Blue Microphones announces the Raspberry, the funkiest mic to use on the move

Blue Microphones has announced its latest addition to its collection of microphones, called the Raspberry.

Designed with a compact form, it retains much of the character of Blue mics, with an interesting design, but has been designed with portability in mind. 

That sees the body of the mic measuring approx. 120 x 38 x  36mm, with the top half wrapped in the grille, the bottom half in red leather, with that iconic Blue logo on the front.

The mic folds flat into the stand for easy portability, with a soft suede case to keep it protected. 

The stand features rubber feet for insulation against vibration on the surface it’s sitting on; you also have the option of removing the stand and attaching to any quarter inch screw thread, so it can sit on a wide variety of tripods or stands.

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The rear of the mic offers a Micro-USB for connection to your device of choice, with USB and Lightning cables in the box, so you can record direct to your iPhone or iPad, Android, PC or Mac. 

There’s also a 3.5mm headphone socket on the rear of the mic for live monitoring of the audio it’s capturing. 

There are dials on the left and right of the mic to change the volume of the headphones and gain of the mic, with the front LED changing to yellow then red if the levels are too high. 

It’s certainly an eye-catching design and we’ve had the chance to have a brief play with the mic, confirming that it will pick up plenty of detail, although you might want to cut the background hiss with software once you’ve recorded everything.

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Blue says that there’s a bespoke internal acoustic diffuser inside the mic to cut out noise and reflections. We found it to sound fairly deep but a little flat, but we’ll continue to test it in a variety of situations and see how it works out.

The Blue Microphones Raspberry will cost £169.99 and will be available from 1 November from the likes of Amazon and Maplin.

Snapchat Spectacles: How do they work and when can you get them?

Snapchat has announced a Google Glass-GoPro hybrid pair of sunglasses.

These sunglasses cost a fraction of the cost of Google Glass, however, and the idea is you’ll buy them in order to capture your adventure while on the go. It’s like a GoPro for you face, actually. Here’s everything you need to know about Snapchat’s first big dive into hardware.

What are Snapchat Spectacles?

In October 2016, Snapchat announced a pair of connected sunglasses called Snapchat Spectacles. They can record video snippets that automatically save to your Snapchat Memories, a new feature in Snapchat that stores all your saved snaps, stories, and locked content. The sunglasses features a camera with a 115-degree lens, with the purpose of mimicking how humans actually see.

Snapchat

How do Snapchat Spectacles work?

According to The Wall Street Journal, The Verge, and Snapchat, Snapchat Glasses will be easy to use.

To record a snap (picture or video), you’ll tap a button the top left-hand corner of the sunglasses. It will automatically stop recording after 10 seconds, though you can tap again to add another 10-second increment (you can record up to 30 seconds at a time). You’ll see a inward-facing light glow when you’re snapping, while an outward facing-light will show others when you’re recording and they’re in your field of view.

Snapchat Spectacles work with Android and iOS devices. If you own an Android, you can transfer your snaps over Wi-Fi, but if you have an iPhone, they’ll transfer either via the glasses’ Bluetooth connection or Wi-Fi. But keep in mind you can use the sunglasses as a standalone device (they’ll store the snaps until you have access to your phone). To playback your snaps, you’ll need to use the Snapchat app for Android or iOS.

When watching your snaps recorded with Snapchat Sunglasses, you’ll notice a new “circular” format that is meant to display your footage the way the human eye sees, though you’ll watch them cropped in either landscape or orientation mode.

We don’t yet know the image quality of the recorded snaps or whether they will be weatherproof.

How long will Snapchat Spectacles last?

Snapchat said Snapchat Spectacles’ batteries will last about a day, and the outward-facing light on the sunglasses will serve as a battery indicator that you can double tap on to see how much life they have lift. To charge the sunglasses, simply use the charging case and cable that it comes with (the case can actually juice up Spectacles up to four times once fully charged).

How much do Snapchat Spectacles cost?

The glasses will cost $129.99 (roughly £100), come in one size, and will be available in three colours: black, teal, and coral.

When will Snapchat Spectacles be available?

