Riding a bike is fun, but your quads might not always agree. If you buy an electric one, however, you’ll get the freedom and exercise of a bike with motorized support when you need it. The Vektron D8 from Tern is ideal for those who live a few miles from campus and don’t want their ride to dominate the school day. With eight gears and five levels of assistance, even big hills become easily surmountable. Meanwhile, the low center of gravity (thanks to the motor placement) makes it a good option around town, too.
One charge should be good for between 25 and 55 miles of assisted riding, but once you get above 20MPH, you’ll be picking up the slack (still, that’s pretty fast). The hydraulic disc brakes will safely slow you down, and as the Vektron is foldable, you can tuck it under your desk or easily take it on public transport if you need to. We also like the Vektron’s rear storage rack, which is handy for lugging all of your gear to class.
It’s called the Orion Visual Cortical Prosthesis System, and it’s been developed by Second Sight Medical Products. Like the Argus II before it, the Orion system consists of a small camera mounted on a pair of glasses to capture images, a video-processing unit to convert what the camera sees into electrical impulses the wearer can interpret and an implant that stimulates the user’s brain to create a perceived image. However, unlike the Argus II which used implants that clamped onto the patient’s optic nerves, the Orion’s implant sits directly on the brain itself.
This implant is installed via a small craniotomy in the back of the patient’s head, above the occipital lobe. “They put the electrode array in there between the two halves of the brain against the visual cortex,” Second Sight CEO Will McGuire told Engadget. “Then they basically screw the electronics package into the skull, just next to the craniotomy.” This electronics package contains a small transmission coil that wirelessly receives data and power from the system’s external parts.
The installation process requires an overnight hospital stay followed by a three- to four-week recovery period before the unit is turned on. At that point the user is fitted with glasses, the various components are connected and “really what you’re hoping to get then is for them to start seeing spots of light, phosphenes, from some of the electronics,” McGuire said. “But then there’s quite a bit of work that has to happen.”
Those phosphenes are the result of the implant’s 60 electrode array electrically stimulating the visual cortex and each one needs to be individually tuned to provide the most distinct and discernable spot of light possible. This process requires weeks to months of adjustments to perfect. The next step is establishing a spatial map, ensuring that each electrode is energizing the correct spot on the patient’s brain. This involves having the patient repeatedly tap the specific spot the surface on a tablet when, say, electrode 32 is energized.
“It’s done over and over for each electrode — we really have to train them not to move their eyes, which is the natural response when you see light,” Nik Talbot, Second Sight’s senior director, implant and R&D, explained. “As they move their eyes, the brain is expecting to see something different, where in fact, they’re not going to see anything different because they’re taking in everything through the camera. So they have to be taught to keep their eyes looking forward, the same as the camera.”
Once the mapping is complete and confirmed accurate, that data are fed into an algorithm that “can be used to convert video into stimulation parameters to replicate what the camera is seeing,” he continued. Then it’s a small matter of spending a few more months getting used to the system and learning how to use it most efficiently.
The Orion is undergoing an Early Feasibility Study at UCLA Medical Center and the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston to ensure that the technology is safe for larger trials. Six patients, five men and one woman, were outfitted with the prosthesis in January 2018. Each of them is completely bilaterally blind. 13 months after the implants were installed only one patient reported a serious adverse effect, specifically, a seizure.
“Overall, for that number of subjects at that point, we feel that’s very good and very safe,” McGuire remarked. “And I think the physician community would agree with it.”
However, the road to FDA approval is a long one, despite being part of the agency’s Breakthrough Device Program. “The FDA gives that designation to technologies that are that are meeting a significant unmet clinical need,” Talbot explained. “So there’s no other option out there, whether it be a therapy or whether it be some sort of diagnostic tool.” Being the first and only implantable artificial-vision system is certainly enough to qualify. This designation also provides the research team with more direct, high-priority interactions with the FDA as they seek a path toward approval. McGuire hopes to have an agreement finalized with the FDA in the second half of this year. The team can’t yet disclose when they expect the devices to make it to market, however.
