Netflix still wants to help you trick your kids with new fake New Year’s countdown

If your children haven’t discovered it yet (or you’re trying it out for the first time), Netflix has a kid-friendly fake New Year’s Eve countdown video ready for 2017. The idea behind this clip is to show it to your child/children a few hours before midnight and then send them off to sleep afterwards—it’ll supposedly give you time to party with the adults after.  Head to Netflix and search for Countdowns. You can see clips from 10 Netflix videos (including the likes of Chasing Cameron, Fuller House, Trollhunters, All Hail King Julian, Beat Bugs, etc.) with each video lasting  between one and five minutes. Common sense dictates you don’t try this on kids that can tell time, how else are you going to fool them to head to bed early?

Source: Lifehacker

Canadian audiobook listeners prefer Amazon and Audible over iTunes

David Clare/Flickr

A new study from BookNet Canada explores the local consumers’s audiobook listening habits and methods for discovering new titles. It was found in this follow-up to a 2014 study that most users found audiobooks on websites of retailers as well as from recommendations by friends. However, it doesn’t mean these are the top places for downloading. People still prefer to borrow from public libraries or make use of free downloads to acquire new audiobooks.

But for those who do purchase audiobooks from retailers, the popular retailers to turn to are Amazon and Audible. Amazon is used 21 percent of the time this year (compared to 21.5 percent in 2014 and Audible is used to buy audiobooks 20.7 percent of the time (compared to 14.2 percent in 2014). Apple’s iTunes sees a 3 percent dip in use from 2014—they’ve gone from 17.7 percent in 2014 to 14.7 percent this year.

Source: Forbes

Microsoft could be on track to selling 30,000 Surface Studios

The most notable desktop release in 2016 is undoubtedly Microsoft's first desktop PC, the Surface Studio. With a stunning 28-inch PixelSense Touch display, an articulating arm with the ability to sit flush as a large drawing tablet plus an ecosystem that includes not just mice, keyboard and Surface Pens but also a new Surface Dial, this is the ultimate vessel for a more creative-focused Windows 10.

A report from Digitimes says that the Surface Studio, which is sold at a premium price and still unavailable in many markets, is on track to sell an estimate of 30,000 orders. This is remarkable for a machine that starts at US $2,999 for the base model. Surface Studio has not yet been introduced in Canada, with the exchange rate being what it is, we can expect pricing to be stratospheric for a desktop.

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Twitter CEO gives us the ‘It’s complicated’ spiel for editable tweets

Safe to say, it’ll make our lives easier if Twitter opted to add an edit feature to our tweets. But apparently, it isn’t as easy as it would be but it looks like Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has been giving it some thought. When asking users what they want to see Twitter improve on, people are asking for the ability to edit. And Dorsey looks like he wants that for users, too. However, it doesn’t seem to be as easy a task or rather there are things to consider, including whether this should be for quickly editing mistakes or edit anytime.

Adding this feature will require work on the backend but it’ll also affect how the service works. As The Verge points out, what if someone edited an old tweet that you retweeted and it turns out different from what you wanted to share. It’ll take a lot of work on Twitter’s part to see how this can be implemented. But it looks like they are at least thinking about this.

@michaelpachter I'm listening. And what do you want from edit? Quickly fix mistakes or edit anytime?

— jack (@jack) December 29, 2016