Letterboxd has just revealed its top 10 highest-rated animations of the year 2024. Look Back, a one-shot work by Fujimoto that received a movie adaptation, has been ranked as the best-animated movie this year.

VLC media player is among the surprise entrants at CES 2025, and the company is demoing a feature that automatically generates subtitles for you. When I see companies launching new AI features, I'm usually skeptical because it has become an overused buzzwordbut in this case, it does seem useful.VideoLAN, the parent organization of VLC media player, says it uses open-source AI models to introduce automatic subtitling to its media player. There are two layers to this: The first is generating subtitles itself, and the second one is translation. In the CES demo, VLC media player can be seen playing a video with subtitles in multiple different languages. At the moment, there is no word on when this feature will be available, but I really like the fact that translation is supported because it'll make videos more accessible to people who don't speak English.In a video uploaded to X, VideoLAN president Jean-Baptiste Kempf said the AI subtitle generation feature works completely offline. This is heartening to hear because AI tools have often been criticized for violating your privacy by using your data without consent and for extremely high energy usage at data centers.Even though the world has largely adopted streaming services to play videos, there is still a big market for media player apps like VLC media player. VLC media player has crossed 6 billion downloads, according to Kempf. His LinkedIn post reads, "The number of active users of VLC is actually growing, even in this age of streaming services. Well see how much it will continue to grow!" There are better-designed alternatives, but VLC media player has retained its place on every computer I've used. It still plays practically any video file I throw at it, and it has lots of hidden features for those who want to dig deeper.

Just a couple of days after Anker announced its 140W four-port wall charger at CES 2025, its already on sale. The charging brick has a display (which lets you keep tabs on various metrics), multiple fast-charging options and an odometer to track its lifetime usage. You can slash $10 off its retail price on Amazon and Ankers website. When not on sale, the Anker Charger (140W, 4-Port, PD 3.1) costs the same as Apples 140W wall charger for MacBooks but has loads of extra perks. Among those is its high-definition (although we dont know the exact resolution) color display. There, you can monitor its total output power, a per-port wattage breakdown, temperature and its total hours of operating time (the aforementioned odometer). The screen even rotates 90 degrees with a long press of its button to fit different outlet orientations. Its three USB-C ports, two of which are high-speed and can charge a 15-inch MacBook Air to 50 percent in 30 minutes. Also onboard is a single USB-A port. The Anker Charger supports multiple fast-charging options, including PD3.1 and UFCS. Its bundled with a five-ft 240W USB-C to USB-C cable. The four-port charger has an MSRP of $90, but you can get it for $80 by clipping a digital coupon on Amazon and Ankers website. Also on sale is Ankers new 25,000mAh charger with two built-in cables. One cable is retractable, while the other loops into a lanyard when not in use. Anker says the retractable one has been tested for over 20,000 retractions, and the lanyard cable can support up to 44 pounds. The soda-can-sized charger also has three USB-C ports, which can deliver up to 100W to your devices. It, too, has a display showing battery temperature, output and input wattage and battery health (this one is shown in a classic percentage rather than hours). The Anker Power Bank (25K, 165W, Built-In and Retractable Cables) retails for $100 but can be yours for $90 with a coupon on Amazon and Ankers website. Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribe to the Engadget Deals newsletter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/deals/ankers-newest-charger-from-ces-2025-is-already-discounted-183858056.html?src=rss

If you know anything about coffee, and coffee snobs, youll know theyre always going on about where their beans are sourced from. The preference for single origin beans is better for traceability, transparency, and when you discover a variety you adore, you can keep going back. Japanese company Mihatama, however, turned up to CES 2025 in Las Vegas with Flavor Craft AI, an app-controlled system to meter out beans to suit your specific taste. You can just imagine the coffee snobs clutching their heads at the thought of blending beans in such a fashion.Essentially, you fire up the app and select preferences based on your preferred flavor, selecting for strength, acidity, bitterness, astringency and richness. Once youve done so, the AI will direct the machine to churn out a blend of different beans sufficient quantities to match the flavor youve requested. Said beans will be collected in the bottom tray, where you can then dump them into your grinder of choice and brew up your drink.The company has set up a pre-launch page on Indiegogo which will open to pre-sales at some point in the near future. Its representatives have said that itll cost around $400 when it goes on sale, plus or minus the cost of never being able to invite your coffee snob friends over to your house ever again.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/home/kitchen-tech/this-mean-bean-machine-is-bound-to-upset-coffee-fans-183045969.html?src=rss

