There’s a deodorizing coat hanger for the anti-laundry contingent

If you’re too lazy to take your clothes to the dry cleaner, well then Panasonic has the tech gadget you didn’t even know you needed (and face it, you probably don’t need it.) They’ve invented a clothes hanger, the Nanoe X, that deodorizes your clothes.

The deodorizing hanger uses negatively charged particles, or “nanoe,” to clean your clothes. These ions gather moisture from the air and are a billion times smaller than steam particles, and thus invisible to the naked eye. They won’t get stains off your clothes, but they will eliminate odors such as sweat and cigarette smoke without harming delicate fabrics.

The hanger has two cleaning modes and will take 5–7 hours to clean your garment. It also comes with a clothing cover that helps trap the nanoe, ensuring an even and thorough cleaning. As an added bonus for allergy sufferers, the hanger will also eliminate pollen from your garment.

The price for a hanger that will take 5 hours to eliminate the odor from (but not actually clean) one garment at a time? Kaden has the price at 20,000 yen, which translates to about $180. So if you have some extra cash laying around when this thing finally comes to the US market (it appears it’s initially only going to be available in Japan), you’ll finally have a way to deodorize your clothes without cleaning them (or, you know, using Febreze).

Source: Panasonic (1), Kaden, Panasonic (2)

LG Innotek to Begin Mass Producing Flexible Printed Circuit Boards With Eye on 2018’s ‘iPhone 9’

LG Innotek will begin mass production of flexible printed circuit boards in 2018, with supply chain sources stating that the supplier aims to become one of the main FPCB manufacturers for the “iPhone 9” (via The Korea Economic Daily).

The sources said that LG Innotek is nearing the completion of development on its first FPCB run, and will “likely” break ground for FPCB-focused facilities in the second half of 2017. The supplier is focusing on becoming a main FPCB component maker for Apple and LG Electronics, and would enter into the field currently dominated by Samsung and its production on FPCB components for the 2017 iPhone 8.

LG Innotek is set to kick-start the mass production of flexible printed circuit boards for smartphones from next year. With this move to become a flexible PCB supplier for Apple’s iPhone, LG Innotek would pose a challenge to Samsung Electro-Mechanics which has already accumulated know-how in this area.

According to industry sources on June 25, LG Innotek has almost completed the development of flexible PCBs and would likely to break the ground for related facilities in the latter half of this year. LG Innotek aims to become a main flexible PCB supplier for Apple and LG Electronics.

With Apple’s move to an OLED display in the iPhone 8 this year, the company had to source flexible PCBs because existing PCBs were incompatible with the new flexible OLED screen. Although early rumors pointed towards a display with a curved edges around the sides of the iPhone, it’s now expected that the iPhone 8 will have the same slightly curved 2.5D display of the iPhone 7.

The supply chain report today is the second story in the past few weeks that has already begun looking towards next year and the so-called “iPhone 9” that is expected to launch fall 2018. In May, sources knowledgeable of Apple’s and Samsung’s iPhone 9 supply chain talks said that the 2018 smartphone will launch in two OLED screen sizes: 5.28-inch and 6.46-inch.

Tags: LG, iPhone 9
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Pocket-lint newsletter: How to sign up to get the latest stories and offers weekly

The weekly Pocket-lint newsletter is back. You can now get a concise round-up of the week’s hottest news stories, deals and features sent directly to your email inbox each Friday.

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Pocket-lint UK deals of the day: Raspberry Pi 3 Kit for £36.99 today

Welcome to Pocket-lint deals of the day were we scour the internet to find you the very best deals that are available in the UK today.

We will be regularly updating this page, so bookmark it and check back regularly to make sure you don’t miss out on some of the best tech deals online.

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Tech and Gadgets

• NeeGo Raspberry Pi 3 Kit – reduced from £100 on Amazon today to £36.99.
• Oral-B Smart Series 4000 Electric Rechargeable Toothbrush – £39.99 on Amazon.
• Pebble 14 mm Time Round Smartwatch – Silver/Red – £59.98 on Amazon.
• Logitech MX Anywhere 2 Mouse is reduced on Amazon today from £69.99 to £36.99. 
• Lenovo 65CDGAC1UK ThinkVision X24 OLED FHD Monitor has been reduced from £179.99 to £119.99 on Amazon.
• HP Pavilion x360 15-bk150sa 15.6-inch 2 in 1 – Silver laptop is £499.00, saving you £150 off on Currys.
• Microsoft Universal Foldable Bluetooth Keyboard is £32.99 today reduced from £99.99 on Amazon.

