, it combines striking styling with pretty outrageous claims. The calling card for the Owl was a claimed 0-62 mph time of just 2 seconds. Now, Aspark has released a couple of videos showing the car launching in real life. The company did two launches, and claimed that the car hit the benchmark speed in less than 2 seconds in each run. In the one shown above, it took 1.87 seconds, and the run below was 1.92 seconds. Those match claimed times for the
As with the reveal in Frankfurt, we’re maintaining a healthy level of skepticism of the Owl. For one thing, we don’t see any shots of the speedometer or any time or speed recording displays. For another, the location seems oddly small to be hustling a car to about 60 mph and back down. It looks like a parking lot behind a warehouse, and though the claimed times would maybe make the feat feasible, we’d be nervous going that fast in a short parking lot that ends in a grassy upward hill.
Despite this skepticism, we’re also not going to brush off the Owl altogether. These videos definitely prove the company has at least one running prototype, and we’re impressed to see the company showing a running car just a few months after the inital reveal. That’s more than could be said about
. And while there’s nothing in the video to truly confirm the Owl’s performance, we can tell the thing launches really hard. So overall, we’re cautiously optimistic about the Owl, and if the company keeps rolling out info and video like this, the ratio of caution to optimism will probably shift to optimism’s favor.
Atari Is Launching a Cryptocurrency Because That’s Just What a Company Like Atari Does Now
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Lately, it’s seemed like Atari has been putting it’s focus on two big strategies: crowdfunding and promoting products that don’t exist. So, it makes perfect sense that it’s reportedly getting into the cryptocurrency game with its own coin offering, the Atari Token.
It’s become commonplace for struggling companies to co-opt the rampant interest in cryptocurrencies to excite investors and at least give the appearance of being on the cutting edge. Most recently, Kodak slapped its name on a blockchain initiative that seems to be poorly conceived.
Earlier this month, Fred Chesnais, CEO of Atari Game Partners, bragged to Polygon that the company’s new leadership has rescued it from the edge of bankruptcy over the last few years. “We had €30 million of losses. €35 million of debt,” he said. “Today? No more debt. We are profitable.” That would mean that Atari isn’t quite in the desperate position that Kodak has been over the last year, but it’s still plowing into the land of corporate backed initial coin offerings.
Today’s announcement is light on details. Bloomberg reports:
Shares in the Paris-based company have soared more than 60 percent since it gave further details of its crypto push on Feb. 8, after first mentioning some of the plans in December. Atari is taking a stake in a company that’s building a blockchain-based digital entertainment platform and, as part of that agreement, it will create its own digital currency called Atari Token. The company is also expanding its online casino-gaming partnership with Pariplay Ltd. to allow gambling with digital currencies.
We’ve asked Atari for more specifics on what they’re planning and will update this post when we receive a reply. For now, all we have is this press release from the Atari SA holding company. Chesnais is quoted in the release saying:
Blockchain technology is poised to take a very important place in our environment and to transform, if not revolutionize, the current economic ecosystem, especially in the areas of the video game industry and online transactions. Given our technological strengths with the development studios, and the global reputation of the Atari brand, we have the opportunity to position ourselves attractively in this sector. Our objective is to take strategic positions with a limited cash risk, in order to optimize the assets and the Atari brand.
Reading between the lines, it does seem that Atari is planning something similar to Kodak’s now delayed KodakCoin ICO. Kodak is primarily partnering with a separate company that’s handling the details while it takes a percentage of profits for the use of its name. Licensing its old games to other companies and slapping its names on merchandise like this dumbass hat is pretty much all Atari does now.
But it’s been making a buzz in the last year for new initiatives that have been pegged to crowdsourcing. Most notably, a nostalgia console called the Ataribox was announced in July with little to show except some nice looking renders. Coming on the heels of Nintendo’s massive success with two vintage console reissues, the Ataribox concept sounded promising. But then we got some specs, and most importantly a price.
It turns out, Atari is focused on making some sort of set-top streaming box with some Atari classics and indie games, and it’s looking to charge somewhere between $250 and $300. An upcoming Indiegogo campaign to fund the initial manufacturing was announced and launch date of “Spring 2018″ was set. In December, those plans were delayed. And we haven’t heard anything since.
