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Bird offers teachers free rides for the start of the school year
Are you a teacher? Would you like to use an e-scooter for the month of September? Get in touch with Bird.
MTA spends $1 million to test disinfecting NYC subways with UV light
MTA invests $1 million in UV light devices to disinfect trains, subways and buses.
Ask Engadget: Which devices are easiest to sanitize?
The support shared among readers in the comments section is one of the things we love most about the Engadget community. Over the years, we've known you to offer sage advice on everything from Chromecasts and cameras to drones and smartphones. In fact, our community's knowledge and insights are a reason why many of you participate in the comments. We truly value the time and detail you all spend in responding to questions from your fellow tech-obsessed commenters, which is why we've decided to bring back the much-missed "Ask Engadget" column. This week's question asks about how to keep smartphones squeaky clean and sanitized. Weigh in with your advice in the comments -- and feel free to send your own questions along to ask@engadget.com! I'm a medical student, and I'm in and out of different hospital and clinic rooms. The reality is, students and doctors all have their phones will them pretty much constantly: in pockets, in use throughout the hospital, and with or without gloves on. When I think about it, it actually can be kind of gross. My question is: What smartphones and smartwatches are easiest to clean effectively, or what accessories make it easy to sanitize or otherwise protect them? Of course, it would be nice if they also looked good (because why buy the new iPhone if you're going to put a clunky case on it, right?).
Ontario kills EV subsidies to reduce gas prices
Last month, Ontario elected a new provincial government; Doug Ford's Conservative Party, which has already begun enacting its key policies. That includes an immediate end to an electric and hydrogen vehicle subsidy, as well as incentive programs for EV chargers. The aim? To gut a cap-and-trade program that was designed to encourage folks to ditch their planet-killing gas guzzlers.
Movie 'sanitizer' VidAngel files for bankruptcy
Back in 2016, Hollywood studios were able to stop VidAngel from streaming sanitized versions of blockbuster hits, claiming that its system for doing so was covered under the Family Movie Act of 2005. The injunction, which VidAngel promised to appeal, claimed that the company was operating as an unlicensed video on demand service.Unfortunately, the company is now filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
GM and Honda will mass-produce hydrogen fuel cells together
Just weeks after the car and energy industries began their big push on hydrogen, the first real action is being taken. General Motors and Honda have leapt into bed together to begin work on a new factory that'll mass-produce hydrogen fuel cells for their vehicles. Fuel Cell System Manufacturing (FCSM) will be based at GM's electric vehicle battery site in Brownstown, MI (pictured), and is expected to start work in 2020.
Obama proposes oil tax to fund clean transportation
President Obama has proposed a $10 per-barrel tax on oil to fund cleaner mass transit and cleaner vehicle research. The plan, laid out in a fact sheet, is a "smart, strategic integrated investments to help reduce carbon pollution, strengthen economy" according to the White House.
Use this clever way to clean a Mac's SuperDrive
I rarely used the SuperDrive in my 2009 MacBook Pro. I can't remember the last time there was anything I needed to read or load from a CD. But in 2011, a friend's kid wanted to watch a DVD on my laptop during a trip. We inserted the disc, only to have the SuperDrive spit it right back out. Matter of fact, it ejected every subsequent DVD and CD we put in. I didn't really care that my SuperDrive seemed to be bust as I had no use for it, but over the next year, I would occasionally attempt to get it working by running various CD cleaner products on it and blowing inside the drive. Nothing worked, so I just assumed the drive was dead. Last month I gave the MacBook to a friend. I warned him the SuperDrive didn't work and if he wanted a working one, he'd need to pay to replace it. He asked me if I tried everything to clean the drive. I told him I had. But for some reason that night I decided to do a Google search on the best ways to clean your optical drive. I came across this thread on Apple's support communities and had my friend follow it to the letter -- minus one step. To my utter shock, my friend called me up the next day saying the SuperDrive was as good as new. Here are the steps he followed. I've also marked the step he did not follow: Get hold of a credit card. Cut a strip of fine, lint-free cotton cloth as wide as the credit card and twice its length. Wrap the cloth around the credit card lengthwise and hold it taught between your thumb and forefinger at one end. [My friend did NOT do this step] Dab some lens cleaning fluid on the bottom side of the cloth-wrapped card. (Camera lens fluid will do.) Insert the cloth-wrapped credit card on the left-most side of the slot drive by about 1.5 inches. (Make sure the Mac is powered off.) Pull the credit card out and insert again -- repeat four to five times -- add some more cleaning fluid if it evaporates. My friend found that following this procedure (minus step 4) completely fixed the SuperDrive in the MacBook Pro that had not worked in almost four years. As noted by the original poster, "Any readers that want to try the above on their own optical drives should do so at their own risk. We also highly recommend no one follows step 4 as putting any kind of liquid in a computer can have damaging, irreversible effects."
