Hasta La Gadget!

I have a love-hate relationship with Super Mario Bros. I really like the game, and played it a lot back in the day on my NES. I also died a lot and remain utterly convinced to this day that the game cheated. If you’re a Mario fan, and need a way to get caffeine into your body at warp speed, this is the coffee mug for you.

This Super Mario Bros. pipe mug looks like the green plumbing you would jump into when playing the game to find those secret levels with lots of bonus coins.

I guess if you want to replicate the game experience as much as possible, you could put coins in the bottom of the mug to find after you drink all your coffee, but then again you might choke on those, or poison yourself from the metals. The mug is ceramic and hand wash only, and will set you back $14.99 at ThinkGeek.

Super Bowl ads tend to get a lot of attention and Microsoft wants just that for the Xbox Adaptive Controller. The company is returning to this major sporting event with an ad that highlights this special controller that makes gaming possible for the differently-abled. This is Microsoft’s first Super Bowl ad in four years as it last aired one back in 2014.

Super Bowl ads are not cheap by any stretch of the imagination which is why there’s always so much interest in them. Companies typically spend around $4.5 million per 30 second slot and that’s excluding the cost of production.

The Microsoft commercial highlights all of the different ways that this powerful controller can be used to play games. The Xbox Adaptive Controller has two programmable buttons which are fairly large as well as the ability to hook up to 19 jacks for various accessories. The controller can be used to play games on both the Xbox and PC. The company has even designed the packaging to be accessible.

The two-minute ad walks us through the story of several young gamers who have disabilities and how they’re able to play Xbox games with the Adaptive Controller. So it’s not more of an outright pitch for the controller as you’d expect from a conventional ad. It’s more emotional in that it tells stories that make you take a second and appreciate people who defy odds on a daily basis.

Microsoft Super Bowl 2019 Ad Highlights Xbox Adaptive Controller , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

Machine learning and all its related forms of “AI” are being used to work on just about every problem under the sun, but even so, stemming the alarming decline of the bee population still seems out of left field. In fact it’s a great application for the technology and may help both bees and beekeepers keep hives healthy.

The latest threat to our precious honeybees is the Varroa mite, a parasite that infests hives and sucks the blood from both bees and their young. While it rarely kills a bee outright, it can weaken it and cause young to be born similarly weak or deformed. Over time this can lead to colony collapse.

The worst part is that unless you’re looking closely, you might not even see the mites — being mites, they’re tiny: a millimeter or so across. So infestations often go on for some time without being discovered.

Beekeepers, caring folk at heart obviously, want to avoid this. But the solution has been to put a flat surface beneath a hive and pull it out every few days, inspecting all the waste, dirt and other hive junk for the tiny bodies of the mites. It’s painstaking and time-consuming work, and of course if you miss a few, you might think the infestation is getting better instead of worse.

Machine learning to the rescue!

As I’ve had occasion to mention about a billion times before this, one of the things machine learning models are really good at is sorting through noisy data, like a surface covered in random tiny shapes, and finding targets, like the shape of a dead Varroa mite.

Students at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland created an image recognition agent called ApiZoom trained on images of mites that can sort through a photo and identify any visible mite bodies in seconds. All the beekeeper needs to do is take a regular smartphone photo and upload it to the EPFL system.

The project started back in 2017, and since then the model has been trained with tens of thousands of images and achieved a success rate of detection of about 90 percent, which the project’s Alain Bugnon told me is about at parity with humans. The plan now is to distribute the app as widely as possible.

“We envisage two phases: a web solution, then a smartphone solution. These two solutions allow to estimate the rate of infestation of a hive, but if the application is used on a large scale, of a region,” Bugnon said. “By collecting automatic and comprehensive data, it is not impossible to make new findings about a region or atypical practices of a beekeeper, and also possible mutations of the Varroa mites.”

That kind of systematic data collection would be a major help for coordinating infestation response at a national level. ApiZoom is being spun out as a separate company by Bugnon; hopefully this will help get the software to beekeepers as soon as possible. The bees will thank them later.