Earlier this month, the company made news with its crowdfunding campaign to bring Rollercoaster Tycoon to the Nintendo Switch. This time, it’s going through a new organization called StartEngine, a crowdfunding platform by Howard Marks, the co-founder of Activision. The Rollercoaster Tycoon campaign relies on a more complicated model that gives contributors a piece of equity in the game’s profits.
And now, it seems Atari is going in another crowdfunding direction with an initial coin offering. Maybe it’ll work. But right now it seems like Atari is good at coming up with wacky ideas for funding and bad at delivering on promises. It keeps corporate communication to a minimum and the Ataribox seems like some very pretty, overpriced vaporware. The ICO world is filled with jokes and scams, but so far, many of them are profitable jokes and scams. In the last week, Atari’s stock price has almost doubled.
The ultimate guide to making cafe-style coffee in your own home
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You could spend $6 on a great coffee. Or not.
To brew a delicious cup of coffee, there are certain variables you need to master: the ratio of coffee to water, brew time, water temperature, and the grind size of your beans. All of these factors have to come together to create a balanced cup. When the coffee grinds are introduced to hot water, the water begins to extract compounds from the coffee beans. The goal? Liquid that is not too bitter, burnt, or sour. To get there, you need to extract the right compounds from the beans at the right time. This can take experimentation, and will change depending on what product you use to concoct your brew.
And while there are standard recommendations, coffee making is really all about personal taste. For example, I (a coffee enthusiast, clearly) prefer the pour-over method and use a Chemex to brew my coffee. But that’s just one way to get a pitch-perfect cuppa. During my college barista years, I picked up some tips of the trade—and worked with some quality gear—that I still use daily. Read on.
Let’s start at the very beginning (a very good place to start). Factors like where the coffee is grown, the blend of the beans, and how long they’ve been roasted for dictates the flavors of your fluids. If you don’t know what kind of coffee you like, get tasting. A decent way to do this is to try out a subscription service that will ship multiple taster roasts. I personally like Bean Box, which offers a sampler of single-origin coffees—coffees from one country or farm—from 20 roasters around the world. Instead of committing to a larger bag, the service sends four 1.8 ounce bags, each roasted within 48 hours of being shipped. Each box comes with tasting notes, tips on how to brew the coffee, and a bonus treat like a piece chocolate. A 12-month subscription to the Bean Box sampler box costs $18 a month.
The first step to fresh-tasting, yummy coffee is to start with whole beans. Forget pre-ground coffee. You want to grind your coffee as close to brewing as possible. The longer your beans are exposed to oxygen, the quicker the compounds will break down. Pre-ground coffee also removes control over the grind size, so you won’t be able to tweak your recipe until it’s time for a new bag.
The key to coffee grounds is achieving the correct-size grind with a uniform surface area. Ideal coarseness depends on how you brew your coffee. A Chemex does best with a medium grind, while beans going into a French press can be coarser—here’s a simple guide to the “ideal” textures for various apparatuses.
The long and short of it is that if you change the size of the coffee grounds, you affect the rate at which compounds—volatile oils that account for the aroma and taste and bitterness-causing acids—are removed from the beans. For example, if you are making a pour-over coffee, the water is flowing through the grounds relatively quickly, so the grind size should be smaller. Because it takes a relatively short amount of time for water to pass through your grounds, you’ll want more surface area exposed to get a strong-enough brew. If you’re making cold-brew or using a French press, you can grind your beans pretty coarsely. Because the grounds get a proper bath in the water, full-immersion methods don’t do well with fine grounds. Too much surface area for too long means over extraction.
Basically, you need a good grinder that will give you a consistent grind for a uniform and repeatable taste. The Baratza Encore (pictured above) has 40mm burrs that provide 40 coarseness settings and is fairly easy to clean. Burr grinders use two revolving surfaces to crush your beans into equal-size grounds. Being able to change the size of the grind makes you able to use any type of coffee maker.
Devices like the Kruve let you really fine-tune your grind. It’s basically a sifter that makes sure your grounds are uniform and your extraction rate is even. The XL Kruve set has 15 sieves to separate particles of different sizes. The smallest set (two sieves) goes for $50, and the largest offering (the full 15) is $170. There are other sizes, too.
Once your bag of coffee is opened, let the deterioration of the flavor begin. Keep the beans away from sunlight and make sure to get an airtight container. Try to drink your coffee within two weeks, but if you cannot finish it, you can also freeze or refrigerate your beans.
