Hasta La Gadget!

Amazon’s Fire TV Cube has always been a bit of a curiosity. Clearly, the company wanted to combine an Echo Dot with a Fire TV streaming player, but it took a few tries before we genuinely liked it. Now with the third-generation Fire TV Cube, Amazon is giving it a more premium sheen with a cloth-covered design, a more powerful 2GHz octa-core processor, and an HDMI input connection for plugging in your cable box. Doing so will let you tune the Fire TV Cube to specific channels with voice commands—you know, for those of you who can’t let your local sports go.

Given that new hardware, Amazon says the Fire TV Cube will feel much faster than before. It’s also the first streamer on the market to include support for WiFi 6E, which should help when you’re dealing with huge 4K streams. When it comes to older content, Amazon has also included Super Resolution support for upscaling HD video into 4K. It’s unclear if that will actually help older content look better, but we’re looking forward to testing it out.

In addition to the $140 Fire TV Cube, Amazon also announced the $35 Alexa Voice Remote Pro, which is unfortunately sold separately. It features a backlight and programmable buttons for launching your favorite streaming apps. Perhaps most useful though? There’s a Remote Finder feature, which allows you to ask Alexa to trigger a noise in case the Remote Pro gets stuck in your couch. That’s one big advantage it has over Apple’s easy-to-lose Apple TV remote.

The new Fire TV Cube ships October 25th while the new remote will ship November 16th. Both are available for preorder now. 

Amazon

Follow all of the news from Amazon’s event right here!

On October 5th, Lululemon will launch a new membership service that requires a Mirror at-home fitness device. Lululemon Studio builds upon the 10,000 on-demand and livestream classes already accessible with a Mirror subscription. Members will get access to old online content from studio partners, can stream the new classes they release per week and can sign up for in-person classes at their brick-and-mortar locations at a discount. At the moment, the program lists eight partner studios, namely AARMY, Y7 Studio, DOGPOUND, FORWARD__Space, Pure Barre, Rumble, AKT and YogaSix. Members will also get discounts on Lululemon products and get early access to its events. 

As The New York Times notes, the new program is part of the company’s efforts to expand Mirror’s reach. Lululemon purchased interactive home gym startup Mirror for $500 million back in 2020 during the height of COVID-related lockdowns, when people had no choice but to work out at home. As restrictions eased, people started flocking to gyms again. At-home fitness companies the found their sales dwindling and the demand for their products to be much, much smaller than before. Peloton, for instance, suffered a massive loss worth $757.1 million in the first three months of 2022. Lululemon itself slashed its Mirror sales outlook for 2021 to between $125 and $130 million from $250 million and $275 million.

In an interview with The Times, Lululemon chief executive Calvin McDonald, said: “What we saw in terms of connected fitness was a shift in change coming out of the pandemic where guests were really asking and looking for the convenience and the ability to not just have a solution to work out at home. Profitability is within our control. We’re choosing to invest to grow the business.” McDonald didn’t say how many users Mirror has, but it has apparently brought in new customers to the brand. He also said that the company expects Mirror to account for 5 percent of its sales in the next five years. 

A Lululemon Studio membership will cost $39 a month, and all current Mirror subscription members will automatically become Studio members. Those who don’t have a Mirror yet will have to get one first. To lower the barrier of entry, Lululemon will cut Mirror’s price by almost 50 percent and will sell it for $795 (original price is $1,495) for a limited time starting on October 5th.

Credits:Image: Adam Glanzman.

In many ways, we know more about deep space billions of miles away than our deep oceans here on earth. Only 5% of the oceans have been observed, and to remedy this, MIT engineers have built a battery-free underwater camera to push deep sea exploration to the next level. It’s fascinating!

The overall goal is to keep an eye on the environment and flag cases of pollution and climate change damages. The duration the camera can stay underwater without any support is paramount because changing the battery is costly.

Photo description from MIT: “Fadel Adib (left) associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and director of the Signal Kinetics group in the MIT Media Lab, and Research Assistant Waleed Akbar display the battery-free wireless underwater camera that their group developed.”

To work around this, MIT researchers convert the ocean’s ambient noise (sound energy) into electricity enough to capture color photos and transmit them wirelessly without a battery. Such capabilities enable researchers to drop the camera in places where they don’t have to retrieve it regularly, improving the chances of finding new species.

The energy is harvested by piezoelectric materials that convert any force applied to them into electricity. Once enough power has been harvested, it can be released and utilized to capture and transmit photos.

The communications system also benefits from piezoelectric materials using a backscatter networking (PDF link) technique which is many orders of magnitude (thousands of times) more energy-efficient than standard networking technologies. Essentially, instead of emitting energy to transmit a signal, the device reflects surrounding energy (or not) to emit digital 0 and 1 signals.

So far, the camera can transmit 40 meters underwater, which does not qualify as a “deep ocean,” but much work is going into extending this capability. Creating a battery-free underwater camera is a remarkable technical feat. Making it work ever deeper is the next level.

Reseachers Create Underwater Battery-Less and Wireless Camera

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Wordle is back with another tricky puzzle. Though you may not use the solution word often, you’ve certainly experienced it once or twice in real life.

The suit says Sgt. Garrett Hardin had a history of problems that the Harris County sheriff should have addressed, including the injury of a man one week earlier.