This machine makes cold brew coffee in less than 10 minutes

Cold-brewed coffee is delicious. It’s about two-thirds less acidic than coffee brewed with hot water, which results in a cleaner, smoother and less bitter taste. Unfortunately, making cold brew coffee is a pain. You typically have to let the grounds steep 12 to 24 hours, which requires a lot of planning ahead. This is not something you want to do when it’s a hot summer’s day and you want that cold brew coffee ASAP. Fortunately, however, there is now a solution. Say hello to the Pique, a coffee machine that can make cold brew coffee in less than 10 minutes. And, based on the sample I had, it tastes amazing.

Now, I should say here that the Pique isn’t a real product just yet. Right now it’s still strictly in prototype stage. It’s yet to be launched on Indiegogo, which is where it’ll get most of its funding. In fact, the device that Pique’s creators showed me this past Monday (seen above) was made out of plywood, sheet metal and ABS plastic — materials that they hammered together in a workshop based in Louisville, Kentucky. That workshop is owned by FirstBuild, a subsidiary of GE Appliances that attempts to bridge the gap between the maker movement and real marketable products. It’s essentially an open innovation space that lets makers test out small batch production without all the hassle of mass manufacturing. FirstBuild’s first products include an indoor pizza oven that can heat up to 800 degrees and a dedicated ice maker.

“My wife loves cold brew,” said Justin Brown, a senior design engineer at FirstBuild who’s also the inventor behind the Pique. “But we found it very difficult to plan the night before in order to make it.” So when the team at FirstBuild were deciding on their next big project, Brown figured that a way to make a quick cold brew would be a great choice. They were also given advice by Sunergos Coffee, a local Louisville coffee roaster, on tips and tricks of making great cold brew coffee. After a lot of trial and error, they finally created a real functional model.

But, it was still kind of ugly. So FirstBuild ran a design competition, inviting members of its community to come up with ideas. Today, it announced its winners, with first prize going to Nick Allen from San Francisco, who designed the hourglass design you see above. This is what the Pique will eventually look like. Second and third place winners are the LPK Design Team of Cincinnati and Robert Matzke from Germany. Aside from their prize winnings (First place received $5,000, second $3,000 and third $2,000), one percent of the Pique’s campaign funding on Indiegogo will be shared amongst the winners.

Brown and FirstBuild product evangelist Taylor Dawson visited the Engadget office in San Francisco with the Pique prototype to show us how it all worked. First, he opened up the brewing chamber and added a standard 8-12 cup basket-shaped paper filter. Then he put in a cylindrical filter guard, which lets you manually stir the coffee grounds without messing up the filter. “Manually stirring is key to making cold brew,” says Brown. It’s a step that you would have to make in the traditional way of making cold-brewed coffee anyway, he says.

Next, he placed 100 grams of espresso ground coffee in the basket. “The grind needs to be fine,” says Brown. “You need a lot of surface area of coffee to water, to increase the extraction.” They also developed their discs and filter system to allow for a very fine grind coffee to drain through. Then he poured in a liter of water for a 10:1 ratio of water to coffee. This ratio can be adjusted to whatever strength you want. A 4:1 ratio, for example, would make a more concentrated cup of coffee, to which you can add extra water or milk. He then stirred the grounds really well, making sure that the coffee was saturated and really mixed in with the water. This took him about a couple of minutes.

Then he closed the brewing chamber and pressed a button. Instantly, the Pique roared to life. It was the sound of a gasket pressing onto the coffee and a vacuum pump built right into the machine. According to Brown, this vacuum pulls air out of the slurry and helps to “open up” the coffee. “It allows water to come in contact with it on a microscopic level. It really increases the extraction,” he says.

“It’s basically an infusion process,” says Dawson. “Vacuum infusion is actually pretty commonly used in other industries; we’re not reinventing the wheel here.” Indeed, it’s not even the first time vacuum infusion has been used to make cold brew; a quick search on the internet revealed that some people have done this before with a chamber vacuum machine. But the Pique offers an accessible one-stop-shop solution for quick cold brew, one that I haven’t seen before.

As the seconds ticked by, I heard the vacuum pump kick in every so often. “We have a closed loop feedback to keep reduced pressure in the chamber,” explains Brown. “If there are any leaks in the air, the pump will kick back on.”

