Android Oreo beta now available for Nokia 6

Launching first through Nokia Mobile Beta Labs.

HMD Global, the company in charge of Nokia-branded Android phones, has been doing a commendable job with fast software updates. So far we’ve seen Oreo updates pushed out to the Nokia 8 and Nokia 5, and the next handset to share in on the Oreo love is the Nokia 6.

Chief Product Officer at HMD Global, Juho Sarvikas, made the announcement via Twitter on December 19, and like other Nokia devices, the Nokia 6 will first get Oreo through the Nokia Mobile Beta Labs program.

You can enroll in the program and register your device on the official Nokia website, and once you do, you’ll receive an OTA update for 8.0 Oreo within a matter of minutes.

An official build of Oreo should be available soon, but if you want to test it out now and put up with the possibility of a few bugs here and there, today’s your day.

Android Oreo

• Android Oreo review!
• Everything new in Android Oreo
• How to get Android Oreo on your Pixel or Nexus
• Oreo will make you love notifications again
• Will my phone get Android Oreo?
• Join the Discussion

These $6 Bluetooth headphones are the perfect last-minute holiday gift idea

Last-minute gift idea = complete!

Bluetooth headphones have become more of a must-have with phones than they ever were in the past thanks to the removal of headphone jacks on various newer devices. Not everyone wants to drop hundreds of dollars on Bluetooth headphones, though, and luckily you don’t have to.

Right now you can pick up these Vtin Bluetooth Sports Earbuds for just $5.99 at Amazon when you use coupon code 5ERVAUV2 during checkout. These days it’s hard to find a meal to eat for $6, let alone a pair of headphones that you can use on a daily basis to listen to music, take phone calls, and more.

The ear hooks are designed to better fit and hold inside your ears so they won’t move while you are working out or moving about, and the cable buckle helps adjust the length of the cable to help them fit better. You’ll get around 6 hours of playback time per charge, and they recharge fully within 2 hours. Whether you are looking for a last-minute holiday gift idea, or want some Bluetooth headphones for yourself, you won’t want to pass up this deal. Do yourself a favor and pick up a couple pairs at this price and then thank us for the idea later.

See at Amazon

Headphones Gift Guide 2017

Like music to your ears.

Not everyone is an audiophile. Folks who are, like to endlessly ponder the merits (and lack thereof) of their headphones and other equipment, but most of us just want a good pair of headphones in the right style that fit our budget.

We’ve harnessed the power of a couple of self-admitted audiophiles-in-training and bring you our headphone gift guide. We’d love to own (or already do!) any of these products and think you’ll feel the same way if you want the most from your phone when it comes to music or video.

Best Earbuds

Most people use earbuds to listen to music on phones because they’re portable and, in many cases, inexpensive. And there is a huge selection to choose from when buying. That means there are plenty of good ones, but also plenty of bad, too. Here are our picks for the best earbuds.

Best overall: Bose QuietComfort 20

Everyone knows about Bose on-ear headphones, but did you know the same active noise canceling system comes in earbud form, too? The QuietComfort 20 earbuds offer the same acoustic cancellation as the bigger model but will fit in your pocket. Complete with in-line audio controls (be sure to choose the right model — Android or iOS) and a wide selection of tips, the QuietComfort 20s from Bose are the best earbuds money can buy. They’ll also set you back about $250.

See at Amazon

Best sounding: 1MORE Triple Driver

While they don’t offer noise cancellation or fit as well as the Bose buds in our top pick, these earbuds from 1MORE win when it comes down to the sound. Grammy award-winning sound engineer Luca Bignardi is responsible for this as his input helped this UK company tune the drivers for the best audio response possible from a small speaker that sits inside your ears. And it worked! The 1MORE Triple Drivers are about $90 and worth every penny if you want the best sound.

See at Amazon

Best value: Panasonic ErgoFit

You can get awesome earbuds for just $8! The Panasonic ErgoFits might not sound as good or offer as many features as others on this list, but they are hands-down one of the best deals around when it comes to earbuds. They come in eight different colors and have a decent inline mic for taking calls or talking to your phone’s assistant, and are one of the best ways to spend $8 we can think of.

See at Amazon

Best Wireless headphones

Headphone jacks on smartphones are going to soon become a thing of the past. Or at the very least become that thing you find on specialty phones like the LG V series. That means wireless headphones that look great, sound great and fit great are something you’ll soon be looking for if you’re not already. Here are our top picks for sound without wires.

Best overall: Bowers & Wilkins PX

At $399 they’re not cheap, but if you’re looking for wireless headphones that sound amazing and have decent noise cancellation, the Bowers & Wilkins PX is your best bet. They have removable magnetic earcups for easy cleaning, 20+ hours of battery life, and gesture support that stops the music automatically when you remove them from your head. Magic!

See at Amazon

Best noise cancellation: Bose QC35 II

Bose has a reputation for decent sound quality and even better noise isolation, and the $349 QC35 IIs are the company’s best yet. Like the wired QC20s, these use algorithms to intelligently block outside noise from disrupting your flight, commute or coffee shop excursion. Best of all, they’re super lightweight and have Google Assistant built right in!

See at Amazon

Best value: Jabra Move

If you’re after sheer value for money, you can’t do better than the Jabra Move wireless headphones. For just over $50, they sound great, are incredibly comfortable, and have over eight hours of battery life. They’re also very sturdy, made from lightweight aluminum.

