China’s heavy-duty rocket fails in mid-flight

China’s space program has largely run smoothly (with notable exceptions), but it just ran into a serious obstacle. State media reports that a new heavy-duty rocket, the Long March 5 Y2, failed shortly after launch. Xinhua would only say that an “anomaly” occurred and that an “investigation” will follow, but it’s apparently serious enough that the 5 Y2’s satellite-carrying mission had to be scrapped altogether.

This could easily hinder China’s plans in the near term. The country was supposed to send a probe to the Moon later this year — if it has to conduct a thorough inspection of its rockets and fix any bugs, it might have to put its lunar plans on hold. That would reassure rival countries hoping to beat it to key space milestones, but it would also wound the pride of a nation determined to catch up to pioneers like the US and Russia.

Source: Reuters

Tesla will deliver the first 30 Model 3s on July 28th

Tesla will start delivering its much-anticipated Model 3 EV this month, as promised. CEO Elon Musk tweeted that the company will have a “handover party for [the] first 30 customer Model 3s on the 28th.” He added that production will grow exponentially, “so August should be 100 cars and September above 1,500.” By December, the company will be building 20,000 cars per month, he said in a subsequent tweet. The goal is to produce up to 10,000 cars per week by 2018.

Handover party for first 30 customer Model 3’s on the 28th! Production grows exponentially, so Aug should be 100 cars and Sept above 1500.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 3, 2017

Musk tweeted that the “Model 3 passed all regulatory requirements for production two weeks ahead of schedule.” That’s good news, because Tesla was late with the production of its last EV, the Model X, and had some production glitches with its with rear seats, those weird doors and the parking brake. At a recent shareholder meeting, he admitted that Tesla tried to do too much with the first version of the Model X, and wouldn’t repeat that mistake with the Model 3 (and upcoming Model Y).

The EV maker reportedly has a backorder of nearly 400,000 for the Model 3, which starts at $35,000 and has an average order price of around $42,000. If Tesla meets its production goals, the Model 3 could become one of the top twenty best-selling vehicles in the US in 2018, ahead of stalwarts like the Hyundai Elantra and Nissan Sentra.

The first customers to get the Model 3 will be owners of current Model S and Model X vehicles, and after that, it’ll depend on your place in the pre-order queue. Elon Musk said in May that Tesla will open 100 new “retail, delivery and service locations” to keep up with repairs and service.

The Model 3 won’t have the “ludicrous” 2-second 0 to 60 mph acceleration time of the Model S, but it will scoot to that speed in 5.6 seconds. That gives it bragging rights over Chevy’s Bolt, which can go from 0 to 60 in 6.5 seconds, still a very respectable time for an “economy” EV. Tesla will also build a quicker “D” version with dual motors, promising first dibs to buyers who placed pre-orders for the regular Model 3.

Source: Elon Musk (Twitter)

Microsoft’s canceled Surface Mini shows up in photos

In the heady days of 2014, Microsoft had a dream of launching a smaller version of its nascent Surface tablets. The Surface Mini was a passion project of division chief Panos Panay, but it was axed by CEO Satya Nadella and EVP Stephen Elop shortly before its debut. Aside from a few leaked promo images, pictures of the Surface Mini in the real world have remained elusive, at least, until now.

A number of leaked photos of the abortive device are making the rounds online, courtesy of Windows Central. The images offer a detailed look at the tablet, ports and all. It appears as if the Surface Mini was designed to ape the Surface Pro 3, albeit with the home button in portrait orientation. The device would have shipped with a kickstand similar to the Surface 3 (which hit shelves in 2015) and has angled edges, giving it a chunky bezel.

The ports that can be seen in the images include a microSD card slot for extra storage, headphone jack, Micro-USB port for charging, and USB-OTG. The Surface Mini was rumored to run on the limited Windows RT operating system (also found in the Surface 2, and later killed by Microsoft in 2015).

Confirming the Surface Mini in 2014, Panay claimed the device (which was rumored to support the same pen as the larger Surface Pro 3) was ideal for note-taking. The images attest to that, even showing a pen loop at the rear of the kickstand. The 8-inch tablet also included a Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor with 1GB RAM, an Adreno 330, and a screen resolution of 1440 x 1080.

Microsoft reportedly shelved the Mini as it didn’t offer enough variation on the smaller devices that were available at the time (in hindsight, the consistent decline in tablet sales that followed proved the company right). The smaller Surface may not be resurrected any time soon, but at least we can finally gawk at the little tablet that never was.

