Similar to the Nonda Zus, the Roav by Anker SmartCharge Spectrum connects to your phone over Bluetooth while you drive. When you turn the car off and the Bluetooth connection breaks, the Roav app will mark down your parking location on a map, so you can find your way back.
Perhaps more usefully, every time you start your car, the SmartCharge will also log the health of your car battery, so you can track its charge over time from your phone, and get a replacement ready before you get stranded in your own driveway.
Those features alone (along with Quick Charge 3.0 charging) would make this worth $20, but it does have one last trick up its sleeve: A customizable accent light. The LED ring around the USB ports can display 16,000 different colors, and you can choose your favorite from the app to make it perfectly match (or stand out from) your car’s own dashboard lighting. Pretty nifty.
Adobe Squeezed the Best Parts of Its Video Editing Suite into a New Mobile App
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Adobe has embraced mobile photo editing with open arms, releasing robust apps like Lightroom for processing and perfecting your images on a phone. It hasn’t been quite as committed when it comes to mobile support for video production, which is why it’s nice to see its four-year-old Premiere Clip app being eclipsed by its new Project Rush which merges parts of Premiere, After Effects, and Audition into an all-in-one video app that lets producers master videos right from a mobile device.
If you’re unfamiliar with Adobe’s desktop video production tools, Premiere Pro is its video editor, After Effects is a visual effects and motion graphics tool, and Audition is a multi-track editor for audio. Together they cover all the angles of video post-production, but to date have been only available for Macs and PCs.
Back in 2014, Adobe released a streamlined version of Premiere for Android and iOS devices called Premiere Clip, but Project Rush is going to vastly expand what content creators will be able to produce from their mobile devices. However, Project Rush isn’t mobile-only. A desktop version will be available as well, and using Adobe’s cloud capabilities, projects will be automatically synced across devices, allowing users to begin editing on their phone, but then finish a project on their laptop.
Project Rush isn’t going to replace Premiere, After Effects, or Audition altogether. In order for its UI to replicate itself between computers and mobile devices, the capabilities and interface of Project Rush has been streamlined to accommodate smaller touchscreens. Power users of Adobe’s post-production tools will undoubtedly find a lot of functionality missing in Project Rush, but at the same time, it should boost what users can create solely from a handheld device.
Video and audio editing apps have been available for phones and tablets for a while now, so Adobe isn’t breaking new ground there. But complex visual effects software like After Effects has not.
During a brief demo of Project Rush it didn’t appear as if the new app had borrowed AE’s powerful compositing and masking capabilities, but advanced color correction tools was there, as were the motion graphic titling templates that are already available in Premiere Pro. Creating custom animated titles didn’t appear to be an option either—although I’m not sure I’d even want to attempt that on a six-inch screen.
When it comes to audio, Project Rush hands the mastering off to Adobe’s Project Sensei which is the company’s AI-powered automation software. Instead of having to process every bit of audio by hand, Project Sensei will automatically mix and master the sound levels on a user’s behalf, which is an approach we’re seeing creep into more and more of Adobe’s products.
Rounding out Project Rush’s focus on video-production-on-the-go is the ability to publish or share video content on multiple platforms including YouTube, Facebook, and Snapchat, from the app. This includes the ability to specify custom thumbnails, the title and description of the video, and even scheduling if you find yourself finishing in the middle of the night, and don’t want your masterpiece to hit the internet until you wake up in the morning.
Adobe doesn’t have a specific timeline for when Project Rush will be available for download; “later this year” is the only timeline it will commit to. But it will be showing more of the app at the VidCon 2018 conference in Anaheim this week.
This Plug Senses Outlets and Glows So You Never Have to Shock Yourself Again
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Blindly reaching under your desk to find an available outlet to plug in your dying laptop is never a safe idea—I’ve had it go wrong… it was not pleasant. Reaching for a flashlight is a safer approach, but Ten One Design’s new Stella plug is an even better one. It’s got its own built-in flashlight that only turns on when electricity is detected nearby, illuminating the outlet and reducing the risk of getting shocked..
It sounds like sorcery, but electricians already use tools with similar technology so they can quickly assess if a wire is carrying power without having to connect a multimeter. Ten One Design has not only improved the sensitivity with the non-contact voltage sensor it’s incorporated into Stella, the company has also worked to minimize the power consumption of the built-in LED flashlight so that it should run for well over a decade on its integrated battery. You’ll have long replaced your laptop by the time it stops working.
The Stella is available in PC and Mac versions, but the latter includes an additional upgrade for keeping your cords decluttered.Photo: Ten One Design
The $35 Stella will be available in two versions for Mac and PC laptops, but the Mac version includes an additional upgrade to the hardware that Apple ships. Ten One Design has included a slide-out clip so that when the Stella is connected to your MacBook’s power brick, you have a better way to wind and secure its braided power cord. It’s a small improvement, but one that MacBook users might actually be even more excited for than Stella’s automatic flashlight.
