Landing a jetliner in a strong crosswind is no joke, as any pilot (or passenger) can attest. If you crank those winds up to 60-70 MPH plus, then you have not only a supreme test of pilot skill, but pure YouTube entertainment. A site called Big Jet TV has 90,000-plus people watching the butt-puckering action as planes come in nearly sideways, engines howling, trying to get down on London Heathrow runway 27L. 

The commentary itself is pure entertainment, with the announcer doing his upmost to keep his gear and himself from blowing away. It's become a notable enough happening that he's even fielding requests for interviews from the BBC and others. It can be a bit hard to watch at times and is not recommended for anyone squeamish about flying — tune in above, if you dare. 

Facebook rebranded itself as Meta in order to fully embrace virtual reality via the Oculus platform, so how is that actually going? The company reportedly told employees that its primary social VR platform for the Oculus Quest headset, Horizon Worlds, has grown ten times to since December, according to The Verge.

Meta's chief product officer Chris Cox said that since Horizon Worlds was rolled out widely in early December in the US and Canada, its monthly user count has expanded to 300,000 people. That includes both Horizon Worlds and Horizon Venues, a separate live event VR app with the same mechanics, a company spokesperson confirmed. It doesn't include the VR conferencing app Horizon Workrooms, however.

Horizon Worlds was first launched as an Oculus social platform called Facebook Horizon back in 2019, and launched into beta later on. Users appear as avatars with an upper body only, and can build their own custom worlds. Earlier this week, Meta announced that 10,000 of those worlds have been built so far and its Facebook group for creators numbers over 20,000. 

The company seems intent on avoiding issues like harassment rampant in Facebook, having introduced "personal boundaries" to Horizon Worlds and Venues earlier this month. It's also dealing with technical issues as some users couldn't access Horizon Venues during a virtual Foo Fighters concert. 

Still, growth so far seems solid, given that access to the site currently requires an Oculus Quest headset, with the latest Quest 2 model priced at $299. However, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that Meta planned to bring a version of Horizon Worlds to mobile phones later in 2022 in a bid to expand the user base. Depending on how well that works, it could provide a big boost to membership. 

Four Wordle puzzles at once? That was so five hours ago. Now, a site called Sedecordle has come up with a version that lets you do no less than 16 Wordle-style puzzles at a time, following the path of Octordle (eight), Quardle (four) and Dordle (two). 

When I checked out a Sedecordle puzzle, I thought "that's not so bad" before I realized it didn't fit on the screen and I had to scroll (and scroll) to reach the end of the puzzle. Sedecordle ups the ante on Octordle in terms of the number of guesses too, giving you 22 shots at each puzzle compared to 13. That increases your odds of avoiding a failure that would really suck if you got, say, the first 15 correct. 

I would love to tell you that I tried to do one, but even Quardle is a huge time sink that has been driving users mad. Suffice to say, you'd have to be a massive Wordle fan and slightly masochistic to try one four times that size. Much as folks expanded on the original Rubik's cube with up to 22 sides, knock-offs are now taking Wordle to its logical, very silly conclusion. 

Amazon and Visa have resolved their simmering dispute over payment fees in the UK and elsewhere, Reuters has reported. "We've recently reached a global agreement with Visa that allows all customers to continue using their Visa credit cards in our stores," a spokesperson told Reuters. 

Amazon threatened to stop accepting Visa in the UK starting January 19th, citing the high fees it charges for credit card transactions. The rest of Europe wasn't impacted as the EU has a cap on card issuer fees, but both Mastercard and Visa card issuers jacked fees in the UK following Brexit. UK regulators recently announced that they'd investigate those increases. 

It seemed likely that Amazon wouldn't carry out its threat, given Visa's dominance in the payment market. Sure enough, shortly before that deadline, Amazon announced it would continue accepting the cards after all and said it was "closely working with Visa on a potential solution." 

Amazon didn't ban or threaten to ban Visa cards anywhere else, but it has been charging an additional transaction fee for Visa-using customers in Australia and Singapore. That charge has now been revoked, and Visa and Amazon appear to have put the whole thing behind them. "This agreement includes the acceptance of Visa at all Amazon stores and sites today, as well as a joint commitment to collaboration on new product and technology initiatives," a Visa spokesperson said in a statement. 

As both the Chrome and Firefox browsers approach their 100th versions, what should be a reason for the developers to celebrate could turn into a bit of a mess. It turns out that much like the Y2K bug, the triple-digit release numbers coded in the browsers' User-Agents (UAs) could cause issues with a small number of sites, Bleeping Computer reported. 

Mozilla launched an experiment last year to see if version number 100 would affect sites, and it just released a blog with the results. It did affect a small number of sites (some very big ones, though) that couldn't parse a user-agent string containing a three-digit number. Notable ones still affected included HBO Go, Bethesda and Yahoo, according to a tracking site. The bugs include "browser not supported" messages, site rendering issues, parsing failures, 403 errors and so on.

How could such a silly thing be happening? "Without a single specification to follow, different browsers have different formats for the User-Agent string, and site-specific User-Agent parsing," Mozilla explained in the blog. "It’s possible that some parsing libraries may have hard-coded assumptions or bugs that don’t take into account three-digit major version numbers." 

Luckily, developers for both browsers have a plan. If there are issues with sites that can't be resolved before the versions are released, both browsers will freeze the version numbers at 99 in the UA strings or inject code overrides to fix the problems. Both have also asked developers to test their sites with Firefox/Chrome 100 user agents. The browsers are set to arrive on March 29th and May 3rd for Chrome and Firefox respectively — hopefully like Y2K, it'll be much ado about nothing.. 

