Aside from its functional uses, mirrors come in pretty handy when you’re trying to achieve some cool optical illusions. A good example of this is the classic infinite effect. It looks like a pretty complicated effect, but it’s easily achievable and only requires a mirror, glass, and a light source.
Employing this effect to create an uber cool computer desk is Redditor Jacks_RagingHormones. His setup makes it look like his keyboard is on the surface of an abyss that has no end, which is what makes it so awesome.
Want to try and do what Jack and his raging hormones did? Head over to Imgur for more details on the build.
NVIDIA’s GeForce Experience isn’t a baby anymore – several months in and 2.5 million downloads since this system’s introduction and eventual public beta release, this game optimizing control center will replace the company’s “NVIDIA Update” system as the standard. In each driver package included with a GeForce graphics card, the GeForce Experience will be packaged, starting this week with the R320 GeForce GTX 780 launch driver.
The NVIDIA GeForce Experience will be released in version 1.5 this week as well, bumping the number of games supported to 70 and ushering in support for the newest graphics hardware on the market with the GTX 780. This release will be the first in which the GeForce Experience is packaged with a driver, but will be retro-fit to all systems supported being released in the future – where applicable.
The GeForce Experience is now well out of beta, acting as both a user interface through which a gamer’s check and update to the newest GeForce drivers is made simple and providing a place where games can be optimized instantly.
The big deal with the GeForce Experience is the gamer’s ability to one-step optimize their game settings to the best they can be given their computer’s abilities. This system is made for two kinds of people playing games:
1. Users who know what some of the setting available to them are, but not the whole lot, and want to optimize their gaming experience.
2. Users who want to optimize their gaming experience and have no idea what the vast majority of the settings are – or mean – in each game.
For each of the 70 games optimized uniquely by NVIDIA graphics and performance specialists, maximizing image quality “while maintaining great performance” is literally as easy as clicking the button “optimize.”
NVIDIA has also let it be known that they’ll be releasing new features for the GeForce Experience later this summer, one of them being Optimal Playable Settings (OPS) Customization – this means you’ll be able to bump up a setting here, knock another down here, and the system will compensate and act accordingly. More than just “this is best” will be available to you once this customization feature is released.
This summer users will also see support for NVIDIA SHIELD. This little mobile device will have its own connection on your PC, rather than having its own Android application, this allowing you to optimize the full-powered network-streamed games it’s capable of playing straight from the source – but optimized for SHIELD. Further details surrounding unique SHIELD options will be coming soon.
Finally there’s ShadowPlay, another “later this summer” update. This release is essentially “TIVO for games”, as one NVIDIA representative puts it, allowing you to record video of your system constantly and select segments you’d like to save. ShadowPlay will use Kepler graphics driver technology to record 20 minute segments at a time, allowing you to keep what you want and toss the rest – all through the GeForce Experience.
As NVIDIA continues its journey down the gaming road with software specifics such as the GeForce Experience, so too do they continue to tweak and empower their graphics cards – like the GeForce GTX 780, for instance. This week the GTX 780 has been revealed with much of the same hardware delivered in the GeForce GTX TITAN, but with slight differences that make it just a little bit less expensive and, as NVIDIA has informed us, “more of a pure gaming focus card than TITAN.”
The GeForce GTX 780 works with the same GK110 GPU used in the GeForce GTX TITAN. Inside are 12 SMX units bringing 2,304 CUDA cores, along with six 64-bit memory controllers (that’s 384-bit) with 3GB of GDDR5 memory – that’s 50% more of each than the GTX 680 delivered.
This memory interface also delivers up to 288.4GB/second peak memory bandwidth to the GPU. Like TITAN, this card is meant to run next-generation technology such as WaveWorks and FaceWorks, each of these demoed at NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference earlier this year.
GeForce GTX 780 works with a base clock speed of 863MHz while a typical Boost Clock speed works at 900MHz. This number comes from an average found by NVIDIA running “a wide variety of games and applications”, while the actual Boost Clock speed will depend completely on your actual system conditions. Memory speed on the 780 is noted at a 6008MHz.
