Razer has a new iPad Pro mechanical keyboard case for gamers

Razer on Thursday announced an iPad Pro accessory that’s perfect for those of you who like to game while on the go.

It’s also for those of you not in love with the iPad Pro’s stock smart keyboard. Razer is offering an alternative that uses its new “Ultra-Low-Profile Mechanical Switches” in order to provide the same acuity and responsiveness found in full-size mechanical keyboards. The peripheral-maker appears keen to help Apple push the iPad Pro as a PC replacement, so it’s rolling out a new compact keyboard case created just for the slate.

The Razer Mechanical Keyboard Case is cloaked in all-matte black, has a detachable polycarbonate shell with a metal kickstand, and boasts chiclet keys that require just 70 grams of force. It appears the keyboard case pairs to the iPad Pro via Bluetooth, rather than the Smart Connector, and therefore can’t recharge the iPad Pro while in use. But it does have a 10-hour battery life with the backlight at maximum (or 600 hours without).

“We’re commonly thought of as a company that makes phenomenal products for gamers, but to design the very best products, we’ve had to innovate from the ground up – even from each individual component such as mechanical switches,” explained Min-Liang Tan, Razer’s CEO.

“We’re excited about the potential of our Ultra-Low-Profile Mechanical Switch and look forward to exploring other applications in addition to the mechanical keyboard we’ve designed for the iPad Pro,” Tan added, indicating it plans to use its new mechanical switch in other products.

• The Razer RealSense Camera will enhance your broadcasts
• Razer Mamba (2015) hands-on: The best gaming mouse on the planet
• Calling all GDC goers: Pick up your free Razer Nabu X smartband today

Until then, you can get Razer’s new mechanical keyboard case for iPad Pro. It is releasing right now, with pricing set at $169.99 in the US or €189.99 across Europe. It’s available at both Razer’s online store brick-and-mortar locations.

Pokemon Go: How to find and catch rare Pokemon?

So you’ve been playing Pokemon Go for a bit and want to catch a rare one, eh?

You’re in luck. We at Pocket-lint have played with the game ourselves and scoured the internet for the best tips and tricks out there, so everything you need to know is laid out below, including details about which Pokemon are common/rare/legendary, as well as how to find and catch rare ones.

Once you’re done getting all the information you need, check out these pieces for more stuff about Pokemon Go, such as how to play, general tips and tricks, how to get the game in your country, why is everyone talking about it, and other mind-boggling facts about the new app:

• Pokemon Go: How to play and other tips and tricks
• Can’t get Pokemon Go in your country yet? Here’s how to download it now
• What is Pokemon Go and why is everyone talking about it?
• Pokemon Go: Best, worst and craziest places people have found Pokemon
• London through the eyes of Pokemon Go
• Pokemon Go: 11 amazing, mind-boggling facts about the AR game
• Pokemon Go: How to catch Pikachu as your first Pokemon

What are Pokemon?

Everyone has heard of Pokemon. They’re fictional creatures from the self-titled franchise that exploded in the 90s. The idea is that Pokemon Trainers – aka humans – try to catch and battle Pokemon for sport. Pokemon originated in a Nintendo video game for the first Game Boy and eventually landed in trading cards, animated shows, movies, and comics. Now, via Pokemon Go, they’re in an augmented-reality mobile game.

There are more than 700 Pokemon that have appeared in the Pokemon franchise over the past 20 years, though only 151 of them are in the new mobile app. Browse our gallery of all the Pokemon in Pokemon Go, in alphabetical order:

• How many Pokemon are in Pokemon Go? 151, and here they are

What are rare Pokemon?

There’s actually two types of rare Pokemon: Rare and Legendary. The Legendary ones are the rarest creatures in the Pokemon universe. In fact, few have actually seen them. It’s been confirmed (via code in the game) that Legendary-status Pokemon are hiding, and Articuno, Moltres, Zapdos, and Ditto were even spotted by a player. Rumour has it Niantic, the game’s developer, is withholding them for a huge in-game event or something.

