RAHULISM

ASUS recently launched its third gaming smartphone -- the ROG Phone 3 -- with a powerful spec sheet. This also includes a display with a 144Hz refresh rate. However, it seems like that the 144Hz refresh rate isn't the only option available on the smartphone and go on until 160Hz refresh rate too. Read on to know how you can get the display setting.

How to enable 160Hz display on ROG Phone 3?

It is suggested that the ROG Phone 3's refresh rate can go up to 160Hz with a simple trick. As discovered by XDA Developers, the 160Hz can be enabled by entering a debug command that will bring about the 160Hz refresh rate option in addition to 60Hz, 90Hz, 120Hz, and 144Hz ones.

All you have to do is perform some steps (mostly on the technical front) and get the 160Hz refresh rate on the ROG Phone 3. For this, you need to set up an Android Debug Bridge (ADB) on your PC and enter the command "adb shell setprop debug.vendor.asus.fps.eng 1" via a command prompt or a terminal window. Once the command is entered, just reboot your smartphone, following which you will get the 160Hz refresh rate option by heading to the Settings>Display>Refresh Rate. It can also be enabled from the Refresh Rate Quick Settings tile.

One thing worth noting is that while the 160Hz display setting work on normal usage and even with games that support 144Hz (since the 160Hz could be unlocked for them without the command), the display isn't fully calibrated in this option and can enable some issues as well. You can tweak the display settings by going to the Settings>Display>Splendid for better working of the display with 160Hz refresh rate.

If you feel you want to get back to the original refresh rate, you can enter the ADB command "adb shell setprop debug.vendor.asus.fps.eng 0" on your PC, reboot the smartphone, and you are good to go.

To recall, the ROG Phone 3 comes with a 6.59-inch Full HD+ AMOLED 144Hz display and is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 Plus processor. It comes in three RAM/Storage options: 8GB/128GB., 12GB/256GB, and even a 16GB512GB. On the camera front, it gets three rear cameras (64MP, 13MP, 5MP) and a 24MP front camera. It is backed by a 6,000mAh battery with 30W ROG HyperCharge and runs Android 10. Additionally, it comes with Ultrasonic sensors for AirTrigger 3 and grip press, dual front-facing speakers, enhanced X Mode performance-optimization software, upgraded GameCool 3 cooling system, and more.

You've probably heard a lot about how you should protect your identity from thieves and scammers. After all, cybercriminals can commit ID fraud with just the barest set of information about you. But what can you do to prevent identity theft?

Start by making sure you use these tools and services to protect your identity from theft.

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1. Identity theft protection and monitoring

Let's start with the most obvious solution: identity theft protection. What is it, where can you find it, and how much does it cost?

In most cases, identity theft protection is a feature bundled into bank accounts and credit cards. Providers will monitor your account for suspicious activity and contact you in the event of unusual spending.

You can also take the time to monitor bank and credit card statements - in paper or online - to ensure nothing is amiss. Some companies offer easy access to your credit agency to keep an eye out for any new credit applications in your name.

A great feature that has been introduced by banks and credit cards companies is SMS alerts. These can be configured so that you receive instant notification if your account goes overdrawn, or a maximum spend has been breached.

With all this in mind, you should, however, avoid ID fraud insurance. All this does is mitigate the expense of sorting the fallout from ID fraud - it doesn't reimburse your bank account or credit card. But as long as your identity theft was not caused by personal negligence, your bank will cover the cost of the fraud.

2. Secure authentication

Your identity can be stolen from a laptop, desktop, tablet, smartphone, even a smartwatch.

The solution? Be sure to set up secure authentication. This can be anything from a password or PIN code to thumb or fingerprint recognition. Clearly it depends on what device you're using and its limitations, but always choose the most secure option.

Avoid unlock shapes and gestures on phones and tablets, however. Finger grease can make it clear what the unlock gesture is, making this the least secure option.

In addition to securing how you access your devices, take the time to set up two-factor authentication wherever it is available. Once enabled, this prevents unauthorised access to your account by requiring more than just your password. This might be a one-time passcode generated by a mobile app, or a one-off emailed link.

With your login authentication secured, your ID has a better chance of staying out of the hands of hackers.

3. A VPN

While wrongly considered a privacy and security solution for almost everything, there is one thing VPNs do well: they encrypt your data. If you regularly use public Wi-Fi, this is vital to prevent observation from password sniffers. Hackers use these to collect logins, passwords, and other transmitted data from unencrypted connections.

Encryption prevents a password sniffer from collecting any usable data.

So, be sure to use a VPN on any device you might use on a vulnerable network. This probably means your laptop, smartphone, and tablet.

If you're not using a VPN already, now is the time to start. Most VPNs support multiple devices and a subscription of under £10 a month.

