Gadgets & Tech – Spoken Edition

When it comes to virtual reality tech, you typically fall into one of two camps. Either you love the sci-fi concept of snapping on a headset and suddenly being transported into an immersive, three-dimensional universe, or you’re a reasonable person who finds these same headsets vomit-inducing, awkward to wear, and downright butt-ugly.

At least for the time being, it looks like my fellow hardware-haters have won out. According to a blog post by Magic Leap CEO Rory Abovitz published yesterday afternoon, the arguably overhyped mixed-reality startup has made the “difficult decision” to lay off what’s reportedly roughly half of its workforce as the company shifts from something consumer-facing into one that’s used by corporate overlords. And honestly, while layoffs are wretched no matter what, I’m 100 percent on board with the idea of corporations fully embracing virtual reality.

To be fair, corporate-centric tech is something that Magic Leap’s dabbled with a bit leading up until now. This past holiday season, the company officially rolled out the Magic Leap Enterprise Suite, a roughly $3,000 toolkit meant to help white-collar workers across a buffet of industries collaborate on a virtual plane, kind of like an upgrade to the teleconferencing software a lot of these same workforces are using right now.

That’s the thing about headsets like the ones hawked by Magic Leap and others in the space, like Facebook, Google, and Microsoft: While their headgear might be too expensive and impractical for your average run-of-the-mill gamer, that same tech is already changing the way major corporations like Walmart train tens of thousands of employees, and changing the way troops are training in the U.S. military. The uptick in adoption in industries like these is why some analysts project that the enterprise appetite for virtual reality tech is about to hit an estimated $4.3 billion dollars by 2023, swallowing more than a quarter of what’s shaping up to be a nearly $15 billion dollar market around the same period.

Granted, the bulk of spending on these sorts of high-tech goggles is still largely coming out of the pockets of consumers chasing some kind of sci-fi-based gaming high, but that’s a market that’s drastically plummeted over the past year, even as enterprise adoption continues to climb. And honestly, if these corporations want these ugly-ass headsets so bad, then I say they can keep them.

I’m going to preface this by saying I love dark mode. It started with my desktop Kindle app, and as soon as it was rolled out everywhere, I switched everything over to the soothing white-on-black aesthetic. My eyes rejoiced, and I too decried this mad blog calling dark mode a crutch for suckers.

But oh, I have now seen the light.

It started with the latest Slack update and its new set of premade themes. I usually color-code my various Slack groups so I have an easy visual cue as to who I’m responding to at a given moment. The big problem was that Slack’s dark mode themes are way too similar to each other. My frustration peaked this week when I started mixing up channels in my work Slack, and when I started noticing I had to reread several DMs. Then out of the blue, I wondered if switching back to light mode for this one app would make my life easier.

So I turned light mode on and my god, my eyes. They burned with the fires of a thousand suns suddenly beamed straight into my pupils. That said, as soon as they adjusted, words suddenly popped into clearer focus. Color schemes were much more distinct. In my dark cave of an apartment—which no number of lamps seems to ever brighten—the things I needed to see and read were magically easier to absorb and retain. That tracks, as studies find light mode is actually better for reading comprehension.

Then I flipped the switch on my entire laptop and again, momentarily blinded myself. But suddenly, my inbox was also easier to read. I no longer had weird formatting issues when copy-pasting text written in light mode to dark mode. I switched back to light mode on my phone. Surprisingly, I found I didn’t miss dark mode’s supposed aesthetic superiority as much as I thought I might. Gifs and photos in my texts popped. It felt like perhaps my eyes had gone flabby after months of dark mode. In general, simply switching to light mode felt like shaking my brain out of its stupor.

That said, I’m not stupid. Gizmodo’s dark mode stans have already roasted me for my betrayal. (Editor’s Note: the roasting will continue until the dark mode returns. - Cranz) I’m not saying throw dark mode into the trash forever. I’m merely suggesting that in these dark times, where it is impossibly hard to focus, switching back for productivity and work-related apps is a gamechanger.