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Games

• Xbox Live 3 Month Gold Membership and Rocket League for free – £14.99 on Amazon.
• Sony PlayStation VR – £317.99 on Amazon.
• Mortal Kombat XL (PS4) – £12.49 on Base.
• Dead by Daylight (PS4) – £19.99 on Amazon.
• Yakuza Kiwami Steel Book Edition (PS4) – £23.85 on Base.
• 8BITDO NES30 Pro Wireless Bluetooth Controller Dual Classic Joystick YIKESHU For Android Gamepad – £28.45 on Amazon.
• Rime (PS4 & Xbox) – £17.49 on Argos.
• Need for Speed: Most Wanted (PlayStation Vita) – £7.49 on Base.
• Deus Ex: Mankind Divided Day One Edition (Xbox One) – £8.64 on Amazon.
• Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands Inc The Peruvia PS4 – £26.86 on ShopTo.net.
• Prey (PS4) – £22.85 on Base.

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Audiovisual

• HISENSE H49M3000 49″ Smart 4K Ultra HD HDR LED TV – £369.00 on Currys.
• LG 43UH603V 43 inch Ultra HD 4K Smart TV – £379.00 on Amazon.
• Philips 55PUS6401 55 Inch SMART 4K – £499.00 on Amazon.
• Hisense 55M7000 4K TV – £599.00 on John Lewis.

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Phones

• Google Pixel 32GB Black with 5GB data – £25.00 upfront cost £27.99 per month £696.76 total cost over 2 years at Mobiles
• Diamond X 4G Andorid 6.0 – £75.68 on Amazon.
• Apple iPhone 7 256GB in red – £779.00 on John Lewis.
• Bush Spira D3 – £99.95 on Argos.

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Entertainment

• Heroes complete box set in Blu-ray is £17.99 using code BINGE10 on Zavvi.
• John Wick 2 – £19.99 on Zavvi.
• Rogue One: A Star Wars Story Blu Ray – £15.00 on Amazon.

Sorting Lego sucks, so here’s an AI that does it for you

Neural networks are currently being tasked with everything from adding animations to video games to reproducing images taken from MRI scans. Training the AI, which needs to be fed vast amounts of data, can be a slog and even then it may not produce completely accurate results. But when it comes to recognizing and classifying images and objects the AI can cut out a lot of leg work, as Jaques Mattheij found out when he built his own neural network for the novel task of sorting through his massive Lego collection.

You see, Mattheij decided he wanted in on the profitable cottage industry of online Lego reselling, and after placing a bunch of bids for the colorful little blocks on eBay, he came into possession of 2 tons (4,400 pounds) of Lego — enough to fill his entire garage.

As Mattheij explains in his blog post, resellers can make up to €40 ($45) per kilogram for Lego sets, and rare parts and Lego Technic can fetch up to €100 ($112) per kg. If you really want to rake in the cash, however, you have to go through the exhaustive process of manually sorting through your bulk Lego before selling it in smaller groupings online. Instead of spending an eternity sifting through his own, intimidatingly large collection, Mattheij set to work on building an automated Lego sorter powered by a neural network that could classify the little building blocks. In case you were wondering, Lego comes in more than 38,000 shapes and over 100 shades of color, which amounts to a lot of sorting even with the aid of AI.

Starting with a proof of concept (built using Lego, naturally), Mattheij spent the following six months improving upon his prototype with a lot of DIY handiwork. In his own words, he describes his present setup as a “hodge-podge of re-purposed industrial gear” stuck together using “copious quantities of crazy glue” and a “heavily modified” home treadmill.

The current incarnation uses conveyor belts to carry the Lego past a web camera that is set up to take images of the blocks. These are then fed to the neural network as part of its classification training, and all Mattheij has to do is spot the errors in its judgement.

“As the neural net learns, there are fewer mistakes, and the labelling workload decreases,” he states. “By the end of two weeks I had a training data set of 20,000 correctly labeled images.”

