We have several more weeks, if not several more months, to go in this sudden era of Everything from Home. Work from home, school from home, funerals from home, church from home, happy hour from home—you name it, and we as a society are trying as best as we can to pull it off remotely. Tech use as a result is up all over, but arguably the biggest winner to date of the "Oh, crap, where's my webcam" age is videoconferencing platform Zoom.
Zoom's ease of use, feature base, and free service tier have made it a go-to resource not only for all those office meetings that used to happen in conference rooms but also for teachers, religious services, and even governments. The widespread use, in turn, is shining a bright spotlight on Zoom's privacy and data-collection practices, which apparently leave much to be desired.
The challenge is particularly pronounced in the health care and education sectors: Zoom does offer specific enterprise-level packages—Zoom for Education and Zoom for Healthcare—that have compliance with privacy law (FERPA and HIPAA, respectively) baked in. Many users in those fields, however, may be on the free tier or using individual or other types of enterprise licenses that don't take these particular needs into consideration.
We’ve all seen, and occasionally wrestled with, bill acceptors like the one [Another Maker] recently liberated from an arcade machine. But have you ever had one apart to see how it works? If not, the video after the break is an interesting peak into how this ubiquitous piece of hardware tells the difference between a real bill and a piece of paper.
But [Another Maker] goes a bit farther than just showing the internals of the device. He also went through the trouble of figuring out how to talk to it with an Arduino, which makes all sorts of money-grabbing projects possible. Even if collecting paper money isn’t your kind of thing, it’s still interesting to see how this gadget works on a hardware and software level.
As explained in the video, a set of belts are used to pull the bill past an array of IR LEDs. The hardware uses these to scan the bill and perform some dark magic to determine if it’s a genuine piece of currency. [Another Maker] notes that these readers actually need to receive occasional firmware updates to take into account new bill designs. In fact, the particular unit he has is so out of date that it won’t accept modern $5 bills; which may explain how he got it for free in the first place.
Back in the before times, when a larger percentage of the human race roamed the Earth, i.e., several weeks ago, Comcast customers had to deal with something called a "data cap." Cable users who consumed more than a terabyte of Comcast-branded Internet data in a single month had to pay an extra $10 for each additional, precious block of 50GB, or $50 more each month for unlimited data. Now, with a pandemic sweeping the United States and more people spending each day at home than ever, consumer-broadband usage is way up. But instead of raking in as many overage fees as it can, Comcast decided to upgrade everyone to unlimited data for no extra charge, for two months beginning March 13—and its network has no problem handling it.
Comcast on Monday said it has measured a 32 percent increase in peak traffic since March 1 and an increase of 60 percent in some parts of the US. VoIP and video conferencing is up 212 percent, VPN traffic is up 40 percent, gaming downloads are up 50 percent, and streaming video is up 38 percent.
Comcast, the nation's largest cable and home-Internet provider, described the pandemic's impact as "an unprecedented shift in network usage" but not one that diminishes Comcast's ability to provide sufficient Internet bandwidth. "It's within the capability of our network; and we continue to deliver the speeds and support the capacity our customers need while they're working, learning, and connecting from home," Comcast said. The company continues to monitor network performance and "add capacity where it's needed."
An example of Dark Sky's maps from the desktop Web version. [credit: Dark Sky ]
Popular weather app and data-collection service Dark Sky has been acquired by Apple for an undisclosed sum, a blog post from the Dark Sky team announced. The post claims that Dark Sky will now “reach far more people, with far more impact, than we ever could alone.”
The iOS app will not see any changes “at this time,” and it will continue to be listed on the App Store. Android and Wear OS are a different story, though. The Android app will no longer be available for download, and “service to existing users and subscribers will continue until July 1, 2020, at which point the app will be shut down.” Active subscribers will get a refund.
Enlarge/ Future moon bases could be built with 3D printers that mix materials such as Moon regolith, water, and astronauts’ urine. (credit: ESA/Foster and Partners)
Early last year, NASA announced an ambitious plan to return American astronauts to the Moon and establish a permanent base there, with an eye toward eventually placing astronauts on Mars. The Artemis Moon Program has its share of critics, including many in the US House of Representatives, who appear to prefer a stronger focus on a crewed mission to Mars. As Ars' Eric Berger reported last August, "NASA stands a very real risk of turning the Artemis Program into a repeat of the Apollo Program—a flags-and-footprints sprint back to the Moon with no follow-through in the form of a lunar base or a sustained presence in deep space."
