After Math: As the cash flows

It was a profitable week for some of the biggest names in tech. Amazon released its second quarter earnings, Buzzfeed jumped into the hardware business with a smart hotplate, and Uber found yet another way to gouge its customers. Numbers, because how else will we know how much we owe?

BT offers broadband to every rural home in the UK, for a price

The UK was confident when it unveiled plans to make broadband available to every home by 2020, but how’s it going to get there? BT thinks it can help. The telecom giant has made an offer to spend up to £600 million (about $788 million) giving 1.4 million rural homes access to internet with speeds of at least 10Mbps. This would theoretically help the government meet its goal in one fell swoop, rather go through a slow existing process that requires residents to ask for access. It sounds tempting, especially since the current approach would leave some waiting for access when 2020 arrives, but it’s not as clear cut a solution as it looks on the surface — it could lead to higher internet bills.

The offer wouldn’t make use of public funds, but it would compensate for the spending by raising access charges for Openreach’s national network, including BT’s own customers as well as competitors like Sky and TalkTalk. There’s a real chance you would see the cost reflected in higher service fees, rather than absorbed into taxes. Moreover, this is coming just months after British regulator Ofcom proposed that BT cut nearly £100 million (roughly $131 million) in Openreach charges. BT might be trying to counter those rate drops by using rural broadband as its pretext. And like many telecoms, it’s no doubt eager to avoid regulation where possible.

Officials “warmly welcome” the offer, but they’re not sold on it yet. They intend to study whether or not BT’s proposal or a regulatory approach is best for connecting the UK. The contrast between this and rural broadband efforts in the US is notable, however. Regulators have pushed American internet providers into offering rural broadband they likely wouldn’t deliver otherwise, but the government also doesn’t have a short-term goal to connect every home in the country. The UK’s goal is at once more ambitious and more attainable, but that also gives it a hard choice that could have long-lasting repercussions.

Source: Guardian

Why KWGT is an essential tool for Android themers and widget lovers

Nowhere is home screen customization more important than widgets.

A good widget can improve both the usefulness and the beauty of a home screen. A stylish weather widget can give you a heads-up before you roll out into a rainy day. A calendar widget can help keep you focused and productive throughout your day. A whimsical music widget can help you control your music and your mood, day or night. But what if the widget that came with your favorite apps are trash? What if you want widgets that look as good as they perform?

Well, that’s when you bust out customized widgets with KWGT.

What is KWGT?

KWGT — short for Kustom Widget — is a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get widget maker. What does that mean? It’s basically Photoshop for widgets: you build a widget layer by layer, piece by piece. With this level of control over a widget, users can craft widgets that fit their tastes, their needs, and their home screen.

Kustom widgets consist of a variety of items, from simple pieces like text and images, to more complex Kustom Komponents and FontIcons. Komponents are customized KWGT blocks, like say a pre-fabricated music widget where all you have to do is change the colors and resize it to fit your widget box, or a series of customized weather icons to match a particular theme. Komponents can be packaged and distributed on Google Play, so you can find Komponents, as well as assembled Kustom widget Presets on the store for you to buy and download, both simplifying and broadening the experience for the average Kustom user.

Presets are essentially finished widgets that are ready to be loaded and tweaked as desired. You can also export Kustom widgets you’ve already customized and liked as Presets for you to load again at a later date. We use Presets to export color-customized widgets for our themes for user convenience.

Why should I bother with KWGT?

KWGT can do amazing things, blending seamlessly into countless themes while standing out as a bold accent on others. You can use it to showcase useful data without distracting from or covering up a beautiful wallpaper. You can use KWGT’s touch shortcuts to hide shortcuts to your favorite apps — and to private apps — inside an innocuous-looking widget. We’ve used KWGT and Material Music Komponent in several themes to create music widgets that blend seamlessly into their themes, as seen in our Frozen Fever and Beauty and the Beast themes.

If your preferred weather app doesn’t have a weather widget that looks good — or doesn’t have a widget at all — you can build a weather widget in KWGT that will look exactly the way you want it to while pulling in data from one of four sources: Open Weather Map, Yahoo, Yr.no, and Weather.com AKA The Weather Channel. You can even pull in Material weather icons to make your weather forecast just a little more fun.