See at Amazon

Best Wired Over-Ear or On-Ear headphones

If you’re a person who doesn’t like earbuds, you probably appreciate a good set of on-ear or over-ear headphones when it comes to listening to music or video. While not as easy to carry around, bigger headphones mean bigger sound and there are great options to choose from at almost every company that makes audio equipment represented. Here are our top picks.

Best overall: OPPO PM-3

Offering great sound, great comfort, and a great look, the OPPO PM-3 planar closed-back headphones are our pick for the best overall on-ear or over-ear headphones. Companies like Bowers & Wilkins or Bang & Olufsen make great headphones that are comfortable to wear, but the OPPO’s are just as comfortable and sound even better when driven from your average (read: not with a high-end DAC and amp) smartphone or media player. They’re incredibly light so you’ll forget you’re wearing them, except for the wonderful sound that comes from the speakers. The OPPO PM-3s cost about $400 but are a joy to use.

See at Amazon

Best sounding: Sony MDR7506

Unless you have a phone with a high gain amplifier, the Sony MDR7506 over-ear headphones offer the best sound possible from your average equipment. They’re a little bulky and have a cumbersome coiled cord, but they are tuned for a flat response and used in studios every day because they offer a true representation of the audio. And with a 63 Ohm impedance, they’re a perfect match for most phones or portable media players. The MDR7506 headphones cost about $80 but sound better with most phones than models costing hundreds more.

See at Amazon

Best value: Samson SR850

These semi-open-back headphones bring real studio-reference audio to the table for about $30. They offer a 10Hz-30kHz frequency response and have a 32 Ohm impedance so any phone or media player can properly drive them, and the semi-open-back design helps fight “ear-fatigue” as well as lets you hear things like car horns when you’re walking, which can be pretty important. They’re not built quite as well as our other picks and the open-back design means they will leak a bit of noise, but they are a great buy at $30 and we recommend them to anyone looking for that great budget-friendly pick.

See at Amazon

Best High-end

If you have a phone like the LG V30 with a high-end DAC and amplifier, you might want a pair of high-end headphones to go with it! When it comes to listening to music, there is nothing quite like driving a pair of large transducer headphones and losing yourself in the sound, and to get there you need the right equipment. Here are our top picks for your audiophile smartphone.

Best overall: Sennheiser HD 800

A huge 56-millimeter driver and unique (patented, even!) transducer design make the Sennheiser HD 800’s sound great, and the excellent craftsmanship and materials used make them the best overall headphones when you’re looking in the high-end. They’re 300 Ohm so you’ll definitely need the right phone or media player to use them, but the big soundstage and comfortable fit make the Senn HD 800s a great set of headphones and our top pick when it comes to the category. You’ll be spending about $1,160 here, but that’s not a lot of money when it comes to audiophile equipment.

These come with a 6.3mm XLR audio interface, so be sure to buy the adapter to use them with your phone!

See at Amazon

Best sounding: Grado PS1000e

If you value the very best sound above all else, the Grado PS1000e model is for you. At only 32 Ohm they’re an odd choice for this category but paired with a high-power amp these tonal wood (mahogany in this case) and steel over-ear headphones bring a sound you simply won’t believe directly to your ears at moderate volume levels. While the Sennheisers may be more comfortable while bringing excellent audio quality (and thus our top pick) these offer greater detail and a huge soundstage that will make you feel like you’re there in person rather than listening through a cable. Simply put, we haven’t found anything that sounds as good as the Grados, but they’re not as comfortable as the also-excellent Sennheiser HD 800s.

The Grado PS1000e headphones use a 6.3-millimeter XLR audio interface, so be sure to order an adapter to use them with your phone!

See at Amazon

Best value: Beyerdynamic DT 990 Pro (250 Ohm)

If you have the power to drive them from your phone, the Beyerdynamic DT 990 Pros is the 250 Ohm configuration are hands-down the best value in high-end headphones. At $170, they’re hundreds less than other brands but offer excellent sound quality and are extremely comfortable to wear for extended periods. They will also get as loud and nasty/awesome as you want! They aren’t built as well as others on this list, and the open-back design means others get to hear along with you at high volume, but this is the best way to spend $170 if you have the phone to drive them.

Don’t get the 600 Ohm model if your primary use is with a phone or portable player, but for home use on the right equipment, they are awesome, too!

See at Amazon

Samsung’s mega-wide gaming monitor is first to be HDR certified

Last week VESA (finally) launched an HDR standard for computer displays to tell consumers whether a pricey monitor will show games and movies the way the creators intended. Samsung has announced that it’s 49-inch QLED super ultra-wide monitor, the CHG90, is the first to receive the DisplayHDR 600 certification. That means it delivers enough brightness (600 cd/m2 peak and 350 cd/m2 average), contrast (3,000:1) and color accuracy (10-bits) to deliver on the HDR promise.

The CHG90 has a very weird 3,840 x 1,080 resolution (a 32:9 aspect ratio),144 Hz refresh, AMD FreeSync support, deep curvature and a $1,300 price tag, so it’s not for everyone. It’s built mainly to replace multi-monitor setups so that you can, say, game on one half and stream on the other. As a single screen, it could give you more visibility and flexibility with controls, but does not, obviously, deliver full 4K resolution.