Check out our complete list of the best VPN services

4. Antivirus and online security software

Every computer and mobile device you use should have antivirus software. While Windows might ship with on-board AV and malware software (Windows Defender) mobile devices are less secure.

At its best, online security software can detect dodgy websites, phishing links, and clean up malware from your PC or smartphone. What is the risk to your identity, though?

Well, emails claiming to be from a reputable bank that are really scammers trying to trick you into logging into a spoofed website is one key risk. That's a one-way trip to identity theft.

Similarly, you have the risk of malware installing keyloggers on your system. These tools record keystrokes as you type, recording usernames and passwords that hackers can then use to access your accounts. All they need to do is pick an account holding your personal details and your ID is theirs to steal.

Keep your devices safe online with the best antivirus software

5. A password manager

Remembering multiple passwords is tough---but it is vital for you to hold different passwords for every account. Many account breaches occur because the same password is used for email as, say Facebook, or PayPal.

Ending this behaviour will improve your security considerably, reducing the likelihood of identity theft. The way to remember all your passwords and keep them safe and secure is to remember just one. Saving your passwords in a password manager is the answer. Can't think of a password? Don't worry - password managers feature secure password generators.

With a password manager, a master password is used to provide access to the vault. This might be secondary to a thumb or fingerprint, depending on what device you're using.

Don't forget education, awareness and vigilance

If you're using these tools you have a good chance of avoiding identity theft. While nothing can stop your accounts from being stolen due to a corporate data breach, you've done everything you can to secure things are your end.

Or have you? Well, in terms of software and services, yes. But there is always more you can do. Start by being more aware of cybersecurity issues, just as you would stay up to date about neighbourhood crime. After all, we're all members of the digital neighbourhood. Be aware of new risks, and always double check what you're doing - especially when you're considering following a link in an email or text message claiming to be from your bank.

Cybercriminals will attack from any angle, using any media. Be ready for them.

At first, you will be stunned because it is nothing like the keyboards you have seen before.

Are you “all thumbs” as the saying goes? Typewise, a new keyboard for mobiles may help put your thumbs to better use. But be prepared for a surprise. It has reinvented the whole orientation of letters.

The problem

First, small keyboards on mobile phones lead to many typos. Typos, compounded with autocorrect, often result in gibberish.

Second, the keyboard that you use was actually meant for typing with 10 fingers. It is the keyboard of the 19th-century typewriter which had been nicknamed the “Remington Bang-method”. You cannot simply “bang” out a message on the mobile keyboard because the keys are too close together. According to a study by the University of Cambridge, UK, one out of every five words you type out contains a typo.

A third, and most dangerous problem, is privacy. Keyboards can record everything you write. Most keyboard apps use artificial intelligence to make them more efficient. These rely on the Internet to train their central algorithms or supply their business models with user data. Keyboard apps such as Go Keyboard, Kika Keyboard, Touchpal Keyboard, Wave Keyboard or Cheetah Keyboard are notorious for collecting user data.

The solution

The Typewise keyboard app, available on both Apple’s App Store and in Google Play, is made in Switzerland by David Eberle and Janis Berneker. There is a free version and a paid version. The premium version with more features works out to as little as Rs 20.75 a month if you pay Rs 249 for the whole year.

How to install

After downloading the app, open it and follow the directions. On an iPhone, go to Settings—General—Keyboards. Tap on Keyboards on the top and Add New Keyboard. Tap on Typewise which will be under third-party keyboards. When you want to type a message, long-press the globe icon and choose Typewise.

On my Samsung phone running Android 10, I found it easier to instal and did not need to open Settings separately. You can switch the keyboard to Typewise by tapping the keyboard icon on the bottom right. On some Android phones, you have to go to Settings to change the keyboard.

What it looks like

At first, you will be stunned because it is nothing like the keyboards you have seen before. It is still QWERTY but the alignment is different due to the hexagonal design. The keys are bigger and more accessible with your thumb though you can type with one finger too. There are two space bars represented by blank hexagons on two sides so that both your thumbs can access them. To use backspace, swipe from right to the left. Tap the blank key twice for a full stop. Flick up on a letter to get an uppercase. Press on a blank and then move your finger around to shift the cursor anywhere you want.

You must practise how to access punctuation symbols, numbers and special characters. If you want the conventional keyboard, tap the keyboard icon to the upper left above the keyboard. Tap it again to return to the hexagonal keyboard.

The hexagonal orientation helped me reduce typos drastically. Algorithms analyse where individual keys are pressed exactly and thus eliminate systematic errors. The two space buttons allow the most frequently used keys to be reached easily. Unacquainted with an actual typewriter, there is no reason why most smartphone users should not get used to the keyboard easily. A smart tutorial and games within the app help you master the new keyboard.