What’s most exciting is where the Second Sight team plans to take this technology next. In addition to packing more and more electrodes into the array to improve the image fidelity, expanding the electrode count to between 150 and 200 channels.
“We think we can make some significant improvements just on the software side,” McGuire said. “And then there’s other technologies that are being developed out there that we’re not necessarily developing but we think to play a key role with artificial divisions. And we’ve got partners who are working on some of these right now.”
For example, the team is looking into is distance filtering. Because the image input comes from a single camera, the patient has no depth perception. “If we had two cameras perhaps we could give them the option of only seeing objects that are within 10 feet or objects that are greater than 10 feet,” Talbot said. “What that would do would clear up the image for them. Right now, they’re picking up things that are near and far. That can distort what they’re seeing and make it more difficult to interpret.”
The team is also investigating face- and object-recognition features. Because the image that the user sees is still decidedly low-fidelity, incorporating these technologies would enable the system to assist its wearer beyond stimulating their brain. “They could have this object-recognition software tell them in their ear, iPhone or coffee cup” when the item is in the camera’s field of view, McGuire said.
Then there’s the Predator vision. Second Sight is looking into integrating a thermal camera, which would enable the user to see in infrared, into its system. “It would be good for them to have that as kind of a mode perhaps, in which they could switch to thermal imaging,” McGuire said. “And they can identify where people are in the room, day or night, more easily. They could maybe identify the hot part of a stove or cup of coffee, things like that.”
We’re still years away from having the technology behind Geordi LaForge’s visor, but enabling the visually impaired to hunt an elite team of commandos through the South American rainforest is a pretty solid tradeoff.
For businesses, the first space below the search bar is some of the world’s most desirable real estate. Search for “Nissan repair,” and the first entry is a link to Nissan’s official site, paid for by Nissan itself. Do the same for “iPhone repair,” “cracked phone display” or “broken Pixel” and no such ad appears, you just get the maps layout and organic search results.
The reason why is either the first blow in a proxy war over the right to repair, or the unintended result of a heavy-handed attempt to tackle fraud. A year after the change was implemented, however, the repair-store community is demanding answers — something Google promised but has yet to deliver on.
The majority of people using Google will click the first link shown to them, and that spot is available to rent, for a price. Unfortunately, this combination of trust and commerce means that top spot on Google is an easy target for fraudsters. Tech support scams will direct unwitting users to official-looking websites that dupe people into downloading malware.
On August 31st, 2018, The Wall Street Journal published an exposé into these scams and how they operate. On the same day, Google’s David Graff published a response outlining how the company would deal with the problem. The director of Global Product Policy said that Google had seen a “rise in misleading ad experiences, stemming from third-party technical support providers.”
As a consequence, Google began restricting ads in the relevant categories, namely for tech support. The search giant updated its policies to reflect this, blocking ads related to “third-party consumer technical support.” Below it, a non-exhaustive list of examples: “Technical support for troubleshooting, security, virus removal, internet connectivity, online accounts (for example, password resets or login support), or software installation.”
In the months that followed, however, hardware repair businesses found their ads blocked by Google. In May 2019, xiRepair owner Jonathan Strange wrote that, despite being approved to use Apple trademarks in its ads, Google refused the placement. Strange believes that Google may have started with just software keywords and is now targeting phrases like ‘phone repair.’
But Google has never made it clear that it is now targeting ads for hardware repair. And its silence has angered business owners and those in the wider right-to-repair movement, who feel Google is undermining their efforts. Late last month, repair website iFixit published an open letter to the FTC, saying that Google’s decision to block ad placements “deserves scrutiny.” Later on, the company added that businesses that take “mail-in repairs” are “out of luck.”
In a statement to Engadget, the FTC said it could not speak about allegations made against specific companies. It doesn’t appear that Google would be liable for regulatory scrutiny in the near future, however. “It’s very unlikely that Google is using its Android power to gain a monopoly in hardware,” says antitrust lawyer Joel Mitnick; “it would be a difficult case to pursue.” Essentially, because Google’s own Pixel hardware business is so small, it isn’t subject to monopoly rules.