“One of the things we want to give you is a capability to set your own brew time,” says Brown. “Either via an interface on the machine or an app via Bluetooth.” Coffee enthusiasts, he says, will likely want to mess around with the right extraction time and so forth to get the best brew possible.

In our demo though, we stuck to the default brew time. In exactly seven and a half minutes, the machine made a loud swoosh sound as the gasket released and the coffee began to drain into the container below. We ended up with around 750 milliliters of coffee, which is a very healthy amount of extraction considering we started with a liter of water.

Brown then poured in the freshly brewed coffee into a cup of ice and handed it to me. I sipped at it tentatively. It tasted fantastic. The coffee was so smooth that it was almost like drinking flavored water. There were hardly any bitter notes. Instead it was clean, bright and really delicious. It didn’t need any cream or sweetener; it was just fine on its own. I gave a cup to my colleague, Roberto Baldwin, and he really liked it too.

So what’s the price? “We’re thinking of a range between $250 and $500,” said Dawson. He said that the Pique is really meant for the enthusiast crowd — people who care about pourovers and single-origin beans — and not the mainstream. As such, he thinks the price is competitive. In comparison, a Bonavita 8-cup brewer retails for around $190 while the premium Ratio Coffee machine retails for $570. You can also get a Hario cold water dripper for about $265 or a Toddy for about $40. None of these options make cold brew coffee in less than an hour.

What’s next from here? Well, Brown and Dawson still have to meet up with the winners of the design challenge and figure out how to finesse their designs to meet the Pique’s standards. Eventually, they hope to launch the campaign on Indiegogo on June 28th 2016, with a ship date slated for late 2017. That’s a long time from now, but if you really want cold-brewed coffee at a moment’s notice, you might be prepared to wait.

Source: Pique

QWERTY keyboards change how you feel about words

The keyboard is mightier than the pen for written communications nowadays, and that apparently has a large impact on how we feel about words. A good example is the QWERTY effect, where words from the right side of the keyboard supposedly have more positive associations. For instance “hunky pinup” typed with the right hand supposedly makes you feel better than the left-side only phrase “sweet dress.” Swiss and German researchers have concluded that the effect works all over the web, and applies to product names, film and book titles, and video clips.

The team studied millions of of names and titles from 11 sites including Yelp, Amazon and YouTube. On all but two of the sites, reviewers rated names and titles more favorably if they had a higher ratio of letters rightward from “y,” “h” and “n.” Weirdly, positive reviews on Yelp, Amazon and other sites also had more words with a high ratio of right-side letters.

The researchers feel that the study confirms a high level of QWERTY effect on the web, but didn’t specify why it happens. They noted that even if people feel better about right-side dominant words, it doesn’t necessarily affect our decisions, since the top products on Amazon don’t have names that exhibit the effect. It could just be that it’s a bit easier to type from the right, since it’s the dominant hand for most folks and has fewer letters. However, linguistics professor Naomi Baron tells New Scientist that it also has more vowels, which are associated with positive emotions. “We don’t put emotions into most of our consonants, we put them into our vowels.”

Via: New Scientist

Source: Cornell University

Acer’s Switch Alpha 12 is a silent, liquid-cooled hybrid laptop

When you think of a liquid-cooled laptop, a giant gaming monstrosity like the ASUS GX700 probably comes to mind. But with its latest convertible, the Switch Alpha 12, Acer is taking that technology in the other direction to create a slim and silent notebook. It’s the first hybrid laptop to run Intel’s sixth generation Core processor without a fan, a notable accomplishment since fan noise is still a problem with today’s thin laptops. The Switch Alpha 12 also packs in a kickstand and a detachable keyboard, both of which gives it the vague profile of Microsoft’s Surface devices.

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As you can probably guess, the Switch Alpha 12 packs in a 12-inch screen. It’s running at a 2160 by 1440 resolution, which is almost as sharp as Apple’s Macbook Retina. As for that cooling setup, Acer says it uses the heat of the coolant as it expands into gas to keep the entire system moving. That’s why it doesn’t need an external radiator or pump, like the ASUS GX700’s clunky accessory.

