Honor 9 Premium with 6GB of RAM and 128GB storage now up for sale in Europe

Honor 9 Premium is available in select markets in Europe for €499.

Honor is rolling out an upgraded version of the Honor 9 with 6GB of RAM and 128GB storage in select markets in Europe. The phone is called the Honor 9 Premium, and it is retailing for €499. There’s also a variant with 6GB of RAM and 64GB storage that is available for €450.

First spotted by WinFuture, the Honor 9 Premium is now up for pre-order on Three Italy and Switzerland’s Digitec. Both models sport 6GB of RAM and 64GB storage, and we’re yet to see the variant with 128GB storage go up for sale.

Read: Honor 9 review

The Honor 9 is one of the best phones in the mid-range segment, offering a 5.15-inch Full HD display, Huawei’s HiSilicon Kirin 960 chipset, 12MP RGB camera at the back augmented by a 20MP secondary monochrome shooter, 8MP front shooter, Wi-Fi ac, Bluetooth 4.2, and a 3200mAh battery. The phone runs EMUI 5.1 based on Android 7.0 Nougat out of the box.

There’s no word on availability in other markets, but we should know more in the coming weeks.

Satiate your hunger with a scrumptious food-themed wallpaper!

I like food.

Food is delicious, sometimes nutritious, and comes in so many shapes, forms, colors, tastes, and types. Food is everywhere, a lot of people take it for granted, and with the right tools, you can turn even the simplest and most popular foods into an edible art form. Sounds a lot like one of my other loves: Android theming. So it’s only right that we bring the two together and make your stomach growl the way mine does every time Lammes Candies’ talks about Chocolate Covered Strawberries.

GRRRRROOOOOOOWWWWWWLLLLLLLLLL!!!!!!

False alarm, sweetie, they’re not coming back ’til the fall.

Chocolate Chip Cannoli. Do I really need to say more? I do? Okay. Look at the perfect crisp of the shells, the snowy dusting of the powdered sugar. Look at that delectable ricotta mascarpone filling. Well, it’s a little hard to look at it because each and every inch of this amazing filling has been covered with tiny, adorable, delectable miniature chocolate chips. When is dessert getting here?!

Homemade Chocolate Chip Cannoli by /u/ragsy1224

Bread wasn’t the base of the food pyramid for decades for nothing. Bread is an edible hug and the basis of so many dishes. Good bread is a meal unto itself, and with bread as fluffy and perfect as this Bahn mi, it could very well make me a wonderful breakfast, lunch, dinner, or midnight snack, depending on how much butter, jam, honey, or peanut butter is around…

Nah, I’ll just eat it straight up. NOM.

Bánh mì by /u/LittleVietmeomeo

This looks messy and sticky and I think there’s a lucky, lucky bastard somewhere who absolutely destroyed this mountain of perfectly grilled poultry. Forget deep fat drying, we need expertly grilled with wonderfully caramelized sauces! This succulent meal may be long gone, but this perfect picture of summer backyard grilling can forever taunt you from your home screen.

Grilled barbeque chicken legs with Bone Sucking brand rub and homemade sauce by /y/Under_Ach1ever

The french fry may forever be the favorite, but there’s something about a perfectly crispy, crunchy tater tot that will forever captivate the hearts of many a fried food foodie. And while the BLT here is crispy and I’m sure it was scrumptious, the star here are those perfectly seasoned, GBD (Golden Brown & Delicious) tots. You just want to put a few dozen in a brown paper bag and munch on them while you go walk around a street fair.

BLT with Tater Tots by /u/GeekGroovy

If this is truly this Redditor’s first time baking cupcakes, they’ve got a future in the business, because these are cupcakes I want to see at Walt Disney World when I’m walking up to Cinderella Castle. Or while I’m walking up to the Mad Tea Party, because it looks like Alice is painting the roses red with the beautiful marbled transition from red roses to white here. I want to eat them all, damn the tummy ache that will follow!

GRRRROOWWWWWLLLLLL

First time cupcakes by /u/mang0es

Designing a game for virtual reality is kind of like writing a movie

We talked to two of the creators of Virtual VR, about the process of developing the game for a mobile headset and how many drafts it took to get the story straight.

Take it from me, and the rest of the brains behind the site you’re currently perusing: writing a story is hard work, and writing one for other people to experience and enjoy is even more laborious. A good story requires more than relatable characters and a plot to hook the readers; it also requires iteration.

It’s the same process writing the plot for a game set in virtual reality. I talked to Samantha Gorman and Danny Cannizzaro, two of the creators behind the award-winning Virtual VR, about how designing and writing a narrative-driven game is kind of like putting together a play, or a movie. The Daydream VR-exclusive tells the story of a virtual world where robots are officially using humans for fun. The final product is an outstanding example of how effective VR storytelling can be, even if the device is small and the story is short.