Want the Samsung Galaxy S8’s iconic and awesome home screen widgets without being stuck with the TouchWiz Home launcher? Try S8 for KWGT and get that Samsung goodness on any custom launcher — or any other phone, for that matter!

Where do I start with KWGT?

KWGT, like Photoshop, can be a bit overwhelming when you first use it, but there are a few ways to help acclimate yourself to Kustom widgets and both their UI and their uses. When you add a KWGT to your home screen, the first menu you’re greeted with is Kustom’s Preset menu, where you can select a pre-made widget to play with. By playing with a simple Base Pack Preset, you can acclimate yourself to KWGT’s controls and see just what the app can and can’t do. Another way to ease your way into KWGT is to download Kustom packs like Trident for KWGT, which will give you a wide variety of widget to color and resize for your home screen.

Kustom’s help site is robust and easy to follow along with, and you can find plenty of help and widget ideas on their official forum. You can also look forward to seeing more KWGT Presets and widgets in awesome Android Central themes for you to play with and build your KWGT experience with!

Want us to explore any particular projects with KWGT together? Hit me up in the comments and on Twitter with your requests!

Download KWGT (Free / $3.49 for premium)

From the Editor’s Desk: The Essentials

Andy Rubin’s new firm needs to act fast, and deliver a great product, if it’s to avoid being squeezed by the competition.

I haven’t written (or, if I’m honest, really thought a whole lot) about the Essential Phone since its announcement. Indeed, most of the hype around the device stems from the fact that it’s the brainchild of Android founder (and namesake) Andy Rubin. It’s obvious, but let’s state it upfront anyway: Tech media and tech enthusiasts probably wouldn’t care about this phone as much were Rubin’s name not attached. The buzz is (at least) as much about the man as it is his phone.

That’s not to say the product itself isn’t interesting. The bezel-less design is eye-catching and futuristic (though sure to become more pedestrian over the next six months). The approach to modular add-ons — using physical connections for power only, and handling data transfer over a high-frequency wireless connection — is smart and forward-thinking.

And it’s always nice to see manufacturers taking a lighter touch when it comes to customizing Android.

The vision around the rest of the product is less clear. It’s a $700 phone launching in 2017 without water resistance. The battery capacity is underwhelming, despite its chunky proportions. The dual camera setup, though interesting, is unproven, and on paper pretty run-of-the-mill.

And assuming it lands sometime in August, the software situation is precarious as well. The Essential Phone will run Nougat out of the box, right as Android O is being finalized. It’ll almost certainly get O, but it’s unclear when that’ll happen. Remember we’ll be just a month or so out from Pixel launch season when the Essential phone does arrive.

Hardware is hard, and delays happen, but the Essential Phone would’ve been a much easier sell back in June (the original target date). As it stands, you could realistically see the phone being squeezed between Google’s new Pixels at the high end, and the now very well established OnePlus in the middle of the market.

Most consumers won’t care about having the very latest OS, but as a startup (albeit a very well-funded one with plenty of experience at the helm) Essential’s target audience is narrower than that. The people who care about modularity, stock Android and the cachet that Andy Rubin’s leadership brings are tech nerds — the sort of people who might also be weighing up a Pixel or OnePlus purchase.

To me, it’s not entirely clear whether Essential is trying to be OnePlus, Google, Apple, or all of the above, or neither. The company’s ambitions stretch far beyond smartphones, yet its first product is targeting the most competitive segment of this very competitive market — with features that are impressive but not necessarily differentiating.

I once joked about who would eventually “buy Essential and ruin all its products,” (Facebook? Verizon?) I don’t really think that’ll happen. Rubin certainly doesn’t need the money, and his goal isn’t to just build another smartphone brand. But the company needs at least a reasonably successful launch for its first product to springboard towards other markets.

Can Essential pull it off? Who knows. But the clock is certainly ticking.

