Hasta La Gadget!

When Apple first demonstrated Siri, it looked like Apple had a pretty awesome new feature in their hands, but unfortunately the rollout of Siri to the masses left a lot to be desired. Apple has since labeled Siri as being in beta, and in a recent report from Xconomy, it looks like Apple is definitely stepping up their efforts at improving their voice assistant software. According to the report, they claim that Apple has been busy hiring speech recognition talent at one of Apple’s “secret” offices located in Boston and near the MIT campus, and that these speech recognition talents have been hired solely for the purpose of working on Siri, although the exact nature of their jobs remains unknown for now.

Ever since Apple has introduced Siri, the Cupertino company has been slowly making changes behind the scenes, such as introducing new languages Siri would support in updates to iOS, and earlier this year a job listing has revealed that Apple is looking for more engineers to help improve Siri. In any case with this reported bout of hiring, hopefully the next update we see to Siri will be a more noticeable one, one that perhaps will be announced alongside the new iPhone in September, but we can only hope!

Like It , +1 , Tweet It , Pin It | Apple’s Alleged Secret Boston Office Working On Improving Siri With Recent Hirings original content from Ubergizmo.

Playing real-time strategy (RTS) games like StarCraft 2 involves a lot of action from the player, and staying idle and clicking lazily will not win you games. This is so important to the point where prowess has even begun to be measured in actions-per-minute, or APM, whereby the top gamers usually manage to clock some impressive numbers. Of course high APM doesn’t necessarily equate to being good, but if you’ve always wondered how the pros of StarCraft 2, the video above was taken by GomTV’s Khaldor in which we basically get to look from a first person’s point of view at how one of the best players in StarCraft 2, STX_INnoVation, plays the game. Needless to say STX_INnoVation’s speed is incredible and breath taking, so if you have a few minutes to spare and want to have your mind blown, be sure to check it out in the video above.

Like It , +1 , Tweet It , Pin It | Watch StarCraft 2 Played From A Professional’s Perspective original content from Ubergizmo.

When we were kids growing up, our parents probably did a lot of cool stuff for us that we probably could not appreciate until we got older, so hopefully Laurent Aigon’s kids will be able to appreciate what their dad did for them when he built a functional Boeing 737 cockpit in their room! In fact by functional we mean that not only does it light up and have switches and stuff, but to the point where it is actually being used as a training simulator by the Institute of Aircraft Maintenance at Bordeaux-Merignac where he was invited to come and guest lecture.

Aigon is not a professional pilot, in fact his profession as a waiter is probably pretty far-removed from a pilot, but because it was his dream to become one, he decided to undertake this process whereby he sourced various parts from the internet, ultimately costing him thousands of Euros in the process. The setup also includes five networked monitors to act as his “window”, and he has also managed to get the simulator working where it can actually simulate flights to places such as Sydney and Rio de Janeiro. It is a pretty epic and elaborate setup and at the moment, Aigon is undertaking a five-year certification course that would allow him to start building flight simulators professionally.

Like It , +1 , Tweet It , Pin It | Man Creates Working 737 Cockpit In His Kids’ Bedroom original content from Ubergizmo.

Earlier this month you might recall that GameStop had stopped their pre-orders of the Sony PlayStation 4 console, presumably because they ran out of their allocated stock and did not want to process orders they knew they might not be able to fulfill in a timely manner. Well the good news is that if you still wanted to get your hands on a launch day PS4 console, it looks like GameStop has managed to secure more units as they have reopened their pre-orders for the console, although given how popular the console is, you might want to hurry as stock could diminish pretty fast.

As it stands GameStop is currently only selling PS4 bundles, as opposed to just the console alone, meaning that unless you don’t mind waiting for a few days or weeks, you will have to spend a bit more than you had initially planned. The retailer is offering bundles which includes games such as Killzone: Shadow Fall, Call of Duty: Ghosts, Battlefield 4, or Madden NFL 25 for $459.98, while other bundles that include Knack and Drive Club and additional DualShock 4 controllers will be priced at $519.97.

Like It , +1 , Tweet It , Pin It | Sony PlayStation 4 Pre-Orders Back Again At GameStop original content from Ubergizmo.

Researchers from Asia and Europe have developed the world’s lightest and thinnest organic circuits, which in the future could be used in a range of healthcare applications.

Lighter than a feather, these ultrathin film-like organic transistor integrated circuits are being developed by a research group led by Professor Takao Someya and Associate Professor Tsuyoshi Sekitani of the University of Tokyo, who run an Exploratory Research for Advanced Technology (ERATO) program sponsored by the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST), in collaboration with Siegfried Bauer’s group at the Johannes Kepler University (JKU) Linz, Austria.

The circuits are extremely lightweight, flexible, durable and thin, and conform to any surface. They are just 2 microns thick, just 1/5 that of kitchen wrap, and weighing only 3g/m^2, are 30 times lighter than office paper. They also feature a bend radius of 5 microns, meaning they can be scrunched up into a ball, without breaking. Due to these properties the researchers have dubbed them “imperceptible electronics”, which can be placed on any surface and even worn without restricting the users movement.

The integrated circuits are manufactured on rolls of one micron thick plastic film, making them easily scalable and cheap to produce. And if the circuit is placed on a rubber surface it becomes stretchable, able to withstand up to 233% tensile strain, while retaining full functionality.

“This is a very convenient way of making electronics stretchable because you can fabricate high performance devices in a flat state and then just transfer them over to a stretchable substrate and create something that is very compliant and stretchable just by a simple pick and place process.”

This prototype device is a touch sensor featuring a 12×12 array of sensors on a 4.8 cm x 4.8 cm circuit. It is made up of two layers, an integrated circuit layer and a tactile sensor layer.

With the development of these plastic electronics, the possibility for flexible, thin, large area electronics has been realized. In the future, the group would like to expand the capabilities of these circuits.

“The new flexible touch sensor is the world’s thinnest, lightest and people cannot feel the existence of this device. I believe this development will open up a wide range of new applications, from health monitoring systems, wearable medical instruments, and even robotic skins in the future.”

The results of this research were published in the July 25, 2013 issue of the journal Nature.

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Via: University of Tokyo