The Switch Lite is selling incredibly well for Nintendo. The company revealed during its last quarterly report that it shipped 1.95 million Switch Lite consoles in the first ten days it was available. That compares well even against the Switch, which sold 2.74 million units in its first month on shelves when it launched in April 2017.
The Switch Lite’s performance is a bit surprising for two reasons: It’s a less expensive version of a new console, not a brand-new system, and the price difference between the two is not as large as some of the other consoles on the market. At $199, the Switch Lite is definitely cheaper than a $299 Switch, but it’s not an enormous difference. It’s also got a significant negative stacked up against it — JoyCon drift. JoyCon drift is a problem where JoyCon controllers begin to register ghost “input” that occurs with no one actually touching the controller. It’s completely separate from any calibration problem, and we know the Switch Lite suffers from it — reports of JoyCon drift on the Switch Lite began to surface almost as soon as the console launched.
But any fear that the drift problem might lead to sales problems was apparently wrong. Nintendo has racked up huge results for the console in just the first few weeks. Nintendo moved 4.8M Switch consoles this quarter and 1.95M of them were the Switch Lite. Game sales were up 48 percent thanks to the strong performance of titles like Link’s Awakening. The Switch family is projected to beat the SNES lifetime (49.1M units) and could even top the 61.91M units sold over the lifetime of the original NES. Super Mario Maker 2 (3.93M units), Fire Emblem: Three Houses (2.29M units) were the other two major titles called out for top performance this quarter.
It’s striking to see how strong the Switch is performing in comparison with the last major handheld that Nintendo launched. The 3DS had major problems at launch, with slow sales and a weak game lineup. A lot of articles were written about how mobile games and handheld titles were eating the entire market, and consoles like the 3DS might be a casualty of this process. I remember thinking that the 3DS could probably be flipped into a success, but that the console would be unlikely to repeat the DS’ success. That’s more-or-less how things played out for Nintendo, while Sony was driven out of the handheld market altogether.
Given the rocky situation for handhelds, you might have expected Nintendo to move away from them altogether. Instead, the company explored the concept in two stages, first with the Wii U’s handheld controller (which generally failed), and then with the Switch, which rather obviously hasn’t. It’s an interesting example of how Nintendo was willing to stick with a concept and polish it when other companies might have pulled the plug and gone back to building more conventional living-room hardware. Instead of treating the Wii U as if it failed because of the controller, Nintendo obviously decided that it failed because the controller wasn’t an independent gaming system capable of running the living room games people wanted to play while simultaneously providing on-the-go options.
Sony and Microsoft continue to cater to the more traditional gaming crowd, and Nintendo’s JoyCon drift problem is a severe issue that the company should fix whether its hardware is popular or not. But the Japanese firm has a knack for finding the right way to zig when others are zagging.
Don’t be afraid! Although it may be Halloween, the only thing terrifying about these deals is how terrifyingly good they are. Halloween is here, but if you’ve finished high-school chances are you aren’t going trick or treating this year. That doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the holiday! Grab some candy, and then pick yourself up a nicer treat like a new 2-in-1 laptop.
Dell designed this 2-in-1 laptop with a 13.3-inch 4K touch-screen display. The system also comes with a stylus, which is useful for taking handwritten notes and drawing images onscreen. Right now you can get it from Dell with a large discount that drops it from $1,398.99 to $799.99. Just use promo code DBLTINSP137 at checkout.
Sceptre built this 65-inch TV with a 4K panel that supports HDR. The TV also has a pair of 10W built-in speakers, and while it doesn’t have any smart features, it’s one of the least expensive 65-inch TVs on the market. Right now, it’s marked down from $899.99 to $379.99 from Walmart.
BenQ may not be a widely recognized brand, but that doesn’t mean the company doesn’t have what it takes to produce a high-quality gaming monitor. This display utilizes a curved 2K panel that can display up to 144 images each second. The screen also has support for HDR 400 and FreeSync 2. Right now it’s marked down from $699.99 to $399.99.
As SSDs steadily take over the storage market, the prices on HDDs just keep dropping. This rather high-end 2TB HDD has 256MB of cache that makes the drive more responsive. A few years ago this drive would have cost you considerably more, but right now it’s marked down to $49.99 from Amazon that makes it an excellent deal.
This inexpensive laptop features a quad-core AMD processor with a capable integrated graphics processor that’s able to run older games with medium settings. The system also comes with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage space. Right now it’s marked down from $449.00 to $329.00 at Walmart.
If you are like me, then you hate taking time out of your busy work and gaming schedule to clean up around your house. Although this device can’t fold your laundry and put it away for you, Eufy’s RoboVac 30 is a nifty little device that can help save you time by keeping your floors clean so that you don’t have to. With a powerful 1,500Pa suction vacuum built-in, this device will roam your home removing any dust, hair, or misc. other dirt that gets tracked in. It also has built-in Wi-Fi and can be controlled via your smartphone or by Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant voice commands. Currently, it’s marked down from $290.99 to just $199.99 from Amazon.