With his prototype up and running, Mattheij claims he is just waiting for the machine learning software to reliably class all of the images itself, and then he can start selling off the lucrative toy. If Matthiej manages to get the system working, he could then rechannel those profits into new expensive Lego projects.

Via: IEEE Spectrum

Source: Jacques Mattheij

Tesco has a one-hour delivery service in London now, too

Tesco has today launched a new one-hour delivery option in London, after having been caught secretly testing the speedy service last month. Via the Tesco Now apps for iOS and Android, customers can order up to 20 products out of a 1000-strong selection from 8AM to 11PM (or from 9AM on weekends). For serious BBQ emergencies, you can ensure delivery within an hour for an £8 fee, or choose the two-hour option for £6 if you’ve still got a pack of sausages in the fridge. Within the app, you can also track the progress of the moped-riding Quipup courier entrusted with your supplies.

Tesco follows Sainsbury’s in launching a one-hour delivery service in London. The latter supermarket’s offering is also only available in the capital via mobile app, and carries a £5 fee for up to 25 items. Both are trying to compete with Prime Now one-hour deliveries, which has enjoyed a relatively unchallenged head-start. Amazon covers many UK cities and towns, offers more than 20,000 products in some places, and charges £7 for a 60-minute guarantee or nothing if you can wait up to two hours (though the catch is you need a Prime subscription to start with).

Tesco is starting out small by comparison, with the service limited (for now) to these central London postcodes: E1, E2, EC1, EC2, EC3, N1, N16, NW1, NW10, NW3, NW5, NW6, NW8, SE1, SE11, SW10, SW11, SW12, SW13, SW14, SW15, SW1, SW3, SW4, SW5, SW6, SW7, SW8, W1, W10, W11, W12, W14, W2, W7, W8, W9, WC1, WC2.

Source: Tesco

MakerBot will connect Chromebooks to cloud-based 3D printers

Earlier this year, Makerbot announced in its most recent bloodletting that it would focus more on the education market. Today we’re seeing some of the fruits of that decision. First up is “My MakerBot,” what the outfit describes as a cloud-enabled browser-based printer monitoring platform that’s compatible with Chromebooks (which are incredibly popular in the classroom) and Autodesk’s Tinkercad 3D design software.

More than that, Makerbot will also release Makerbot in the Classroom, a guide for teachers containing lesson plans and nine different 3D-printing projects. Those nine projects are “a small sampling of hundreds of lesson plans” that educators can access via Thingiverse’s Education portal. Teachers apparently downloaded some 14,000 lesson plans last month alone.

If education can stop the layoffs at Makerbot, targeting the education sector — seemingly the only place that’s seeing much growth for 3D printing — seems like it could work out pretty well for the beleaguered firm.

Hip-Hop Documentary ‘Can’t Stop Won’t Stop’ Debuts Exclusively on Apple Music

Sean Combs’ exclusive Apple Music documentary Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A Bad Boy Story officially debuted on the music streaming service last night [Direct Link]. The film was announced this past April, following the documentary’s premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival.

Can’t Stop Won’t Stop follows Combs, aka “Puff Daddy,” and the rise of Bad Boy Records throughout the 1990s, all the way up until the reuniting of the Bad Boy Family in 2016 for a reunion show tour in New York City.

Apple Music’s full description follows:

In 1993, Sean “Diddy Combs, a.k.a. Puff Daddy, founded Bad Boy Records and changed popular culture forever. In 2016, the Bad Boy Family reunited in Brooklyn, New York for the biggest homecoming in hip-hop history. Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A Bad Boy Story explores the passion and personalities behind the empire, and goes inside the making of a movement and the staging of an unprecedented musical event.

This is an intern-to-CEO story — a raw behind-the-scenes look at the legacy of Bad Boy through a complex portrait of its mastermind as Combs reunites the Family over a frantic three-week rehearsal period. The film traces the label’s emergence in Harlem and Brooklyn, follows its meteoric rise, reflects on the tragic killing of Biggie Smalls, and celebrates Bad Boy’s influence — all while reveling the love and commitment that binds every member of the Family together.

The Apple Music page for the film includes the trailer, a running time indicator of one hour, and “Songs in this Movie” so viewers can easily find the music that appears in the documentary. Apple has also placed Can’t Stop Won’t Stop across the carousel on Apple Music’s “Browse” tab, as well as given more spotlight to hip hop-related radio stations, playlists, and old tracks and videos by The Notorious B.I.G.

