The sixth and final episode of Slow Horses’ fourth season lands on Apple TV+ today, giving me a flimsy excuse to urge you all to watch. It’s a pulpy, fun and gripping British spy thriller that has finally started to garner some deserved attention. At six episodes a run, it’s respectful of your time in a way plenty of other streaming series aren’t. And while it’s unafraid of showing you the brutal side of espionage, you can revel in its gloriously deathly sense of humor.
Slow Horses focuses on Slough House, a department inside Britain’s security service where agents are dumped. MI5 officers who can’t be trusted with real work, or angered their superiors, are dumped in the administrative purgatory. Since you can’t hand a spy a pink slip and send them on their way, they’re parked at Slough House until they retire, or quit.
The show stars Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb, the antithesis of anyone’s imagined vision of a real spy. Lamb is perpetually drunk, obsessed with his own bodily emissions and is unpleasant to be around. (As I said when the show started, Slow Horses delights in watching the once and hopefully-future George Smiley playing someone so grubby.)
He’s joined by Jack Lowden as River Cartwright, a would-be superspy and the scion of a great family of spymasters parked at Slough House for spoilery reasons. Of course, much as River may chafe at his exile, he’s not quite able to live up to his own expectations. Much like the rest of the team, that Lamb delights in tormenting, River lacks some top-tier spy talents.
Naturally, despite being a team of “losers, misfits and boozers,” Lamb and his crew are regularly drawn into MI5’s grander intrigues. This time around, a central London shopping center is blown up, which precipitates a rabid hunt for the culprit. Except this time, the answers aren’t in MI5’s hands, but the slow horses themselves, but that’s about as much as I can say.
Much as I love the world the series depicts, drawn from Mick Herron’s series of books, I adore its dialog. Creator Will Smith (not that one), who recently won the series’ first Emmy, worked on The Thick of It. The British sitcom is the progenitor for Veep, and also laid the groundwork for Succession; two series that also share a love for the almost operatic use of profanity.
A show like Slow Horses should be dominating the news cycle every single episode, but I think we all know why it remains in a smaller niche. That it’s on Apple TV+ certainly limits the number of people who are able to watch it and, by extension, fall in love with it. After all, despite having the world’s most well-heeled backer and access to every iPhone in the world, it still has a quarter of Netflix’s user figures.
But don’t let its platform hold you back, especially when you can pay for a month’s worth and watch all four seasons in a week, depending on your patience. It’s certainly worth it.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/streaming/im-so-glad-slow-horses-is-a-hit-120003767.html?src=rss
By the end of 2024, the world will have nearly 2,000 Gigawatts of solar generation capacity in service. Each panel is made of silicon, glass, various polymers, aluminum, copper and an assortment of other metals that capture the sun’s energy. It’s a rule of thumb that, barring damage, a panel will last for up to 30 years before it needs to be replaced. But what happens to all of those raw materials when the current crop of solar panels becomes obsolete? Surely, we’re not just wasting it all, are we?
What kills a solar panel?
Received wisdom suggests solar panels last for around 30 years, but that’s not the whole story here. “30 years is our best guess,” explained Garvin Heath of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). NREL found there was a higher rate of failures at the start of a panel’s life, often due to manufacturing or installation faults. In midlife, only a handful of panels fail. Then the statistics begin to climb northward the closer to the three decade mark you get but, even so, the number of panels that break are “less than one percent” of the total in operation at that time.
Matt Burnell is the founder of ReSolar, a British startup looking into reusing, repowering and recycling solar panels. As part of his work, Burnell visited a 40,000 panel array solar farm where 200 of the panels were broken during installation. “I took about 50 from that site, tested them to see their value for reuse [and] generation capacity,” he said, most of which were within the “tolerance range of the manufacturer.” Essentially, for the odd crack in the glass or bump on the frame — which may cause problems down the line — the panels were otherwise perfectly functional.
If a panel has survived its birth and installation, then the biggest thing that kills solar panels is the weather. Heath said a common cause is extreme weather events damaging the panel, or even just regular, aggressive weather causing things to degrade. Sadly, once a panel is broken, it’s often not worth the effort to repair.
So panels deemed “broken” during manufacture or installation may still be very capable of making power from the sun. But there are also plenty of panels that are being withdrawn from service after 25 or 30 years, even if they aren't broken in any meaningful sense. There's a fairly simple reason solar farms don't allow these panels to soak up rays until they simply cease to function.
It’s the economics, stupid.
The key issue is efficiency loss, which is when panels aren’t able to generate as much power as they did when first installed. Most solar panels are made with laminated adhesive layers that sit between the glass and the solar cells to hold them together and aid rigidity. Sun exposure can cause those laminated layers to discolor, reducing the amount of light that can reach the cells. That diminishes the energy-generation capacity, which is a problem for large commercial farms.
“Manufacturer's warranty their [solar] modules’ performance for a 30-year period,” explained Garvin Heath. For instance, a maker will pledge that its panels will be at least 80-percent efficient for the bulk of its expected three-decade service life. These warranties give large utility-scale customers confidence in what they’re buying, and at the point that term has expired, it’s often far more cost-effective to simply junk and replace them.