Some other odds and ends:

• So it seems like the LG G6 had a solid start, but that sales quickly declined post-Galaxy S8. That’s about the only conclusion to draw if you read between the lines of LG’s recent financial results, and contrast them with the early news on G6 sales. The V30, more of a traditional flagship than the G6, may fare better, especially if it has a broader global launch than the V20 and V10.
• I like what I’m hearing so far about the Huawei Mate 10. It’s unclear what Huawei’s U.S. strategy is these days, but in markets where Huawei does actually sell phones, a bezelless successor to the Mate 9 could go a long way.
• It’s typhoon season here in Taiwan — which, if nothing else, gives me the opportunity to capture pictures like this.
• And I’m getting to grips with a new camera, the Panasonic GH5 after almost three years of using less capable (in video terms, anyway) Olympus shooters. Look for the first videos from the new rig to start appearing on the AC YouTube channel this next week.

That’s it from me for a few weeks. I’ll be back with another Editor’s Desk right around the time we’re preparing to head off to IFA 2017 in Berlin.

Ben Heck’s Super Glue Gun: The first working prototype

Now that the team’s making progress with the electronics for the handle design, Ben is working with Autodesk Fusion 360 to create the model for the 3D printer to house the trigger and protoboard. The rest of the glue gun case also needs to be modeled; Fusion 360 helps by being able to import some parts to get the sizing right. Take the bearings for the hot end feed system/nozzle, for example. It’s not only the physical design that needs tweaking, however: The team is having difficulty with math calculations on the ATTiny hardware, and Felix is repairing the electronics for the hotend and motor control. How’s your C programming? What would you design differently? Weigh in over on the element14 Community.

Jurassic Park lied. Artificial intelligence just proved that T. Rex couldn’t run

Why it matters to you

Cutting-edge 3D modeling and machine learning tech reveals that you could probably outrun a T. Rex in real life.

Move over, Harvard University! The institution’s plan to clone a woolly mammoth has been upstaged by scientists at the U.K.’s University of Manchester, where they used cutting edge technology to recreate an even more badass extinct animal in the form of the fearsome 40-foot carnivorous dinosaur known as Tyrannosaurus Rex. Well, recreate it inside a computer at least.

Using a state of the art, high performance N8 High Performance Computing (HPC) system, impressive 3D modelling technology, and some handy machine learning thrown in for good measure, researchers from Manchester University’s School of Earth and Environmental Sciences set out to bring the prehistoric “tyrant king” to digital life. This led to some new information regarding its biomechanics. TLDR version: Steven Spielberg lied to us.

What T. Rexes think about when they think about running

“There has been a big argument in paleontology about the likely running speed of T. Rex, with some people thinking that it was slow and others that it was fast,” lead investigator Dr. William Sellers told Digital Trends. “This has knock-on effects about how it must have hunted, and whether or not it was an active predator, or more of a scavenger. We’ve been working for a number of years using engineering and robotics techniques to study animal locomotion, and we thought that this was an ideal test problem for some of the technology we have developed.”

There were two main aspects to Manchester University’s study. The first was digitizing the dinosaur and creating a 3D simulation in the computer. This is something Sellers’ team has been working on for a number of years. Way back in 2013, Sellers used then-new laser-scanning techniques and an advanced computer modeling system to recreate the Argentinosaurus, a friendlier, herbivorous dinosaur that measured a whopping 131 feet and weighed as much as 80 tons.

The second part of the T. Rex study is the really groundbreaking bit, though. This is where the machine learning comes in, which was used to generate the necessary locomotion calculations and incorporate myriad hard and soft constraints in the simulation.

“[I utilized] completely unsupervised learning, using a goal criteria of ‘Get from A to B as fast as possible,’ and given enough computer time it can manage that all on its own,” Sellers explained. “This gets around the problem of just getting out what you put in. No one knows how T. Rex, moved but at least this way you have an objective optimization criteria to justify the choices made. It also means that it is relatively easy to add in extra constraints like ‘don’t break any bones.’ It’s basically a multi-physics, multi-objective simulation system.”

Must go faster!

The results sadly disprove one of our favorite childhood movie sequences. In 1993’s Jurassic Park, an injured Jeff Goldblum, riding in the back of a Jeep, is chased by a marauding escaped Tyrannosaur. Earlier in the movie, Sir Richard Attenborough’s character John Hammond says that the T. Rex has been clocked at running 32 miles per hour. According to Sellers, the real figures wouldn’t have been anywhere near that. Even an on-foot Jeff Goldblum would have been the odds-on favorite in a man vs. T. Rex sprint.