For most of us, we would think of a speaker as something that is static and non-expandable, simply because it has tended to be that way for so long. What then if I were to propose the idea of an expandable speaker? This is what the folks over at POW Audio have come up with, a brand new portable audio device that has reimagined the way speakers are built in order to deliver unparalleled sound quality in the form of the Mo. The Mo expandable Bluetooth speaker will rely on POW Audio’s patented WaveBloom technology which can expand to create a passive radiator that supports the speaker’s high-quality drivers using an air-filled chamber.

The added air will end up delivering better bass resonance, bigger volume, and improved overall sound quality. All of these are simply unachievable using a standard, tightly-packed speaker, since that would not have the expansive wave chamber. The Mo can be pre-ordered at the moment with shipping set to commence this coming middle of March 2019. With an asking price of $99.99 apiece, it is certainly worth checking out considering that it will be more than just a novelty.

Another unique feature of the Mo expandable Bluetooth speaker would be its ability to be easily attached to the back of any smartphone via POW Audio’s universal mount. Whenever it is not in use, the Mo can also be folded down flat to the back of the handset, and it is not surprising that the diminutive form factor makes it easy to be slipped into any pocket. The universal mount, as well as a wallet that can be swapped on when Mo is not attached will arrive with each individual purchase of Mo to help new owners get started right out of the box.

Mo will also boast of Stereo Sync that sees a couple of Mo speakers getting paired in order to spread left and right channels while boosting amplitude for an immersive, true stereo experience. One can choose from Snow and Graphite color schemes for this water-resistant and UV stable speaker. With Bluetooth 4.2 connectivity and USB-C charging, it will offer up to 8 hours of music playback on a full two-hour charge time.

Press Release
[ POW Audio reveals the Mo expandable speaker copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

Machine learning and all its related forms of “AI” are being used to work on just about every problem under the sun, but even so, stemming the alarming decline of the bee population still seems out of left field. In fact it’s a great application for the technology and may help both bees and beekeepers keep hives healthy.

The latest threat to our precious honeybees is the Varroa mite, a parasite that infests hives and sucks the blood from both bees and their young. While it rarely kills a bee outright, it can weaken it and cause young to be born similarly weak or deformed. Over time this can lead to colony collapse.

The worst part is that unless you’re looking closely, you might not even see the mites — being mites, they’re tiny: a millimeter or so across. So infestations often go on for some time without being discovered.

Beekeepers, caring folk at heart obviously, want to avoid this. But the solution has been to put a flat surface beneath a hive and pull it out every few days, inspecting all the waste, dirt and other hive junk for the tiny bodies of the mites. It’s painstaking and time-consuming work, and of course if you miss a few, you might think the infestation is getting better instead of worse.

Machine learning to the rescue!

As I’ve had occasion to mention about a billion times before this, one of the things machine learning models are really good at is sorting through noisy data, like a surface covered in random tiny shapes, and finding targets, like the shape of a dead Varroa mite.

Students at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland created an image recognition agent called ApiZoom trained on images of mites that can sort through a photo and identify any visible mite bodies in seconds. All the beekeeper needs to do is take a regular smartphone photo and upload it to the EPFL system.

The project started back in 2017, and since then the model has been trained with tens of thousands of images and achieved a success rate of detection of about 90 percent, which the project’s Alain Bugnon told me is about at parity with humans. The plan now is to distribute the app as widely as possible.

“We envisage two phases: a web solution, then a smartphone solution. These two solutions allow to estimate the rate of infestation of a hive, but if the application is used on a large scale, of a region,” Bugnon said. “By collecting automatic and comprehensive data, it is not impossible to make new findings about a region or atypical practices of a beekeeper, and also possible mutations of the Varroa mites.”

That kind of systematic data collection would be a major help for coordinating infestation response at a national level. ApiZoom is being spun out as a separate company by Bugnon; hopefully this will help get the software to beekeepers as soon as possible. The bees will thank them later.