Power grids have a limited number of interconnections, essentially the on-ramp that enables them to push power to the grid. Each interconnection has a hard upper limit in terms of the power it can send, so solar farms need to generate the maximum permitted electricity at all times. “[Even when] they’re working within warranty performance, the opportunity cost of having a module producing [more] power on your interconnection is quite valuable,” said Heath.
ReSolar’s Matt Burnell used an example of a 10 Megawatt solar farm in the UK that had a 15 Megawatt interconnection. “10 years ago, they could only fit 10 megawatts into the space that they had [...] but with newer and more efficient modules, it’s now financially viable for them to strip the asset down and rebuild it.” “You have these big pension funds looking at this from a spreadsheet,” looking for ways to better maximize their investment. The end result is that all of these otherwise fine panels are junked. “When you think about the embedded carbon of bringing [the panels] over [from China]” said Burnell “and then they go into the waste stream [...] seems mad.”
Even if panels could be repaired to full efficiency,it’s not likely solar panel repair shops will be opening in droves. “There’s a serious question around the labor costs of testing and repairing versus just buying a new panel,” said Burnell. He added in another example of panels that had to be taken down to address fire safety legislation, which were similarly at risk of being discarded because the effort to repurpose them was too great. To reduce waste, ReSolar actually wound up collecting and sending on a consignment of those panels to Ukraine for use in a hospital.
In the trash
Matt Burnell / ReSolar
Another rule of thumb is that only one in 10 solar panels is recycled, with the remaining nine sent to landfills. There is no standard method for tracking a panel’s eventual destination, and it’s not clear how such a system would be implemented. But there’s a risk landfills are about to be overwhelmed with the volume of panels that’ll be coming down from roofs. The Los Angeles Times, for instance, reported on the coming glut of panels in California after the state’s push to get more solar installed from 2006 onwards.
The legal situation is barely patchwork, with Grist describing things in 2020 as the “wild west,” since only Washington has any sort of mandatory legislation. Decommissioned solar panels are covered by federal solid and hazardous waste rules, dependent on the materials used in their construction. If a panel includes heavy metals like lead and cadmium, then they can’t be sent to a general landfill, lest their poisons leech into the soil. But that often just means those panels are redirected to landfills that are designed to handle specialist waste.
The EPA is, at present, looking at developing rules that would standardize the recycling process for solar panels and lithium batteries. But while there are no federal mandates for recycling, or even tough legislation at the state level, the situation is far from ideal. A small fraction of the panels are actually sent to recycling centers, the rest left to an uncertain fate. As Heath points out, the risk is that while recycling is uneconomical and unavailable, we’ll see huge boneyards of working solar panels, left piled up while the situation changes.
In the UK and Europe, solar panels are covered by the Waste from Electrical and Electronic Equipment directive, or WEEE. The rules oblige supplying companies to collect and recycle discarded panels, or to shoulder the cost for another entity to do so. It means that, hopefully, we won’t see tons more panels being dumped to landfills, but also means it’s often going to be more economical to send working panels to recycling rather than repurposing them.
Recycling
Matt Burnell / ReSolar
If you want to free up the raw materials lurking inside a solar panel, then there are two approaches. There’s the mechanical way, in which you can shred the components, which is both simpler and more wasteful: it can recover glass and metal, but little else. Or there are thermal and chemical approaches that seek to separate the components, enabling more of the rarer metals to be recovered.
“Existing recyclers have traditional markets that their economics are built around, so glass recyclers look at a module and say ‘wow, a module is 80 percent glass by weight, I know what to do with that,” said Heath. “With the materials inside, there are more precious metals with higher value,” he said, “but they’re mixed in with the plastic polymer layers [...] which are hard to separate economically.” Consequently, the silicon, silver and copper embedded in the cells are often ground down into bulk and abandoned.
The IEA’s 2024 report on panel recycling looked into how these mechanical methods aren’t great for material qualities. “The outputs of mechanical processing are usually not very pure and better yields of high-quality materials [...] especially silicon and silver, should be targeted,” it said. It added that often these recycling processes aren’t optimized to run solar panels, and so “there is frequently some downgrading of recovered material quality,” hardly a great step on the road to circularity.
It’s also hard to know what goes into a solar panel. “The variation in materials [found in solar panels] is wild,” said ReSolar’s Matt Burnell. The litany of manufacturers don’t yet have any obligation to share their raw material data, although new regulations will change that soon. Until then, it’s difficult for recyclers to know what they’ll be pulling out of the panels they’re looking to process.
As well as recyclers not knowing the composition of the panels, there’s the risk of noxious chemicals being added to expedite some processes. Antoine Chalaux is the general manager of ROSI Solar, a specialist solar panel recycler in France. He talked about the inclusion of chemicals like Teflon and antimony, both of which are toxic and cannot be released into the atmosphere. “We’ve developed our recycling processes to capture [them],” he explained, “but we’re pushing [manufacturers] to use it less [in future].”
Burnell believes that the industry is really at the “very dawn” of solar recycling but is confident that with investment today, solutions will be quickly found in the very near future. “We’ve got this massive lead-in time,” he said “so we know what’s coming onto the market today, and we know what’s coming into the system in 25 to 30 years.” The real ticking clock is for the glut of panels that were installed in the early 2010s that will start entering the waste stream in the next decade.