“It’s easy to mistake willful ignorance for malice,” said iFixit Repair Advocate Kevin Purdy in an interview with Engadget, “and in this case, frustratingly, it’s that Google is just deaf to the complaints of repair shops.” He feels the issue is one where Google clumsily implemented a ban before thinking it through. Purdy also feels that Google stands to lose, since it will encourage repair companies to game the algorithm, something Google tells people not to do.
One issue is that Google isn’t explaining or administering its policies in a manner that outsiders can understand. Google’s policy on the use of trademarked words explicitly says that “third parties may properly use trademarks in certain circumstances” — including (emphasis ours) “by resellers to describe products.” But Phone Ninja in Australia was rejected on the basis that it used “brand-name repair terms from our website,” according to owner Bradley Penniment.
“Unfortunately, repairs are 95 percent of our revenue,” added Penniment, saying that removing key search terms would be inadvisable. The owner believes that the ads crackdown is having a significant detriment on his business, with revenues falling by a fifth compared to last year. Unless phones have gotten significantly more sturdy, or the ad crackdown is hurting people. And this experience is not unique to Phone Ninja: Many others are complaining of falling revenues.
One potential consequence is users with damaged hardware can only use official repair channels. That may cause people to get inadequate support and force them to spend more for similar service. A CBC investigation from 2018 found that Apple Store support had a track record of overcharging for minor work, or in one example, saying that repair work would cost $1,200. A third-party store, however, found that the real issue was a loose wire and fixed it for just $75 — saving the customer money and keeping a laptop out of the trash.
The Repair Association, a group that represents more than 60 technology and civil-liberties bodies, including the EFF, polled store owners. In a survey, with people who self-reported as the owners of a repair store, a majority said that they had been rejected for offering “Third-party consumer technical support.” In rejection emails, shared with Engadget, Google does not offer an explanation, just that phrase and a link to the relevant section of its policy.
“There is no alternative to Google,” writes one respondent, noting that they are struggling to find other places to advertise. Others bemoan the slowdown in business that the crackdown has caused, while many others are still chasing a verification system promised by Google.
“In the coming months,” wrote David Graff in his response to the WSJ’s August 31st exposé, “we will roll out a verification program to ensure that only legitimate providers of third-party tech support can use our platform to reach consumers.” Close to a year later and no verification system has been made available, despite the clamor from repair stores looking to have their ads reactivated.
Google already has experience running a similar kind of verification program. Locksmiths and garage door companies in the US can only run ads on Google if they apply, demonstrating compliance with the law and up-to-date paperwork. Google says that this process takes two weeks to complete — so what is the issue with phone repair?
It could be that there are no globally-recognized repair industry bodies that could offer legitimate certification. Since the repair industry mostly comprises small, independent firms, there’s little lobbying power or clout to create a universal standard. Only some states, like California, offer registration. Google may be unable (or unwilling) to make the added effort to create one for such a small business community. The fact the company hasn’t communicated about this since August 31st 2018 is frustrating to the companies that are struggling.
“The way it was done was dishonest,” says Phone Ninja’s Penniment, “especially when you consider that it is now 12 months since David Graff announced that a verification system would be rolled out ‘in the coming months.'” At the time of publication, Google was unable to provide comment and could not make relevant executives, such as David Graff, available for interview.
At the same time, Google says it is “creating products with people and the planet in mind,” and this week published new hardware sustainability commitments. It pledged that its first-party devices would ship in a carbon-neutral way by 2020, and that 100 percent of its devices would include recycled materials by 2022. Google neglected to mention ways it wants to make those same devices more repairable. Its hardware division isn’t tied to search, but they remain two parts of the same company.
Google isn’t the only one offering mixed messages. On Apple’s environment page, the company boasts that its products are “built to last as long as humanly possible.” But Apple and other companies have sought to block attempts by individuals to repair their devices. Earlier this year, Motherboard uncovered records showing that Apple, Verizon and Lexmark bankrolled a campaign to kill a right-to-repair law in New York.
