FirstBuild Paragon Induction Cooktop review – CNET

The Good The FirstBuild Paragon Induction Cooktop is a versatile countertop system that lets you sous vide, fry, slow cook or sauté with the induction burner and Bluetooth-connected temperature probe. The product also comes with an easy-to-use, streamlined app that helps you monitor your cooking.

The Bad The price of the Paragon – $299 – will keep this product out of reach for some home cooks. And don’t rely on the induction cooktop to boil water quickly.

The Bottom Line The Paragon is a handy multitasker that can do much more than just sous vide, which makes this product a useful addition to the kitchen.

Visit manufacturer site for details.

Buying a sous vide system is an expensive gamble if you’re new to this type of cooking. Sous vide involves vacuum-sealing food in a plastic bag and putting that bag in a temperature-controlled water bath (read more about how it works here). The immersion circulators and countertop systems that regulate the temperature of your water bath cost at least $100, and a few are as much as $500. So there’s a chance you could throw a few hundred bucks at a product, not even like sous vide, and be stuck with an expensive “unitasker” taking up valuable kitchen storage space.

The Paragon Induction Cooktop delivers sous vide cooking with a little more flexibility. The $299 Paragon, which is made up of an induction cooktop and Bluetooth-connected temperature probe, lets you create a temperature-controlled water bath in whatever induction-compatible pot you have hiding in your cabinet. What makes the Paragon more appealing than other sous-vide-only products is that you can use the system for multiple cooking tasks such as deep-frying, slow-cooking and sauteing thanks to the induction burner that is the heart of the product. That means that you can still find ways to use the Paragon in your home, even if it turns out that cooking food in a bag isn’t your jam.

Paragon serves up sous vide with a hearty…
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We’ve seen a sous vide-centric product with the same level of versatility — the Oliso SmartHub & Top also includes an induction base on which you can cook in a variety of ways. However, the Oliso system includes a bulky water bath unit that takes up more space than the Paragon. And the Paragon’s lower price makes this product more approachable than the $499 Oliso.

The Paragon has a few quirks that you’d have to overcome if you buy it: some slight variation between actual and set temperatures; the oddly shaped, large induction cooktop; the nearly $300 price. But the Paragon is easy to use, works with a responsive app and, most importantly, cooks food well, no matter what method you choose.

How the Paragon works

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The Paragon Induction Cooktop is made up of two parts: a Bluetooth-connected temperature probe that attaches to the side of a pot (foreground) and an induction countertop burner.

Chris Monroe/CNET

The Paragon comes from appliance manufacturer GE’s Louisville, Ky.-based FirstBuild microfactory. FirstBuild ran a successful crowdsourcing campaign for the Paragon on the website Indiegogo in 2015, and backers began receiving their cooking systems earlier this year.

The Paragon is a simple system. You get a 12-inch wide countertop induction burner that works because of electromagnetic heat (read more about the science of induction here). The cooktop connects via Bluetooth to a temperature probe. That probe attaches with magnets to the side of an induction-friendly pot that you place on the cooktop. If you want to sous vide, you fill a pot with water, attach the temperature probe (make sure it’s in contact with the water) and set the temperature you want the water to reach directly on the cooktop’s digital display or with the Paragon’s app. The probe measures the temperature of the water, then tells the cooktop to turn the heat up or down to get to your desired temperature.

Twitter Moves to ‘News’ Category in App Store to Boost Visibility

Twitter yesterday changed how its iOS mobile app is categorized on the App Store in order to enhance its visibility, following the company’s poor Q1 earnings report earlier this week (via TechCrunch).

Twitter now appears in the “News” category, where it’s the #1 ranked app ahead of CNN and Reddit. Previously it could be found in “Social Networking”, where it occupied #5 in the category rankings, behind the the likes of Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp.

Achieving a #1 ranking in the App Store should also give Twitter’s “Overall” ranking a boost, which equates to better visibility in the top “Free” apps chart, where Twitter currently sits at #28.