So, We’ve Come To This: Chinese City Has Designated ‘Zombie Sidewalk’ For Slow-Walking Texters
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Because why on earth should a person need to be aware of their surroundings, the Chinese city of Xi’an in Shaanxi provence has a designated sidewalk for slow-walking texters, aka phubbers (previously: a similar lane in another city). Some more info while I run to lunch and yell, “Look out, shark!” at anyone staring at their phone.
The lane is painted red, green and blue, and is 80cm wide and 100m long. Pictures of smartphones along the route distinguish it from an ordinary pedestrian lane.
Shaanxi Online says that a large shopping mall, which looks onto the street, had been pushing to have the lane for a month.
It says that cars often come onto the pavement, which is a busy channel for pedestrians who might not be paying attention to their surroundings.
Personally, I never text and walk. You know why? “You never walk.” I hate it. The only things worse than walking are jogging and running. “Wow. On a scale from one to ten, just how unhealthy are you, GW?” UNINSURABLE.
Thanks to Amelie, who agrees being aware of your surroundings is a dying art.
So, We’ve Come To This: Chinese City Has Designated ‘Zombie Sidewalk’ For Slow-Walking Texters
https://ift.tt/2JX3aAq
Because why on earth should a person need to be aware of their surroundings, the Chinese city of Xi’an in Shaanxi provence has a designated sidewalk for slow-walking texters, aka phubbers (previously: a similar lane in another city). Some more info while I run to lunch and yell, “Look out, shark!” at anyone staring at their phone.
The lane is painted red, green and blue, and is 80cm wide and 100m long. Pictures of smartphones along the route distinguish it from an ordinary pedestrian lane.
Shaanxi Online says that a large shopping mall, which looks onto the street, had been pushing to have the lane for a month.
It says that cars often come onto the pavement, which is a busy channel for pedestrians who might not be paying attention to their surroundings.
Personally, I never text and walk. You know why? “You never walk.” I hate it. The only things worse than walking are jogging and running. “Wow. On a scale from one to ten, just how unhealthy are you, GW?” UNINSURABLE.
Thanks to Amelie, who agrees being aware of your surroundings is a dying art.
High Security: A Fingerprint Padlock That Can Be Easily Be Disassembled With A Screwdriver
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This is a shot of the fingerprint padlock that lockpicking hobbyist LockPickingLawyer was sent by the manufacturer for review. After spending almost no time with the lock, LockPickingLawyer discovered the entire lock can be disassembled by removing three torx screws around the bezel, the shackle opened, and even relocked without the owner’s knowledge. That’s some high security. After making the manufacturer aware of this critical design flaw, they responded with, and I kid you not:
the lock is invincible to the people who do not have a screw driver
Well that’s a relief. It’s not like a criminal would already own a set of torx screw drivers, or that anyone can just buy a set on Amazon for $4. Now I’m not saying this company should head back to the drawing board, but they should definitely get out of the lock making business and burn their office to the ground.
Keep going for a shot of his email to the manufacturer and their amazing response.
Thanks to Luc, who’s not convinced that lock is sledgehammer proof either.
MIT engineers give RFID tags chemical-sensing capabilities
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Chelsea Turner, MIT
Engineering specialists from MIT have devised a way to make RFID (radio-frequency identification) tags more reliable and pick up on chemicals in the surrounding environment — without needing the typical battery.
The ‘plug-and-play’ nature of the new designs is very promising for facilities that need to monitor pipes or gas containers over larger networks. It also offers an increased communication range (up to 10 meters) which can help minimize the amount of required readers and thereby lower overall costs.
RFID tags are already ubiquitous in retail, libraries and hospitals. They’re cheap, wireless, not too power hungry, and are very useful for keeping track of inventory. However, it’s their design that subjects them to inefficiency; most RFID tags have tiny, in-built antennae, which deflect a radio signal and transmit code that’s then stored in the tag’s chip. The problem is when the radio waves reflect against walls (or other objects) and interfere with sensing. Sai Nithin Reddy Kantareddy, a graduate student, explained that antennae-based sensors increase the chances of getting false positives or negatives which makes them unreliable.
To deal with that complication, MIT’s Auto-ID lab has a design which turns ordinary RFID tags into sensors. Some RFID tags are battery-assisted, while others are more passive (meaning they get their energy from a remote reader), but both types use antennae. Aware of the shortcomings associated with antennae, the researchers came up with an UHF (ultra-high frequency) tag sensor configuration which is less prone to interference, and was able to sense glucose in the environment. The glucose-sensing chip produces an electric charge whenever it identifies glucose, and that acts as the battery.
Their approach involved memory chips that could switch between a ‘passive’ energy-based mode and a local, energy-assisted mode (where an external battery is normally required) into an RFID tag with standard radio-frequency antennae. A circuit wrapped around the chip allowed it to activate the energy-assisted mode only when it sensed particular stimuli.
In the future, the researchers hope to develop RFID tag sensors that can identify environmental carbon monoxide — and the good news is their chip-centric design is much more scalable and than the specificity demanded by antennae designs.
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