According to Justin Ashford from the YouTube channel The Art of Repair, Apple will not offer battery health warnings for third-party repairs. iFixit subsequently confirmed that third-parties will not be able to properly replace a broken iPhone battery, only those approved by Apple itself. It notes that this is the equivalent of a check-oil light that only a Ford dealership can reset, even if you change the oil yourself.”
Convenience aside, if companies can gatekeep who gets to repair their devices, or increase the price to an unsustainable level, the result will be more e-waste. More junk that harms both the people who have to deal with it and our planet as a whole.
Image Credits: Vasily Pindyurin via Getty Images (iPhone battery), volkan.basar via Getty Images (Google)
There are other wireless charging pads available, of course. Still, it’s interesting to see a big name such as Mophie make one when Apple couldn’t, and then for Apple to sell the Mophie devices through its website and stores.
Mophie revealed a pair of multi-device pads Friday, each of which provide 7.5W of charging output. The dual version ($99.95) allows you to boost the battery charge on a Qi-enabled iPhone and AirPods at the same time, with a USB-A port included to let you charge another device via a cable.
The 3-in-1 model ($139.95) adds an Apple Watch stand, through which you can charge your smartwatch at the same time as your phone and AirPods, with a dedicated cavity for the latter. Mophie suggests the Watch stand is at an ideal angle for Nightstand Mode.
The company claims the pads are optimized for Apple devices. The pads aren’t quite as flexible as Apple wanted AirPower to be, though. It only lets you charge one each of iPhone, AirPods and Apple Watch simultaneously, though AirPower was to allow you to top up any combination of the devices. Nor does it seem you’ll be able to view the charge level for each device from your phone, a feature AirPower was to offer.
Along with the pads, Mophie revealed a pair of USB-C car chargers that have 18W of output. They include a model with a single port ($24.95) and one with an extra USB-A port, which provides 12W of output ($29.95).
Apple is selling all four devices through its website now. They’ll be available in some Apple stores and from Mophie’s website next week.
But underneath all of this technology is the potential risk to your privacy. In just the past few months, news reports have uncovered a series of alarmingrevelations that companies like Amazon, Google and even Apple have been listening in on conversations without permission. The data that they collect are also often stored indefinitely unless you explicitly delete it or turn off the recording ability. The companies have since responded that the listening of information only occurs to a small percentage of its customers and that the data are anonymized. While that may be true, it’s disconcerting that none of this is transparent, and that the customer is rarely in complete control of their data.
An easy way to avoid this, of course, is to not partake in this technology at all. But a company based in Lawrence, Kansas, is working on an alternative solution: a virtual assistant aimed at preserving privacy and that’s also open source. It’s called Mycroft, and though you may not have heard of it, the company’s been around since 2015.
“At the time, the only real voice technology that was in broad production was Siri,” said Mycroft CEO and founder Joshua Montgomery to Engadget. Amazon had announced Alexa in November of 2014, but it was still in private beta when the idea for Mycroft came about. “We thought, you know, hey, this is the type of technology that could be really groundbreaking in the future. And scarcely a year later [in 2016], Amazon launched their Super Bowl ad with Alec Baldwin, and then Google got in on the game, and suddenly it’s the fastest-growing segment of the technology market.”
Montgomery is an aerospace engineer and USAF veteran with more than a passing interest in technology. In 2005, he started a small internet service provider based out of Lawrence called Wicked Broadband, which ended up being one of the few small ISPs in the country offering gigabit fiber, way before Google got on board. At the same time, he and a group of friends wanted a space to build fun things. For example, back in 2005, he collaborated on something called the Fox Blocker, a device that, when screwed into your TV, would block Fox News from showing up (Engadget wrote about it back in 2005). “It was a lot of fun,” he laughed.
