Nerdly News Curated from Interesting Sites
In the avalanche of news that was Google’s Pixel 2 event last month, the company kind of glossed over the Fast Pair feature. Understandably so — it had a lot to get through at the event. And besides, it was far from the coolest thing about the company’s new Pixel Buds headphones (that title goes to the Babelfish-esque real-time translation feature). The feature is similar to… Read More
Jonathan Simmonds, an MD in Boston, MA, created these Map Anatomy illustrations that represent a detailed, functional diagram of the human head’s anatomy in the style of a London tubemap; you can buy downloads and posters from his Etsy store, but act quickly, because Transport for London are notorious, humourless assholes about this kind of thing! (via Reddit)
Honda has been manufacturing the Super Cub 50 and 110 since since 1958. Over 100 million have been produced. On November 10, they’ll release a “classic” model that hearkens back to its original design introduced 60 years ago. Shown here, the 2018 Honda Super Cub in Pearl Shining Yellow color.
From New Atlas:
If there is one motorized vehicle that deserves to be termed as iconic, that has to be Honda’s Super Cub. The small, rugged two-wheeler has been constantly in production since 1958, with numerous variants and offsprings still pouring out from 16 Honda factories in 15 countries.
Among these, the basic Super Cub 50 and 110 are still in production in China and, as Honda has just announced, a new dedicated production line has been set-up at the Kumamoto factory in Japan. These two direct descendants of the original 1958 model have received a well-deserved revamp, ahead of delivery to Japanese dealerships on November 10.
The plastic costumes have undergone a discrete redesign, while the application of LED lights brings about some energy-saving freshness. The four-stroke single-cylinder engine has also benefited from a gentle touch of modern engineering and metallurgy, now employing tougher and lower-friction pistons and cylinders, as well as a host of present-day tidbits, like needle bearings, new oil filter, a dipstick to measure oil level etc.
Hardware teardowns are awesome when guided by experts. One of our favorites over the years has been [Mike Harrison], who has conquered teardowns of some incredibly rare and exquisitely engineered gear, sharing the adventure on his YouTube channel: mikeselectricstuff. Now he’s putting on a workshop to walk through some of the techniques he uses when looking at equipment for the first time.
[Mike] will be in Pasadena a few days early for the Hackaday Superconference and floated the idea of hosting a workshop. We ordered up some interesting gear which he hasn’t had a chance to look at yet. A …read more
Google is trying to make video conferencing less awful by designing its own speaker-mic and other hardware that works with Google Calendar. Its bundled together a touchscreen controller, a speaker-mic, a camera, and an Asus Chromebox that work in sync to let offices coordinate meetings.
The 10.1-inch touchscreen controller lets you join events scheduled on Google Calendar and look up meeting details. You can also pin or mute team members, control the camera, and add people to a call. The controller can be connected to a laptop via an HDMI cable and has a 1280 x 800 display.
Google designed the speaker-mic to reduce echo and background noise. The speaker has a 360-degree pickup with four cardioid mics and a 250-square-foot range. For…
Razer will likely announce its first smartphone tomorrow, November 1st, but last-minute leaks keep coming. Phandroid spotted that UK phone dealer 3G leaked the phone’s specs early, and apparently, the device will feature a display with a relatively unprecedented 120Hz refresh rate. This is the same rate as the iPad Pro 10.5, which people loved, and a new phone from Sharp called the Aquos R Compact, which will be released in December in Japan. A high refresh rate is valuable for gaming and reducing lag, so it makes sense that Razer would prioritize the display.
The spec listing also suggests the phone will include support for Dolby Atmos sound through front-facing stereo speakers and amplifiers certified by THX. Again, this will likely…
Intels new Optane SSDs are finally coming to regular PCs with the Optane SSD 900P. Theyre superfast, with Intel claiming sequential read speeds up to 2,500 MB/s and sequential write speeds at up to 2,000 MB/s, via ZDNet.
If you havent been keeping up with all the latest and greatest in solid-state hard drive technology, Optane is Intels branding for products that use the companys 3D XPoint memory, which it claims offers denser storage than DRAM, while still being dramatically faster than a traditional NAND SSD. In other words: its trying to bridge the gap between the high-speed but low-capacity flash memory your computer uses for RAM and the high-story but relatively low speed memory used in SSDs.
Intel says that…
This past Friday, Netflix released the second season of its hit series Stranger Things. Last year, the show appeared out of nowhere, catching pretty much everyone by surprise with its combination of retro-80s nostalgia and Steven Spielberg-meets-Stephen King storytelling. But this year, it was all about the expectations, with the streaming service creating a wave of hype that framed the shows return as one of the must-watch entertainment events of the year.
Now that weve actually had a chance to see what series creators the Duffer brothers put together for the sequel, a group of us here at The Verge decided to sit down and discuss our feelings about Stranger Things, season 2. The nostalgia, new characters like Eight, Billy, and Bob,…
Earlier this month, drawing app developer Astro HQ released a video of a really clever new idea for its apps: it turned the iPads front camera into a button, letting you tap on the lens to activate things on screen. It was a smart way to free up screen space, but as it turns out, Apple doesnt agree. Astro said today that its app was rejected from the App Store for violating Apples guidelines.