Note: Terms and conditions apply. See the relevant retail sites for more information.For more great deals, go to our partners at TechBargains.com.
Apple has released its long-awaited AirPods Pro upgrade with better microphones, a new in-ear design, and (finally) active noise cancelling. They also come with a much higher $250 price tag. One thing Apple has not improved is the repairability. iFixit has completed its customary teardown of the new AirPods, and they get the same score as the last version: a big, fat zero.
Apple has led the charge to make mobile devices thinner and lighter at the expense of repairability. The iPhone has never had so much as a removable battery, even back when Android and Windows Phone devices did. The AirPods were among the first true wireless earbuds on the market, and they’ve been wildly successful for Apple. However, they have been disposable pieces of technology since launch.
As iFixit points out, there’s nothing you can do if your Airpods Pro break — simply opening the glued-together casing will likely damage the hardware, and Apple doesn’t offer replacement parts. Even the silicone ear tips use a non-standard design that makes them incompatible with third-party replacements. Accessing the microphones also required iFixit’s engineers to cut through the stem’s plastic housing.
The battery is probably going to be the first thing to go, and you can’t replace that even if you manage to open the AirPods Pro. The AirPods Pro use a small button cell-style rechargeable battery, which is very similar to the one used in Samsung’s Galaxy Buds. iFixit found that you could replace the battery in the Galaxy Buds, but Apple has chosen to mount the battery with a soldered cable. So, you can’t realistically expect to replace that yourself.
Apple does offer a “battery service” program for the AirPods Pro, which gets you a new battery installed for $49 per earbud. If you needed to replace both batteries after a year or two, the $100 bill would be a significant chunk of the price for a new set of earbuds.
While we don’t necessarily expect super-small electronics like this to be easy to disassemble, the AirPods Pro are particularly tough to repair. Samsung’s Galaxy Bugs managed a six out of ten for repairability, which is better than some phones. The AirPods Pro get a zero, which isn’t a great look for a company that takes every opportunity to crow about how much renewable energy and recycled material it uses.
Ever since it introduced Android, Google has struggled to provide a camera framework for developers that allows them to both build camera-enabled apps quickly and take advantage of the advanced capabilities being offered by phone makers. Its first Camera API was limited, and the second version is complicated. Neither has a vendor-independent way to activate some of the advanced modes that have been added to phones for improving image quality and adding stylistic effects. Now, Google is launching CameraX, a library that provides not just a simplified way for developers to access Android’s Camera2 functionality, but provides extensions for additional capabilities.
CameraX Is a Simpler Way to Harness the Power of Camera2
CameraX is provided as a Jetpack support library, and the basic portion of its capability is usable on Android OS versions back to Android 5.0 (API level 21). Its wrappers provide a use-case-centric set of interfaces to Camera2, and add lifecycle awareness to help reduce programming overhead. Google also says it reduces device dependencies, so CameraX code should run across all types of hardware (there are also calls to ask whether a device has a particular capability like a front camera).
To work with CameraX a developer specifies a desired use case with configuration options. Listeners are then added to handle the data output by the CameraX library — which can be either in the form of a data stream or written directly to a file. Finally, the use cases are bound to Android Architecture Lifecycles, so that CameraX can handle some of the housekeeping associated with setup and teardown of resources for the application. One nice feature of CameraX is that multiple use cases can be run simultaneously, so a preview can remain live while images or video are analyzed and perhaps captured, for example.
CameraX previews are bound to surface textures
CameraX supports several use cases: Preview, to get an image on the display; Image analysis, to get direct access to the image buffer; and Image capture, to save a fully-processed image or video. Google provides several sample applications for various use cases. As is the recent trend, the ones I looked at are written in Kotlin with alternate Java versions.
After a few lines of setup, CameraX commands are fairly straightforward. For example, to simply capture an image from the camera, there is a takePicture() method. Prior to calling it, another simple call lets an application select which camera to use, or to set other parameters. As you’d expect, CameraX requires the app to have CAMERA permissions, and WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permission on versions of Android prior to Q if you want to capture directly to the file system.
Extending RAW Image Capture to Multi-frame Scenarios
It was a big advance in capability when Android phones started offering the option to save RAW images for later post-processing, instead of only allowing access to their pre-processed JPEG versions. But with smartphones increasingly relying on the sophisticated merging of multiple frames to create a single output, post-processing a single RAW frame isn’t always the best option. With CameraX, app developers can directly read the stream of frames coming from the camera. That’s important for applications like machine learning and artificial reality (AR). However, it is also a potential boon for those wanting to provide their own image processing pipelines — either on the device or later on a desktop computer or in the cloud.
CameraX Offers Extensions for HDR, Night, Portrait, and Beauty
One area that has made third-party camera apps less attractive is the difficulty they have harnessing the advanced computational imaging capabilities of newer-model smartphones. For devices that support CameraX extensions, applications can access their advanced modes including HDR, Night photography, Portrait mode, and Beauty enhancements with the simple addition of a few lines of code to an existing Camera2 application.