In addition to grind size, you should be cognizant of the temperature of your water. The “right” temperature depends—of course—on your grind size. If given enough time, water of any temperature will extract compounds from coffee beans, but finding the right combination of water temperature and grind size and coffee maker is the difference between complex coffeehouse flavors and, well, not that.
If you pour very hot water on coffee grounds that are too fine, it’ll extract a lot of the bitter compounds. If you pour warm water over coarse grounds, you’ll be left unexciting murky water. Cold brew, to illustrate, is ground course and the beans are fully immersed in cold water for a solid 24 hours. Here, less surface area and colder temperatures don’t matter because the beans are bathed in H2O for a good long while.
For what it’s worth, when using my Chemex, I do a medium grind and heat up my water to 202 degrees. I adjust from there.
You’ll want to pour the water over the grounds steadily and slowly. It’s important not to agitate the grounds too much while you’re wetting the coffee. Agitation speeds up how quickly the coffee is exposed fresh water. Too much agitation can pull out unfavorable flavors. My pouring routine goes like this: pour just enough water to wet all the beans and let them “bloom.” The bloom allows the grounds to expand and release gases trapped during the roasting process. This process should last 15-20 seconds. When finished, begin pouring again from the outside and slowly work your way in making smaller and smaller circles until you reach the middle. Keep the stream of water slow and steady until you have poured the desired amount of water.
My kettle of choice? This BonaVita 1-liter kettle, which lets me keep hot water at my precise specifications for up to 60 minutes. The gooseneck spout allows for a slower and more controlled pour, too.
Now that we’ve covered grind size and water temperature, the next factor we need to control is the weight. Brewing coffee is all about ratios. You need to be able to measure two things: how much coffee you’ve ground and how much water you’re using. Most suggested ratios are around 1:17. This means 17 grams of water for every one gram of coffee. (I use 18 grams of water for every gram of coffee because I am a rebel.) One thing to consider is that adding more water doesn’t mean you will make your coffee weaker. It can also affect how many compounds are extracted, changing the taste rather than the strength of your cup.
This Hario scale will make it easy to track the weight of your elements as well as how long your coffee’s been brewing. If you are making a pour over coffee in a device like a Chemex, you’ll be able to see how quick or slow the coffee is running through the grounds and the filter. It’ll help you measure your proportion of coffee to water. $41.
To me, a Chemex is the simplest pour-over device. Its clear glass body can brew several cups at once, and makes it easy to see how much water you’ve poured. It’s easy to clean, too. Toss the filter in the trash—or wash out a metal one—and rinse it under the faucet.
These bleach-free filters fit every size Chemex. They reach above the glass lip making sure no grounds make it through to the bottom. You can get 100 filters for $27. If that’s too expensive or wasteful for you to stomach—don’t fret!
If you’re trying to cut down on waste, these stainless steel filters work fine. It’s a little messier to clean and you’ll need to adjust the grind size on your grinder, but this reusable mesh filter keeps the grounds from getting into your coffee and has saved me many times where I’ve run out of paper filters. It also has a washable, removable silicon ring to prevent scratches to your apparatus. $15.
Breville Precision Brewer
Now for a breezier, hands-off option. With six brewing modes—including a “fast” option, “strong” presets, and a custom “my brew” function—Breville’s Precision Brewer will make you a great cup of coffee at home. There are customizable flavor and taste settings, a cold-brew function, and a separate shower head adapter used to make a single cup of pour-over coffee with Hario V60 or Kalita Wave coffee makers. $300.
This whole-bean Breville machine is expensive, but if you’re into espresso drinks like lattes and cappuccinos, it’s worth at least checking out. If you think about it, one $4 latte a day will cost you $1,460 for the year—$1,825 with the tip your barista deserves. That’s more than the $1,180 this machine will set you back.
What makes this device so pricey? It’s got a built-in automatic grinder, an automatic steam wand, and the digital temperature gives you the right temperature coffee with every cup. The touchscreen display lets you pick settings for the grind, brew, and milk froth level. I’ve tried it, love it, and have already started a savings account for one with my Qapital app.
The Zojirushi travel mug—PopSci folk Sara Chodosh and Kendra Pierre-Louis are super passionate about it—is made of stainless steel, has a wide mouth (key for fitting ice cubes!) and genuinely keeps hot drinks scalding.
