You may now cool or heat a small part of your body on the go, if you are in Japan and have ¥13000 to blow. The Reon Pocket is a roughly the size of a smartphone, hangs around your neck, and claims to cool that spot up to 13C or warm it 8.3C. As you can see from the photo, a special shirt will come with it so that it can be perfectly seated. Read the rest
It's got a long way to overturn the PS2's and Nintendo DS's ~150m hauls, but Sony's PS4 reached the 100m sold mark this summer and has a good shot at ending up the third best-selling game console (currently the Game Boy, 120m sold) of all time.
The PlayStation 4 reached this milestone after just 5 years and 7 months, and less than 3 years after passing 50 million sales. Sony’s PS4 sales have been consistently strong throughout this generation, with 19 million sold in 2017 and 17.8 million last year. Sony also revealed that digital download share has passed the 50 percent mark, meaning more people are now purchasing digital games than physical disc copies. Sony’s next-generation PlayStation, most likely the PS5, now looks set to launch in fall 2020.
Next year is the year 8K TVs become "affordable", hence the big marketing push for a new generation of consoles based around 20XX-series NVidia GPUs. Read the rest
Everything's a computer these days, obviously, but this one is surprisingly elaborate given the apparent simplicity of what it does. Lisa Braun on Twitter: "Here is my little thread about Lightning video adapters – also known as Haywire – which are actually computers that feature Apple Secure Boot and run Darwin kernel."
Now you know why they're so unreliable! "Haywire" indeed!
After disastrous previews —the damned things simply broke in the hands of tech journalists trying them out—Samsung is relaunching its cursed folding tablet-phone, promising a fixed and reliable device. The Galaxy Fold is coming to America in September.
• The top protective layer of the Infinity Flex Display has been extended beyond the bezel, making it apparent that it is an integral part of the display structure and not meant to be removed.
• Galaxy Fold features additional reinforcements to better protect the device from external particles while maintaining its signature foldable experience:
• The top and bottom of the hinge area have been strengthened with newly added protection caps.
• Additional metal layers underneath the Infinity Flex Display have been included to reinforce the protection of the display.
• The space between the hinge and body of Galaxy Fold has been reduced.
The Folding Lemon, previously: Already regretting assigning Anthony Burgess to review the Samsung Galaxy Fold Read the rest
We can expect three new “iPhone 11” models this fall from Apple, according to the official unofficial rumor mill. Each of these is said to be designed with an A13 chip, a Lightning port, and a new 'Taptic Engine' that will replace iPhone's current 3D Touch. Read the rest
Adrian Storey decided to use a 5" portable TV--a monochrome cathode ray tube the size and weight of a bag of sugar--as a computer monitor. The first problem: it uses a 3.5mm jack as its sole RF input. There were further problems.
1980s 5″ BW TV connected to a PC as 3rd monitor – Display port to HDMI cable into HDMI to composite video adapter, composite video adapter into old VCR, old VCR RF out into coaxial to 3.5mm mono jack adaptor. Mono jack to TV!!
Achievement unlocked :)
Ultimately the whole exercise was a little pointless
Fun, though! Read the rest
Hearthcabinet's "Ventless Fireplaces" use "pre-filled alcohol gel cartridges" -- that is, proprietary logs. When Drew quizzed the company's reps about this on Facebook, they danced around the question, but yeah, it's proprietary logs all right. The company notes that the design is patented (the founder, a product liability attorney named Michael Weinberger, has many related patents) so presumably this is the firm's primary method to prevent third-party log makers or log refillers. From what I can tell, there aren't any digital countermeasures that would allow the manufacturers to invoke other anti-adversarial interoperability measures like the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act or Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. And as clever as the design may be, it is yet another example of the rising tide of proprietary, single-use consumables, from Juicero juicers (RIP) to proprietary coffee pods. 8-packs of replacement logs sell for $80-$93with options for "unscented, vanilla, pine and cinnamon." (Image: Hearthcabinet) Read the rest
It being 2019, you may now buy a portable cassette player with Bluetooth functionality. Meet Its OK, a ~$65 gadget currently firing up Kickstarter.
Chaim Gartenberg:
Read the restthe It’s OK does the usual tape things, like playing cassettes or letting you record to tapes, it also bills itself as the world’s first Bluetooth 5.0 portable cassette player (a claim of such niche specificity that it seems to be true). It allows you to listen to your favorite jams with wireless headphones or even link it to a Bluetooth speaker, should you wish.
Eurogamer's Will Judd flirts with heresy: "Are mechanical keyboards really good for gaming?"
When it comes to PC gaming peripherals, stats and specs drive purchases. Gaming monitors became popular because they offered lower latency or higher refresh rates, while gaming mice boasted higher sensitivities and improved tracking accuracy. Yet this quantitative trend doesn't seem to apply to one peripheral in particular: mechanical keyboards. No single stat separates mechs from their non-mechanical counterparts, yet mechanical keyboards are routinely recommended over alternatives that cost a fraction of the price. Why is this the case? Are there genuine gaming advantages?