Right now, ROSI’s processes aren’t as cheap as other recyclers, and Chalaux knows that it can be a problem. “Right now, there’s no economic reason for companies to [recycle with us], but there’s the question of image,” he said. “All of the manufacturers and owners of PV projects want a good story for the end of life for their panels.” The other benefit of this process, however, is to produce high-purity recycled materials that can be used by local manufacturers.
The future
Graphic by Al Hicks / NREL
One step toward a more recyclable solar panel might be to eliminate the use of those adhesive polymers in its construction. If a panel could just use sheets of glass with the solar cells sandwiched inside, it would be a lot easier to deconstruct. Not to mention you’d likely get a longer and better performance out of them, since there would be no polymer layers to discolor.
Thankfully, a team from the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has demonstrated that such a product can exist. Rather than gluing the layers together, femtosecond lasers weld the front and back panels of glass to each other. The solar cells are sandwiched inside, held by the bonding of the glass to its sibling, and nothing else. And when the panel eventually reaches its end of life, which may be a lot longer than 30 years, it can just be recycled by shattering the glass.
The project, led by Dr. David Young, says that if the proposals are accepted, we could see a commercial version of the panel within two to three years. He added that the rigidity offered by welding will be just as sturdy and waterproof as panels using polymer layers. Unfortunately, by that point, we’ll have decades upon decades of panels made using the old system that we’ll still need to deal with. And until we get a cost-effective, scalable way to recycle them, the answer to the question ‘What happens to solar panels when they die?’ will be ‘nothing good.’
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/what-happens-when-solar-panels-die-140019832.html?src=rss
Hey! If you have fond memories playing Manic Miner or Jet Set Willy on your family TV, you’ll love The Rubber Keyed Wonder. It’s a new documentary chronicling the birth, life, death and rebirth of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum that premieres today. The crowdfunded film is an adoring look at the iconic and legendary artifact of computing history with plenty of high profile contributors. Two thumbs up! Go watch the film now, there’s no need for you to keep reading beyond this point, I hope you have loads of fun!
If you’re a die-hard fan, there’s no need to keep reading!
(Hopefully they’ve gone now.)
It was while watching The Rubber Keyed Wonder that I realized what makes me itchy about the current crop of pop-culture documentaries going around. A documentary should be an authored essay offering a point of view, an argument, or at least educating you about a subject matter. They’re usually deeply one-sided, but they normally have something to say beyond “hey, isn’t this neat?” That’s what I’ve found lacking in documentaries like this and GoldenEra, since they don’t have much at all to say beyond that. Which is heartbreaking when the film’s subject matter is nowhere near as neat and far more interesting as it's made out to be here.
If you’re unfamiliar, Sir Clive Sinclair was a British inventor whose work made a huge impact on the electronics industry. He developed ultra-small transistor radios, pioneered the pocket calculator, the digital watch and the portable TV. His interest in green transport saw him build a single-rider electric vehicle decades before the advent of the e-scooter. But all of that is a footnote to his range of affordable home computers, the most notable being the Spectrum.
The Britain Sinclair grew up in was broke, and he made it his life’s mission to produce products that were affordable enough for anyone to buy. His cheap, mass-market products were big hits and deeply undercut the competition, especially in home computers. Unfortunately, the low cost also meant his gear was badly-made, unreliable and severely underpowered.
But the affordability and limitations sparked a creative boom that is credited with creating the UK’s computer games industry. The heads of several major British studios cut their teeth on developing and selling games for the ZX Spectrum. And the second-order effects of Sinclair’s work left a far deeper impact on the technology industry more broadly. Sinclair’s protégé turned rival Chris Curry left to build Acorn Computers and, from there, founded ARM. The founder of what would become Rockstar North worked on the Sinclair production line in Dundee.
Sinclair was also reportedly difficult to work with, had severe temper tantrums and quite a big ego, too. He was fairly bad at business, and his refusal to listen to other people wound up costing him both of his companies, once during a fight with the UK’s National Enterprise Board in 1976 and once again in 1985. Then there was his habit of rushing out unfinished products to keep money flowing into his company at the cost of his reputation.
The reason I bring all of those things up is because every single one is either given the briefest of attention or elided completely. The Rubber Keyed Wonder would much rather streamline its focus to the Spectrum itself and its impact, erasing the more interesting story around it. But if you know anything about the territory, and how bound up the machine and its idiosyncratic founder were, these omissions hurt the story.
But I understand why: This isn’t a documentary that aspires to being a serious examination of a very interesting period in computing history. Instead, it’s a product of the fan-nostalgia industrial complex, where the most insightful comments are buried in favor of misty-eyed rememberings. That’s not to say it isn’t honest; even the Spectrum’s most ardent fans are happy to admit the machine sucked on several fundamental levels. Even the Sinclair employees joke that they knew they were selling barely-functional crap a lot of the time, but that the hobbyists who bought them loved it nevertheless.
The film can’t help but be informative, delving into the broader ecosystem that cultivated around the Spectrum. There’s its genesis, the games that made it famous, and the culture it spawned from independent computer stores to the cottage industry of magazines focused on it. But there’s also plenty of time-sucking montages of playthrough footage from Spectrum games that sap the film’s momentum in favor of squeezing the audience’s ‘member berries.