To conclude: even crappy coffee tastes OK in your favorite novelty mug. Here’s mine.
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via Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now http://ift.tt/2k2uJQn
There’s no natural reason for some wheels of cheese to be bright orange, but most of us don’t think about it all that much. Sure, we know the fluorescent shade of boxed mac and cheese is food coloring fakery, but we don’t think of pale orange cheddars or goudas as looking unnatural.
Of course, no cheese is naturally orange. Milk does not have orange pigment in it, and none of the bacterial processes going on inside aging dairy turn it such a bright hue.
If you love an intriguing origin story, this version of how cheese became orange is for you:
Back in ye olde 17th century (or possibly 16th, no one seems sure), English dairy farmers were looking to make a few extra shillings, so they started skimming the fat off the milk used to make their cheese. They could turn this fat into other products, like butter, or just sell it straight to consumers. The trouble was that the cheese made from low-fat milk didn’t have the same creamy yellow hue to it, and was thus identifiable as lower quality cheese. Not to be thwarted by a few fat globules, the farmers simply started adding coloring to mimic the hue of a full-fat product.
Over time, added coloring became a way to make your cheese stand out, and eventually certain products became associated with particular orange or yellow hues. And the tradition continues today.
If you like origin stories with more plausibility but less dastardly intrigue, there’s another version. Cheese made from cow’s milk in the spring and summer has a more buttery hue to it because the herd is out grazing on grass rather than chomping on feed. Applying a colorant helped farmers even out the appearance of their cheeses over the course of the year. It was all pretty much the same quality, so farmers were just assuaging customers’ concerns over the varying hue.
Pick whichever story you prefer, because it’s not clear which one is more accurate. But we do know that two of the core facts are true: 1. That the color of cheese used to vary over the course of a year, and 2. That over time some cheeses have become traditionally orange, even though no cheese is naturally that color.
“Today it’s used to bring out the tradition of the cheese, more so than to even out fluctuations over the year,” says Gina Mode, one of the lucky few people who gets to work with and research cheese at the Center for Dairy Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (she also grew up on a dairy farm). She explains that cows today, and really for much of the past century1, are fed year round on grain-based feed, not grass. And it’s the grassfed cows that have variations in their milk.
Grass, unlike grain, contains lots of beta carotene, an orange pigment that’s also found in carrots, pumpkin, and sweet potato. Cows turn some of their dietary beta carotene into vitamin A, and the rest gets stored in their fat cells. That same fat also makes its way into the milk. Since the beta carotene is bound up inside the fat globules, though, the milk itself isn’t all that yellow. It’s only when you add enzymes in order to make cheese or butter that the globules break down, revealing the pigment.
This means that cheese from grassfed cows has a significantly yellower hue to it. Just take a look at the variation, even in uncolored cheddars.
Goats’ milk cheddar is the whitest, because goats convert all of their dietary beta carotene into vitamin A and leave none behind to color their cheese. Then they get increasingly yellow and top out with the New Zealand cheddars because, as Mode explains, “New Zealand has much more grass-fed [cows], so they have a richer, golden color to their cheese.”
There’s also variation based on the type of cow producing the milk. “Some cows just pass the beta carotene right through,” Mode says. “The most famous of those is the Guernsey. There used to be a Golden Guernsey brand that was famous because it had this beautiful golden color.” It was for that reason that Guernseys were prized for making butter, the color of which also heavily depends on the beta carotene content of the milk it comes from.
Butter also used to be a richer yellow color, and many manufacturers used to add a pigment to even the hue over the course of the year. This is why margarine was so aggressively yellow—to make it look like the finest butter. Farmers pushed back on this so much that state legislatures started enacting laws to keep margarine from looking too much like a real dairy product. “I’m too young to remember this, but my parents talk about how it used to be illegal to color your margarine because Wisconsin was so pro-dairy,” says Mode. “If you bought margarine, it was completely white and it had a packet of annatto in there for you to stir in yourself. People used to go across the border just to buy yellow margarine.”
Those restrictions were eventually lifted, and today most margarine is back to an almost unnatural yellow color. But that fact that people cared enough that their non-dairy spread looked like a dairy product illustrates why we bother to color food in the first place: it affects the taste.