It’s interesting that a gaming monitor is first to receive the VESA DisplayHDR certification, as there are plenty of professional graphics monitors designed for maximum color accuracy and contrast. However, many of those use IPS panels that lack brightness and likely wouldn’t meet the 600/350 cd/m2 threshold. Samsung has mostly used its QLED tech for 4K TVs, and while the blacks aren’t as good as on OLED displays, they’re definitely bright.

On the color side, VESA says that monitors must display a billion colors (10 bits), but 8-bit panels with 2 bits of “dithering” to simulate 10 bits also qualify. Very few monitors have true 10-bit panels, but most of Samsung’s QLED TVs do (Samsung’s specs for the CHG90 don’t say).

VESA promised to announce multiple DisplayHDR certified monitors on or before CES 2018, so you can expect to see others soon. It will be interesting to see which is the first to conform to DisplayHDR 1000, which is much more demanding for brightness and black levels (contrast). If consumers start pushing manufacturers to meet those specs, it will be a big plus for both gamers and streamers.

Via: Tom’s Hardware

Source: Samsung

This year we took small, important steps toward the Singularity

We won’t have to wait until 2019 for our Blade Runner future, mostly because artificially intelligent robots already walk, roll and occasionally backflip among us. They’re on our streets and in our stores. Some have wagged their way into our hearts while others have taken a more literal route. Both in civilian life and the military battlespace, AI is adopting physical form to multiply the capabilities of the humans it serves. As robots gain ubiquity, friction between these bolt buckets and we meat sacks is sure to cause issues. So how do we ensure that the increasingly intelligent machines we design share our ethical values while minimizing human-robot conflict? Sit down, Mr. Asimov.

In the last year, we’ve seen Google form the DeepMind Ethics & Society to investigate the implications of its AI in society, and we’ve witnessed the rise of intelligent sex dolls. We’ve had to take a deep look at whether the warbots we’re developing will actually comply with our commands and whether tomorrow’s robo-surgeons will honor the Hippocratic Oath. So it’s not to say that such restrictions can’t be hard-coded into an AI operating system, just that additional nuance is needed, especially as 2018 will see AI reach deeper into our everyday lives.

Asimov’s famous three laws of robotics is “a wonderful literary vehicle but not a pragmatic way to design robotic systems,” said Dr. Ron Arkin, Regents’ professor and director of Mobile Robot Laboratory at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Envisioned in 1942, when the state of robotics was rudimentary at best, the laws were too rigid for use in 2017.

During his work with the Army Research Office, Arkin’s team strived to develop an ethical robot architecture — a software system that guided robots’ behavior on the battlefield. “In this case, we looked at how a robotic software system can remain within the prescribed limits extracted from international humanitarian law,” Arkin said.

“We do this in very narrow confines,” Arkin continued. “We make no claims these kinds of systems are substitutes for human moral reasoning in a broader sense, but rather we can give the same guidelines — in a different format, obviously — that you would give for a human warfighter when instructed how to engage with the enemy, to a robotic system.”

Specifically, the context of these instructions is dictated by us. “A human being is given the constraints, and restraints, if you will, for the robotic system to adhere to,” he said. It’s not simply a matter of what to shoot at, Arkin explained, but whether to shoot at all. “There are certain prohibitions that must be satisfied,” Arkin said, so that “if it finds itself near cultural property which should not be destroyed, or if that individual or target is near civilian property like a mosque or a school, it should not initiate in those circumstances.”

This “boundary morality,” as Arkin puts it, likely won’t be enough for robots and drones to replace human warfighters, and certainly not next year. But in certain scenarios, such as clearing buildings or counter-sniper operations, where collateral damage is common, “put a robot in that situation and give it suitable guidance to perhaps do better, ultimately, than a given warfighter could,” Arkin concluded.

In these narrowly-defined operations, it is possible to have a three-laws-like sense of ethics in an AI operating system. “The constraints are hard-coded,” Arkin explained, “just like the Geneva Conventions say what is acceptable and what is not acceptable.”

Machine-learning techniques may empower future AI systems to play an expanded role on the battlefield, though they are themselves not without risk. “There are some cases of machine-learning which I believe should not be used in the battlefield,” Arkin said. “One is the in-the-field target designation where the system figures out who and what it should engage with under different circumstances.” This level of independence is not one that we are currently ethically or technologically equipped to handle and should instead be vetted first by a human-in-the-loop “even at the potential expense of the mission. The rules of engagement don’t change during the action.”

“I believe that if we are going to be foolish enough to continue killing each other in warfare that we must find ways to better protect noncombatants. And I believe that this is one possible way to do that,” Arkin concluded.

While 2017 saw the rise in interactions between robots and humans in the supermarket — looking at you, Amazon Go. In the coming year, care must still be taken to avoid potential conflict. “These robots, as they actuate in the physical space, they’ll encounter more human bodies,” said Manuela Veloso, Professor at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science and head of CMU SCS’s Machine Learning Department. “It’s similar to autonomous cars and how they’ll interact with people: robots will eventually need to have to make ethical decisions.” We’re already seeing robots encroach on production lines and fulfillment centers. This sense of caution will be especially necessary when it comes to deciding who to run over.

