You dream of a couch, but you have no idea how your vague idea of ​​a couch actually works in your living space. Or you go to a furniture store with the measurements in hand to purchase a table, but walk away unsure whether the table will look wrong, even if it technically fits into your dining room.

But what if you could take all that stress off with one app? Ikea is trying to provide the solution with its latest addition to the range of extremely practical AR tools it calls Ikea Studio. The app was developed in collaboration with the Danish interior design laboratory Space10 and aims to use the LiDAR sensors of an iPhone to understand your living space and determine whether your favorite Ikea ottoman or oversized lamp fits into your living room.

It’s currently in beta, downloadable via TestFlight, unfortunately only available under iOS. If you can install it anyway, it will probably be worth trying out before your next trip to the big yellow and blue box. Everything to make the trip a little less an odyssey (in the classic sense).

How to use Ikea Studio

The gist is pretty simple: the app captures a floor plan of a room you want to redecorate and then allows you to read a limited catalog of Ikea offerings that match the dimensions of your space. Conveniently, your existing furniture will be replaced with white boxes that are easily overwritten by the images of the Ikea furniture you have chosen. The scanning system takes into account the presence of windows and doors and allows you to change the color of a wall. If you want to test out some of the more redundant features of augmented reality, the app also lets you turn digital lights on and off in case you have a limited imagination and want to see what your suggested quarters might look like more or less easily.

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More useful is that you can see what your walls will look like adorned with shelves, or what they might look like if painted a gorgeous shade of seaweed green:

When you’ve explored the possibilities, you can export a 3D or 2D rendering of your floor plan. Hopefully the process will make the tedious chore of outfitting your home a little less, provided you are happy with finding Ikea for all of your furnishing needs. (If not, read on.)

A precursor to Apple Glass?

There just has to be a proprietary business model, right? In an interview with Wired In the UK, Tommy Campbell, head of digital design at Space10, suggested that the introduction of Apple’s AR glasses will provide a broader framework for Ikea’s ambitions in the digital furniture space.

He told the magazine:

We therefore made a very conscious decision to paint the vision of Studio as a vision that can exist both on the smartphone and in a glasses-like environment. We also used a new renderer reality kit from Apple that allows us to achieve a level of detail for these models that has not been seen before in IKEA’s AR portfolio.

Apple Glass or not, the beta iPhone app offers an exciting new way to explore your decorating options without pulling out a tape measure.

Other apps do the same

Ikea’s app may look like the best version of its kind right now, but that doesn’t negate the previous ones. If you don’t have an iPhone or don’t want to commit to becoming an Ikea brand warrior, there are a few other apps out there that do the same (or similar).

• Magicplan Also creates a floor plan of your environment and can be integrated into Amazon, expanding the scope of your ordering and visualization options. It’s available for iOS and Android.
• Houzz is a little different in that it has photos that you can browse to find a creative spark, but you can also snap a photo of your surroundings to see what some new outfits in your digs want. It is also available on iOS and Android.
• Dulux Visualizer reminds us how important color can be. The paint company has its own app that you can use to upload a photo to see which color goes best with your walls. Available for iOS and Android.
• Oh yes, and then there is something else Wegmesse. The online furniture retailer has an app that is eerily similar to Ikea’s in that you can see how the exclusive deals fit into your home. It’s on Android and iOS.

The clubhouse has got to be into something as every other social media platform is launching its own version of their live voice chats with audio only. Twitter, Discord, Facebook, LinkedIn, Spotify, and Telegram have similar features in development, but the latest company to join the trend is Reddit with its newly announced Reddit Talks.

Reddit Talks allows subreddits to host live audio discussions that are open to all members of the community. During the early testing phase, only the moderators of a subreddit can host talk, but anyone on Android or iOS can overhear. Hosts can assign voice rights to other listeners during a talk, and “trusted community members” can host their own conversations in the future.

By doing official announcement threadAccording to Reddit, the talk feature is for “any community it should be used for,” citing “Q&A, AMAs, lectures, sports radio-style discussions, community feedback sessions, or just a place to hang out” as Suggestions for how to use conversations.

We still have to see how to start a talk, but we can see how the user interface works using the in-app screenshots posted by Reddit.

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Like most other clubhouse-style chat rooms, Reddit Talks lists all of the users in the room based on their roles. Speakers and moderators are listed at the top of the window, followed by all participating users. Hosts can tap a user to invite them to speak. There are also options to mute, remove and block users.

