A 2-in-1 Windows 10 laptop powered by a smartphone chip

The chipset behind the Asus NovaGo comes straight from smartphones, so we were into the fact that the volume and power keys are aligned along the right side of the laptop. This is shaping up to be the always-connected laptop counterpart to a smartphone in so many ways.
[…]
The Asus NovaGo presents a glimpse of an always-connected laptop future with what promises to be stellar battery life, mixed with last year’s smartphone chipset and older ports.

It has us excited for what this laptop eliminates more than it introduces. Not having to connect to unsecure Wi-Fi, setup a hotspot or worry as much about battery life is a brilliant change that makes it possible to use this laptop anyway.

Performance is the wildcard. How does Qualcomm’s smartphone chipset backed by a lot of RAM compare to laptop that have the usual Intel CPUs at the heart?

That’s going to require more testing of the Asus NovaGo in a full review coming soon.

Source: Asus NovaGo hands on review | TechRadar

And no leaky backdoor installed in the form of Intel management engine

Having been very happy about my old Canon printer, I decided to get another one when it died after four years of trusted service. This one is absolutely horrific. It started off with difficulties connecting via WiFi. The amount of paper jams I have is around 1 page printed to 1 page jammed. The scanner can’t remember if you want to scan a PDF or a PNG and defaults to PNG. Scans are unceremoniously dumped into the Documents folder. When you open the lid to change pages to scan, you are as likely to open the ink drawer. Occassionaly the printer decides to forget what type of paper is in the drawer and asks you to register the paper type (it has never been anything BUT A4!). Sometimes it just randomly prints off blank pages. Because it feels like it. A true frustration, getting behind this damn thing.

An apparent factory cockup has left OnePlus Android smartphones with an exposed diagnostics tool that can be potentially exploited to root the handsets.

Security researcher Robert Baptiste suggested the EngineerMode APK was made by Qualcomm, and was intended to be used by factory staff to test phones for basic functionality before they are shipped out to the public.

Unfortunately, it seems someone at OnePlus forgot to remove or disable the package before kicking the handsets out to the general public, and as a result folks now have access to what is effectively a backdoor in their Android phones.

In addition to basic diagnostic tasks like checking the functionality of the phone’s hardware components – such as the GPS and wireless electronics – the tool can also allow people, using the password ‘angela’, to obtain root access and gain full control over a device:

The Register

Being able to root your phone gives you access to the full functionality of the OS, however. This is something I think is a good idea – there are plenty of apps (eg battery monitors) that require root access to function.

The phone-in-the-closet phenomenon has become a hidden store of e-waste; a two-year-old phone still has value and is still a powerful device. And so it’s great news that Samsung is starting a new “Upcycling” initiative that is designed to turn old smartphones and turn them into something brand new.Behold, for example, this bitcoin mining rig, made out of 40 old Galaxy S5 devices, which runs on a new operating system Samsung has developed for its upcycling initiative.
[…]
The team hooked 40 old Galaxy S5’s together to make a bitcoin mining rig, repurposed an old Galaxy tablet into a ubuntu-powered laptop, used a Galaxy S3 to monitor a fishtank, and programed an old phone with facial recognition software to guard the entrance of a house in the form of an owl.
[…]
It’s all very cool and Samsung plans to release both the software it used to unlock the phones as well as the various plans for the projects online for free.
[…]
Upcycling is a great way to keep old devices alive and it can’t easily happen without the original manufacturer’s support. “The challenge with keeping old electronics running a long time is software,” Kyle Wiens, CEO of iFixit, told me over the phone. “With phones in particular, the old software is insecure and doesn’t run the new apps.
[…]
Samsung’s upcycling project has a placeholder github with a video explaining its process. “They’re setting up a maker magazine style portfolio of projects,” Wiens explained. The site will work by allowing users to download software that removes Android and opens the devices up to other forms of software. From there, users can browse a wide variety of homebrew software and projects.

The platform will be open, so users can make and upload their own projects and software once it launches. In an example from a Samsung promotional video, a user downloaded fish monitoring software to an old Galaxy S3 and ordered the sensors for the water right from the website. After it’s all set up, the user has a device that monitors the PH balance and heat of the fish tank. It even allows the pet owner to snap pics of their swimmers or turn the lights on and off.

Robust support for repurposing devices like this is unheard of in the tech industry. Companies such as Apple have made it hard for users to fix their own broken devices. In most cases, manufacturers would rather people just buy new devices than fix their old ones. It’s a philosophy that’s good for the company, but bad for the environment and bad for the customer.