The company has not commented on the thematic switch, which has yet to be reflected in the Google Play store (where it still sits in the “Social” category), but the change indicates that Twitter is looking to court a new audience interested in sources of breaking news and curated information on current affairs, as it seeks a strategy that will heighten its online profile and significantly boost growth.

Twitter’s Q1 earnings earlier this week showed poor performance, with $595 million company revenues falling short of the $607.8 million analysts expected. The platform had zero growth in new users in Q4 of 2015, but a new tallying system enabled the company to report a 2 percent increase in active users in Q1 (310 million, up from 305 million users in Q4). The company remains unprofitable, with a Q1 net loss of -$79.7 million, and gave bleak guidance for the quarter ahead.

Twitter has attempted to improve its core product over the past year with a number of changes to the way the platform works. The app now sorts tweets in the timeline by quality rather than recency, for example, while the starred “favorite” icon got replaced with a “like” heart icon. However, Twitter’s stock fell more than 12 percent after its Q1 report, indicating the company’s efforts to increase its mainstream appeal have so far failed to pay dividends.

In March, Apple launched its Apple Support account on the social network, which is dedicated to answering customer support questions. Earlier this month, Apple launched a new Twitter account for Apple News, giving its Apple News team a way to promote stories and content on the social network. The Apple News Twitter account is used to share “top stories” and “great reads” curated by Apple News editors in the United States.

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Xiaomi may finally unveil its smartwatch later this year

Xiaomi has been rumored to launch a smartwatch for some time now, and it finally looks like the vendor will unveil its first offering in this space sometime later this year. Co-founder and vice-president Liu De confirmed the existence of the smartwatch, stating that it will be officially announced in the latter half of 2016.

That doesn’t say much other than suggest a launch sometime after the month of June, but this is the first time the company has acknowledged that it is working on a smartwatch. According to GizmoChina, Xiaomi will also launch electric bikes and showcase new products from Ninebot, one of the several lifestyle companies the Chinese vendor has invested in.

While there’s no further information regarding the smartwatch, Xiaomi is all set to launch the successor to the Mi Band in an event in China on May 10. The Mi Band 2 will offer a display as well as a physical button, and is expected to be aimed at the entry-level segment, much like its predecessor.

Audi S8 Plus first drive: V8 power, and then some

Sitting at the top of Audi’s saloon family is the A8. Give it a sporty makeover and it becomes the S8. Give that a bit of a tweak and a boost and you arrive at the Audi S8 Plus, the most powerful saloon that Audi has ever put on the road. 

And by the most powerful, we mean 605 pferdestärke.

We’ve previously said that the A6 is rather stately, but for the A8 family, that’s exactly what it is. The regular A8 is a large executive saloon, with the A8L offering more space for VIP transport. It’s perhaps with that target market that the S8 avoids the full RS treatment, instead walking a more delicate path, preserving the prestige of this VIP cruiser.

Audi S8 Plus: Elegant design

There’s a formula in current Audi design that’s resulted in a strong family identity. It flows from the A4 through the A6 and into the A8 and into this S8 Plus. At this top level, however, things are more understated. This isn’t a model that screams horsepower in your face like some of Audi’s RS models, and we can’t help feeling there’s a point to that: it’s a subtler touch, for an owner who doesn’t want to be as showy.

There’s the addition of carbonfibre body details in places, with the option to change the added (but small) boot lip spoiler from body coloured to carbon. The same can be applied to the wing mirror covers, and the rear lights are darkened, sitting above the S8 badges.

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Around the front the nose gets a slight tweak with a lowered front apron with carbon trim, and a move to black for the grille, away from the standard chrome. There’s also an exclusive paint colour for the Audi S8 Plus, a silver with matt effect. 

What the Audi S8 Plus hangs onto is its stately elegance. The S8 Plus isn’t too big for its frame, it doesn’t look bloated or ungainly, but there’s no escaping that this is a serious looking car.

It’s more meaty around the front than the BMW 7 Series, although there’s a sharper drop in the rear roof line, meaning less rear window space than BMW’s big saloon. Both the Audi and the BMW are more serious in posture than the Mercedes S Class, with the AMG models offering a healthy rivalry to Audi’s S8 Plus in the performance executive saloon class, although this Audi undercuts the AMG in price quite nicely.