Not literally, of course, because annatto is tasteless. It’s a fat-soluble pigment that covers the seeds of the Bixa orellana L. plant, and in the tiny quantities used for cheesemaking it changes nothing about the true flavor. (Incidentally, you can add beta carotene directly to the milk, but the University of Guelph’s Food Science school notes that it is “too yellow and makes the cheese taste like carrots”).
Still, our perception of a food affects how we think it tastes, and thus orange cheeses and yellow butters seem different than pale products.
All cheddar cheese, for example, is actually white (barring the grassfed stuff), but some people have a preference for the orange stuff because it seems to taste better. Blindfolded, they’d never be able to discern the difference. The orange is just a pigment—but it works.
The use of annatto in coloring cheese may have started with cheddar. Mode says that one of the first to start using orange coloring for marketing purposes was an English variety called Red Leicester.
Red Leicester is a hard cheese similar to cheddar that uses annatto to produce a dark orange hue. When the farmers selling Red Leicester began their campaign, cheddars were all white, so their cheese’s orange tint made it stand out.
Other cheesemakers followed suit, and over time certain varieties acquired a tradition of coloring. Some are the deep orange of Red Leicester, others a lighter orange, and still more a light buttery color. Consumers now expect gouda, edam, and havarti to have creamy hues, so most manufacturers add a tiny bit of annatto to produce that rich color (by the way, you’ve been saying “gouda” all wrong. It’s GOW-duh, not GOO-duh). One strange exception: Muenster isn’t trying to mimic a beta carotene color at all. The type made in England has an orange exterior that comes from the microorganisms living on the surface, but the variety made in the U.S. uses annatto to merely mimic that pattern.
Ironically, it’s now the natural grass-fed hue that makes cheese stand out in the U.S. “If you’re an artisan, it’s one of those things that’s unique and special for your cheese,” explains Mode. “Like Uplands’ Pleasant Ridge Reserve, that’s a famous one where you can actually taste a difference from the milk as well.” Uplands only makes that cheese from May through October because the quality of the milk is so distinct. In the fall, when the cows feed on hay instead of fresh grass, they make another type of cheese that doesn’t rely on beta carotene for its flavor or color. And you really can tell the difference.
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Eight Samsung Galaxy tricks you can’t do on any other phone
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Samsung likes to add its own flourishes to the Android operating system, which means Galaxy phones boast quite a few unique features that you won’t find on standard Android devices—or iPhones for that matter. We’ve collected eight tips and tricks that should work on Galaxy phones and Note devices released in the last couple of years (except where we state otherwise). Go ahead and take full advantage of the Galaxy experience.
1. Change the order of the navigation keys
Don’t like the way Android arranges the navigation keys (Recents, Home, and Back) at the bottom of the screen? You can swap their order, and even make the navigation bar to stay out of the way until you need it.
Open Settings and hit Display followed by Navigation bar. On the next screen, you can set a new background color for the bar and change the order in which the Recents, Home, and Back buttons appear.
From the same menu, you can also add a new button to the navigation bar to hide it from view, leaving more room on screen for your apps. If you enable this hide button, it will appear on the far left of the bar. Tap it twice to hide the bar, and then drag it up from the bottom of the screen to restore the bar. Then you can double-tap the show and hide button again to lock the bar in place.
2. Create GIFs from YouTube videos
Everyone loves a well-chosen GIF, and Samsung Galaxy phones let you create them straight from any on-screen YouTube video—no third-party add-ons required. Instead, all you need is an integrated app called Smart Select, available on the most recent Galaxy phones (from 2017 and later).
First, open a YouTube video in the app. On a Galaxy phone, you then swipe in from the right; on a Note device, you tap the S Pen icon on the right side of the screen. Next, choose Smart select followed by Animation. Arrange the capture box on screen, start playing the video, and tap Record to capture the clip you like. When you’re done, tap Save to store the GIF in your Gallery app. From this repository, you can load it into other apps and share it with other people the same way you’d share a photo.
3. Set customized reminders
For the forgetful, phone reminders are invaluable. And when it comes to the Reminders app, Samsung phones have a couple extra tricks up their sleeves.
First, you can turn any website into a reminder. Open Samsung’s own browser, tap the menu button (three dots) on the top right, and then choose Share followed by Reminder. Second, you can receive a reminder about text messages too: Open Messages, long-press on the thread you want to save, and then pick Message options and Send to Reminder.
