Roku players now search for news videos

Your Roku player may be an entertainment machine at heart, but it’s also becoming an information hub. Roku has expanded its search feature to look for videos across 50 services, that now include news channels. If you want to find the latest election coverage from the big four US broadcasters (ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC), you can. The approach works by date, too, so you can find everything that happened on a given day instead of having to search by topic. Roku’s news search selection is small right now, but there are promises of more partners coming in the months ahead.

Source: Roku

Apple Maps Introduces Transit Data for Denver, Colorado

Apple Maps has been updated with comprehensive Transit information for the city of Denver, Colorado, enabling iPhone users in the area to navigate using public transportation, including buses, subways, and commuter rails.

Transit routing was introduced in iOS 9 with support for a limited number of cities, but Apple has since expanded its public transportation coverage for over 20 cities around the world and 30 cities in China.

Apart from Denver, Transit directions are available in Apple Maps for Austin, Sydney, Baltimore, Berlin, Boston, Chicago, London, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Toronto, New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington, DC.

Ahead of the 2016 Summer Olympics, Apple has also added Transit support for cities including Montreal, Portland, Seattle, New South Wales, and Rio de Janeiro.

(Thanks, Ram!)

Tags: Apple Maps, Transit
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Researchers build a 1,000-core processor

You may have heard of many-core processors before, but you probably haven’t seen anything like this. UC Davis has developed the KiloCore, a CPU that (as the name suggests) packs a whopping 1,000 cores — extremely handy for very parallel tasks like encryption, crunching scientific data and encoding videos. And importantly, it’s not just about performance. Thanks to its ability to shut down individual cores, the chip can handle 115 billion instructions per second while using 0.7W of power. That’s enough that you could run it off of a lone AA battery, folks.

You aren’t about to see mass production. The university had IBM manufacture the chip on a relatively ancient 32-nanometer process when the industry’s newest processors are usually made using a smaller, more efficient 14nm technique. However, it raises the possibility of many-core processors finding their way into many mobile devices. They’re not universally helpful (many tasks are better-served by a few very fast cores), but they could save a lot of time when your laptop or phone would otherwise churn slowly.

Via: ScienceDaily

Source: UC Davis

TextEdit Icon Spotted on iOS 10 During WWDC 2016 Demo

During its What’s New in Metal, Part 1 session at WWDC 2016, Apple used an iPad to demo the graphics API’s new adaptive tessellation capabilities on iOS 10. At the 17:58 mark of the video, a TextEdit icon can be seen on the iPad’s home screen from the multitasking app switcher screen.

TextEdit is Apple’s basic word processor preinstalled on macOS Sierra and previous OS X versions, but the company has not released a mobile version for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch as it has done for some of its other first-party Mac apps. There are also no third-party apps that fully match the app shown in the screenshot.

TextEdit and Preview icons were previously spotted in a pre-release iOS 8 screenshot, but neither of the apps were included in the public version of the software update. An early 2014 report had said both apps would debut on iOS 8 as read-only document viewers for Preview and TextEdit files stored in iCloud from a Mac.

While there is an outside chance that Apple plans to release a basic text editor on iOS to complement Notes and Pages, the most likely explanation is that TextEdit serves as a simple “Hello World” testing app for internal developers. Apple is known to have several internal apps for use by software engineers and employees only.

Game Center is also shown, despite being removed as a standalone app on iOS 10.

Apple previewed iOS 10 at its WWDC 2016 keynote on June 13 and has seeded the first beta to developers. A public beta will be available in July ahead of an official launch in the fall. iOS 10 is compatible with most devices that can run iOS 9, excluding the iPhone 4s, iPad 2 and 3, original iPad mini, and fifth-generation iPod touch.

(Thanks, Ahmad!)

Related Roundups: WWDC 2016, iOS 10
Tag: TextEdit
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BT Smart Hub: BT’s new Hub is faster, smarter and ready for the future

BT has announced its latest router, called the BT Smart Hub, and claims it has the most powerful Wi-Fi signal of all its broadband rivals, to ensure a connection that’s even faster and more stable.

Although it doesn’t officially carry a Home Hub name with BT calling it the Smart Hub, once you hook it up, you’ll find it calling itself Home Hub 6 – and we guess that’s how many people will refer to it. 

Unlike previous BT Hubs, which have been getting smaller, the BT Smart Hub is a larger device than its predecessor, standing taller, but still offering the same basic shape, choosing to be an upright device, for a small footprint on the surface you place it on. 

As previously, rather than offering an array of blinking lights with obscure names, BT uses different colours, diffusing from behind the central logo bar. These reflect the status of the router, but most of the time there’s a soft blue hue, showing that it’s connected.

If you don’t want those lights you can turn them off, or set them to a schedule so they are only on some of the time.

Pocket-lint

The reason this router is now larger, says BT, is because the top section is a dedicated Wi-Fi zone. The design of this router is all about performance and there are seven antenna stuffed into that top section, carefully arrayed to give you the best all-round performance. 

As with previous devices there’s a handy slide-out information card on the rear with the router name and password on it. This is really useful if you have visitors, as you can just pass the card over for them to log on.