Source: Samsung Made a Bitcoin Mining Rig Out of 40 Old Galaxy S5s – Motherboard

Well done Samsung!
The upcycling website is https://galaxyupcycling.github.io/

Manufacturing of the Kinect has shut down. Originally created for the Xbox 360, Microsoft’s watershed depth camera and voice recognition microphone sold ~35 million units since its debut in 2010, but Microsoft will no longer produce it when retailers sell off their existing stock. The company will continue to support Kinect for customers on Xbox, but ongoing developer tools remain unclear. Microsoft shared the news with Co.Design in exclusive interviews with Alex Kipman, creator of the Kinect, and Matthew Lapsen, GM of Xbox Devices Marketing.

The Kinect had already been slowly de-emphasized by Microsoft, as the Xbox team anchored back around traditional gaming to counter the PS4, rather than take its more experimental approach to entertainment. Yet while the Kinect as a standalone product is off the market, its core sensor lives on. Kinect v4–and soon to be, v5–powers Microsoft’s augmented reality Hololens, which Kipman also created. Meanwhile, Kinect’s team of specialists have gone on to build essential Microsoft technologies, including the Cortana voice assistant, the Windows Hello biometric facial ID system, and a context-aware user interface for the future that Microsoft dubs Gaze, Gesture, and Voice (GGV).

During a routine periodic fire suppression system maintenance, an unexpected release of inert fire suppression agent occurred. When suppression was triggered, it initiated the automatic shutdown of Air Handler Units (AHU) as designed for containment and safety. While conditions in the data center were being reaffirmed and AHUs were being restarted, the ambient temperature in isolated areas of the impacted suppression zone rose above normal operational parameters. Some systems in the impacted zone performed auto shutdowns or reboots triggered by internal thermal health monitoring to prevent overheating of those systems.
[…]
However, some of the overheated servers and storage systems “did not shutdown in a controlled manner,” and it took a while to bring them back online.

As a result, virtual machines were axed to avoid any data corruption by keeping them alive. Azure Backup vaults were not available, and this caused backup and restore operation failures. Azure Site Recovery lost failover ability and HDInsight, Azure Scheduler and Functions dropped jobs as their storage systems went offline.

Azure Monitor and Data Factory showed serious latency and errors in pipelines, Azure Stream Analytics jobs stopped processing input and producing output, albeit only for a few minutes, and Azure Media Services saw failures and latency issues for streaming requests, uploads, and encoding.

Source: Azure fell over for 7 hours in Europe because someone accidentally set off the fire extinguishers

ouch cloud!

Tosi’s conceptual breakthrough is the creation of an entirely new type of qubit, using both the nucleus and the electron. In this approach, a qubit ‘0’ state is defined when the spin of the electron is down and the nucleus spin is up, while the ‘1’ state is when the electron spin is up, and the nuclear spin is down.

“We call it the ‘flip-flop’ qubit,” said Tosi. “To operate this qubit, you need to pull the electron a little bit away from the nucleus, using the electrodes at the top. By doing so, you also create an electric dipole.”

“This is the crucial point,” adds Morello. “These electric dipoles interact with each other over fairly large distances, a good fraction of a micron, or 1,000 nanometres.

“This means we can now place the single-atom qubits much further apart than previously thought possible,” he continued. “So there is plenty of space to intersperse the key classical components such as interconnects, control electrodes and readout devices, while retaining the precise atom-like nature of the quantum bit.”

Source: Flip-flop qubits: Radical new quantum computing design invented

Antennas receive information by resonating with EM waves, which they convert into electrical voltage. For such resonance to occur, a traditional antenna’s length must roughly match the wavelength of the EM wave it receives, meaning that the antenna must be relatively big. However, like a guitar string, an antenna can also resonate with acoustic waves. The new antennas take advantage of this fact. They will pick up EM waves of a given frequency if its size matches the wavelength of the much shorter acoustic waves of the same frequency. That means that that for any given signal frequency, the antennas can be much smaller.

The trick is, of course, to quickly turn the incoming EM waves into acoustic waves. To do that, the two-part antenna employs a thin sheet of a so-called piezomagnetic material, which expands and contracts when exposed to a magnetic field. If it’s the right size and shape, the sheet efficiently converts the incoming EM wave to acoustic vibrations. That piezomagnetic material is then attached to a piezoelectric material, which converts the vibrations to an oscillating electrical voltage. When the antenna sends out a signal, information travels in the reverse direction, from electrical voltage to vibrations to EM waves. The biggest challenge, Sun says, was finding the right piezomagnetic material—he settled on a combination of iron, gallium, and boron—and then producing it at high quality.