How to spring clean "Open With" duplicates
If you use your Mac for any period of time, you will find the need to open a document with a different program other than the one set as default. The "Open With" menu appears in the Finder whenever you right-click or control-click on the icon of a document. The "Open With" command is designed to give you a list of alternative choices to handle the file that you've selected, but after long-term use you will find this list can get a little bit messy. Duplicate entries in your "Open With" menu can be easily cleaned via a simple terminal command. We initially covered this command in a 2009 post about rebuilding your launch services, but this post is updated with video and a few new methods that'll work in OS X Mountain Lion. In the video below, I will demonstrate the basic terminal command. I will also show you how to create a bash script to make it easier to repeat this cleaning whenever needed, as well as create an Alfred workflow to do the same (requires the Alfred powerpack.) Below you'll find the commands used in the video. If you are creating the .bash_profile alias method, remember you will have to quit and relaunch terminal for this to work. Fix Duplicate "Open With" Terminal: alias fixow='/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain user;killall Finder;echo "Open With has been rebuilt, Finder will relaunch"' Fix Duplicate "Open With" via Bash alias: alias fixow='/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain user;killall Finder;echo "Open With has been rebuilt, Finder will relaunch"' If you are a little shy of monkeying around in terminal and bash, you can use utilities such as Onyx or Cocktail to get the job done.
Sharp Cocorobo vacuum avoids obstacles, embraces small talk
With iRobot cleaning up in the robotic vacuum game, it's only logical that some major manufacturers like LG and Samsung want a piece of the dirt sucking action. Sharp has gotten into the game as well -- though the company's 'bot goes the extra mile for cleanliness. Cocorobo TX-V100 has voice recognition functionality and will happily talk back, courtesy of its "voice communication," which includes phrases like the ominous "I understand." The little floor cleaning disk also has infrared sensors for avoiding obstacles and a built-in camera, so you can observe your sparking abode from a carpet view while you're out. Cocorobo will be invading Japanese households this June. Check out a video of the 'bot in action after the break.
Inhabitat's Week in Green: gigantic LED cube, synthetic bones and a playground from recycled wind turbines
Each week our friends at Inhabitat recap the week's most interesting green developments and clean tech news for us -- it's the Week in Green. Happy April 1st! In honor of the day, we've rounded up some of Inhabitat's best April Fools stories for your reading pleasure. Our collective jaws dropped this morning when we were sent an anonymous photo from a tipster which hints at intergalactic plans for Apple's new Cupertino campus. Google also surprised us today when it announced a partnership with the city of New York to replace NYC taxis with driverless Google Cabs. In other NYC news, it was revealed today that New York City's ever-popular High Line park is going to bring a train back on the High Line to keep up with the growing crowds, and satellite photos divulged that Dubai appears to be building a series of Dubai-shaped islands off of its coast. In more serious news, the New York Auto Show is hitting Manhattan next week, and in preparation this week Fisker released the first sketch of its highly anticipated Nina Plug-in Hybrid. Inhabitat will be on-scene at the reveal on Tuesday to bring you the first photos of its unveiling, so stay tuned for Inhabitat's live Fisker Nina coverage on Tuesday! We also brought you a sneak peek at several more innovative eco vehicles that will displayed at this year's New York Auto Show -- including NYC's taxi of tomorrow and Infiniti's new Nissan Leaf-based EV. Meanwhile, Lexus divulged that it is considering producing the sexy LF-LC hybrid sports coupe, and Chevy Volt's sexier European twin the Opel Ampera racked up 7,000 orders, putting it well on its way to meeting sales targets. In two-wheel transportation news, bicycles kicked into high gear as Specialized launched the world's fastest E-bike and Jose Hurtado designed a hubless 'Twist Bike' that can be turned into a tandem in a snap.