And, unlike military applications, civil society has many more subtle nuances guiding social mores, making machine learning techniques a more realistic option. Veloso states, “Machine learning has a much higher probability of handling the complexity of the spectrum of things that may be encountered,” but that “it probably will be a complement of both.”

In this way, fundamental social rules — such as no biting, no shouting, et cetera — can be hard-coded into the AI while machine learning can help guide the AI through its day-to-day tasks. “Machine learning has a very beautiful kind of promise — in some sense humans, they are not as good in terms of explaining everything they care about in terms of actually rules and statements,” Veloso added. “But they do reveal themselves how they act by example.”

Like Arkin, Veloso doesn’t exactly think we’ll be handing robots the keys to the kingdom next year. “AI systems for a long time should be assistants, they should be recommenders,” she said. And we’ve already witnessed that trend in 2017, with digital assistants moving from our phones to our homes. It’s one that will very likely continue into the new year. But a long time doesn’t mean never. “These AI systems have the potential to be great other ‘people’,” Veloso continued. “Great other minds, data processors and advisors.” Just maybe don’t give them guns just yet.

Humans will have responsibilities towards their mechanical counterparts as well, specifically treating them with respect. Now, whether robots — especially anthropomorphic ones like Hanson Robotics’ Sophia, which debuted this year — “deserve” respect anymore than your Keurig or Echo do is a slippery ethical slope that only Chidi would relish sliding down. But social standards on acceptable behavior are constantly in flux, and this something that needs codifying in 2018.

“We feel responsible to not hurt dogs and cats,” Veloso explained. “I don’t think that [robots] will have ‘feelings’ like a dog or a cat does. I think that it’s probably that people have to get used to appreciate the function, like you’re not going to kick your refrigerator or disconnect your toaster” when they don’t function properly.

“I believe that if we don’t make these robots look a lot like people — with skin and everything — people will always treat them as machines,” Veloso concluded. “Which they are.”

Our relationship with technology, especially AI systems that approach (and will eventually exceed) human intelligence are changing whether we like it or not. For example, we’ve already seen Google’s AlphaGo AI beat the pants off of human masters repeatedly this year. We’re not likely to see America’s military rolling out autonomous smart tanks and Terminator-style battle robots within the next two decades, let alone 12 months, Arkin estimates.

The US Army is already reaching out to industry for help in designing and deploying machine learning and AI systems to counter foreign cyberattacks, the first results of which will begin rolling out next year. In the immediate future beyond that, we’re likely to see a slate of smart technologies, from self-guided helicopters to in-the-field part printing (assuming Elon Musk doesn’t get his way). The state of the art for battlefield AI is simply too far within its infancy to reliably deploy such technology. Instead, that change will likely be driven by civilian society.

“I think humans are amazing in the sense of being extremely open minded with respect to technology,” Veloso said. “Look at the world in which we live versus the world in which our grandparents lived. The amount of technology we are surrounded by is absolutely fascinating. We aren’t taught in school anything different from what our grandparents were taught in school: it’s history and geometry and algebra and we still manage to live with so much more technology because humans are so smart.”

Hopefully we’ll prove smart enough to treat tomorrow’s robots better than we treat each other today.

Check out all of Engadget’s year-in-review coverage right here.

NASA will take images of its quiet supersonic jet’s shockwaves

When NASA begins testing its supersonic jet, you won’t only hear about it — you’ll see cool images from the experiments, too. The agency has recently completed a series of flight tests proving that the imaging technique it developed is capable of capturing the shockwaves NASA’s Low Boom Flight Demonstration (LBFD) aircraft will make when it starts flying faster than the speed of sound.

The Federal Aviation Administration has placed restrictions on supersonic flights, because they tend to produce powerful shockwaves that people on the ground hear as very loud booms. In 2016, NASA began developing a quiet supersonic jet design with Lockheed Martin under the Quiet Supersonic Transport (QueSST) program. The agency will work with a contractor to bring that design to life as the LBFD jet and expects to start demonstrating what it can do by 2022.

But before anybody can use that technology to create planes that cut current flight times in half, scientists will have to confirm that it can actually do what it was designed for. That’s why the agency has been improving upon the “schlieren imaging” method used to visualize elements that are typically invisible, like air flow and shockwaves. NASA’s technique is called Background Oriented Schlieren using Celestial Objects or BOSCO. It uses full-sized telescopes and cameras with special hydrogen alpha filter to capture images of shockwaves as a plane flies with the sun in the background.

The technique produces images like this:

The photo above was captured during NASA’s latest round of tests wherein a US Air Force Test Pilot School T-38 aircraft traveled in supersonic speeds between the cameras and the sun at an altitude of 10,000 feet. When NASA first tested the technique in 2016, the aircraft flew at an altitude of 40,000 feet and traversed an area 300 feet in diameter. For the more recent tests, the smaller equipment NASA used had to be able to capture images while the plane was moving through an area only 100-foot-diameter in size.

Why? Well, because to be able to capture clear images of the shockwaves produced by LBFD, a plane meant to fly 60,000 feet above the ground, NASA has to mount its equipment on a chaser plane flying 10,000 feet below it. The chaser only has a small window of opportunity to capture its shockwaves, as well. Now that NASA has proven that its technique will work (the image above wouldn’t exist otherwise), it can focus on building LBFD and start putting it through some rigorous testing.

