No Surprise With Robot Eyes: Microsoft Awarded Patent For Emotion-Revealing Glasses

It's no surprise anymore that things in this brave new world can't remain private.  Your papers, property, and person are one thing, but what happens when you willingly enter the public eye, and that public eye is now equipped with glasses that can read your emotions?

Uh, future?  Can we just go focus on space travel or something?
This is creepy.
(Image courtesy dailymail.co.uk.)

Feline Groovy: Play Out Your "Crazy Cat Person" Fantasy Via This New App

Are you too popular?  Are you more interesting than the average person, and suffer no lack of friends due to this?  Do you often find yourself graced with many socially-engaging options and fun things to enrich your life?  And do you hate the hell out of all of that?  Never fear...now, you can become a crazy cat person, at least in the realm of apps...

Questioning your sanity has never been so adorable!
(Image courtesy notarybatonrouge.info.)

Forests, Not Firebombing: New Drones Could Plant A Billion Trees Per Year

While just last week we discussed drones aiding and abetting criminals in prison, now it's time to look at one of the nicer sides of our flying friends.  An ex-engineer from NASA now intends to use drones to plant over a billion trees a year...

Spread the love (and the oxygen!)
(Image courtesy lionsground.com.)

Space Station Sunday: Robot Muscles Get Ripped, New Coffee Cups Get Sipped

Good afternoon, space fans!  It's been another fascinatingly productive week on the ISS.  Here's what's up!

Friday marked the 25th anniversary of the Hubble Telescope.  Keep shooting those stars!
(Image courtesy NASA.gov.)

Tutorial: A Simple iOS Collection View in Swift

Introduction
A collection view is a great way to present view elements in a grid-like arrangement. The precise layout of visual elements is definable through subclassing a collection view. Collection views are packaged with a data source facility that makes it possible for an app to generate data-driven views (collection view cells). In this tutorial we will create a subclass of a UICollectionView and write a random color generating function to supply our collection view data for its cells.

Get The App Kicked Out Of You: Chinese Now Hiring Thugs By Smartphone

You used to have to go into shady bars or disreputable gyms to find yourself a hired goon.  Now, thanks to the magic of smartphones, you need only use an app, according to a report from China...

And to think, beatdown apps used to be all fun and games...
(Image courtesy play.google.com.)

Aviation Vs. Incarceration: Drones Delivering Drugs Into Prison Yards

Drones!  Is there anything they can't do?  They help to fight fires, deliver contraceptives, bomb insurgents, and don't even require an endless supply of pharmaceutical-grade speed to keep their pilots awake!  Now, they've added a naughty new skill to their flying functions...

"OVER HERE!  DROP THE WEED OVER HERE!"
(Image courtesy nativemonster.com.)

"Clear" For Takeoff: New App Removes All Of Your Objectionable Social Media Posts

If you have some kind of a social media account, chances are you've at some point made a statement or posted an image there that you're not particularly proud of.  Maybe you've let it get buried in a tidal wave of tech and time, but if it still exists, it can still be found...and possibly used against you.  Take this power away from your enemies with a new app...

(Image courtesy failbook.com.)

Answers To All Of Your Searches: Now, You Can Download Your Entire Google History

As humans, it is an ineffable part of our nature to search.  Searching for meaning, searching for love, searching for a place to call our own...we do love a good quest - sometimes, even if we don't really know what we're searching for.  That fascination has only escalated with the advent of search engines, which require only mere, vague, and often strange commands to set us out onto our next journey.  And now, all that you've searched for can be found again...

Search from your perch...
(Image courtesy forum-politique.com.)

PyGest: A Python tkinter Tutorial, Conclusion

This is the final article in our Python tkinter tutorial series. If you've been following along from the beginning, you should now have a desktop file hashing application with a fully functioning graphical user interface!  Here is our final product:

Space Station Sunday: Enjoying Coffee And Baseball, Just Like Back Home (Plus A Dragon)

Happy Sunday, space fans!  Here's what was floating around on orbit this week.

*Yoink!*  The Canadarm-2 snags the SpaceX Dragon resupply craft.
(Image courtesy Scott Kelly / NASA.)

A Whole New World (Of 3D Printing): Disney Makes Soft, Snuggly 3D-Printed Prototypes

With 3D printing technology expanding dramatically, the innovative ideas just keep coming.  Want to 3D print a mud hut to chill in?  Covered.  Need to get fresh tools to the International Space Station on the double?  3D printing can handle that.  And now, 3D printing isn't even limited to materials that are supposed to remain sturdy...