With the money and free time that Wicked afforded him, he helped create the Lawrence Center for Entrepreneurship, a co-working space that doubled as a place for makers, complete with laser cutters and 3D printers. “And you know, working there, we wanted to do something that was super-creative,” said Montgomery. “One of the ways we thought would be really cool would be to add voice. I wanted to make a place like Iron Man’s lab, with Jarvis.”
Thus, the idea for Mycroft was born. The team even came up with a smart speaker reference device called the Mark I and put it on Kickstarter in August of 2015, just three months after Amazon debuted the very first Echo to the public. It funded, but it really was mostly intended for developers and makers like themselves.
And then the aforementioned Amazon ad happened. “We were just kind of buoyed along by the wave.” It helped add legitimacy to their idea, but it was also incredibly daunting.
The Mark II showing recipe conversions
“When I originally went out and started talking to people to raise money, the feedback was that nobody’s ever going to want one of these,” Montgomery said. “They were saying, ‘It seems a little crazy, and it’s always listening, which is super-creepy.’ And then Amazon did their ad and overnight, the reaction changed. It became ‘Oh, Amazon’s in that space, you’re never going to have enough momentum to conquer it.'” The problems in fundraising went from selling a crazy product that nobody wanted to selling a non-crazy product that was going to get overwhelmed by the behemoth that is Amazon.
Still, Mycroft survived and has raised about $5 million from investors and the community. That’s a far cry from the billions that Amazon and Google make, of course, but for a small seven-person team based in Kansas, that’s enough to keep the project going.
Just like Alexa and Google’s Assistant, Montgomery describes Mycroft as a platform. Even though the company has made the aforementioned Mark I speaker, around 90 percent of Mycroft’s user base use it on their own devices, be it a Raspberry Pi or their own desktops or laptops. As of this writing, Montgomery says there are around 34,000 Mycroft users.
On top of that, there are several companies that have chosen to work with Mycroft because they didn’t want to be beholden to Amazon or Google. Mycroft has received investment from Jaguar Land Rover, for example, and has implemented the Mycroft platform in an F-Type sports car as a test. A tiny personal robot from Spain called the Q.bo One uses Mycroft, and Chatterbox, a voice AI designed to teach children to code, also uses Mycroft as its platform. Montgomery says he’s received a lot of attention from players in the hospitality industry, such as cruise ships and hotels, because there’s a strong incentive to preserve the privacy of guests.
The Q.bo One is an open-source robot that uses Mycroft AI
“At the end of the day, our goal is the same as Google and Amazon, and it’s to provide a voice experience so natural that you can’t tell you’re talking to a computer,” he said. “The difference is that we’re building an open platform, and we want to make it available to everyone as opposed to locking it up in a vault somewhere and then charging for access. And we’re aiming at preserving privacy.”
One way Mycroft protects users’ privacy is ensuring that all of the data submitted is entirely opt-in. “Around 15 percent of our community contributes their data to improve the technology. For the remaining 85 percent, we don’t keep that data at all. It just disappears.” Mycroft also offers the right to be forgotten, which means that even if you did submit your data in the past, you can choose to delete all of it. “There is absolutely no danger of somebody listening in to your private conversations if you don’t want it to happen,” he said.
The privacy aspect of these technologies is a bigger issue than most people realize, Montgomery said. “The path that we’re setting ourselves on, in terms of being willing to give up all privacy to these companies in exchange for, you know, being able to get the weather on-demand or set a timer is really alarming.”
“The level of integration that voice assistants will eventually have on our day-to-day lives is going to be equivalent to the level of integration that smartphones have on our lives today. And so giving these companies access to everything we say and everything we do and allowing them to take that and manipulate us and monetize us is something really scary.”
An updated design of the Mycroft Mark II.
Of course, as such a small company, Mycroft has run into problems along the way that are probably relatively minor for companies like Amazon and Google. For example, with its work with Jaguar, it learned that it needed to support 40 languages instead of just English. It had to collaborate with Mozilla and the larger open-source community for internationalization efforts, which unfortunately takes a lot of time.