In the conclusions reached by the researchers, the T. Rex could not run due to its size and weight. This means it would have been unable to pursue prey at high speeds, and even its regular walking speed would have been hampered due to its unwieldy skeleton.

The news isn’t all disappointing, though. In fact, four words about the research project’s future are all but guaranteed to turn your frown upside down: Japanese Tyrannosaurs Rex robots.

“I am already working with some robotics groups in Japan to expand the capabilities of our simulations,” Sellers said. “Ultimately what I want to do is create a virtual Cretaceous where we can test various ideas about dinosaur and other plant and animal interactions. That would allow us to address many currently unanswerable questions in paleontology, and more importantly identify what gaps we have in our knowledge that need to further work. This is a major challenge but is something that is getting to be within the reach of modern computer systems.”

So a dinosaur robot theme park that’s basically Westworld meets Jurassic Park? We’re all over that! If any venture capitalists are reading this, you should totally get in touch!

You can check out an academic paper detailing the University of Manchester’s T. Rex project here.

Jurassic Park lied. Artificial intelligence just proved that T. Rex couldn’t run

Why it matters to you

Cutting-edge 3D modeling and machine learning tech reveals that you could probably outrun a T. Rex in real life.

Move over, Harvard University! The institution’s plan to clone a woolly mammoth has been upstaged by scientists at the U.K.’s University of Manchester, where they used cutting edge technology to recreate an even more badass extinct animal in the form of the fearsome 40-foot carnivorous dinosaur known as Tyrannosaurus Rex. Well, recreate it inside a computer at least.

Using a state of the art, high performance N8 High Performance Computing (HPC) system, impressive 3D modelling technology, and some handy machine learning thrown in for good measure, researchers from Manchester University’s School of Earth and Environmental Sciences set out to bring the prehistoric “tyrant king” to digital life. This led to some new information regarding its biomechanics. TLDR version: Steven Spielberg lied to us.

What T. Rexes think about when they think about running

“There has been a big argument in paleontology about the likely running speed of T. Rex, with some people thinking that it was slow and others that it was fast,” lead investigator Dr. William Sellers told Digital Trends. “This has knock-on effects about how it must have hunted, and whether or not it was an active predator, or more of a scavenger. We’ve been working for a number of years using engineering and robotics techniques to study animal locomotion, and we thought that this was an ideal test problem for some of the technology we have developed.”

There were two main aspects to Manchester University’s study. The first was digitizing the dinosaur and creating a 3D simulation in the computer. This is something Sellers’ team has been working on for a number of years. Way back in 2013, Sellers used then-new laser-scanning techniques and an advanced computer modeling system to recreate the Argentinosaurus, a friendlier, herbivorous dinosaur that measured a whopping 131 feet and weighed as much as 80 tons.

The second part of the T. Rex study is the really groundbreaking bit, though. This is where the machine learning comes in, which was used to generate the necessary locomotion calculations and incorporate myriad hard and soft constraints in the simulation.

“[I utilized] completely unsupervised learning, using a goal criteria of ‘Get from A to B as fast as possible,’ and given enough computer time it can manage that all on its own,” Sellers explained. “This gets around the problem of just getting out what you put in. No one knows how T. Rex, moved but at least this way you have an objective optimization criteria to justify the choices made. It also means that it is relatively easy to add in extra constraints like ‘don’t break any bones.’ It’s basically a multi-physics, multi-objective simulation system.”

Must go faster!

The results sadly disprove one of our favorite childhood movie sequences. In 1993’s Jurassic Park, an injured Jeff Goldblum, riding in the back of a Jeep, is chased by a marauding escaped Tyrannosaur. Earlier in the movie, Sir Richard Attenborough’s character John Hammond says that the T. Rex has been clocked at running 32 miles per hour. According to Sellers, the real figures wouldn’t have been anywhere near that. Even an on-foot Jeff Goldblum would have been the odds-on favorite in a man vs. T. Rex sprint.

In the conclusions reached by the researchers, the T. Rex could not run due to its size and weight. This means it would have been unable to pursue prey at high speeds, and even its regular walking speed would have been hampered due to its unwieldy skeleton.

The news isn’t all disappointing, though. In fact, four words about the research project’s future are all but guaranteed to turn your frown upside down: Japanese Tyrannosaurs Rex robots.

