital skeleton toy) without the need for any of those nasty encoder cords. You can manually position a miniature 3D-printed figurine with joints in front of the camera. It turns out that the same position algorithm that works on a human body also works on your tiny digital figure, causing it to conform. There are no connections to get tangled in, and no lengthy calibration to deal with; simply pick it up and start moving it about, and the computer will instantaneously transfer everything into digital form.
[Source]

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has cleared SpaceX to fly Starship prototypes again, after the company identified the probable cause of the failure of the rocket system’s booster stage during a flight in May.

SpaceX said over the weekend that the next flight of Starship could happen as soon as this Thursday, July 16. It would be the second-ever launch of the third version, or V3, of Starship. SpaceX also said that this Starship will carry the first third-generation Starlink satellites to space. Previously, Starship had only carried dummy versions of the larger, more powerful internet satellites.

This is SpaceX’s second test flight of its Starship system, and it’s first as a public company, testing the market’s appetite for the company’s “fly, fail, fix” approach to rocket development that often ends in fireballs — or, as CEO Elon Musk calls the explosions: “rapid unscheduled disassembly.” SpaceX completed its IPO and publicly listed on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange on June 12, making it one of the ten most valuable companies in the world and raising nearly $86 billion, a record.

SpaceX’s first test launch of the V3 Starship on May 22 was largely successful. The company’s Super Heavy booster lifted the 407-foot rocket into space before the upper stage section separated and deployed 20 satellite simulators along with two modified Starlinks that recorded footage of the Starship exterior.

The new third-generation booster was supposed to return to Earth and perform a simulated landing in the Gulf of Mexico. But its engines didn’t properly re-ignite, and it instead plummeted into the water below.

The problem happened at that moment of booster separation, according to SpaceX and the FAA. SpaceX said in a post published over the weekend that “slight differences in engine startup on the ship” caused the Booster to turn 90 degrees in the wrong direction. SpaceX said it has modified this engine startup sequence to allow the booster to “more reliably flip in the desired direction” and that the booster has been modified to “improve re-light reliability.”

The FAA said in a statement Monday that the most probable root causes of the Super Heavy booster failure were “heat effects on propulsion system components during the [rocket’s] ascent and erroneous engine alarm system settings.” SpaceX said in its post that it has made changes to Starship’s engine alarm and abort systems that should reduce the chance of a similar failure in the future.

While the first upper stage of Starship V3 was able to successfully deploy its test payload in May and simulate a landing in the Gulf — a milestone SpaceX had struggled to reach before — it also did so while losing one of the three Raptor engines that are meant to be used in the vacuum of space. SpaceX said over the weekend that it has made “[s]everal hardware and operational modifications” to prevent this from happening again.

This next Starship test flight will see the company launch the first of its V3 Starlink satellites to space, which are supposed to increase the satellite network’s capacity and user speeds. SpaceX is planning to deploy 20 of these new satellites during the launch. They are designed to connect with the larger Starlink constellation “via high-capacity lasers” and then burn up in the atmosphere roughly 20 minutes after they are deployed, according to SpaceX. Six of them will be equipped with cameras to photograph the exterior of Starship.

The V3 versions of both Starship and Starlink are crucial to SpaceX’s future. Starlink was the only profitable part of SpaceX’s business in the run-up to its IPO, and SpaceX needs Starship to become a fully reusable rocket system to even attempt its galaxy-brained plans for space-based data centers and interplanetary travel.

A dedicated outdoor TV? Surely that’s a luxury too far, and who could possibly want one? Turns out, I do.

I’ve long been a fan of watching outside, particularly sport.

Back in 2010 when ITV HD launched, I set up a friend’s inflatable projector screen and we watched the England vs USA World Cup game. It felt amazing, except for when ITV cut to a car advert, rather than showing the goal, but you can’t have everything.

Since then, improvements in technology have meant that projectors have got better, smaller, brighter and smarter. Come the Euro 2020 final (actually held in 2021), we had our garden full of friends, a projector screen attached to my office at the bottom of the garden, and the game at a massive size.

It’s hard to believe that back-to-school season is upon us. 

Kids will return to the classroom in many parts of the US in a few short weeks, some as early as August 3. School supply lists are already available, so you can start shopping. In addition to notebooks and paper, parents are learning that many lessons and projects are expected to be completed using technology, such as laptops and tablets. Some schools, like my son’s elementary school, provide devices such as Chromebooks. But many school-aged and college students will be expected to have a separate device at home, which puts parents in the market for laptops or tablets. 

But today’s educational tech doesn’t come cheap. The evolution of AI led to a memory chip shortage. Those chips are vital to most devices, including phones, gaming consoles, computers and tablets. And that shortage means you can expect higher prices. One workaround could be refurbished or secondhand models. 