For an app to have access to an extension, the phone maker needs to add a hook to the CameraX library to the vendor’s own API. If a vendor doesn’t provide an implementation of a capability, CameraX just reports it as being unavailable. Currently, developers using the alpha version of CameraX can make use of extensions on the following phones:
Samsung (HDR, Night, Beauty, Auto): Galaxy Note 10 series (pictured, top)
(demonstrated at Samsung’s SDC19)
CameraX is currently in alpha, but it’s expected to get to beta status — meaning final APIs according to Google — in December. Samsung showcased its support for CameraX this week at its Software Developer Conference, and it co-hosted a session with Google on how developers can take advantage of both CameraX and its extensions on the latest Samsung phones.
Google’s DeepMind AI lab has contributed to some of the company’s most impressive AI feats in recent years such as the Wavenet voice engine and object recognition in Google Photos. DeepMind has also shown off its AI prowess by beating humans at games we never thought machines would be able to play. It started by besting the world’s best Go players, and then moved on to StarCraft II. The “AlphaStar” AI beat some of the world’s top players in early 2019, and now it’s playing online and crushing almost all challengers. DeepMind says AlphaStar is now the first AI to reach Grandmaster status in StarCraft II.
In January, DeepMind streamed matches between elite human players and the AlphaStar AI. During those matches, AlphaStar showed an incredible understanding of the game, rotating damaged units out of harm’s way, baiting enemies on ramps, and utilizing special abilities to cut enemy formations in half. AlphaStar beat almost all of its human opponents that day, and DeepMind has continued improving the AI in the months since.
The version of AlphaStar (or “agent”) playing online has undergone some changes that make it fairer to the human players. For example, the AI now only sees the section of the map in the main view, whereas before AlphaStar saw the entire map. It can also play and battle against all three races in StarCraft II (it was limited to Protoss before). Finally, DeepMind capped AlphaStar to a human-like 22 mouse clicks every five seconds.
Even with those limitations, AlphaStar has managed to rise through the ranks and is now at the Grandmaster level. That’s the highest tier in competitive StarCraft II gameplay. It can defeat 99.8 percent of human players, and it may only be a matter of time before it can crush all human challengers.
DeepMind decided to test its AI on StarCraft II because it’s a complex but endlessly strategic game. There are multiple paths to victory, and most players will tell you there’s a strong intuitive aspect to high-level StarCraft gameplay. DeepMind uses reinforcement learning to improve its AI, allowing AlphaStar to log years of game time every day by playing against different versions of itself. DeepMind believes that this same AI technology could one day have applications in robotics to improve motor control. Now, it’s just really good at pwning human StarCraft II players.
For the past few years, RISC-V CPUs have been making waves for themselves on the edges of computing. This open-source ISA has attracted attention for its flexibility and the royalty-free nature of the work; manufacturers and designers can contribute to the ISA and develop it to suit their own needs, as well as contributing back to the project. Up until now, however, all of the RISC-V cores have been in-order CPUs. Modern CPUs from ARM, Intel, and AMD use a technique known as out-of-order execution to improve performance. While these techniques used to be reserved for expensive desktop chips, years of process node improvements and power reductions have brought these techniques into play in mobile as well.
SiFive has deployed multiple CPU designs based on RISC-V already, but the U8 is the first to try and kick things up to competing with a design like ARM’s Cortex-A72. The goal is for the U8 to offer 1.5x performance per watt with 2x area efficiency and better design scalability overall, Anandtech reports.
The U8 is a three-issue out of order CPU core with a 12-stage pipeline, which feeds three execution units. The instruction queue can only issue three instructions, but the decoder is four-wide. Typically, fetch is wider than decode, so we’re seeing something of a reversal here. Tremont recently used this strategy as well, so perhaps we’re seeing something of a trend in microprocessor design — or a design aspect that SiFive went for deliberately as part of building a scalable chip.
The current plans for the chip call for two models, a U84 and a U87. The U87 will be available later in 2020 while the U84 is being finalized. U84 IP is currently running on FPGA platforms and should be commercialized in the not-too-distant future as well.
Overall performance is projected to be good against the A72 and should be competitive with ARM’s more recent chips as well. Whether it’ll be as good as estimated will have to wait for physical hardware to compare. SiFive will be building these chips on 7nm, so they’ll be on comparable process nodes to existing ARM-based chips. CPU clocks are said to be up to 2.6GHz, which is broadly comparable with where ARM chips are landing. I wouldn’t expect to see this kind of chip in smartphones — the amount of heavy lifting between SiFive and a phone is still enormous — but we could see them in more set-top boxes and embedded products.
AMD announced the highest quarterly revenue it has earned since 2005 this week, and the company took good advantage of the trend during the quarter. Sales were higher thanks to strong uptake for Ryzen 7nm parts and the launch of AMD’s Epyc 7nm CPUs, which debuted in August and were available for much of the quarter. Both AMD and Intel reported strong results for this past quarter, despite the drag of the ongoing Chinese trade war.