Audi S8 Plus: Sumptuous interior

If we’ve one criticism of Audi interiors, it can be that things can get a little samey. Sit in the interior of the A1 and you could be in the A6 Avant, depending on where you’re looking.

The TT broke this mould some, the R8 followed suit, but at the executive end of the spectrum in this S8 Plus (as with the A/S/RS7) you get a lift. The interior of the S8 Plus changes the switch gear, the layout and the finish, making it stand out from many of Audi’s cars. This is a competitive space too, having enjoyed the interior of BMW’s high-tech 7 Series, there’s plenty to fight for.

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The heavy application of leather meets glossy piano black trim. Normally we baulk at glossy interiors because they’re a fingerprint magnet, but if you’re going to do it, do it like Audi. The glossy centre console shouldn’t work, but as we sat in the driver’s seat, we couldn’t help but gaze across it. 

There are a lot of controls and buttons, especially to control the media system and the climate control, but the arrangement makes you feel like you’re piloting a jet. You may as well be, with that much power on tap, but the use of a handled drive select lever helps reinforce this feeling.

The brushed steel finish to the buttons, and stainless steel pedals brings a lift to a dark interior, with grey dials presenting your essential speed and revs. The centre of the driver’s display is all digital, so can carry mapping or entertainment information from the MMI system, all of which can be controlled via the steering wheel, but you don’t get the full digital treatment as you do on the Audi TT.

Love the blinds in the Audi S8 Plus pic.twitter.com/Kzpmpqg9ol

— Chris Hall (@christhall) April 15, 2016

For the rear passengers, powered blinds sit inside the double-glazed privacy glass, giving more protection from the sun, making it a peaceful place to ride. There’s also active noise cancellation in the interior, as well as a boosted 14-speaker Bose sound system as standard. The back seats are ridiculously comfortable and you’d expect nothing less. 

Audi S8 Plus: On the road

Slip into the driver’s sport seat of the S8 and you’ll notice that visibility is excellent and it’s very comfortable. That will be welcome news for those who’ll be driving his nibs in the back and we love that there’s a central arm rest that’s adaptable for both the driver and the passenger separately.

Finger the start button and the awakening roar of the 4-litre V8 will send a tingle down your spine. This is a boosted version of the standard S8 which offers 520PS, which, frankly speaking, is nowhere near enough power. In reality, that lift to 605PS means that the S8 Plus will hit 62mpg in 3.8 seconds, over the measly 4.1 seconds of the standard model.

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Just pause and think about that for a few seconds. Yes, that’s about how long it takes to hit the legal speed limit. The Audi S8 Plus is speed limited to 155mph, but you can have that limit lifted to 189mph if you opt for the Dynamic Package. That, importantly, adds the fade-free carbon ceramic brakes, hence the £9250 price.

While his lordship fingers his copy of Horse and Hound in the backseat, this vast saloon will eat the road as it launches itself into the horizon. From the driver’s seat it’s almost inexpressibly satisfying. There’s little or no delay as you put your foot down and the speed hits you like a hammer.

The S8 Plus squirms when you hit the pedal hard, all four wheels delivering power and dynamically fighting to keep grip and keep you heading in the right direction. You’ll feel this brutal ballet through the steering wheel, driven by that snarling orchestral V8, but you don’t feel out of control.

It differs from the tight precision of the Audi R8. The clean delivery of power is breathtakingly fast in Audi’s supercar, but feels potently aggressive in this twin turbo saloon, it’s muscly and brutal.

But the Audi S8 Plus manages that side of the car with panache. If you’re just popping to Waitrose to buy more saffron, then cylinder on demand and the comfort mode will get you there as smoothly as any limo. It’s quiet, it’s peaceful, it’s almost sedate, as well as being wonderfully plush.

Turn the corner, return to Dynamic mode and floor it, and you’re back in a sports car, with tightened suspension and heavier steering making you lord of the road. While the R8 might be ridiculously assured in corners with effortless control and grip, the S8 Plus perhaps surprises: it doesn’t wallow like a hearse, despite the size.