The Switch Alpha 12 weighs in 2.76 pounds with a keyboard, and 1.98 pounds as a standalone tablet. That’s a surprising amount of additional weight just for the keyboard, and it puts the laptop right between Apple’s 11- and 13-inch MacBook Airs in terms of heft. The full-sized keyboard is also available in standard and backlit variations (no word yet on how much the latter will cost). And if you want to get your stylus on, there’s also an optional Active Pen with 256 different levels of pressure.

You can get your hands on the Switch Alpha 12 in June starting at $599. Aside from its cooling aspect, there doesn’t seem much to differentiate it from the sea of convertibles out there, but we’ll be taking a closer look at it soon.

Acer unveils new Chromebook, convertible and ultrathin notebooks

Acer’s newest notebooks come in two styles: the Chromebook 14 for Work, S 13 ultrathin notebook (pictured above) and the R 15 convertible. Plus, Acer has updated three of its consumer models and one commercial brand. The Chromebook 14 for Work features an Intel Core processor, Gorilla Glass case, spill-resistant keyboard and 12 hours of battery life.

The S 13 ultrathin weighs 3.13 pounds, features 6th Generation Core processors and a full HD IPS display with the option for touch functionality. It starts at $700. The R 15 is an ultrathin convertible and its most tricked-out model includes 6th Generation Core processors, 12GB DDR4 memory, NVIDIA GeForce 940MX graphics and a 15.6-inch FHD IPS display.

Acer’s updated consumer notebooks include the F 15, which now features metal covers in five colors. The E 14, 15 and 17 has been updated with seven new colors, while the ES 15 received an update with the latest 6th Generation Intel Core processors and three fresh colors.

Acer also announced the Switch Alpha 12, a silent, liquid-cooled laptop, during its live event in New York today.

Update: We added hands-on images of the Chromebook 14 for Work, Aspire S 13 and the F Series.

Edgar Alvarez and Chris Velazco contributed to this report.

Acer reveals new Predator gaming desktop, notebook and display

Acer is made a truckload of PC announcements at its NYC event today, and new gaming gear was part of the news. The company pulled the wraps off of a trio of Predator series devices, including the Predator 17X gaming notebook, Predator G1 gaming desktop and Predator Z1 monitors. The trio joins Acer’s gaming line that already includes a pair of gaming laptops, desktops, displays and even an 8-inch tablet. Let’s take a closer look at each of the new machines, shall we?

For those who prefer to do their gaming on a desktop, Predator G1 remains compact enough to take with you, should the need arise. The G1 supports NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan X graphics alongside 6th-gen Intel Core processors and can employ up to 64GB of RAM. Acer says its taken the internals from its previous Predator G6 desktops and crammed them into a much smaller enclosure. Best of all? The G1 is ready to handle VR, and it does so without taking up a ton of space.

The Predator 17X gaming notebook follows the Predator 17 that Acer trotted out at IFA last year. As the number suggests, this laptop keeps its 17-inch display and a similar design to last year’s model. That 17-inch panel comes in HD IPS (1,920 x 1,080) or 4K UHD IPS (3,840 x 2,160) options, depending on how high-res you want the visuals to be. Inside, there’s an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 GPU, bringing desktop-level graphics to Acer’s new gaming notebook.

To keep things cool, the company developed a three-fan setup. In addition to the usual two fans, there’s a third in the front of the laptop that pulls in air from the that side of the machine and blasts it directly over those components that get hot in the midst of battle. Acer’s Predator 17X is also VR-ready, and the company says the new notebook and the Predator G1 desktop are the only machines that support four VR standards, including both Oculus Rift and HTC Vive in addition to OSVR and StarVR. Both gaming machines also include Killer DoubleShot Pro which allows you to use Ethernet for gaming and a Wi-Fi connection for streaming music and the like — at the same time.

Last but not least, Predator Z1 series of monitors includes curved gaming displays at 31.5-, 30- and 27-inches. Most notably, it supports NVIDIA’s G-Sync technology that improves graphics performance to remedy screen tearing and skipping problems. What’s more, that 30-inch Z1 display also sports a 21:9 aspect ration for ultra-wide views. Acer’s new monitors aren’t the first to include the NVIDIA tech, but the feature will certainly be a welcome addition.

