Batteries are the Achilles heel of any portable gadget. It was NiCad that brought the downfall of Black & Decker’s much-loved DustBuster vacs. Now, the company’s new, updated Flex hand vacs have lithium-ion rechargeable batteries. These should offer twice the runtime over an old DustBuster, even if the new “Flex” name is roughly half as cool. More »
Apple was just granted yet another patent for slide-to-unlock, and it’s even more general than the first two. More »
Privacy is becoming something that is more and more valued as technology seeps deeper into our lives, but is harder and harder to find in pure form. But as Buzzfeed’s Russell Brandom points out, when you have two ex-Navy Seals and a cryptology legend working on an iPhone app called Silent Circle, privacy suddenly just got a whole hell of a lot easier. More »
Leap customers, go ahead and jump for joy. The CDMA-based carrier is finally rolling out its first LTE market next week after about a year of testing it in Tucson, Arizona. (The first official market has yet to be named, however.) With its spectrum swaps finally complete, Leap hopes to spread LTE to around 21 million POPs by the end of this year and to around two-thirds of its current network by the end of 2015. Its only LTE offering is a Huawei Boltz mobile hotspot, but it promises LTE-capable smartphones soon. Curiously, the carrier does offer the LTE-capable iPhone 5, but there’s no word if Leap’s LTE network will support it. The only nationwide carrier without LTE at this point is T-Mobile, though it has promised rollouts starting next year; here’s hoping that merger with MetroPCS (which already has LTE) will hurry that along.
Filed under: Cellphones, Wireless, Mobile
Leap finally gets LTE, rollout starts next week originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 10 Oct 2012 16:16:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Over the last few years, we haven’t seen the kind of gains in computing speed that one might expect if you’re strictly following Moore’s Law. We’re beginning to run into limits on the frequency of any single CPU or GPU, and one of the modern ways to get past this limitation is through the use of parallel computing architectures.
However, programming for parallel chips hasn’t been an easy transition for traditional programmers, and the technology has largely remained the domain of high-end engineering projects. However, one company is pushing an initiative to bring parallel computing to everyone.
Adapteva has been producing multicore chips with 16 cores for a little over a year now, and is now testing a 64-core chip. The plan now is to produce a low-cost parallel processing kit for as little as $99. The hope is by providing fully open source hardware and software, development for and adoption of parallel processing would increase dramatically. As this takes hold, the plan is to launch a computing platform called “Parallella.” According to Adapteva: “Once completed, the Parallella computer should deliver up to 45 GHz of equivalent CPU performance on a board the size of a credit card while consuming only 5 Watts under typical work loads. Counting GHz, this is more horsepower than a high end server costing thousands of dollars and consuming 400W.”
By launching its first kits on Kickstarter, the company aims to drive production costs down dramatically, and in exchange will open source the chipset as well as all documentation and software. The $99 kit will put an Epiphany-III based Parallella board in your hands, including a dual-core ARM A9 CPU, as well as 16 Epiphany cores on board and development software.
A pledge of $199 or more will get you the upcoming 64-core Epiphany-IV board – if the project is able to reach a stretch goal of $3 million. With 17 days left to go, the project has raised nearly $300,000 of its $750,000 goal, so there’s a way to go. If you’re into tinkering with the latest in technology, and want to see what you can do with an extremely powerful chip, then you might want to get in on the project and pledge.
For some Twitter users, the social network’s own app offerings just don’t cut it, which is why a lot of people are into TweetDeck, which is one of the more popular Twitter clients, and it’s available across most platforms. Today, the client received a redesign that gives it a new theme, improved fonts, and some other welcomed improvements.
The update is mostly subtle, but the update brings enhanced and adjustable fonts, as well as a brand new “lighter theme” that features dark text against a light background, instead of the dark background and lighter text that the client used in the past. It’s definitely a huge change, though, for those that enjoy a lighter look to their apps. If you’re a fan of the darker background, you can still select that one if you’d like.
As far as the new font improvements, you can change the size of the font in the settings pane. You can select Small (13 pt.), Medium (14 pt.) or Large (15 pt.) font sizes. It certainly doesn’t provide a lot of size adjustment, but it’s nice that users can make the text slightly larger or smaller if need be.
The update is available now for Windows and Mac users, as well as Chrome users. Windows users will need to restart the app in order to implement the changes, while Chrome users will need to restart Chrome itself. The updated Mac app is available for download in the App Store as well.
