News written by Petteri Pyyny (May, 2019)

Many people prefer to go to sleep while listening to soothing music. To help with this, Spotify has finally added a sleep timer to its Android app. Such feature has been a standard option for most music players for ages now, but the biggest of them all, Spotify, hasn't bothered with the feature until now.

To activate the feature, use the three-dot menu in top corner in "Now Playing" mode. Now, a menu appears. There, you can spot the Sleep Timer option. User can choose between 5, 10, 15, 30, 45 and 60 minutes. Alternatively, you can choose to end playing after the currently playing track.

As you might imagine, here's nothing more to it. A simple, yet quite useful new feature to the most popular streaming music app there is. Screenshots below highlight where to find the feature:

After yesterday's decision by Google to revoke Huawei's Android license, more bad news are piling for Huawei. Now, U.S. semiconductor giants Intel and Qualcomm have stopped supplying parts to Huawei.

Even though Huawei has its own chip manufacturing business that produced Kirin chips and others for mobile phones, the company still relies heavily on U.S. chips for most of its other products. Effectively, the decision by Qualcomm and Intel will mean that the Huawei's PC manufacturing business ceases to exist. Only U.S. companies produce chips needed to build x86 compatible computers, at least in scale that is required by a giant like Huawei.

Furthermore, some of the Huawei's phone models - especially those in the high end - use at least some U.S. -made chips - and this will mean trouble for those models, too.

The decision is based on U.S. administration putting Huawei officially to its trade blacklist on Thursday, making it illegal for any U.S. company to do business with Huawei.

Google has confirmed the yesterday's news about Google revoking Huawei's Android license.

Company said that the decision is based on United States adding Huawei officially to the country's trade blacklist on Thursday and that it is simply obeying the decision made by the U.S. It also states that the decision wont affect the current Huawei phones and that those will still have access to Google's services and updates. However, it is not clear whether the current Huawei phones will continue to receive Android updates or updates to Google services.

Huawei losing its Android license means that it has to rely on open sourced version of Android (AOSP) for its Android updates. This means that all new Android versions will arrive to Huawei models with considerable delay - sometimes the delays between the official Android update and AOSP update have been almost a year or so.

United States has waged a war against Chinese telecom giant Huawei for some time now. But now the big guys are joining the fight. According to reports, Google will stop all collaboration with Huawei.

Decision means that Huawei phones wont get any new Android updates, ever. It also means that all future Huawei phones will be blocked from accessing Google services. No access to Gmail, no access to Google Play store, etc.

Huawei will still have an access to open sourced versions of Android, but without the access to Google's proprietary services and APIs. Google will also cease all collaboration and support for Huawei that involves Android development and testing, Reuters' sources say.

Google's decision comes shortly after United States officially added Huawei to the U.S. trade blacklist.

Huawei also owns popular sister phone brand, Honor, and the decision applies to that brand, too.

EDIT 20/05/2019: Google has clarified what the decision means to existing Huawei users.

Most of the computer fans know the legendary Commodore 54. Even those of you who are too young to personally experience machine might have heard of the computer. But very few have ever heard about Commodore 65, C=64's planned successor.

Commodore, noticing that during the era of 16-bit computers, their old cashcow, Commodore 64 was quickly losing its sales, set up a team to milk the last pennies out of the decade-old Commodore 64. They built a backwards compatible Commodore 65 that added features similar to Commodore's other computer line, Amiga.

C=65 had a built in 3.5" disk drive, high-resolution graphics and CPU at 3.54MHz (C=64 ran at 1MHz) with 128kB of memory (expandable to 1MB) - and most importantly, a C=64 mode, allowing the computer to run C=64's massive software and game selection. Commodore 65 never made it to the market and only appx. 50 - 200 prototypes were ever built.

After Commodore went bankrupt in 1994, its assets were liquidated and the prototypes were sold all across the world.

Since those days, the Commodore 65 has begun one of the most sought-after collectibles in the computing history and some of those few prototypes tend to appear in various online markets for sale. We reported of one such incident 2 years ago when an "almost complete" Commodore 65 was on sale at eBay.

The old magnetic strip of debit and credit cards is nowadays rarely used in most of the Western countries, having been mostly replaced by either contactless payments or chip-and-pin payments. Finnish bank S-Pankki has now introduced a line of debit and credit cards that are designed vertically rather than horizontally.

Reasoning behind the design change is that consumers mostly see their cards positioned vertically - either when stored with their phone flip-covers or when paid with chip-and-pin terminals.

The card itself is still the same, standard-sized bank card we all know, but the all the graphical design elements - including the numbers on the card - are positioned so that they're meant to be read when the card is positioned vertically.

S-Pankki is not the first one to do the switch, as some banks have introduced the portrait cards in past two years, too, such as Sterling Bank in the UK. But S-Pankki is one of the largest banks in Finland, whereas most other banks around the world to introduce portrait cards have been "new banks" rather than traditional, big banks.

Traditional 16 digit card number is split into four lines, each having four numbers. Card still has the old, black magnetic strip so the card can still be used in countries where chip-and-pin payments and contactless payments aren't the norm. More info from S-Pankki website (in Finnish).

Facebook owns some of the world's most popular social media and communication channels, but haven't done much to improve their interoperability. This is about to change soon, as the company plans to allow sending private messages between its main messaging platforms: Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp.

The feature was already rumored earlier this year, but it was finally confirmed at yesterday's f8 developer event. It is unclear how the interoperability would exactly work, as WhatsApp relies solely on phone numbers, while Instagram and Messenger require users to create their own accounts. Thus, to what "phone number" would WhatsApp user send a message to when wanting to contact a person who is only in Messenger.

Company didn't give a clear timeline for the change, but it wont happen soon - it seems that the next year is most likely timeline for the roll out.

Facebook has been tipping its toes with the massive dating app market recently with its Facebook Dating feature, available in handful of countries. Now, company is expanding that business by launching a feature called Secret Crush.

With Secret Crush, one can tag up to 9 of his/her friends as the ones who the user is interested in. To limit the scope, the people added to the Secret Crush list must be either user's friends or friends of the user's friends.

People added to the list wont know about the addition ever, unless they also add the user to their own list. If so, both users will receive a notification from Facebook about the match. According to Facebook, the feature, announced yesterday at the f8 event, wont change the way Facebook newsfeed works, i.e. the people you've added to the lis wont appear more frequently in your newsfeed than without the list.

Secret Crush is part of the Facebook Dating feature, which has been available only in select few countries, including Colombia and Canada. Now the service is expanding to 14 new countries, but yet to the U.S. or any of the Western European countries.

Feature itself is simply a "power to the user" feature - it could be automated, as studies have shown that Facebook actually knows about your love interests before you do.