In April 2026, CNET found that nearly half (48%) of US adults have considered secondhand devices within the past year. Several factors influenced their decision, including cost-effectiveness (31%) and newer models being too expensive (25%). 

However, refurbished tech isn’t exempt from those price hikes. So what should you do if you have to buy a laptop or tablet for school but don’t want to break the bank? I’ll explain. 

How is the RAM shortage impacting refurbished tech? 

Older devices bypass new chip costs, making them a potentially more cost-effective option. But the RAM shortage is increasing demand and prices for refurbished products. 

Apple is the latest tech company to raise prices on its new and refurbished products. Its Certified Refurbished store saw price increases of 6% to 15% in June. A refurbished 14-inch MacBook Pro M5 with 16GB of memory and 1TB of storage cost $1,699, but a discount brought it down to $1,439 on June 14 after looking at Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. It now costs $1,999, but a discount brings it down to $1,699. 

Other companies, including Samsung and Microsoft, have also been affected by chip shortages. Microsoft will increase the prices of its Xbox Series X/S on Aug. 1, and its new Surface laptop models will cost more. The chip shortage isn’t expected to end until 2028, so more companies may continue to raise prices on new and refurbished devices. 

Refurbished back-to-school tech may still cost less than new devices, but there are a few shopping tips to keep in mind if you need to buy a laptop or tablet soon. 

Compare policies and prices from refurbished retailers 

You may find good deals when buying secondhand tech online, including discounts and accessories. Buying and selling on online platforms such as Facebook Marketplace and OfferUp can offer good deals, including accessories or a better price than major retailers. However, you won’t have a warranty, return policy or professional assessment of the device. That could mean you’re stuck with tech you’re dissatisfied with. 

Certified refurbished retailers, such as Back Market, have limited-time warranties, money-back guarantees and inspections to help you feel comfortable buying a used device online. Compare prices, warranties and policies and specifications across major retailers, such as Amazon’s Renewed Store and Best Buy Outlet, for the best deal. And tech brands have refurbished stores, too, like Apple’s Certified Refurbished, Dell Refurbished and HP Refurbished Certified. You may even find limited-time back-to-school savings on secondhand tech, but it’s worth making sure you have the right protections if you’re unhappy or the device isn’t what you expected when it arrives. 

Once you’ve settled on a device you’re comfortable with, pay with a credit card with purchase protection in case the device is stolen, damaged or lost within a certain timeframe (usually three to six months). Keep all of your receipts and tracking information, and make sure the device is in the expected condition when you receive it. 

Trade in your old device for savings 

Major retailers have trade-in programs that can lower the cost of a new device. Apple’s Trade-In program gives you an Apple gift card based on the value of your old device. You can use it toward a new or refurbished Apple product or accessory. And Amazon’s trade-in program similarly lets you trade-in your old device for an Amazon gift card that can be used toward buying refurbished tech on Amazon. 

Another way to save money on refurbished tech during back-to-school season is to sell your old device on a buy-and-sell platform — such as Swappa, ItsWorthMore or ecoATM — and trade it in for cash to put more toward a refurbished device you’re considering. You may get more or less depending on your device’s age and condition. Newer models in good to excellent condition typically sell for more. It’s worth comparing offers across sites to get the most money for your device, which can mean paying less for your new one.

Don’t count out new laptop and tablet models yet 

Buying refurbished tech may seem like an easy way to cut costs on a laptop or tablet for the upcoming school year, but back-to-school deals and student discounts can sometimes bring the price of a new device down to the cost of a refurbished one.

As enticing as refurbished tech may be, pay attention to software upgrades, the device’s battery health and the device’s overall condition. Some devices, such as Intel MacBooks, aren’t eligible for software upgrades anymore, which isn’t ideal when you plan on using it for some time. In that case, a new device may be best. 

• Darktrace reports cryptojacking via a compromised AI gateway (LiteLLM‑Proxy on AWS Bedrock), breached through exposed SSH and abused with XMRig mining
• Attackers also showed suspicious IAM activity, hinting at possible cloud credential misuse, with connections traced to Vietnam
• Experts warn AI gateways concentrate privileged access, urging strict port closures, least‑privilege roles, and control‑plane monitoring to reduce blast radius

If you are using AI gateways as part of your tech stack, be wary – they are being leveraged in cryptojacking attacks, experts have warned.

Cybersecurity researchers Darktrace have published a new report on a cloud-hosted AI gateway, connected to Amazon Bedrock, which was compromised and used for cryptocurrency mining.