TweetDeck redesigned with new theme, adjustable fonts is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
A big selling point of DVDs and Blu-rays are exclusive commentaries from the directors and actors. They explain the reasoning behind certain scenes, or how some crazy special effects happened. Movie buffs understandably eat this chatter up. Looper director Rian Johnson even made one that you can listen to in the theater. But does anyone else even care? More »
If you think about what sort of computers we were working with just a few years ago and compare them to what’s now possible in the palm of your hand with smartphones, a NASA satellite running on Android should’t seem all that strange to you. That is to say a NASA satellite working with a smartphone running Google‘s Android – that smartphone being the HTC Nexus One, a device that’s now gone through many years of tests and will be heading to space (again) in 2013 with a program called PhoneSat, dedicated to small, low-cost, easy-to-build “nano-satellites.”
This program has been announced to be taking off in 2013 by HTC this week, with the program having been initially revealed not long after the HTC Nexus One was first sent to the market in January of 2010. One of the most recent tests done with the Nexus One was a rocket launch back in July of 2010 when the smartphone was connected to a rocket. This launch worked with a Intimidator-5 on a CTI N4100 load and shows a whole lot of spinning action.
The mission that the Nexus One will be going on in 2013 has been made possible by a massive amount of tests over the years including thermal-vacuum chambers, extreme vibration tests, and again, high-altitude balloon flights. Using the Nexus One, a device that’s now tried, tested, and proven to be robust enough to function all the way up into space, NASA can make rather tiny (no more than 10 inches on each side) satellites that can probe the universe – or at least our own atmosphere for starters.
In an announcement of the timeframe by HTC, their own Global Community Manager Darren Krape mentions that it’s amazing how much NASA will be able to do with the Nexus One even though it’s now several years old. With the HTC devices out on the market today – like the HTC One X+, so much more will be rocking forth in the future as well – here’s to NASA and HTC’s continued partnership in space!
HTC Nexus One making tiny satellites a reality for NASA in 2013 is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Sony’s fourth member of the acclaimed NEX family of cameras, the NEX-6, predictably slots in between the 5N and 7 in its mirrorless product lineup. We’ve seen the 6 hardware a few times, and now we’ve gotten to take some pictures with the thing. Want to know how its 16.1-megapixel APS-C sensor performed? Check out our gallery below and head on past the break for a video sample and our impressions.
Gallery: Sony Alpha NEX-6 sample photos
Continue reading Sony Alpha NEX-6 sample shots and video
Sony Alpha NEX-6 sample shots and video originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 10 Oct 2012 15:45:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Yesterday, we told you that Gearbox had released the highly anticipated Mechromancer DLC for Borderlands 2 a week early, which is good. Unfortunately, a number of users were reporting that the DLC and the patch that goes along with it were wiping badass ranks, skins, heads, golden keys, and in some particularly nasty cases, character saves, which is bad. Today, however, Gearbox is saying that the DLC and the rank reset bug aren’t actually connected, which is simply a relief.
After reports of the rank reset bug hit the Gearbox forums, community manager Chris Faylor posted a statement claiming that though the bug and the DLC seem connected, in reality they aren’t. “The good news is that the release of Mechromancer and today’s update are not connected to the occurrences of Badass Rank being reset — while the timing may appear coincidental, it’s a separate issue that we are continuing to investigate,” Faylor wrote. While he got his words a little jumbled there – the timing actually is coincidental – it’s good to know that downloading the Mechromancer DLC isn’t going to completely ruin your game.
Of course, this isn’t the first time we’ve heard of the rank reset bug, so it could be that the Mechromancer DLC is pulling players back into Borderlands 2 and they’re simply experiencing this reset bug for the first time. If that’s happening, it’s easy to understand why these players are thinking that the Mechromancer DLC has something to do with the bug. Thankfully, it doesn’t, or at least that’s what the official word from Gearbox claims.
That doesn’t change the fact that the rank reset bug is still floating around out there and causing headaches for a lot of players. Gearbox says that its working on a fix, and if you encounter it, you’re urged to email the studio at profiles@gearboxsoftware.com. When you do, be sure to provide as many details as possible so Gearbox can get a better grasp on when the bug occurs and who it affects. Have you been hit by this nasty rank reset bug, or have you managed to avoid it thus far?
Gearbox: Borderlands 2 rank reset bug not connected to DLC is written by Eric Abent & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
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