Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 and Redmi Note 5 Pro specs detailed in full ahead of launch

Upcoming additions to Xiaomi’s Redmi Note series leak ahead of their official unveil.

Xiaomi is all set to unveil the Redmi Note 5 in India tomorrow, February 14, and ahead of the official launch, the phone’s spec sheet has made its way online. The leak also suggests that Xiaomi is working on a Redmi Note 5 Pro, which is powered by Qualcomm’s latest mid-range Snapdragon 636 chipset. It also looks like the Redmi Note 5 Pro will have dual cameras at the back, in a 12MP + 5MP configuration, with a 20MP front camera with LED flash up front.

The leak details the full specs of the Redmi Note 5 and Note 5 Pro, with both phones set to sport 5.99-inch 18:9 displays. Based on the specs, it looks like Xiaomi is rebranding the Redmi 5 Plus as the Redmi Note 5 in India, with the phone featuring the same Snapdragon 625 platform as its predecessor, along with a 4000mAh battery, and memory configurations of 3GB/32GB and 4GB/64GB.

It looks like the Redmi Note 5 Pro is the more interseting of the two devices, featuring up to 6GB of RAM and 64GB of internal storage. The phone will also come in variants with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage, and 4GB of RAM as well as 64GB of storage. Like the Redmi Note 5, the Note 5 Pro has a 4000mAh battery that charges over microUSB.

Both devices also feature a hybrid SIM card slot, and fingerprint sensors at the back. The poster suggests both phones will run MIUI 9 atop Nougat, which means it’ll be a while before we see an Oreo-based version of MIUI 9.

Xiaomi is also set to launch the Mi TV in India at tomorrow’s event, so there’s plenty to look forward to. I’ll be on the ground in New Delhi, so stay tuned for more on Xiaomi’s upcoming products in India.

Facebook opens up social VR app Spaces to Groups

Facebook Spaces is no longer just a place for you to hang out with friends and family in your list: you can also use it to form bonds with people in the Groups you’re in. You can now host or join a VR Space with up to four people from a Group, so you can discuss shared interests in virtual reality. The social VR app allows you to connect with new people in a deeper way: you could, for instance, conduct practice sessions together using VR props if you’re all part of a music or a stand-up comedy group. You could perform in one Space as a band and livestream your performance to friends. You could also watch videos together or just chat and get to know one another at a deeper level in a VR environment.

By opening up Spaces to Groups, Facebook has amped up the social aspect of the app. Since that also means you could end up in a single VR environment with people you don’t know that well — or at all — Facebook has ensured you can report people and mute or pause the experience anytime. It’s an early experimental feature, though, so you’ll likely encounter bugs as you go along, meeting new friends through your Oculus Rift or HTC Vive headsets.

‘Sea of Thieves’ will live or die by how its world grows

Sea of Thieves is unquestionably an absolute blast to play. It unashamedly embraces every seafarer cliché and trope so you can live out all your pirate fantasies, just without the sunburn, scurvy and missing appendages. You can down grog until you puke, take to the open ocean in search of treasure or conflict and, when you lose a cannon fight, play a mournful tune with your fellow scallywags as you go down with your galleon. But Sea of Thieves isn’t supposed to be a game you spend a few fun evenings playing before forgetting it just as quickly. Developer Rare envisions its core audience spending hundreds if not thousands of hours plundering this new world. If that’s going to be the case, though, it has to grow to be twice the title it is today.

Sea of Thieves is a bit of a gamble for Microsoft, which has played it safe for years investing in the Halo, Gears of War and Forza franchises. A twee open-world pirate simulator is, by comparison, well out of Microsoft’s comfort zone. First-party studio Rare could also do with a new, big hit. The UK-based team hasn’t really done anything of note since the Viva Piñata games, the last of which came out almost a decade ago. Rather than feel under pressure, though, the vibe at Rare is very much one of excitement. As executive producer Joe Neate puts it: “We’re flying at the moment, dude!” They feel they’ve made the game they set out to: a fun, addictive and cooperative experience that was the intention long before the pirate theme was even decided upon.

