Sometimes it feels like having anything less than the latest and greatest graphics card means getting left behind in terms of features. Today Nvidia bucks that trend, at least a little bit, by bringing its RTX Video Super Resolution to GeForce RTX 20-series GPUs. The video enhancement tool, previously available to RTX 30-series and newer cards, comes to the older hardware via the 1.5 update of the tool.
If you haven’t heard, Nvidia RTX Super Resolution is a way to enhance 2D video with a bit of AI-enhanced algorithmic processing magic, leveraging the AI tensor cores in RTX GPUs. The idea is to make older and lower-quality videos shine on newer displays and laptops, sort of like an enhanced version of the way a 4K TV will upscale a 1080p input signal. Super Resolution can enhance web video in the Chrome or Edge browsers, as well as local playback in VLC. It’s included in the Nvidia Control Panel tool.
RTX Super Resolution isn’t related to any version of DLSS upscaling for games and other 3D content — they’re completely separate technologies. Even so, it’s nice to see Nvidia make good on the promise it made earlier this year to bring the feature to Turing-based desktop and laptop GPUs.
Two years ago, late on a February night in Vernon, British Columbia, Melissa Trixie Watt was struggling to sleep, so she reached for her phone. She saw that she had a Facebook message. “How are you? I hope you are well,” read the DM from an unknown man. According to his profile, he was a tow truck driver with a long, graying beard. He lived 45 minutes away and said he’d been talking to her on OkCupid—a site she’d never used. “I think I should come to Vernon and see you,” he wrote. “What are your thoughts on that?” Lying under her duvet, Watt felt a chill.
She wrote back and asked for screenshots of the conversations. It turned out that he knew more of her personal details: the car she drives, that she works as a massage therapist, the name of her practice. Scariest of all, he was under the impression that they’d made plans to meet up and enact a rape fantasy.
“I’ll wear black pantyhose with the crotch ripped open, no panties and high heels,” wrote the poseur, whose profile pic was Watt in a tie-dye tank top, her long blond hair swished to one side.
“Mmm good little slut. You know what I want,” the tow truck driver wrote.
“I can wear the pantyhose and heels at work all day with a short skirt and tease all the men I treat so that I get raped extra hard by you,” wrote the person impersonating Watt.
“Just wait till I have you in my hands,” the driver texted back.
“I am your property. I am your rape meat. I am a whore Daddy,” wrote the impersonator.
This wasn’t the first time Watt had received messages like this or seen a similarly horrifying exchange. Fake profiles impersonating Watt had been popping up on KinkD, FetLife, and OkCupid for the past four years. At times, late-night texts and calls poured in from men hunting for explicit photos or a hookup. Still, this one was different.
When she saw that the tow truck driver had a photo of her wearing a bra and panties, something clicked. She began to think she knew who was doing this—someone she had once considered a friend.
A cute little beagle with big smiley eyes … how could you not fall in love with Watson? But the residents of my Parisian building were terrified when they saw him enter. Watson is not like any other dog. He’s trained to detect the tiny insects that have been all over the front pages of French newspapers for the past few weeks: bedbugs.
This fall, fear has become paranoia. Pictures of bedbugs in cinemas, metros, and trains have saturated social media. “I’ve been getting so many calls from worried people lately,” says Watson’s owner, Charlotte Ducomte, founder of the company WatsonDetect. For years now, she and Watson have been going through the city and its suburbs to detect bedbugs in private apartments and company offices. These past few weeks, she’s been inundated with calls from people who “wanted to have their apartment checked … just in case.” There is “ia bedbug panic in Paris” right now, she says.
Bedbug numbers in France have surged in 2023. There’s been a 65 percent increase in pest control visits for the insects across the country this year compared to last, says France’s Union Chamber of Insect Control.
This is partly due to the weather. According to Jean-Michel Bérenger, an entomologist who cofounded the National Institute for the Study and Fight Against Bedbugs in 2018, heat accelerates a bedbug’s life cycle, and September and October have been particularly hot in Paris—average temperatures have been 4.5 degrees Celsius above normal. “When the temperature inside your house is 25 to 26 degrees Celsius (77 to 78.8 Fahrenheit), it takes only five days for the bedbug eggs to hatch. In normal conditions, when the temperature is around 20 degrees Celsius, it takes 10 days,” he explains.
But the current plague of bedbugs is also part of a general rise in their numbers in recent years, says Bérenger. The modern world, filled with people constantly on the move, easily allows the insects to spread. Ducomte says numbers have been increasing in Paris since 2002 and attributes this to more visitors to the city, driven by cheap flights and the convenience of Airbnb. “People move a lot more than before … and thus, they are more likely to be infested,” she says.
When Watson moves through my apartment, he doesn’t stop anywhere. Lucky me. Pausing is his way of showing his owner that he can smell bedbugs, which in the early stages of an infestation can be hard to detect—the insects are quite shy, often hiding inside furniture frames or under floorboards during the day and coming out to feast at night. With few effective tools for detecting small numbers of bedbugs, dog-based services have become increasingly popular in the city, even if the limited research on them suggests their accuracy can be patchy.