But if the Artemis Program's ambitious objectives survive the appropriations process, materials science will be crucial to its success, particularly when it comes to the materials needed to construct a viable lunar base. Concrete, for instance, requires a substantial amount of added water in order to be usable in situ, and there is a pronounced short supply of water on the moon. In a new paper in the Journal of Cleaner Production, an international team of scientists suggests that astronauts setting up a base on the moon could use the urea in their urine as a plasticizer to create a concrete-like building material out of lunar soil.
There's certainly a strong argument to be made for using existing materials on the Moon itself to construct a lunar base. NASA estimates that it costs around $10,000 to transport one pound of material into orbit, according to the authors. Past proposals have called for 3D printing with Sorel cement, which requires significant amounts of chemicals and water (consumables), and a rocklike material that would require both water and phosphoric acid as a liquid binder. (The latter might be better suited to constructing a base on Mars.)
Today's Dealmaster is headlined by a couple of early deals on the entry-level models of Apple's latest MacBook Air and Mac Mini. The former is down to $950 at Amazon, a $50 discount, while the latter is down to $699 at B&H, a $100 discount. These offers are fairly modest, but they're still noteworthy considering Apple only launched the new computers a couple weeks ago.
We gave the new MacBook Air a favorable review earlier this month, calling it "a really good laptop, and easy to recommend." Have a look there for the full rundown, but the new Air is still very well-built, now comes with more base storage at 256GB, and most importantly, comes with a new "Magic Keyboard" that should be much more agreeable and durable than the ultra-low-travel "butterfly" keyboards of recent models.
The new Mac Mini, meanwhile, is essentially identical to the refreshed model Apple released in 2018, but with the base storage bumped from 128GB to 256GB. Otherwise, it remains the lowest-cost and most compact way to bring macOS into a desktop environment for more casual tasks. This offer is $200 cheaper than the previous-gen 256GB Mac Mini's current going rate.
The coaster is built around an Arduino Micro, which uses a microphone to detect audio levels in the room. When it detects an extended silence, it then fires off a sound clip using a Sparkfun audio breakout board. The questions vary from plain to politically sensitive, so there’s a good chance you could get some spicy conversation as a result. Any talking device runs a risk of being more annoying than helpful, and there’s certainly a risk that Chatty Coaster could fall into this category. Choosing the right content seems key here.
Overall, while this may not be the ultimate solution to boring company, it could get a laugh or two and serves as a good way to learn how to work with audio on microcontrollers. Video after the break.
We’ll admit, when we were reading this one, we thought we had deja vu. But this one’s a lot less blamey.
Enlarge/ Want new issues of your favorite comic book series? Switching to digital this week won't change their lack of availability. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty / Marvel)
Comic book fans received a huge blow last week when they learned that a ton of their favorite series wouldn't receive printed runs in the near future due to coronavirus concerns. That might be fine for those fans who have shifted to tablets and e-reader devices for their comics fix, but what about comics fans who not only want print versions, but also want to support their favorite local brick-and-mortar store?
This week, comics publishers responded by expressing solidarity with physical retail partners. For at least one week, Marvel, DC, and other major publishers will not launch new comics in print or on digital platforms.
On Tuesday, a bulletin sent by Marvel Entertainment President Dan Buckley to retail partners confirmed that its usual run of new Wednesday comic books would indeed not arrive in a physical format this Wednesday, April 1. No April Fool's joke there; this is due to Diamond Distributors, the biggest American publisher of print comic books, canceling shipment for any comics with a publish date of April 1 or later "until further notice," as per an announcement on March 23.
One of the strangest things about human nature is our tendency toward inertia. We take so much uncontrollable change in stride, but when our man-made constructs stop making sense, we’re suddenly stuck in our ways — for instance, the way we measure things in the US, or define daytime throughout the year. Inertia seems to be the only explanation for continuing to do things the old way, even when new and scientifically superior ways come along. But this isn’t about the metric system — it’s about something much more personal. If you use a keyboard with any degree of regularity, this affects you physically.