These entries, like any other reminder on your phone, will appear in the Reminder app. You can also tap on any reminder and choose Edit, then tell that item to pop back into view at a certain time or location (for example, make a grocery list reappear when you take your phone to the supermarket).
4. Modify the split-screen view
Many Android phones let you split the screen into two so you can view a couple of apps simultaneously. But the latest version of Samsung’s operating system (found on the Galaxy S8, S8 Plus and Note 8) takes this ability a step further: It lets you pin part of an app—such as a video, a portion of your Twitter feed, or a section of a map—in split-screen mode. This will leave the clip on the top of the display, while you keep working on something else underneath.
On the navigation bar, tap the Recents button, scroll to the app you want to pin, and hit its Snap Window button, which looks like a box with a dashed outline. A blue box will appear over the window; position it to highlight the relevant portion of the screen and tap Done. Then you can choose another app to fill the lower half of the view. To exit this split-screen view, touch the divider line between the apps and drag it up to the top of the screen.
If you have an earlier version of the Samsung Galaxy phone, you can’t pull off the same trick. However, you can still use the split-screen view: Tap the Recents button, scroll to the app you want to see, and tap the icon that looks like two stacked rectangles. The app should stick to the top half of the screen. In the bottom half of the screen, scroll through the other recent apps and choose the second app you’d like to view.
5. Personalize your audio experience
Samsung promises to create an audio experience tailored specifically to your tastes, which is especially effective when you’re wearing headphones. Once you tweak the settings to find your ideal mix, the phone will remember your choices and keep those settings in place for calls, music, movies, and every other sound it emits.
To tinker with the sound, go to Settings and tap Sounds and vibration followed by Sound quality and effects. On the next screen, you’ll see a few equalizer options you can play around with, such as adjusting the balance between bass and treble.
If you’re less comfortable with technical terms and just want to feel out the best mix for you, tap Adapt Sound and then Personalize sound. This will take you through a short configuration wizard that lets you hear sample sound configurations and pick the one you like best. To go back and reconfigure the sound after you’ve set it, or turn off the feature, go back to the Adapt Sound screen.
6. Hide apps and files
Samsung Galaxy phones come with a Secure Folder app that acts like a digital safe on your phone. You can hide apps and files in here, setting a password, PIN, or fingerprint scan to protect them.
To set up your safe, launch the Secure Folder app from your app drawer. Then follow the instructions on screen to set up the security lock. Once you’ve protected the app, use the Add apps and Add files buttons to drop new stuff into the Secure Folder, hidden away from anyone who might get access to your phone.
You can also use the Secure Folder in conjunction with regular apps like Camera and Calendar: Anything in these apps, such as photos and appointments, won’t appear in the regular apps elsewhere on the phone. You can even have duplicates of your social networking apps, such as Facebook, run separate accounts in the Secure Folder.
7. Pay with your phone more often
To pay for stuff with your smartphone, Apple Pay and Android Pay are both fantastic choices. However, they only work with checkout terminals that come equipped with Near Field Communication (NFC), the same tech that powers contactless credit cards. Samsung Pay can work via NFC, but it’s also compatible with the older magnetic-stripe terminals, where you swipe your credit card through to pay. That means a broader range of card readers support Samsung Pay, compared to the payment methods from Apple and Google.
To connect your financial accounts with Samsung Pay, start by opening the app—it comes pre-loaded on your phone. Then choose Start and follow the on-screen instructions to add your credit or debit cards to your account. If you haven’t already created a password-protected Samsung account, you’ll need to do so now, but the app should walk you through this process.
When you’re done, head to the store and get ready to pay with your phone. For an older terminal, tapping your phone near the stripe should do the trick.
8. Take notes on the lock screen
To scribble on your phone without unlocking it, you’ll need a Galaxy Note 8 phablet. Because this trick relies on the Note’s integrated stylus, it won’t work on the smaller Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus phones.
The phablet should enable this ability by default. However, you can always check to make sure it’s active: Open Settings and tap Advanced features followed by S Pen. The Screen off memo toggle switch should be set to on.
Now, whenever inspiration strikes, you can pop out the stylus from the base of the device, tap it on screen while holding down the top button, and start writing. There’s no need to wake the screen, type in your PIN, or make any other preparations. In fact, this will even work in the rain—both the Note 8 and the S Pen are waterproof, so droplets won’t faze them. And as soon as you replace the stylus, Samsung Notes will automatically save anything you jotted down on the lock screen.