Read more at VRHeads

Exercise stick trains your muscles with light-based feedback

Of all the products ripe for technological gimmicks, training gizmos take the (low-fat, sugar-free) cake. That said, a new gadget called Axon does look pretty cool, if you’re willing to risk Kickstarter. It’s a stick that resembles a stout pool cue, with sensors and lights that measure the force you apply when pushing it against a wall, floor, ceiling, rock or tree. You can then train your body to match the lights, helping you improve muscle and back strength.

The Axon stick shows a digital readout of exactly how much force you’re applying, but the lights, which extend down the stick as you press, are easier to follow during a workout. When you start a rep, the lights turn yellow and gradually move down the stick toward the sensor. The idea is to then “‘chase’ the yellow guidance light and turn it green by applying a target amount of force,” the company behind it says. Once you hit the target force, the lights turn green.

Meanwhile, the the AxonFit app gives you access to a library of exercises created by personal trainers (or your own custom workouts) that you can transmit to the Axon stick. “Axon then guides users through those workouts, provides accurate, real-time, visual feedback and sends data collected during workouts back to AxonFit app.” As with most other fitness apps, you can then track your progress, compete with friends and share on social networks.

While a stick might seem a pretty silly workout tool, you can use one to do full-body, iso-kinetic-type training by pulling or pushing it. Since you’re not hefting free weights, “Axon is accessible to people at any fitness level, including both children and the elderly,” its creators say. It’s reasonably light and small, so you can use and store it easily, even in a small apartment.

To make sure it was durable, light and stylish, the group hired Whipsaw, the company that helped create Nike’s Fuelband, to design it. The result is a nice-looking, 10 pound, five foot bamboo stick with a 5.5-inch circumference and chargeable battery (via the base) that lasts about three hours. The sensor uses durometer rubber that won’t scuff surfaces, and each stick can be paired with multiple accounts.

The Axon is available at an early bird price of $249, or $389 for a pair. So far, the company is about a quarter of the way to its $50,000 goal, with four weeks left in the campaign. The price isn’t cheap, but it’s no more than, say, a decent elliptical trainer or set of free weights. And if it ends up under your bed or the closet gathering dust like most training equipment, at least it won’t take up too much space. If you decide to make a pledge, remember that as with any Kickstarter product, there’s a chance it will never ship and that you’ll lose all your money.

NASA is putting hundreds of historical videos on YouTube

As part of its mission to make its research easier to access, NASA is uploading decades’ worth of archived footage to YouTube. So far around 300 videos have been uploaded, with a further 200 on the way. Each clip documents an important part of NASA’s history, including Space Shuttle landing research, X1 and X43A trial flights and the testing of the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle.

SpaceX chief Elon Musk has previously commented on how difficult it was to find historical footage on NASA’s website. Before the uploading project, curious flight-fans would have to laboriously search through the Dryden Aircraft Movie Collection via the Dryden Flight Research Center website. Standard search queries in Google would reveal nothing. Now, with the video library prominently on the (renamed) Armstrong Flight Research Center’s website and YouTube channel, everyone has easy access to these fascinating historical highlights.

Via: Motherboard

Source: Armstrong Video Gallery

Android’s phone app automatically shows GPS info during 911 calls

A lot can happen during a car accident. Between the initial shock from the impact, airbags going off and general disorientation, when you reach for your phone to call 911 you might not know where you are. Couple all that with cell phones’ notoriously flaky ability at transmitting your exact location information to emergency service operators, and getting an ambulance to the scene of your accident can be incredibly difficult. To help sidestep that, Google has updated its Phone app to automatically display your location when making a 911 call.

As 9to5 Google reports, the location card will show your current address, a map and even you latitude and longitude coordinates. Your device needs to be running Android Marshmallow or higher to take advantage of the new features. More than that, it looks like this could be tied specifically to Android One, Nexus and Pixel handsets.

Via: 9to5 Google

Source: Google Play

One single theory may have solved three Mars mysteries

We still aren’t quite sure how Mars formed; there are many questions about its distinct geology and weird (but lovable) potato moons that don’t really make sense. But now, a study in the journal Geophysical Research Letters may have solved some of the enduring mysteries of the red planet.

Mars has hemispheres that are geologically different from one another (smooth in the north, cratered in the south). Additionally, the afore mentioned potato moons and a composition that is different from Earth’s add to its mystery. Researchers Stephen Mojzsis and Ramon Brasser discovered that it was possible to have just one explanation for all three phenomena: a giant asteroid collision.

After the planets first formed, a lot of leftover debris was floating around the early solar system. These asteroids slammed into the planets as they were settling, violently bombarding and reshifting planetary compositions. The “giant impact” model theorizes that the rocky inner planets were initially smaller than they are now; asteroid impacts added to their masses as they absorbed the elements within this space debris and reformed themselves.

The researchers took a close look at Martian meteorites and realized that the composition of metals within its mantle could have come from one large asteroid impact. They calculated the size of the asteroid needed to deliver these metals found using Mars impact simulations. The final result: An asteroid the size of Ceres, roughly 1,200 km (745 miles) wide, may have impacted the planet around 4.43 billion years ago. Mars was likely subjected to smaller impacts afterwards.

