Source: Hacker News
Source: Hacker News
Source: The Verge - All Posts
In 2012, The Verge broke the news that Valve was making a game console. Gabe Newell himself dished on the company’s grand plans. By 2015, the “Steam Machines” had utterly flopped. But Valve never stopped quietly working on the idea. The Steam Deck handheld became the seed for a grand reboot of Valve’s console and headset ambitions. And now, Steam Machines are back.
@verge Hello from Valve headquarters! We just saw the Steam Machine, the PC game console that’s not much bigger than a box of Kleenex. It’s coming alongside the sequel to the Steam Controller, the most customizable gamepad ever made. It’s like a Steam Deck for your TV with far more performance — enough to replace an Xbox or PlayStation in your living room, perhaps? But might be priced more like a PC… #valve #steammachine #steamcontroller #gaming #gametok
♬ original sound – The Verge – The Verge
The new Steam Machine is for your TV, the Steam Controller is for your hands, and the Steam Frame is for your face— and they might just be the start. The company hinted there might be more SteamOS hardware later on.
We’re tracking Valve’s rebooted hardware plans in this Verge StoryStream. And if you want to know how we got here, it also contains our original Steam Machine coverage — going back over a decade.
Source: ToolGuyd
It seems that Bantam Tools, owned by Bre Pettis of MakerBot fame, no longer makes or sells desktop CNC milling machines.
Formerly called the Other Machine Co, Bantam Tools launched a revised version of the Othermill in 2020.
See: New Bantam Tools Desktop CNC Milling Machine is Aimed at Prototypers
But now, their metal-machining and PCB-prototyping CNC machine business seems to have disappeared.
Bantam’s website now exclusively features art machines, stemming from their acquisition of Evil Mad Scientist nearly 2 years ago.
The company, on their website, says “we offer the widest array of art machines.” Prices start at $949 and – from what I can see – go up to $9,999.
They also have a special edition “EggBot” that can be used to decorate Christmas ornaments. That machine is priced at $699.
Bantam’s CNC plotters look impressive at the high end, and at least polished at the entry price level
I can’t help but wonder what happened here.
Hopefully this pivot will help Bantam eventually return to CNC router, milling, and cutting technologies.
Bre Pettis sold MakerBot to Stratasys in 2013 and acquired the Other Machine Co in 2017. Hopefully he still has a couple of tricks up his sleeve.
Source: Hack a Day
With batteries being such an integral part of smartphones, it’s little wonder that extending the period between charging and battery replacement has led to many theories and outright myths about what may affect the lifespan of these lithium-ion batteries. To bust some of them, [HTX Studio] over on YouTube has spent the past two years torturing both themselves and a myriad of both iOS and Android phones to tease out some real-life data.
After a few false starts with smaller experiments, they settled on an experimental setup involving 40 phones to investigate two claims: first, whether fast charging is worse than slow charging, and second, whether limiting charging to 80% of a battery’s capacity will increase its lifespan. This latter group effectively uses only 50% of the capacity, by discharging down to 30% before recharging. A single control phone was left alone without forced charge-discharge cycles.
After 500 charge cycles and 167 days, these three groups (fast, slow, 50%) were examined for remaining battery capacity. As one can see in the above graphic for the Android group and the similar one for iOS in the video, the results are basically what you expect. Li-ion batteries age over time (‘calendar aging’), with temperature and state-of-charge (SoC) affecting the speed of this aging process, as can be seen in the SoC graph from an earlier article that we featured on built-in batteries.
It seems that keeping the battery as cool as possible and the SoC as low as possible, along with the number of charge-discharge cycles, will extend its lifespan, but Li-ion batteries are doomed to a very finite lifespan on account of their basic chemistry. This makes these smartphone charging myths both true, but less relevant than one might assume, as over the lifespan of something like a smartphone, it won’t make a massive difference.
Source: OSNews
For those of us unaware – unlikely on OSNews, but still – for a hot minute in the second half of the ’90s, Apple licensed its Mac OS to OEMs, resulting in officially sanctioned Mac clones from a variety of companies. While intended to grow the Mac’s market share, what ended up happening instead is that the clone makers outcompeted Apple on performance, price, and features, with clones offering several features and capabilities before Apple did – for far lower prices. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he killed the clone program almost instantly.
The rather abrupt end of the clone program means there’s a number of variants of the Mac OS that never made their way into the market, most notable variants intended for the Common Reference Hardware Platform, or CHRP, a standard defined by IBM and Apple for PowerPC-based PCs. Thanks to the popular classic Mac YouTuber Mac84, we now have a few of these releases out in the wild.
These CDs contain release candidates for Mac OS 7.6 and Mac OS 8 for CHRP (Common Hardware Reference Platform) systems. They were created to support CHRP computers, but were never released, likely due to Steve Jobs returning to Apple in September 1997 and eliminating the Mac Clone program and any CHRP efforts.
↫ Mac OS 7.6/8 CHRP releases page
Mac84 has an accompanying video diving into more detail about these individual releases by booting and running them in an emulator, so we can get a better idea of what they contain.
While most clone makers only got access to Mac OS 7.x, some of them did, in fact, gain access to Mac OS 8, namely UMAX and Power Computing (the latter of which was acquired by Apple). It’s not the clone nature of these releases that make them special, but the fact they’re CHRP releases is. This reference platform was a failure in the market, and only a few of IBM’s own machines and some of Motorola’s PowerStack machines properly supported it. Apple, meanwhile, only aid minor lip service to CHRP in its New World Power Macintosch machines.
Source: Hacker News
Source: Hacker News
Source: Hacker News
Source: Ars Technica
Flock Safety—the surveillance company behind the country’s largest network of automated license plate readers (ALPRs)—currently faces attacks on multiple fronts seeking to tear down the invasive and error-prone cameras across the US.
This week, two lawmakers, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), called for a federal investigation, alleging that Flock has been “negligently handling Americans’ personal data” by failing to use cybersecurity best practices. The month prior, Wyden wrote a letter to Flock CEO Garrett Langley, alleging that Flock’s security failures mean that “abuse of Flock cameras is inevitable” and that they threaten to expose billions of people’s harvested data should a catastrophic breach occur.
“In my view, local elected officials can best protect their constituents from the inevitable abuses of Flock cameras by removing Flock from their communities,” Wyden wrote.
