Vankyo’s Performance V600 projector is a $250 answer to the question “are there any projectors good enough to play video games in broad daylight without a screen that won’t cost me a ton of money?” More specifically it’s a native 1080p LED-light projector featuring 4,000 lux brightness, two HDMI-in ports, stereo speakers, and a crisp 300-inch viewing area. Judged solely on its specifications, it’s a fantastic projector for presentations in spaces where total darkness isn’t an option. But the picture brightness, quality, and audio fidelity are juuust good enough to make it feel like a decent little portable home theater for people who actually care about resolution.
202 years. That’s how long it will take to close the gender gap unless we speed up the process, says a recent report by the World Economic Forum. And looking at the statistics, this makes sense. A recent study by Pew Research found that the gender pay gap has narrowed but stayed relatively stable since… the 80s. Somehow, we’ve learned how to build self-driving cars and smartphones with more computing power than the first computers used in space travel, but we still haven’t figured out how to pay men and women equally.
It’s no secret that audiophiles and hi-fi enthusiasts are skeptical of wireless speakers. Sure, there are some successes – KEF’s LSX is a recent example – but wireless technology typically degrades sound quality at least a little, and almost certainly introduces some degree of latency. Hi-fi manufacturer Bowers & Wilkins claims to have solved these problems with its new Formation suite of wireless products. I had the chance to listen to the speakers, and they’re like Sonos on steroids. Expensive steroids. The Formation family consists of five products at launch. Formation Duo ($3,999): A futuristic-looking stereo pair that borrows drivers from B&W’s premium 700 and 800 series speakers, while incorporating DSP to further improve the sound.
I’m supposed to be packing up all the electronics I “won’t need until after the move.” What does that even mean? I need all of my electronics all of the time. Instead, I’m pretending to write a review of these Aukey smart outlets. I’m really just surfing Amazon and planning out our new smart home. Aukey makes everything from headphones to keyboards. I’ve come to expect a certain level of quality from its products – they usually aren’t the best, but they’re often the best value – and these smart outlets are no exception. They feel well-made, there’s nothing wrong with how they look, and they work as advertised.
Over the past 10 years cryptocurrency, blockchain, and art have become the most surprising and unlikely of bed fellows. Street art, graffitti, and memes are quite common, but the words cryptocurrency and fine art rarely appear in the same sentence. But that’s changing as one artist is making these worlds collide to produce something as individually unique as a Bitcoin wallet private key. Toronto-based fine artist – Nelly Baksht – is one of a growing community creating works specifically for the cryptocurrency and blockchain industry. But she hasn’t always been interested in the decentralized technology.
California-based nonprofit artificial intelligence lab OpenAI has cautiously revealed the capabilities of its latest AI, which it’s calling GPT-2. The system can generate surprisingly convincing text to follow any sample you throw at it, like a news article headline, or the opening paragraph of a fictional tale, or a prompt for an essay on a specific topic. Here are some samples that OpenAI shared to illustrate what it can do:
The White House has been tagged with digital Bitcoin BTC graffiti, thanks to a new augmented reality platform powered by cryptocurrency. Satoshi’s World allows anyone in the world to add text, images, and GIFs to real world settings for a small Bitcoin fee. Posts are made viewable through a special Google Maps feed. It was launched over the weekend, and it took just a few hours for “bitcoin” to be scrawled across the White House. Found it pic.twitter.com/11UfbvSkUL — Neeraj K. Agrawal (@NeerajKA) February 9, 2019 It works like this: you drop the little orange ‘Pegman’ anywhere on the map, and its first person view will appear on the right hand side of the screen.
This article is part of Demystifying AI, a series of posts that (try to) disambiguate the jargon and myths surrounding AI. History shows that cybersecurity threats evolve along with new technological advances. Relational databases brought SQL injection attacks, web scripting programming languages spurred cross-site scripting attacks, IoT devices ushered in new ways to create botnets, and the internet in general opened a Pandora’s box of digital security ills. Social media created new ways to manipulate people through micro-targeted content delivery and made it easier to gather information for phishing attacks. And bitcoin enabled the delivery of crypto-ransowmare attacks.
I spent the last few months with nearly every room in my home lit up by Monster’s gorgeous IlluminEssence lighting. As a result, I have no further use for ordinary bulbs. These aren’t the first LED lights I’ve tested out, but they managed to find the perfect mixture of quality, brightness, ease-of-use, and cost. Plus, Monster’s managed to put together several different kits that make the IlluminEssence line up incredibly easy to navigate.