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On Wednesday, a gunman murdered 17 people in Parkland, Florida, which brings the country’s 2018 gun-death tally to 1,859. Feeling helpless and enraged? You’re not alone—and you’re not helpless. I spoke to Shannon Watts, the founder of Moms Demand Action, for some instruction on concrete steps the average citizen can take.
Make Gun-Safety Legislation Your Primary Issue When Choosing Among Candidates
“The first thing you can do is to commit to voting for gun safety,” says Watts. “You can educate yourself about where your lawmaker stands on this issue. Does he or she have an A rating from the NRA?” Gun-rights advocates are extremely alert to whether their reps are acting in their interests; gun-control activists must be similarly vigilant. For example: “Heidi Heitkamp, the Democratic senator from North Dakota, voted against background checks after Sandy Hook. So if you want to vote for her you’ve got to reconcile that [with your desire to vote in pro-gun-control candidates],” says Watts.
Follow the Money
“Number two is find out how much money your representative gets from the NRA. Rubio had some…interesting statements yesterday [after the school shooting in Florida], but he’s taken three million dollars in campaign contributions from the NRA.” Obviously no politician who’s funded by a gun-industry lobbying arm is going to prioritize safety legislation. Knowing where they get your money will make your reps’ priorities crystal clear.
Vote
“Register to vote and get your friends to vote,” says Watts. November mid-term elections are right around the corner. Rock The Vote will tell you how restrictive your state’s voting regulations are (automatic voter registration, same-day voter registration, etc.). Contact your reps and let them know how you feel about voter ID laws, for example. Contact RTV, or Spread the Vote, or your local chapter of the NAACP to find out how to register and mobilize voters in your area. Other ideas for how to get out the vote? Leave them in the comments.
Force Candidates to State a Position
“We want to get candidates on the record [about their position on gun-safety legislation],” says Watts. Moms Demand Action sponsors events for volunteers, and they’re introducing a new tool for public accountability: a “gun sense candidate questionnaire” that volunteers for the organization will use to pressure candidates and representatives to put their position on gun safety on the public record. If they equivocate or waffle, says Watts, “oppose them.” You can find events at Moms Demand Action or Everytown for Gun Safety, its partner organization. If you don’t have a chapter near you, start one.
Run for Office
If there’s no one else, says Watts, “you have to run yourself. There’s a moral imperative to run for office right now. Any office, not just Congress—city council, school board, sheriff. Seventeen percent of 500,000 elected positions are held by women, and when women hold office, they create policy that more in line with gun safety. But we need not just women—we need everyone to run, especially people who’ve been harmed by gun violence…or any caring American who thinks they’ve learned enough about policy and is now ready to make policy. In November, 13 of our volunteers ran [for state and local office] and nine won. Over 400 want to run in future elections.”
Watts started Moms Demand Action on December 15th, 2012, right after the Sandy Hook massacre. Since then, there have more than 200 school shootings. This is a test of character for every person in this country. Enough of feeling helpless and enraged: pick up the phone, print out a form and walk over to your representative’s office, lace up your sneakers—and if all else fails? Run.
HDR is less confusing—and even geekier—when broken down by detailed heatmaps
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Pretty much any online explainer about high dynamic range TVs (HDR) is hobbled by a not-insignificant asterisk: if you’re reading it online, your screen almost certainly can’t convey the visual difference. HDR benefits from a full pipeline of newfangled tech to increase color gamut and luminance ranges on screens. In other words, they’re brighter and more colorful—and most computer and phone screens can’t convey that.
But as it turns out, there’s a way, albeit a geeky one, to visually break down both the impact and issues of current-day HDR. As one enterprising gamer found out, the answer is tucked away into every single Xbox One console.
A thread on the renowned gaming forum ResetERA appeared on Thursday with a huge swath of heatmap images from modern HDR-compatible games, all posted by a user with the handle EvilBoris. And as he explains to Ars Technica, these images came about simply out of curiosity.
The heat (map) is on
This gallery contains a mix of flattened images and their respective HDR-10 heatmaps. The color scale on the right-hand image is better explained in the text below. This is a particularly solid representation of good HDR-10 data being spread across an entire dark-and-light image.