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Then you have all the technology to keep you safe. Lots has been said about collision avoidance and autonomous systems on other cars, but Audi has been doing this for a long time. Adaptive cruise control will vary your speed in traffic to keep you a safe distance from the car in front – handy in motorway cruising – and pre-sense front will detect potential accidents and alert you, before taking measures, like pre-loading the brakes and tightening the seatbelts.

This latter system we got to test, when a tractor emerged into the road on a corner with no warning. The S8 Plus audibly alerted us so we could dab the brakes and take action. 

First Impressions

The Audi S8 Plus is in some ways a marvel. It’s expensive, sure. It costs £97,715 for starters, boosted to £108,115 as seen here, but as we said, most of that extra comes from the added Dynamic package with carbon brakes. The performance numbers are impressive, especially in context of the AMG rivals, with the S63 some £20k more expensive.

You might think that all that power would just mean that the S8 Plus is expensive to run. Well, at 28mpg (Audi’s figures), it is. Even with cylinder on demand reducing the load, this saloon is a long way from the more efficient diesel options of the regular A8.

The Audi S8 Plus is going to be for the few. It’s a blend of sports car performance with luxury limo comfort and priced as such. However, the S8 Plus is a marvellous car to drive. If this is on your list, just make sure you’re sat up front where the fun is, rather than languishing in the rear.

Elon Musk’s AI initiative opened an online dojo

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the artificial intelligence you coded in your garage probably doesn’t have the type of resources behind it that Google used to make DeepMind a fearsome Go competitor. That’s what the Elon-Musk-backed OpenAI Gym is for. It’s in open beta right now, and available test environments include Go on 9×9 and 19×19 boards, a ton of classic Atari games and robot control simulations, among others, with more to come.

The firm says it launched this is because progress made in reinforcement learning lags for a few reasons. Firstly, OpenAI notes that existing, open-source testing environments lack diversity and are difficult to set up and use. What’s more, there’s a dearth of standardization, which makes reproducing the tests — key for any sort of academic research — between different projects in an apples to apples way pretty hard to do.

Want in? The Python-based environments apparently are compatible with algorithms written in “any framework,” including Tensorflow and Therano. But if you’re looking to dominate the leaderboards you might be disappointed: OpenAI says it’s worried less about your high scores and would rather see the generality of your technique when you upload your results.

Via: OpenAI (1) (Twitter)

Source: (2)

BT is raising prices for (almost) everyone in July

If you enjoy BT’s phone, broadband or TV services, you can expect those packages to get a little more expensive in the coming months. According to The Guardian, the provider has announced a series of inflation-busting price increases, which will its see standard broadband rise from £13 to £15 and its £25-per-month superfast fibre connections go up by an average of £2.05 from July 3rd. However, BT says it will boost download allowances by 20 percent to make up for it.

From July, monthly line rental direct debits will rise one pound to £18.99 (a 5.5 percent increase), although the Basic £5 rental package for low-income households will stay the same. Call prices have also been been increased across the board, with fixed cost landline calls rising 11.3 percent to 19 pence, UK landline and 0870 numbers jumping from 10.24p to 11p and Anytime UK Calls getting a 55 pence increase to £8.50 a month.

It could be argued that BT is inflating prices to recoup some of the money it is paying for Premier League football rights. Together, BT and Sky spent a record £5.14 billion on securing coverage for the next three seasons. However, BT’s Sport package isn’t immune from the price increases, as the company will charge broadband customers £6 instead of the normal £5 from July.

Last year, BT announced its new pricing tiers in July and then rolled them out in September. However, with an expensive Premier League season set to kick-off at the end of August and a fresh commitment to expanding fibre broadband across the UK, the company appears to have brought its annual hike forward to help finance it all.

“We realise that customers never welcome price rises, but we have again ensured that low-income customers avoid increases. And we continue to highlight money-saving options for all customers,” says John Petter, BT Consumer CEO. “We have also done our best to ensure that all of our customers will get more value if their price is going up, and we know they want faster speeds and better online security from their broadband.”

