Rocket League is one of a select few games to offer full cross-platform play after Sony loosened up some of its restrictions. While PS4 players have been able to take on rivals on PC for some time and, since last month, those on Switch and Xbox One, gamers haven’t had an easy way to partner up with their buddies on other platforms. That’s about to change on February 19th, when the Friends List party system arrives.
The Friends List has four tabs. The first displays your friends playing on the same platform, and the second includes your buddies playing on different systems. The other tabs are for recent players and notifications, including those all-important party invites. You’ll also see invites for clubs, which now also work across platforms.
We’re throwing a party and you’re invited! The Friends Update will go live on Feb. 19. Watch our walkthrough of the Friends List and Cross-Platform Parties!
To add a friend, you’ll need to know their RocketID, which combines their username with a four-digit number. This is automatically assigned, though you can change your RocketID username from an option at the bottom of the list (the number will stay the same).
Psyonix said in October it was delaying its RocketID system until this year, to make sure it was compatible with PS4. After Sony gave the thumbs up for cross-platform play, Rocket League players now only need to wait one more week until they can form elite car soccer teams with their pals on other platforms.
Meanwhile, next week’s update also brings practice options for extra modes (including Hoops and Rumble), Competitive Season 9 rewards and a way to see your number of weekly wins. However, an event that was planned for this month has been canceled. Psyonix will focus instead on a different upcoming event.
In a random act of generosity, a user on the Nintendo Switch subreddit offered to give away a free game. Then another offered. Then another. Eventually, the mods decided they needed to temporarily ban giveaways, lest these gestures completely overtake the subreddit.
Transforming your camera’s RAW sensor data into a usable image is calculation-intensive and sometimes, your computer doesn’t have the muscle to get it right. For the next version of Lightroom, Adobe has introduced a feature called "Enhance Details" that uses AI to tackle the process, called "demosaicing." The neural network works on Bayer images (Canon, Nikon, Sony, Olympus) as well as X-Trans (Fujifilm) to increase detail while reducing problems like moire and false colors.
Demoisaicing is particularly tricky in parts of an image with lots of texture, detail and colors. "Myriad mathematical calculations are required to perform the interpolation necessary to build an image," Adobe stated in a white paper. "This takes time, even on the most powerful computer hardware. As a result, software like Lightroom is constantly balancing the tradeoff between image fidelity and speed.
The problems that typically crop up are the loss of small details, false colors across sharp edges, moire, edge blurring (zippering) and more. Using Adobe’s Sensei, Enhance Details was trained extensively in the cloud so that it can use the hardware on your PC or Mac. "We trained a neural network to demosaic RAW images using problematic examples, then [use] machine learning built into the latest Mac OS and Windows 10 operating systems to run this network," said Adobe.
The result is a up to 30 percent more resolution in Bayer and X-Trans RAW files, and it comes organically from your camera’s sensor, rather than being generated artificially. There are a few caveats: You need a relatively powerful computer, and the process is only useful for images meant to be printed at a large size, or those with lots of details or artifacts.
On top of the enhance feature, Adobe added HDR, Pano and HDR Pano merge tools, along with a targeted adjustment tool and histogram clipping indicators. The HDR and Pano functions make it easier to combine multiple images to create images with more dynamic range, either in regular or panoramic formats.
Lightroom CC now has a targeted adjustment tool that makes it easy to fine-tune specific parts of an image, like the sky. The histogram clipping indicators show areas that are too dark (in blue), or too light (red), helping you deal with under- and over-exposed areas of an image. Finally, Adobe has added photo sharing to its Lightroom iOS app, and fixed bugs in the Android and ChromeOS versions, "making way for new features coming soon." The release will start rolling out today to Creative Cloud users with access to Lightroom CC.
Amazon has announced that it will acquire Eero, one of the biggest players in the networking hardware space known for its easy-to-set-up mesh Wi-Fi solutions.
Bay Area-based Eero, named after Finnish industrial designer
, has been in operation since early 2015. It has already shipped several products. Neither Amazon nor Eero revealed how much money the tech giant paid in the acquisition, but Eero had
In case there was any doubt that the acquisition is part of a larger smart home strategy, a quote in Amazon’s press release from SVP of Amazon Devices and Services Dave Limp named that as a reason right off the bat:
We are incredibly impressed with the Eero team and how quickly they invented a WiFi solution that makes connected devices just work. We have a shared vision that the smart home experience can get even easier, and we’re committed to continue innovating on behalf of customers.
As is always the case with releases like this, there’s also a quote from the chief of Eero, Nick Weaver:
From the beginning, Eero’s mission has been to make the technology in homes just work. We started with WiFi because it’s the foundation of the modern home. Every customer deserves reliable and secure WiFi in every room. By joining the Amazon family, we’re excited to learn from and work closely with a team that is defining the future of the home, accelerate our mission, and bring Eero systems to more customers around the globe.
Eero’s products have a 4.6-star product rating on Amazon’s store, and the devices already support Alexa voice controls. Amazon has been pushing a feature
, many users end up paying some service to do it for them. Like many contemporary mesh Wi-Fi offerings, Eero’s products are relatively easy to get going.
Eero’s products could fill a gap in Amazon’s product strategy and help users more easily set up their Fire TV, Echo, and Ring devices—as long as those users don’t mind living fully in Amazon’s ecosystem. Amazon hasn’t said much about what it plans to do with Eero yet, but you can bet that the products will be used to make Amazon’s total dominance of the home more likely.
Warmer waters in the Pacific Northwest are killing salmon before they can reproduce.