.@diddy’s #CantStopWontStop has arrived!
Watch now on Apple Music. https://t.co/twohrAXFaV pic.twitter.com/X4VQGqo0XV

— Apple Music (@AppleMusic) June 26, 2017

Apple’s exclusive access to the one-hour documentary is said to be for as long as one year. Following the announcement in April, Combs said he felt “blessed” to be working with Apple as a partner in telling the story of Bad Boy Records.

Can’t Stop Won’t Stop is the latest music-related film content for Apple Music, and represents Apple’s ongoing push into original TV production. The company launched Planet of the Apps earlier in June, and Carpool Karaoke: The Series is set to debut on August 8.

Moving forward, Apple hopes to expand its content beyond music and tech, with former Sony executives Jamie Erlicht and Zack Van Amburg helping to lead Apple’s push into more traditional television for Apple Music.

Tag: Apple Music
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SpaceX just sent up two rockets in 48 hours — and landed them again

Why it matters to you

After experiencing some serious difficulties last year, it’s great to see SpaceX well and truly back on track.

SpaceX has been following through on its promise to ramp up its mission rate with its reusable rocket technology, over the weekend nailing two launches and landings in the space of just 48 hours.

The private space company’s busiest schedule to date began in Florida on Friday, June 23 when it successfully launched a Bulgarian communications satellite into orbit. The mission marked the second reflight of a Falcon 9 rocket after previously supporting the Iridium-1 mission at the start of this year.

Friday’s mission presented a major challenge as the Falcon 9 deployed the satellite into an orbit higher than usual for SpaceX. That meant the rocket would have to endure extra heat and other forces on its descent toward the drone ship in the Atlantic. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said beforehand that there was a “good chance” the rocket wouldn’t make it back.  In the event, it performed a heavier-than-usual landing, but appeared largely unscathed.

On Sunday SpaceX turned its attention to Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, where it launched another rocket (above), this one deploying 10 satellites for communications company Iridium. Extreme conditions, including fog, wind, and rough seas, meant this mission also faced challenges. Indeed, the team was forced to reposition the drone ship in the Pacific, but in the end the landing was perfect. A little while later, Musk posted a sped-up video (below) of the successful landing with footage captured by a camera attached to the rocket.

Sped up version of today’s rocket landing on the Droneship Just Read the Instructions (guess it did)

A post shared by Elon Musk (@elonmusk) on Jun 25, 2017 at 2:41pm PDT

Flying a used rocket just six months after its first flight — as it did on Friday — marks real progress for SpaceX, which took a year to refurbish its first relaunched rocket back in March. Fast turnaround time is important if it is to achieve its ambition of efficient space flight, with the aim to have boosters ready to fly again in just days rather than months.

Riding high

SpaceX is riding high following a number of recent high-profile successes, which besides its March reflight and landing include its first-ever reuse of a cargo ship that’s currently docked at the International Space Station.

It all looked very different just nine months ago when SpaceX suffered a major setback after one of its Falcon 9 rockets exploded on a Cape Canaveral launchpad. But after months of investigation, the team fixed the issue and has now been enjoying a string of successes as it continues its quest to perfect its reusable rocket system in preparation for more ambitious missions into deep space.

From EV fleets to LED streetlights, San Diego is America’s premier smart city

Your city is dumb. The potholed streets, coin-operated parking meters, and drafty brick buildings many of us interact with every day haven’t changed much in a century. But it’s finally happening. From Oslo to San Diego, cities across the globe are installing technology to gather data in the hopes of saving money, becoming cleaner, reducing traffic, and improving urban life. In Digital Trends’ Smart Cities series, we’ll examine how smart cities deal with everything from energy management, to disaster preparedness, to public safety, and what it all means for you.

You might think of San Diego as just a laid-back beach town. But it’s a town full of marvelous, counter-intuitive trends and odd dichotomies too. It’s the second-largest metropolitan area in California, yet its citizens and government think of it as a “city of villages.” It’s the town where surfing was born, yet the city is home to as many advanced technology startups as its counterpart in Silicon Valley. It’s largely a conservative place, yet one that is more committed to a clean environment and the advancement of science than just about anywhere else in the country. It’s a city in the crosshairs of the anti-immigration movement, yet one from which you can literally walk across a bridge to Tijuana, Mexico.