Clean-up time

The main concept of Sea of Thieves is that the game can kind of be whatever you want it to be. There is a linear goal, which is to complete quests, amass riches and earn your reputation as a pirate legend. You can go it alone if you want, sailing a little dinghy into the unknown. You can even try managing a huge galleon one-handed if you’re up to the challenge, but, like a brimming tankard of grog, Sea of Thieves is best enjoyed with friends. Between plotting a course, orienting the sails, steering, loading the cannons, dropping anchor, patching holes in the hull and bailing out water, scanning the horizon for other ships and keeping tabs on your treasure and limited resources, there’s almost too much for even the max party size of four to handle.

Cooperation feels totally natural, and you’re not forced into performing one routine task over and over. There’s no designated captain, and I found that people typically move fluidly from one role to the next. Communication is absolutely essential. The game is, in fact, designed to be played with a headset, though there are stock phrases and actions available on the D-pad if you either don’t have or don’t want to use a microphone, or if there’s some language barrier that needs overcoming. There’s no real reason to use that line of communication to flame other players, and if you’re playing with randoms and run into a troll, you can vote to throw them in the brig until they either buck up their ideas or leave your session.

As it stands, the way you increase your reputation and top up the coffers is to sail to an outpost (you start each gaming session at one, too) and grab “voyages” from either the Gold Hoarders or the Order of Souls — “trading companies” that outsource quests to pirates like yourself. You get maps and riddles that lead you to locations where you either have to find buried treasure or defeat a skeleton mini-boss and his minions. When complete, you take chests and enchanted skulls back to your ship to store on board, cashing them in only when you return to an outpost triumphant. Throughout the sandbox world you’ll also find bottles glinting on beaches that contain side-quests, as well as shipwrecks and skeleton strongholds to explore that may house hidden treasures — a facet of the game design director Mike Chapman calls the “happy accident simulator.” Voyages start off being free, but more difficult missions with more bountiful rewards can be purchased with gold. You have to spend money to make money, as they say.

Comin’ for your head, Cap’n Keith

The Sea of Thieves is a risky place, though. You don’t want to complete five missions in a row, your lower deck piled high with booty, only to have another crew sink you and steal it all. But even if you stop at an outpost after every quest, there’s no guarantee that goons won’t be camped out, waiting to ambush you before you can turn that chest over to the Gold Hoarders for your due reward. You could, of course, forego doing quests altogether and spend your entire pirate career profiteering from the labors of others. Interactions with other players is part of what keeps things interesting, after all. That said, mastering the art of warfare on the waves is where the biggest skill cap in Sea of Thieves undoubtedly lies. The few battles I’ve experienced could be described as clumsy at best.

The big galleons are not at all agile, cannons are hard to aim even in the calmest seas and, while you’re fumbling with the wheel, sails and everything else, an enemy can easily sneak aboard with a gunpowder barrel (a recent addition to the game) to decimate your hull from the inside. Though not a particularly menacing sight, a smaller, nimbler boat can easily run rings around a galleon and pepper it with enough point-blank shots to send it sinking to the seafloor in minutes. I’ve no doubt, however, that a well-oiled and battle-hardened crew could be confident that their chances of success are well beyond the flip of a piece of eight. That’s assuming they want to engage in the first place, of course. Everyone has something to lose.

Direct hit

There’s a charming rock-paper-scissors simplicity to almost everything in Sea of Thieves, and one that doesn’t change, however legendary you become. You may be the richest, most reputable captain around, but that doesn’t make your cutlass any sharper, nor your cannon more powerful. Every buccaneer is on a level playing field, making your skills as a deckhand, strategist, marksman and the rest what distinguishes one player from another. Keeping all sailors on an even keel extends to making sure the experience is the same, whether you’re playing on an OG Xbox One, a One X, a powerful gaming rig with three-monitor setup, or a beat-up old laptop. Resolution doesn’t have a significant impact on gameplay, thanks to the cartoony art style, and you can’t turn the wheel any faster or swing the sniper rifle reticle any quicker on any one platform than on another.