“For companies like Amazon and Google, they’re able to acquire pillar technologies as complete companies that were already in business for decades,” Montgomery said. “For us, we have to build it from the ground up.”
Another issue is that in order to build machine-learning, you have to have a bunch of data, and with only a 15 percent contribution from the community, that, again, takes a lot of time. Yet, Montgomery said that Precise, its wake-word spotter — the tech used to detect voice — is on par with Amazon and Google.
That’s not to say it’s perfect. “Just like technologies from those companies, the data set is biased toward white men because it’s white guys that contributed all the data,” he said. That’s even more so with the Mycroft community, as Google and Amazon by default have larger and therefore more diverse user bases to cull from. “We’re actively seeking to diversify the data set and make it better for everybody.” More recently, Mycroft has been working to build a local machine-learning tool that allows people to directly train their wake word on-device itself, which should help with the potential issue of the device not recognizing different voices.
As of right now and for the foreseeable future, Montgomery said that Mycroft will be focused on getting the best user experience possible, especially on core functions like alarms, timers and getting the news and weather. It’s also concentrating its efforts on the production of the second-gen of its smart speaker, the Mark II, to Kickstarter backers. But while the Mark II is a much more consumer-friendly version of the hardware, Montgomery admits that the Mycroft platform is not quite consumer-ready just yet.
Still, he’s optimistic that they can get it done. “Using our approach and to be financially successful is important. We’re continuing to build trust with the community, and when more of those people contribute data, we can continue to improve.”
“After many (many) requests to purchase a Racer3, we made sure to answer the demand with the ‘Street Version’ of our next-generation drone,” the project’s description reads. The league promises a “true, field-ready version of the DRL Racer4 drone” with the same power configuration. However, its electronics system will be redesigned to support off-the-shelf and plug-and-play parts, so you can easily find components and fix it if it breaks.
The bad news is that the league can only offer shipping within the US at the moment, though it may open orders to other regions if there’s enough demand. (You’ll have to take this survey to let the league know.) If you are in the US, you’ll have to pledge $599 to get a DRL Racer4 Street drone as a reward.
While Foot Locker is still selling apparel and sneakers from other sportswear brands at its new location, including Adidas and Puma, the partnership with Nike does make gear from The Swoosh stand out. For instance, throughout the store, you’ll see signs next to Nike products that tell you to download the NikePlus app to “scan and learn.” That’ll let you use the app to scan barcodes on items and then, within seconds, view available sizes and colors at this Foot Locker store. Additionally, you can use the Nike app to reserve items directly from the company and pick them up at the Foot Locker.
But that’s not it. There’s also Nike’s Unlock Box, a vending machine that lets you scan a QR code attached to your Nike+ profile and get free swag every few weeks. When I went to the new Washington Heights Foot Locker, a two-level, 10,000-square-feet space, the Unlock Box had Air Jordan pins and Nike sunglasses and USB power packs — though what’s in the vending machine will change from time to time. It’s the same concept Nike’s shown off at a few of its other stores, intended to drive people back regularly into its store, of course.
Perhaps the biggest highlight of the first Nike-powered Foot Locker, however, is the ShoeCase (pictured in the lede image). Like the Unlock Box, you’ll have to scan your NikePlus code to use it, but this one will enter you into a real-life, real-time raffle that can give you the chance to buy limited-edition sneakers. For those of you who are into kicks, it’s basically the physical version of Nike’s The Draw, and what Nike sells through it will refresh regularly. So one day it might be a pair of Air Max, another day Air Jordans will be displayed on Nike’s ShoeCase. Once you scan your NikePlus pass, the machine rotates the shoe and in few seconds prints out a ticket to let you know if you won and can buy the sneaker.
“The Tolkien estate will insist that the main shape of the Second Age is not altered,” Tolkien scholar and series supervisor Tom Shippey told the German Tolkien Society. During this period, Sauron tries to reform Middle-earth for the better but falls into evil, becoming a powerful and oppressive ruler. “Sauron invades Eriador, is forced back by a Númenorean expedition, returns to Númenor. There he corrupts the Númenoreans and seduces them to break the ban of the Valar. All this, the course of history, must remain the same.”
