Thursday, April 30
Comcast brings fiber to city that it sued 7 years ago to stop fiber rollout
In April 2008, Comcast sued the Chattanooga Electric Power Board (EPB) to prevent it from building a fiber network to serve residents who were getting slow speeds from the incumbent cable provider.
Comcast claimed that EPB illegally subsidized the buildout with ratepayer funds, but it quickly lost in court, and EPB built its fiber network and began offering Internet, TV, and phone service. After EPB launched in 2009, incumbents Comcast and AT&T finally started upgrading their services, EPB officials told Ars when we interviewed them in 2013.
But not until this year has Comcast had an Internet offering that can match or beat EPB's $70 gigabit service. Comcast announced its 2Gbps fiber-to-the-home service on April 2, launching first in Atlanta, then in cities in Florida and California, and now in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
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Salty groundwater supports life in Antarctica’s extreme Dry Valleys
It’s easy to forget that Antarctica is a desert, given that very nearly the entire continent is covered by a thick sheet of ice. But snowfall is very slow to add to that white mantle, as the cold air and ocean around Antarctica aren't exactly going to provide prodigious production of atmospheric moisture.
As its name implies, one of the driest and weirdest locales in a very weird continent is the McMurdo Dry Valleys. This area near the coast is the biggest chunk of Antarctica not covered by ice. Bare rock is found there, and not a whole lot else.
There is, however, an unusual feature known as Blood Falls. At the end of Taylor Glacier, which spills into one of the Dry Valleys (Taylor Valley, actually), a mysterious red trickle of salty, iron-rich water periodically stains the ice as it spills out like blood from a wound. It’s a good thing that it isn’t a paranormal message from ghosts warning researchers to leave the valley, because it has had the opposite effect—it draws them in. In 2012, for example, biologists looking for signs of life eking out an existence in the Dry Valleys discovered that Blood Falls contained an impressive community of microbial life.
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Tips and Tricks: Using Windows 10 IoT Core for Raspberry Pi 2
The post Tips and Tricks: Using Windows 10 IoT Core for Raspberry Pi 2 appeared first on Make:.
Speaker Profile: Interaxon's Ariel Garten On Muse, The Art Of Zen—And Mind Games
Microsoft's Edge Will Let You Scribble On The Web—And That's Awesome
Your Body is Your PIN with Bodyprint
[Christian Holz, Senaka Buthpitiya, and Marius Knaust] are researchers at Yahoo that have created a biometric solution for those unlucky folks that always forget their smartphone PIN codes. Bodyprint is an authentication system that allows a variety of body parts to act as the password. These range from ears to fists.
Bodyprint uses the phone’s touchscreen as an image scanner. In order to do so, the researchers rooted an LG Nexus 5 and modified the touchscreen module. When a user sets up Bodyprint, they hold the desired body part to the touchscreen. A series of images are taken, sorted into various intensity categories. These files are stored in a database that identifies them by body type and associates the user authentication with them. When the user wants to access their phone, they simply hold that body part on the touchscreen, and Bodyprint will do the rest. There is an interesting security option: the two person authentication process. In the example shown in the video below, two users can restrict file access on a phone. Both users must be present to unlock the files on the phone.
How does Bodyprint compare to capacitive fingerprint scanners? These scanners are available on the more expensive phone models, as they require a higher touchscreen resolution and quality sensor. Bodyprint makes do with a much lower resolution of approximately 6dpi while increasing the false rejection rate to help compensate. In a 12 participant study using the ears to authenticate, accuracy was over 99% with a false rejection rate of 1 out of 13.
Filed under: Android Hacks, Cellphone Hacks
Do You Really Own Your 3D Printer?
The post Do You Really Own Your 3D Printer? appeared first on Make:.
Let’s embed some classic games in tweets
This one's for you @Lee_Ars https://t.co/PHwtwGgUNM
— Kyle Orland (@KyleOrl) April 30, 2015
Remember the feeling you got the first time you embedded a YouTube video in an external website—how simple and seamless it felt transporting rich multimedia content from one part of the Web to another? The feeling of inserting a fully playable classic game into a humble tweet isn't quite the same, but it's still pretty remarkable for anyone who remembers when these old titles required every bit of power available to a state-of-the-art PC.
The Internet Archive's massive collections of classic games and software, emulated through JSMESS, has actually been fully embeddable in outside webpages since early February. But plenty of people, us included, only seemed to notice this feature in the last day or so. Internet Archive curator Jason Scott even noted a sizeable bump in Web traffic going to the site as word of the feature got around social media in the last 24 hours.
While you can copy iframe code to your personal Web space or blog, Twitter makes it especially easy to embed a game by simply linking to the applicable URL on archive.org. Then you can embed that tweet in a webpage, as we've done above in a transparent attempt to garner the favor of Reviews Editor Lee Hutchinson through his favorite classic series. If you're really feeling fancy, you can even embed a tweet that has an embedded copy of DOS running a TRS-80 emulator, which could run any number of games. Hold on one second, I have to go see if my Inception top is still spinning.
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The Internet of Cows: Azure-powered pedometers get dairies mooovin’
SAN FRANCISCO—At Microsoft's Build conference here today, corporate vice president of Microsoft's machine learning unit Josephe Sirosh discussed some of the applications already leveraging data analytics and machine learning services in Microsoft's Azure cloud. Among the early adopters: Japanese cows.
In 2013, Fujitsu introducedGyuHo SaaS, a cloud-based system for dairy farmers that helps track the health of their herds through Wi-Fi connected pedometers—essentially giant Fitbits for cows. The time and movement data can help farmers not only track the general health of cattle, but can also help track when cows are going into estrus (a condition more commonly known as "heat").