Source: NASA

Geeks are using science to make the best chocolate ever

Rob Anderson is a geek. So he makes chocolate for other geeks, or, more accurately, “people who really like chocolate and geek out about it.”

What does he mean by that? If you change one step of the chocolate-making process, you change the taste of the resulting chocolate entirely. And Anderson wants to show you exactly what that means. Fresco Chocolate, his company, roasts beans four different ways and conches (aka aerates and stirs) chocolate four different ways to create totally unique bars that bring the eater into the factory with him to be part of the process.

Oh, and by the way, he built most of the machines he uses himself.

The thing is, Anderson isn’t alone. He’s part of a new movement called bean-to-bar chocolate that is revolutionizing chocolate by making it from scratch with a strong focus on flavor. This distinctly American phenomenon has expanded in the past 12 years from five bean-to-bar chocolate makers to around 200 as of this writing. Almost all of these folks construct some of their machines themselves, and a large portion of them come from the tech and engineering world. Why? It all comes back to good old geekery.

All chocolate is made from cocoa beans, but “bean-to-bar chocolate” has come to mean something distinct.

For contrast, most of the chocolate that we eat is made by big companies. They mix low-quality cocoa beans from all over the world in big batches and then overroast them and add a ton of sugar, vanillin (fake vanilla!), cocoa butter and emulsifiers like soy lecithin to guarantee that the taste and texture are always the same. What we think chocolate tastes like is usually just sugar and vanilla.

This type of product is generally called industrial chocolate. Not all of it is bad, but the term is often a shorthand way of saying that low cost and consistency are the maker’s primary goals. Industrial chocolate turns up in many places, especially in the candy bars and chocolate bars we buy at the grocery store, and often in the treats we buy from chocolatiers, aka someone who makes candies and confections, like truffles, chocolate bark and so on.

Bean-to-bar chocolate, on the other hand, is made from scratch, usually by a single person or small group of people. A bean-to-bar chocolate maker sources whole cocoa beans and then roasts, grinds and smoothens them into chocolate in a single facility. They’re engineers, creating chocolate from raw materials.

“Roasts, grinds and smoothens” sounds easy, but in reality, it’s a nuanced, almost-impossible process with thousands of variables.

First makers source the beans from farmers. Much of a good chocolate’s flavor comes from what happens at the farm level, the way the fresh beans are fermented and then dried (for example, improperly fermented beans will have off-tastes like smoked ham). So makers often work directly with farmers or reliable go-betweens to guarantee that they’re getting high-quality products and to ensure that farmers are being paid fairly for their work, usually much more than fair-trade prices.

There’s plenty of technology at the farm level, but for the most part, bean-to-bar makers innovate on what happens after the farm, at the factory. First, makers take those dried beans and roast them, using everything from conventional kitchen ovens to reengineered clothes dryers, and the temperature and time aren’t standardized at all. But the roaster, temperature and timing hugely affect how the chocolate tastes, so this is one of the most important steps in the chocolate-making process.

Amber Day

After roasting, each cocoa bean needs to be cracked to reveal the cocoa nibs inside. The cracked beans are then sorted into nibs and inedible husks in a process called winnowing.

The cocoa nibs are then ground into tiny, tiny particles in a machine called a melangeur so that the resulting chocolate “liquor” (sorry, it’s not alcoholic) is, well, liquidy. It’s often pretty gritty at this stage, so it’s ground again with sugar and other ingredients to make sure all the particles of cocoa, sugar and anything else are the same tiny micron size. Some makers then use a machine called a conche to mix and polish the chocolate and release volatile acids, making it even smoother and more like the European-style chocolate that we’re used to eating.

Finally, the chocolate must be heated and cooled to the correct temperature to have a nice snap and sheen, a process called tempering. After this process, the chocolate is shelf-stable and ready to be eaten.

By changing variables like the roasting temperature and the type of machine they use, makers can shape the chocolate and bring out different flavors, creating chocolate that fits their personality (and taste buds).

You need to be an engineer, physicist and bona fide geek to make chocolate from scratch, someone who wants to spend all day with machines, tweaking tiny pieces to make them run more efficiently. You also need to understand the chemistry behind those almond-shaped beans and how adjusting one step will affect the rest. Further, because chocolate has become an industrial product over the past 150 years, the available machines are enormous (and enormously expensive), which means if you’re making chocolate on a small scale, you might just have to build your own.

Chocolate isn’t the only industrialized product to get an overhaul. As our food systems have become more and more opaque, people are increasingly interested in where their food comes from, how it’s made and who makes it. Take farm-to-table, for example, where the vegetable is now reified. Or craft beer, with thousands of people brewing in their basements and hundreds of microbreweries popping up around the country, making beverages that leave Anheuser-Busch to the frat boys (who, come to think of it, are now drinking the craft stuff too). Meanwhile specialty coffee has paved the way for chocolate’s entrance, highlighting the farmers and normalizing the idea of single-origin beans.

In other words, it’s chocolate’s turn.

Molly DeCoudreaux

This didn’t happen by accident. A retired organic chemist named John Nanci in Eugene, Oregon, had seen the craft-beer and specialty-coffee industries take off, and when he learned about making chocolate from scratch, “it clicked,” he said. “I was like, ‘I’m not missing this boat.’”

