For the last three years Jake Welch has been 3D scanning public restrooms and archiving their peculiarities on a website called The Restroom Archive. “It started as a joke,” Welch, the site’s creator and head archivist, told 404 Media. 

The Restroom Archive describes itself as “an ongoing repository of publicly accessible restrooms.” When someone first visits the Archive, the site serves them a random 3D scan of a public restroom, its location, and a brief written description. Hurricane, Utah’s Gypsy Emporium Antique Mall, for example, was scanned on April 11, 2026 and features paintings of a squirt gun on two of its four walls. “This restroom is accessed by passing through the antique mall through a back hallway and through the door of a jail cell,” the description says.

The renders are created with smartphone photogrammetry apps like Polycam which take hundreds of photos of an area and stitches them together to create a 3D environment. The results are imperfect. The rooms appear to run at the seams as if they’re built from wax and the tech has trouble with reflective surfaces, sometimes rendering mirrors as an abyss. There’s often a blank spot or warp in the render where the person who took the photos has been marred out of the scan. Sometimes the process captures a shoe or bit of arm which ends up in the final render unattached to a human.

The brief descriptions and imperfect scans make the Archive uncanny, but also funny. “I had just discovered Polycam for the first time, and went out with friends one night, staying out late. We went to an IHOP, and I kind of started to scan the restaurant as a joke,” Welch, a freelance designer in NYC when he’s not scanning restrooms, told 404 Media.

A month later, he scanned a bathroom restaurant while out with his wife. “I came back and we were just laughing at how funny of an idea that was and I kind of just kept doing it,” he said. 

After scanning the restaurant, Welch went on a road trip with friends and scanned all the restrooms he hit along the way. “After I had like five or six of them, I started noticing things that I liked about each of them. I was like: ‘I like that this one has this weird trash can from outside in the restroom,’ or ‘I love that this one has the hand dryer plugged into an outlet right below it.’ It was all of these things that I thought were just hilarious, but also kind of interesting,” he said.

“Some of them are scary. Some of them show their wear from the use of people passing through them. But some of them are really interesting and well-designed, well-decorated, or super eclectic,” Welch said. “Maybe this is the artist brain in me but I started to see them as storytelling. They very much reflect the culture of where they’re situated and the people that are using them.”

According to Welch, some of the most frightening restrooms are the ones he saw on road trips. “I feel like it’s always the ones that are on the highway as you’re passing through a truck stop. There’s the Minute Market in Washington, Utah. So grimy looking. Or ampm in Barstow, California. Sometimes in its bar where it’s just totally graffitied and worn. The mirror is completely covered, you can’t even see in it. They’re often scary,” he said.

Welch said he’d also observed vast regional differences in America’s toilets. I think it has a lot to do with suburban versus urban,” he said. “Most of my restrooms in Utah are quite spacious, or maybe a little bit more commercial because there's a lot of [chain restaurants] in Utah. Here in New York, all the restrooms are really small, really impromptu. Oftentimes, I'm scanning them in these tiny hole-in-the-wall restaurants where you have to walk through the kitchen to get to the back, and it's obvious that they don't let everybody use the restroom. So those ones are usually a little bit more decrepit, a little bit more neglected, or sometimes they use them like storage rooms, a little bit more multifunctional because space is tighter in New York.”

After three years of scanning the restrooms and uploading them, Welch decided to overhaul the Archive and open it up to public submissions. “There are submission agreements that they have to abide by, but they're really loose,” he said. “It's it's things like just making sure that the scans are quality, making sure that they're not scanning anything too terrible or too gross because I have to vet all of them before they're posted, or, you know, making sure that people aren't trespassing or aren't scanning private residential restrooms or anything like that.”

Most Android and iOS smartphones can handle scanning a bathroom, but Welch preferred his iPhone. “If it’s a pro model, it has lidar, which uses lasers in your phone to measure distance,” he said. “I don’t even know why they have that. It feels like the use cases are kind of limited, but for me, it’s like I can’t get any other phone besides a pro model anymore because I like the lidar too much for bathroom scanning.”