AMD reported revenue of $1.8B, up 9 percent quarter-on-quarter and 18 percent year-on-year, with a gross margin of 43 percent, up 3 percentage points. While AMD’s margins still lag Intel’s significantly, a three percentage point improvement in one quarter is significant. It’s AMD’s highest gross margin since 2012 and its highest quarterly revenue since 2005. Even more impressive, it hit that revenue record despite declining profits in the Enterprise, Embedded, and Semicustom business.
The decline in EESC isn’t surprising. Even as 7nm Epyc maneuvers for the runway, the PS4 and Xbox One are both seeing declining sales. The last year of a console’s life is always the roughest, and AMD will take a hit for that through the end of 2019 and into the first half of 2020. Six years ago, when it announced the terms of its console deals, AMD also told us that the deals were front-loaded, paying the highest profits early in the cycle and lower rates as it drew to a close. This explains some of the decline in earnings in EESC as well. Epyc’s momentum is ramping, but AMD doesn’t have much server market share yet.
Other encouraging trends include higher average selling prices (ASPs) driven by higher Ryzen desktop sales and strong demand for AMD’s top-end Ryzen products. Revenue grew 36 percent year-on-year and quarter-on-quarter, which is an exceptional overall growth trajectory. According to AMD, Epyc processor revenue and unit shipments grew more than 50 percent sequentially. AMD CEO Lisa Su said:
We expect server revenue to grow sequentially by a strong double-digit percentage in the fourth quarter, as we continue ramping our second-generation EPYC processors. We remain on track to achieve our near-term goal of double-digit server CPU share by mid next year.
AMD expects to break $2B in revenue in Q4 2019, “an increase of 48 percent year-over-year and 17 percent sequentially.” This is despite the fact that semicustom is expected to continue to decline. In retrospect, AMD couldn’t have hoped for better timing as regards its server business. From 2012 to 2017, the PS4 and Xbox One basically kept AMD alive, injecting billions in revenue at a time when the company desperately needed it. Now, as the PS4 and Xbox One wind down, Epyc is already winding up, taking some of the sting out of that inevitable sales cycle. By the time the PS5 and Xbox Next launch in 2020, Epyc will be firing on all thrusters.
It’s clear that EESC will be the segment to watch 12 months from now. The combined impact of two console launches and improved server sales should drive significant revenue improvements in this segment. Intel’s own Q3 2019 was record-breaking, but both companies are openly acknowledging that the space between them is much more competitive than it used to be. But this is what the restoration of competition promised between the two companies, and it’s what we’re seeing today. AMD’s fortunes are improving. It’s paying down long term debt and improving its own net cash position. Long-term debt has fallen from $1.7B in Q4 2017 to roughly $1.1B today.
Unlimited data on mobile networks used to be the norm when you couldn’t use very much of it because of sluggish devices and speeds. Metered data was all the rage for a while but has since been supplanted by unlimited data plans. Are they really unlimited, though? Over the past few years, the big four US carriers have been working to twist the definition of the word “unlimited” until it has no meaning. AT&T may have finally succeeded with its new plans that determine when the carriers will throttle your connection to unusably slow speeds.
AT&T’s new data plans come in three flavors. At the bottom is the Unlimited Starter for $65 per month. Next up is Unlimited Extra for $75, and AT&T’s top of the line is Unlimited Elite for $85 monthly. Naturally, all the plans have pricing breaks if you add more than one line.
All of AT&T’s plans have a suspicious number of limits for an unlimited plan, but the entry-level option is particularly galling. With Unlimited Starter, you get full speed LTE and SD-only video for as long as AT&T thinks you should. The carrier can, at any time, start “deprioritizing” your data. That means your LTE connection will drop to sub-3G speeds, making many services unusable. There’s also no hotspot data included with the Unlimited Starter plan.
The next step up is closer to the experience we’re accustomed to on other carriers. With Unlimited Extra, you get LTE speeds until you’ve used 50GB in a billing cycle. Then, you’re throttled for the rest of the month. You get 15GB of hotspot data on this plan, but video is still SD. Unlimited Elite boosts the deprioritization threshold to 100GB, and there’s 30GB of hotspot data. You do get HD video on this plan, though.
AT&T previously offered a free subscription to Spotify, HBO, or a handful of other services with its unlimited plans. Now, you only get that with Unlimited Elite, and HBO is your only option. However, AT&T will throw in access to the upcoming HBO Max streaming service.
Even in the context of fake-unlimited data plans, these plans seem to have a whole lot of limits. The three plan levels with different deprioritization caps just seem a lot like the tiered data caps of years past. AT&T Unlimited Starter and Unlimited Extra launch on November 3rd, and Unlimited Elite will launch later.
After decades of only minor changes, the last few years have brought us an onslaught of high-tech updates to traditional cooking devices. Among those have been a variety of smart ovens and connected thermometers. As someone who cooks dinner almost every night, I can both appreciate how useful more technology can be in the kitchen, but also that it can sometimes just make life more complicated. So I set out to test the Cinder Grill ($429) and Meater’s completely wireless thermometers ($69-$269) with that in mind. Would they make life easier for a tech-enthusiast cook, and would they produce better results than the devices they aim to replace?