DotLumen founder Cornel Amariei describes his product as a self driving system to enable blind and low-vision people a way to get around. Its essentially the electronic equivalent to a guide dog, helping users avoid obstacles when walking around. The Romanian company turned up to CES 2025 in Las Vegas armed with prototypes of its headset that it hopes will make blind peoples lives a lot easier.The headset looks like a chunky piece of VR gear, with a front unit sitting on your forehead just above your eyes. Theres a chunky power and processing pack on the rear that keeps the bulky device's weight balanced while walking around. In the front, there are six computer vision cameras three near field and three pointed further away which Amariei says was inspired by Teslas setup.Collision avoidance is the main priority here, preventing you from bumping into other pedestrians or street obstacles. In front of the headset are a series of little arms that make contact with your forehead, each one tied to a vibrating motor. When the vibrations are in the center of your forehead, its safe for you to move forward, but when the vibrations move either side, you should turn to refocus.There is also a voice guide, and this will chime in to let you know when the view in front of you is getting crowded. Amariei told me that the headset has a battery life of around 2.5 hours, which is more than enough for an average walk. But that if you do need some extra juice, you can hook up a USB-C battery pack and carry that around with you as well.Daniel Cooper for EngadgetTesting the headset in the less-than-ideal environment of CES was a great way way to see how serious the company is. After all, the ceilings are low, the walkways narrow and there are always hundreds of people who just walk at you, expecting you to throw yourself out of their way. Which is why I wore a blindfold and strapped the prototype to my head in order to roam the floor at Eureka Park.Its obviously quite hard to describe the sensation navigating a space using only gentle taps on your forehead. I certainly was quite hesitant, taking small steps and slowly moving forward, letting the headset guide me on my journey through. When crowds thronged past me in tight formation, the hardwares audio guide said narrow, telling me the space around me was in short supply.What impressed me is that I was able to navigate the scrum without bumping into anyone, and managed to get a fair way through the hall. Naturally, I cant speak to the headsets long-term effectiveness, especially as someone who can see, but the technology certainly feels like it could be very useful.Amariei said DotLumen will begin selling its headset in Europe in the near future, with the price expected to come in under 10,000. As steep as that sounds, he added the price to train a guide dog is significantly higher. In the US, the Guide Dog foundation says it costs $50,000 to breed, raise, train and place an assistance dog.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/wearables/dotlumens-haptic-headset-could-help-blind-people-navigate-181532099.html?src=rss

Verizon will soon provide new 4G and 5G kit for Air Force bases.

This adds to the ongoing battle to regulate VPN usage in Pakistan. Here's all you need to know.

Acer unveiled two new gaming handhelds at CES 2025, and one of them is frankly just comically large.

This week, multiple wildfires have burned more than 33,000 acres across Los Angeles, fueled by a rare set of perfectly terrible conditions, including a midwinter drought.On the other side of the country, freezing temperatures are blanketing states as part of a polar vortex disruption that, somewhat paradoxically, is more frequent in a warming world. Simultaneously, Saudi Arabia has seen unprecedented flooding, and Australia is in the throes of a heat wave that is worsening bushfires. Amid all that destruction, scientists just confirmed that 2024 was the first year that global temperature averages exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming since the preindustrial era.2024 saw its own share of climate disasters, from monsoon flooding in the Philippines to devastating hurricanes that hit North Carolina and Florida to record-breaking heat and wildfires in Canada. In the U.S. alone, the Federal Emergency Management Agency declared an unprecedented 179 disasters in 2024, equivalent to one every two days.For years, limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius has been a goal set as part of the Paris climate agreement. Climate scientists warned that if we hit 1.5 degrees of warming above preindustrial levels, we would see devastating impacts: more than a billion people exposed to severe heat waves once every five years; coral reefs likely to decline 70% to 90%; sea level potentially rising 2.5 feet on average.Before 2024 was even over, as it was on track to be the warmest year on record, some expected it would surpass that 1.5 degree threshold. The Copernicus Climate Change Service, part of the European Unions Earth Observation Programme, has now confirmed that. Human-induced climate change remains the primary driver of extreme air and sea surface temperatures, it said, though it also noted that other factors, such as the El Nio Southern Oscillation, contributed to the unusual temperatures experienced over the past year.Still, 2024 was the warmest year on record based on global temperature archives dating as far back as 1850. And it was the first calendar year to reach a global average temperature 1.5 degrees above preindustrial levels.Each year in the last decade is one of the 10 warmest on record. We are now teetering on the edge of passing the 1.5C level defined in the Paris Agreement and the average of the last two years is already above this level, Samantha Burgess, strategic lead for climate at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, said in a statement. These high global temperatures, coupled with record global atmospheric water vapor levels in 2024, meant unprecedented heat waves and heavy rainfall events, causing misery for millions of people.Human-caused climate changein which the burning of fossil fuels leads to extreme levels of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere that warm the planetexacerbates extreme weather. It makes everything from severe storms and flooding to heat waves, droughts, and wildfires more frequent and intense.The focus on limiting warming to 1.5 degrees hasnt worked as a climate messaging strategyclearly, since we failed to prevent it from happening. Part of the issue is the binary it creates: that we must avoid 1.5 degrees of warming, or else. In fact, the world doesnt immediately end at 1.5 degrees, it just gradually gets worse. That means climate skeptics still have room to say weve hit this deadline, and yet the world is still standing.For much of the globe, though, things arent fine at this level of warming. And even though 2024 hit this threshold, its not a reason to give up on climate action. If warming continues to 2 degrees C, or even 3 degrees, the effects will be more extreme: the complete decline of our coral reefs, an ice-free Arctic Ocean, up to 50% declines in key crop yields.Humanity is in charge of its own destiny, but how we respond to the climate challenge should be based on evidence, Carlo Buontempo, director of Copernicus, said in a statement. The future is in our handsswift and decisive action can still alter the trajectory of our future climate.