In 2005, the year that the first bean-to-bar chocolate maker in the U.S., called Scharffenberger, sold to Hershey for about $50 million, Nanci created a site called Chocolate Alchemy that detailed how to make chocolate at home with little machinery, something that everyone said couldn’t be done. He discovered that after roasting the beans in your oven of choice, you can use a Champion brand juicer to crack them open quickly. Then you put the cracked beans in a big bowl and blow air over them with a hairdryer: The light shells blow away, leaving the nibs. (This is a huge improvement over separating nib from husk by hand, a painstakingly labor-intensive method.)

“You’ll have about a 6-foot circle of husk around you,” Nanci writes on his site, Chocolate Alchemy, about using a hairdryer. “The kitchen is not such a good option.”

He also took machines made for different purposes and jury-rigged them to work for small-batch chocolate. For example, he realized that melangeurs (the machines used to grind cocoa nibs) are really just big granite grinders. “I Googled ‘granite stone and granite wheels,’ and what popped up was an Indian wet grinder,” he remembered. Wet grinders are used to grind lentils, among other things. “And I went, ‘Oh, that looks similar.’”

So he bought one, found out that it overheated immediately when grinding nibs, and tore it apart. “I learned about what makes motors overheat, modified it and then talked to the company and said, ‘I have a new market for you. Are you willing to make these modifications and sell it as chocolate melangeur?’”

“I present it as a chemist, because I am a chemist.”

It was, and it did, and now you can buy a variety of Spectra melangeurs on Nanci’s site. Other similar melangeurs have popped up as well, such as the aptly named Cocoatown, which you’ll find in almost every bean-to-bar chocolate maker’s factory.

That’s only one of the machines Nanci created, and it’s a small piece of his website, which is bursting with beans you can buy (still the only source for people just getting started) and the nitty-gritty about how to make chocolate from scratch. “I present it as a chemist,” he explained, “because I am a chemist.”

Almost all bean-to-bar makers in the country got their start using Nanci’s beans and methods. Some bigger makers like Raaka still use machines that he invented and produced. Meanwhile, on the other end of the spectrum, almost half of his customers buy machines and beans to make chocolate at home for themselves, not to sell.

I say “almost” because there are also those like Amano Chocolate, founded by Art Pollard in that golden year, 2005. Pollard is a trained physicist who was “assisting on nuclear projects” at Los Alamos by time he was 13, and his partner, Clark Goble, worked at Los Alamos as well, focusing on nuclear modeling, among other things.The two have run a search-engine technology company called Lextek International since 1993, with clients like Apple, Prodigy and Motorola. You’ve most likely used their product, because it’s even been incorporated into Adobe Acrobat, starting with version 6.0 to the present.

Pollard invested in vintage machinery for his chocolate factory, like an enormous winnowing machine from the 1920s or 1930s. “Most all of our machines, I’ve rebuilt myself,” he explained. “For a lot of them, parts aren’t available anymore, so I had to either make the part from scratch myself or design the parts and have them machined.”

Pollard believes “it’s critical” to have a background in technology and engineering in order to make chocolate. “I highly recommend designing and building your own machines, because you learn why things are the way they are. If someone just buys a machine, they just know, this machine works.” If you buy readymade machines, Pollard says “you lose the whys. It’s the whys that are important for making a superior-quality product.”

“There was a time when we made an engineering mistake and had to throw out $30,000 worth of chocolate.”

That knowledge also helps things run more smoothly. For example, recently, when Pollard bought a new machine, it arrived without the necessary software. Rather than send it back or hire an engineer, both of which would cause him to lose weeks of production, Pollard simply took a weekend and designed and built a control system himself.

That’s not to say it’s all smooth sailing. “There was a time when we made an engineering mistake and had to throw out $30,000 worth of chocolate,” Pollard remembered.

This kind of mistake, and the trial and error that leads to it, has caused chocolate maker Alan McClure, who owns Patric Chocolate and is widely considered one of the best makers in the country, to stop scouring chemistry books on his own and go back to school to pursue his Ph.D. in food science.

If you could cut down on the trial and error inherent in making craft chocolate (figuring out the right roasting temperature for each batch of beans, deciding how long to conche and so on) by understanding the chemistry behind it — well, the sky would be the limit.

“I had to struggle the whole time to understand more about what I’m doing, the levers and dials that you pull as a chocolate maker,” McClure said about what it was like to make chocolate before grad school. “Understanding scientific ways of approaching things has allowed me to have more solid results when I’m doing my own R&D,” he continued. “My decisions tend to be better, based on facts” rather than on a hunch.

“I had to struggle the whole time to understand more about what I’m doing.”

McClure is already using his new knowledge to make a difference. For example, he’s spent the past few years of his graduate work analyzing different cocoa samples to evaluate their levels of theobromine, caffeine and epicatechin. Those three compounds, among others, give chocolate its signature bitter taste, one that turns many people off dark chocolate.

“I’ve been looking at the amounts of those in different origins of cocoa in an effort to learn more about exactly where the bitterness is coming from,” he explained. By analyzing the amounts of each in different types of cocoas, he can better understand how to make less-bitter chocolate from all sorts of beans.

This dedication to hard science is part of the craft-chocolate movement’s identity. Take Rob Anderson, the owner of Fresco Chocolate. With degrees in computer science and electrical engineering, he works as a senior director of emerging technologies at an industrial-electronics-manufacturing company. “I don’t do the typical executive sort of things like play golf and hang out at the country club,” he said. “I come home to make chocolate.”