Many, many people are content to live their entire lives typing on QWERTY keyboards. They never give a thought to the unfortunate layout choices of common letters, nor do they pick up even a whisper of the heated debates about the effectiveness of QWERTY vs. other layouts. We would bet that most of our readers have at least heard of the Dvorak layout, and assume that a decent percentage of you have converted to it.
Hardly anyone in the history of typewriting has cared so much about subverting QWERTY as August Dvorak. Once he began to study the the QWERTY layout and all its associated problems, he devoted the rest of his life to the plight of the typist. Although the Dvorak keyboard layout never gained widespread adoption, plenty of people swear by it, and it continues to inspire more finger-friendly layouts to this day.
August Dvorak was born May 5th, 1894 in Glencoe, Minnesota. He served in the US Navy as a submarine skipper in WWII, and is believed to be a distant cousin of the Czech composer Antonín Dvořák. Not much has been published about his early life, but Dvorak wound up working as an educational psychologist and professor of the University of Washington in Seattle, and this is where his story really begins.
Dvorak’s interest in keyboards and typing was struck when he advised a student named Gertrude Ford with her master’s thesis on the subject of typing errors. Touch typing was only a few decades old at this point, but the QWERTY layout had already taken a firm hold on the industry.
As Dvorak studied Ford’s thesis, he began to believe that the QWERTY layout was to blame for most typing errors, and was inspired to lead a tireless crusade to supplant it with a layout that served the typist and not the typewriter. His brother-in-law and fellow college professor, William Dealey, joined him on this quest from the beginning.
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Dvorak and Dealey put a great deal of effort into analyzing every aspect of typing, studying everything from frequently-used letter combinations of English to human hand physiology. In 1914, Dealey saw a demonstration given by Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, who were using slow-motion film techniques to study industrial processes and worker fatigue. He told Dvorak what he’d seen, and they adopted a similar method to study the minute and complex movements of typists.
In 1936, after two decades of work, Dvorak and Dealey debuted a new layout designed to overcome all of QWERTY’s debilitating detriments. Whereas QWERTY places heavy use on the left hand and forces fingers outside the home row over 60% of the time, the Dvorak layout favors hand alternation and keeping the fingers working at home as much as possible. In this new arrangement, the number of words that can be typed without leaving the home row increased by a few thousandfold. Dvorak and Dealey along with Gertrude Ford and Nellie Merrick published all of their psychological and physiological findings about typing in the now out-of-print Typewriting Behavior (1936).
The original Dvorak layout. From Typewriting Behavior via @rand.ferch
At first, it seemed as though the Dvorak-Dealey simplified layout had half a chance of supplanting QWERTY. Dvorak found that students who had never learned to touch type could pick up Dvorak in one-third the time it took to learn QWERTY.
Dvorak entered his typists into contests, and they consistently out-typed the QWERTYists by a long shot. It got so bad that within a few years, Dvorak typists were banned outright from competing. This decision was overturned not long after, but the resentment remained. QWERTY typists were so unnerved by the speed of the Dvorak typists that Dvorak typewriters were sabotaged, and he had to hire security guards to protect them.
The QWERTY is Too Strong
Although there were likely many factors at play, the simple fact is that by the time Dvorak patented his layout, Remington & Sons had cornered the market on typewriters. Even so, Dvorak released his keyboard during the Depression, and hardly anyone could afford to buy a new typewriter just because there was some hot new layout.
Although Dvorak typewriters were never mass-produced, they almost made waves thanks to the US Navy. Faced with a shortage of trained typists during WWII, they experimented with retraining QWERTY typists on Dvorak and found a significant increase in speed. They allegedly ordered thousands of Dvorak typewriters, but were vetoed by the Treasury department because of QWERTY inertia.
August Dvorak went on to make one-handed keyboards with layouts for both the left and right hand. In 1975, he died a bitter man, never understanding why the public would continue to shrug their overworked shoulders and keep using QWERTY keyboards. He might have been pleased to know that the Dvorak layout eventually became an ANSI standard and comes installed on most systems, but dismayed to find the general population still considers it a fringe layout.
I’m tired of trying to do something worthwhile for the human race. They simply don’t want to change!
If proof were needed that the Trump administration never met an environmental regulation it didn't want to eviscerate, on Tuesday morning the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration published final fuel efficiency rules for new passenger cars and light trucks for model years 2021 through 2026. As has been widely anticipated, the EPA and NHTSA have gutted plans established in 2012 to make the nation's fleet of vehicles more fuel efficient.