There are two types of primary quests, three sizes of ships and four varieties of weapon: sword, pistol, blunderbuss and the pirate’s equivalent of a sniper rifle. Similarly, there are three main types of resources. Bananas restore player health, wooden planks are needed to patch holes in your hull and the purpose of cannonballs is pretty obvious. While it’s not hard to find these on the sea’s many islands, you can carry only so much to store back on your ship, making a good stockpile key to a long, healthy voyage. Also, you can reload your guns only from an ammo chest on your vessel, so bullets are just as valuable a commodity.

The game is designed to be simple and accessible on the surface, withholding nothing from any player from the very outset, for a specific reason. Rare doesn’t want the quests or your reputation level or the size of your wallet to be the reason you play the game. It’s the adventures you have, and the stories you create organically while inside this sandbox — think something akin to Eve Online, but where the ships are waterborne. The tale of escaping an ambush by the skin of your teeth, only for a cursed chest that cries water to sink you on your way to an outpost. Or that night you almost collided head-on with another galleon in the eye of storm, only for the ship to disappear into the darkness a second later before either crew were able to fire a shot or exchange a friendly word. One player has already gone down in community history by swimming the length of the Sea of Thieves while ships sailed alongside him, sniping at snarks eager to thwart his progress. In-game folklore is already being written, which Rare is embracing with Easter eggs referencing such feats dotted across the world.

Weeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Game mechanics are one thing, but the backdrop to your tall tales is just as important. With Sea of Thieves, Rare is attempting something that’s immersive on the one hand, cartoony and fun on the other. The water, for example, is basically photorealistic. Wave and wind physics, driven by ever-changing weather patterns, as well as how the different sizes of ships handle at sea, also feel lifelike. The various shanties you can play on your character’s concertina and hurdy-gurdy were recorded on real, creaky instruments, not cooked up on a computer.

But just as some aspects are designed to anchor you in a believable, engaging world (excuse the pun), others are heavily stylized and overly colorful. The pirates, ships, sharks and skeletons are all caricaturish. These elements look like they were made from plasticine, not created digitally, and there’s nicks and scuffs everywhere to reflect the battered, worn nature of things recycled at sea. There’s a certain hidden depth to characters and ships that may not be immediately obvious, which Rare calls the “wonky” factor. On the initial character select screen, which wasn’t in the recent beta but will be present in the shipping game, you’re presented with a selection of randomly generated pirates. These are of various ages, ethnicities, genders and body types; some look like ruffians, others like chiseled heroes. The idea here is that you don’t spend forever selecting what eyebrow width, etc., most closely matches your own, but go through a few cycles and pick an avatar you just like the look of. Wonkiness, one of the hidden values, is how symmetrical various parts of the character are, contributing to its uniqueness.

Adopt a scallywag

One of the most interesting things I learned about Sea of Thieves is how the game handles ship encounters. Every craft you see is worked by a human crew, but you’d neither want to exist in a world where you can’t move with all the vessels, nor feel you’re completely alone out there. During development, Rare extended the draw distance (how far you can see clearly) and increased the graphical fidelity of the horizon so you can’t confuse a mast at full sail with a far-off rock. The studio also decided that the optimum encounter pattern should put you in range of a ship every 15 to 20 minutes. The Sea of Thieves is mirrored many times over across servers so you get the right density of craft per instance.

Each crew could be questing in a different corner of the world, though, so to keep encounters consistent, the servers effectively teleport ships between different instances so there’s always a potential friend or foe just over the horizon. This “black magic,” as PC design lead Ted Timmons calls it, also keeps the distribution of different sizes of boat relatively consistent across the multiverse. It gets even more complicated, though. If privateers take you out, sink your ship and steal all your loot, when you respawn and board a new galleon, you can head back to the area and seek revenge, knowing that your rivals haven’t been warped to another instance. Basically, when you interact with other ships, you create something of a tether between you that makes it feel as though you’re in a persistent, shared world. I can’t really explain it in any more detail than that, since Rare would only be vague about the technicalities. “It’s complicated shit,” Neate concluded.