Fujitsu built the data analytics for GyuHo (which is Japanese for "cow step") in the Azure cloud. Using Azure machine learning logic, the software-as-a-service application can detect spikes in movement activity at night that are an indicator that a cow is going into estrus and is ready for artificial insemination. Sirosh said that by alerting farmers when data suggested estrus was beginning (which the system can do with 95 percent accuracy), they could raise their successful insemination rate from about 30 percent, based on daily hands-on cow inspection, to 65 percent.
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Turn Your Dremel Tool into a Plastic Welder!
The post Turn Your Dremel Tool into a Plastic Welder! appeared first on Make:.
Apple and IBM will give 4 to 5 million iPads to Japanese seniors
The collaboration between Apple and IBM is an extension of the partnership the two companies announced last year as they hope to put more iOS devices and IBM software into offices. Last July, Apple and IBM said that they would introduce over 100 industry-specific apps for iPhones and iPads to entice IT departments to buy Apple for their offices. This latest project with Japan Post will be similar in that IBM will design wellness apps and analytics software for iOS to serve an aging population.
The initiative will be a part of an existing Japan Post service called Watch Over in which post deliverers check in on senior citizens and report their status to family members for a monthly fee equivalent to about $8.40, according to the Wall Street Journal. Apple and IBM will run a pilot program in the second half of this year.
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Xbox One slowly narrows its quarterly sales deficit against the PS4
With Microsoft showing a burst of new sales momentum in the last holiday season following some significant price cuts, there may have been some hope that the Xbox One would be able to finally match or overtake the PS4 in sales when 2015 came around. So far, that has not been the case. Sony's system continues to outsell the Xbox One by a healthy margin on a worldwide basis.
Today's earnings report from Sony mentioned 2.4 million worldwide shipments of the PlayStation 4 for the first quarter of 2015. That number compares quite favorably to Microsoft's earnings last week, which reported 1.6 million sales of all Xbox hardware, including the Xbox 360, during the same period. Using an estimated year-over-year drop-off of 40 to 66 percent for Xbox 360 sales (in line with previous and current console transitions), Microsoft likely pushed out between 1.12 and 1.34 million Xbox One systems from January through March.
(The usual disclaimer about sales vs. shipments here... while the two numbers aren't precisely equivalent, hardware units shipped to stores are usually sold through to consumers in four to six weeks, according to industry analysts. So most units shipped by the end of March have likely been cleared off of store shelves by this point, having little impact on the relative console race. The terms are used interchangeably throughout this piece.)
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Fab Academy Students Challenged to Make Something BIG
The post Fab Academy Students Challenged to Make Something BIG appeared first on Make:.
This R/C Plane Built from a Weed Whacker Actually Flies
The post This R/C Plane Built from a Weed Whacker Actually Flies appeared first on Make:.
Brace Yourself: Tag Heuer's $1400 Android Wear Watch Is On Its Way
ABI Research gives us our first look at the Apple Watch’s S1 board
When iFixit tore down the Apple Watch last week, one of the things it couldn't dig into was the S1 "System in Package" (SiP) that powers the device. The S1's components were covered in a "solid block of plasticky resin" rather than a standard heat spreader, so we couldn't see the individual chips and controllers on the board like we usually can in iFixit teardowns.
Today ABI Research took things one step further, removing that block of resin and exposing what's underneath. Most of the components aren't surprising. There's a Broadcom BCM43342 chip for dual-band 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0, 512MB of RAM from Elpida, and 8GB of flash memory from Sandisk and Toshiba. An NFC controller from NXP and a signal booster from AMS enable Apple Pay on the watch, and interestingly these appear to be identical to the NFC components inside the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. Other chips include a combination accelerometer and gyroscope from STM and a touchscreen controller from ADI.
The most interesting component under the hood is the custom Apple CPU and GPU at the center of it all, here identified only as APL 0778. We still don't know what CPU architecture powers this chip, what its manufacturing process is, or how fast it is relative to the A-series SoCs that power iPhones and iPads—we'll need to wait on more detailed analysis from the likes of Chipworks for more insight. That said, developer Steve Troughton-Smith has already dug into the watch's software and discovered a driver for the PowerVR SGX543 GPU, the same basic architecture found in the Apple A5. That GPU is included in the iPad 2, iPhone 4S, iPad Mini, fifth-gen iPod Touch, and (in a special version with one CPU core) the third-generation Apple TV.
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Should You Back A Kickstarter If The Team’s Last Project Failed?
The post Should You Back A Kickstarter If The Team’s Last Project Failed? appeared first on Make:.
I Used 3D Hubs to Print a Phone Dock. Here’s What Happened.
The post I Used 3D Hubs to Print a Phone Dock. Here’s What Happened. appeared first on Make:.
The inadvertent hilarity of the Heartland Institute vs. Pope Francis
A little while back, word filtered out that Pope Francis was going to devote an encyclical to climate change. It's not much of a surprise; his tenure has featured a strong emphasis on caring for the poor, and the poor are in no position to air-condition, flood-proof, and bioengineer their way out of the worst impacts of climate change.
As part of the preparation for the encyclical, there's a meeting going on at the Vatican Science Academy that's focused on climate change. Guests include everyone from Ban Ki-moon to Nobel Prize winning scientists. Not on the guest list was the Heartland Institute, most notable for putting up a billboard suggesting that people who cared about climate change might be just as deranged as Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber.
When in Rome...
But Heartland decided to go to Rome anyway. I know this because someone has signed me up to its press mailing list, which offers up quotes from expertise-free "experts" that make you wonder whether some of them might need an intervention—or simply a trip back to Earth from whatever planet they seem to be inhabiting.
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