Privacy issues

Typewise runs locally on your device. Everything you type remains on it and your data is not transmitted to the cloud. Its artificial intelligence can run offline, thereby maximising privacy. Other keyboards require dozens of permissions to access your calendar, contacts, files or GPS location. Typewise does not require suspicious permissions nor does it need “Full Access”.

Hinglish Vinglish

Typewise gives support to Hinglish which means you can now type in your vernacular using the English script and autocorrect will not change it to something else. Additionally, backtick (è) has been added to special characters as well as more custom accents like a.

Typewise is a great innovation. Just spend a week on it and watch how your typing improves. The only thing missing is support for Indian languages. Hopefully, this will come with time.

Many people think that Blogger lacks in all of the extra goodies you can add to other platforms like WordPress, but it simply isn't true. By using widgets you can customize your blog as much as you like by just adding little snippets of code to the sidebars.

Allow users to talk to you via IM, see what your most popular posts are, or even read news from sites such as Mashable. With these 25 widgets, you can create an even more powerful way of communicating with your visitors, just make sure you don't overload them with too many!

What are some of your favorite widgets for use on Blogger?

Communications Widgets

Google Talk - Give visitors the ability to talk to you via Google Talk directly from your blog sidebar.

Jaxtr - Create a widget that allows people to call you on the phone without revealing the phone number to them.

Meebo Me - Meebo Me will allow you to create a chat box that you can install on your Blogger page, giving you the chance to converse with visitors to your site.

Skype - The official Skype widget allows you to create various buttons that can show your current status and also allows people to just click it and give you a call.

Tag-Board - Allows you to add a real-time chat board to your blog that your visitors and you can use to converse.

Social Widgets

Delicious Linkrolls - Share your Delicious bookmarks with the world with this easy to install linkroll widget.

FriendFeed Widget - Share all of your FriendFeed activity with the readers of your site.

Google Friend Connect - A makeshift social network that runs across any site that has installed Google Friend Connect. You can join a site, see the other members, play games and more.

LinkedInABox - LinkedInABox retrieves your LinkedIn profile to display on your blog, allowing people to look through things such as your specialties and experience.

MyBlogLog - If someone visits your blog that is also a member of MyBlogLog, their avatar and username will appear in the box. You can then click on any person to check out their profile on the service.

Twitter - Add your Twitter stream to your blog and display anywhere from your last tweet to the last twenty. Also gives a link for people to be able to follow you.

Share on Facebook - A simple widget that allows your readers to share items from your blog on Facebook.

SocialFeed - A miniature lifestreaming widget that broadcasts your activities on sites such as Twitter, StumbleUpon, Last.fm and so on. Has several different skins you can choose from.

Utility Widgets

Add This - The popular social bookmarking button is available for Blogger accounts.

Easy Comments - This widget allows you to add commenting to any page of your site by placing the widget at the bottom of a page. Allows people to say if they liked the comment, includes comment threading and more.

Google Search - Add an AJAX powered Google search box to your blog that you can allow to search the web and your blog, or even just restrict it to the contents of your site.

Popular Posts - This widget will take a look at your comments, up to the last 5,000, and generate a list of which posts had the most conversation around them.

Recent Comments - Display the most recent comments on your blog in this widget so that readers can join in the conversation.

Related Posts - Not so much a widget as a hack, this will give you the related post functionality that so many WordPress powered blogs use.

ShareThis - The highly customizable green button that ShareThis is known for can be added to your blog. Choose if you want it for social bookmarking, users emailing your posts and more.

Shout List Icons - Be the king (or queen) of social sharing with this widget that generates icons for over 30 social sites your blog can be added to.

Tag/Label Cloud - Gives you the ability to install a traditional tag cloud in your sidebar so people can see what you write about the most.

Miscellaneous Widgets

Flickr - You can generate an HTML or Flash based badge of your photo stream to share your images with your visitors.

Mashable - Yes, now you too can share the best web-related news on your blog with the Mashable widget.

Picasa Albums - Display your public Picasa albums in your blog sidebar with this handy widget.

Disney’s massive archive spans the course of nearly a century of content, which can turn any search for specific characters, scenes or on-screen objects within it into a significant undertaking. However, a team of researchers from Disney’s Direct-to-Consumer & International Organization (DTCI) have built a machine learning platform to help automate the digital archival of all that content. They call it the Content Genome.

The CG platform is built to populate knowledge graphs with content metadata, akin to what you see in Google results if you search for Steve Jobs (below). From there, AI applications can then leverage that data to enhance search, discovery and personalization features or as Anthony Accardo, Director of Research and Development at DTCI, told Engadget, help animators find specific shots and sequences from within Disney’s archive.