“I am already working with some robotics groups in Japan to expand the capabilities of our simulations,” Sellers said. “Ultimately what I want to do is create a virtual Cretaceous where we can test various ideas about dinosaur and other plant and animal interactions. That would allow us to address many currently unanswerable questions in paleontology, and more importantly identify what gaps we have in our knowledge that need to further work. This is a major challenge but is something that is getting to be within the reach of modern computer systems.”

So a dinosaur robot theme park that’s basically Westworld meets Jurassic Park? We’re all over that! If any venture capitalists are reading this, you should totally get in touch!

You can check out an academic paper detailing the University of Manchester’s T. Rex project here.

Honolulu is the first big US city to ban phone use at crosswalks

Cities have tried innumerable measures to keep pedestrians’ eyes off their phones when they cross the street, and there have even been some state-level attempts at legislation to force a change in behavior. Honolulu, however, has officially drawn that line in the sand — it’s the first major US city to pass a law that fines you for crossing the street while using your phone. As of October 25th, the Hawaiian burg can ask you to pay between $15 to $99 if you’re caught looking at a mobile device while you’re strutting the crosswalk. How much you pay depends on whether or not you’re a repeat offender. There is an exemption if you’re calling emergency services, though, so don’t feel guilty about dialing 911 while you rush to the scene of a crash.

Honolulu has a better reason than most US cities to adopt this kind of ban. Mayor Kirk Caldwell notes that his city has more crosswalk impacts than “almost any other city” in the US, so the fines could have a sizeable impact even compared to smartphone-addicted cities like New York or San Francisco. Reuters points out that over 11,000 crosswalk injuries could be blamed on phone use between 2000 and 2011 alone, and most of that was before smartphones took off.

There are certainly some outstanding concerns with the law. Critics contend that Honolulu would be better off educating people about responsible phone use than asking police to stop you while you’re in mid-text. Surely there are bigger crimes to deal with, opponents argue. However, the bigger problem may be the consistency of enforcement. As with many minor infractions, police may decide to look the other way unless this leads to something more serious (in this case, a collision). The fine may just be a formality, a penalty you pay on top of whatever other punishment you’re already facing. Still, the law might be a success if it persuades even a few people to pay attention.

Via: Reuters

Source: Honolulu.gov

Court says politicians can’t block people on social media

A federal court in Virginia just handed down a verdict that could affect a lawsuit against the president for blocking users on Twitter. US District Judge James Cacheris has ruled that Phyllis Randall, chairwoman of the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors, violated the right to free speech of a constituent she blocked on Facebook. Brian Davison said he was blocked after accusing the Loudoun School Board of corruption in his reply to the chairwoman’s post on her Facebook page asking local citizens for their thoughts and feedback.

Judge Cacheris explained that since Randall is acting as a public official on her Facebook page, she violated the First Amendment by “suppressing critical commentary regarding elected officials.” What she did, the judge said, is a form of viewpoint discrimination, which the ACLU describes as unconstitutional, since it tramples upon a person’s right to present dissenting opinions without fear of prosecution.

Randall’s lawyer argued that her Facebook page doesn’t represent the government, because she doesn’t use the county’s resources to maintain it. But since she used her page to solicit comments from constituents during office hours, the judge wasn’t swayed by the argument. The chairwoman also said that she only deleted Davison’s comment because it mentioned family members of elected officials and that she unbanned him 12 hours later. Clearly, that explanation didn’t affect the judge’s decision either.

Despite the ruling, Randall isn’t facing any penalty, and the consequences of her actions are fairly minor. It’s the decision itself that’s notable. As Judge Cacheris wrote in his ruling, the case “raises important questions about the constitutional limitations applicable to social media accounts maintained by elected officials.” Indeed, the senior staff attorney of Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute (aka the plaintiff in the lawsuit against President Trump) told The Wall Street Journal:

“We hope the courts look to this opinion as a road map in holding that it is unconstitutional for President Trump to block his critics on Twitter.”

Source: The Wall Street Journal

‘No, it will not squash you.’ Transforming homes unfold from a cube in minutes

Why it matters to you

Ten Fold Engineering is up-ending the concept of prefab construction with modular, moveable, self-deploying buildings.