In terms of pricing and availability, all three of the new devices will be available in the US and Europe in June. The Predator 17X notebook and Z1 displays will arrive in China in May, while the G1 will go on sale there in July. Acer’s new gaming laptop starts at $2,799/€2,499/¥39,999 and gets pricier depending on the configuration. That compact G1 desktop pricing starts at $2,300/€1,199/¥10,999, again increasing in cost as you upgrade the internals. Lastly, the Z1 curved displays begin at $600/€599/¥4,999 and vary depending on size. Unfortunately, Acer didn’t specify pricing for each model.

Supernatural podcast ‘Lore’ is getting its own TV show

If you like your podcasts dark and to fill you with a sense of dread, then you may have come across Aaron Mahnke’s Lore series. Launched in March 2015, the audio show focuses on horror stories of old, touching on the origins of legendary beasts, ghosts, witches and murderers based on real-life accounts and historical events. The award-winning podcast already claims more than two million monthly listens, and now it’s going to get the TV treatment. According to The Hollywood Reporter, The Walking Dead executive producer Gale Anne Hurd is on board to turn Lore into an hourlong horror TV series.

Staying true to its roots, the adaptation will combine narration, “historical mixed media” and scripted scenes shot with actors. Lore is the latest podcast to get its own TV series and follows in the footsteps of real-crime series Serial, which was picked up by Fox 21 Television Studios late last year. It doesn’t yet have a network attached, but production company Propagate Content will court broadcast and cable partners. If you’re new to the series, or fancy a little refresher, there are currently 32 episodes waiting to be added to your favorite podcast app — I can assure you they’re definitely worth a listen.

If you’ve been itching for more Lore in your life, you’re in for a treat: Lore is in development for television: https://t.co/7FucjKQTXW

— Lore Podcast (@lorepodcast) April 20, 2016

But don’t worry, the podcast isn’t going anywhere. You’ll still get new episodes from me every two weeks.

— Lore Podcast (@lorepodcast) April 20, 2016

Via: The Hollywood Reporter

Source: Lore

‘Mirror’s Edge Catalyst’ gets delayed once again

EA will release Mirror’s Edge Catalyst on June 7th in North America and June 9th across Europe, a delay of two weeks. This is the second time Catalyst has been delayed; the first re-scheduling pushed the game’s release back three months, from February 23rd to May 24th. In the first instance, DICE Senior Producer Sara Jansson said the team needed more time to polish the game’s mechanics. This time around, Design Director Erik Odeldahl says DICE needs more time to work on Social Play features.

“To support the Social Play features, we are using a brand new online technology,” Odeldahl says. “We also want to make sure we have the opportunity and time to address player feedback from the Closed Beta.”

The Mirror’s Edge Catalyst closed beta kicks off on April 22nd and will be live through April 26th.

If video killed the radio star, VR slayed it

There’s nothing in virtual reality quite as rapturous as exiting Tyler Hurd’s Old Friend for the first time. The uptempo, computer-animated experience, backed by up and coming VR studio Wevr, is a three-minute long, hyperactive, confetti-filled romp through a neon-hued world of happy clouds, little naked green men (that wouldn’t look out of place on the set of The Muppets) and one very determined marching band leader. It’s essentially a dance party set to the Future Islands track of the same name and it stars you, the viewer, as a squiggly-armed raver. In a way, it does for VR what The Buggles’ Video Killed the Radio Star did for MTV: It’s defining a whole new genre for a whole new medium. Think of it as the next phase in the evolution of the music video.

“Yes, music videos exist, but this is a whole new category of music interactivity… music storytelling because you interact with it,” says Wevr co-founder Anthony Batt of Old Friend’s appeal. “… When you look at the [little green] guys, they look at you. They see your hands. So when we saw Tyler’s piece, we just thought, ‘It is a whole new space. Just a whole new thing.’ And I think VR needs that. For it to be more popular, I think it needs to be more fun.”

Batt’s right to be concerned about the accessibility of VR. Many of the current commercial experiences, which are targeted at early adopters, either rely on principles of video gaming, proximity-based gimmicks, documentary work or high-art aesthetics. All of which can prove to be a barrier of entry for the broader tastes of the general public. Old Friend succeeds because it asks nothing more from the viewer other than to have fun, dance (if you want to) and inhabit a kaleidoscopic virtual space. Quite simply, it has mass appeal.