The GeForce GTX 780 works with a new Adaptive Temperature Controller – working here with NVIDIA’s GPU Boost 2.0, fan speed will be adjusted up or down “as needed” to maintain a temperature of 80C. With the Adaptive Temperature Controller working on the GTX 780, an adaptive temperature filter eliminates “unnecessary” fan fluctuations with an advanced RPM and temperature targeted control algorithm.
The software solution that allows this control will be available on the NVIDIA reference design for the GTX 780 as well as to partners who wish to implement it on their fans. Expect a bit more of a smooth ride with this feature implemented on your card – TITAN quiet.
The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 is build to work with, again, the same die as the GTX TITAN, but here has no extra double-precision floating-bit. Users will be working with around a 70% performance upgrade over the GTX 580, and an overall experience that’s consistent with gamers wanting to blast out maximum graphics settings and screen resolutions with high levels of AA to boot.
The NVIDIA-made GeForce GTX 780 reference board is 10.5-inches in length and works with two dual-link DVIs, one DisplayPort connector, and a full-sized HDMI out. Users will need to power this amalgamation with one 6-pin PCIe power connector and one 8-pin PCIe power connector.
THe NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780′s pricing sits at $649 USD and this will be the first card delivered with NVIDIA giving manufacturers the GeForce Experience to include on their install disks. While the GeForce Experience is an entirely optional system to install, and it’s completely free to download from the web either way, this release does mark the first point at which NVIDIA is formally pushing the GeForce Experience as an interface they recommend to anyone and everyone working with GeForce hardware and a love for one-button graphics and performance optimization for games.
While many of us already have tablets like the iPad, the futuristic vision of people walking around with digital notebooks taking notes with a stylus never really came to be. With Sony’s upcoming E-Ink tablet, this could finally be a reality.
Currently being shown in prototype form, the new tablet features a large 13.3″ (A4 Size) drawing surface, and is ridiculously thin. In fact, it’s just 6.8mm thick (almost 30% thinner than a current-gen iPad). The tablet features a 1600×1200 resolution screen, using E-Ink’s new Mobius screen technology. This new tech sandwiches the electrostatic film between plastic layers instead of glass, which cuts down on thickness and weight, and makes the display material flexible. In addition, Sony says the plastic screen will be more durable than glass versions – though I have to wonder how long well it will hold up to stylus pressure over time.
Photo: DigInfo
The display is designed for taking notes, data entry, and creative tasks. While the black and white display isn’t as responsive as LCD screens, it’s definitely faster than other electrostatic screens, with exceptional battery life. In fact, Sony says the tablet can go up to three weeks without a recharge. Another benefit of course is the ease of reading the screen in daylight and workplace lighting.
Sony plans on releasing a commercial version of the tablet at some point later this year.
I’ve often wished that I could combine the speed of my cable Internet connection with my phone’s data connection to form one supercharged slightly above average connection. If you’ve been wishing for the same thing my wish buddy, take a look at Switchboard. It’s a subscription-based cloud service that will let you tap into multiple Internet connections at once.
The Switchboard service is currently being developed by a company called Connectify. The company claims that its servers can spread the packets that you upload or download across multiple Internet connections. All you have to do is link your computer to these connections; the Switchboard software and Connectify’s servers will do the rest.
Switchboard is actually similar to one of Connectify’s other apps called Dispatch. Dispatch can also send data to and from your computer through multiple Internet connections. The upside to Dispatch is that it doesn’t need to pass through a server. That means you only pay once – just for the client software. But Connectify says that Dispatch is only good for applications or processes that use multiple sockets at once, such as web browsing or peer-to-peer connections. Programs that use single sockets like Netflix and Hulu will gain nothing from Dispatch. Also Dispatch doesn’t have a Mac client, whereas Switchboard will have one.
Pledge at least $60 (USD) on Kickstarter to be one of the first to try out Switchboard. But with great speed comes great expense. Not only is Switchboard a subscription service, its plans also have data caps. The limits range from 10GB to 2TB per month depending on your plan. I’m not saying that’s unreasonable, but now I have another wish: I wish that future computers had this functionality baked in.
When Apple started putting high-resolution retina displays into its line of MacBook notebook computers, it spurred a lot of competitors to begin offering high-resolution screens and notebooks for themselves. This is good news for users who prefer high-resolution screens. During CES 2013 back in January, computer maker Acer was showing off a range of prototype notebooks using very high resolution displays.