Research published this year has given a name to something employers have been circling for a while. Deskilling is what happens when an expert stops practising and gets worse. Never-skilling is what happens when a novice never gets good in the first place, and it is the more awkward problem, because the people it affects are the ones companies are already hiring fewer of.

The sharpest evidence comes from a randomised controlled trial run by Anthropic researchers Judy Hanwen Shen and Alex Tamkin, published in January.

They recruited 52 mostly junior software engineers, gave half of them an AI assistant, asked all of them to learn Trio, a Python library none of them knew, and then quizzed everyone on the concepts they had used minutes before.

The AI group averaged 50%. The hand-coding group averaged 67%. Anthropic describes the gap as the equivalent of nearly two letter grades, and it was statistically significant, with a p-value of 0.01.

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The speed benefit, which is the entire reason anyone reaches for the assistant, did not really materialise. The AI group finished about two minutes faster, a difference that failed to reach significance, partly because several participants spent up to 11 minutes composing queries, roughly a third of their allotted time.

They learned less, finished no faster, and came out worst on the thing that matters most when the machine is wrong. That thing is debugging, where the gap between the groups was widest. The control group, denied an assistant, hit errors and had to resolve them, which is a fair description of how debugging is learned. The AI group did not hit the errors.

Medicine has arrived at the same worry from a different direction. A Nature Medicine Perspective published in May, led by Duke-NUS Medical School with co-authors at Harvard, UCL, and King’s College London, coined it for trainees who lean on AI during their formative clinical years and never build the reasoning that safe, independent practice requires.

It adds a third category with even less attention on it: mis-skilling, the trainee who accepts an AI error uncritically and files it away as fact.

Those authors are careful in a way the coverage of them has not always been. Direct evidence from medical training, they write, is absent. The argument rests on learning theory and on early signals from non-clinical settings, which is to say from studies like Anthropic’s.

Their prescription is a three-phase framework: build competence without AI, then teach people to calibrate their scepticism, then introduce the tools under supervision.

How the tool is used matters more than whether it is used. In the Anthropic trial, the high scorers asked conceptual questions or requested explanations alongside the code. The low scorers delegated wholesale, or leaned on the assistant to debug for them.

Employers are already pricing this in. Gartner predicts that critical-thinking atrophy will push half of global organisations to require “AI-free” skills assessments through 2026, which is a polite way of saying that hiring managers no longer trust a portfolio.

Ford, meanwhile, has been rehiring engineers to fix what its AI systems got wrong, an expensive demonstration of what happens when the people who could have caught the error are no longer on the payroll.

The trial comes with real limits, and its authors say so. The sample was small, the quiz measured comprehension immediately rather than months later, and it used a sidebar assistant rather than an agentic coder. The researchers expect the impact of those to be more pronounced, not less.

It is worth noticing who ran it. Anthropic sells the assistant, and it has published a paper arguing that using the assistant carelessly makes you worse at your job. That is either unusual candour or the opening of a pitch for learning modes, and both readings can be true.

What the research does not say is that juniors should code by hand. What it says is that the shortcut and the skill are not the same road, and that the industry has spent two years assuming they were.

Valve recently released a new version of the Steam Controller, which features a wired USB puck that serves both as charger and dedicated, low-latency wireless receiver. The downside is they aren’t currently available for purchase separately, but that’s not a worry because you can now make your own thanks to [safijari]’s OpenPuck project.

OpenPuck uses the highly affordable Pro Micro NRF52840 board, programmed to emulate the wireless receiver portion of the puck, meaning one can pair their Steam Controller to it just like they would with the factory puck. A major part of the project was naturally documenting the wireless protocol, but there’s also an array of extra features offered by OpenPuck.

Hitting button combos lets one conveniently emulate Xbox, Nintendo Switch, or Sony PlayStation controllers. Meaning OpenPuck can for example be plugged into a Nintendo Switch and it will see OpenPuck as an official wired controller, complete with motion sensor and haptic feedback.

Why is it necessary for this emulation to be done from OpenPuck? Because while the Steam Controller has tight integration with Steam Input — a sort of highly useful translation layer for controller inputs — that integration also means the controller’s best features only work while Steam is running. OpenPuck’s ability to emulate other console controllers makes it flexible in a way the factory puck isn’t, and a user can make the most of a single controller this way.

It’s worth noting that while the real puck has the ability to charge the controller (whether or not the user makes it walk itself), the OpenPuck doesn’t have this ability. Does that mean one must still use the factory puck for charging? Not at all, as the Steam Controller charges just fine over a USB-C connection.

There’s a short video below that demonstrates the flashing and setup, so check it out if you think it might be useful to you.

Thanks for the tip, [Jaki]!