Cinder Is a Cool Name for a Grill, but What Does It Do?
When you first see a Cinder Grill it is hard not to think of the George Foreman grill. But the Cinder is light years ahead of the Foreman. Yes, it is a grill (technically, more of a griddle or “flattop” since it has flat surfaces), but it is a high-precision and versatile version. You can dial in just about any temperature, and use either one or both cooking surfaces. Speaking of which, the surface isn’t huge, so like the Foreman, you’re constrained to how much you can cook at once. I found I could cook four eggs or four burgers at once, but either filled the entire 9-inch by 10-inch grilling surface.
Cinder Promises Sous-Vide Without the Water
I’ve been using a thermal bath and vacuum-sealed bags to help get meat and fish cooked to a precise temperature for 15 years because the results are excellent. The trick is that the water bath is held at a specific temperature so that your food can’t get hotter than that — meaning you won’t overcook or burn it. However, it’s a bit of a cumbersome process, and the resulting texture and color aren’t typically appetizing, especially for steaks. So an additional step of patting the meat dry and searing it is needed (aka a reverse sear).
The Cinder Grill provides a remarkably evenly-heated cooking surface as shown using this thermal image from a FLIR ONE Pro camera.
The Cinder grill replaces the water bath with carefully heated heavy metal plates. A set of three high-tech heating coils under both a top and bottom plate allows you to control the temperature of the grill surface precisely. At least that’s what Cinder and a control knob calibrated to the nearest degree promised. I wanted to check for myself, so I used my FLIR ONE Pro to measure the surface temperature of the grill plates when I had the control set to 350 degrees. While it wasn’t perfect, the Cinder did a much better job than most grills. The middle third or so of the lower grill was within a degree of 350 (at least as measured by the FLIR), and most of the rest — except for the extreme corners — was within about 10 degrees. That compares well with a typical grill or oven, where temperatures can vary 20 to 40 degrees with time or across the cooking surface.
The Cinder Grill makes it a cinch to cook a perfect steak — simply pick your desired temperature for the doneness you want, and then use the Sear mode to get a great crust.
For its next trick, the Cinder can also sear. So you can accomplish both the initial cook of your food to the correct temperature, and then sear it. Cinder makes that a simple process. Simply take your food off, turn the temperature knob to sear, wait for it to heat up, and then put your food back on. If you want both sides seared, as you would for a steak, close the grill so both the top and bottom plates will be used, and then press the knob. The Cinder will do a 45-second countdown for you, which is just about the right amount of time for searing most meat and some fish.
The Cinder Also Makes an Accurate and Convenient Griddle
While some stoves come with a grill/griddle burner, most of them aren’t that accurate. If you have room for it on your counter, Cinder is a nice alternative. You can simply dial in the temperature you want — I taped the temperature chart from the Hester Cue on a cabinet over my review Cinder — and cook up anything you can make on a traditional flattop. I had great success with grilled cheese sandwiches, Reuben sandwiches, Smashburgers (using Cinder’s recipe), fried eggs, toast, and bacon.
In this mode, you are back to the standard cooking practice of checking your food for doneness and making sure it doesn’t burn. If it is thick enough to tolerate a thermometer I found that the Meater wireless probes worked perfectly. I loved that I could use them even with the Cinder closed, and not worry about wire leads needing to snake out between the very hot plates.
Comparing the Cinder and the Brava
The Cinder reminded me initially of the Brava smart oven that I reviewed last year, in particular, because they both claim to make it easy to cook a perfect steak. But after using it for a while, it’s clear they serve quite different purposes (once you get past the fact that they both do an excellent job of cooking steaks). The Brava lets you cook several elements of a meal at once, and can often do that automatically, without you needing to do more than prep and load the food according to directions, and then use the touch screen to pick out what you’re cooking. So the Brava is without question an excellent labor-saving device.
If you’re cooking a steak, or something similar, the Cinder can also save you a lot of labor (I don’t say time, because the process isn’t any faster than sous-vide and sear, and slower than the simple throw-it-in-a-skillet approach). But for most foods, the promise isn’t less work; it’s a better and more repeatable result.
Brava also has a very large array of recipes for ingredients and combinations, along with tons of videos. Cinder has a few recipes, a few videos, and a depressingly sparse food guide. That’s an area where I think they need to really step up their efforts, as I was often stuck with trial and error when cooking something they didn’t have instructions for. The Cinder also has more trouble handling either delicate fish (if you cook with the lid down to get the full effect, it squeezes the fish) and uneven-width ingredients (for example bone-in short ribs) as the top can’t heat them evenly.
On the other hand, the Brava is more than twice as expensive as the Cinder ($1,095 for the Brava versus $429 for the Cinder) and can’t be used as a traditional cooking surface. Both are fairly small and unlikely to replace the need for a traditional oven or stove or even microwave. However, either can certainly replace a toaster oven and take up about the same room on your counter. Note that both are heavy, so they are not something you’re going to want to pull out when you use it and put away afterward.
