Hasta La Gadget!

While an electric vehicle or electric car is a choice that makes plenty of sense if you want to enjoy a low carbon footprint, you will need to make use of mathematical formulas more often than not since there is a whole lot of calculating to be done where range is concerned. After all, electric vehicles cannot simply be ”fueled up” anytime, anywhere, and recharging your ride might take a few hours instead of a few minutes where pumping gas is concerned. Well, perhaps it would be best to make use of the EP Tender, a trailer that would not be wrongly described as a “generator on wheels”.

A cable that will run from the EP Tender to the car is capable of detecting any “low-battery” warnings that the electric vehicle might kick off, where upon detection, the EP Tender will turn itself on and send electricity to the starving batteries right there and then. In fact, the EP Tender is said to be able to deliver 22kW of energy even when you travel at speeds of up to 80mph, which translates to additional juice for you to travel north of 300 miles. However, strapping the EP Tender to the back of your ride is not the most aesthetically pleasing sight on the roads for sure.

Like It , +1 , Tweet It , Pin It | EP Tender Is A Generator On Wheels original content from Ubergizmo.

Philips graciously released an API a few months ago for its Hue smartphone-controlled smart lightbulb to let developers tinker, and already there are a number of apps taking advantage. Today, mobile design firm Fresh Tilled Soil is showing off the hack it put together using that API and the IFTTT service for simple web-based programming to allow users to control their Philips systems via text message.

As you can see in the video, it just requires that you send messages to a number assigned by IFTTT with the color you want the lightbulbs to change to, and that info is passed on to the Philips router connected to your Internet connection to relay the messages to the bulbs themselves. You can specify the flicker pattern, and use the Philips Hue iPhone app to do a bunch more neat stuff, like change the lights to match the background color of a picture taken with the phone, for instance.

Fresh Tilled Soil provides a step-by-step guide of how they made this work on the site, so enterprising Hue owners are free to try it at home for themselves, and it doesn’t look too difficult thanks to the ease of using IFTTT. Philips is moving quickly in this space, probably to block out startup competitors like Lifx, but that competition is opening up lots of opportunities for devs and smart hacks like this one. It’s a very good time to be in the smart home space, as this seems like a crucial turning point that could lead to much wider mass market adoption of said technologies.

Samsung tailored its Galaxy S 4 to deliver the best possible scores on popular Android benchmarking tools, investigations have revealed, despite apps potentially not getting the same power for real-world use. The AnandTech research was sparked by claims Samsung was reserving its fastest graphics chip speeds for select benchmarking apps alone, with games and other software only ever seeing slower performance from the Exynos 5 Octa processor found in select models of the Galaxy S 4. The motivation behind the tinkering appears to be to ensure the flagship smartphone posts consistently high benchmarking numbers for comparison with other devices, even if that doesn’t necessarily translate to its everyday abilities.

Concerns about the clock speed the GPU ran at during testing began after it was noticed by Beyond3D users that the Galaxy S 4 ran its graphics chip at 533MHz when certain benchmarking apps were used. During the rest of the time, however, the GPU ran somewhat slower, at 480MHz.

A similar process was spotted during CPU testing, with the Galaxy S 4 automatically switched to a certain clock speed when select benchmarking applications were running. When AnTuTu, Linpack, Benchmark Pi, GFXBench 2.7, or Quadrant were loaded, the Galaxy S 4 would push its processor to the maximum frequency supported by each of the four cores. The behavior was spotted on both the Exynos 5 Octa and Qualcomm Snapdragon powered versions of the handset.

The claim is that Samsung has specifically tailored how the Galaxy S 4 reacts to benchmarking by the user, aiming to make sure the phone always looks its best. In reality, the situation is somewhat mixed: the CPU, even in its locked state, never reaches a speed that’s unobtainable to individual applications.

However, on the GPU side, the 533MHz reached during testing is not, apparently, made available for users’ apps. Samsung, it’s pointed out, never actually promises a certain GPU clock speed from the phone, but it raises questions about misleading expectations when on-paper performance doesn’t translate to real-world performance.

Benchmarking has always been a dark art, with questionable relevance for most users. Nonetheless, there are some device owners who enjoy knowing how their smartphones and tablets compare to the rest of the market, and it seems Samsung is doing them a disservice by not being entirely transparent about how its devices treat such testing.

We’ve contacted Samsung, which tells us that there is not currently an official comment on the report. We’ll update when we hear more. Update: Samsung has commented on the benchmark findings.

Samsung Galaxy S 4 artificially tuned for benchmarks research spots is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
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Groupon’s iOS app just scored a refresh this week, adding access to the firm’s new Reserve discount reservations platform via a dedicated tab. Savored users should be familiar with the concept: secure a spot at hit restaurants just as you can on OpenTable, but Groupon’s flavor packs a compelling value add. Instead of earning negligible points towards dining gift certificates, Savored (and now Groupon Reserve) members can snag discounts of up to 40 percent at select restaurants in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Miami, New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. The feature is now available in Groupon’s iOS app, which you can download (or update) at the source link below.

Filed under: Internet, Mobile

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Via: The Next Web

Source: Groupon (iTunes)

A military judge acquitted Bradley Manning of aiding the enemy and convicted him of multiple counts of violating the Espionage Act on Tuesday. The verdict marks the end of a three-year-long ordeal that began with Manning’s arrest in Iraq and subsequent detainment in Kuwait and Quantico, Virginia.

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