That’s not to say The Rubber Keyed Wonder is a waste of time, especially given the dearth of material on the subject*. There’s plenty in there that I learned for the first time, and found some of the games I’d not encountered as a kid to be seriously impressive. It’s just a shame that you will probably leave this film with a nagging desire to answer some of the questions it’s just not at all interested in engaging with.
* It’s probably the law that I have to mention Micro Men, the tongue-in-cheek BBC comedy that satirizes the feud between Sinclair and Curry. Both men went on the record to decry its factual inaccuracies, with Curry saying the film was “very unfair” on Clive Sinclair. It is, however, quite a fun watch so long as you accept that it’s mostly fictional. You can probably find it for free online if you look hard enough.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/tv-movies/the-rubber-keyed-wonder-is-an-adoring-portrait-of-the-sinclair-zx-spectrum-170047407.html?src=rss
I’ve been wishing for a product like MyRow to come onto the market for as long as I can remember. I love rowing, and own a Concept2 Model D, which is one of the world’s most popular rowing machines. Concept2’s ergometers — which is the fancy word for “rowing machine” — are a mainstay of gyms all around the world. But the Vermont-based company has dragged its feet when it comes to embracing the smart fitness revolution. The best it offers is some clips on its latest machine that can be used to hold a third-party tablet in place.
Inspired by Peloton, plenty of other companies have bolted HD screens with live classes to their gym equipment. But Concept2 is still standing by the PM5, a little black box with a liquid crystal display that debuted in 2014 which displays stats like your split times and stroke rate. If you can’t quite imagine how I feel: It’s as if you own a Game Boy, and everyone else in the world is rocking a Steam Deck. To try and improve matters, I bought a little 3D-printed smartphone holder from eBay but, even so, it’s hard not to feel short-changed.
Step forward MyRow, the brainchild of Gary Simpson, founder of Transit Wireless, the company that brought cell service to the New York City subway. While sheltering in place from COVID, he had a Concept2 and a Peloton bike at home to help keep in shape. Back at CES, he told me, despite his love of rowing, he would often default to the bike with its glossy screen and video classes. Inspired, he founded MyRow in the spirit of bringing something similar to the Concept2.
The end product is an internet-connected display that can be retrofitted onto a Concept2 Model C, D, E or RowErg so long as it is equipped with the PM5. The package includes a 22-inch display, power adapter and the mounting arm you’ll need to bolt onto the rower. Once installed, you can access on-demand video classes and digital workout guides, as well as just a nicer way to stare at your rowing stats compared to the sub-Game Boy display you’re used to.
Installation took me less than half an hour, and most of that was just bolting the mounting arm onto the rower. Bear in mind, you’ll need to run a data cable from the PM5 to MyRow since the tablet can’t interface with the machine directly. I hope you’re good at cable management, since you’ll need to find a way to elegantly route the data and power cables along the body of the rower.
Photo by Daniel Cooper / Engadget
Under the hood, MyRow is just a skinned Android tablet which takes a minute to boot, with software updates taking another minute. Given the device is so new, there have been lots of updates, including the addition of plans and features. The UI is simple enough, with big target boxes and clean lines, which is ideal if you need to change a setting mid-row.
There’s a surprising amount of connectivity in this thing, too, with ports for Ethernet, USB-C, micro-USB, USB-A and a 3.5mm headphone jack. Plus, it’s Bluetooth and ANT+ compatible for any wireless headphones or heart-rate monitors you use. There’s a forward-facing webcam in the body that isn’t being used for anything right now. The company is looking to build a form analysis tool that’ll harness it eventually, and may also use the camera to enhance group rows.
Once your feet are strapped in and you’ve got one hand on the grab, it’s time to pick your workout. Users can select from video workouts, as well as preset and custom training plans that will just throw your intervals on the screen. The stats are laid out like pretty much every other on-demand fitness class, with your key vitals running along the bottom. That includes calories burned, distance rowed, stroke rate, pace per 500 meters, average pace, stroke length, power and average power.
On the left side of the display, you’ll get a timeline showing you when the next internal is, and on the right-hand side, a leaderboard for the video class you’re participating in. I surprised myself, because I don’t think of myself as someone who is that competitive, but the leaderboards brought something out in me. The fact I was able to leap into the top 10 in a number of classes is, I’m sure, just down to MyRow’s presently small user base. But, a win is a win.
Photo by Daniel Cooper / Engadget
As much as I enjoy using MyRow, I do have one gripe given the custom nature of the product. Concept2’s rowing machines use air resistance, so when you pull the chain you’re driving a fan. A fan which kicks out enough noise that it can drown out the instructor’s voice and music even when you turn the volume up to max. Maybe sharper-eared rowers won’t find it a problem, but I wish they’d have made more effort to compensate for the general noise of the rower.
Now, 2024 has been a year of rigorous self-examination and one where I’m humble enough to admit my flaws. I’m nearly 40 and I’m never going to magically evolve into one of those people who cares about their own marginal gains. I’m not going to look at a countdown timer, compare it to my previous lap’s best and then try to beat it on a regular basis. And as much as I love rowing, I get bored, and a big screen could alleviate that if I can watch the streaming service of my choice while I do so.