Meater: The First Truly Wireless Remote Food Thermometer
Meater block with four wireless probes
Whatever technology you use to cook perfect meat and fish — whether it is a skillet, a grill, a smoker, or a sous-vide bath — accurate temperature measurement is vital. If you’re a pro, like my friend who owns our local restaurant, you can tell the doneness of a steak by comparing it with the softness of the skin on your hand. But if you’re like most of us, a fast-reading digital thermometer is the way to go. It’s also your best option for getting consistent results with trickier foods like poultry and fish. And of course, if you’re cooking in a smoker, you need a way to know what’s going on without frequently opening the lid.
Traditionally, there have been a couple of types of digital thermometers for food. One is a hand-held probe that you can stick directly into the food. I keep one of those near our stove and another near our outdoor grill. They’re simple and don’t need any wires. Then there are thermometers that use wired probes. They range from entry-level models, such as Weber’s iGrill, to more sophisticated versions like the excellent Fireboard 6-probe model. These now offer internet connectivity, but you wind up having to deal with untangling and routing the wires each time you use them.
So-called wireless thermometers before Meater still required wires to their probes, and they required separate probes for measuring ambient and food temperatures. Meater addressed both of these issues with a unique wireless probe that measures the food temperature at the point and the ambient temperature at the back end where the electronics live. The probes use Bluetooth to talk to a nicely designed wood base. You can either read the temperatures directly from the base’s display or have it connect to Wi-Fi so that you can monitor it from your mobile phone.
Cooking With a Meater Thermometer
To be honest, I have put off looking at Meater because I really didn’t think it would work with the probes in a large Faraday cage as with my pellet smoker. Much to my surprise, the probes worked great in it. They also worked well when I sealed them up with a steak I was cooking sous-vide in a thermal bath, and when I stuck them into a steak I was cooking in the Cinder Grill. The probes are limited to an ambient temperature of 527F (higher temps can damage them), so I’ve been nervous about trying them in my Brava oven.
The MEATER worked perfectly when I used it with my Memphis Advantage pellet cooker.
The Meater probes recharge by being placed in their base, and in turn, the base is powered by AA batteries. I’m used to similar devices recharging over USB, but it is easy enough to use rechargeable AA batteries instead. When I first got the Meater system for review, I found it hard to tell the probes apart (they have a tiny number 1-4 on their rear end), but shortly after that Meater sent out small metal number tags ($8 on their site), and now it’s easy. The only other small thing I found tricky is that the probes need to be inserted a couple of inches into the food. For large items, that’s easy. But in some cases like sausages or chicken thighs, it can take a little doing.
Overall, I really like the Meater system. When it first launched, Meater was pretty expensive, but the company has done a good job of providing some value-priced options. You can get a single probe plus a base without a display and with a 33-foot range for $69, or a 165-foot range version with a Bluetooth repeater for $99. The unit we reviewed has four probes, Wi-Fi, and a display, and sells for $269. So you’re definitely paying a premium over wired units like the iGrill, but you’re getting the convenience of no wires and having two sensors in each probe.
A 5G millimeter wave cell site in Minneapolis on a light pole.
5G technology is in the early stages of deployment in the United States and around the world. Here in the US, where 5G is being used at very high wavelengths (mmWave), the technology isn’t very good. Early service areas are very small and the range is terrible. Verizon has already admitted that its 5G network service is unlikely to deliver any significant benefits for rural users. There are a lot of reasons to be skeptical of 5G, even though the wireless industry is committed to painting the opposite picture.
But one thing 5G doesn’t do. It does not cause cancer. Scientific American is the latest to weigh in on this issue, following its own publication of an op/ed in which a public health and safety regulator called for further investigation of the potential health hazards of 5G. As Scientific American explains at length, the entire EM spectrum can be divided into two types: Ionizing and non-ionizing radiation.
Everything that kills you is on the right. Everything we use for communication in this context is on the left. Image via Wikipedia
Put simply, ionizing radiation kills you. Non-ionizing radiation doesn’t. There is a reason why we do not stand cancer patients in front of a 5G cell phone for 30 minutes, then declare them cured. It’s because 5G mmWave signals struggle to penetrate solid objects. Frankly, 5G range is lousy even in the open air. The reason we don’t stand cancer patients in front of an unshielded operational nuclear reactor for 30 seconds and declare them cured is that they would die of radiation poisoning. The difference between those two timeframes and outcomes is, at heart, the reason why 5G phones are completely safe to carry in your pocket while unshielded nuclear reactors are not.
Every frequency range that we use for cellular communication is in the non-ionizing part of the EM spectrum. This includes the 28GHz and 39GHz frequencies considered for mmWave 5G. Some of the other frequency bands for 5G are identical to bands we’ve already used for various wireless communication systems (spectrum assignments vary by country, so I can’t provide a universal breakdown, but there’s overlap with other, previous standards and spectrum allocations).