The team created two kinds of acoustic antennas. One has a circular membrane, which works for frequencies in the gigahertz range, including those for WiFi. The other has a rectangular membrane, suitable for megahertz frequencies used for TV and radio. Each is less than a millimeter across, and both can be manufactured together on a single chip. When researchers tested one of the antennas in a specially insulated room, they found that compared to a conventional ring antenna of the same size, it sent and received 2.5 gigahertz signals about 100,000 times more efficiently, they report today in Nature Communications.

Source: Mini-antennas could power brain-computer interfaces, medical devices | Science | AAAS

The Debian advisory says affected users need to disable hyper-threading “immediately” in their BIOS or UEFI settings, because the processors can “dangerously misbehave when hyper-threading is enabled.”

Symptoms can include “application and system misbehaviour, data corruption, and data loss”.

Henrique de Moraes Holschuh, who authored the Debian post, notes that all operating systems, not only Linux, are subject to the bug.

Source: Intel’s Skylake and Kaby Lake CPUs have nasty microcode bug

Here’s hoping your mobo supplier releases a BIOS / UEFI update soon…

We present simple tongues consisting of fluorescent polyelectrolytes or chimeric green fluorescent proteins (GFPs) to discriminating 33 different whiskies according to their country of origin (Ireland, US, or Scotland), brand, blend status (blend or single malt), age, and taste (rich or light). The mechanism of action for these tongues is differential quenching of the fluorescence of the poly(aryleneethynylene)s or the GFPs by the complex mixture of colorants (vanillin, vanillic acid, oak lactones, tannins, etc.; the interactome) extracted from the oak barrels and added caramel coloring. The differential binding and signal generation of the interactomes to the polymers and proteins result from hydrophobic and electrostatic interactions. The collected quenching data, i.e., the response patterns, were analyzed by linear discriminant analysis. Our tongues do not need any sample preparation and are equal or superior to state-of-the-art mass spectrometric methods with respect to speed, resolution, and efficiency of discrimination.

A pioneering new technique that encourages the wonder material graphene to “talk” could revolutionise the global audio and telecommunications industries.

Researchers from the University of Exeter have devised a ground-breaking method to use graphene to generate complex and controllable sound signals. In essence, it combines speaker, amplifier and graphic equaliser into a chip the size of a thumbnail.

Traditional speakers mechanically vibrate to produce sound, with a moving coil or membrane pushing the air around it back and forth. It is a bulky technology that has hardly changed in more than a century.

This innovative new technique involves no moving parts. A layer of the atomically thin material graphene is rapidly heated and cooled by an alternating electric current, and transfer of this thermal variation to the air causes it to expand and contract, thereby generating sound waves.

Though the conversion of heat into sound is not new, the Exeter team are the first to show that this simple process allows sound frequencies to be mixed together, amplified and equalised – all within the same millimetre-sized device. With graphene being almost completely transparent, the ability to produce complex sounds without physical movement could open up a new golden generation of audio-visual technologies, including mobile phone screens that transmit both pictures and sound.

Source: Good vibrations no longer needed for speakers as research encourages graphene to talk

Researchers at the University of Science and Technology of China created a quantum device, called a boson sampling machine, that can now carry out calculations for five photons, but at a speed 24,000 times faster than previous experiments. Pan Jianwei, the lead scientist on the project, said that though their device was already (only) 10 to 11 times faster at carrying out the calculations than the first electronic digital computer, ENIAC, and the first transistor computer, TRADIC, in running the classical algorithm, their machine would eclipse all of the world’s supercomputers in a few years. “Our architecture is feasible to be scaled up to a larger number of photons and with a higher rate to race against increasingly advanced classical computers,” they said in the research paper published in Nature Photonics. This device is said to be the first quantum computer beating a real electronic classical computer in practice. Scientists estimate that the current faster supercomputers would struggle to estimate the behavior of 20 photons.

Ranasinghe and his team used an RGB colour sensor and a pH sensor to capture the colour and acidity of a freshly poured glass of lemonade. This data was sent to a special tumbler in another location that was filled with water. An electrode around the rim of the tumbler mimicked the sourness of the lemonade by stimulating the drinker’s taste buds with a pulse of electricity. LED lights replicated the colour.

Source: Virtual lemonade sends colour and taste to a glass of water | New Scientist

ntel’s new Optane memory is, according to Intel, an entirely new type of computer memory. It’s based on the 3D Xpoint memory architecture Intel announced back in July 2015. It’s as fast as the DRAM memory found in every computer used today, but as stable as the NAND memory found in the SSDs central to most of your pricier laptops.
[…]
And according to Intel, when its slotted into a computer alongside DRAM it speeds that computer up incredibly—giving you the kind of benefits traditionally only seen when you use a solid state drive. Intel claims computers power on twice as fast as they would without Optane, browsers launch five times faster, and games can launch up to 67 percent faster.