I’ve only had a few hours with Sea of Thieves personally, but they were a very fun few hours indeed. I defaulted into role-playing a swashbuckler without it feeling forced, and since I typically spend my game time on supercompetitive titles like Dota 2, it was a refreshing, relaxing couple of sessions. From what I’ve seen on Twitch and YouTube, people seem to be having the same experience. And that’s just playing the beta, which was a server stress test more than anything, ahead of the retail version launch on March 20th. Whether Sea of Thieves will still be fun 100 hours in, though, is an entirely different matter.

Load the cannons!

The threat to Rare’s vision of an infinitely replayable game is boredom — the descent into a Destiny-esque grind. How many times can you dig up a treasure chest or plunder a skeleton stronghold before it starts feeling repetitive? How many times can you make yourself sick from grog, play a shanty duet or shoot yourself out of a cannon in a suicidal attempt to take a rival’s ship before the novelty wears off? How many encounters can you have with the rarely seen and fearsome Kraken before the wow factor subsides? In other words, how long can you play before there aren’t any adventures left to have?

The potential for Sea of Thieves to lose its charm isn’t news to Rare, of course, with development on the title expected to continue long after release. By the time March 20th rolls around, there will already be another trading company that’s set up shop at the many outposts. These new voyages will see you transporting livestock — chickens, pigs and snakes, as it stands — and cargo from one area of the world to another. It’ll be worth having someone on your ship with a good memory, because you’ll have to track down, say, a rare breed of snake that lives on only a few of the world’s islands. And remember to play a tune to calm them down before you cage them, or risk getting bitten and poisoned. Chickens are easily startled and hard to catch, while pigs will require feeding from your banana stash during transport.

This little piggy went to sea

You might have to move your cargo around to stop it from drowning if you’re taking fire, or stash it belowdecks lest it gets struck by lightning in a storm. You’ll want to find, rob and save as many cannonballs, wooden planks and bananas as possible en route, too. Everything you’re carrying has a monetary value, and these quests will become an exercise in resource management, adding diversity to quest choices and giving you more ways to earn a reputation on your road to becoming a pirate legend.

As Rare tells it, while achieving legendary status is the primary goal, that isn’t the end of the game. When you become a legend, you’ll get access to a secret tavern built into a shipwreck hidden somewhere in the game world. Here you become a true captain, with your own unique ship moored up at your new hideout. You can show this off to lesser crewmates if you wish, but only a legend can solicit special quests from the specters that haunt this forgotten place. Becoming a legend is just the key, then, to unlocking a new route of progression and harder, more elaborate quests.

The ghosts of a pirate legend’s secret cove

Another element Rare is hoping to add at launch is special, all-comer quests that’ll be marked on the map by a skull-shaped cloud that’ll float above one of the skeleton strongholds. Like shipwrecks, these skull islands will occur randomly, and everyone on the Sea of Thieves will be able to see this beacon no matter where they are. It’ll draw ships together and also act as a warning to others carrying precious cargo to keep a wide berth. The marked location will be intentionally difficult to plunder, however, so as much as you might expect a meeting of ships to turn into all-out war, the idea is that you’ll have to cooperate with other crews to defeat the fortress’ enemies, grab the key to the vault and enjoy the bounty that lies within — much more than one crew can carry without having to make several trips. Whether you honor the transient truce, double-cross your friends or leave one man behind to rob everyone blind while you’re pretending to tackle the fort’s inhabitants together is up to you.

Beyond these early additions, the plan is to dream up more types of quests, time-limited events and new mechanics — different cannonball types, maybe — to keep people coming back to the Sea of Thieves. The studio will look at where people are finding value and support all different kinds of player motivations. “What’s beautiful about the idea is that it’s fantasy pirates. There are tons of really interesting and creative things we can do with this game,” design director Chapman told me. “We’re trying to make you feel like you’re in every pirate movie you’ve ever seen.” But continued development and server hosting space costs money, so how does Rare expect to keep evolving the game when everyone that’s going to buy it has bought it already?