Salmon populations are dying in the Pacific Northwest due to climate change. This is particularly devastating for the native Tulalip people, who trace their cultural…
via Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now http://bit.ly/2k2uJQn
It’s often hard to tell when you are using Google Maps exactly where you are supposed to turn. Some Maps users are currently testing out a feature that overlays directions on the real world using augmented reality. It seems this feature is in testing for pedestrians right now.
AR overlays for Google Maps was first announced last year, but hasn’t rolled out yet. However, early testers note that users need to hold the camera of their device up and point to a few nearby locations for the app to figure out where you are.
Testers reports that the feature works with remarkable precision. It remains unclear how long the AR feature will be in testing. Word is that the AR feature needs more polishing before a full launch.
There is no indication of what exactly Google is trying to polish. There is also no indication of when Google might roll an AR feature out to navigation for drivers.
via Legit Reviews Hardware Articles http://bit.ly/2BUcaU4
Testing a turbopump as the sun sets in Central Texas.
Firefly
CEDAR PARK, Texas—Some four centuries ago, the sultan of the Ottoman Empire wearied of his bothersome neighbors in Eastern Europe. So Mehmed the Hunter, an Islamic holy warrior who reigned for four decades, wrote to the piratical Cossacks living in what is modern Ukraine and demanded their surrender. The cretins must bow to the cultured.
Today, a large painting that dominates one wall of Tom Markusic’s office depicts the Cossack response to Mehmed. On the canvas, a dozen rough-looking, hard-drinking men have gathered around around a scribe, pointing, smoking, and laughing uproariously. The scribe is writing a ribald, disparaging response. It is a copy of the famed Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan Mehmed IV of the Ottoman Empire painting, which hangs in the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg.
Markusic glances at the painting and explains, “Basically, they’re saying, ‘Don’t worry about coming to get us—we’re coming to get you.'”
The Lone Star State is a long way from the Ukraine, where the painting is much-beloved. And though Markusic himself is not a hard-drinking Cossack, he draws inspiration from the story of the rebellious Zaporozhian Cossacks. One of their descendants salvaged his dreams.
Markusic’s rocket company, Firefly, was left for dead in 2016 when its funding dried up. In those last desperate days, as Firefly burned through a million dollars a week, Markusic spent most of his time chasing investors. Eventually, Firefly and its 159 employees crashed hard. Few in the aerospace industry were surprised. Then, as now, dozens of start-up rocket companies are seeking to build newer and cheaper boosters to launch satellites into space. Some failed before Firefly. Some have failed since. Certainly, with a glut of would-be launch providers, most will fail within the coming years. That Firefly joined the ash heap was hardly surprising.
Enlarge/Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan Mehmed IV
by Ilya Repin (1844-1930)
Wikimedia
Only it didn’t fail. Months after Firefly went dark, Markusic found a lifeline in an Internet entrepreneur named Max Polyakov, who hailed from the city of Zaporizhia in southeastern Ukraine. Together—with Markusic’s engineering brilliance and Polyakov’s money and business sense—they have brought Firefly roaring back. The once-dead company may just launch its first rocket this year.
In their own way, Markusic and Polyakov are penning a response to the aerospace industry that expected their surrender. The rest of the aerospace world need not worry about coming to get Firefly—Firefly is coming to get them.
A quasi-spiritual moment
Tom Markusic didn’t find the passion that would consume his life until after he reached his 30s. By the year 2006, he’d spent a decade at the Air Force and then NASA, using his plasma physics background to study propulsion. As he contemplated career advancement, Markusic had begun to read a stack of books on becoming a manager.
Then NASA sent him to Kwajalein, the tiny Pacific atoll in the Marshall Islands where a start-up company named SpaceX had begun to assemble its Falcon 1 rocket for an initial test flight. Markusic was asked to see what he could learn about the company and its methods.
“I was there, in the jungle, reading these management books, and I was watching these guys sweating and putting this rocket together,” he recalled. “It was like a quasi-spiritual moment for me there, because it presented such a stark contrast between this old way of doing things (and learning all of these management techniques) and people that were actually just doing it. They didn’t know everything, but they said ‘Screw it—let’s just do it and go to space.'”
Gradually, Markusic set aside his books and picked up tools. He got his hands dirty. He stopped talking about doing things, and studying how to do things and just did things. In March 2006, the first Falcon 1 rocket launch failed, but that didn’t matter to Markusic. By that summer, he had left NASA to join SpaceX and wound up directing the central Texas site where SpaceX tested its Merlin rocket engines.
At the time, NASA was in the midst of an exploration program called “Constellation,” under which the agency sought to replicate the achievements of the Moon landings in the 1960s and 1970s and eventually send humans to Mars. The NASA administrator at the time, Mike Griffin, famously dubbed the plan “Apollo on steroids.” Critics said the program to build huge, expensive rockets would get bogged down and fail to lower the cost of reaching space. They were largely correct, and Constellation was canceled in 2010.
“It just kind of occurred to me that, if we’re going to do cool things in space, we’ve got to figure out how to get the costs down, and the folks that are going to figure it out are these people,” Markusic said of companies like SpaceX and others that shared the new space ethos. “I literally went native on NASA and basically didn’t go back. I joined the SpaceX mission.”
Markusic remained at SpaceX for five years before shorter stints at Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic. He returned to central Texas in 2014, about an hour down the freeway from SpaceX’s engine test site, and founded Firefly. By then, he had fully embraced new space and the idea that the greatest impediment between humans and the universe is the cost of access to space.