Snapchat is making a “limited number” of Snapchat Spectacles. CEO Evan Spiegel said the glasses would be available this autumn, and Snapchat is going to take “a slow approach” when it comes to rolling them out. We don’t yet know where you can buy them. 

Is this Snapchat’s first hardware product?

Not technically. The company has developed merchandise in the past, such as a plushie, deck of cards, backpack, ice cube tray, and more.

Casey Neistat

What is Snapchat?

Snapchat began in 2011. It’s a popular photo-sharing app that allows you to send pictures and videos – both of which will self destruct after a few seconds of a person viewing them – to friends. Snapchat is also a fun messaging app. When you take a picture or video with the app, you can add a caption or doodle or lens over top, and then send the finished result to a friend along with a chat message.

Alternatively, you can add it to your “story”, a 24-hour collection of your photos and videos (also called snaps), which you broadcast to the world or just your followers. If you don’t feel like sharing your picture or video with anyone, you could just save it to Memories, a new feature in Snapchat that stores all your saved snaps, stories, and locked content. It also shows your phone’s camera roll.

• You can read all about Snapchat from here.

Snapchatters were sending about 700 million snaps a day as of May 2014.

Snapchat

What is Snap?

In October 2016, Snapchat announced that its company would now be known as Snap. It also described Snap as a “camera company” rather than a mobile app developer. In a blog post, Evan Spiegel, Snapchat’s CEO and cofounder, said Snapchat is evolving into Snap because Snap offers more than just Snapchat (ie, Snapchat Spectacles), and it wanted to better distinguish product information from company information.

In other words, Snapchat the mobile app will remain Snapchat, while Snapchat the company will be called Snap going forward.

Want to know more?

Check out Pocket-lint’s Snapchat hub for related news.

German cars will share real-time data to help you find parking

However smart your car might be, there’s only so much it can tell you by itself. Wouldn’t it be nice if cars regularly shared helpful driving info beyond what you offer in mobile apps? Here thinks so. It’s launching services that will have cars automatically sharing real-time data to improve commutes for everyone. Vehicles (starting with those from Here owners Audi, BMW and Mercedes-Benz) will use their sensors and cameras to offer details on free parking spaces, traffic conditions, and road hazards. You’d know that a parking spot has opened up, or that heavy rain is forcing drivers ahead to slow down.

The services will be available in the first half of 2017, and they won’t be limited to either German car brands or even the car industry in general. And yes, Here is aware of the potential privacy issues. It’s promising that the data will be anonymized, so there shouldn’t be an easy way for hackers to identify individual motorists. The main challenge is simply time — Here’s solution won’t give you a truly comprehensive view of the road until there are plenty of connected cars roaming the streets.

Via: BBC

Source: Here (PDF), Here 360

China’s largest ride-hailing company is investing in bicycles

The largest ride-hailing service in China just made a big investment in a different kind of transportation program: bicycle sharing. According to a report from TechCrunch, DiDi Chuxing is kicking off a “multi-layered partnership” with Ofo — an app-based bicycle sharing outfit with a network of over 70,000 bikes in 20 cities. The details of the investment are pretty bare, but DiDi Chuxing says the companies will “explore strategic cooperation in urban rideshare, including offering a quality bike-sharing experience on DiDi’s platform.” In other words, the company’s ride-hailing app may include a bicycle rental option in the near future.

Bike sharing in China is nothing new — the country is actually the world leader in bicycle share programs — but a lot of those are state sponsored. DiDi Chuxing’s investment in Ofo casts the company in a new light, pitting a major transportation firm as privatized competitor to the nation’s public bike programs. Can a private bike sharing program integrated into a major platform outperform state-sponsored sharing services? At this point it’s hard to say, but it’ll be interesting to see how Ofo fares in the long term.

Via: Fast Company

Source: TechCrunch, Shanghai Daily

Scientists catch a classic quantum experiment on camera

If you know a bit about quantum physics, you’ve likely heard of the Schrödinger’s Cat concept used to explain superpositions: a cat in a box with a poison flask is at once alive and dead until you look inside. Researchers have produced this oddball state in the lab before, but they’re now using it to create the most detailed X-ray movies of molecules they’ve seen so far. A team at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory first blasted an iodine molecule with an optical laser, splitting the molecule into simultaneous excited and relaxed states. When the scientists hit the molecule with X-rays afterward, the light scattering off of both states created an X-ray hologram showing the excited state. After that, the SLAC group only had to capture enough of these holograms to create a movie.