Maybe you found this article on Google, in which case you have an immigrant to thank, Sergey Brin, the search engines cofounder. Or perhaps someone sent you the link on WhatsAppa company created by another immigrant, Jan Koum. Maybe youre reading it on a laptop powered by an Intel processor, in which case you can thank another immigrant, Andrew Grove. Or possibly its on your iPhone, in which case credit is due to Steve Jobs, whose father emigrated to the United States from Syria.Examples of the contributions first- and second-generation immigrants have made to the world are innumerable. But whats really interesting, beyond the headline-grabbing individual success stories, are the statistics showing that immigrants generally are not only more likely to be entrepreneurs but also more likely to be successful and build a company that lasts compared to their native-born peers.Consider these stats from the American Immigration Councils latest report: Although only around 28% of Americans are first- or second-generation immigrants, 46% of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children. In 2023, those companies generated revenue of over $8.6 trillion, more than the GDP of every country apart from the U.S. and China. And four out of every five billion-dollar startups have founders or leading executives who were either born abroad or have immigrant parents.As a former child refugee and three-time immigrant, I find these statistics both inspiring and challenging. Why are immigrants so skilled at building businesses that last?Most research focuses on what immigrants lacklike resources or local connectionsthat pushes them toward entrepreneurship. But I wanted to explore what immigrants bring that makes them so successful.To find answers, I studied top immigrant entrepreneurs across industries, from tea to tech. While the immigrant experience is incredibly diverse, I discovered recurring themes in their stories. Here are three key lessonsrooted in the past, present, and futurethat we can all learn from these extraordinary entrepreneurs.Drawing inspiration from the pastAccounts of the immigrant experience often focus on the identity crises created by living across different cultures. But my research shows that immigrant entrepreneurs turn that apparent crisis into a positive, drawing on the richness of their past experiences to create successful businesses that make bridges between cultures. Deep familiarity with another culture helps immigrants spot enormously lucrative opportunities that others simply cannot see, and the ability to build cross-cultural bridges becomes one of their entrepreneurial superpowers.For instance, Hamdi Ulukaya grew up in a nomadic Kurdish shepherd community in a remote part of north-eastern Turkey. After emigrating to New York, Ulukaya was surprised to discover he couldnt get yogurt of the quality he enjoyed back home. Harnessing the knowledge from his childhood in Turkey, Ulukaya created Chobani in 2005. The company now does over $2 billion in sales every year.The orthodox position on entrepreneurship is that budding entrepreneurs should look outward into the world to identify a gap in the market that they can profitably fill. But many immigrant entrepreneurs start by lookinginward,drawing on their complex multicultural identities to create a business that truly matters to them.Entrepreneurs need to follow their heart, and their vision, and their passion first and then see whats out there, not the other way round, says Reem Hassani, an Iraqi-American who cofounded Numi Organic Tea, the worlds largest fair-trade tea company on her approach to starting a business.Another example is Jan Koum. Growing up in the Soviet Union during the final years of communism, Jan felt the pervasive fear of being monitored during phone conversations. After moving to the U.S. in the early 1990s, he faced new challenges, including the high cost of calling home and the overwhelming noise of constant advertising in American culture.Jan drew on those diverse experiences from two different culturesthe fear of monitoring, the cost of calling, and the annoyance of advertisingto create a business that offered a fully encrypted, free-to-use, and ad-free way of communicating: WhatsApp.You dont need to be an immigrant to learn from these approaches to business building. Anyone can look inward and identify the personal passion that they can turn into a profitable enterprise. And cross-cultural bridging also does not require immigration. Anyone can learn deeply about another culture through travel and taking opportunities to live and work internationally.Such exposure can also help you identify trends in other parts of the world that are ripe for export to new markets, a skill that immigrant entrepreneur Hernan Lopez, founder of the podcast network Wondery, refers to as reading tomorrows newspaper today.Taking action