What sounds like something out of a sci-fi novel is rooted in a very simple concept that pays homage to the way buildings were built more than 100 years ago. Ten Fold Engineering, a United Kingdom-based company, has developed a modular, self-deploying structure that can transform from a truck-sized block to a fully functioning building in less than ten minutes.

The key to their cool new offering is a patented lever system that controls counter-balanced folding linkages. This system allows the structure or home to effectively ‘make itself’— all the owner has to do is push a button and watch it unfold. Then they simply secure it using an electric drill. The unit closes by being pulled in with a winch, which has a fail-safe. In fact, the unit does not close until the floors are folded up. The company even promises on its website, “No, it will NOT squash you.”

Company officials say there’s even room to store some furniture inside the compacted structure. Once set up, the building unfolds to three times its original transport size, with all internal fixtures and fittings pre-installed. The company’s base unit, the U-Box, is approximately 645 square feet when unfolded.

“We wanted to do something new, but at the same time, we wanted to challenge people to think differently about structures,” founder David Martyn told Forbes. “We live in houses that are stuck in the ground. We aren’t a nomadic culture anymore, so this is a new concept based on a modern interpretation of nomadism as it relates to the global economy.”

Ten Fold is heavily invested in how these products can be used. While affordable housing comes to mind, the Ten Fold team also envisions other uses. For example, a school room could be moved from site to site depending on need. Affordable single-family homes could be airdropped into Africa. The same goes for mobile medical clinics, refugee camps, and other educational facilities.

The technology is so versatile that a single truck-sized box could alternatively be used to construct a 100 M2 off-grid building, a 200-seat covered grandstand, or a 100-kw solar array.  The company has been reaching out to architects, engineers and manufacturers to explore new ways of deploying their buildings.

This concept could change the construction sector in many ways. First, because the structure can be unfolded anywhere and not just on a build site, it eliminates the need for foundations, builders and construction vehicles and materials. Because they can be delivered anywhere by truck or air, they could re-purpose land that might otherwise remain underutilized. Lastly, those who get antsy living in one place for too long could simply pick up and move elsewhere. The structures can be refolded and moved to a new location in minutes rather than days and can be interlinked or stacked in various combinations to expand functionality.

“This is about speed, size and ease, and there’s nothing else that does it.”

Martyn is an architect with more than 25 years of experience designing homes, office buildings and other structures throughout the U.K. He was inspired to design Ten Fold products because his four adult children pay painfully-steep rents in the UK, where the average rent for a one-bedroom flat in London is around $1,600 per month.

“It will allow the young to get a building without owning the land,” Martyn recently told The Sun. “It changes the dynamics of the market, which does need to change because it is a transportable property asset. This is a real solid building that doesn’t have to stay in the same place. This is about speed, size and ease, and there’s nothing else that does it.”

From a design perspective, Martyn also wanted the units to be independent of postmodern technology.

“Think Victorian engineering,” Martyn recently explained. “Ten Fold structures don’t have computers or networking; they are simply using physics. Everyone is always thinking that they have to be more automated, but in fact this is more automatic by being less automated.”

The concept and the company’s prototype videos have attracted a massive viral audience as well as interest from the housing, retail, events, mining and energy sectors. The technology has also attracted attention from people who want to live off the grid. Ten Fold says the structures can be outfitted for off-the-grid living, depending on the climate and the degree of autonomy required. While the units are perfectly capable of attaching to a national electric grid, they can also be outfitted with solar panels, generators, and other alternative solutions.

The company was founded in 2011 with around four million pounds in private funding. The company’s first “real world” project is with G3Festivals, a Dutch company that specializes in festival accommodations and infrastructure.

The units are reasonably priced compared to traditional housing, with an estimated cost starting at about $130,000. It’s unclear when models will be made available to the general public. Rather than acting as a traditional manufacturer, Ten Fold is licensing out its patented technology to contractors. That way, local manufacturers can build the products and Ten Fold doesn’t have to ship units around the world.

On its website, Ten Fold confirms that the European standard production drawings are complete and are being converted to American building codes. The company hopes to begin product deliveries by the end of 2018; possibly sooner for the American and mainland European markets.

Ten Fold’s breakthroughs are just one entry in a global race to change the construction industry. From movable walls,  Zurich’s robot-built house,  shipping container homes, and modular hotel construction, the face of the building industry could look very different not so far in the future.