“So if an animator working on a new season of Clone Wars wants to find a specific type of explosion that happened three seasons ago or as a reference to make something for this current season, that person had to spend hours on YouTube going through video because you can't find that by just looking at episode titles.” But with the help of this platform, the animator will be able to simply search for the requisite metadata.

The project began in earnest 2016 after a few years of investigation, Accardo said. “It was really about preparing a company like Disney, [which was] operating in a traditional sense for broadcast and home video distribution, for what would we need to take advantage of the differences between a digital video platform with direct access to consumers and the traditional distribution methods.”

But building such a system from the ground up is no easy feat. Developing a functional and robust taxonomy is vital, Accardo continued, “especially if you're going to generate a lot of different metadata for a lot of different attributes. You need to start thinking about how you are going to manage those terms and those labels. If you let those taxonomies get out of control, then the resulting data that you generate is going to be hard to take advantage of in any sort of sophisticated, scaled way.”

The team then created what it describes as “first automated tagging pipeline,” according to a Medium post published Thursday. “Tagging content is an important component of DTCI’s use of supervised learning, which is regularly employed in custom use cases that require specific detection,” the DTCI team wrote. ”Tagging is also the only way to identify a lot of highly contextual story and character information from structured data, like storylines, character archetypes or motivations.”

The pipeline leveraged existing facial recognition software, which the DTCI team then applied to its catalog of movies and TV shows. The module was able to successfully detect and recognize human faces from the onscreen action. Following that initial success, the team was able to train the system to detect specific locations as well.

But recognizing a human’s face from live video is a far different task than teaching an AI to spot animated faces. “The face of a character in Cars has human properties but it doesn't look like a human face,” Miquel Àngel Farré, DTCI’s Manager of Research and Development, said. “Therefore, we need something that can learn the abstract concept of ‘face,’ and with traditional machine learning, it was very complicated. But thanks to deep learning we could achieve that.”

The team tried to apply the live-action facial recognition model to animated content but with mixed results. Turns out that the machine learning methods they employed, such as HOG+SVM, work well in picking out color, brightness and texture changes, the team wrote in its Medium post, but it could only pick out human features -- two eyes, a nose, and a mouth -- if they were within general human proportions. As such, using this system to tag Monsters Inc. was right out.

They then annotated a few hundred frames from two Disney Junior animated shows, Elena of Avalor and The Lion Guard, and attempted to train the system using those small samples but that returned disappointing results as well. The team had little other choice than to turn to deep learning methods to train the animated facial recognition system. “For animated characters, it was really one of those things that there's no other way to do it, Farré explained. “It's really what works well.”

The problem with that, however, is that deep learning training data sets are massive by nature. So instead, the team used the samples it already had to fine tune a Faster-R CNN Object Detection architecture that had already been trained to detect animated faces using a different, non-Disney dataset. Basically, instead of training up a brand new architecture using huge amounts of Disney content, the team employed the speedier method of taking an existing, already-trained architecture and adapting it to their specific content.

After adjusting the data set slightly to correct for false positive results, the team combined their animated facial recognition detector with other algorithms such as bounding box trackers to shorten the processing time and improve efficiency. “This allowed us to accelerate the processing, as fewer detections are required, and we can propagate the detected faces to all the frames,” the team wrote.

The tagging process isn’t entirely automated, humans do have oversight over the system’s generated results, depending on how that data is being used. “If this is something that’s going to power a consumer-facing feature, or a consumer-facing search,” Accardo said, “then we would want to make sure that the classifier is trained, highly accurate, and custom to that content. We run those results through our QA platform and have humans QA them.”

This technology could prove revolutionary for consumers as well. Since the system can be applied to “all of [Disney’s] studios, all of the broadcast networks, everything from ESPN to the feature films to TV networks,” as Accardo points out, you would, in theory, be able to search for all episodes in a series containing a specific minor recurring character or prop, or were shot in a specific location, or feature a specific action sequence. Recommendation and discovery engines could become more accurate and efficient in sussing out the sorts of content viewers are looking for without the hamfisted results we see from today’s streaming services.

Moving forward, Accardo and the team hope to further expand the system’s ability to understand generalized concepts by leveraging multimodal machine learning techniques such as the framework that PyTorch recently released and which the team utilized in its work. “Way back in 2014, 2015, we had this water cooler conversation about automatically identifying an arrest,” Accardo explained. “We would do that by using natural language processing against the script, using logo recognition to identify like a badge of a police officer, using all of these different things to identify a concept that is not clearly visible or audible.”

But before that can happen, more research and development is necessary. “The thing about machine learning and AI is, the things that are based on understanding all the context, those are more difficult,” Accardo said. “You have to start with the clearly identifiable things and then you can move into multimodal machine learning.”

“The use of inferencing, the use of knowledge graphs, the use of semantics, to really enrich your ability to automate capturing human context and understanding,” he concluded, “that to me is super exciting.”