There’s better methods of scanning that would create cleaner and more accurate visions of the world’s bathrooms. “I’ve had a lot of people in the comments in some of my videos saying that I should use Gaussian splats, which are a newer technique for making 3D models, and they’re a lot higher fidelity,” Welch said. “It’s built up with these blurry-looking point clouds, and they’re a little bit more crisp. But I kind of like this aesthetic of the blobby, stitched together photogrammetry. It kind of feels like it’s befitting of the space.”

He also liked the strange abysses the iPhone makes. “Another aspect of the lidar, since it’s lasers, when it bounces off a reflective surface you get really weird artifacts. So that’s why, if you look at a lot of the scans, a lot of the trash cans or a lot of the mirrors, they get really really wacky. So I think that’s fun,” he said.

When he set out to redesign the site a few weeks ago, Welch said it was important that he take it as seriously as possible. The contrast between the strange subject matter and the serious archive was important. “I started doing a lot of research on real life internet archives used by museums, libraries, and also just started doing research on public bathroom signage, and started to pull together these conventions to design a new website,” he said. “And part of that was the descriptions [...] there's something about the subject matter being so funny and humorous and taboo that made me want to completely steer away from that and take the archive 100% seriously.”

The redesign, and a viral Instagram reel, drove traffic to the Archive and submissions started to come. “I’ve had a few from around the world. I had one in Dublin that’s a typical tavern-pub bathroom, but in the description they said that the walls were covered with tags of left-wing groups and soccer clubs,” he said. “To my untrained eye, as an American, I wouldn’t have known.”

And, of course, there were new and different kinds of scary public bathrooms. “The very first user-submitted submission was in the basement of the Tri-Cities airport in Tennessee and it had been completely gutted. It’s just a dirt room,” he said. “I opened it up and I’m like, ‘what the hell am I looking at?’ And then I notice in the corner, like the ghost of an imprint of a urinal with the plumbing still attached. I'm like, ‘oh my God, this is a restroom.’ It was such a left field submission, but it was honestly kind of validating to me of why I should open it up to the public.”

Welch told me he envisioned a future where bathroom scans poured in from around the world “It's cool to see new restrooms. I'm hoping that it gets attention in other parts of the world where maybe restroom designs are different,” he said.

Then he told me about a hole in his archive. “Sign up to be an archivist,” he said. “We need your scans in South Carolina.”

Samsung has disabled the Notification Categories feature by default beginning with One UI 6.1, making per-app alert controls harder to access in current builds, according to Android Police.

This feature allows users to block or allow specific types of notifications within an app. It is still available in One UI 8.5 on current Galaxy devices, but must be found via search and enabled manually.

The feature is Samsung's equivalent to the Notification Channels system on Pixel and stock Android.

Notification Categories: Functionality and Accessibility Challenges

Notification Categories allows users to filter specific alert types within an app, rather than enabling or disabling all notifications. For example, Android Police notes users can keep forecast updates and breaking news from Samsung News and Google, while blocking sports scores or Gemini Live prompts.

The feature also works with third-party apps. Android Police explains it can be used to allow direct messages and essential alerts from apps like TikTok or Instagram, while blocking spam and video recommendations. Notification Categories is distinct from the newer Notification Highlights tool, as it is an older, separate utility for managing alerts.

Samsung disabled Notification Categories by default starting with One UI 6.1, and the setting is now located under several submenu layers.

Android Police reports that finding it requires using the AI-powered search in the Settings app, which returns two results: an integrated toggle within Galaxy Themes and a separate "Manage notification categories for each app" option. The correct setting is found in Advanced Settings with other notification toggles.

Android Police notes the setting is easy to access only if users know the exact search terms; otherwise, it is difficult to locate.

How to Enable Notification Categories, And What to Watch For

To turn on How to Enable Notification Categories and Key Considerations in recent One UI:

1. Open the Settings app.
2. Search for "notification categories," and select "Manage notification categories for each app" instead of the Galaxy Themes option.
3. Enable the feature in Advanced Settings under notification toggles.
4. Configure each app individually, as the feature requires per-app setup rather than a centralized page.
5. Access an app's categories directly from the notification panel when an alert appears. Android Police notes this is faster than navigating through the app list in Settings.