Old Friend’s marching band leader sets the pace for this VR dance party

The genius of Old Friend’s design is in how quickly it acclimates the viewer — be they VR veterans or novices — to the VR world before setting off on a high-octane thrill ride. It amuses so consistently, so fantastically with ever-changing colors, the constant pulse of the music and choreographed performances by the troupe of little green men all around you, that you forget to feel embarrassed about dancing with a bulky headset on. But it’s the ability to wave your avatar’s squiggly arms all about much like you would at a club or concert (and, hopefully, in time with the music) that really sells the experience. By incorporating your upper body, it makes the whole thing feel, well, real. It shifts you from a passive observer of this virtual synthpop revelry to the life of the party.

That appeal is due, in part, to the relentlessly upbeat visuals and infectious optimism of the Future Islands track that inspired it. But Old Friend works so convincingly because it taps into a deeper and more irresistible, primal human response to music. Simply put, it makes you want to dance; it makes you want to bust as many weird moves as you can with the coterie of Muppets-like creatures. It’s only when it ends that you realize Hurd’s taken something personal — like a private dance party for one you might’ve had in your living room or bedroom — and repurposed it into a virtual world. What Hurd’s created here is something you can expect will trigger a flood of imitators, especially as VR gains a pop culture foothold and more and more musicians seek to cash in on the medium.

And while elements of interactivity are present in the piece — happy-faced clouds and mountains smile when you gaze at them, and you can manipulate your avatar’s arms using the Vive controllers — they don’t overwhelm to the point of distraction like in so many other ambitious VR experiences. So though you can pull the controller’s trigger button to make your in-VR hand open and close, it doesn’t serve any deeper purpose; you can’t pick things up or reach out and touch anyone or thing.

You can move your hands (and even fist pump) to the beat in Old Friend

“It’s been kind of a process of figuring out how to add just the right amount of interactivity so people don’t feel like they need to do stuff,” says Hurd. “But also [to add] some rewards for trying. … I don’t know if you noticed, but if you touch the little guys, they bat their hands away.”

Old Friend’s high-profile premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival this week in New York is a significant victory for Hurd: It’s his first VR project, and he developed it himself. His road to the festival spotlight and studio distribution was serendipitous, to say the least. Hurd first caught Wevr’s attention with Butts, a cheeky, computer-animated short-cum-VR experience he’d created two years ago. But Butts didn’t start out as a VR project and, in fact, Hurd had nothing to do with its initial VR development.

It wasn’t until some friends of his out in San Francisco, who he’d worked with at video game developer Double Fine, had taken it upon themselves to adapt Butts for VR. As Hurd explains it, they’d been experimenting with Tilt Brush, the Google-developed VR painting application, and asked if they could port Butts to VR. Hurd, however, wasn’t sold on the burgeoning medium.

“I was like, ‘I don’t know. That sounds kinda stupid.’ I was like, it’s not gonna work because I was coming from a filmmaker thought with it. I had a camera in mind. What do you do about the camera?” he says.

Flatulence and confetti go hand-in-hand in Butts

Within a couple of weeks, Butts had been reborn as a VR experience, but Hurd, who was living in New York at the time, didn’t get to see the finished product until about six months later.

“They had a DK1 [Oculus’ first development kit] and a Kinect 2.0, and they were doing head tracking. Like their own mishmash head-tracking technique. … But then when I got to see it on a DK2, immediately I was like, ‘I need to do this now!,’” says Hurd of that first ecstatic brush with VR that led to his eventual epiphany.

Inspiration for Old Friend struck Hurd while riding the subway and listening to the Future Islands track. He’d direct a music video in his mind with “all these crazy dances” — a vision he built out with each successive listen. Once he’d decided to begin mocking up the experience using the track as the focal point, there was only one crucial hurdle left to overcome: licensing approval. Hurd says he tried every available point of contact he could find to get in touch with the band, but to no avail. Batt had suggested he change the track, but Hurd wouldn’t budge. “I was like, I’m not changing this song because the song inspired the piece. You change the song, you change the piece,” he says.

That is, until Wevr stepped in and finally hammered out a deal in the weeks leading up to Old Friend’s Tribeca debut.