With shipments of its Pocket handheld console finally under control, Analogue is turning its attention to a whole new retro machine. The Analogue 3D aims to be the ultimate Nintendo 64, playing original cartridges on modern 4K displays. I’d love to show it to you, but Analogue is only releasing a teaser image and a few key specs today.
The Analogue 3D is the latest in a line of consoles from the company that emulate retro hardware. All of Analogue’s machines use field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA) that are coded to mimic original hardware. Rather than playing ROM files like most software emulators, Analogue consoles play original media — in this case N64 carts — without the downsides that software emulation often brings, such as increased input lag or visual imperfections.
Analogue
Analogue started out with boutique recreations of Neo Geo and NES hardware, before targeting a more casual audience with systems that mimicked the SNES and Genesis. Its most splashy release to date is the Pocket, which emulates a variety of handhelds. There’s also the TurboGrafx-like Analogue Duo, which was announced in 2020 and, after some delays, will apparently ship this year.
That may seem like a disparate group of consoles, but there is one thing that ties them together: they’re all pretty primitive. If you’ve been around a while, you’ll remember consoles being referred to as 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit and so on. A lot of that was marketing, but the hardware of 8-bit systems is broadly less complex to recreate than that of 16-bit systems, and so on. As the first true “64-bit” console on the market, the N64 is by far the most complex system Analogue has tackled to date. Its 64-bit 93.75MHz CPU was wild for a $200 console — even if most developers still wrote 32-bit code for it — and its Silicon Graphics “reality coprocessor” was the stuff of (extremely nerdy) playground legend. They made the T-rex from Jurassic Parkwith (better versions of) that thing!
Analogue
The Analogue 3D is described as a “reimagining” of Nintendo’s console, and the company is promising 100 percent compatibility with carts from all regions. It will output at 4K resolution with Original Display Modes that target “reference quality recreations” of specific CRTs and PVMs. To translate, that means Analogue is building filters that might, for example, make a modern OLED or LCD display feel more like a dope mid-’90s Sony Trinitron TV. No word on whether they’re baking in a recreation of the weird LG TV with legs I played on for most of the ’00s.
Internals aside, the N64 has a small library of games and a mistake of a controller, but there are some classics in there. On the first-party side, The Legand of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask have both held up to decades of scrutiny, and Mario 64, some camera issues aside, is as fun to play in 2023 as it was in 1996. Then there’s Paper Mario, Mario Kart64, F-Zero X, Star Fox 64, Super Smash Bros. and countless others. Rare also did some fantastic work on the N64 with the likes of GoldenEye 007, Perfect Dark, Banjo-Kazooie, Diddy Kong Racing and Conker’s Bad Fur Day.
Quality third-party titles were harder to come by, but Star Wars: Rogue Squadron, Mischief Makers, Harvest Moon 64 and the Turok games are all worth checking out. (I personally spent more time playing Horse in an average port of Tony Hawk’sPro Skater than any of these, but there’s no accounting for taste.)
Analogue / 8BitDo
One thing very few people remember fondly is the N64’s three-paddled controller, which at the time felt fine but boy was it not. The Analogue 3D will have four controller ports, just like the original N64, but it thankfully also supports Bluetooth and 2.4G wireless connectivity. 8BitDo will be releasing a companion controller for the console, which is all-but invisible in the picture above. After some toying around in Photoshop, it appears to be very similar to the company’s Ultimate controller, but with C-buttons where the regular face buttons would be, the A+B buttons replacing the right analog stick and a big ol’ start button in the middle.
There’s no word yet on price — early Analogue machines cost a lot, but its more recent efforts have been more palatable. The Analogue Duo, which has a CD drive inside, cost $250 when pre-orders went live, so it seems a fair guess to say it’d be in the same price range — though you’ll need to budget for a couple of controllers no matter the price, as Analogue doesn’t supply them with any of its systems.
The Analogue 3D is currently slated to ship in 2024, and knowing Analogue, pre-orders will open some time in the next few months and sell out almost immediately.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://ift.tt/GqetrMW
Myspace is getting the documentary treatment, with a film currently in the works chronicling the rise and fall of arguably the first big social network. When it launched in 2003, you chose your top eight digital friends, and drama ensued. The platform went mainstream, becoming an important music promotional tool long before Bandcamp or even YouTube.
The movie will be a joint project between production companies Gunpowder & Sky and The Documentary Group. Gunpowder & Sky has produced documentaries like 69: The Saga of Danny Hernandez and Everybody’s Everything, about deceased rapper Lil Peep. The Documentary Group’s behind shows like Amend: The Fight for America and The Deep End, a series focusing on spiritual wellness guru Teal Swan.
Maybe, just maybe, we’ll even learn what Tom from Myspace’s last name is.
Web-swinging around New York City in Marvel’s Spider-Man might be the best game mechanic in recent times, but why not add wings? With the sequel, Insomniac did just that — and gave players two Spideys to control.