Daily Mac App: Clean
Let's face it, cleaning your desktop can be a right chore. Clean makes it easy by automating the process for those who simply can't face it. Some of us are more prone to desktop clutter than others. I have seen some horrors in my time, desktops were you simply can't see the wallpaper for the side-to-side mess of icons. How does anyone find anything in that mess? Like other cleaning tasks, sometimes you simply can't face weeding through all the files, separating important from rubbish and that's where Clean comes in. It's a tiny app that you can either set up to clear out your desktop on a daily, weekly or monthly rotation, or fire it up manually when it all gets too much. Clean will move all the files on your desktop to a user-specified folder and will organize them by day or month. You can tell it to ignore files with labels, which means you can keep files on your desktop that you really want to stay by just applying a label to them in Finder. By moving, not trashing your files, Clean gives you the opportunity to evaluate whether you really need those files. If you haven't accessed them for a couple of months for instance, perhaps it's time to trash them and reclaim some hard disk space. Yes you can do all this manually, and no Clean doesn't do anything revolutionary, but it's a free app that gets the job done for those that have a mess of files on their desktop and can't face sorting them manually.
Philips Sonicare DiamondClean USB toothbrush to stay fresh at your desk
For the modern dental enthusiast, we present to you the Philips Sonicare DiamondClean USB toothbrush -- because keeping your stank breath fresh at your computer is essential for early morning Skype calls. Long since gone are the days where brushing your teeth was limited to the bathroom. Nowadays, you'll need to keep those chompers fresh no matter where you might find yourself, including (but not limited to): the computer lab at school, your home office, your boss' office, or maybe even the Apple Store. Claiming up to 100 percent plaque removal and 44 percent more bristles, some are going so far as to call this £250 ($405) teeth gleamer the "iPod of toothbrushes." Check out the full PR and the so fresh, so clean jam after the break. Update: the folks at Philips emailed to let us know the USB toothbrush will sell for a suggested $219.99 in the US.
Suzuki unveils Every electric van, bead curtains sold separately
Just when you thought the electric van couldn't get any more stylish, Suzuki went out and raised the bar even higher, with its Every van -- a prototype plug-in that has state felony written all over it. Following in the wake of Mitsubishi's Minicab i-MiEV, this love bus is powered by a lithium-ion battery that can be fully juiced in about five hours, with a cruising range of up to 62 miles. It's also a good 400 pounds heavier than its gas-powered predecessor, though, as Integrity Exports explains, its cargo capacity remains fixed at around 550 pounds. For now, Suzuki is sending out just 13 vehicles to a handful of Japanese dealerships, in the hopes of testing the market before a potential widespread launch. No word yet on when that could happen, but Japan's soccer moms and airport shuttle drivers must be licking their chops.
TUAW's Daily Mac App: Onyx
Cleaning up a Mac is something many users never do, but if you want to squeeze all the performance and disk space you can out of your Mac, you need a tool like Onyx. A free multi-purpose utility, Onyx lets you run a myriad of system tasks such as disk maintenance, cache clean-up and index rebuilding. You can use Onyx to clear away the cobwebs that collect in things like the browser cache, font caches, boot, kernel and extension caches, as well as logs from crash reporters, system diagnostics and Software Update. If that wasn't enough, you can also get Onyx to delete previous iTunes libraries, the QuickTime Content Guide, recent items lists and even Mail downloads. OK, you can do most of these things yourself manually, but Onyx makes it fast and easy to do it all from one place. Cleaning isn't the only talent Onyx has -- it's able to do quite a few maintenance and repair tasks such as verifying your startup disk, which it will do on it's first run automatically. By rebuilding the Spotlight Index or LaunchServices, you can often cure small corruption issues with your Mac. You can check the S.M.A.R.T. status of your internal disks, verify file structure and fix disk permissions without having to open Disk Utility. Onyx will also let you change some hidden preferences in Finder and other Apple programs such as iTunes and Mail, allowing you to tweak a few things here and there. Onyx is a great free system utility that we've covered many times in the past and which allows you to perform a load of different tasks all from one application. If you're interested in cleaning out OS X, download Onyx today. By the way, Onyx also works well with OS X Lion.