Source: Windows Central

SpaceX suffers hitch as it’s forced to abort rocket launch with seconds to go

Why it matters to you

SpaceX could learn valuable lessons from Sunday’s aborted lift-off, lessons that should help it along the sometimes rocky road to creating the perfect reusable rocket system.

SpaceX’s attempt at a record-breaking third mission in nine days had to abort just seconds from lift-off on Sunday evening. At this stage, the specific reason for calling off the launch isn’t clear, or at least hasn’t been made public yet.

Sunday’s mission was due to put the Intelsat 35e communications satellite into orbit.

The countdown at the Florida launch site proceeded smoothly until nine seconds from lift-off. The first sign that something was wrong came when the clock inexplicably stopped.

A short while later, SpaceX principal integration engineer John Insprucker, who was presenting live coverage of the mission on YouTube, resumed commentary in his usual unflappable style.

“We were inside T-minus 10 seconds and we’ve had an abort in the countdown sequence,” Insprucker told the online audience. “We’re waiting to hear more information.”

Having assessed the situation, the team, which only had a 59-minute launch window on Sunday evening, decided to postpone the attempt.

A SpaceX tweet confirmed it was “standing down for today,” adding that the rocket and payload had suffered no damage.

Unless a particularly serious issue comes to the fore, Sunday’s abort appears to be a hitch rather than a major setback. It’s certainly not on par with the calamity SpaceX suffered back in September 2016 when one of its rockets exploded on the launchpad during a fueling operation.

According to the private space company, the next launch opportunity is at pretty much the exact same time on Monday evening, though of course it’ll only happen if it can identify and fix the issue that caused Sunday’s abort.

Next launch opportunity is on Monday, July 3 at 7:37 p.m. EDT, 23:37 UTC.

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) July 2, 2017

On this occasion, the large amount of energy required to deliver the 6-ton Intelsat 35e into geostationary orbit, which is considerably higher than the Falcon 9’s usual low-Earth orbit missions, means the rocket won’t have enough fuel to attempt one of its spectacular landings. SpaceX has so far nailed 13 rocket landings — including two individual rockets that have launched and landed on two occasions — demonstrating the current system’s reusability for the vast majority of its missions.

Speaking of reusability, SpaceX is about to welcome back its first reused Dragon capsule, which has spent the last month at the International Space Station after taking supplies there in June. The capsule is scheduled to splash down in the Pacific Ocean on Monday morning. Fingers crossed it goes smoothly.

Watch Toyota’s home-based support robot help a paralyzed U.S. Army vet

Why it matters to you

It’s robots like these that are beginning to utterly transform the lives of those with limited mobility.

Toyota has completed the first in-home trial of a robot designed to help those with limited mobility carry out everyday tasks.

The Human Support Robot (HSR) has been in the lab for several years, but the team behind it recently decided to give it a run in the real world, taking it to the home of Romulo “Romy” Camargo, a decorated war veteran who suffered injuries in Afghanistan that left him paralyzed from the neck down.

During the trial, the robot helped Romy with a range of home-based tasks, including opening doors and fetching things like bottles of water or snacks from the pantry. Toyota posted a video showing the robot helping out a clearly delighted Romy, though it’s fair to say his young son was pretty stoked about it, too.

The HSR is about a meter tall and features a telescopic body, extendable folding arm, and flexible hand. The current version of the sensor-laden robot responds to QR-like codes placed on various objects about the home that help it to build up a map of its operating area. In the video we see Romy using a mouth stick to tap out commands on a tablet, with the wheel-based robot responding accordingly. It can also understand voice commands.

“This is a big game changer for everybody that has a disability,” Romy said, adding that the HSR could be part of “the next chapter of human support robots helping people with disabilities.”

Toyota is still refining the robot’s design and plans to use its experience with Romy to make it even more useful and efficient.

Design plan

When Toyota’s engineers set out designing the HSR, they decided to focus on three key areas. First, they wanted a compact and lightweight body to better accommodate a wide range of household designs. This means its extendable arm and telescopic body allow the robot to retain a small footprint while giving it decent reach to better perform a variety of tasks.

Second, it had to be super safe, prompting the team to include start-of-the-art obstacle avoidance technology as well as an arm that moves slowly and without any great force.

Finally, it had to have an intuitive interface that’s easy to use, whether via voice command or hand- and mouth-held devices, depending on the user’s disability.

The HSR is actually one of a number of robots that Toyota is developing to assist mobility for the disabled and elderly. The Japanese company recently unveiled the latest version of its robotic leg brace aimed at helping partially paralyzed people to walk, and it’s also developing a Care Assist Robot aimed at medical and care facilities to help workers lift patients to and from their beds.