Shippey points out that although the broad strokes of the history of the Second Age are established, there are plenty of unanswered questions about the events of the period, such as what Sauron did after the fall of Morgoth. Amazon can take creative license to create its own story within this history, as long as it doesn’t contradict Tolkien’s writings.
The Tolkien estate maintains power of veto over any content in the show, Shippey says, and is willing to nix anything that doesn’t fit with Tolkien’s vision. The First Age and the Third Age of Middle-earth (in which the books are set) are both “off-limits” to the TV show, so don’t expect to see hobbits, Gondorians or many familiar faces in the new adaptation.
Shippey also reports that Amazon hopes to premiere the series in 2021, but it is still early in the production cycle so this date could be pushed back.
All right, so calling these “musical instruments” isn’t particularly helpful. They are instruments in that they can be used to make music in the broadest sense of the word. A Day That Will Never Happen Again is basically a drum machine. Here You Are, You Are Here is a synthesizer. And Everything You Love Will One Day Be Taken From You is a sampler… sort of. But their interfaces are highly unusual, to say the least. And they’re designed, quite specifically, to prevent you from re-creating or repeating things.
There are no keyboards or fretboards. You can’t practice scales until you master them. Instead, they’re plywood boxes with a few knobs or buttons, and a small computer like the Raspberry Pi inside. Each one operates according to what Seznec described to me as a “very specific, very impractical rule” that is then explored to its most extreme.
For example Volume 1: A Day That Will Never Happen Again basically looks like a book made of plywood, with four knobs and a button on the front. Inside is a Raspberry Pi and a Teensy microcontroller. What it does is simple (in theory): Every day it plays a new and unique rhythm. You’ll never be able to replicate the pattern it played August 4, 2019, because that day is gone and with it the specific set of variables that created it.
But getting to a place where the machine is capable of creating something that can’t be re-created requires a lot of moving parts. Inside the instrument is a library of 123 samples collected by Seznec on a single day: December 15, 2018. And every day a unique seven-digit number derived from the year and date is used to seed a random number generator. The results then determine which 10 of those samples get used, generates a pattern for each one and sets the controls for the “other” knob (which we’ll get to in a bit).
Now the knobs on the front allow you to tweak things, but they really only give you the illusion of control. Most of the major decisions have already been made for you. The rate knob allows you to change the speed at which the pattern plays back. The program Seznec built using Pure Data (the same language used to create patches for Critter & Guitari’s Organelle) can scale to 3,000 BPM from 60. Though, as he’s quick to tell me, “it’s a good illustration of how BPM is a relative measure more than a scientific one. … When you get faster, our ears start to group those beats together — so rather than feeling like it is playing at 1,000bpm […] it actually can feel more like 16th notes playing at 250 BPM. … The faster it gets the more pronounced this effect becomes, though once it gets really fast the samples certainly start to all blend together and create more of a texture than a rhythm.”
The inside of Volume 1: A Day That Will Never Happen Again
The length knob changes the duration of the samples. The original recording might be several seconds of keys jangling. But if you turn the knob all the way down it becomes short, clipped and barely identifiable. Meanwhile, the steps knob changes the number of steps in the pattern from one all the way up to 50. All of these parameters interact and can dramatically change the sound of the daily rhythm pattern, but the core ingredients remain unchanged.
And Seznec isn’t done throwing curveballs yet. The fourth knob on the front is labeled “other”; it controls, well, other parameters. As he explains, “it will be a different set of parameters each day.” For instance, it could be a pitch shifter or a probability setting. Each of those is mapped to random slopes so the knob doesn’t even control all those parameters in the same way. In short, try as you might to recapture a moment with A Day That Will Never Happen Again, “it will not do what you want it to do.”
Creating obstacles like this for a user is something that Seznec frequently explores. And is informed in part by his time spent running a small indie-game studio, and game design is, as he says, “in a lot of ways about making stuff harder for people.”