This is why I’m excited to know that MyRow has promised to integrate streaming videos into its platform by spring 2025. Because when you’re not taking an on-demand video class, you’re just staring at a well-designed stats screen. The sooner we can add any sort of entertainment to that, even if it’s just a clip of someone rowing down a beautiful river, the better.
Photo by Daniel Cooper / Engadget
I’m optimistic about MyRow’s potential to help turn the Concept2 into a machine that’s a little friendlier, even for its diehard users. It’s available to buy now, with the tablet setting you back $500 and the membership costs either $36 a month or $359.88 if you pay for the year, which represents a 20 percent discount. If you get the tablet on its own, however, you’ll still be able to use the Just Row feature, although it’s a hefty price for basically better data visualization.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/home/smart-home/myrow-took-my-concept2-rower-and-made-it-smart-134503528.html?src=rss
Oura, the Finnish company that has done more than most to put smart rings on the map, is ready to show off its fourth-generation Ring. The new model gets a sleeker design, longer battery life and smarter sensors producing even smarter insights for wearers. But the thing I really care about is that the company has finally made a perfectly-round ring that doesn’t include any ugly-ass etchings on the outside.
The biggest change made to the Ring 4 is in the sensors, which were previously housed in raised bumps that kept contact with your finger. Now, the sensors are flush with the body, making the whole thing a lot smoother and sleeker than it was before. And while I haven’t seen it in the flesh yet, the press images seem to suggest it’s a decent chunk thinner than its predecessors.
Those sensor improvements aren’t just focused on making them smaller, but also improving their ability to peer into our bodies. Oura says Ring 4 has 18 distinct signal pathways, up from eight in the Gen3, which is paired with its new “Smart Sensing” algorithm. The ring will automatically optimize which of those 18 pathways to use to maintain a constant reading, given how much jewelry moves around through the day.
This is a real issue for some Oura users, because if the ring shifts around too much, you’ll get inconsistent readings. The company claims that the new hardware offers a 30 percent increase in blood oxygen sensing, 31 percent fewer gaps in nighttime heart rate and seven percent fewer gaps during the day. Oura hasn’t said what battery size the Ring 4 has, but says the above tweaks should help it get up to eight days of life on a single charge.
Oura
Ring 4 is available in 12 sizes (4-15) and in six colors; Silver, Brushed Silver, Gold, Rose Gold, Stealth and Black. All bar the Stealth is clad in titanium with physical vapor deposition coating, with the outlier draped instead in titanium with diamond-like carbon coating. Much like its predecessor, its water-resistant to depths up 100 meters, and is suitable for saunas and swimming, but not deep-sea diving.
The company is also redesigning its mobile app to group all of the data it collects about you into three distinct categories: Today, Vitals and My Health. The first two of those help you explore your vital signs for the day in aggregate or in detail. My Health, meanwhile, will offer longer-term insights including your cardiovascular age, cardio capacity, stress and sleep. This will start rolling out today for all users, regardless of which generation of ring they own.
When I reviewed the third-generation Ring, I griped about the company’s decision to paywall features behind a monthly subscription. Look, I get you can’t build a sustainable hardware business on device sales alone and this sort of recurring revenue helps keep the lights on. But that only works if what you’re offering is compelling enough to justify the $5.99 a month, or $70 per year, which is why the Ring 4 is getting some new membership-only features.
Oura
That includes automatic heart-rate and activity detection for up to 40 different activities, removing the need for users to manually log their stats after a workout. When the app detects symptoms of high stress, it’ll now place that data in context with your movement, activities and tags. There’s also a better-developed suite of features for people who menstruate, with new insights for fertility windows — the company adding that this is designed to aid pregnancy, not prevent it.
Of course, while Oura’s never been the only game in town, it’s now got competition from Samsung’s Galaxy Ring. You can see that Samsung got to the integrated sensors ahead of the company it’s drawing inspiration from, but the Galaxy Ring is fairly basic, features-wise. Oura CEO Tom Hale told Bloomberg he feels the Korean giants are two years behind his company as things stand.
Oura Ring 4 is available to pre-order today, with shipping expected to begin on October 15, 2024, with prices starting at $349. The first month of membership is free, with users asked to cough up $5.99 a month or $69.99 for the year. Even if you already have an Oura Ring sizing kit, the company urges you to get the new updated sizing kit before ordering your ring, which is available in sizes 4-15.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/wearables/ouras-fourth-generation-smart-ring-gets-smaller-and-smarter-070005477.html?src=rss
Ring is rebranding its subscription products, ditching Ring Protect in favor of Ring Home, and to celebrate it’s bringing some new features along. The most notable change is the addition of 24/7 recording if you own select wired video cameras, ensuring you don’t miss anything if a motion alert wasn’t triggered. You’ll also get video clip previews sent through push notifications, rather than having to wait for the app to open.
In addition, users can now get Extended and Continuous Live View options for their cameras, letting them keep an eye on what’s going on when they need it. Extended Live View, for instance, will up the time limit on watching a camera from 10 minutes to 30, while Continuous removes the limit altogether. You’ll also get Doorbell Calls, which triggers a phone call that’ll connect straight to your smartphone when someone’s at the door.