On a different note, Toyota also has plans to start selling its diminutive Kirobo robot, a 34-cm-tall android that apparently wants to be your buddy.

The best launcher for Android, the podcast

Action Launcher is one of the most popular launchers on the Play Store, and it just received its biggest update in years. So what better time to bring on its owner and chief developer, Chris Lacy, for a chat about its past, its present, and its future?

Right now, by the way. The time is right now.

Hosted by Daniel Bader, Florence Ion, and Andrew Martonik.

Show notes

• Flo and Daniel talk OnePlus 5
• Action Launcher drops the 3, adds a new logo and frees up previously paid features
• Why Action Launcher is the only launcher I use
• The best Android launchers

Podcast MP3 URL: http://traffic.libsyn.com/androidcentral/androidcentral342.mp3

Kaspersky offers code to prove it’s not a Russian stooge

Kaspersky Lab is understandably worried that it might lose US government contracts over fears that it’s in bed with the Russian government, and it’s making a dramatic offer in a bid to keep the money flowing. Founder Eugene Kaspersky tells the AP that he’s willing to provide source code to prove that his online security company isn’t a Trojan horse for Russian spies. He’s ready to testify in front of Congress, too — “anything” to show that his company is above board.

The executive acknowledges that some governments (he hasn’t said which) have pressured Kaspersky Lab to go to the “dark side” and launch cyberattacks, and that some staffers are former Russian intelligence officers. However, he insists that his company has never caved to those demands, and that the hires are “most probably” sales staff meant to court government deals. He adds that the company network is too segmented for any one employee to abuse it.

Whether or not the American government is receptive is another story. Some in Congress (most notably Senator Jeanne Shaheen, who tweaked a bill to ban Kaspersky Lab from Department of Defense contracts) are convinced that the outfit is connected to the Russian government. Also, there’s the question of whether or not source code would even be effective in changing minds. The worry isn’t so much what Kaspersky Lab is doing right now as what it might do in the future. What if Russia orders the company to introduce backdoor exploits, or slips a mole into a key position? Even if it’s fiercely independent, it could be an involuntary agent.

There’s no evidence at this point to suggest that Kaspersky Lab is misbehaving. One of its employees was even arrested by Russia over treason allegations relating to actions taken before he joined the Kaspersky team. Even so, American politicians may have a hard time believing the company regardless of the evidence it provides. Just the potential for digital espionage is setting them on edge, and neither code nor testimony is guaranteed to change that mindset.

Via: The Hill

Source: Associated Press

Windows 10 will remind you to install the latest major update

Are you still running the original version of Windows 10? Microsoft is about to offer a not-so-subtle hint that it’s time to move on. The software giant has revealed that it will start sending notifications to users who are still using Windows 10 version 1507, warning them that the operating system is deemed “end of service” and will no longer receive monthly security patches. You’ll see a convenient button to upgrade to the latest release (at present, the Creators Update) if you’re part of this group.

Yes, this is another instance of Microsoft steering Windows users toward upgrades they don’t necessarily want. In this case, however, it’s not surprising why Microsoft would get a little pushy. Outdated versions of Windows helped spread the recent spate of malware attacks, and Microsoft probably doesn’t want to see another outbreak erupt simply because some users are skittish about OS upgrades. It’s betting you’ll be thankful for the nuisance if it keeps your PC safe in the long run.

Source: Windows Experience Blog, Microsoft Support

US lifts laptop ban at Abu Dhabi airport

The US is scaling back its ban on laptops for Middle Eastern flights headed to the US… though it’s not because officials believe everything is safe. The Department of Homeland Security has exempted Abu Dhabi International Airport from the ban (which also covers tablets) after verifying that Etihad Airways has properly implemented “enhanced security measures.” While the agency isn’t clarify what those are, they include tighter screening for both people and the devices they carry aboard.

The American government implemented its initial ban in March across 10 mostly Middle Eastern airports. While it didn’t dive into the specific motivations behind the move, it’s reportedly in response to a specific threat of bomb-laden fake iPads. If so, the Abu Dhabi change suggests that DHS still believes there’s a threat — it’s just confident that it can prevent explosive slates from reaching US-bound aircraft.

Either way, the change could give hope to airlines and travelers alike. As the AP points out, air carriers have seen business drop as a direct result of the ban. Emirates cut 20 percent of its flights to the US, for instance. Portable computing is important enough that some passengers would rather stay at home (or find alternative routes) than do without their gadgets, and airlines may not have much choice but to bend to DHS’ will if they want to avoid a lasting drop in business.