We’re trying to make you feel like you’re in every pirate movie you’ve ever seen.

Mike Chapman, Design Director

Well, Rare’s in kind of a privileged position in that respect. For one, Xbox Live is a monthly subscription, and if people are seen to be using that subscription to play Sea of Thieves, then it’s only fair for some of that to get reinvested. Similarly, this will be the first new, high-profile Microsoft title added to the monthly Game Pass membership. Subscribers will be getting the game for free, but if they keep playing and paying, then Rare will keep developing. Sea of Thieves is expected to be one of those games that people love to watch too. If it ends up bringing new people to Microsoft’s streaming site Mixer, then that’s also worth something. And finally, Sea of Thieves will be propped up by the dreaded microtransaction. (At least Rare isn’t interested in the controversial loot box model, though.)

There are various cosmetic items in the game, including clothing, weapon skins, sails and figureheads that are prime for the microtransaction model. We know that pets will eventually appear in the game too, such as monkeys and parrots that follow you around and interact with other players as well as with you. The in-game store will feature only “emotional” modifiers intended to enhance your enjoyment of the game. Rare assures me there’ll never be anything one can buy that alters the game mechanics — “pay to win” items, as it were. Microtransactions won’t feature until several months after launch, when Rare delivers the first major update for the game. Right now, exec producer Neate says the “focus at launch is to deliver a great game experience, and nothing is going to distract us from that.”

Prepare to be boarded!

But to keep the player base’s attention, the game will have to consistently grow beyond what we’ve already seen and the immediate road map Rare is sharing. The early signs are promising. Streamers seemed to love the beta, and a ton more people joined the broadcasts, interested in seeing what it was all about even if they didn’t end up pre-ordering to get a beta key of their own.

Whether Sea of Thieves does evolve into one of those titles that becomes a regular feature in gamers’ lives for years to come, though, will depend on the unknown. It’s the classic chicken-and-egg problem. Sea of Thieves has to seduce a large and loyal audience to make continued development worth Microsoft’s while. And that audience will stick around only if it feels there are more tales yet to be spun.

LG announces new AI-based camera features for upcoming V30s at MWC

LG is turning to AI as the differentiator for its upcoming phone.

LG is all set to announce an upgraded variant of the V30 at MWC dubbed the V30s, and ahead of the event the manufacturer has highlighted a few features that will be making their way to the device. The company said that it was researching AI-based solutions for over a year now, focusing on image and voice recognition:

LG spent more than a year researching how AI should be implemented in smartphones, long before announcing LG ThinQ at CES 2018. This research focused primarily on making AI-based solutions with the objective to deliver a unique and more intuitive user experience, focusing on the camera and voice recognition. The result is a suite of AI technologies that is aligned closely with the needs and usage behavior of today’s users.

To that effect, LG is announcing two new features that leverage artificial intelligence: Vision AI and Voice AI. Vision AI automatically analyzes objects to serve up recommendations on the best shooting mode, which is similar to what Huawei does in the Mate 10 and Mate 10 Pro. LG says that the feature takes several factors into account, like angle of view, color, reflections, backlighting, and saturation levels, offering recommendations from the eight shooting modes available: portrait, food, pet, landscape, city, sunrise, sunset, and flower.

LG says that it worked with a “partner in image recognition” to analyze over 100 million images — coming up with over a thousand unique categories — to fine-tune the phone’s image recognition algorithms. Vision AI will also be able to automatically scan QR codes, and the feature will automatically tweak settings to increase brightness “by a factor of two” when taking low-light images.

As for Voice AI, LG has worked with Google to introduce exclusive voice commands for Google Assistant. The company rolled out 23 commands last year, with an additional nine commands making their debut on the V30s.

