HARD TECHNOLOGY GROUP HTG NEWS TIPS

You know what can teach you Braille and piano a lot more quickly than traditional means? Vibrating gloves, or gloves with haptic feedback, if you will. In fact, IEEE Spectrum senior editor David Schneider was so intrigued by the idea, that he put together his own version to serve as a haptic touch-typing tutor for his 11-year-old son. He admits that his gloves (made using transistors, $14 worth of vibration motors purchased from eBay and long cords connecting them to an Arduino Nano board) aren't as sleek as Georgia Tech's piano-teaching ones. But, hey, they worked, and once he created a program to go along with them, they did their job well enough. Schneider's program displays one among the 100 most common English words at random on screen -- it does so one letter at a time, sending vibrations to the right finger as the letters appear. Not bad for something he merely cobbled together. But (as he realized later on), the program would've been a lot more fun and effe...

What good is having an ultra-powerful PC if you're still connecting it to a dusty old monitor? We reckon doing so would be pretty silly. Good thing that alongside the new Alienware Area 51, Dell's pulled the curtain back on its 34-inch Ultrasharp U3415W display then. It boasts a wider-than-widescreen 21:9 aspect ratio that's paired with 3,440 x 1,440 lines of resolution (just under 4K's 3,840 x 2,160) and a curved screen. Dell says that the monitor's wide field of view mated with its curves will give gamers a leg up on the competition because, compared to flat monitors, less eye movement is needed to take advantage of the player's peripheral vision. Intrigued to test that claim? You can do so come this December. We're hoping that regardless of size, though, a curved screen doesn't necessarily equate to an expensive screen -- Dell hasn't announced pricing for these displays just yet. SOURCE

Pizza is essentially the perfect food. Well, so long as you aren't lactose intolerant or have problems with gluten. We realize that those are pretty big caveats, but stay with us for a second -- it'll be worth it: NPR spotted a study of why different cheeses diverge in looks and taste when baked. Seriously. In a paper called "Quantification of Pizza Baking Properties of Different Cheeses, and Their Correlation with Cheese Functionality," researchers found that, among other things, the reason why mozzarella is so unique of a topping has to do with the way it's prepared. The cheese bubbles and browns because of its inherent elasticity due to stretching. In contrast, cheddar isn't as ideal because it isn't very elastic, thus it doesn't bubble as well. The same apparently goes for Edam and Gruyere, too. Lest you think this paper was just an excuse for the scientists to eat lots of pizza (maybe it was), they claim that by understanding why foods behave...

Despite all the changes going on in automobiles lately, one thing that's remained pretty consistent in every car I've driven has been the rearview mirror. We can check that one off now though, now that I've taken a test drive in a Nissan Rogue equipped with the new Smart rearview mirror. Due to roll out on the company's cars in North America next year, it's a simple augmentation that combines a traditional mirror with a video screen. Flipping the dimmer switch usually meant for night driving drops you into video camera mode, with a feed streamed directly from a 1.3MP camera mounted in the trunk that drops out the usual blockages from the car's interior for a clear view of what's behind you. Back up cameras are already common -- and highly necessary if you have my (lack of) parallel parking skills -- but is it time to change out something that's worked pretty well for the last century or so? KEEP IT READING!

Jonesing for a taste of the HTC One M8 lifestyle but don't have the cash to make it happen? Never fear -- Sprint has just started offering the fantastic-in-plastic HTC One E8 to customers who want M8 horsepower without the matching price tag. No, really: in case you've forgotten, the E8 features the exact same screen, BoomSound speakers, processor and RAM as its slightly upmarket brother. The only real difference is that the E8 only comes with 16GB of internal storage (which is mitigated pretty nicely by its microSD card slot) and the fact that HTC ditched the Duo camera setup in favor of a more traditional 13-megapixel sensor 'round the back. In the event that your gear acquisition syndrome just started flaring up, you can lay claim to your very own E8 (in either white or gray) for $400 outright, $0 down and $20.84/month for 2 years with Sprint's Easy Pay option, or $99 with a standard 2 year contract. SOURCE

HTC's Desire lineup often lives in the shadow of the One and Butterfly series, primarily because most of them are designed to appeal to budget-minded phone buyers. The company's been cranking out a lot of them this year (the 816, 616, 516, 610, 310 and 210, to name a few), and HTC isn't done adding more to the list. Its next phone is the Desire 510. Its claim to fame is that it's the least expensive -- er, "most affordable" -- LTE-capable phone the Taiwanese manufacturer has produced to date. Sadly, we weren't given any pricing details, but it likely varies by region. The 4.7-inch device should be available in markets worldwide, including Europe, Asia and the US (HTC confirmed that the device will be sold on Sprint, Boost Mobile, Virgin Mobile and Cricket). The 510 will begin selling in some markets in September, but we'll have to wait for each region to offer more specific launch details. Along with its affordability comes basic hardware componen...