Thankfully, it's just a cunningly-titled top list of models Judd recommends; I have, therefore, titled my linkpost to his listpost with an even more shamelessly clickbaity title.
I do have an opinion, though, that might justify it: it doesn't really matter what mechanical keyboard you get so long as you don't get a cheap one. What's most important is learning which sort of switch suits you best -- linear, tactile, clicky -- and thenceforth completely ignoring the online cult of mechanical keyboards, because you got one to play games, not waste enormous sums of money on custom keycaps and bizarre, barely-functional niche layouts, like I do.
In fact, if you don't even want to think about all that stuff, and simply want to discover a mechanical keyboard that is good for playing games without further ado, allow me to commit fully to the most base and foul heresy and recommend that you just buy whatever Logitech is making right now [Amazon]. Read the rest
Now you too can experience the joy and wonder of changing the BIOS configuration of a Lenovo-brand personal computer with the Lenovo BIOS Simulator Center. [via Hacker News] Read the rest
It was 40 years ago today.
On July 1 of 1979, Sony first began to sell the TPS-L2, first known as the Soundabout and soon rechristened the Walkman. This original Walkman wasn’t the first portable tape player, but it was the first that didn’t have a record function. Portable cassette recorders had mostly been used by reporters; this one, with its newly designed lightweight headphones, was specifically intended for music. It changed the world.
Photo: Dave Jones (CC BY 2.0) Read the rest
It helps that he's using a high-end hammer action keyboard, but Yohan's Kim's incredible skill cannot be denied. Perhaps Creative Labs needs a new spokesman:
BONUS REMIX:
Jony Ive, Apple's longtime design chief and the creator of countless iconic designs, is leaving the firm to form his own agency. Apple will be his first client.
Read the rest“After nearly 30 years and countless projects, I am most proud of the lasting work we have done to create a design team, process and culture at Apple that is without peer. Today it is stronger, more vibrant and more talented than at any point in Apple’s history,” said Ive. “The team will certainly thrive under the excellent leadership of Evans, Alan and Jeff, who have been among my closest collaborators. I have the utmost confidence in my designer colleagues at Apple, who remain my closest friends, and I look forward to working with them for many years to come.”
Bob Shaw's "Light of Other Days", nominated for a Hugo award in 1967, presented the concept of slow glass: a material that takes light days, months or even years to pass through. A pane set in front of a lake for a decade, for example, could then be sold to city-dwellers wanting a nicer view. The gorgeous vista would last only 10 years, obviously, then become a delayed view of the slow glass being transported from the lake, shipped to the SlowGlass showroom, purchased and installed, before, finally, becoming a view of the bare wall behind it--as it looked ten years earlier. A more mundane applications might be to use 12-hour slow glass to provide offices and malls with permanent daylight.
Such a material still can't be bought at Home Depot, but this CGI mockup shows how we might fake it: all we'd need is a big LCD display, a camera, and lots of storage to hold months or years of HD footage.
Read the restVisualization of an outdoor installation. The monitor shows what's behind it, with 6 months delay.
A good way to understand how something works is to watch how it fails.
Read the restOver many years of filming with my high speed camera, I have a decent little library of malfunctions in a wide variety of guns. These don't normally make it into videos, and I figured it would be neat to present a bunch of them together. Enjoy!
Eccentric eyewear maker Scott Urban first kickstarted his "Reflectacles" frames in 2016; the frames used emedded retroreflectors to make them throw back tons of light, making them highly visible (and great for things like night cycling); subsequent iterations beefed up the IR reflectivity, which blinded many CCTV surveillance cameras (they use IR to paint low-light scenes, and their sensors can be overwhelmed if enough of that IR bounces back at them). Read the rest
The fourth incarnation of the wonderful Raspberry Pi is upon us. A faster quard-core CPU, up to 4GB of RAM, gigabit ethernet and dual HDMI outputs are the upgrades; there's USB-C too, but just for power. The CPU boost is a big deal, say early users, but dual-4k displays and 4x the RAM bring it squarely into the realm of everyday desktop computing. Still $35; the 4GB model is $55.
Seriously look at this. True Gigabit Ethernet speed on Raspberry Pi 4.
Raspberry Pi 3B: 94MB/sRaspberry Pi 3B+: 285MB/sRaspberry Pi 4B: 930MB/s pic.twitter.com/WWWIFcDpoV
— Ben Nuttall (@ben_nuttall) June 24, 2019
Raspberry Pi 4 is here! A tiny, dual-display desktop computer, with three RAM variants to choose from, and all the hackability you know and love. On sale now from the familiar price of $35: https://t.co/d9iwVidexm #RaspberryPi4 pic.twitter.com/4fll4gx1Ax
— Raspberry Pi (@Raspberry_Pi) June 24, 2019
Raspberry Pi 4 is here! Set mine up and here it is, streaming iPlayer pic.twitter.com/FXm4yOFVSF
— Rory Cellan-Jones (@ruskin147) June 24, 2019