LG announced earlier this year that it would stop releasing new phones every year, and instead of iterating on hardware, the company is now looking to AI for differentiation From LG’s senior vice president and head of mobile unit Ha Jeung-uk:

As we communicated last month at CES, the future for LG lies in AI, not just hardware specs and processing speeds. Creating smarter smartphones will be our focus going forward and we are confident that consumers will appreciate the advanced user experience with the enhanced V30 that many have been asking and waiting for.

LG also said that some of the features that will be debuting on the V30s will be making their way to older models. With MWC just under two weeks away, we don’t have to wait long to find out what’s in store with the V30s.

YouTube chief says Logan Paul won’t get the banhammer

YouTube might have cut off Logan Paul’s ad revenue, dropped him from Google Preferred and suspended his planned original projects, but that doesn’t mean he’ll get booted off the platform anytime soon. In an interview at Recode’s annual Code Media conference, YouTube chief Susan Wojcicki said Paul won’t be getting banned from the video website anytime soon. “He hasn’t done anything that would cause those three strikes,” she explained when host Kara Swisher asked why the company hasn’t banned Paul. “We can’t just be pulling people off our platform… They need to violate a policy.”

Wojcicki is talking about YouTube’s three strikes policy, which states that the platform will terminate creators’ accounts if they get three strikes within a three-month period. According to the Google-owned company’s community guidelines, creators can get strikes if they videos “contain nudity or sexual content, violent or graphic content, harmful or dangerous content, hateful content, threats, spam, misleading metadata, or scams.”

Logan Paul has been under fire ever since he posted a video showing the body of a suicide victim while joking around and laughing in Japan’s Aokigahara forest. While he apologized and published a suicide prevention video afterward, he has also followed that up with a video of him tasering dead rats and a tweet saying he’d join that dangerous/ridiculous internet Tide Pods challenge. YouTube was also hit by a wave of criticism over the role it played in hosting his videos, putting its relationship with advertisers in jeopardy. The event forced it to change its Google Preferred moderation system and to introduce new punishments to address creators’ “egregious actions.”

Wojcicki said YouTube won’t be banning Paul (yet) despite all the backlash it got, because the platform “need[s] to have consistent laws” so that it can apply its policies consistently to millions of videos and creators. She added: “What you think is tasteless is not necessarily what someone else would think is tasteless.”

Via: The Verge

Source: Recode’s Code Media

Netflix preps late-night series with ‘Daily Show’ vet Michelle Wolf

Netflix is determined to cement its place in the talk show landscape. The streaming service has unveiled plans for a weekly late-night show hosted by Michelle Wolf, a contributor to the Daily Show and a veteran comedienne. While the half-hour program doesn’t even have a title yet, it won’t be limited to politics and will include the risqué humor “we couldn’t do on TV,” according to Wolf. The series will debut sometime later in 2018.

This definitely isn’t Netflix’s first fling with talk shows — it launched Chelsea Handler’s series in May 2016, and it’s hard to escape the marketing blitz for David Letterman’s show. However, it illustrates Netflix’s desire to compete directly with the conventional talk show circuit by recruiting its stars. It also highlights a potential weak point for TV networks like Comedy Central. While it’s nothing new for comedy contributors to jump at chances to host their own shows (see John Oliver and Samantha Bee, among others), internet services like Netflix make that easier — they don’t have to compete for time slots or clean up their language.

Via: Variety

Source: Hollywood Reporter

Cryptocurrency mining site hijacked millions of Android phones

Smartphone users are just as vulnerable to cryptocurrency mining hijacks as their PC counterparts, and sometimes on a dramatic scale. Malwarebytes has detailed a “drive-by” mining campaign that redirected millions of Android users to a website that hijacked their phone processors for mining Monero. While the exact trigger wasn’t clear, researchers believed that infected apps with malicious ads would steer people toward the pages. And it wasn’t subtle — the site would claim that you were showing “suspicious” web activity and tell you that it was mining until you entered a captcha code to make it stop.