Yes, people, this isn't a dream. What you see above is, indeed, a 3D-printed castle. After working on it for a few months, an architect from Minnesota has now finished building a fancy home made out of 3D printing materials. The man behind it, Andrey Rudenko, began his construction adventure back in April, when he decided he wanted to be the one to set a new bar for 3D-printed homes -- there have been some in China, but questions have been raised about the quality of them. "It has been two years since I first began toying with the idea of a 3D printer that was capable of constructing homes," Rudenko told the site 3DPrint. "When I started out, people struggled to believe this project would progress any further." Well, its very real now, and we can only imagine how dazzling it looks in person. KEEP IT READING

Is your Wesnesday evening missing a sense of ambiguous mystery? We've got something for you: Cyanogen and a start-up named Nextbit are working on "something really cool" for mobile devices, but won't say a word about what it actually is. Nextbit has been around for awhile, but its goals are nebulous at best. "The future of mobile is just getting started," its website reads. "We're building the groundbreaking technology that will take it to the next level." Cyanogen's partnership with the company was only just announced today, and it brings precious little information to the table -- offering only a survey suggesting that testers for the mysterious project may need to wipe their device (preferably a Nexus 5 or Nexus 7) to participate. Still, the partnership shows that Nextbit is finally gaining traction, and whatever it's working on may become public soon. The company is expanding its talent base, too -- remember that undetermined p...

Grab someone in the street and ask them about Imagination Technologies and they're more likely to run away than tell you that it's the company that designs the graphics chips for Apple's mobile devices. The company is more than just the home of PowerVR, however, and bought MIPS in order to become a direct rival to ARM, its more famous UK chip-design neighbor. Now, the company has decided to produce a Raspberry Pi-style development board in the hope of taking MIPS mainstream, describing it as "Raspberry Pi on steroids." Aside from the differences in hardware and chip architecture between the two devices, there's one big change in approach: Imagination Technologies is giving its board away for free. The romantically-named MIPS Creator CI20 is a barebones board that's capable of running Linux distros like Debian 7, as well as Android 4.4, and measures 90.2mm by 95.3mm. The hardware is packing a 1.2GHz MIPS32 CPU, 1 GB RAM and a PowerVR SGX540 GPU - the sa...

Yup, that's the question... If anyone have a better suggestion, feel free to contact me luigivsf@hotmail.com or luigivsf@gmail.com Thanks!

Since Windows Phone's humble beginnings, Microsoft has been the underdog in the wireless industry. Four years later, nothing's changed -- except, perhaps, a few more percentage points of market share. Even then, it's got a long way to go before catching up to Android and iOS. Let's give the company credit for pushing forward, improving its platform and not giving up, though: When I reviewed the last major OS update, I said I could finally use Windows Phone as my daily driver. The one element that Microsoft continued to lack, however, was buy-in from large phone makers. They put more focus on Android products, which meant anyone interested in Windows Phone had a small selection of devices to choose from. For Microsoft, it's time to experiment with a new, simpler approach. The software giant has buddied up with HTC to convert the One M8, its Android flagship, into a Windows Phone. That's all there is to it. There's absolutely no change to the hardware -- ...

Los Angeles' grand dreams of putting iPads in schools came into question a month ago, and they've now come to a screeching halt. Superintendent John Deasy has suspended a contract with Apple to both "take advantage of an ever-changing marketplace" (read: diversify hardware) and, crucially, to investigate recently raised ethical concerns. Allegedly, both Deasy and a top deputy have close links to executives at both Apple and curriculum provider Pearson, calling the whole iPad program into question; it suggests that officials were doing personal favors rather than taking kids' needs into account. Deasy is quick to claim that his team was only working closely with Apple and Pearson on the pilot, not the contract, and offered a deal to another major vendor. Whether or not that's true, the suspension suggests that the vision of an iPad in every LA classroom may never come to pass -- it's more likely that the broader device selection is here to stay. SOURC...

Here is a small tutorial that will help you increase the period of use of the DualShock 4 before needing to recharge it. The only negative point with the new controller from Sony over the Dualshock 3 is that the controller battery will not last more than a few hours. In this tutorial we will change the controller battery with another one from a smartphone, which will allow us to obtain a gain of 50% more of charging capacity. You will need: - A knife or scissors. - A battery (see below for battery details). - Tape or soldering iron. - Red and black electric wires which can be found easily in shops. The battery type to use: The current dualshock4 battery has 1000 mAh and 3.65 Volts, after we change to the 1500mAh battery, you will be able to get 50% extra power. You can use a 2000 mAh battery which will let you get more power but make sure it is 3.6 volts, 3.7 volts, lithium-ion, and the dimensions correspond to the origin of your PS4 controller battery. Changing the batter...