The team has also streamlined and expanded combat movesets and abilities. A lot of the gadgets from the first game return, but they’re easier than ever to access. Previously, if you wanted to use a gadget, you’d have to hold R1 and switch from your web-shooters to another option. Now, web shooters are always triggered by mashing R1, but you can hold R1 and hit one of the four face buttons to activate your slotted gadgets. It’s all further augmented by a compelling plot featuring the likes of Venom’s symbiote, the Lizard, Sandman, and more.
After a week with the Meta and Ray-Ban’s latest $299 smart sunglasses, they still feel a little bit like a novelty. But Meta has improved the core features, with better audio and camera quality, as well as the ability to livestream directly from the frames. If you’re a creator or already spend a lot of time in Meta’s apps (Facebook, Instagram, even WhatsApp), though, there are plenty of reasons to give the second-generation shades a look. These Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses feel more like a finished product.
Analogue’s 3D aims to be the ultimate Nintendo 64 console tribute, playing original cartridges on modern 4K displays. All Analogue’s machines use field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA) coded to mimic the original hardware. Instead of playing often legally questionable ROM files, like most software emulators, Analogue consoles play original media, without the downsides that software emulation often brings. The Analogue 3D is currently slated to ship in 2024, but no price yet.
Ookla has published its latest findings with regard to US carrier data speeds, and to the surprise of nobody, T-Mobile is still very much ahead when compared to Verizon and AT&T.
In terms of raw download speed, T-Mobile median speed is clocked at 164Mbps versus Verizon’s 76Mbps and AT&T’s 73Mbps. Yes, T-Mobile’s median download is over twice as fast. For upload, T-Mobile comes in with a median speed of 11Mbps, while Verizon hits 9Mbps and AT&T manages 7Mbps. Even performance consistency is being won by T-Mobile, with a rating of 85%, followed by Verizon’s 81% and AT&T’s 78%.
5G performance was also tested, and again, T-Mobile straight up dominates. According to Ookla, T-Mobile’s median download speed on a pure 5G connection is 222Mbps, with Verizon coming in second at 154Mbps and AT&T at 102Mbps.
Where things finally even out slightly is 5G consistency. Ookla found there was no statistical winner in this category, which you might as well mark as a win for Verizon. T-Mobile scored a 74.9% and Verizon got a 74.7%. What is clear is AT&T lost, coming in at 66.4%.
As for which devices are the fastest on these networks, Ookla’s data shows that if you want the best speeds, you’ll want the new iPhone 15 Pro lineup, followed by Samsung’s Galaxy S23 family, then the Pixel 7 Pro. The Pixel 8 lineup wasn’t tested given the timing of their release.
There is a large amount of fun insights in these reports. We recommend checking out the full thing. You can even see where your home state lands in the ranking of data speed. For us here in Oregon, it’s not great, ranked at #24. Boo.
Tesla battery replacements can cost between $5,000 and $20,000. HUIZENG HU/ Getty Images
A Tesla-owning couple said they received a £17,374 bill, or $20,698, after their vehicle broke down.
One of the owners, Johnny Bacigalupo, told Edinburgh Live that the bill was “absolutely obscene.”
They were told by a Tesla customer support rep that the battery was “damaged due to water ingress.”
A Tesla owner said he was “flabbergasted” when he and his partner were hit with a hefty bill to fix their electric vehicle.
Johnny Bacigalupo and Rob Hussey told Scottish news outlet Edinburgh Live they were given a £17,374, or $20,698, bill to fix their Tesla after its battery was damaged by rain last week.
“I honestly can’t believe that this has happened. When I first got the call I thought we would get a bill for £500 or £1,000,” Bacigalupo told Edinburgh Live. “When they said over 17 grand – it’s absolutely obscene. My heart missed a beat, honestly.”
Elon Musk said in 2019 that it could cost between $5,000 and $10,000 to replace a Tesla battery, J.D. Power reported, noting that the figures are different in 2023. Recurrent, which reports on EV battery health, said battery replacement could cost anywhere from $5,000 to $20,000.
After being unable to start their vehicle and arranging to have it delivered to Tesla Edinburgh by a collection firm, Bacigalupo and Hussey received a call on Wednesday informing them that the battery was “damaged due to water ingress.”
The 8-year warranty didn’t cover this, and they were asked if they wanted to proceed with a repair costing $20,698.
“Did I wish to proceed?? I was flabbergasted and couldn’t really find my words,” Bacigalupo said, who told the Tesla representative that the couple wasn’t at fault.
The outlet said it verified the bill via correspondence between Tesla and the couple and that it had seen an email from Tesla customer relations, which says it’s investigating the complaint.
A similar incident occurred last year when a Canadian Tesla owner was told it would cost $26,000 to get a replacement battery for his vehicle, Fox Business reported.
The owner, Mario Zelaya, shared his experience in a TikTok video and said he was locked out of his Tesla Model S after the battery died. Zelaya said he eventually sold his Tesla after he spent $30 getting replacement ownership papers, which were locked in the vehicle.
EV batteries can deteriorate at various rates depending on numerous factors, including how they were charged and the environment in which the vehicle was driven.
Tesla Europe didn’t immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.