The exact number of victims isn’t apparent, but it’s large. Malwarebytes identified five internet domains using the same captcha code and Coinhive site keys used for the campaign. At least two of the sites had over 30 million visits per month, and the combined domains had about 800,000 visits per day. Even though most people only ever spent a short amount of time on the pages (an average of 4 minutes), that amounted to a lot of mining time.

Not surprisingly, Malwarebytes is recommending that Android phone users use web filters and security software to fend off these hijacks. We’d add that you can reduce the odds of encountering these campaigns by sticking to Google Play for app downloads, since you’re less likely to run into rogue apps. However, it’s doubtful that mining ploys like this will go away any time soon. So long as cryptocurrency values remain through the roof, you’re bound to see someone hoping to make a few coins at your expense.

Source: Malwarebytes Labs

Keep your records looking and sounding sweet: Here’s how to clean vinyl

lambros / 123RF

As the twin krakens of Spotify and Apple Music have wrapped their tentacles around the music industry, a curious thing has happened: Vinyl records, those big black discs that were once all too common in garages and dorm rooms, have made a resurgence.

In fact, the vinyl industry has seen a straight decade of year-after-year growth. That’s impressive for a product that seems so antithetical to our modern philosophy of convenience. After all, new vinyl collections aren’t easily portable, require a record player for listening, and are prone to damage that can destroy their sound. In an age dominated by streaming services and the ability to flit between songs like gnats, the vinyl record seems as archaic as straight-razors or horse-drawn carriages.

Why is vinyl back with such a fervor? Perhaps in an age where music has been broken down to bytes of data, vinyl offers a long-lost, tangible experience. To hold a record with your fingertips and place it on the spindle of a record player, to hear the tonearm drop and the needle settle into the groove, is a ritual. Forget the debate about whether vinyl sounds better than digital for a moment: for many people, the simple pleasures of flipping through a record collection and placing the needle gently into position cannot be replaced for the sake of convenience.

With more people getting into vinyl as a hobby, there is one thing that may shock new enthusiasts: Unlike files in an iTunes collection, records can get dirty. Dust and grime can easily accumulate in the grooves of a vinyl record, and even a little dust or static electricity can impact the sound quality. Many a record owner has pulled a dusty Stones LP from their parent’s collection only to discover a cacophony of pops and static as soon as the needle begins to glide through the gak. To enjoy vinyl to the fullest, record owners must keep it clean. Thankfully, it’s not difficult. There are a few ways to clean a vinyl record, even on a tight budget, and doing so will keep a record sounding pristine for decades.

Get a machine to do it for you

For those who don’t want to risk damaging their records when cleaning them by hand, or those who simply don’t have the time, buying a machine to clean them is the best option. In fact, some would argue a proper record cleaner can better clean a record than any manual process. There are many brands of cleaner out there, ranging in price from the approachable to the absurd. Here are two of the most notable:

VPI HW-16.5 ($700)

On the higher end of record cleaners is the VPI HW-16.5. Vinyl collectors respect VPI for its top-of-the-line record players, and its record cleaners are similarly praiseworthy. Like the players, however, the cleaning machines are also quite expensive, often running nearly $700. For those who can afford the cost, this cleaner is as good as they come, as well as straightforward to use. After clamping a record down on the turntable, simply use a brush to spread cleaning fluid around the record, then use the cleaner’s vacuum to suck it all up. The process is quick and easy, and the device has a solid build. Aside from being noisy, the only downside is the aforementioned price, which will keep it out of the hands of the average collector.

Buy it now from:

Amazon Music Direct

Spin-Clean ($80)

A far cheaper option than the HW-16.5, the Spin-Clean lacks a vacuum or an impressive case, but will get dust off a record quickly and quietly. The device uses rollers to scrub both sides of a record at the same time, and drain the dirty water down into a basin. Unfortunately, letting the fluid run off instead of vacuuming it up means that sometimes fluid will be left on the record. Moreover, this device might not get rid of deeply entrenched grime. At $80, however, the machine does a respectable job, and is affordable for most collectors.