Straight outta E.P.C.O.T....
(Image courtesy 3dprint.com.)

I Know It's Only Rock 'n Roll (Setlyst App Review), But I Like It

Are you a rocker?  Do you rock out?  Then you know that, amid all the beers, babes, gear, and gregariousness of live performance, it really helps to be organized.  A new app can help take care of at least a little bit of that (without making you start a budget for a real manager...)

Now you just have to worry about staying inflammable and keeping your gear in one piece.
(Image courtesy wallpedes.com.)

Pan-droids: Futuristic "Automated Kitchen" Robo-Chef To Debut In 2017

Many classically-popular visions of the future are starting to pick up steam, but one in particular is really cooking.  No, seriously, it's a robot that cooks...

Just don't let it drink too much of that wine as it works.
(Image courtesy digitaltrends.com.)

TAX ATTACKS! Your Guide To Online Tax Filing

Alright, Americans, it's time to pony up your pennies to Uncle Sam again.  It's one of those necessary evils, like death, except it happens to you every year.  Fortunately, like so many other aspects of modern life, we have computers that are here to help with this issue...

Keep as much of your hard-earned loot as possible!
(Image courtesy bostinno.streetwise.co.)

PyGest: A Python Tkinter Tutorial, Part 5

This is part five in our Python tkinter tutorial series, in which we are building a simple GUI app to process and check file hash digests. In the previous two articles (part 3 and part 4), we configured the input and output widgets for our app. In this post, we're going to build out our app's two primary buttons and hook them into the appropriate input and output fields.

Space Station Sunday: New Experiments And A Fresh Dragon

Good afternoon, space fans!  It's been another fascinating week aboard our favorite orbital outpost.  Here's what's up...

Chilling over the Himalayas earlier this week.
(Image courtesy Scott Kelly / NASA.)

Peppery Pacification: New Crowd-Control Drones In India Feature Pepper Spray

Some police departments used to strive for "less-lethal" weaponry, leading to an influx of options like bean-bag guns, LRAD sound cannons, and all varieties of sprays and chemicals to subdue (but not kill) their targets.  Now, that premise has taken flight on a whole new level: pepper-spray drones.

We can't even control cops that over-use pepper spray...will machines do any better?
(Image courtesy politicalblindspot.com.)

Bodies And Oddities: New "Figure 1" Medical Photo-Sharing App Offers Different Doctors' Opinions, Crazy Pics

One of the most popular social media apps, Instagram, has been growing in popularity so much that some users have even been abandoning their Facebook for it.  Now, an Instagram-type app has found a niche community for people who need to use the photos for research that goes further than what you're wearing or what you ate today.  Enter Figure 1, a photo-sharing app for doctors.

Physical graffitti?
(Image courtesy linkedin.com.)

Bugs, Drugs, and Thugs: DEA Phone Tap Protocol From 1992 Onward Paved Way For Current NSA Programs

Many compelling arguments have been offered as evidence to stop the NSA and other agencies from spying on American (and others') phone calls.  Constitutional rights infringement, invasion of privacy, and simply wasting time and manpower are all noteworthy points that the programs should be stopped.  However, nothing justifies the removal of this century's scaled-up security state better than history itself:  powers-that-be have been monitoring calls for decades, and it didn't stop terrorists one bit...

It didn't really stop drug dealers that much, either.
(Image courtesy anyclip.com.)

We've Had An Orbiting Nuke In Space For 50 Years. Deal With It.

Uh...please don't freak out about this?

No seriously, promise you won't be weird about it?

Okay.  Happy 50th birthday to our orbiting nuclear reactor.

It's weird how 1960s ads make everything seem fun.
(Image courtesy flickr.com.)

PyGest: A Python Tkinter Tutorial, Part 4

This article is part four in our ongoing Python tkinter tutorial series. When we left off in part three, we had just completed configuring the inputs for our interface, which included text entry, label and button widgets. We'll now move on to the widgets necessary for conveying the application's two outputs: 1) the hash digest value of the file input supplied by the user, and 2) a message indicating whether the file hash generated by the app matches the optional hash value that may be supplied by the user.

Space Station Sunday: A Super-Productive Workweek And A Supertyphoon

Good afternoon, space fans!  With the historic One Year Crew of astronaut Scott Kelly and cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko now safely aboard the ISS, their monumental mission is now well underway...  

Happy Easter from the ISS!
(Image courtesy Scott Kelly / NASA.)