That said, one exception is Twitter. That hellhole of a website doesn’t need anyone to shine a light on its horribleness. No one needs better comprehension of the irony-poisoned drivel that gets posted there. Not today, not ever. That shit can stay in dark mode forever.

Verizon won’t make you pay late fees—or cut off yourself altogether—if you can’t pay due to coronavirus-induced financial hardship. The carrier announced today that it will extend its new non-payment and late fee policy through the end of June for individuals and small businesses.

The main caveat is that customers will need to let Verizon know that they are having trouble paying their bills; Verizon won’t automatically assume unpaid bills are do to covid-19 and will likely cut you off if you don’t inform them.

Back in March, Verizon and several other major telecom companies agreed not to cancel customers’ internet and cell phone service for 60 days, or through the end of May. The agreement was part of an FCC initiative to “Keep Americans Connected.” Verizon also added an extra 15GB of 4G LTE hotspot data for customers with unlimited data plans, as well as 15GB of extra data for customers on prepaid and postpaid metered standalone or shared data plans.

But this extension may not benefit some customers, according to a recent analysis of the program. Customers who are subscribed to Lifeline, Verizon’s government assistance program for qualified, low-income individuals, who have home phone service and/or Fios Home Internet service qualify for Verizon’s covid-19 relief package, but customers with a DSL plan don’t. In addition, Verizon said that new Lifeline customers are not eligible to have their first two billing cycles waived, though they will have access to discounted Fios home internet.

Verizon told Gizmodo that it’s extending its low-income internet option for new Fios Internet customers and waiving router charges for two months. However, Verizon did not say if new Lifeline customers would be eligible to have any billing cycles waived this time around.

Fios is only available in certain metro areas, like New York City and Boston, in eight states, compared to its DSL service that is more broadly available in 11 states. But Verizon’s DSL service largely covers rural areas in those states, which are statistically less likely to have access to fast, reliable internet.

Something as simple as going to the grocery store or picking up prescription medication has become a more serious activity for persons who are at a higher risk of contracting covid-19. But grocery deliveries and special shopping hours are sometimes easier to come by than getting prescriptions delivered to your front door or your mailbox. Not all prescriptions can be sent through the mail, either. But UPS and CVS are finding a way around that by expanding their collaborative drone prescription delivery service to Florida, The Verge reports.

Starting May 4, residents of The Villages retirement community, a collection of 55-plus communities in Florida, are eligible to have their prescriptions picked up from participating CVS pharmacies and delivered to their doorstep via a UPS-operated drone. The first test flights will be less than half a mile from one CVS store, and UPS Ground drivers will complete the delivery, at least initially. If that goes well, two more CVS stores will join at a later date.

UPS and CVS originally partnered in October 2019 to explore drone deliveries. “We’re always looking to improve convenience for customers through faster, lower-cost and more efficient delivery models,” said Kevin Hourican, president of CVS Pharmacy. “Given our focus on innovation, we’re excited to be the first retail health care company to explore drone delivery options with UPS.”

UPS is also operating a limited drone delivery service in North Carolina, delivering prescription medication to several retirement communities. Both service locations have been cleared by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). According to UPS, its drone airline is the “first to receive full Part 135 certification from the Federal Aviation Administration,” which is the highest level of certification a drone airline can receive. This certification allows UPS to fly drones over people, at night, with packages that weigh over 55 pounds, and out of an operator’s line of sight.

UPS and CVS are not the only companies teaming-up for health-related deliveries. Google’s drone service, Wing, FedEx, and Walgreens first partnered last year in Christiansburg, Virginia on a pilot program to deliver over-the-counter medicines and other related items to residents. Wing received approval from the FAA to operate as a certified drone airline in April 2019.

These drone delivery methods are still very much in the testing phase, so don’t expect them to scale-up substantially any time soon, but they could prove to be effective enough to warrant further expansions.

The Washington Post reports that 25,000 email addresses and passwords, allegedly from the World Health Organization (WHO), National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Gates Foundation, and other large organizations, were stolen by hackers and posted online. It’s unknown where the list came from, or who even created it, but it was first posted to 4chan and then made rounds among right-wing extremist groups on Pastebin, Twitter, and Telegram.