The prices for each of the new Ring Home tiers will remain the same as their Ring Protect predecessors, at last for now. Home Basic is $4.99 a month, while Home Standard is $9.99/month, and Home Premium is $19.99/month. Unsurprisingly, Extended Live View and Doorbell Calls are available at the Standard tier, while the Continuous Live View and 24/7 recording are unlocked at the Premium level.
As for why the tiers were changed, it's to enable users to bolt-on additional packages from Ring's growing ecosystem of security products. It says that, when the change kicks in on November 5th, you'll be able to add Virtual Security Guard and Alarm Professional Monitoring to the same plan.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/home/smart-home/ring-brings-247-recording-to-some-of-its-wired-cameras-130003545.html?src=rss
It’s wild to think the reMarkable 2 debuted in March 2020, a time now more famous for other reasons. A lot has changed in the four-plus years since, and now it’s time for its successor, the reMarkable Paper Pro. The third-generation, distraction-free writing slate gets a color e-paper display as well as a raft of other equally notable improvements. That includes a bigger screen, faster internals and an active stylus for a more paper-and-pen-like experience. But this much more tech comes at a higher price, so let’s answer the question: Is it worth it?
reMarkable is the standard bearer for devices straddling the gap between the analog and digital. It’s an e-paper slate with a stylus (and optional keyboard) that lets you read, write and edit your own documents and PDFs. The focus is on giving you a tool that’ll act like paper and pen or a word processor rather than anything more fully-featured. That way, you can focus on whatever you’re doing without the distractions a full computer, tablet or phone offers. If there was a way to make “medium tech” sound not like an insult, I’m sure reMarkable would wear it proudly.
Hardware
The new reMarkable Paper Pro measures 196.6 x 274.1 x 5.1mm, making it roughly an inch taller and a quarter-inch wider than its predecessor, the reMarkable 2 (188 x 246 x 4.7mm). But it doesn’t feel that much bigger, thanks to plenty of effort made to shrink the bezels around the display. And the left band (the chin when using the device in landscape mode) has been eliminated altogether here. All of that room has been made to accommodate the Paper Pro’s headline feature: an 11.8-inch Canvas Color screen.
I prefer tablets that have a slightly more austere design than where the industry has been for the last few years. The reMarkable 2 was one of many slates aping the then-current iPad’s rounded off corners and sides that never felt right. The Paper Pro is a delightful correction, with sharper lines and squarer corners that gives the device some much-needed visual rigidity. The edge band is also inlaid with grooves that, designer Mats Solberg explained, has two useful benefits beyond looking good. First, it evokes the idea you’re holding a sheaf of paper in your hand, and second, it adds some grip to a device that’s surprisingly thin.
The inside of the Paper Pro has been given a thorough upgrade as well, with a new 1.8GHz Cortex A53 processor paired with 2GB of RAM and 64GB of storage. This is underpowered compared to any smartphone from the last decade, but don’t forget the reMarkable doesn’t need that much grunt. It’s still a big leap ahead of the rM2, which was packing a 1.2GHz dual-core chip with 1GB of RAM and 8GB of storage. The battery’s a lot beefier, too, leaping up from the 3,000mAh of the rM2 to 5,030mAh here. It needs to be, given this is also the first reMarkable with a backlight, making it the first model you can use in dark rooms without a lot of grief.
Daniel Cooper for Engadget
To be clear, the new size and the switch from a passive stylus to an active one means none of your existing reMarkable accessories are compatible with Paper Pro. The accessory connector is on the backplate rather than the edge, and the new stylus is magnetically charged. So when you’re pricing one of these up, bear in mind that you’ll need a whole new set of extras, too.
In use
As soon as you turn on the Paper Pro, you’ll notice the leap in performance compared to its predecessor. At the risk of damning this thing with faint praise; If the reMarkable 2 felt like a fancy ereader, then this feels more like a slow tablet. The faster internals and display mean the experience is a lot more responsive and snappy, with far less delay between action and result. There are even little animations during the setup process and unlocking the device with a six-digit code feels like you’re unlocking a phone.
The Paper Pro uses a modified version of E Ink’s Gallery 3 technology called “Canvas Color.” Each pixel in the display holds a series of particles: White, Cyan, Magenta and Yellow. These can be combined to make eight solid colors (Red, Green, Blue, Cyan, Yellow, Magenta, White and Black) or, with dithering, up to 20,000 different shades therein. The analogy the company uses is in the CMYK inks found in most printers and newspaper presses.
Daniel Cooper for Engadget
The end result is a display with visible, if muted, color reproduction with some limitations you’ll need to work around. If you’re making handwritten amendments to a document, you’ll need blue, cyan, magenta or red. Because yellow, green, gray and cyan are irritatingly faint when you write with a thin nib on existing text. The inverse is true for highlighting, where the gentler colors are better.
There’s no big difference in readability between the Paper Pro (229 ppi) compared to its predecessor (226 ppi). But I can’t quite shake the nagging feeling that the smaller, older device has sharper text when I’m looking at it. Your mileage may vary.
Because of how much new tech has been crammed inside the Paper Pro, you’ll find scrolling speeds are much faster. When I used the reMarkable 2, I felt I could see its processes taking place in real time. You know, “Identify input, process input, send command to screen, refresh screen,” with a notable delay. Here, any lag feels more like a result of the e-paper display’s natural limitations and slow refresh rate rather than slow processing speed.