In Volume 2: Here You Are, You Are Here (which was revealed yesterday) the obstacle is, unsurprisingly, location. It uses a Bela board (similar to BeagleBone but with a focus on audio processing) and GPS to power a granular synthesizer and an incredibly powerful metaphor. Granular synthesis works by breaking apart recorded sounds into tiny grains and then recombining them in various ways to create your synth tone. In this case, the source material is a recording of Seznec’s son playing piano in their home in Scotland — a country and home he’s preparing to leave.
All of the synth’s parameters are controlled by the GPS. The only thing controlled by the knobs on the front are volume and pitch. Everything else, from the attack and release, grain size, panning, number of grains playing, etc., is determined by the instrument’s physical location — to a resolution of just a few feet. As Seznec told me, the instrument is “about leaving this place I’ve lived in for 13 years, and also about the sounds that I’m not going to hear. … We only remember these tiny little snippets of days … it becomes about that intersection of memory and place. There are grains of sound, like literally actually grains of that recording, that I will never hear, because I won’t go to the right place to hear them. In the same way, that time that I recorded it and that day I recorded it and that moment, I don’t actually remember it all. There are grains of that memory that are gone as well, and I’m not getting those back.”
Google isn’t going to plan your next vacation, but, instead, it’s offering flight-price guarantees — with some conditions. For a limited time, when it tells you prices won’t drop on a trip you book through Google Flights, it’ll refund the difference if it’s wrong and the cost does get lower before you take off. Specifically, certain trips from the US booked between August 13th and September 2nd.
It’s been a few days since Cloudflare stopped providing security protections to 8Chan, which led to the notorious site going offline. While 8Chan’s leaders are still trying unsuccessfully to bring the site back, some of its users have found a way to reach it through some rather unusual and potentially problematic methods. The Daily Beast has reported on how some users are accessing the site via ZeroNet, a decentralized, peer-to-peer network for hosting content, similar to BitTorrent. But due to how this network works, some users are getting worried that they’re hosting child pornography.
A site can be published to ZeroNet by an individual user, but those who then view it become “seeders,” just as BitTorrent users can seed parts of files shared over the network. By default, if you access the site, you download up to 10MB of data from it to share through ZeroNet, though users can choose to download and seed more if they’re so inclined. You’ll need to actually view that content before it gets downloaded and shared from your computer… so it’s entirely possible to view 8Chan and just not look at child porn. But given the chaos that is 8Chan, you really are taking a bit of a risk viewing the site at all over ZeroNet.
Following its launch in Japan, VAIO’s SX12 offers just about every conceivable I/O you could ever want and is now out in the US. Its starting price of $1,119 means this isn’t a cheap deal, but how could it be when such a diminutive 12-inch model somehow crams in three USB-A ports, one USB-C port, an HDMI port, a full-sized SD card slot, a headphone/mic port, an Ethernet port and even a VGA port — 00’s style.
Apple really, really doesn’t want you replacing your own iPhone battery. It has rolled out new software that detects if you have installed a battery that lacks an official authentication key and displays a warning about the battery’s health. The issue, first spotted by iFixit, affects the iPhone XR, XS and XS Max devices running iOS 12 and the iOS 13 beta. If you replace your own iPhone battery or get it replaced by an unauthorized repair shop, when you head to the battery settings page, you’ll see a message claiming that the battery isn’t “genuine”.
Apple had appeared to be easing up on its campaign against third-party battery swaps, as it reversed its policy against repairing iPhones with replaced batteries earlier this year. However, the company has introduced similar software limitations in the past to prevent users from repairing other Apple products such as MacBook Pros.
Lab Zero and 505 Games have announced that their action RPG Indivisible will reach PC, the PS4 and Xbox One on October 8th. The Switch version is also “coming soon,” the team added. Whichever version you play, you’ll get the same meticulously animated visuals and elaborate backgrounds, plus a fast-paced action RPG mechanic that involves absorbing “Incarnations” that can fight alongside you.
But wait, there’s more…
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