In short, San Diego is a weird, wonderful place — and it’s quickly becoming a global leader in the development and deployment of Smart City technology. In San Diego’s case, this means way more than urban development; this is re-writing the city’s DNA.

Smart Cities San Diego is a highly ambitious, multi-year collaboration that combines the resources of the City of San Diego, San Diego Gas & Electric, General Electric, the University of California San Diego, and a major nonprofit partner, Cleantech San Diego — a trade association whose mission is to advance these technologies. Led by these visionary organizations, Smart Cities San Diego brings expertise and ideas from government, business, education, and the nonprofit community in a public-private partnership that rivals the advances of just about any other community in the world.

And it’s fundamentally changing the nature of what it means to live there.

A Complex History

It all began in the 90s, in the heart of a financial crisis.

“We realized we needed to go beyond just being more efficient,” explained David Graham, the Deputy Chief Operating Officer of the City of San Diego, on whose shoulders much of the success of the Smart City initiatives rest. “We really started to look practically at ways to use data and technology to improve city services and save money.”

In addition to a burst of new technologies, the State of California was also heavily invested in the climate improvement goals supported by then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

“Every city in the United States is in the early stages of becoming smart cities.”

“We were able to unite the business community, academia, the government, and our utilities,” said Graham of those heady early days. “That created the people platform for our smart city efforts. We began with ideas around electric vehicles, and then you begin to layer. When you look at it from the big picture, if the city is the bloodstream of this organic being, then the utility is like the nervous system. Once we understood that concept, we could start thinking how we could better connect, coordinate and understand what is going on around our city.”

Another enormously important factor in the success of the smart city initiatives in San Diego is the presence of a full-time nonprofit advocate for the people, companies and organizations that support the development and deployment of clean technologies and renewable energy. Cleantech San Diego was founded a decade ago as a member-based trade association that helps foster partnerships and encourage investment in smart city technologies.

“We provide what I like to call a safe space for the public sector and the private sector to come together to talk about what the city needs to do,” Cleantech President and CEO Jason Alexander told Digital Trends. “We also support the deployment of pilot projects so our members can ensure that their ideas work in the real world.”

San Diego Goes Electric

San Diego started very early with electric vehicles (EV). To get ahead of the curve, the city facilitated the expansion of a public electric vehicle infrastructure that ensures safe, reliable, and efficient charging almost anywhere in the San Diego power grid. That was a major investment and a fundamental redesign to one of the city’s most important infrastructures. Today, 32 percent of San Diego’s electricity is renewable, and there is no coal in San Diego Gas & Electric’s energy portfolio.

More recently, San Diego Gas & Electric along with Pacific Gas & Electric and Southern California have raised more than $1 billion to try to electrify the entire state’s transportation sector. They can certainly point to San Diego as an example of success. The region is home to more than 14,000 EV drivers, nearly 1,000 charging stations, and car2go’s fleet of 400 electric vehicles. And San Diego plans to overclock its EV program by installing up to 90,000 charging stations at single-family homes, putting in up to 45 charging spots for ground support equipment at San Diego International Airport, and installing charging stations at locations used by taxis, shuttles and rideshare vehicles.

Please enable Javascript to watch this video

San Diego’s latest triumph also involves electricity, and started as a pilot project. With involvement from Cleantech San Diego and other constituents, the city installed 3,000 LED street lights with wireless sensors and adaptive controls downtown. Not only did the lights improve energy efficiency, the extra effort to add wireless sensors has added a whole new dimension of data to the city’s arsenal — and simultaneously launched the most significant IoT civic project to date.

“With the streetlights, we realized that we didn’t know when they were on or off or how much energy was being used,” Graham remembered. “Utilizing technology to better control them and reduce our energy footprint was attractive in the first place. By moving forward with the adaptively controlled streetlight network, we figured out exactly how much energy we could save. But then our vendor, GE, told us they could communicate a lot more information than just whether a light is on or off. We could gather information regarding transport, parking, traffic and more.”