Plenty of work has been done by the reMarkable team to reduce the latency between the pen and the display. Even after the addition of the color screen, which necessitated some compromise, the input lag was cut from 22ms on the rM2 to 12ms here. Similarly, there’s no lag when you’re typing as there could sometimes be when you were using the older slate. If there’s one thing I’m still not sure about, it’s that when writing in color, the text doesn’t initially render in the color you’ve chosen. Your first blast of scrawling pops up in gray and it’s only after the screen refreshes that it reloads in the correct color.
Daniel Cooper for Engadget
There’s one other thing that I want to draw attention to, and it’s a subtle thing but well worth pointing at. A lot of time and effort has gone into ensuring that handwritten notes and highlights can work seamlessly with text inputs. For instance, if I’m typing something and feel the need to highlight, underline or draw a ring around the word with the pen, I can. If I then have to go back and amend that text later, it’s easy enough to expect the handwritten additions to become unmoored from the text. But reMarkable has done the hard work to ensure that it all remains in place — it’s a subtle piece of engineering, but one I deeply appreciate.
Backlight
Paper Pro is the first reMarkable with a backlight, and its inclusion here is very much “better late than never.” I’ve often enjoyed writing notes with the reMarkable 2, but found it frustrating that it’s unusable in darker environments. That both the slate and the new Type Folio are now backlit – activated by tapping the top right corner of the screen — means that’s no longer an issue. The light emitted from both is in my experience gentle rather than eye-searing, even when I pushed everything to maximum. Fundamentally, you’ll be able to use this in a dark room or on an airplane with the cabin lights dimmed without any stress or eye strain.
Marker
Like its predecessors, the Paper Pro comes with a choice of stylus. What separates the Marker and Marker Plus is that the latter, as before, has an active surface on top, allowing you to use it as an eraser. Make an error, and all you have to do is flip it over to get rid of your boo-boo, whereas with the Marker you’ll need to select the erase tool from the menu.
Daniel Cooper for Engadget
But while you might not notice much of a difference at first blush, plenty has changed on the inside. The older reMarkable styluses were passive, enabling you to use a number of compatible third-party styli in their place. This time around, both versions are active — full of technology to help orient the pen and communicate with the tablet for faster processing. It connects magnetically to the “right” hand side, wirelessly charging from the slate like the Apple Pencil.
Ironically, a lot of effort has gone into ensuring that, despite the raft of changes between this model and its predecessor, you’ll struggle to notice the difference. I’ve seen some folks saying that the new Marker has a harder tip and that as the display is rougher, it’s less fun to use. I’m not sure my experience matches that, and every time I compare the two, I feel like it’s more or less the same.
As for the Marker’s battery life, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get this thing to run out of juice under what I’d describe as normal use. An hour or two a day for more than a week and I never managed to run the stylus flat — hell, I barely got the Paper Pro’s battery to half in that time.
Type Folio
reMarkable has launched a new Type Folio for the Paper Pro, which is about 1.1 inches wider and deeper than its predecessor. That extra space affords you a palm rest and a bigger margin around the outside of the keyboard, but nothing too dramatic in terms of changes to the keys. You do now get an Escape key, which exits a document and goes back to the homepage. There’s also a new Icon Toggle, which when activated will remove the icons from the screen to further reduce distractions.
Daniel Cooper for Engadget
Now, I’m a big fan of the old Type Folio, finding that it made the right compromises for a travel keyboard. Its main keys were properly sized and spaced so my muscle memory carried over from my regular keyboard to this one and back again. The compromises, like the half-height function row and narrow non-character keys, were the right ones to make. Given the Paper Pro’s bigger size, its Type Folio can spread those extra keys out a little further to give the whole thing room to breathe. It’s better than it was before, but what we had before was no slouch.
Price and availability
The reMarkable Paper Pro is available to order today, priced at $579 with the standard Marker and $629 if you want the Marker Plus. You can add a case from $89, but a full leather version will set you back $179. If you want to add the Type Folio, which I’d say is a key way of making the reMarkable truly useful, you’ll need to pay an additional $229.
The company has, however, decided to keep the reMarkable 2 around as a lower-cost option, selling it for $379 with a standard Marker. Given the reMarkable 2 has topped our e-ink tablet buyer’s guide for several years, it’s still a solid choice if the Paper Pro is too rich for your blood.
The competition
There are a decent number of e-paper tablets floating around the market right now, with the majority of them offering monochrome screens. In our e-ink tablet Buyer’s Guide, we named the reMarkable 2 the best option for most people. If you’re looking for a slate with a color display, your options are the Paper Pro, or the Kobo Libra Color and the elegantly named Onyx Book Tablet Note Air 3 C.
Kobo’s device is much more portable than the Paper Pro, but that’s because the Kobo is primarily designed to be an ereader. Its smaller seven-inch screen is squarely in ereader territory, and while there’s a notebooks feature that allows you to write freehand as much as you want, it’s never going to be able to compete with the Paper Pro’s 11.8-inch screen on that front. The Libra Color will be a better option for those who primarily want to take notes in and mark up ebooks — Kobo’s library is nearly as robust as Amazon’s Kindle library, and you can digitally mark up any book you buy from Kobo without restriction.