Buy it now from:

Amazon Spin Clean

MIT drones navigate more effectively in crowded spaces by embracing uncertainty

Amazon and other companies have big plans for delivery drones. In order to get to the point where delivery drones are truly safe and ready to become mainstream technologies, though, one of the things that needs work is making them more agile and better able to deal with complex obstacles while flying. That’s something that researchers from MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have been working to improve.

Their new NanoMap technology promises to give drones the ability to consistently navigate at 20 miles per hour speeds through obstacle-packed locations such as forests or warehouses — in which even the slightest of miscalculations can result in a crash.

“NanoMap is a mapping system that enables drones to fly at high speeds through dense environments like forests and warehouses,” MIT CSAIL graduate student Pete Florence told Digital Trends. “The system’s key insight is that it actively models and accounts for the uncertainty of not being 100 percent confident about where the drone is located in space. This makes it a more flexible approach for flying in real-world environments that you can’t predict in advance, and creates a deeper integration between perception and control.”

Jonathan How, MIT

NanoMap consists of a depth-sensing system, which seamlessly stitches together a series of measurements concerning a drone’s surroundings. This allows it to anticipate what motion plans to make concerning both what it is currently looking at and also what it might see in the future. That’s different from existing drone piloting technologies that are routinely reliant on intricate maps that tell the drone exactly what is around it at any point.

The idea of a high-speed drone that doesn’t sweat the small details about its exact location sounds, at best, counterintuitive and, at worst, a bit scary, but MIT’s smart tech means it’s surprisingly effective. Without the NanoMap system being employed, MIT’s test drone crashed 28 percent of the time if it went off-course by more than 5 percent. With NanoMap, these crashes were reduced to only 2 percent of flights that veered 5 percent off course.

According to Pete Florence, the technology could theoretically also be used in any piece of hardware involved in navigation, including self-driving cars. There’s still a lot more work to be carried out, though.

“There’s much more that can be done in terms of improving our systems for planning, control, perception and local obstacle avoidance,” he said. “As an example, we intend to work on the system so that it can one day incorporate other pieces of information related to uncertainty, like being able to account for the uncertainty of the drone’s depth-sensing measurements.”

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If Apple designed a scooter, it would probably look a lot like The Eagle

Apple’s Jony Ive doesn’t design scooters, but if he did we’re imagining they may well be along the lines of The Eagle, a forthcoming ultra-thin carbon fiber electric scooter created by Swiss and Lithuanian startup Citybirds. Recently shown off at the ISPO trade expo in Munich, Germany, The Eagle promises to join the ranks of best escooters when it finally hits the streets.

The scooter is described by its creators as the thinnest and lightest electric scooter concept on Earth, with a folded thickness of just 30mm. This makes it perfect for both storing in your home and office, and any commute that requires you to fold it up for space saving. It features a 36-volt motor that will grant you a top speed of around 25 kilometers per hour (approximately 16 mph) and a battery that will give you a range of 15 kilometers (nine miles) or double that with an extra battery.

In addition to this, it will boast both plug-in and inductive charging, and a pop-up display in the handlebars, which will offer turn-by-turn directions, as well as the possibility of acting as another external display for information like media notifications.

“We started designing Citybirds scooters in 2014, when the first iconic non-electric Pigeon scooter design appeared on Kickstarter,” CEO and designer Ignas Survila told Digital Trends. This was followed by the newer Raven scooter before the team turned its attention to creating the sleekly impressive Eagle e-scooter.

Don’t expect it to be here in time for this summer, though. “We present it not as a finished product, but as a concept that will only appear on the market in 2020,” Survila said. There are no more details at present about the exact availability of the scooter, nor its planned market price. However, Survila said it won’t be prohibitively expensive. “For sure it won’t be more than 1,500 euros,” he said.

While the equivalent of $1,840 isn’t exactly cheap, it’s also not in the upper echelons of escooter prices. Given the chic design and promise of some nifty smart features, it seems a pretty fair price. Now we guess we should better get saving some extra cash.

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