The studies that have come out that claim to find relationships between cellular exposure and lifespan or tumor rates in animals have all been badly compromised by poor quality controls. Proponents of these studies and the scareism around 5G often deliberately neglect to mention that the studies are effectively worthless. In one major example, a 2018 paper by the National Toxicology Program claimed to find evidence that rats exposed to high-RF fields used in 5G developed cancer. The problem is, the rats exposed to the high-RF field also lived longer than the rodents in the control group. Does this mean that high RF signals actually cause long life spans in rats? It does not. But a study with data showing that high RF fields cause long life in rats is a study with an obvious methodological problem. The 2018 report and others like it have been exhaustively deconstructed and criticized by publications like ScienceBasedMedicine and Ars Technica.
As Scientific American notes, the number of people using mobile phones has risen from essentially zero to basically the entire planet over the past 30+ years, yet no well-conducted study has found evidence of any health risks associated with mobile devices, beyond those caused by absentmindedly walking into a bus. This is less a joke that it might seem; cell phones are associated with the increase in pedestrian deaths in recent years. Long-term studies of radar workers don’t show an increased incidence of cancer, and radar workers absorb far more energy than anyone with a typical cell phone.
In 2019, I view 5G as a beautiful example of a worthless technology. Companies want you to care about 5G so they can sell you stuff. Realistically, I doubt 5G will be a practical benefit before 2022 or later, and it may never be a practical benefit to large sections of the United States. That’s reason enough to ignore the entire industry, at least for now. But there’s currently no known reason to avoid 5G based on medical data.
Studies to measure the impact of cell phone usage on the human body have been going on for decades in 13 countries. The reason you periodically hear about badly designed studies showing harm is not because any credible evidence of harm has been unearthed. In every case, the studies that claim to have found strong evidence of harm have failed to hold up under further analysis.
Do I believe we should continue to study these questions? I absolutely do. But I also believe in clearly communicating the findings from the methodologically rigorous studies that continue to show no links between cancer and cellular communications. 5G may drain your wallet and your battery. There is currently no credible evidence supporting a link between 5G and cancer.
DJI is the undisputed leader in the consumer drone market, with products running the gamut from a few hundred to thousands of dollars. Few people will jump right into drones with a $2,000 unit, so the entry-level is important. DJI is hoping to attract more drone pilots with the new DJI Mavic Mini. It’s less expensive than the company’s other drones, and it’s small enough that you don’t need a federal license to fly it.
The Mavic Mini isn’t DJI’s first foray into the world of entry-level drones. The company previously launched the Spark, an aircraft that started at about $500. The Mavic Mini costs a bit less at $400 — plus it’s more capable and easier to take with you. Unlike the Spark, the Mavic Mini folds up for transport, and it weighs just 249g. The low mass makes flight time impressive, too. DJI says the Mavic Mini can remain airborne for about 30 minutes. That’s on-par with the more expensive Mavic quadcopters and much more than the Spark. That drone topped out around 15 minutes of flight time.
The weight is important for another reason. The Mavic Mini is exactly 1 gram under the limit for federal registration. That means you can unbox and start flying the Mavic Mini without getting a license from the FAA. That license only costs $5, but it’s still nice to be able to skip that step for first-time pilots.
DJI has seen fit to include a controller with the Mavic Mini, another notable upgrade over the Spark. You will still have to use your smartphone to view the video feed, but the controller has a mount built-in. The controller will make it easier to keep the drone stable, which is good because the Mavic Mini doesn’t come with rotor guards (those cost extra). It also has a range of up to 2.5 miles.
As an entry-level drone, the Mavic Mini doesn’t have all the advanced camera features of the company’s more expensive products. The drone can record 2.7K video, but there’s no 4K option. The frame rate is also locked at 30fps — there’s no cinematic 24 fps option like you’d get on Phantom or Mavic Air.
The DJI Mavic Mini is available for pre-order today, and it should ship on November 11th. The base model costs $399, and $100 more gets you some spare batteries, replacement rotors, rotor guards, and a case.
This inexpensive laptop with its dual-core processor and 8GB of RAM offers solid performance for everyday home tasks like web browsing and school work. Lenovo claims this system should also be able to last up to 8.5 hours on a single charge. Right now it’s marked down from $449.00 to $279.00 at Walmart.
This version of Dell’s Alienware Aurora pairs a fast AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics card that’s able to run today’s latest games with the highest graphics settings. The system also has an Intel Core i7-9700K processor that comes overclocked from Dell to run at 4.6GHz on all CPU cores. This system typically retails for $1,869.99, but you can get it from Dell today for just $1,199.99.
If you are like me, then you hate taking time out of your busy work and gaming schedule to clean up around your house. Although this device can’t fold your laundry and put it away for you, Eufy’s RoboVac 30 is a nifty little device that can help save you time by keeping your floors clean so that you don’t have to. With a powerful 1,500Pa suction vacuum built-in, this device will roam your home removing any dust, hair, or misc. other dirt that gets tracked in. Currently, it’s marked down from $269.99 to just $199.99 from Amazon.