TUAW's Daily Mac App: Disk Inventory X
With Lion on the way, maybe it's time to give your Mac a bit of spring cleaning. The best place to start is always the hard drive, and Disk Inventory X is a great tool. You let Disk Inventory X scan your hard drive and it creates a visual representation of the used file space on your disk called a treemap. Each of the colored blocks represents a file on your hard drive. They're color-coded by file type, allowing you to visually distinguish documents from media files, applications from fonts. The size of each of the blocks is proportional to its file size, meaning that the bigger the file is the larger the block, which allows you to quickly identify large space hogs. The large purple square in the image above represents the sparse bundle used by FileVault, but you can easily see the digital copies of Inception, Star Trek and Tron Legacy I have stored in iTunes outside the FileVault. Once you've identified an errant large file, click on the block to display information about the file including size, creation and modification date, owner, permissions, file path and format. You can then either reveal the file in Finder or trash it straight from Disk Inventory X. While you can find large files manually with Finder, Disk Inventory X streamlines the process. Download the free Disk Inventory X today and reclaim some of that valuable hard drive.
California's zero-emissions rebate program ironically runs out of green
Californians will have to look elsewhere to start receiving cash back for buying eco-friendly vehicles, as the California Air Resources Board has just announced that its ever popular rebate program is no more for the time being. CARB, as the board also goes by, launched its Clean Vehicle Rebate Project (CVRP) in March of 2010 with initial funding of over $11 million to go around -- but we knew it wouldn't last. According to the CVRP website, the program has issued a little over $7 million worth of rebates thus far, with the rest pending or reserved for the already existing EV-owners. The board hopes to bring the program back within the next fiscal year by charging it up with $17 million worth of rebates. It'll create more opportunities to get some of these rebates, while simultaneously extending the duration of the CVRP by decreasing the maximum amount to $2,500 (about half of the previous maximum). If you're doing your math correctly, that equates to more than 6,000 total rebates that'll be up for grabs -- opposed to the 1,400 first-rounders who were awarded the rebates already. With luck and some economical upturns, Californian volt-heads can cruise into 2012 with their non-petrol-deficient wallets a little bit fuller.
Violight goes ultraviolent on your gadgets, leaves germ corpses in its wake
Violight has been in the business of UV-based germicide since way back in 2004, but now it's bringing its wares closer to our geeky hearts. Its new Cell Phone Sanitizer will nuke 99 percent of all germs and bacteria slithering around your phone or MP3 player, and it'll do it in under 5 minutes too. Or such is the claim, anyhow. Alternative applications for this ultra-versatile product include using it as gift packaging or as a display stand in stores -- you've got to love that added value right there. Some patience will be required before you lay down $49.95 for your very own UV zapper, as Violight's Sanitizer isn't hitting the market until at least October. Video teaser's ready right now, though, just after the break.
Robots to invade Scottish hospital, pose as 'workers'
A new £300 million ($445 million) hospital is set to open up soon in Stirlingshire, Scotland. Why would you care about that? Maybe because laser-guided robots will play a fundamental role in the facility's daily running, including the disposal of waste, delivery of meals, cleaning of operating theaters, and (gulp!) drug dispensation. We're told they'll have their own underground lair corridors and dedicated lifts, with humanoid employees able to call them up via a PDA. It's believed that using robots to perform the dirty work will be more sanitary than current methods, but we have to question the sanity of anyone who believes this isn't the first step toward the robot rebellion. Well, it's been nice knowing you guys.
Mint automatic floor cleaner up for pre-order, shipping this summer
It's not like the automatic vacuum cleaner market could get much more crowded, but Evolution Robotics has put an interesting twist on things with its Swiffer-packin' Mint. If you'll recall, we saw this guy wiping up the downright disgusting floors of the Las Vegas Convention Center back in January, and now it looks as if production plans are moving along nicely. Equipped with a NorthStar positioning technology that enables it to never hit the same spot twice on the same run, this hardwood sweeper is now up for pre-order. Unfortunately, getting in line requires a non-refundable $20 deposit, but the outlay will be applied to the purchase price and will enable you to snag one of the first shipments this summer (which is significantly more awesome than waiting for it to hit retail shelves in Q4). Don't worry -- your Roomba won't be too envious.