  

Clock 'N Roll: It's Almost Time For The Apple Watch!

Heads up...the next shiny chunk of future is about to fall of the tech tree and land on your wrist.  The much-heralded Apple Watch will go on sale next Friday, April 10th...

Anything with "space" in the color title has got to be interesting.
(Image courtesy macrumors.com.)

Euthanizing Youtube: Security-Testing Hacker Discovers Ultimate "Delete" Button

What if you had computer hacking skills of such astonishing power, you could bring an entire lane of the information superhighway to a screeching halt?  What would you do with your great and terrible force?  This week, one man was faced with this fascinating decision...

NOOOO!  NOT THE HARLEM SHUFFLE!
(Image courtesy answerbag.com.)

Space Station Sunday: EXTRA! EXTRA! Aliens Proven Real; Have Crush On Scott Kelly

In a stunning scientific breakthrough today, the astronauts aboard the International Space Station confirmed that extraterrestrial life is not only now an established fact, but that two such alien entities had been brought aboard the ship.

Chess games with the creatures had previously only been attempted by video uplink,
due to their unique rules involving eating the still-beating heart of the loser.
(Image courtesy collectspace.com.)

After receiving radio signals from an unknown origin for several months, the astronauts had considered that the data may have been a glitch on the new high-frequency receiver installed during Expedition 39.  However, engineers at the Goddard Spaceflight Center in Maryland secretly analyzed the information and concluded that the signals were indeed a form of communication, indicating the impending arrival of the extraterrestrial creatures.  The first message, decoded from a complex cipher, read simply, "SUP".

Amid laughter overheard in the background of one later transmission,
the aliens also took responsibility for using an orbiting laser to "blaze up" a variety of crop circles.
(Image courtesy funny-pictures.picphotos.net.)

The otherworldly beings, who are said to look humanoid but have a strong odor of peppermint, then continued to communicate, establishing numerous visual rendezvous occasions but never entering Earth's atmosphere or the ISS itself.  Videos of these rendezvous are widely available on youtube, and formal apologies have been issued from all who ridiculed the footage.

Furthermore, in an amazing interstellar story of friendship, the creatures indicated they would be re-appearing in time to visit with astronaut Scott Kelly when he returned to the ISS, citing reasons such as the fact he would routinely jettison candy bars out the airlock as peace offerings for them during initial attempts at contact in 2011.  Also, one of the apparently-female aliens blushed when explaining that Kelly once apparently blew her a kiss, as seen through the ISS cupola windows.

The aliens, who have no concept of twins in their race, also found it impressive
that Kelly was considered important enough to have been cloned.
(Image courtesy cbsnews.com.)

Two emissaries from the aliens' mission entered the Quest airlock on the ISS at 06:30 this morning and, after having air-composition tests assure the ISS crew that the beings were not toxic, they were allowed into the station.  After sharing a game of chess and playing frisbee with some tortillas, the aliens expressed their admiration and extreme affection for astronaut Kelly, which they indicated in their traditional manner of lightly drumming their fingers on his shaved head and humming what reportedly sounded oddly like Elvis's "I Can't Help Falling In Love With You."  They expressed their joy at the fact that Kelly intends to remain in space for the next year.

The aliens' messages had previously been decoded to reveal that they found Astronaut Kelly "dreamy."
(Image courtesy youdontknowjersey.com.)

After several hours of press conferences with Earth, the creatures then retreated to their ship and vanished, leaving only a bootleg copy of the Voyager record behind with a request to "please send up some more of your planet's rock-and-roll music...it pleases our Grand High Emperor Presley."  As the astronauts discovered, these extraterrestrial creatures were able to develop faster-than-light travel, but couldn't match human ingenuity when it came to the evolution of rocking out.

The aliens had reportedly played "Johnny B. Goode" an estimated 1.3 trillion times
since obtaining the record, and have latched onto all Earth rock radio signals since.
(Image courtesy boingboing.com.)

More information and links to various NASA press releases can be found here.

Other extraordinary news stories from today:

-CERN proves the existence of the Force!

-Google releases "Actual Cloud" platform!

-Uber launches a boat service!

-Voltron cat condo!

The aGupieWare team wishes everyone a safe and entertaining April Fool's Day.

New Abortion-Education App Provides Help To Women Worldwide

Abortion rights are a serious issue which affects women around the world, but can something as impersonal as technology bring like-minded women the help that they need?  Now, thanks to a new app, a notable organization thinks that they can help those women when society won't...

(Image courtesy umbc.edu.)