Now, as for the general rare ones… this gets complicated. Pokemon that are rare might only be rare in your area; they could be very common Pokemon somewhere else. Still, there seems to be some Pokemon that almost all players have trouble spotting and catching. Here’s a list of just 20 rare Pokemon, in order of most rare (it’s based on information compiled by thousands of users around the world at Poke Assistant):

(Click each to see an image.)

• Charizard
• Ditto
• Omastar
• Charmeleon
• Dragonair
• Muk
• Vaporeon
• Machamp
• Ivysaur
• Venusaur
• Blastoise
• Nidoqueen
• Nidoking
• Vileplume
• Poliwrath
• Alakazam
• Weepinbell
• Victreebel
• Slowbro
• Marowak

How do you find rare Pokemon?

The most common Pokemon found in Pokemon Go include Pigey, Rattata, Caterpie, Duduo, etc. Chances are – often playing the game for a few days – you’ll notice you keep finding these little guys and none of the rare ones, like a Marowak. So, how do you find these elusive creatures? Simple: raise your trainer level. Wild Pokemon rarity is tied to your trainer level and CP stat (how well a Pokemon can attack).

You can see your trainer level in the lower left-hand corner of your screen. To raise your trainer level, you need to get experience. That means you must grab all those PokeStops, fight in several gyms, hatch those eggs, walk around a lot, and just play the game basically. You can even buy a Lucky Egg from the store to double your experience gain for 30 minutes. After about 10 levels or so, you will spot those wild, rare beasts.

How do you catch rare Pokemon?

The Nearby menu in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen show how close a Pokemon is to you. When hunting the rare ones, you’ll want to track the creatures that appear greyed-out behind a silhouette. These are Pokemon you haven’t caught yet, and thus they aren’t recorded in your Pokdex. The closer the Pokmon is to you, the fewer footprints you’ll see underneath the silhouette (3 footsteps = 300 metres, etc).

Make sure to keep the Nearby menu open and then circle the Pokémon you want to capture by clicking on it. The circled silhouette should shift up and down based on proximity to you (the more right and down the silhouette is, the father it is from you). If the Pokémon is moving down the menu, walk away to see if it gets closer. Pokemon listed on the Nearby menu are always close by, so keep trying and looking.

Now, check out this guide to learn how to catch a Pokemon in general. For rare Pokemon, try to get the ring around the Pokemon as small as possible before flinging a Poke Ball. The smaller the ring, the more likely the Pokemon won’t escape from the ball. If the Pokemon does escape, just fling several Poke Balls at it before it has a chance to run away. That and pray to the Poke Gods is about all lower-level players can do.

Higher-level trainers upon hitting Level 7 can grab Razz Berries from PokeStops. Feed these to wild Pokemon to make them less likely to run away or escape Poke Balls. At Level 10, you can use more powerful Poke Balls (like Great and Ultra Balls). Wild Pokemon of all levels have difficulty escaping these balls. And if you feed a rare Pokemon a Razz Berry first, then fling a powerful ball at it, you’ll likely be successful.

Are there any other tips and tricks?

Rare Pokemon change from location to location, and it depends on a number of factors, including player population density, proximity to certain types of landscapes, nearby landmarks, different times of the day, etc. Also, certain Pokemon dwell in areas related to their type. Psychic- and ghost-type Pokemon can be found near cemeteries, while fire- and ground-type Pokemon are more likely to appear in arid, desert climates.

Based on information culled from Reddit, Twitter, and our own experiences, here’s other tips and tricks on how to find and catch rare Pokemon:

• Wall a lot, and walk slowly.
• Check unvisited lanes, undiscovered locations, and unpopulated areas.
• Go to locations depending on the type of rare Pokemon you want to find.
• Place lures at PokeStops to lure all nearby Pokemon to your area.
• Use Incense to draw Pokemon if you’re staying put in an area for 30 mins.
• Look for rustling leaves in the game.
• Continually check the near “Nearby” menu for Pokemon.
• When you spot one, switch off the AR Camera (top-right corner of screen).
• Throw a clean Poke Ball without excessive hand movements.
• Make sure your phone has plenty of battery.