The Talks interface is customizable and features unique avatars, reaction emojis and a choice of background colors. Listeners can tap the hand icon to “raise their hand” and ask for permission to speak. If you’re invited to speak, you’ll see a notification, along with the option to accept or decline.

Conversations will undoubtedly change Reddit, but the feature will be enabled once it’s live, so communities that don’t want to allow conversations can ignore it. Subreddit moderators who want to test out Talks early on can Join the waiting list here. Reddit will collect feedback from participating communities after the initial tests. We therefore assume that the features will change at the time of publication.

Photo: lzf (Shutterstock)

Cardio is important to our health in many ways, and at least that is what we should all strive for Minimum requirement of 75 to 150 minutes per week. If you enjoy running, biking, or hiking and do it more often, so much the better.

But we all need strength training too. Both is importantSo if you’re primarily a lifter, cardio should be a few times a week. and if all you want to do is run you should still hit the weights.

What if I run a lot?

This is where the dilemma comes in: if you want to spend more time on the trails and less time in the gym, can you use an exercise regimen that includes days for the upper and lower body and skip the lower body stuff entirely? Because when running (or cycling or hiking) the legs are used.

Unfortunately, not. To make your legs stronger, you need to adequately challenge them heavy weights or other suitable exercises to build strength. Running is pretty much the opposite of that: you take thousands of steps, but each one is just a small amount of work. To make matters worse, the better at running you are, the more efficient you are and the less work each of these steps really is.

How do cyclists get those big legs?

Well, often it is because they are training strength in addition to all of their miles on the bike. They also often train strength-specifically with their bikes as resistance, which could probably replace the leg day in part. But you or I chugging up a few hills on a ride are not the same type of workout.

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So, yes, you have to do a leg day if you want to be a healthy, well-rounded athlete. But here’s the good news: taking the time to exercise your legs will make you faster, stronger, and possibly even less prone to injury on your runs or rides.

So instead of an upper / lower split, consider full body weight training done twice a week. Or check out the rest of the Our tips for combining running and strength trainingthat you can adapt to any type of cardio that is your favorite.

Regardless of whether the gap lasts for a day, a month or forever, a new program “Facebook Email Search” shows again why you might not want to use your regular e-mail address for the sprawling social media site – or why really. As a researcher foundIt’s pathetically easy to search through a large list of email addresses and link them to real Facebook accounts.

The scope of the tool is pretty significant – up to five million email addresses a day if it’s really on the rise – and it can link Facebook accounts to those emails regardless of the account owner’s security settings. You may have made your Facebook profile as private as possible, but that doesn’t stop the tool from doing its magic.

While this type of vulnerability does not pose a direct threat to your security as no one can use the existence of your email address as a way to break into your Facebook account, this is still another data point that you probably don’t want to use not be tied up in a huge database. This information could be used to dox or fish you at a later date, or who knows what else – attackers can get a lot more creative with a wealth of data about you, your related accounts, and some leaked passwords.

Since Facebook is a juicy target for attacks and Data breachesand chances are that the majority of users of the service are unlikely to be ready to part with it for good. One of the best things you can do for yourself is to use fake data about yourself wherever possible. You should have at least one email address on Facebook that you don’t use with any other service (and ideally a separate phone number, also).

Changing this data on Facebook is easy: all you have to do is go to your elementary school Facebook settings page to change your email address, or “contact” as Facebook calls it. Add a new one, make it the primary, and delete the old one – it’s that simple. You’re about to perform a similar process to switch to a new phone number. All in all, the switchover shouldn’t take more than ten minutes. That includes the time you spend digging through your inbox or text messages waiting for Facebook to send you new confirmations.

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In a perfect world, you would use a unique email address (and phone number, if applicable) for all of your social services. The former is pretty easy to set up and manage, especially if you have a password manager do all the heavy lifting. The latter is a lot harder to deal with, and it’s something you can probably avoid if you stop giving your phone number to the services you use. The exception, of course, is when a service only offers two-factor authentication. It is better to enable this than to forego it. However, you can avoid this entirely if you can set up with a service too conventional two-factor authentication with a third party app.

If this all sounds like a lot to remember, it shouldn’t be. Just keep that one word in mind when you’re setting up a new service or reviewing the information you’ve already shared with a service: obfuscation. If a service doesn’t need to know your actual information in order to give you access, you don’t have to cough it up. The more you can hide your critical information like your name, date of birth, email address, phone number, and real address, the better off poking around with smart people.