The screens had a resolution of 2880 x 1620. Asus has now stepped up with a notebook that we haven’t heard about until now called the ZenBook UX51VZ-DB115H. This notebook has a 15.6-inch screen carrying a resolution of 2880 x 1620. Asus didn’t bother offering up an official press release or announcing the product, this new computer packing its high-resolution screen has simply turned up on the German Amazon.com website for pre-order.
The pixel density for the high-resolution screen is 221 ppi. Other hardware available on the machine includes an Intel Core i7-3632QM processor, 8 GB of RAM, a 256 GB or 512 GB SSD, and graphics by a Nvidia GeForce GT 650M GPU. The notebook also features an aluminum chassis, and integrated DVD burner, and an HD resolution camera.
Connectivity includes three USB 3.0 ports and the machine runs Windows 8 for the operating system. The notebook measures 380 x 255 x 19.7 mm and weighs 2.06 kg. Power comes from an internal eight-cell battery with 90Wh of power inside.
The notebook can be pre-ordered starting at €1700 for the version featuring a 256 GB SSD. If you opt for the 512 GB SSD the machine starts at €1999. This machine certainly isn’t cheap, but if you’re looking for a Windows 8 notebook with a very high resolution display this could make for a very nice option.
Google will co-invest in a quantum supercomputer lab near its Mountain View campus, exploring the potential for incredibly-fast processing tipped to run 11,000x faster at some tasks compared to a standard Intel chip. The computer itself will be manufactured by D-Wave and based at NASA‘s Ames Research Center, where the Universities Space Research Association nonprofit will be responsible for its operation; Google and other companies will share access to the “D-Wave Two” hardware, which is rumored to cost around $10m.
It’s not the only time D-Wave has offered quantum technology, though that’s not to say Google’s shared machine will be one of many such installations. D-Wave sold the first quantum supercomputer to Lockheed Martin in 2010, following it up with a commercial version back in 2011.
D-Wave’s system differs considerably from the traditional path to producing a supercomputer. Usually, manufacturers piece together thousands of regular x86 chips and use complex software and hardware to get them all working together on the same problems; more recently, we’ve seen an increase in the role of more flexible GPU-based processing alongside normal CPUs.
In D-Wave’s quantum computing approach, however, a whole new chip architecture is introduced. The company calls them “Qubits” and each chip has up to 512 of them; they’re responsible for simultaneously encoding information at the quantum level as either 0, 1, or both 0 and 1 at the same time. The Qubits are hooked up using Couplers, which push a pair of Qubits to either matching or opposite states, and then programmable magnetic memory is used to guide the path of the processing.
D-Wave Qubit processing:
It’s that duality of state which helps quantum computing to be so fast, D-Wave claims. By examining all of the combinations simultaneously, the final computation comes far quicker than from a traditional processor, making it particularly suited to the sort of mass-crunching Google has a tendency to perform.
“In the D-Wave processor, the qubits can slowly be tuned (annealed) from their superposition state (where they are 0 and 1 at the same time) into to a classical state (where they are either 0 or 1). When this is done in the presence of the programmed memory elements on the processor, the 0 and 1 states that the qubits end up settling into gives the answer to a user-defined problem. All circuitry on the D-Wave processors is made from a material known as a superconductor, which is cooled to 20mK, (near absolute zero) in order for the quantum effects to manifest in the material” D-Wave
Specifically, Google apparently intends to harness quantum computing for advanced machine learning – or at least attempt to – and accurately model the real world. That could be used for more intuitive search, along with combining data from multiple services and making engaging inferences, such as Google is already attempting with Google Now. “We hope it helps researchers construct more efficient, effective models for everything from speech recognition, to web search, to protein folding” a spokesperson told Forbes.
For NASA, meanwhile, the Ames team will use the D-Wave hardware to explore robotics, space mission planning, and air-traffic control. Its potential for crunching data on possible habitable planets elsewhere in the universe will also be examined; the Ames team is also responsible for the Kepler project which is hunting space for exoplanets.
20-percent of the quantum computer’s usage time will also be opened up to research projects, with teams encouraged to submit proposals for what they might do with the unusual processing power. Those selected will get free access to the supercomputer.