Source: The Guardian

‘No Man’s Sky’ lore comes from classic sci-fi and comics

“We always said we shouldn’t have a narrative, but we should have a lore,” says No Man’s Sky mastermind Sean Murray. And honestly, with a procedurally generated universe that’s staggeringly gigantic, it’d be impossible to create a traditional video game story with things like cutscenes. But to make the world feel more alive and less like a giant empty sandbox, Murray says the team at Hello Games turned to artist Dave Gibbons of Watchmen fame and scribe James Swallow who worked on the writing for Star Trek and Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

What’s more, their contributions to the supplemental materials that come with certain versions of No Man’s Sky influenced the development team to consider how things worked in the game proper. Like landing gear on a ship, for instance. Knowing all this makes the game’s PlayStation 4 limited edition being currently sold out on Amazon and the $150 iam8bit “Explorer’s Edition” on PC not including the comics sting a bit more.

Source: PlayStation Blog (EU)

Will.i.am’s next wearable is available to pre-order

Rapper, singer and entrepreneur William Adams, best known as Will.i.am, is ready to unleash his next smartwatch on the world. It’s called the Dial and is available to pre-order from Three in the UK, starting at £22 per month with a £49 upfront fee, or £25 per month with a one-off, £19 payment. That’s right, you’ll need to take out a new, separate contract to use this wraparound wearable. Unlike most smartwatches, however, it doesn’t require a tethered phone. That’s because it comes with a Three SIM card inside, allowing you to call, text and access the internet with nothing but what’s on your wrist.

The Dial is being touted as a “voice-first” device with its own virtual assistant, called AneedA. Like Siri, Cortana and Alexa, the idea is that you can ask for information and execute tasks while your hands are full. How AneedA compares to those alternatives is, for now, a mystery. Three says it has the ability “to learn and tailor responses to each consumer” and “make traditional mobile search irrelevant.” Big claims, which we’re skeptical of given the performance of its previous wearable, the Puls. In early 2015, the press called it a “wearable nightmare” and “riddled with problems.”

Its successor has one more trick to win you over: free music streaming. The service, powered by 7Digitial, has over 20 million tracks that you can listen to ad-free. There’s no extra subscription and no promotional period to worry about. The data you spend streaming is written off too, so you’ll never hit your monthly data cap while listening to Scream & Shout. Such a bonus, while welcome, probably won’t be enough to make this smart cuff a hit. Few consumers in the UK are interested in taking out a second contract, even if it has the star power of someone like Will.i.am behind it.

Samsung Gear 360 launches in Korea alongside Galaxy J series

Samsung has launched the Gear 360 in South Korea for 399,300 Korean Won, or the equivalent of $350. The 360-degree camera is now available for purchase online in the country, and will be heading to over 450 stores starting from May. At launch, the Gear 360 is compatible with the Galaxy S7, Galaxy S7 edge, Galaxy S6 edge+, Galaxy Note 5, Galaxy S6 edge, and Galaxy S6.

The Galaxy J5 2016 and the J7 2016 have also made their debut in the country, and will be available for 290,000 Korean Won ($253) and 363,000 Korean Won ($318) respectively. The Galaxy J5 features a 5.2-inch 720p display, quad-core 1.2GHz Snapdragon 410 SoC, 16GB storage, microSD slot, 2GB of RAM, 13MP camera, 5MP front camera, LTE, and a 3100mAh battery.

The Galaxy J7 shares the same specs, with the main differences being a 5.5-inch 720p display, higher-clocked 1.6GHz CPU, and 3300mAh battery.

Galaxy Note 4 already receiving May security patch in India

Samsung is already rolling out the May security patch to the Galaxy Note 4 in India. The update comes in at 378.38MB, and there isn’t much in the way of what’s new according to the changelog, which only mentions the usual stability and bug fixes. What is interesting though is the Android security patch level, which is listed as May 1 2016.

The phone picked up the Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow update earlier this month, and has received an update with the April security patch just four days ago. If you’re on the Galaxy Note 4 in India, be sure to head into your device’s settings to download the latest update. As for what’s fixed in the May security update, we’ll have to wait for Google to formally announce it next week.