Nov 14
The Fox News host thinks “Acosta’s overwhelming bias” toes “the company line at fake news CNN.”
Nov 14
“This isn’t gonna stop [Jeff Bezos] from turning you into a warehouse.”
Nov 14
T-Mobile REVVL 2, REVVL 2 Plus dangle 2-year warranty offer
Posted in: Uncategorized
Smartphone prices are soaring higher and higher every year, sometimes with very little reason to. Some manufacturers try to steer the ship the other way but such is the unstoppable market trend. Ever the contrarian, “Un-carrier” T-Mobil insists you don’t really have to burn through your life savings to get a serviceable smartphone (while it does sell such wallet-burning models … Continue reading
Nov 14
It seems that Samsung is finally trying to play the good Android citizen card lately. In addition to cleaning up its act as far as monthly security updates go, it has also opted to work with Google right from the start in supporting its grand vision of foldable phones. Now based on leaked firmware for its Android 9 Pie beta, … Continue reading
Nov 14
In little over a year, we’ll be seeing the third and final chapter of Star Wars’ latest trilogy, Episode IX, hit theaters. Unsurprisingly, we barely know a thing about it yet, other than it exists and some people we know and love are in it. But that just gives us more reason to make a list of hopes about what we’ll…
Nov 14
Nov 14
Just last month, Sony effectively confirmed that there will be a PS5. What this means is that there is a good chance that there could be a next-gen Xbox console as well, given how intertwined Microsoft and Sony’s actions are as far as the console space is concerned. More recently it appears that Microsoft’s Xbox boss Phil Spencer seems to be pretty excited about the future of the console.
Speaking to LevelUp (via GameSpot), Spencer expressed his excitement for the next Xbox where he was quoted as saying, “The reason I love the consoles that we build is because I think we can build very special consoles. I see it today with Xbox One X and how games run on the Xbox One X; I think it’s a fantastic place to play. When I look at our future plans, I am very excited about what we are going to do in the console space.”
It is actually interesting that Microsoft is pursuing a next-gen Xbox following the announcement of their own game streaming service. However according to Spencer, he does not believe that game streaming will replace traditional consoles just yet. Instead he says that it’s all about “choice”, where players will be able to choose how they want to play.
There is no word on when the next-gen Xbox console will drop, although some analysts have predicted that it might only be in 2020. Some rumors surrounding the console have suggested that the next-gen Xbox could actually be more than one device, where one of the devices could be a streaming box which seems to be in line with what Microsoft has announced so far.
Xbox Boss ‘Very Excited’ For The Next Xbox Console , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.
Nov 14
Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo were working on an investigation into the killing of 10 Rohingya Muslim villagers.
Nov 14
As much as we love or LEGO sets, these building blocks are made of plastics, which are byproducts of crude oil and natural gases. And while we’re not tossing LEGO bricks in the trash like drinking straws, making them still isn’t great for the environment. That said, LEGO wants to be more sustainable, and it is starting with this set called the LEGO 10268 Creator Expert Vestas Wind Turbine.
The set is based on Vestas’ wind turbine which is installed in over 80 countries. What makes this set unique is its use of plant-based plastic. The tiny trees in the set are made from all-new sustainably sourced plant-based plastic. The plastic used to make the spruce trees are made from sugarcane. The rest of the plastic elements of this set still uses plastics from conventional sources, but I guess LEGO needed to start small to see how this goes before ramping up.
The 826-piece set has a Vestas Wind Turbine that stands 3.3 feet tall, and comes with the ‘Plants from Plants’ spruce trees, along with a house with a working porch light. You also get three LEGO Vestas servicemen minifigures and a LEGO dog. This is one pretty cool and innovative LEGO set. I’d really like to own this one. You can order yours for $199.99 starting on November 23, 2018 in the LEGO Shop.
[via Mike Shouts]
Nov 14
Subterranean drone mapping startup Emesent raises $2.5M to autonomously delve the deep
Posted in: Today's ChiliSeemingly every industry is finding ways to use drones in some way or another, but deep underground it’s a different story. In the confines of a mine or pipeline, with no GPS and little or no light, off-the-shelf drones are helpless — but an Australian startup called Emesent is giving them the spatial awareness and intelligence to navigate and map those spaces autonomously.
Drones that work underground or in areas otherwise inaccessible by GPS and other common navigation techniques are being made possible by a confluence of technology and computing power, explained Emesent CEO and co-founder Stefan Hrabar. The work they would take over from people is the epitome of “dull, dirty, and dangerous” — the trifecta for automation.
The mining industry is undoubtedly the most interested in this sort of thing; mining is necessarily a very systematic process and one that involves repeated measurements of areas being blasted, cleared, and so on. Frequently these measurements must be made manually and painstakingly in dangerous circumstances.
One mining technique has ore being blasted from the vertical space between two tunnels; the resulting cavities, called “stopes,” have to be inspected regularly to watch for problems and note progress.
“The way they scan these stopes is pretty archaic,” said Hrabar. “These voids can be huge, like 40-50 meters horizontally. They have to go to the edge of this dangerous underground cliff and sort of poke this stick out into it and try to get a scan. It’s very sparse information and from only one point of view, there’s a lot of missing data.”
Emesent’s solution, Hovermap, involves equipping a standard DJI drone with a powerful lidar sensor and a powerful onboard computing rig that performs simultaneous location and mapping (SLAM) work fast enough that the craft can fly using it. You put it down near the stope and it takes off and does its thing.
“The surveyors aren’t at risk and the data is orders of magnitude better. Everything is running onboard the drone in real time for path planning — that’s our core IP,” Hrabar said. “The dev team’s background is in drone autonomy, collision avoidance, terrain following — basically the drone sensing its environment and doing the right thing.”
As you can see in the video below, the drone can pilot itself through horizontal tunnels (imagine cave systems or transportation infrastructure) or vertical ones (stopes and sinkholes), slowly working its way along and returning minutes later with the data necessary to build a highly detailed map. I don’t know about you, but if I could send a drone ahead into the inky darkness to check for pits and other scary features, I wouldn’t think twice.
The idea is to sell the whole stack to mining companies as a plug-and-play solution, but work on commercializing the SLAM software separately for those who want to license and customize it. A data play is also in the works, naturally:
“At the end of the day, mining companies don’t want a point cloud, they want a report. So it’s not just collecting the data but doing the analytics as well,” said Hrabar.
Emesent emerged from Data61, the tech arm of Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, or CSIRO, an Australian agency not unlike our national lab system. Hrabar worked there for over a decade on various autonomy projects, and three years ago started on what would become this company, eventually passing through the agency’s “ON” internal business accelerator.
Data collected from a pass through a cave system.
“Just last week, actually, is when we left the building,” Hrabar noted. “We’ve raised the funding we need for 18 months of runway with no revenue. We really are already generating revenue, though.”
The $3.5 million (Australian) round comes largely from a new $200M CSIRO Innovation fund managed by Main Sequence Ventures. Hrabar suggested that another round might be warranted in a year or two when the company decides to scale and expand into other verticals.
DARPA will be making its own contribution after a fashion through its Subterranean Challenge, should (as seemly likely) Emesent achieve success in it (they’re already an approved participant). Hrabar was confident. “It’s pretty fortuitous,” he said. “We’ve been doing underground autonomy for years, and then DARPA announces this challenge on exactly what we’re doing.”
We’ll be covering the challenge and its participants separately. You can read more about Emesent at its website.
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