Monthly Archives: November 2025

Source: Hacker News

Source: Hacker News

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.

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.

• Valve has no news about Steam Deck 2
• Valve enters the console wars
• Our first look at the Steam Machine, Valve’s ambitious new game console
• The Steam Frame is a surprising new twist on VR
• Valve’s new Steam Controller might be my dream controller
• Here’s the secret Steam Machine that Valve probably used to test headsets.
• Valve’s master plan for Steam Machines is finally coming into focus
• In case you missed it, the Dreamcast-shaped EmuDeck Machine is dead.
• Remember Steam Machines? EmuDeck founder revisits Valve’s TV console idea
• Wait, wait… HDMI and DisplayPort could’ve been a single port THIS WHOLE TIME?
• Farewell to the Steam Link, the best wireless HDMI gadget ever made (update: it’s $2.50)
• Gaming performance on Valve’s SteamOS can’t keep up with Windows
• Valve’s first Steam Machines and controller have been officially released
• Alienware’s Alpha console will bring Steam to your living room this November
• Valve delays Steam Machines and controller until 2015
• Valve shows off updated Steam Controller design
• Valve posts entirety of Steam Dev Days to YouTube, explaining its console and VR strategy
• Steam In-Home Streaming lets you play away from your PC
• Steam Controller ditches the touchscreen for better backwards compatibility
• Alienware’s Steam Machine will arrive in September
• SteamOS now supports Intel and AMD graphics
• Valve reportedly about to release a standard interface for virtual reality controllers
• Valve announces 13 Steam Machine partners, including Alienware
• CyberPowerPC Steam Machine will compete with consoles at $499
• Digital Storm details its first Steam Machine: a hybrid Windows and SteamOS combo for $1,899
• Valve reportedly has 12 Steam Machine partners
• You can download SteamOS right now
• SteamOS will be available to download on December 13th
• Digital Storm’s first Steam Machine will be a $1,469 gaming PC
• Piixl Jetpack straps a SteamOS PC to the back of your TV
• iBuyPower’s Steam Machine offers PC specs for the price of a new Xbox
• Valve says it wouldn’t make ‘Half-Life 3’ a SteamOS exclusive
• We play with the Steam Machine, Valve’s game console of the future
• John Carmack says odds of Steam Machines being successful are ‘a little bit dicey’
• Valve demonstrates how its Steam Controller works with your favorite PC games
• Here’s what’s inside Valve’s first Steam Machine prototypes
• Valve’s Steam Box won’t challenge consoles, says ‘Borderlands’ studio boss
• Valve unveils the Steam Controller
• Valve announces Steam Machines, the Steam Box hardware beta
• SteamOS: could Valve’s game console challenge Windows?
• Valve announces SteamOS, a living-room operating system for games
• Valve’s Steam Box teased for Monday reveal on official countdown page
• Valve’s Steam Box could be revealed next week
• Xi3 opens $999.99 pre-orders for Piston gaming ‘console PC’ (update 2)
• Valve will hand out Steam Box prototypes ‘in the next three to four months’
• Valve’s Gabe Newell addresses layoffs: ‘We aren’t canceling any projects’
• Valve reportedly fires more employees as part of ‘great cleansing’
• Valve fires Jeri Ellsworth, who was developing Steam Box game controllers
• How Valve’s Steam Box will reinvent the game console as you know it
• Gabe Newell says Apple is the Steam Box’s biggest threat
• ‘Steam was broken’ without a route to the living room, says Valve’s Greg Coomer
• Valve confirms it’s building a Linux-based Steam Box that will act as a local gaming server for all your screens
• Exclusive interview: Valve’s Gabe Newell on Steam Box, biometrics, and the future of gaming
• Valve’s Steam Box gets big push at CES as Gabe Newell meets with major hardware partners
• Gabe Newell says Valve will release its own console-like PC for the living room
• Connect the dots: Valve’s Big Picture could be a Linux game console
• Valve says it’s jumping into the computer hardware business
• Valve hiring an engineer to help with ‘hardware design’ in its R&D labs
• Valve: we won’t be releasing a Steam Box console in the immediate future

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.

Related Posts:

Dremel has Left the 3D Printer, Laser Cutter, & Digital Fabrication Business Home Depot Gave an Innovation Award Badge to Makita XGT Tools We’re Much Closer to SawStop-Like Table Saw Regulations – Update

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