Most people are familiar with repetitive stress injuries, such as carpal tunnel syndrome, that can develop over time if you do the same motions with your hands or other body parts repeatedly. Carpal tunnel syndrome can be very painful and can significantly affect your performance at work or at home. If you suffer from carpal tunnel or want to reduce the chances that you will suffer from the condition, there are some computer peripheral options out there that will help.
One of the biggest causes of repetitive motion injuries for computer users is the mouse. Moving your wrist back and forth for hours each day, day in day out can cause pain for many people. One way to treat this problem is with an ergonomic mouse that helps reduce those repetitive stresses. One of the more unique mice available out there promising ergonomics is from a company called Penclic.
Penclic has announced a new ergonomic mouse called the Bluetooth B2 Mouse. It looks rather like someone stabbed a pen into the top of a small mouse designed for portability. The mouse base has a little scroll wheel and the pen has multiple buttons. This particular mouse from Penclic eliminates the need to use a wire or take up a USB port with a wireless adapter by supporting Bluetooth.
If your notebook or desktop computer has integrated Bluetooth, you don’t need anything else to pair this mouse to your computer. The mouse will work with both Mac and Windows machines. The pen-style is designed to provide users with an intuitive user experience and the mouse is designed to work without a mouse pad.
The mouse feels and acts like a pen in your hand and uses a laser sensor to move the cursor with accuracy over most surfaces. The mouse has a total of five buttons and an integrated scroll wheel. The mouse is powered by an internal rechargeable battery good for up to two months of use on a single charge. The wireless range is up to 10 m and the mouse comes in white only. You can purchase the B2 Bluetooth Mouse now.
We’ve already seen a handful of concept videos – somelegit, somehumorous – about the real world use cases of Google Glass. Digital creative agency Playground Inc. illustrates more practical applications of the much hyped augmented reality headset in its own concept video. They also have good news and bad news.
Like any other computer, the functionality of Google Glass is as dependent on its software as it is on its silly-looking hardware. The video below focuses entirely on apps, from simple ones like a map and a barcode scanner to fancier ones like an emergency service hotline and a guitar tutor.
What you saw are just mockups, but the good news is that according to Playground Inc., each and every single one of those apps could be made today. Put another way: what you just saw wasn’t a vision of the future. It’s a window to a parallel present.
The bad news? Playground Inc. says that there are two things that make it virtually impossible to implement these apps – the Glass’ battery and its API. I’d add a third: try filling a street, a room or even just an elevator with people using Google Glass. See how that works out. Seriously though I highly recommend you read Playground Inc.’s blog for more on the agency’s thoughts on Glass.
One of the things that I have yet to purchase – awaiting both product refinement and for the cost to come down – is a proper desktop 3D printer. And while interest has certainly caused numerous 3D printers to be announced and released onto the market, I have still yet to take the plunge. Now, another new 3D printer has been announced which might just be the one I finally break down and buy.
Developed by Pirate3D, the Buccaneer 3D printer is designed to be both easy to use, and affordable. Unlike some more industrial looking 3D printers, the Buccaneer’s modern, minimalistic aluminum and acrylic machine will look great sitting on any desktop – especially alongside Apple’s industrial design. In fact, it looks a whole lot like the original Power Mac G4 Cube.
And while it has a small footprint of just under 10″ square, its printing area will be big enough to produce objects up to 5.9″ x 3.9″ x 4.72″, using fused filament like many other consumer 3D printers (though it will only accept PLA filament at this point, and not ABS). Unlike other 3D printers, the Buccaneer will use a unique central feeding cartridge, which not only looks better, but is designed to make it easier to load filament.
Uploading images to the printer can be done via a wireless network from your mobile device, and the system will include easy-to-use modeling software. It’s unclear if you’ll be able to send images from your PC or Mac, but I can’t imagine they wouldn’t include that capability.
While a release date and final pricing for the Buccaneer hasn’t been announced, it’s makers say it will be priced “under $1,000,” which definitely makes it one of the most competitively priced ready-to-use 3D printers on the market – with the Cubify Cube going for $1299, and the UP! priced at $999.
To sign up for more information on the Buccaneer, head over to the Pirate3D website.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