This contest proved how far behind the times chatbots really are

The chatbots you’re hitting up on Facebook or Kik may seem as though they can really understand you, but in all actuality they’re pretty stupid, at least when it comes to common sense. That’s why a new Turing Test in the form of the Winograd Schema Challenge seeks to prove how lacking the bots really are in the grand scheme of things.

The challenge asks computers to make sense out of specific sentences with grammar that humans can understand, but that may be obtuse to machines. For instance, in the sentence “The city councilmen refused the demonstrators a permit because they feared violence,” computers aren’t able to parse who the word “they” is actually talking about. In contrast, human readers can understand it because of context clues. That’s exactly the type of thinking researchers are looking to improve, namely with deep learning.

The contest featured a grand prize of $25,000 for entrants who could achive 90 percent accuracy with similar sentences, and the best came from Quan Liu, a researcher from the University of Science and Technology of China as well as Nicos Issak, a researcher from the Open University of Cypress.

Facebook and Google, who have long since been championing the improvement of the bots’ understanding of complex human speech were not present at the contest, but they also have utilized “deep learning” neural networks to improve their chatbots and personal assistantes. Quan Liu’s group, from the challenge, did as well.

The contest came as a result of an improvement on the original Turing Test, which is a way for humans to evaluate a machine’s intelligence. Still, even with the accuracy the teams were able to achieve during the conference, machines clearly have a long way to go when it comes to matching human accuracy.

Source: MIT Technology Review

Researchers create skeleton robot with human-like muscles

If robots that mimic animal or human behavior are your nightmare fuel, turn away now. Researchers at the Tokyo Institute of Technology went one step further with a skeleton robot, giving it human-like muscles to help with movement. The microfilament muscle “tissues” connect to joints and expand/contract just like the real thing. In fact, the robot has the same number of muscles in its legs as we do. At this point, they’re not very strong and though the strands help with smoother movements, the skeleton still requires assistance to walk.

The skeleton robot can also move its arms and, perhaps most importantly, its jaws with the help of the muscle fibers. This means that it can enjoy the finer things in life, like Cheetos. It’ll be interesting to see if the team can continue to refine the robots movements. More specifically, getting those muscles to expand and contract quickly so that the skeleton can improve its soccer skills.

Via: Popular Science

Source: Tokyo Institute of Technology

Vevo’s mobile-focused redesign offers smarter recommendations

Vevo has spent much of the last year or so entirely revamping its product. Most music video watchers probably first encountered the brand on YouTube; many artists big and small use Vevo to power their feeds. But the company has been focused on making its website and apps for iOS, Android and Apple TV destinations unto themselves, rather than something that powers music videos on other platforms.

Today marks another big push in that direction: Vevo is releasing a major update (including iOS and Android apps) that highlight a number of changes made across the platform. Among those include a new, portrait-oriented video player for smartphones, public user profiles that you can follow for recommendations, and a smarter and more visually engaging feed that uses Vevo’s vast amount of data to show you more relevant videos. Oh, and the company has a new logo, too.

The starting point for this new experience is the Spotlight feed that you see when you open the app. After going through the onboarding process (which involves selecting genres and artists you’re a fan of), you’ll see a feed of videos, playlists and users you might be interested in checking out. Vevo’s had this feature for a few months now, but the company says it’s a lot smarter now.

“We want to take your likes and the related artists of the artist that you’ve liked, we want to take your watch history into consideration and we want to take acoustic similarity into consideration,” says Miguel Alvarado, the company’s VP of data and analytics. “We’ll have these three buckets of data and from there we’ll create a personalized list — and we want to keep it very fresh, so every time you come to the app it’s a new list.”

Beyond coming up with music matches using its database, Vevo will make nods towards human-powered music curation trend by featuring various “Vevo Curators” in the Spotlight feed, as well. The company is targeting music bloggers, radio DJs and performers to build profiles and playlists that’ll be featured in your feed. “Because of your watch history, we can match you with a curator playlist based on the stuff that you’ve watched before,” Alvarado explains.