And when we say detailed, we mean it. The footage captured the molecular activity down to a resolution of 0.3 angstrom (less than the width of an atom) at timescales so small (a few trillionths of a second) that you can watch the atoms build up to a frenzy and eventually relax. You see direct evidence of the Schrödinger’s Cat paradox, too — the atomic bonds in the molecule at once break and stay together.

The technique could be used to image other molecular systems, which could help make sense of biological functions ranging from photosynthesis to vision. That, in turn, could help the scientific world harness molecular-level behavior and apply it in fields like energy and medicine. This is just a first step, but it’s an important one.

Via: Gizmodo

Source: SLAC, ArXiv.org

Debate venue offering journalists $200 ‘bargain’ for WiFi

At one point or another, we’ve all paid too much to access Wifi when we’re out and about. Well, ahead of tonight’s first presidential debate of the general election between Republican candidate Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton, journalists will apparently have to shell out $200 to connect to Hofstra University’s wireless network. That’s according to a tweet from Slate political reporter Jim Newell. Personal WiFi hotspots are prohibited as well, with Newell adding that he isn’t sure exactly how the venue will enforce the edict.

As a bit of confirmation, Vocativ’s social media specialist Ryan Beckler posted a tweet with the following image, presumably from within the university:

$200 for WiFi at tonight’s debate. $600 for a seat, WiFi, and Ethernet. #Debates2016 pic.twitter.com/U1LPVzSGc0

— Ryan Beckler (@RyanBeckler) September 26, 2016

$200 for WiFi access, $75 for a seat in the media filing room (without internet access) or $325 for a hardline connection and a seat in the media filing center. Sounds like a veritable circus of value. However, given that nearly every modern smartphone can act as a modem, the chances of this keeping journalists offline are pretty slim. That doesn’t mean the event’s staffers aren’t trying.

A tweet from Politico’s Kenneth P. Vogel shows an AIrcheck WiFi Tester in use for detecting any unauthorized networks. If you’re on the ground and reading this, know that using USB tethering will sidestep the $2,000 tool’s methods.

Technicians patrolling #debatenight press file using this device to detect & shut down hotspots, so they can sell $200 wifi accounts instead pic.twitter.com/JzbkzlZR1g

— Kenneth P. Vogel (@kenvogel) September 26, 2016

Source: Ryan Beckler (Twitter), Jim Newell (Twitter), Kenneth P. Vogel (Twitter)

NASA observes possible water geysers on Europa

Hubble’s extended mission continues to pay off: NASA announced today that a team of astronomers using the space telescope have spotted what appear to be plumes of high-altitude water vapor spewing from the icy surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa. Researchers have long believed that Europa holds a global ocean beneath a thick, potentially miles-deep, layer of ice, but the new observation indicated it could be possible to sample the ocean without landing or drilling on the moon itself.

“Europa’s ocean is considered to be one of the most promising places that could potentially harbor life in the solar system,” Geoff Yoder, the acting associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate said in a statement. “These plumes, if they do indeed exist, may provide another way to sample Europa’s subsurface.”

According to NASA, the plumes are estimated to be around 125 miles (200 kilometers) high and were spotted by William Sparks of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore as his team was looking for an extended atmosphere around Europa. In 10 different images taken over 15 months, Sparks’ team saw evidence of plumes in three of them.

In 2012, a team of researchers in San Antonio also detected evidence of vapor plumes on Europa using the Hubble Space Telescope’s spectrograph, but used a different method to arrive at the same conclusion. While the size and location of the plumes seem to match between the two observations, NASA isn’t ready to confirm that the observed phenomenon are jets of water vapor.

However, the agency is already plotting out new missions to study the phenomenon. When it launches in 2018, NASA plans to use infrared camera on the James Webb Space Telescope to confirm the vapor activity. Looking even further into the future, NASA is mulling a plan to send a payload to Europa that could confirm and study the plumes from a much closer distance.

Source: NASA