Gaming is very popular. Cloud gaming – where remote servers perform game execution and rendering on behalf of thin clients that simply send input and display output frames – promises any device the ability to play any game any time. Unfortunately, the reality is that wide-area network latencies are often prohibitive; cellular, Wi-Fi and even wired residential end host round trip times (RTTs) can exceed 100ms, a threshold above which many gamers tend to deem responsiveness unacceptable. In this paper, we present DeLorean, a speculative execution system for mobile cloud gaming that is able to mask up to 250ms of network latency. DeLorean produces speculative rendered frames of future possible outcomes, delivering them to the client one entire RTT ahead of time; clients perceive no latency. To achieve this, DeLorean combines: 1) future input prediction; 2) state space subsampling and time shifting; 3) misprediction compensation; and 4) bandwidth compression. To evaluate the prediction and...

Unless you're deep in the throes of it yourself, actual, clinical depression can be incredibly hard to wrap your head around. Sure, you can scroll through the Wikipedia article all you like, but intellectually knowing about and feeling depression are two completely different beasts. Zoe Quinn's Depression Quest (which recently hit Steam after a year floating around on the web) is an experience that sort of straddles the line between the two, and -- in spite of a related mess that's still unfolding -- is still worth checking out. The thing to bear in mind is that Depression Quest isn't a really a game. On a purely mechanical level, it has more in common with visual novels (though DQ doesn't really have any visuals to speak of) and the choose-your-own-adventure books of yore. The choices available to you fluctuate depending on the ones you've already made, and while it's not hard to figure out how to reach the "best" ending, it's still frust...

For Uber, its rise to the top hasn't always gone smoothly. From facing legal challenges across different parts of the world, to battling it out verbally with competitors, the ridesharing company has had to fight hard to make a name for itself. And now things have apparently taken a turn for the worse, at least for some of its drivers. According to PandoDaily, a number of Uber drivers in Los Angeles say they have been suffering from serious attacks, such as robberies at gunpoint, in recent months. The report, which cites three drivers who spoke on condition of anonymity, claims that people with bad intentions are using the Uber app to locate drivers on a map in order to rob them. While, in most cases, these criminals are looking to steal the Uber-provided phones carried by operators, PandoDaily was told someone was, at one point, the victim of a carjacking situation. Either way, the main concern here shouldn't be the iPhones or vehicles at stake, but rather every driver's...

Can you remember the last time you logged into PlayStation Home? Neither can anybody in Japan, apparently. According to a statement released on the Japanese website, the 3D social space will permanently close in March of next year. Sony didn't give a reason for the shuttering, but it's not too much of a surprise, the online hub -- an avatar-filled playground often compared to Second Life was never very popular, and seemingly fell short of the company's expectations. Sony's western divisions haven't announced if a similar shut-down is in store for Home's international versions. Oh, you say you do remember the last time you logged into Home? Well, take comfort in the knowledge that Sony is shutting down the service with a large-scale closing event. SOURCE

Mainboard for Macbook Pro 13" (Early 2011) remember its the one who doesnt still have USB3.0 ports. It comes in core i5 or i7 2nd-gen flavor processor. If you have one, dont hesitate to communicate with me. luigivsf@hotmail.com (you can use it to locate me via facebook, twitter, email, paypal, etc)

Yup, our first $1.95 USD from... dunno, just checked PayPal yesterday and I seen it. Anyways, whoever do it, really thanks. A small portion makes the difference. for YOU, yes... any small amount counts! PayPal: luigivsf@hotmail.com

A common sight in the sky above the world's largest solar thermal power plant is a "streamer," a small plume of smoke that occurs without warning. Closer inspection, however, reveals that the source of the smoke is a bird which has inadvertently strayed into the white-hot heat above the plant's many reflecting mirrors. Because the BrightSource Energy plant near Ivanpah uses supercritical steam rather than photovoltaic energy, the sun's heat is reflected off more than 300,000 mirrors to a single point, which is used to drive a steam turbine. The downside of that, of course, is that it's lethal for any wildlife that strays into the picture -- a problem that was recognized well before the facility opened, but now the government has gotten involved. Government wildlife inspectors believe that insects are drawn to the highly reflective mirrors, which in turn lures local birds to their doom. BrightSource feels that the issue has been overblown, claiming that on...

If you've ever groused that you don't get enough sleep, you now know that you're not alone -- far from it, in fact. The Wall Street Journal has provided a rare glimpse at the tracking data from hundreds of thousands of Jawbone Up wearers worldwide, revealing both their collective sleeping habits as well as their activity when they're awake. And... it's not looking good. Even in well-rested cities like Melbourne, the average person slept just over the minimum recommended 7 hours. In Tokyo, many people get less than 6 hours. You don't want to look to your friends for help, then, since they're probably just as groggy as you. It's also clear that us humans are creatures of habit. The vast majority of people get up early on weekdays and sleep in on weekends and holidays. They're relatively idle while they're working in the middle of the day, but extra-active when commuting or heading out on weekend adventures. Yes, the data isn't all that shoc...