Being smart enough to take user behavior as the basis for serving up video recommendations is the key for Vevo, though. “Our algorithms are taking the input of millions of users, so the millions of users are the curators of the system,” Alvarado says. “It’s not that machines are doing [the curation] — people are doing it, but machines are helping to reach that massive scale.”

The next big change for Vevo is focused around public user profiles. Users have long had the option to create a login on Vevo, but now you can make a full-fledged public profile with all the artists and videos you’ve liked and playlists you’ve created. By default, these profiles will be private, but you can go public and start liking other user profiles; that’ll give Vevo another signal to serve you videos you might want to watch. And these profiles are how the company will surface its Vevo curators in your feed.

Ultimately, it’s yet another signal for Vevo to mine in order to show you better recommendations. “We’re building a venn diagram where you have algorithmic, data-powered intelligence as well as social intelligence — and Spotlight [recommendations] are at the intersection of that,” says VP of product Mark Hall. All this focus on better recommendations is key for Vevo — when I tested out the service’s new Android and Apple TV apps this past winter, I found the service’s focus on top-40 pop music to be a major turn-off. But Vevo has gotten progressively better at surfacing more diverse music based on my listening habits, and this should only help in that pursuit.

The new user profiles and updates to Spotlight will be available across all platforms, but the last big product changes are focused on making the mobile app experience more engaging. The most dramatic is that Vevo is going all-in on the dreaded portrait video format. Now, when you start up a video, it’ll go into full-screen in whatever orientation you’re holding your phone. Of course, you can flip it on its side to see the full video, but if you’re holding it in portrait, you’ll see a view optimized to that orientation instead of seeing a tiny view of the video at the top of your screen.

“We’ve done tests on some videos when you’re watching in portrait full-bleed — even though you’re only seeing a segment of the video, it’s plenty good,” says Hall. “You’re seeing most of the action, and it’s paired with the audio and it’s so nice not to have to [flip your phone on its side].” It’s an admission that most people use their phones in portrait; this option reduces friction to getting people into the video. And you can swipe left and right to go forward in back in your feed to see more videos. Swiping up from the bottom of the screen puts the video in the top third of your screen in its full, natural aspect ratio, and you’ll then see either info about the video or more details about the playlist you’re watching below.

I watched a few videos like this using a demo version of the app and I have to say I’m shocked at how natural it felt. It makes sense — most action is in the center third of the frame usually, and while some of the crops I saw definitely felt off, the general experience didn’t feel all that odd. Purists will scoff at this, but given how many people are shooting and watching portrait-oriented video at this point (thanks Snapchat), it’s a pretty smart addition to the app. “We’ve always had this historically difficult mismatch between landscape video and the portrait orientation we all use on our phones,” Hall explained. “People have been incrementally solving towards that, but I think we’ve taken the next step.”

In the same vein, the Spotlight feed has come to life with 15-second video clips that load and play automatically as you swipe through the feed. (These clips are available on iOS today and will be added to the Android app soon.) Eventually, Vevo wants to use its data to find the most engaging points of the video and load those to increase engagement and click-through; the video previews will also soon come to artist pages to make them more dynamic. “When you see the combination of the [Spotlight] video feed with the portrait video experience on mobile we think it’s a pretty big step forward in terms of viewing video on mobile,” Hall said.

Whether this will be enough to meet Vevo’s ambitions remains to be seen, but the company thinks its laser focus on making the best music video watching experience will help it in the long run. “Right now, people have a choice between going to YouTube and going to Vevo, and that’s good for us,” says Hall. “That means we have to innovate and be better. Part of winning that choice is saying this is a better experience than you’re going to get on YouTube.”

Of course, YouTube has a massive long tail of music videos, both official and fan-shot, as well as the Red subscription service that makes the entire site ad-free and a dedicated YouTube Music app. Google is clearly not sleeping on music, which means Vevo will have to be on top of its game. It has its own a subscription service and more product updates in the pipeline. YouTube obviously isn’t going anywhere, but if Vevo can continue innovating in the mobile video space, it could solidify its status as a dark horse candidate for music video aficionados.