Intel Optane memory works as a kind of supercharger for a computer’s storage system. It doesn’t replace any components already in a computer. Instead it’s an add-on, clipped into the motherboard. In a computer’s processes Optane memory sits between the hard drive and the processor—remembering regularly accessed data, like RAM might, but retaining that information even when a program is closed or the computer is turned off.
[…]
Currently Optane memory will only be available for desktop computers with Kaby Lake processors and “Optane memory ready” motherboards (check the documentation for your motherboard to confirm)
[…]
For people who currently own a computer that’s Optane memory ready, it will fit into the M.2 slot on your motherboard—the same one currently used by the fastest solid state drives available, and as with DRAM memory, more is better. Optane memory will come in two sizes when it goes on sale April 24: 16GB ($44) and 32GB ($77).

Source: Intel Claims Its Magical New Memory Will Speed Your Computer Up for Cheap

IBM Q is an industry-first initiative to build commercially available universal quantum computers for business and science. While technologies like AI can find patterns buried in vast amounts of existing data, quantum computers will deliver solutions to important problems where patterns cannot be seen and the number of possibilities that you need to explore to get to the answer are too enormous ever to be processed by classical computers.

Source: IBM Q – US

Scientists have trained a quantum computer to recognize trees. That may not seem like a big deal, but the result means that researchers are a step closer to using such computers for complicated machine learning problems like pattern recognition and computer vision.

The team used a D-Wave 2X computer, an advanced model from the Burnaby, Canada–based company that created the world’s first quantum computer in 2007

Sciencemag.org

In a pilot starting in the north of the Netherlands, Weee Nederland is asking packet couriers to accept old electronics after delivering packages. Hopefully for recycling. If so, this sounds really good.

Pakketbezorger neemt oude apparaten mee

The availability of a universal quantum computer may have a fundamental impact on a vast number of research fields and on society as a whole. An increasingly large scientific and industrial community is working toward the realization of such a device. An arbitrarily large quantum computer may best be constructed using a modular approach. We present a blueprint for a trapped ion–based scalable quantum computer module, making it possible to create a scalable quantum computer architecture based on long-wavelength radiation quantum gates. The modules control all operations as stand-alone units, are constructed using silicon microfabrication techniques, and are within reach of current technology. To perform the required quantum computations, the modules make use of long-wavelength radiation–based quantum gate technology. To scale this microwave quantum computer architecture to a large size, we present a fully scalable design that makes use of ion transport between different modules, thereby allowing arbitrarily many modules to be connected to construct a large-scale device. A high error–threshold surface error correction code can be implemented in the proposed architecture to execute fault-tolerant operations. With appropriate adjustments, the proposed modules are also suitable for alternative trapped ion quantum computer architectures, such as schemes using photonic interconnects.

Source: Blueprint for a microwave trapped ion quantum computer

Backblaze has recorded and saved daily hard drive statistics from the drives in our data centers since April 2013. At the end of 2016 we had 73,653 spinning hard drives. Of that number, there were 1,553 boot drives and 72,100 data drives.

[…]

In 2016, three drives models ended the year with zero failures, albeit with a small number of drives. Both the 4 TB Toshiba and the 8 TB HGST models went the entire year without a drive failure. The 8 TB Seagate (ST8000NM0055) drives, which were deployed in November 2016, also recorded no failures.

The total number of failed drives was 1,225 for the year. That’s 3.36 drive failures per day or about 5 drives per workday, a very manageable workload. Of course, that’s easy for me to say, since I am not the one swapping out drives.

The overall hard drive failure rate for 2016 was 1.95%. That’s down from 2.47% in 2015 and well below the 6.39% failure rate for 2014.

Source: 2016 Hard Drive Reliabilty Benchmark Stats

It starts with the type of headset you need. You have PNR = passive noise reduction, ANR = active noise reduction and earpiece type headsets.