in the presentLooking inward, building cross-cultural bridges, and reading tomorrows newspaper today help entrepreneurs identify opportunities. But how do you turn a great idea into a great business? Immigrant entrepreneurs do that in a very interesting way: by prioritizing community above all else.Many immigrants come from countries where the collective is valued more than the individual. Through immigration, they also lose many of their ties, and when they start to rebuild them, they value and appreciate the extra strength that every new connection brings.When my family fled persecution in communist Bulgaria for a new life in Turkey, our way out of the refugee camp was through a long-lost relative my father tracked down in Istanbul, who opened her home not just to us but also to five other families. Today, her son is our factory manager and her daughter is our accountant. And we have nurtured our business for over 25 years by continuing to draw on and give back to our communities: hiring refugees, women, and youths from disadvantaged backgrounds, implementing profit-sharing programs, and reinvesting profits in Bulgaria and Istanbul.The academic literature calls such connections homophilic ties, a phrase that basically refers to the idea that birds of a feather flock together. People are more likely to do business and work with other people who are like them, which in the case of immigrants often means people from their home countries or cultures.However, the most successful immigrant entrepreneurs are often experts at building community and connections even with people who do not come from the same culture. They do so by focusing on common experiences and shared values that transcend individual cultures. A great example of that comes from the story of Saeju Jeong and Artem Petakov, who bonded over their common experience of being immigrants and their shared commitment to improving health, which led them to cofound Noom, the weight-loss app that is currently valued at over $3 billion.As that story shows, connections across cultures can be just as strong as those within them. And all budding entrepreneurs, whether immigrant or otherwise, can focus on shared values and other commonalities to build the sort of powerful connections that characterize strong businesses. We all have much more in common than that which divides us. Changing the futureMuch of what I learned from immigrant entrepreneurs contradicts the conventional wisdom about building a business. They look inward for ideas instead of out at the market; they prioritize community over personal gain. But perhaps the most striking characteristic of the most successful immigrant entrepreneurs is the depth of their commitment to purpose over profit. Often motivated by their own experiences of hardship, immigrant entrepreneurs build businesses that are committed to realizing visions of a better future for all.A powerful example of that comes from the story of Luis von Ahn, who grew up in Guatemala in the 1980s while the country was racked by civil war. Coming from a place where a quality education is a privilege rather than a right gave von Ahn a deep appreciation of the transformative power of learning. Having made his fortune through designing the CAPTCHA system used by websites around the world, von Ahn backed out of a highly lucrative contract with Google to focus on creating a platform that democratized learning for all.His vision of improved, free language learning materialized as Duolingothe worlds most downloaded educational app. And although money was never its motivator, the company currently has a net worth of just over $10 billion. It was able to overturn its main language-learning competitors because over 800 million free downloads have created a vast user base that both markets the app and makes it attractive to advertisers, whose money keeps Duolingo free for 97% of its users.The story of Luis von Ahn powerfully illustrates one of the key teachings from immigrant entrepreneurs about building a successful business. Real success does not come from the money you take but from the difference you make. Focusing on making a difference means that you will create a company that addresses the real issues that people face. And doing that gives your business the fuel that it needs to take off and head to the stratosphere.if you want to follow in the footsteps of some of the worlds most successful entrepreneurs and create a business with an impact that lasts, here are four things you can do. First, look inward to draw inspiration from your own passions. Second, learn what you can from other cultures to inform your business ideas. Third, build a community based on common ties and shared values that will work alongside you to make your dream a reality. And finally, maintain a focus on purpose over profit to build a business and create a legacy that lasts.