For Anderson, much of the fun of chocolate, which he’s been making since the early 2000s, comes from building the machines and problem-solving the technical snafus. Take his cocoa-bean roaster, which is made out of a modified commercial clothes dryer (“I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is perfect,’” he recalls on finding it).

Over 15 years, Anderson’s roaster has gone through at least four iterations; his winnower, over a dozen; his conche, four. It turns out it’s actually pretty hard to make great chocolate.

And just because you have a good machine doesn’t mean you can make good chocolate. It’s all about how you use those machines. Anderson roasts beans three different ways (for example, he describes “light” as “just enough to soften raw cocoa’s acidic or green edge”) and conches the resulting chocolate four different ways (for example, he describes “long” as “flavor peaks and valleys softened to a melodic harmony”).

He prints that information on Fresco’s labels and lets you choose the style you like the best. Do you want a dark roast and long conche like the Marañón 230 from Peru? A light roast and no conche like the Papua New Guinea 222? Or would you prefer a medium roast and medium conche like the Dominican Republic 224 (which won a gold award at the 2015 International Chocolate Awards)?

In the tech world, you grow up with the idea that you can do anything you want in this life. You just have to learn how.

Art Pollard, Amano Chocolate

This kind of experimentation is the bedrock of an entire school of thought within bean-to-bar chocolate, and the king of it is Dandelion Chocolate. The San Francisco-based company was started by Todd Masonis and Cameron Ring in a basement in Silicon Valley in 2010.

Like many bean-to-bar makers, Dandelion Chocolate built its own machine to separate the cocoa beans’ husks and nibs.

Sound like another kind of company (cough, software, cough)? You’re spot-on: Straight out of college at Stanford, the two had started a tech company called Plaxo with Sean Parker (whom you might remember from Napster), and in 2008, after a few tough years, they sold it to Comcast for upward of $150 million.

That left them with plenty of time on their hands. So what did they do? Started making chocolate, of course. “We were used to writing software,” Todd remembered, “but building a machine that could do something physical was new and interesting.”

The two Stanford grads harnessed their tech-startup know-how and applied it to a new field. They wouldn’t be artists creating a masterpiece but instead pragmatists solving a problem: how to make the best chocolate possible.

When Alain Ducasse opened his chocolate factory in Paris, he invited old-school makers to come try his chocolate. They said essentially to give it 30 years and maybe then Ducasse would have enough experience to make good chocolate. “We don’t want to wait until 2045 to make a good batch,” Todd said. “So we had to figure out how to make good chocolate assuming we know nothing.”

Using A/B testing, Dandelion has developed a methodology that allows it to create amazing chocolate. When the company sources a new type of cocoa bean, it immediately sets to testing it with multiple experiments to discover the perfect process for that particular bean. (“The biggest driver of the flavor is going to be the beans and the fermentation,” Todd said. “By the time we get them, that’s already locked in.” That’s why Dandelion spends much of its time and energy sourcing high-quality cocoa beans from around the world. However, that’s a different story.)

“The biggest driver based on our experiments is the roasting,” Todd explained. They roast batches at slightly different temperatures or for slightly different amounts of time, then make chocolate bars with those batches.

And that’s when the fun begins. Dandelion employees, friends, family — a whole smattering of people — sit down and blind taste-test the different bars, then rate each on a scale of -2 to 2.

“Sometimes we mix it up and put two of the same in there to see if people are cheating or lying or whatever,” he said. “But if you get enough people tasting, you start to see that one roast is preferred over another.”

It takes anywhere from 10 to 20 batches of chocolate to find the right roast — and one that matches their house style (lightly roasted, two-ingredient bars that highlight the bean’s inherent flavor notes).

The resulting chocolate mesmerizes your mouth, changing your idea of what chocolate can taste like. So it’s no surprise that there’s more demand than Dandelion can supply: Masonis said they entered 2017 with a waiting list of more than 500 stores that want to carry their bars.

The company wants to change that, which is why it’s opening a giant factory in San Francisco’s Mission District, which will increase production 10 times. “It’s not good enough to double the amount or eke out 10 percent or 20 percent more,” Masonis explained about the economics of scale. “We have to get to a whole new order of magnitude.”

They’ve done 10 times more work to get to that new order of magnitude as well: They sent a team across the world to try different machines. “We tested the exact same beans from three different processes to try to figure out which machinery was used on the beans at each factory” and which worked the best, Masonis said. “For every machine that we get, we do taste tests and validate and say we won’t do this unless it makes chocolate that’s better than what we do today.”

Call it the scientific method times 10.

Like Nanci, Dandelion wants to share its information. In mid-November, it released a book called Making Chocolate: From Bean to Bar to S’more that promises to change the game for bean-to-bar chocolate. In it, the Dandelion team tells you, step by step, in sometimes excruciating detail, how to make chocolate from scratch. “The Quick Start Guide” is only six pages, but “The Process, Unabridged” is 68 pages and includes everything from how to build your own winnower with PVC pipe to graphs of the “approximate melting points of polymorphic crystal forms.”