Forza Horizon 3 is careful in this scene to limit its max-brightness data to the headlight reflection jumping off the ground.
The gray skies in Forza Horizon 3 offer surprising bursts of luminance data, which this heat map reveals very cleverly.
Agents of Mayhem caps its luminance maximum at 1,000 nits, so the heatmap color here doesn’t go past that value’s color of red.
Another heatmap that reveals the quality of Agents of Mayhem’s 1,000-nit cap.
Users can set their own luminance ranges and caps in Assassin’s Creed: Origins, and this heatmap reflects that with only the tiniest hints of a 4,000-nit violet zone.
Rise of the Tomb Raider is awash with HDR-10 boosts, as shown in a few images.
Rise of the Tomb Raider. Very cool shoe-leather reflections here.
Rise of the Tomb Raider. Reflections off snow definitely look better in HDR than on a standard screen.
Final Fantasy XV uses a 1,000-nit cap here.
Final Fantasy XV.
Microsoft’s “Insects” demo lets users play around with resolution and HDR settings.
Middle-earth: Shadow of War is also lauded for solid HDR-10 performance.
“I was personally interested in why my experience with HDR products has been so varied,” Boris tells Ars via a forum direct message. The anonymous forum member, whose day job revolves around “eye and lens systems” for a tech-research firm (along with a serious photography habit), had been confused about why certain video games’ HDR modes looked different from others. So he started importing saved screenshots taken using the Xbox One X’s internal screenshot tool. Unlike the PlayStation 4 platform, Xbox One supports an export of its HDR metadata in an image format called JXR.
With this mix of basic images and metadata, Boris was able to extract “nit output,” or the exact brightness setting, for every single pixel in an image. From there, he followed some guidance from an Unreal Engine 4 post about HDR resources and attempted to “filter an un-toned HDR image to accurately visualize the brightness of an HDR game (using the “HDR-10” protocol). That effort, combined with a custom gradient map he applied to images, allowed him to render the above heatmap images.
What do they represent, exactly? In short, they show the exact brightness instructions sent to HDR TV sets—and they show off which game studios do this in ways that look best on modern TV sets. As Boris points out in his public explainer post, HDR-10’s metadata contains exact nit output values, not relative ones, that account for a luminance maximum of 10,000 nits. Meaning, every TV set will be told to render certain brightness levels by a 4K HDR Blu-ray or video game, regardless of whether the TV is capable of reaching that 10,000-nit brightness. (Current HDR-10 TVs translate these values in various, appropriate ways, which prevents any default “light crush” issues.)
The first cool thing about Boris’s heatmaps is that they offer a clear, visual answer to “what does HDR do?” A flattened, “SDR” image appears next to each corresponding, crazy-looking heatmap images, so you can make out shapes, reflections, time of day, and other visual basics. Then, a peek at the heatmap, along with its color legend, clarifies how much brightness data is in each pixel. The blue end of the heatmap color scale indicates darkness. Standard brightness information for evenly lit, primary video content typically sits in the 150-nit range, which is yellow in the heatmap. The kind of content you’d expect to be brighter in an HDR image appears as red (1,000 nits), violet (4,000 nits), and white (10,000 nits).
In some images, this is as simple as a shining sun appearing in the heatmap as a concentrated ball of violet and white data. In others, more subtle HDR impact can be seen in heatmap information such as snow reflections, peeks of brightness in otherwise gray skies, and glimmers of light off of “natural” substances like leather and foliage.
Monster Hunter World is offered as an example of HDR-10 optimization gone wrong.
A lack of lower-luminance data points leads to a washed-out image on an HDR-compatible panel.
Perhaps more compelling is Boris’s examination of how various games employ HDR-10. Harsher, less-balanced bursts of HDR data are revealed in games like Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and Monster Hunter World. (Deus Ex‘s issues can be mitigated with a brightness-level tweak in its settings menu, at least.) On the other end, further examination put the undercooked 2017 open-world game Agents of Mayhem at the top of Boris’s list, while certain games’ use of a luminance cap, particularly Rise of the Tomb Raider and Final Fantasy XV, pays off with more balanced bursts of light. (Assassin’s Creed: Origins is lauded, as well, which isn’t surprising. That Ubisoft game has previously been praised for its built-in HDR-optimization menus, which Boris points out.)
