Enlarge (credit: The Washington Post / Contributor | The Washington Post) When Apple released AirTags in 2021, the small electronic tracking devices were touted by top executives as being “stalker-proof.” Since then, Vice reported a minimum of 150 police cases documenting stalkers using AirTags, and there have already been two severe stalking cases involving AirTags…
Monthly Archives: December 2022
Enlarge / Apple’s AirPods Pro, with their noise-cancelling and live-listening features, perform fairly well in tests against more traditional hearing aids. (credit: Jeff Dunn) A study in the journal iScience suggests that, in some noise situations, AirPods, particularly the Pro model, can work just as well as far pricier prescription-only models. AirPods are not sold…
Enlarge / Has any game been more associated with proof of concept than SuperTuxKart? It’s the “Hello World” of 3D racing. (credit: Asahi Linux) For the brave people running Linux on Apple Silicon, their patience has paid off. GPU drivers that provide desktop hardware acceleration are now available in Asahi Linux, unleashing more of the…
The advanced data protection panel in iOS [credit: Apple ] End-to-end encryption is coming to most of iCloud with a new optional feature called Advanced Data Protection, according to Apple’s announcement on Wednesday. Previously, 14 data categories within iCloud were protected. This new feature brings that count to 23, including photos, notes, voice memos, reminders,…
Enlarge / Researchers have finally cracked the secret code of this 1547 letter from Holy Roman Emperor Charles V to his ambassador. (credit: Bibliotheque Stanislas de Nancy) In 1547, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V penned a letter to his ambassador, Jean de Saint-Mauris, part of which was written in the ruler’s secret code. Nearly five…
Enlarge / Nvidia’s GTX 1060 is still one of the most-used GPUs on Steam, but its star continues to fade slowly. (credit: Mark Walton) Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1060 was exceptionally well-reviewed when it was released in 2016—offering performance a bit better than previous-generation flagships for a downright reasonable price of $250. PC gamers responded accordingly….
Enlarge / Would you pay $95,000 for these jeans? They were salvaged from the wreck of the SS Central America, which sank in 1857. (credit: Holabird Western Americana Collections) A pair of men’s jeans recovered from the wreckage of a 19th-century steamer ship fetched an eye-popping $95,000 at auction last week. Per the auction house…
Enlarge / Intel is talking up big performance gains in some old, but noteworthy, games. (credit: Intel) In the run-up to the launch of Intel’s Arc graphics cards, the company emphasized for months that the cards might not perform well in games that didn’t use newer graphics APIs like Vulkan and DirectX 12. The GPUs…
Enlarge / Diesel engines can be modified to burn a diesel-hydrogen mix. (credit: DjelicS) A team of engineers at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney has figured out a way to run a diesel engine on a mix of diesel and hydrogen, dramatically lowering its emissions. Why do we even need a…
The Waymo and Geely driverless car. [credit: Waymo ] Waymo is now running a robotaxi service in two states, but the vehicles for those services are retrofitted commercial cars. The company rolls around in either the “4th-gen” Waymo vehicles, built on the Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid, or the “5th-gen” driver, built on the Jaguar I-Pace. That’s…