In particular, Apple pointed to a section saying that apps couldnt alter or disable the functions of standard switches, such as the Volume Up/Down and Ring/Silent switches, or other native user interface elements or behaviors. While Astros app, Astropad Studio, wasnt strictly altering a switch, it did make the camera stop acting like a…
In September, Google launched the beta of its dedicated interconnects for Google Cloud enterprise users. These direct connections to the Google Cloud Platform essentially give enterprises a private on-ramp to the Google Cloud, which is especially important if they want to mix and match their own data centers with applications that run in Google’s data centers. Today, the dedicated… Read More
Hangouts Meet, Google’s service for running video and audio meetings, is getting a few new hardware companions. The company today announced the Hangouts Meet hardware kit that includes a touchscreen controller, speaker microphone, 4K camera and an ASUS Chromebox to control it all. The Chromebox (an Asus CN62) is the nerve center of this kit. While Chromeboxes (which you can think of as… Read More
Instagram is finally rolling out native support for Hebrew, Arabic and Farsi – three popular languages that are all written right-to-left. They join 36 other languages that Instagram supports natively. And just like all other language options on Instagram, everything besides someone’s username will be translated. Why did this take so long? Because adding a language like Arabic… Read More
With so many communication channels available on the web, knowing how to leverage each platforms strengths is key to developing businesses online. To help you hone your digital marketing skills, were featuring the new Digital Marketing 22-Course Masterclass.
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The Haunted Mansion, no matter what Disney park its in (California, Orlando, Paris, or Tokyo), has been a fan favorite since it opened at Disneyland in 1969. For years even The Walt Disney Company would refer to the Pirates of the Caribbean ride as the last attraction which Walt personally supervised, but thats baloney. Walt was shown concept art and models of many of the effects that would appear in The Haunted Mansion which eventually opened years after his death.
Which brings me to todays Halloween offering. The three Hitchhiking Ghosts appear infrequently in the ride, however they have become the iconic characters most identified with it. Years ago, Disney published three paper sculptures on The Disney Blog that allowed you to download, print out, and construct three very special models of the Hitchhiking Ghoststheir heads turn and follow you as you pass them by.
The effect is based upon the ancient optical illusion known as The Hollow Face. Most simply, a cast of a face is made in a concave (or negative) sculpture. If you look at the cast with one eye closed and walk by it, the face will appear to turn and follow your movement. The Walt Disney Company obtained a patent on a new process that lit the reversed face in such a way that it was more easily viewable while both eyes are open. These busts appear several times in its Haunted Mansions.
To see the sculptures created for you to download by Disney, watch this movie (since the camera has only one eye, the turning effect works very well).
And now its DIY time: click on each image below, download it. Print it out on cardstock and follow the instructions to create your own Hitchhiking Ghosts that will watch the trick or treaters and follow them as they go home. To increase the effect of the heads turning, wink at the ghosts as you pass them. They’ll appreciate that.
All Materials Copyright Disney.
Android users will now be able to battle junk mail and manage their email subscriptions using the new Android app from Unroll.Me.
To be clear, anyone with a smartphone could get the benefits of the service already. You just had to connect you email account, then use Unroll.Me’s features to unsubscribe to the emails you didn’t want and roll-up the rest into a single daily… Read More
Earlier this month, Amazon promised it would bring its Echo line of smart speakers to the competitive e-commerce battleground of India. The devices, including the Echo, Echo Plus, and Echo Dot, were initially available through an invite-only program. Today, Amazon says those orders are now shipping to customers, and will arrive in November. To encourage sales, earlier Echo adopters were offered… Read More
Toy artist Jesse Wroblewski of Chainsaw Estates challenged himself to sculpt a horror movie-themed PEZ candy dispenser for each day in October.
Here’s a look at some of his horribly-creative sculptures, from Pennywise to Pinhead:
See the rest at his Instagram feed.
For the last few months, I had been using Sparkfuns Phant server as a data logger for a small science project. Unfortunately, theyve had some serious technical issues and have discontinued the service. Phant was good while it lasted: it was easy to use, free, and allowed me to download the data in a CSV format. It shared data with analog.io, which at the time was a good solution for data visualization.
While I could continue using Phant since it is an open-source project and Sparkfun kindly releases the source code for the server on Github, I thought it might …read more
Fall – it’s that time of year that brings falling leaves, Hallowe’en, and a pumpkin version of everything that you hold dear. In this case, it’s not a latte – it’s [Robert Vorthman]’s Pumpkin Piano.
[Robert] took a straightforward approach to the build, pressing a Raspberry Pi into service as the backbone of the operation. This is combined with an Adafruit breakout board for the MPR121, which is a chip that provides 12 capacitive touch-sensitive inputs. These are connected to the bountiful produce which make up the piano keys in this fun holiday hack. [Robert] uses some Python code that …read more
Just like the $299 Insta360 One or the $799 GoPro Fusion, Rylo is a 360-degree camera thats not really about filming 360-degree photos and videos. Rylo, which costs $499 and goes on sale today, is a dual-lens camera that lets you do creative things with the full 360-degree sphere of imagery, like transforming it into a regular, flat video that you can reframe as much as you want.
That means you can shoot with this camera and not worry about the composition until you go to edit on your phone. There, youre able to look back at the footage, spin it around like you would with a 360-degree video, and pick, crop, and export a 16:9, 1080p video. (It can also save and export the full 360-degree versions, if you like.)
And, since Rylo boasts…