Under the old rules, automakers had to get their fleets to an average of 46.7mpg (5l/100km) by MY2025. As of today, even that not-very-ambitious target is toast. Instead, the US government is only requiring the industry to achieve an average of 40.4mpg (5.8l/100km) by MY2026. Fleet-wide CO2 targets have been similarly watered down; by that same model year the US passenger vehicle and light truck fleet must meet an average of 199g CO2/mile (124g/km). By contrast, new European Union rules that went into effect this year require EU fleet averages to drop below 153g/mile (95g/km), with massive fines in store for automakers that fail.
As continues to be the case, the rules are based on the footprint of a vehicle, with large trucks and SUVs being held to an even weaker standard. As long as a MY2026 pickup or SUV can meet 34.1mpg (6.9l/100km) and emit no more than 240g/mile (150g/km) of carbon dioxide, that's enough to satisfy the new regulations.
In the quest to automate everything in your home, you no doubt have things that aren’t made with home automation in mind. Perhaps your window AC unit, or the dimmer in your dining room. [Seb] has several ceiling fans that are controlled by remotes and wanted to connect them to his home automation system. In doing so, [Seb] gives a good overview of how to tackle this problem and how to design a PCB so he doesn’t have a breadboard lying around connected to the guts of his remote control.
There are several things [Seb] needs to figure out in order to connect his fans to Home Assistant, the home automation system he uses: He needs to determine if the circuit in the remote can be powered by 5 or 3.3 V, he needs to connect the circuit to an ESP32 board, and he needs to figure out if he can create a custom PCB that combines the circuit and the ESP32 into one. The video goes through each of these steps and shows the development of each along the way.
There’s a lot of info in the video, so it might need to be slowed down a bit to see all the details. There are some other reverse engineering of home automation gear on the site, here, or, you might want to build your own remote to control your automated devices.
Enlarge/ Workers protest outside a massive Amazon fulfillment center on Staten Island on Monday, March 30. (credit: New York Communities for Change)
Amazon has fired an employee after he helped organize a walkout of Amazon workers at a fulfillment center in Staten Island, New York. The worker, Chris Smalls, says Amazon was retaliating against him for his workplace activism.
“Taking action cost me my job,” Smalls said in a Monday interview on Bloomberg TV. “Because I tried to stand up for something that’s right, the company decided to retaliate against me.”
Fitbit is still out there living its life and launching products despite a looming acquisition by Google that could upend the entire company any month now. Today Fitbit announced the Charge 4, the latest in its line of Charge devices that kind of sit at the halfway point between a smartwatch and a basic fitness tracker. The Charge 4 has the same body as the Charge 3, just with updated internals.
You won't be installing apps or playing music on it anytime soon, but it can sync to your smartphone and show notifications on the greyscale OLED touch screen. The device is mostly focused on fitness features with exercise recognition, an activity dashboard, move reminders, and tracking of just about everything, including your general activity, your heart rate, and sleep tracking.
Some big additions to the Charge 4 seemed designed to let you leave your smartphone at home. The first is an internal GPS for location tracking, which will let you log runs without a phone, but it will also severely cut down on the battery life. Fitbit claims the Charge 4 will last up to seven days if you don't turn on GPS, but turning on the GPS will cut that time down to five hours, a stunning 97 percent decrease in battery life. To go along with the new location tracking, there are now seven GPS-based exercise modes. Sync the device to the Fitbit app and you'll see a new "GPS-powered heat map" showing where your toughest workouts were.
Enlarge/ Apollo 11 crew members (L-R) Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and Michael Collins are amused by a question posed shortly before launch. (credit: NASA)
Neil Armstrong was the first human to walk on the Moon. Buzz Aldrin soon followed him onto the lunar surface. And Michael Collins? Well, he remained behind, in lunar orbit. Alone.
For 50 years, he was portrayed by the media as the lonely astronaut. "The emphasis in the press was 'Wasn't I the loneliest person in the whole lonely world in the whole lonely orbit around some lonely thing?'" he recalled during an Explorer's Club event in New York City last year.
Collins insists he was not lonely. After being confined in the small Command Module with Armstrong and Aldrin for a few days, he enjoyed the respite while tracking their activities on the Moon's surface.