Onyx’s Boox Note Air 3 C is more akin to the Paper Pro in size, but it’s decidedly not suitable if you want to work in a more distraction-free environment. The Note Air 3 C, like most other Boox devices, are full Android tablets with E Ink screens, so nothing’s stopping you from going online or even attempting to watch a YouTube video. Even if distractions aren’t an issue for you, the Paper Pro’s streamlined interface makes it much easier to use — for both newbies and those familiar with these devices. Boox devices will appeal more to tinkerers and the most tech-savvy among us because there are a lot of settings you can play around with to make a device like the Note Air 3 C as capable as you need it to be. The Paper Pro keeps things relatively simple, making it more approachable overall.
Wrap-up
Daniel Cooper for Engadget
Look, you just know that there are some folks who’ll look at the Paper Pro’s price and spec list, compare that to a base-model iPad and laugh themselves into a coma. The point is that this isn’t a generic tablet but a device that’s been consciously designed to do fewer things better. So, we’re going to judge this thing on and by its own merits, rather than as a typical tablet.
I’m a big fan of reMarkable’s devices because they offer a way for me to focus in a way that my ADHD brain struggles to do otherwise. If I’m feeling overwhelmed and need to eliminate distractions, then stealing myself away with a device like this really can help. There’s no easy way for me to swipe away from my work to check Reddit or YouTube, helping me stay on track. And given how popular these devices are, I’m sure I’m not the only person who feels this way.
If, however, you’d still like to dip a toe into this water but don’t want to spend that much, then there is good news. reMarkable is keeping the 2 around as an entry-level unit, priced at $379 with the standard marker and because for all of the good things the Paper Pro does, none diminish the long list of good qualities the reMarkable 2 has.
On one hand, you have a device that’s whip-fast, eminently capable at the things that it can do and now has a bigger screen that renders colors. On the other, I cannot pretend that it’s not a pricey piece of kit, especially when you bundle in the Type Folio. Naturally, if your budget can stretch to that sort of cash and you really do need a way to work without distractions, I think it’s worth it.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/tablets/remarkable-paper-pro-review-writing-in-color-is-nice-but-itll-cost-you-173024590.html?src=rss
The 3S seems like a smart idea, since cost remains the second biggest barrier to getting VR/AR gear into people’s homes. The first, of course, being there’s still not a truly killer use case to convince the vast majority of people.
The other big news to come out of the show is the announcement of the Orion Smart Glasses, Meta’s new prototype AR wearable. These, the company admits, aren’t ready to go on sale yet, but it’s working with developers to refine the technology for some unspecified future release.
I’ll be honest: I’m forever skeptical about the potential for AR to be as smart and useful as I’d need it to be. I’m not going to invest until it’s at least as useful as Jeeves — from PG Wodehouse, not the search engine — even if it’s never going to be able to fold my laundry.
Nathan Ingraham was lucky enough to play The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom and is happy to share his thoughts. It’s a throwback top-down Zelda title, albeit with you playing as the title character for the first time. Rather than engaging in combat directly, Zelda must use her magic to defeat enemies and solve puzzles. Nathan’s a fan but, much like Tears of the Kingdom, found the sheer breadth and depth of tools available to be frustrating to marshal and organize.
Meta’s annual VR / AR shindig kicks off a few hours after this newsletter hits your inboxes. As usual, it’ll lay down the direction of travel for the next year of strapping stuff to your face. So, before the awkward stage banter begins, it’s worth reading up on what’s to come. We’ve prepared our usual roundup of all the rumors, scuttlebutt and leaks about what we’ll see.
That includes Orion, a pair of Buddy Holly glasses offering augmented reality in a more user friendly package. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has already hinted about its potential, but he added we’ll only see the prototype today. We can also expect a cheaper version of the Quest 3 and some more AI doodads to come to the Ray-Ban smart glasses.
Once you’ve studied up, you can follow our coverage of Meta Connect 2024 live to get a blow-by-blow of the show the minute it happens. Everything kicks off at 1PM ET / 10AM PT, but the color commentary will start long before then.
TikTok has announced TikTok Music, the company’s streaming service to rival Spotify and Apple Music, is closing down. The platform announced it’ll cease operations on November 28 and delete all user data and login information soon after. It has advised subscribers to reach out to their payment platforms of choice to get refunds before that date. Don’t worry though, I’m a technology journalist and even I didn’t know TikTok had its own standalone streaming service.
At some point, we’ve all encountered someone who just doesn’t get boundaries. They get too deep into our personal space, oblivious — or all too aware — of our discomfort. This problem is magnified online where there’s instant access to someone’s broader digital footprint, which can be a vector for abuse. It’s why most platforms have some sort of block feature, enabling people to limit some user’s access to their lives.
Elon Musk announced a change to X’s policies to enable users you’ve blocked to see your posts. They won’t be able to interact with you, but they will see what you’re posting to the platform. Musk has railed against the block feature before, saying users could already get around this by switching to a non-blocked account. Which is true, in the sort of tell-on-yourself way that suggests he’s got form not respecting someone’s boundaries.
Obviously, the reasons this is a terrible, dreadful, no-good and generally bad idea are so long we’d be here forever trying to list them. But it’s a good reminder that X is a place that thinks trust and safety are four-letter words.