On Pixel and stock Android devices, the equivalent feature is Notification organizer, accessible through Settings, then Notifications, then App notifications, then Notification organizer.

The main drawback is that each app's notification toggles must be configured individually, which Android Police describes as time-consuming.

Samsung does not offer cross-device syncing for notification preferences, so this process must be repeated on each Galaxy phone or tablet.

Android Police notes that using Notification Categories with Notification Highlights, which uses AI to summarize and prioritize notifications, reduces the number of apps requiring manual configuration.

However, full AI filtering through Notification Highlights is available only on recent flagship models, so older and mid-range Galaxy devices do not have this option.

Samsung has not announced plans to re-enable Notification Categories by default in future One UI builds or to add cross-device syncing for notification preferences.

Users setting up multiple Galaxy devices should expect to repeat the per-app configuration on each device until Samsung changes this behavior. The feature remains available in current One UI versions, so users can continue to enable it manually after each device setup.

Thank you for being a Ghacks reader. The post Samsung One UI Hides Notification Categories by Default, but the Setting Can Be Re-Enabled appeared first on gHacks.

Das soziale Netzwerk W versteht sich als Alternative zu Instagram, Bluesky oder X. Die Nutzung ist nur mit geprüfter Identität möglich. (Soziales Netz, Jugendschutz)

Microsoft will offer free Windows 10 security updates through October 2026 to consumers who enable Windows Backup or spend 1,000 Microsoft Rewards points, the company said today. The move provides alternatives to the previously announced $30-per-PC Extended Security Update program for individuals wanting to continue using Windows 10 past its October 14, 2025 end-of-support date. The company will notify Windows 10 users about the ESU program through the Settings app and notifications starting in July, with full rollout by mid-August. Both free options require a Microsoft Account, which the company has increasingly pushed in Windows 11. Business and organizational customers can still purchase up to three years of ESU updates but must pay for the service. Windows 10 remains installed on 53% of Windows PCs worldwide, according to Statcounter data.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a recent video, YouTuber and photographer Paul Baldonado followed Martha Cooper around NYC's Alphabet City for his Walkie Talkie series, a casual interview series with influential street photographers. Martha Cooper is a legend in the world of street photography, with a career spanning over six decades. Much of her work focuses on New York City, but she has also undertaken numerous global projects and a long-term series in Baltimore. Above all, Cooper is best known for her pioneering work capturing graffiti. Her iconic book Subway Art, which was co-authored with Henry Chalfant and is often called the "bible of graffiti," helped legitimize and popularize street art across the world.

In the video, Cooper discusses her prolific career, including where she got her start, various projects she's worked on and how people's reaction to getting their photos taken has changed. She talks about her time working for the New York Post, which sparked her first street art photos, a personal project documenting Alphabet City, a neighborhood in the East Village in New York City. That project involved capturing kids being creative by making toys with whatever scrap they could find in the numerous vacant lots in the area.

Cooper explains that her graffiti work came from photographing a boy with his pigeon coop, who she had worked with numerous times already. He showed her his notebook of sketches, explaining that he was practicing writing his name on walls, and suggested she take photos of graffiti. That boy introduced her to Dondi, a graffiti king. "After I met Dondi, I became kind of obsessed with graffiti and began a whole other project about that," explains Cooper.

The video touches on other projects, including her Casita series and SOWEBO, which she spent a decade working on. She discusses with Baldonado how you know when a series is done and the struggles of being a photographer. She mentions how hard it has been to get certain bodies of work published, with plenty never seeing the light of day. "If you're going to be a photographer, you really need to learn how to accept rejection," Cooper says.

Cooper is currently working on archiving her extensive library of work and getting her images into the Library of Congress. She's still active on social media, sharing her images of graffiti on Instagram.

In what is likely a preview of the levels of grift about to come — levels previously not thought possible — Trump has launched a Solana memecoin two days before his inauguration. The move was so unexpected that many believed the president-elect's Twitter account had been compromised to promote a fake scam token, but half a day later, it appears this scam token is of the genuinely Trump-backed variety.

• Tweet by Donald Trump