Samsung is trying to make its TVs more useful during the global pandemic that is keeping us inside our houses, first with free fitness apps from popular boutique fitness studios and now with an Apple Music app—and free 90-day trial to stream tunes from your Samsung TV. I admit that I didn’t see this coming, but it’s a welcome change. I am a person who owns a 6-year-old Samsung dumb TV, and I use an Apple TV to stream Apple Music through my Sonos soundbar while I work.

It’s no question that during the global pandemic, Google was undoubtedly unprepared for the spike in video conferencing, leaving Zoom to claim the mantle of “that one program everyone uses to video chat now.” But starting in early May, anyone with a Google Account will be able to sign up for Google Meet for free. If you’ve never heard of Google Meet, that makes sense.

Aside from nostalgia, or maybe loaning it out to filmmakers as a prop for period pieces, there are not many practical uses for a 90-year-old Remington portable typewriter anymore. Against all odds, William Sun Petrus did manage to find one novel use for the hardware; he turned it into a makeshift drum machine that rewards his touch-typing skills with some genuinely catchy tunes.

The video doesn’t go into a lot of detail about how this hack came together, aside from some brief clips of Petrus soldering a fairly elaborate bundle of wires together. But in the video’s description he writes that when the typewriter’s individual letter hammers make contact with the “live plate” (the part that looks like a shiny metal bell) a connected Arduino recognizes which hammer was pressed and sends a MIDI signal to a piece of software called Ableton running on a PC. The software in turn triggers one of 17 different sounds, allowing the typewriter to be played like a drum machine/piano hybrid.

If you’ve ever found yourself typing along to the beat of a song you’re listening to, you’ll understand the appeal of an unorthodox instrument like this.

How the “live plate” he engineered works isn’t entirely known. It could rely on a gyroscope inside that determines which hammer made contact with it based on the movements the sensor makes after impact, given the letter hammers all come in from different angles. More likely, however, is that each hammer is just completing a circuit when it hits the plate, based on all the added wires you can see inside the typewriter itself.

There’s an unedited version of this video as well that better demonstrates how it works, but the results are far more satisfying when all you can hear are the samples and tunes that Ableton is producing.

Twitter is expanding its crackdown on misinformation that may influence people to “engage in harmful activity” to include a conspiracy theory that 5G technology is somehow behind the spread of the novel coronavirus causing the current covid-19 pandemic.

Does it really take years of practice and dedication on the basketball court to compete with the talents of NBA players? Apparently not. All you need is some basic knowledge of physics, access to computer simulation software, and enough tools to build a curved backboard that directs every shot through the hoop.

It’s a creation that’s reminiscent of Mark Rober’s motion-tracking dart board that automatically repositions itself to guarantee bullseyes with every throw. But Shane Wighton’s custom backboard takes a passive approach to the problem of being really bad at sinking hoops—though there was still a lot of thought and engineering that went into its design.

To help figure out the exact shape needed for the backboard to redirect every basketball shot down and through the hoop, Wighton created a piece of software that simulated throws from hundreds of different angles and speeds. The results are an elliptic paraboloid (a shape made from both ellipses and paraboloids) that looks less like a pointed noise cone and more like a flattened decorative fruit bowl.

The shape of the backboard was converted to a 3D mesh that an automated CNC cutting tool was able to carve out of pieces of wood that were later assembled to create one large smooth shape once some expanding spray foam was used to fill in the cracks.

Oddly enough, when fully assembled for the first time the backboard didn’t work as predicted. Every shot was instead directed to the front of the hoop, causing each one to bounce out. After investigating, Wighton realized that his simulations didn’t account for the size of the ball itself, so after he extended the hoop away from the backboard by a couple of inches to compensate, every shot started to hit its target.

It’s another example of how science can help with a lack of ability, but sadly this backboard design isn’t regulation. Any hoop dreams Wighton might have are limited to his workshop half court—but nothing is stopping him from raising his own jersey (or T-shirt) to the roof and retiring his number.