When the door slid closed, everything went silent. I couldn’t hear any of the chatter or construction outside. It was weirdly cozy. I was sitting in a tiny pod—wrapped in a deep green felt, with its own built-in bench, desk, and lighting—designed a company waging war the open office. Read more…
Read this article:
Finally, Someone’s Designing a Fix for the Nightmarish Open Plan Office
Intel has revealed all about its new Thunderbolt 3 specification at this year’s Computex conference, and it could be the port that best serves Apple’s single I/O vision of the MacBook’s future: Thunderbolt 3 uses a reversible USB-C connector, and includes USB 3.1 support, as well as increasing data transfer speed over Thunderbolt 2 by 100 percent to 40Gbps, and supporting use… Read More
Read the original:
Thunderbolt 3 Uses Reversible USB Type-C And Could Be The Ultimate Port
Bismillah writes that a new vulnerability in recent Macs — and potentially older ones — can be used to plant code such as rootkits into areas of EFI memory that shouldn’t be writeable, but become unlocked after the computer wakes up from sleep mode. The article explains that [The vulnerability] appears to be due to a bug in Apple’s sleep-mode energy conservation implementation that can leave areas of memory in the extensible firmware interface (EFI) (which provides low-level hardware control and access) writeable from user accounts on the computer. Memory areas are normally locked as read-only to protect them. However, putting some late-model Macs to sleep for around 20 seconds and then waking them up unlocks the EFI memory for writing. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Continued here:
Macs Vulnerable To Userland Injected EFI Rootkits
They were all running mods that let them automate away the tedious grinding that is so integral to the way that MMOs incentivize players to devote thousands of hours to their products. Read the rest
Windows/Windows Phone/Android: Microsoft Hyperlapse gives you the power to shoot tons of video and then combine, condense, and edit it all into a short, time-lapse highlight reel on your PC, Windows Phone, or Android device, for free. Read more…
More:
Microsoft Hyperlapse Builds Time-Lapse Highlight Reels from Long Videos
HAWTHORNE, Calif.—In the sleek warehouse of Tesla’s Design Studio, CEO and co-founder Elon Musk announced the company’s latest products—a line of stationary batteries for households and utilities meant to store energy so that it can be used when energy is scarce and/or expensive. The home stationary battery will be called the Powerwall and it will cost $3,500 for a 10kWh unit. That unit is optimized to deal with serving a house if the traditional power grid goes down. A cheaper, $3,000 version will have a 7kWh capacity, and it will be able to help a house with solar panels deal with the fluctuations in energy supply. The prices don’t include installation, and Tesla said it would be working with certified installers including SolarCity and others. In a Q&A before the event, Musk said that the batteries will have thermal management systems to allow them to power houses in hot and cold climates too—the batteries have an operating temperature range of -20C (-4F) to 43C (110F). Read 18 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Originally posted here:
Tesla’s new “Powerwall” home battery will cost $3,500 for 10kWh units [Updated]
Final Fantasy maker and tech-demo master Square Enix unveiled a doozie of a demo at Microsoft’s 2015 Build conference. Titled Witch Chapter 0 [cry] , the demo showcased a range of DirectX 12 technical and processing wizardries to create a real-time animation on par with pre-rendered cut scenes and movies. During the demo (which you can view below), Microsoft’s Steve Guggenheimer explained each scene contained around 63 million polygons, which is supposedly up to 12-times more than Square Enix managed to render in its Agni’s Philosophy DirectX 11 demo back in 2012. Running 63 million polygons with high-resolution textures—8K by 8K in this case—is no small feat. By comparison, Star Citizen’s biggest carrier ships run up to around seven million polygons , while Ryse’s protagonist Marius was made up of 85K polygons on the Xbox One. One of the most impressive moments in the demo is when Guggenheimer zooms into the character model, revealing an immense amount of detail right up to the individual pores on her skin. The character’s hair was also revealed to be made up of individual polygons rendered with over 50 shaders, and not the less expensive surface mapping technique that’s commonly used to create features such as hair. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Originally posted here:
New Square Enix real-time DirectX 12 demo crosses the uncanny valley
When you’re building your own custom electronics projects, a simple power switch isn’t always easy to find. If you have some DIY projects that use 9V batteries , this super small power switch is fairly easy to build and is mostly made from an old 9V battery. Read more…
View post:
Make a Tiny 9V Battery Power Switch From Parts of an Old 9V Battery
If camping seems like fun but you’d prefer if roughing it wasn’t so rough, the Drumi from Yirego is a compact portable washing machine that can clean around six or seven garments without the need for a power outlet, a generator, or even a sunny day to feed a solar panel. Read more…
Read this article:
A Portable Washing Machine That Doesn’t Need a Drop of Electricity
Specs at a glance: Intel Compute Stick STCK1A32WFC OS Windows 8.1 with Bing 32-bit CPU 1.33GHz quad-core Intel Atom Z3735F (Turbo Boost up to 1.83GHz) RAM 2GB 1333MHz DDR3 (non upgradeable) GPU Intel HD Graphics (integrated) HDD 32GB eMMC SSD Networking 2.4GHz 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0 Ports 1x USB 2.0, microSD, micro USB (for power) Size 4.06” x 1.46” x 0.47” (103 x 37 x 12mm) Other perks Lock slot Warranty 1 year Price ~$150, ~$110 for Ubuntu Linux version with 1GB of RAM and 8GB of storage Our appreciation of mini desktop PCs is well-documented at this point . In the age of the smartphone and the two-pound laptop, the desktop PC is perhaps the least exciting of computing devices, but there are still plenty of hulking desktop towers out there, and many of them can be replaced by something you can hold in the palm of your hand. Intel’s new Compute Stick, available for about $150 with Windows 8.1 and $110 with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, takes the mini desktop concept about as far as it can go. The Stick isn’t even really a “desktop” in the traditional sense, since it’s an HDMI dongle that hangs off the back of your monitor instead of sitting on your desk. It’s not very powerful, but the Compute Stick is one of the smallest Windows desktops you can buy right now. Let’s take a quick look at what it’s capable of. Read 19 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Link:
Intel’s Compute Stick: A full PC that’s tiny in size (and performance)