Having achieved success with the pilot program, San Diego has moved forward with a $30 million upgrade to 75,000 street lights, saving 30 million kilowatt hours annually, eliminating 13,000 tons of carbon dioxide, and generating $30 million in economic development. The city is also using federal community block grants to ensure underserved neighborhoods also have these wirelessly networked street lights, not just downtown or the Gaslight Quarter.

“We’re big on human-powered design. If you forget about the people, you’ve already failed at being a smart city.”

“A big part of being a smart city is being an inclusive city,” said Graham. He recalled talking to one family at an opening party who wondered if they could use the data to find the safest route to walk to school. In fact, the data collected by the streetlight network can be used for all manner of applications, and will be completely transparent to access. A new app designed to find parking in San Diego should be unveiled later this year.

“That’s the question: how can we provide more data not only for our decision makers but also push that information out to software developers and other organizations that can make use of it?” Graham explained. “We’re big on human-powered design. If you forget about the people, you’ve already failed at being a smart city.”

In fact, the program’s first challenge started with people. Having eyes on where people parked, Graham assumed parking violations would go up. But when he talked to the enforcement teams, he discovered that parking enforcement was based on a decades-old fixed route that didn’t even consider the new data.

“If you don’t adapt the process to the technology, the technology becomes extremely inefficient,” Graham said.

Next Stop, Solar City

Consider this: San Diego is the #1 place in the nation for rooftop solar. It’s another place where the Smart City constituents said this is good, but it could be better. Let’s make it better.

“We knew we had a ton of solar permits coming through the city’s application process, and the process was efficient,” Graham remembered. “Solar is a fairly standard technology where the installers know what they’re doing. So we blew up the process. We created a self-certification process for companies, trained them on what the process would be like, and what needed to happen.”

The result of “blowing up the process?” San Diego now processes more solar permits than any other type of permit that the city issues, with zero incidents or problems.

“The private sector’s ability to understand the city’s process for implementing solutions can be slow,” said Cleantech’s Anderson. “It’s slow because of procurement and permitting processes that private sector companies aren’t used to dealing with. People like David Graham want to solve these issues by streamlining the process so that they’re available when the technology is current and not decades later when the tech is out of date.”

America’s Smartest City?

Electricity is important, but the San Diego Smart City initiatives are looking at all manner of upgrades, from clean building techniques to renewable energy to hackathons. Graham mentions in passing that the city is already overhauling its drinking water system.

“Not to be too gross, but we’re turning sewage into pure, clean drinking water,” Graham laughs. “It will eventually be 30 percent sourced from renewable sources. Another thing we did was to invite in the many breweries in the area and let our citizens drink beer made from pure water. Demystifying these things and being very open about that is our future. It’s about citizen engagement at the human level, but also about citizen engagement at the technical level.”

Other smart city-related projects include the smart building initiatives at the Port of San Diego, the Chula Vista Bayfront Master Plan and the EcoLuxury Apartments in Scripps Ranch — the first all-solar apartment complex in San Diego and one of the first multifamily complexes in the United States to offer Net Zero living to all its residents.

“We invited in the many breweries in the area and let our citizens drink beer made from pure water.”

The City of San Diego also announced in 2017 that San Diego will become a “2030 District,” an urban area where the private sector and local building industry leaders commit to sustainability and economic growth. The goal is to achieve a 50 percent reduction in energy, water, and transportation emissions in the district by 2030.

“When it comes to smart cities, the only real rule is ‘You do you,’” Graham said. “The streetlight program might not be the same for everyone. Not everyone will be able to benefit from solar as much as San Diego, but we don’t have the same amount of wind energy as West Texas. You have to find out what works specifically for you. Look to the place where your money is being spent today, and think about how that investment can be leveraged to replace light with light years ahead.”

There are challenges here in San Diego, but they’re solvable ones. Legacy infrastructure that can support advanced wiring, fiber, and other advances is one. Obstacles to having these new data systems communicate with each other is another. There are also questions to come: How does San Diego react to autonomous (self-driving) cars? What does parking look like in an ever-evolving city? How could traffic data be combined with transactional data to identify the ideal spot for a food truck?

“We always say that San Diego is small enough to get things done but big enough to make a difference,” Anderson said. “If we can be the proving ground for the development and deployment of smart city technology here in San Diego, our hope is that these technologies make their way around the world.”