The asteroid hit the northern hemisphere of Mars, which would explain the fact that the area’s crust is younger than that of other Martian areas, and ejected enough material from the surface to create a planetary ring. This could possibly have resulted in the formation of Mars’ two moons, Phobos and Deimos, which would also explain their composition: These bodies are made of both Martian and non-Martian elements.

We still don’t know anything for sure (such is space science), but the fact that this one theory solves multiple mysteries of Mars’ origins and geological features lends weight to it. The researchers hope to add further credence to their theory by studying more Martian meteorites and understanding how asteroids affected our solar system’s formation.

Source: Geophysical Research Letters, EurekAlert

Apple Launches New Blog to Share Details on Machine Learning Research

Apple today debuted a new blog called the “Apple Machine Learning Journal,” with a welcome message for readers and an in-depth look at the blog’s first topic: “Improving the Realism of Synthetic Images.” Apple describes the Machine Learning Journal as a place where users can read posts written by the company’s engineers, related to all of the work and progress they’ve made for technologies in Apple’s products.

In the welcome message, Apple encourages those interested in machine learning to contact the company at an email address for its new blog, machine-learning@apple.com.

Welcome to the Apple Machine Learning Journal. Here, you can read posts written by Apple engineers about their work using machine learning technologies to help build innovative products for millions of people around the world. If you’re a machine learning researcher or student, an engineer or developer, we’d love to hear your questions and feedback. Write us at machine-learning@apple.com

In the first post — described as Vol. 1, Issue 1 — Apple’s engineers delve into machine learning related to neural nets that can create a program to intelligently refine synthetic images in order to make them more realistic. Using synthetic images reduces cost, Apple’s engineers pointed out, but “may not be realistic enough” and could result in “poor generalization” on real test images. Because of this, Apple set out to find a way to enhance synthetic images using machine learning.

Most successful examples of neural nets today are trained with supervision. However, to achieve high accuracy, the training sets need to be large, diverse, and accurately annotated, which is costly. An alternative to labelling huge amounts of data is to use synthetic images from a simulator. This is cheap as there is no labeling cost, but the synthetic images may not be realistic enough, resulting in poor generalization on real test images. To help close this performance gap, we’ve developed a method for refining synthetic images to make them look more realistic. We show that training models on these refined images leads to significant improvements in accuracy on various machine learning tasks.

In December 2016, Apple’s artificial intelligence team released its first research paper, which had the same focus on advanced image recognition as the first volume of the Apple Machine Learning Journal does today.

The new blog represents Apple’s latest step in its progress surrounding AI and machine learning. During an AI conference in Barcelona last year, the company’s head of machine learning Russ Salakhutdinov provided a peek behind the scenes of some of Apple’s initiatives in these fields, including health and vital signs, volumetric detection of LiDAR, prediction with structured outputs, image processing and colorization, intelligent assistant and language modeling, and activity recognition, all of which could be potential subjects for research papers and blog posts in the future.

Check out the full first post in the Apple Machine Learning Journal right here.

Tag: machine learning
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Apple could let you discreetly call 911 with your fingerprint

Calling the emergency services is a deliberately easy process — just three digits in most countries, simple enough for a child to learn. But Apple may have plans to make it even more straightforward, after patenting a new way of calling for help using just your fingertips. The patent describes how the user could program different fingerprints, patterns and even the amount of force required to switch the phone into ‘panic mode’. This would result in the phone calling the emergency services, and could activate a live-stream of video, or provide location data via GPS. Personal safety smart jewelry — already on the market — works in a similar way.

Such technology could prove lifesaving in some situations, as demonstrated by a number of recent news reports. In London, a four-year-old boy saved his mother’s life with Siri’s help, and earlier this month New Mexico police reported that a smart home device had intervened in a domestic dispute. Whether Apple plans on doing anything with the patent, however, remains to be seen.

Via: Alphr

Source: United States Patent and Trademark Office

LastPass Families can manage passwords for a household of six

It’s hard enough keeping track of your own passwords, let alone your family’s. Unless you plan on outfitting your brood with biometric rings, your best bet is to sign up to a password managing tool. That way you can keep track of the logins your clan is racking up, and even reference them to create unique passwords in the future. Most popular services, such as 1Password, already offer family plans. And soon that small list will include LastPass too.

The password authenticator is launching LastPass Families later this summer. The plan will cover up to six members of a household. Once signed up, you’ll be able to organize info into an unlimited amount of folders. You can then open them up to other members. This allows you to keep certain data between you and your partner (like payment info for utility bills) while sharing passwords for streaming services with the kids. And, seeing as LastPass is free across devices, you’ll be able to manage your settings from anywhere.

There’s no mention of pricing yet. Although, LastPass will have to beat 1Password’s $5 a month family subscription to remain competitive. If you’re already forking out $12 annually for LastPass Premium, you’ll be given six months free access to LastPass Families when it lands. In the meantime, anyone can sign up for early access to the plan, considering you have a LastPass account.

Source: LastPass