Google Drive's "search chips" designed to making it easier to find files are rolling out to all Workspace users, The Verge has reported. The new feature first arrived in beta late last year, letting you limit results by file type, modification date, location, people involved and other parameters.

Google

Using the new feature is pretty easy, luckily. When you execute a normal search, you'll see a list of six chips with dropdown menus: Location, File Type, People, Last Modified, Title Only and To do. Clicking or tapping on one of those will filter your search results by a relevant person in the case of people, or a date (Today, Last 7 days, Last 30 days, etc.). 

Google Drive already offered a way to filter files, but hid that feature behind a sub-menu on the right-most icon on the search bar — so many users likely weren't aware of its existence. The search chips are thus more of a (welcome) UI experience improvement than an all-new feature. 

Just last month the original Baby Shark video and its impossibly catchy song set a record with 10 billion views on YouTube. Now, Baby Shark is going to become a movie with a release date planned for 2023, Paramount announced. 

The film will be produced by Nickelodeon Animation and creator The Pinkfong company, but there are no details about the script, plot, etc. The character has been seen in the cinema before, as Pinkfong and Baby Shark’s Space Adventure had a limited run when it came to Netflix. However, that ran for just an hour, while Paramount described the upcoming release as a "feature-length film." 

Baby Shark was also developed into a Korean TV series called Baby Shark's Big Show, which debuted on Nickelodeon in December of 2020. The show was announced by Paramount Plus as part of an upcoming slate of kids/youth programs, including a Dora the Explorer series, new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies and three new films in the SpongeBob SquarePants Universe. 

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 won't hit theaters until April 8th, but a third movie is already in the works. Paramount confirmed that Sonic 3 is now in development, along with a Paramount+ streaming series based on Sonic sidekick Knuckles, starring Idris Elba. "We are delighted to announce that the third Sonic theatrical film and the first live action Sonic series for Paramount+ are being actively developed," said Sega CEO Haruki Satomi in a tweet.

Sonic 2's first trailer confirmed the existence of the titular character's new sidekick Tails, voiced by Colleen O'Shaughnessy. We also saw the return of the first movie's villain, Dr. Robotnik (Jim Carry), who's seeking to gain the Chaos Emeralds. Aiding his quest is none other than Knuckles the Echidna, who demonstrates his powers and posh Idris Elba voice. Elba will also voice Knuckles in the streaming series, set to arrive in 2023.

The first Sonic film was one of the most successful video game adaptations yet, making the launch of a sequel inevitable. Paramount must be pretty confident about that to have already announced Sonic 3 and a streaming series to boot. The trailer looked promising, but we'll find out when it arrives on April 8th. 

Now that Virgin Galactic has a working spaceflight system, it needs to sell rides. The company has announced that it's opening ticket sales to the general public starting on February 16th, letting you become an astronaut if you're willing to pay $450,000 and put down a $150,000 deposit. To mark the launch of public sales, Virgin Galactic revealed new consumer branding (above). 

"We plan to have our first 1,000 customers on board at the start of commercial service later this year, providing an incredibly strong foundation as we begin regular operations and scale our fleet," said Virgin Galactic CEO Michael Colglazier in a statement. 

For that $450K, you'll get a 90-minute ride to the edge of space including the "signature air launch and Mach-3 boost to space," the company said. Passengers will enjoy several minutes of weightlessness and spectacular views of Earth from the 17 windows, as it showed in a new video (below). The ticket also includes several days of astronaut training, a fitted Under Armour spacesuit, and membership in the Future Astronaut community. All flights launch from Spaceport America in New Mexico.

The sub-orbital spaceflights definitely aren't cheap, but are far less than the $55 million you'll pay for an orbital 10-day SpaceX flight. Virgin Galactic's main competitor is Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, though that company has yet to decide on a final price for its suborbital tickets. Virgin Galactic was originally set to launch public and commercial research flights last year, but they were delayed until 2022.

As of late last year, the company had sold 100 tickets to space at the updated $450,000 ticket price. Around 700 people, including Elon Musk, have made reservations.

Epson has unveiled a new long-throw laser projector that delivers a claimed "zero compromise" 4K picture thanks to a 3-LCD chip system with new pixel shifting technology. The Pro Cinema 4K PRO-UHD LS12000 also comes with an HDMI 2.1 port, promising 4K gaming at up to 120 frames per second.

Epson stands out from other projector manufacturers by using its own 3-chip LCD system rather than single DLP chips from Texas Instruments. That generally results in better color fidelity and none of the annoying "rainbow effect" of DLP projectors, but less perceived 4K resolution.

It has apparently solved that problem with what it calls "precision shift glass plate technology." As with other models, it uses three LCDs for red, green and blue, with each limited to 1,920 x 1,080 pixels. However, the shift glass plate system runs at a high refresh rate and accurately shifts pixels "to display a 3,840 x 2,160, 8.29-million-pixel image," the company said. 

The laser light source, meanwhile, pumps out up to 2,700 lumens and lasts for up to 20,000 hours. It also allows for deeper blacks with a claimed contrast ratio of over 2,500,000:1. There's no sign of Dolby Vision, but it does offer HDR10, HLG and HDR10+, with the latter supported on Hulu, Amazon Prime and YouTube, but not Netflix. 

It should be one of the best gaming projectors, as well, with the aforementioned 120 Hz refresh rate, lag input below 20 milliseconds, 1080p upscaling and relatively high brightness. The Epson Pro Cinema LS12000 4K PRO-UHD projector is now available for $5,00 — expensive, yes, but a relative bargain compared to comparable 3-chip 4K projectors from Sony, JVC and others.