BT Smart Hub specs

As we’ve mentioned there are seven Wi-Fi antenna. The Smart Hub offers dual-band 2.4 and 5GHz frequencies and the smart side of this Hub is designed to choose the channel for the best performance and avoid interference. There are also filters to ensure that other devices close to the Wi-Fi spectrum don’t interfere with your signal.

The two bands are unified, but there’s the option to separate them for individual access if you prefer.

There is 3×3 11b/c/g/n/ac 2.4GHz and 4×4 11a/n/ac 5GHz Wi-Fi, along with support for ac Wave 2, the next-generation of Wi-Fi. Although you probably don’t yet have any devices that support Wave 2, its inclusion is a future-proofing move, as we’re likely to see a lot more devices on that standard in the next 2 years.

Aside from the wireless connections, there are four Gigabit Ethernet ports on the rear, and as with the Home Hub 5, the modem is built-in, so you don’t need a separate box. There’s also a USB port. All these physical connections are on the rear. 

BT Smart Hub installation and performance

As with previous Hubs, it comes packed in a box that will fit through most letterboxes. This contains the new Smart Hub and a new powerpack. We replaced the Home Hub 5 with the new BT Smart Hub, and as before, this is as simple as swapping one piece of hardware for the other. 

There are instructions on the packaging to guide you through any setup that’s needed. If, like us, you’re replacing a device you’re already connected to, you might want to head into the settings and change the SSID and password to match that of the device you’ve just replaced, to save you having to reconnect all your wireless devices individually.

Pocket-lint

These settings are handled through a browser, and once connected, heading to bthomehub.home will take you there. You’ll be asked to use your admin password (also on the removable password card), and it’s really simple.

You’ll also here have the option to dive into advanced settings, turn off things like Smart Setup (which runs you through a BT setup for each new device you connect), as well as giving you the option to look at your network map, see what is connected to 2.4 or 5GHz bands, and what physical devices are connected via Ethernet. 

It’s in here that you can also filter devices to see those that are disconnected (a great way to find things that aren’t working), as well as setting access controls. This would mean, for example, that you could set time restrictions on particular devices on your network.

In terms of performance, we’ve found the BT Smart Hub to have increased the strength and speed of Wi-Fi within the house. BT says that you’ll have greater range and that’s true: we have a setup with a separate network in the garden, but the Smart Hub mostly covers the garden, which it didn’t previously. 

But it’s upstairs where we’ve found the greatest benefit. Although we had good Wi-Fi with Home Hub 5, our first impressions are that there’s been an improvement. We’ve only had the Smart Hub for a few days so far, and we’ll continue to monitor its real world performance and update with any findings.

Pocket-lint

For us, the Smart Hub is replacing a Home Hub 5 that was starting to display erratic performance, often with devices losing connection and needing to be reconnected. So far, it looks like this new Smart Hub is better suited to the increasing demands from connected devices. 

BT Smart Hub pricing and availability

The BT Smart Hub will be available in the summer, with no precise date given so far, although BT says it will be offered to existing customers first.

On the high street, the BT Smart Hub will retail for £129. For existing BT Infinity customers you’ll be able to get a Smart Hub free if you renew your contract with BT.

If you don’t want to take out a new contract, but want the Smart Hub, you’ll be able to buy one for a discounted price of £50. For new customers there will be discounted prices too.

Finally, there’s a recycling bag provided in the box so you can send your old hub and all the packaging back to BT for recycling. That’s a nice touch for those wanting to reduce their waste.

Ben Heck’s Hackmanji board game, part 2

Ben, Karen and Felix continue to work on the Hackmanji board game puzzle. In particular, they’ve attempted to make it educational, with electronic logic gates ranging from AND, OR to XOR. Ben breaks down the solutions to the logic puzzles while Felix solders the logic chips. Get in touch with The Ben Heck Show team to be involved in the build of logic puzzles for the game, and create an account with element14 to join one of the largest online communities for makers and engineers.

AI is nearly as good as humans in detecting breast cancer

Someday, computers could help doctors diagnose diseases much faster than they can today. Researchers from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and Harvard Medical School (HMS) have developed a way to train artificial intelligence to read and interpret pathology images. Andrew Beck from BIDMC explains that their “method is based on deep learning,” which is commonly used to train AI to recognize speech, images and objects. They recently got the chance to prove just how effective their technique is during a competition at the annual International Symposium of Biomedical Imaging, where the AI was tasked to look for breast cancer in images of lymph nodes.

The team started training their machine by feeding it hundreds of slides marked to indicate which parts have cancerous cells and which have normal ones. They then identified which types of slides it was having the most trouble with and fed it more difficult samples. Using that method, the AI improved enough to be accurate 92 percent of the time and to win in two separate categories during the contest. It’s still no match for human pathologists who are accurate 96 percent of the time, but it’s clearly shown great promise.

Beck said what’s truly exciting is that when they combined pathologists’ analysis with their creation’s, the results showed 99.5 percent accuracy. He added: “Our results in the ISBI competition show that what the computer is doing is genuinely intelligent and that the combination of human and computer interpretations will result in more precise and more clinically valuable diagnoses to guide treatment decisions.” If you want to read more about this breast cancer-detecting AI, the team published a paper detailing their experience.

Source: Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center