Source: Associated Press

Digital bagpipes aren’t destroying Scotland’s heritage; they’re helping save it

When Duncan Menzies was young — or, as a Scot might say, wee — he decided he wanted to learn to play the bagpipes. He was successful — after years of incredibly trying practice. Then, in his twenties, he decided to change the way others learn to play the instrument.

Highland bagpipes are an important part of Scotland’s cultural heritage, dating back to a proud military tradition, and are still in vogue among contemporary folk musicians. Yet even the instrument’s basics are difficult to master, which leads many budding pipers to give up before they’ve made much progress. Experienced players aren’t easy to find, which led Menzies to worry the bagpipes might one day die out.

Menzies wants to give learners better insight into what they’re getting right, what they’re getting wrong, and make those first steps less frustrating. To make that goal a reality, he’s augmenting traditional methods in place for generations with emerging technology available only in the past decade.

Pipe Dream

Duncan Menzies’ initiation into Scottish folk music came when he was seven years old. That’s when he started playing the fiddle, a pursuit that would spur on his desire to join a local group known as the Fochabers Fiddlers.

The Fiddlers weren’t limited to the instruments for which they are named. When Menzies was ten, he saw them playing with a “child prodigy” called Hamish Munro, a local teenager who had an amazing talent for playing the bagpipes. He was hooked.

“I was like, ‘yep, I want to do that,’” Menzies told Digital Trends in a phone call last month. “So, I badgered my parents for long enough that I eventually got some bagpipe lessons, and it all went from there.”

“I badgered my parents for long enough that I eventually got some bagpipe lessons, and it all went from there.”

A decade later, he completed a Masters in Electronics with Music at the University of Glasgow, and journeyed south to London to begin a PhD course at Queen Margaret University. He received funding for his studies via the university’s Media and Arts Technology program. This initiative mandated he spend a year experimenting with various practical projects before his PhD started in earnest.

“I always thought it would be cool to bodge up a digital bagpipe chanter, because I’d been playing the pipes for quite a while,” he explained. “So, I did a first version of it with an Arduino, just for a bit of a laugh, for one of these practical projects.”

For the uninitiated, a chanter is the part of bagpipes that bears the fingerholes, which allow the piper to play a melody. Menzies built his prototype in a day and a half, taking full advantage of the ease of development afforded to him by the Arduino hardware. However, the parameters of his university course meant he was soon nudged onto another project, and his digital chanter was put on the back burner.

The next year, as Menzies was figuring out what his PhD project should focus on, his digital chanter came to mind. He arranged a meeting with Andrew McPherson, an American expert in digital musical instruments who had recently taken up a post lecturing and performing research at QMU.

He showed McPherson his digital chanter, and quickly realized he’d found the right supervisor for his PhD project. “He was like, ‘oh, that’s cool, the chanter, but what could you actually do with it?’” said Menzies. McPherson, having plenty of experience in this field, was acutely aware they needed to crystallize the ‘why’ behind the concept of a digital chanter as well as the ‘how.’

Bagpiping for Beginners

The untrained ear might not identify the military precision playing the bagpipes requires. However, the earliest historical references to the Great Highland bagpipe — the type Menzies’ project is concerned with — place the instrument squarely on the battlefield. This tradition plays into the daunting task awaiting new learners.

The Great Highland bagpipe has a limited scale, consisting of only nine notes. There’s also no articulation between notes, like the tonguing technique used with wind instruments. Instead, players wanting to break up a sequence of identical notes must use numerous ornamentation techniques.

At its simplest, ornamentation could be flicking a finger down onto another hole while playing a long A note, turning it into two shorter A notes with another note separating them. But ornamentation also includes incredibly complex sequences of notes, and they’re very formally defined.

“These are a totally central aspect of highland piping,” Menzies explained, just as he explained to McPherson in their early discussions about his PhD project. “And it generally takes six months to a year of constant practice to learn all these different ornamentation techniques, before you can start learning the tunes.”That’s a long time to practice an instrument without being able to play a song, and causes a lot of frustration for novices.

“Traditionally, there’s been quite a high drop-off rate of people who get halfway through learning these ornamentation techniques and then go, ‘sod this, this is just too much, I haven’t even learned a tune yet and I’ve been playing for a year,’” said Menzies. “Far and away, the ornamentation is the hardest part of learning the pipes.”

The highly regimented nature of ornamentation techniques adds another challenge – if you’re a beginner practicing at home, how do you know whether you’re doing it right or not? An instructor can point out any mistakes during lessons, one-on-one tuition only makes up a small part of study for most students.