PNR relies on the shell and the seal (which is gel or foam [gel when broken will leak and requires a full replacement of the seal, foam will live through it. Apparently foam also works better around spectacles / sunglasses. Gel tends to offer slightly better noise cancellation]) to cancel the noise of the propeller. ANR send out noise cancellation signals to cancel the noise of the prop. These require batteries. The noise cancellation qualities are usually measured in db (eg 24 dB NRR)

Other differences are
* Are there volume buttons on one or both earpieces
* can you select mono / stereo? Usually you just want mono
* is there a music input for your ipod / phone
* bluetooth onboard?
* weight
* adjustability of the headband (NB large adjustable screws are prone to breakage and banging into stuff)
* material of the headband (you want metal, as it is more adjustable and less prone to breaking)
* quality and materiaal of the padding around the headband (for comfort)
* the quality of the speakers
* is it a fixed or adjustable boom for the mic
* the quality of the mic (how well the mic filters ambient noise and automatically starts transmitting when you start speaking)
* price

Some more information can be found in 2015 plane and pilot headset buyers guide

NB. If you get gel ear seals, make sure you get some protective covers: they will help save the gel seals and also keep your ears at a more comfortable temperature. The covers are very cheap and replacement ear seals are pretty expensive.

Apparently it’s better to have PNR than a poor ANR headset, poor ANR headsets are pretty disastrous.

Bose headsets are the absolute best in ANR, followed closely by Lightspeed. Prices vary from $ 800,- to $ 1300,-

In the PNR world, David Clark is the old world standard but they are quite expensive (and expensive!)

So the one I originally wanted was the Kore Aviation KA-1 $ 150,- with carrying case and foam ear seals. Unfortunately they wouldn’t ship to the Netherlands, so there was no way. (the ear covers are here)

In the end I bought the Rugged Air RA900 headset with ear covers. They retail at $199 but I found them at Mypilotstore for $165 I am very happy with these, even though the first set they delivered had a broken speaker lead. Rugged Radios replaced the entire unit quickly and hassle free and I have had no problems since. The mic picks up spoken words immediately and the speakers are high quality.

Finally you have child headsets in prices ranging from $ 80 to upwards. I quite like the Rugged Air RA250 Child’s Headset but it doesn’t have a flexible boom mike, which I think is a drawback.

There is also the possibility to turn any headset into a bluetooth compatible unit for streaming music or picking up phone calls with this bluetooth streamer for $24,-

Happy flying!

Graphene, which was heretofore, the strongest material known to man, is made from an extremely thin sheet of carbon atoms arranged in two dimensions. But there’s one drawback: while notable for its thinness and unique electrical properties, it’s very difficult to create useful, three-dimensional materials out of graphene.

Now, a team of MIT researchers discovered that taking small flakes of graphene and fusing them following a mesh-like structure not only retains the material’s strength, but the graphene also remains porous. Based on experiments conducted on 3D printed models, researchers have determined that this new material, with its distinct geometry, is actually stronger than graphene – making it 10 times stronger than steel, with only five percent of its density.

Source: MIT Unveils New Material That’s Strongest and Lightest On Earth

Since 2013, Backblaze has published statistics and insights based on the hard drives in our data center. You’ll find links to those reports below. We also publish the data underlying these reports, so that anyone can reproduce them. You’ll find an overview of this data and the download links further down this page.

Source: Hard Drive Test Data – Determining Failure Rates and More

The team, led by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, designed the minuscule transistor with a working one-nanometre gate – far surpassing any industry expectation for reducing transistor sizes. In the scientific study, MoS2 transistors with 1-nanometer gate lengths, published today in the journal Science, the researchers describe a prototype device which uses a novel semiconductor material known as transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs).

The transistor structure uses a single-walled carbon nanotube as the gate electrode and molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) for the channel material, rather than silicon.

‘The semiconductor industry has long assumed that any gate below 5 nanometers wouldn’t work, so anything below that was not even considered,’ explained study lead Sujay Desai.

transistor_schematic670‘This research shows that sub-5-nanometre gates should not be discounted. Industry has been squeezing every last bit of capability out of silicon. By changing the material from silicon to MoS2, we can make a transistor with a gate that is just 1 nanometer in length, and operate it like a switch,’ he added.

For comparison, a piece of paper is about 100,000 nanometres thick.

Source: Transistor smashes industry ‘limit’, measures just 1nm

what the researchers achieved was to sense movement finely enough to distinguish American Sign Language down the the digit level at better than 90 per cent; and better than 82 per cent for “single individual number text input”.
[…]
The researchers say the “micro motions” involved in finger gestures cause “a unique pattern in the time series of CSI values” (dubbed “CSI waveforms” in the paper), and those waveforms are unique to the gesture.
[…]
Right now, WiFinger imposes constraints on the user – rather like the gesture recognition on the Heart of Gold (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), it seems you have to “sit infuriatingly still” for the system to work.

Source: Text input from thin air: boffins give Wi-Fi the finger with AI

An open source, physically secure personal computer.

Source: ORWL – The First Open Source, Physically Secure Computer | Crowd Supply