This AIO desktop utilizes laptop-based components including an Intel Core i5-8265U processor to give you energy efficient computer that fits behind the computer’s 23.8-inch 1080p touchscreen display. The system is also relatively inexpensive marked down from Dell from $858.99 to $549.99 with promo code PUN24RETAFF1.
Measuring just 9.7-inches diagonally with a LED backlit IPS display, this is one of Apple’s smallest tablets currently on the market. It also features a fast A10 64-bit processor and can last up to 10 hours on a single charge. You can get it now from Walmart marked down from $429.99 to $299.00.
Apple’s new AirPods Pro utilizes a new design that’s different from the company’s older AirPod headphones. The key new feature that these headphones have is active noise cancellation. The headphones also use a custom driver and they utilize a high dynamic range amplifier to improve sound quality. The headphones are available starting today for $249.00.
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We’ve seen engineers design some truly amazing robots that can walk, run, and even jump, but not all robots need to be so elaborate. MIT researchers have created a fleet of tiny robotic cubes that can move around and interact with each other autonomously. An individual “M-Block” robot is simple and not very useful, but if you bring the fleet together, they can link up to form new shapes and structures.
The M-Blocks were designed at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) under the supervision of professor and CSAIL Director Daniela Rus. The project started back in 2013 with the aim of designing a more scalable robotic system that doesn’t rely on complex movement mechanisms. The team started working with so-called “inertial forces” to move their 6-sided robots around, and that eventually led to the M-Blocks.
Each cube-shaped robot has a flywheel that moves at 20,000 revolutions per minute. The robot applies a brake to the flywheel when it needs to move, harnessing the angular momentum to roll and hop across a surface. Each side also has permanent magnets that help it connect to other M-Blocks, and small barcodes on the faces help the robots identify each other.
The M-Blocks might not be as quick to reach a destination compared with a wheeled or walking robot. They can only move in one of the four cardinal directions but can do so from any of their six faces. That’s a total of 24 different movement directions. The cubes also have to launch themselves at each other and rely on the magnets to straighten out the collisions. Luckily, they can cover a lot of ground with each leap and can even climb up “walls” composed of other M-Blocks.
This simpler method of locomotion brings several advantages to the M-Block program. The individual robots are inexpensive and easy to produce because there are fewer moving parts. They’re also less likely to accumulate damage or need maintenance compared with more complicated robots with actuators to control limbs. The team believes this design is more scalable and could potentially reach as many as a million modules.
Rus envisions networks of M-Blocks that can work together to become whatever you need in a given situation. For example, M-Blocks could link up to become a temporary staircase to allow access to a building damaged by fire. Currently, the M-Blocks can only form simple shapes, but improved algorithms and communication between the blocks could help them perform more advanced tasks.
If you’re interested in working in the increasingly lucrative world of web and app development, knowing how to code is an absolute must. But knowing just one or two programming languages is no longer enough to get your foot in the door.
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Microsoft is in the process of testing its xCloud game streaming service, but that’s not the only way to get your Xbox games on more devices. The company has also launched a test of its new Xbox game streaming service. This streaming option has more hardware requirements, but it won’t require subscribing to a whole new service.
Microsoft’s xCloud relies on a server someplace online to render games and stream the video to your devices. The upshot there is you don’t need to have an Xbox running to play Xbox games. The new Xbox Console Streaming feature does require you to have an Xbox One, and that piece of hardware does all the rendering and streaming. If you already have a big game library, that could make your streaming experience much better.
Currently, the Xbox Console Streaming test is available to Xbox Insiders in the Alpha and Alpha Skip-Ahead rings, but only those in the US and UK. Once enabled, the streaming test lets you load up and render your library of games on the Xbox One you already have, and the console streams to your mobile device.
You will need a few things in addition to the Xbox in order to enjoy Console Streaming. Microsoft says your home internet needs at least 4.75 Mbps of upload (9 Mbps preferred) and 125 ms or less of latency (50 ms or less preferred). The Xbox needs to be configured for instant-on and connected to your network via an Ethernet cable — every little bit of latency counts in situations like this.
Your console will tell you if something isn’t working.
The game streaming preview only works on Android devices running 6.0 Marshmallow or higher. You’ll also need a wireless Xbox controller with Bluetooth support. Microsoft also strongly suggests you pick up a controller mount for your phone. On the phone side, you need at least 4.75 Mbps down, but Microsoft still says 10 Mbps is preferable.
Interestingly, Microsoft doesn’t mention anything about the local network conditions, and that suggests it won’t support direct streaming when you’re at home. It’s targeting game streaming to your phone while you’re out in the world. So, you might not get any latency benefits while you’re on your home network.
Microsoft will expand the test to more regions and testing groups down the road. First, it wants to see how it works for Insiders.
is definitely cheaper than a $299 Switch, but it’s not an enormous difference. It’s also got a significant negative stacked up against it — JoyCon drift. JoyCon drift is a problem where JoyCon controllers begin to register ghost “input” that occurs with no one actually touching the controller. It’s completely separate from any calibration problem, and we know the Switch Lite suffers from it — reports of JoyCon drift on the Switch Lite began to surface almost as soon as the console launched.