Neither Hurd nor Batt would comment on exactly when Old Friend would see a commercial release, except to say that it’ll be sometime soon and will be distributed via Transport, Wevr’s VR Netflix-like content platform. Already, Hurd’s contemplating his next music-based VR project, for which he’ll once again partner with Wevr.

Old Friend’s happy world has clouds and mountains that smile when you look at them

“For the next one, I definitely want to incorporate hands more,” says Hurd of planned interactivity for future projects. “… I have some great ideas for how to create an avatar because the closer you get to an actual body, the weirder it is. It’s never going to be right. This one [Old Friend] is basically like you’re puppeting the character. So that puppeting thing I want to keep doing. I have some ideas for that.”

As for Future Islands’ reaction to Old Friend, well, that’s still somewhat of an unknown.

“They just know about it, but I haven’t actually ever talked to them directly or know if they’ve ever seen it. My hope is that now I’ll get to meet them and show them. And be like, you inspired me to do this. Thank you.”

Image credits: Tyler Hurd/Wevr

iCloud and Siri Teams at Odds as Apple Seeks to Move Cloud Services In-House

Apple’s efforts to move its cloud infrastructure in-house for its web services are being slowed by “political infighting” between the company’s iCloud and Siri engineering teams, according to The Information.

The paywalled report claims that the fighting is holding back Apple from fixing “technical problems that have plagued iCloud and iTunes,” while at least one key engineering manager is said to have departed the company over the ongoing conflict.

Steve D’Aurora, an engineering manager in a team led by Patrick Gates, resigned last week. That’s raised the possibility that Mr. D’Aurora’s superior, Darren Haas, a “head of cloud engineering,” would leave as well. Both Mr. D’Aurora and Mr. Haas joined Apple through its 2010 acquisition of Siri, the voice-activated assistant on the iPhone.

Multiple sources claim that Apple is working on building its own internal cloud infrastructure, known as “Project McQueen” internally, to reduce its dependence on services like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. Apple spends an estimated $1 billion or more on cloud services each year.

Apple reportedly inked a $400 to $600 million deal with Google last year to “significantly” cut down on its reliance on Amazon Web Services, but its reliance on third-party providers should decrease as it builds or expands new data centers in Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, Ireland, and Denmark.

The new infrastructure is meant to help improve the reliability of iCloud and Apple’s other apps. The infrastructure work has taken on added significance this year. Apple CEO Tim Cook has publicly played up the company’s intention to generate more Internet-services revenue from existing iPhone owners, including from the App Store and things like Apple Music.

In June 2015, it was reported that Apple is building a high-speed content delivery network and planning to upgrade its data centers with more of its own equipment. The foundation of the high-speed data network was reported to be long-haul pipes connecting Apple data centers in California, Nevada, North Carolina, and Oregon.

Apple may be enlisting Chinese server vendor Inspur to help migrate its cloud services in house. Inspur already has employees and facilities close to Apple’s headquarters in California, including an R&D team and production center, and it has previously agreed to partnerships with Microsoft, Intel, IBM, and other technology companies.

Tags: Siri, theinformation.com, Google Cloud Platform, AWS
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Griffin’s $40 BreakSafe Power Cable Brings MagSafe to the 12-Inch MacBook Starting April 25

Griffin Technology has announced that its BreakSafe Magnetic USB-C Power Cable for the 12-inch Retina MacBook, including the new Early 2016 model introduced earlier this week, will start shipping on Monday, April 25.

BreakSafe is a magnetic breakaway power cable for USB-C laptops such as the 12-inch MacBook which, unlike the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, does not feature Apple’s proprietary MagSafe technology first introduced in 2006.

The cable, originally announced at CES 2016, has a quick-release magnetic connector that plugs into the 12-inch MacBook’s USB-C port and safely disconnects from the rest of the cable when under stress or strain, such as tripping over the power cord.

BreakSafe’s magnetic connector is 12.8mm deep, while the USB-C cable is six feet (1.8m) long. The cable, compatible with USB Power Delivery and rated up to 60 watts, is for charging power only and does not support data and video.

BreakSafe can be ordered now for $39.99 on Griffin’s website ahead of April 25 shipping.

Related Roundup: Retina MacBook
Tags: MagSafe, USB-C, Griffin, BreakSafe
Buyer’s Guide: MacBook (Buy Now)
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