This might not seem like that big of a deal, considering that there are already resources like Chocolate Alchemy. Well, I should say “resource,” singular. Because the other resources are technical manuals from the past century, often in foreign languages, and are often inapplicable to this new way of making chocolate. Makers are pretty much left to decipher the process on their own, mostly through trial and error. And we’ve seen how that goes.

For new makers, the text is invaluable. This much information, presented clearly, with graphs, times, temperatures and detailed explanations of such a complicated process, will help the industry grow tremendously. “It’s everything we wanted to know about how to make chocolate when we got started,” said Greg D’Alesandre, co-owner and bean “sourcerer,” who was Dr. Wave (aka the product manager of Google Wave) in another life.

It’s also indicative of the industry that Dandelion wants to share what it knows. “A couple of people who tested our recipes for how to make chocolate at home have gone on to start their own chocolate companies,” said Masonis, reciting a JFK quotation that I have heard from a majority of chocolate makers: “A rising tide lifts all boats.”

In other words, the chocolate that we’re eating now is the best that’s ever existed, and it will only continue to get better. “In the tech world, you grow up with the idea that you can do anything you want in this life,” said Pollard. “You just have to learn how.”

Images and parts of this story were excerpted from Bean-to-Bar Chocolate, © by Megan Giller, used with permission from Storey Publishing.

Images: William Mullan (Raaka chocolate lead image, chocolate melangeur); Paul Takeuchi (nibs falling); Amber Day (chocolate process illustration); Molly DeCoudreaux (Dandelion factory); Megan Giller (Dandelion winnower); Mars Vilaubi (Patric bar)

Microsoft improves transparency for sexual harassment claims

The slew of sexual harassment disclosures in the entertainment business has started to influence the technology world, and Microsoft in particular sees this as an opportunity to rethink its policies. It’s waiving the requirement for pre-dispute arbitration agreements in sexual harassment claims, which could keep complaints out of court and thus out of the public eye. The company already didn’t enforce an arbitration clause relating to sexual harassment, but now wants to eliminate that obligation for the “limited number” of workers who would be affected.

The move comes simultaneously with Microsoft’s endorsement of a bipartisan Senate bill, the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Harassment Act, that would ensure claims are addressed in court. As Senator Kirsten Gillibrand notes, this should prevent serial harassers from “climbing the corporate ladder” and let victims speak out. In theory, you should see fewer instances of toxic corporate culture where management tolerates or even perpetrates harassment knowing there will be few if any public consequences.

This doesn’t mean that Microsoft is doing away with arbitration as a whole. It sees this as a “reasonable” complement to internal processes for other complaints. And that’s unfortunate — companies often prefer arbitration because it tends to artificially favor their side and maintain secrecy (hence why telecoms often force arbitration for disputes). However, the waiver could have a significant impact on sexual harassment claims at Microsoft and the tech industry at large. Victims may be more comfortable coming forward, and other companies might implement similar policies.

Via: New York Times

Source: Microsoft On the Issues

YouTube TV Delays Apple TV App to Q1 2018

YouTube has delayed its YouTube TV apps for Apple TV and Roku devices until the first quarter of 2018, a company representative told CNET today. The over-the-top service’s Apple TV app was initially planned for a launch before the end of 2017, so with less than two weeks left in the year the company has officially pushed back the app’s launch to next year.

Around the same Q1 2018 window, YouTube will also debut apps for older models of Samsung’s smart TVs, as well as Sony TVs using Linux-based operating systems. YouTube TV launched earlier this year on the web, iOS, and Android in five U.S. cities. The app eventually expanded to Chromecast, Xbox One, Android TV, and newer Samsung and LG smart TVs across more than 80 cities.

The $35/month service offers subscribers the ability to stream cable network television shows on ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC, CW, Disney, ESPN, FX, USA, and dozens of other major channels. YouTube TV is a competitor to similar services like Sling TV, Hulu with Live TV, DirecTV Now, and Playstation Vue, all of which can be viewed on the fourth and fifth generation Apple TV models. In addition to streaming live TV, YouTube TV includes content from the $9.99/month YouTube Red service.

Related Roundup: Apple TVTags: YouTube, YouTube TVBuyer’s Guide: Apple TV (Buy Now)
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Echo Look can give you style tips from Amazon’s fashionistas

If you’re tiring of the Echo Look’s AI-powered style tips, we have good news. Now, you can submit your full-body selfies to the Amazon Spark hive for feedback from real-life humans. The e-retail giant launched the camera-equipped Echo Look in June as an invite-only purchase, following it up with its Instagram-style social shopping feed, Amazon Spark, in July. Now, rather predictably, it’s combining the two, according to CNET.

Here’s how it works: You snap selfies in the outfits you’re planning on wearing using the Echo Look and instead of just sharing them with Amazon’s algorithms (or with friends and family), you can now upload them to Amazon Spark for advice from complete strangers. After all, what could be better for your self-esteem than a bunch of randoms judging and commenting on your clothes and body?

Add a question to complete your post, like “which outfit should I wear tonight?” and let the voting commence. The whole thing is tied to your Amazon username, and you can also enable notifications on the Echo Look app.

It only works on iOS for now, with Amazon explaining that it’s a way to “get input on your outfits from others who love fashion as much as you do.” Or you could end up siding with the AI over real-life folk and start questioning your humanity. Who cares when your ensemble looks fire, right?

Source: CNET