Here’s where the digital chanter gets its time to shine. While memorizing and recognizing a long list of ornamentation techniques might be a daunting task for someone learning to play the pipes, it’s relatively easy for a computer — and the hardware is already capable of delivering a description of exactly what the user was playing directly to a PC.

“One of the things about Highland piping technique that made it a really good target for this, is that there’s a whole tradition of ornamentation,” said McPherson. “It’s very well accepted, and it has all these clear rules about what is right and what is wrong, and it’s actually easier to quantify than some other types of performances.”

There are aspects of musical performance that can only be interpreted by a human ear. With ornamentation, however, what’s important is the order of the notes being played, and how seamlessly the transition between one note and another is pulled off. That’s not hard for a computer to understand.

Digital Demystification

“All of these things are easy to measure when you’ve built the hardware for a digital chanter,” McPherson added. “What me and Duncan worked on then was to create a software environment that would allow teachers and students to get real-time feedback on what they were doing, and see potential weaknesses in their playing, and hopefully, correct them.”

While it started as a simple Arduino-based rig, the hardware has leaped forward over the course of the project. The current version of the digital chanter is a custom circuit board fitted with a microcontroller and several analog-to-digital converters. It uses optical photo-reflecting sensors that emit an infrared beam to determine how much of each hole is being covered by a player’s fingers. The latest model also has an audio codec and a headphone output built into the board itself, bringing it closer to the kind of self-sufficient digital instrument Menzies would like to end up with.

However, hardware is only part of the project. It’s the accompanying software that makes the digital chanter such an effective teaching tool, as that’s what gives learners the feedback they can use to improve their skills.

“You can show visually — on the screen — here’s what you actually played, compared to what you were supposed to play,” said Menzies. “And because these ornaments are so very formally defined, so very rule-based, it’s actually quite easy to teach a computer to say, in words: here’s what you played, here’s what you should have played.”

The digital chanter serves to demystify the process of learning how to play the pipes. Even the best teacher and the most well-intentioned student can get their wires crossed because of the gap between music and language. A perfectly rendered description of a mistake might not be interpreted exactly as its intended.

Translating the performance itself into digital information can bridge the gap. The digital chanter gives music the tangibility to help beginners grasp the basics quicker, so they can continue to learn more advanced techniques rather than getting mired in ornamentation. It’s a change to the established formula in place for hundreds of years — but crucially, it’s not an attempt to throw out tradition entirely.

The Bagpipes of the Future

Potential applications for the digital chanter are many. The basics are obvious — a student using one at home to make sure they don’t get into bad habits while practicing, or a teacher implementing one in their lessons to improve their ability to give feedback.

But what if there’s a 10-year-old girl in Australia who’s desperate to learn the bagpipes, and doesn’t have access to a local instructor? The chanter offers a method of recording exactly what’s being played — not just what it sounds like — and transmitting it anywhere in the world.

That’s powerful stuff. The bagpipes could become much more accessible, teachers could be better equipped to pass on their knowledge, and students could be more likely to graduate beyond the difficult early days of learning to play.

“Every form of music-making that we now consider traditional was once new at some point.”

The convergence of technology and music often recalls innovations designed to smooth the rough edges of a live performance — Auto-Tune, Pro Tools, and their ilk. Menzies’ digital chanter does the exact opposite. It strips away any possible layer of obfuscation between the player and the sound they’re producing.

“I think there is a school of thought that says, ‘technology is a destructive force to traditional forms of music-making’ and I totally disagree with that,” said McPherson, who with years of experience with digital instrumentation, is well-equipped to speak on the subject. “Every form of music-making that we now consider traditional was once new at some point, and was frankly once driven by the technology of the day.”

He charts a course from bone flutes from millennia ago, to the advances in mechanical technology that drove the emergence of the orchestra, to analog electronic instruments that sprang up when electronic amplification became available, and today’s crop of cutting-edge synthesizers. To him, to shy away from the possibilities of modern technology is to break a musical tradition dating back as far as music itself. Crucially, the pursuit of innovation doesn’t necessarily demand a clean break from what’s gone before.

“I think that there is a lot to be said for figuring out how you can use a new form of technology to do something valuable that attaches to a culture that’s recognizable,” he said. “I think that that could be teaching and learning, that could be augmenting instruments to extend their capabilities — it could be any number of things.”

Technology and tradition aren’t mutually exclusive concepts. With a little care and consideration, a balance between old and new can produce great results, and Menzies has managed just that with his digital chanter.