Hasta La Gadget!

Creative mode is a pretty awesome addition to Fortnite. It allows players to do some neat things without having to worry about your being shot down by a player or the storm forcing you to move. And with a player base as huge as Fortnite’s is there are many creative players, which means more cool stuff is being built daily. I love it.

One of the best creations is this Millennium Falcon. YouTuber MakaMakes put together this impressive recreation of Han Solo’s ship, but it’s not just a nicely-detailed model on the outside, it also recreates the inside of the famous ship. Han Solo would be proud. Check it out in all its glory in the video below:

I’ve never created anything like this in the game myself, but I imagine this took a good bit of time and effort. Maybe players can create other Star Wars landmarks and turn Fortnite into a giant Star Wars playground. That would be awesome, although I imagine that the game developer may have a problem with that at some point. But it would still be very cool to see it happen.

[via Comic Book]

A collaboration of researchers from MIT and Microsoft have developed a system that helps identify lapses in artificial intelligence knowledge in autonomous cars and robots. These lapses, referred to as “blind spots,” occur when there are significant differences between training examples and what a human would do in a certain situation — such as a driverless car not detecting the … Continue reading

Google has some new devices in the works which judging from a report from last year, are codenamed “Bonito” and “Sargo”. These are rumored to be possible Pixel devices as Google usually uses codenames based around fish for their Pixel handsets. Now it seems that there could be more devices that Google could be working on.

According to a report from Till Kottmann (via Android Police), it seems that Google has at least more devices that they are working on and they are codenamed “Salmon” and “Medaka”. Like we said, Google usually gives fish codenames to its Pixel devices, which hints that these are also Pixel-related products. Just in case you didn’t know, apparently medaka is the informal name for a Japanese rice fish.

It is unclear as to which Pixel devices these codenames could be referring to, but it has been speculated that at least one of them could be the rumored Pixel Watch. The device has been rumored about for quite a while now but has yet to make an appearance. It was speculated to launch last year but it was a no show, suggesting that it might be launched this year instead.

Google will be hosting its Google I/O event towards the middle of the year and sometimes new products do get announced, so hopefully we’ll have more details then and won’t need to wait until the Pixel event at the end of the year to find out more.

Here are the upcoming Google device codenames #leaked:#salmon and #medaka.
None of the devices has a notch and medaka is most probably the rumored Pixel Watch. More info should surface soon.

— Till Kottmann (@deletescape) January 25, 2019

New Google Hardware In The Works Codenamed ‘Salmon’ And ‘Medaka’ , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

Communications satellites are multiplying year by year as more companies vie to create an orbital network that brings high-speed internet to the globe. Ubiquitilink, a new company headed by Nanoracks co-founder Charles Miller, is taking a different tack: reinventing the Earthbound side of the technology stack.

Miller’s intuition, backed by approval and funding from a number of investors and communications giants, is that people are competing to solve the wrong problem in the comsat world. Driving down the cost of satellites isn’t going to create the revolution they hope. Instead, he thinks the way forward lies in completely rebuilding the “user terminal,” usually a ground station or large antenna.

“If you’re focused on bridging the digital divide, say you have to build a thousand satellites and a hundred million user terminals,” he said, “which should you optimize for cost?”

Of course, dropping the price of satellites has plenty of benefits on its own, but he does have a point. What happens when a satellite network is in place to cover most of the planet but the only devices that can access it cost thousands of dollars or have to be in proximity to some subsidized high-tech hub?

There are billions of phones on the planet, he points out, yet only 10 percent of the world has anything like a mobile connection. Serving the hundreds of millions who at any given moment have no signal, he suggests, is a no-brainer. And you’re not going to do it by adding more towers; if that was a valid business proposition, telecoms would have done it years ago.

Instead, Miller’s plan is to outfit phones with a new hardware-software stack that will offer a baseline level of communication whenever a phone would otherwise lapse into “no service.” And he claims it’ll be possible for less than $5 per person.

He was coy about the exact nature of this tech, but I didn’t get the sense that it’s vaporware or anything like that. Miller and his team are seasoned space and telecoms people, and of course you don’t generally launch a satellite to test vaporware.

But Ubiquitilink does have a bird in the air, with testing of their tech set to start next month and two more launches planned. The stack has already been proven on the ground, Miller said, and has garnered serious interest.

“We’ve been in stealth for several years and have signed up 22 partners — 20 are multi-billion-dollar companies,” he said, adding that the latter are mainly communications companies, though he declined to name them. The company has also gotten regulatory clearance to test in five countries, including the U.S.

Miller self-funded the company at the outset, but soon raised a pre-seed round led by Blazar Ventures (and indirectly, telecoms infrastructure standby Neustar). Unshackled Ventures led the seed round, along with RRE Ventures, Rise of the Rest, and One Way Ventures. All told, the company is working with a total $6.5 million, which it will use to finance its launches and tests; once they’ve taken place, it will be safer to dispel a bit of the mystery around the tech.

“Ubiquitilink represents one of the largest opportunities in telecommunications,” Unshackled founding partner Manan Mehta said, calling the company’s team “maniacally focused.”

I’m more than a little interested to find out more about this stealth attempt, three years in the making so far, to rebuild satellite communications from the ground up. Some skepticism is warranted, but the pedigree here is difficult to doubt; we’ll know more once orbital testing commences in the next few months.

Epic Games has kept paid blind loot boxes out of Fortnite’s signature battle royale mode, but now it’s clearing them out of the cooperative Save the World mode, too. As of the 7.30 update, Epic has ditched V-Buck Llamas in favor of X-Ray Llamas that…