Nobody Cares: Technology-only Edition

[Free]

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

I wanted one of these so bad but I never got one! I don't know if these kinds of toys are really even made anymore - certainly they're not as widely available as when Radio Shack was selling them.


FWIW I -did- get an alarm bell kit one year, and an electric motor kit the next year, and those were fun so I guess I can't complain that much.

 

[Veritable Quandry]

This is the one I had around 1980.

 

[Noodles]

Its all Arduino and ESP32s now.

 

[Casey Pelous]

Its all Arduino and ESP32s now.

Nun uh!

Amazon.com

 

[Noodles]

Nun uh!

Amazon.com

Stop showing me things I should not buy.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Hmmm....honestly that one seems a lot more rudimentary than the one in the video.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

Upselling the 750 projects kit?

 

[Casey Pelous]

Upselling the 750 projects kit?

He was probably the kid who pitched a hissy fit on Christmas morning when the red bicycle didn't have whitewall tires.

 

[Free]

What the hell?

No One Can Afford to Buy Hardware, So Nvidia Made Trading Cards to Reminisce About the Good Times

The GPU company announced its first series of trading cards highlighting GeForce’s 'great moments.'

gizmodo.com

 

[Free]

This looks pretty, pretty cool

'Acceleration without fuel:' Revolutionary superconducting thruster harnesses Earth's magnetic field in 1st orbital test

New Zealand company Zenno Astronautics has tested the first of its kind thruster based on superconducting magnets to maintain the position of a satellite in space.

Superconducting magnets can convert solar energy directly into momentum in space and provide a source of acceleration that needs no fuel, but until recently, the technology was too large and complex to fit on a satellite. That's no longer the case.

Zenno Astronautics, a spin-off from the University of Auckland, has flown its new "Supertorquer" system on the Mira satellite built by California-based start-up Impulse Space. The tests began shortly after Mira's launch in November last year aboard the SpaceX Transporter 12 mission and saw the shoebox-size device perform with flying colors, Zenno Astronautics CEO and founder Max Arshavsky, told Space.com.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

Tank Farm Dynamo, David Brin, 1983

 

[Noodles]

What the hell?

No One Can Afford to Buy Hardware, So Nvidia Made Trading Cards to Reminisce About the Good Times

The GPU company announced its first series of trading cards highlighting GeForce’s 'great moments.'

gizmodo.com

Works for sports cards. "I can't play Baseball but at least I can have a baseball card of this famous player!"

 

[Free]

There's a reason glassholes gained such a negative connotation the first time around.

The Meta Glasses backlash is changing how (or if) people use them - Engadget

Backlash online is changing how (or if) people wear Meta's smart glasses.

www.engadget.com

"A lot of men and their behaviors have ruined this product," Danielle, a Florida-based creator and travel host who asked to be identified by first name only, told Engadget. Initially she enjoyed using her smart glasses for capturing travel content from the international trips she hosts. Then she read a story about how contractors working for Meta said they had been tasked with reviewing intimate images and other sensitive details captured by glasses owners.

Further reporting of men using Meta-branded glasses to film videos of themselves harassing women in public sealed the deal. She says she hasn't used them since. "I wouldn't feel comfortable around somebody wearing them, so I wouldn't expect anybody to be comfortable around me wearing them, no matter where I am.

"At this point, they're like a fancy paper weight," she says.

 

[Free]

I wasn't sure this belonged in the tech forums, but since it's trolling the makers of smart glasses...

DuckDuckGo Paso Robles

Knockaround and DuckDuckGo are introducing the world's most innovative anti-surveillance sunglasses. AKA Normal F***ing Sunglasses. No camera, no microphone, no AI, no battery, no electronics of any kind. Just a beautifully crafted pair of matte black sunglasses with a glossy DuckDuckGo logo...

knockaround.com

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

If you ever bought a storage drive that was advertised as being so-many gigabytes or terabytes or whatever, only to plug it in and find out you have less space than you were expecting, the reason is because those size names are metric but computer data and storage is not actually measured that way, so the names are misleading - and increasingly misleading the more space is involved. Funnily enough a new naming convention was adopted almost three decades ago to fix this discrepancy, and your computer almost certainly already uses it by default (and can be set to use it if not), but computer users just never bothered to learn it and kept using the wrong terms all this time, and therefore so did computer hardware vendors.

This not-too-long video helpfully explains:

 

[Free]

BMW is finally starting to punish BMW owners for owning a BMW.

BMW Is Facing a Backlash for Forcing Its Owners to Watch Spider-Man Ads

BMW drivers are mad after their infotainament systems began showing Spider-Man: Brand New Day graphics and animations late last month.

robbreport.com

The promotional campaign for the latest Spider-Man film feels impossible to avoid—especially if you drive a BMW.

Drivers of the German luxury marque’s vehicles have been bombarded with ads for Spider-Man: Brand New Day on their infotainment systems. Unsurprisingly, this has led to a fierce backlash, due in part to the automaker’s previous pledge to not utilize in-vehicle advertising.

But but, it's not in-vehicle advertising!

BMW, for its part, says the graphics and animations are not ads. When reached for comment on Friday, a representative for the automaker told Robb Report that the automaker has no intention of introducing in-vehicle advertising.

“As many of the other stories have noted, the in-vehicle animation is part of a much broader brand partnership which included product placement in the movie and a special edition vehicle on the red carpet of the Los Angeles premiere,” they said. “This was only intended to be a fun experience which celebrates that our vehicles are featured in the new movie. It is available for a limited time and only visible to drivers who proactively initiate it on their vehicle’s touch screen.”

So start enjoying the "fun experience!"

 

[Noodles]

"Its not ads its a partnership" is such a stupid take.

 

[Free]

"Its not ads its a partnership" is such a stupid take.

I would dread having to watch "experiences" every time a model of my vehicle's brand appeared in a movie.