Tesla makes its case for buying SolarCity

Tesla’s been busy with more than the Model 3 in recent months. In August, founder and CEO Elon Musk announced that Tesla would join with his other company, SolarCity, in a $2.6 billion merger. Musk said at the time that the melded company would serve as an “end-to-end clean energy” solution. And just last week, he unveiled the company’s new solar roof and Powerwall 2 home battery which, taken together, would harness and store the sun’s energy to both the house and the electric car in its garage. On Tuesday, Tesla clarified what it expects to come from the merger and how the two companies will function as one.

Simply put, Tesla figures that SolarCity has a lot to bring to the table. “We also expect SolarCity to immediately account for 40% of the assets of the combined company on a historical cost basis,” the company wrote in a Tuesday blog post, “to contribute $1+ billion in revenue in 2017, and to add more than half a billion dollars in cash to Tesla’s balance sheet over the next 3 years.” What’s more, the combined companies will reportedly save on marketing and sales costs, overhead and R&D efforts. Whether those changes will result in layoffs has yet to be determined.

Tesla also defended SolarCity’s balance sheet, citing the latter’s $5.2 billion in assets and pointing out that the 300,000-plus solar roofs it has already installed will generate over $8 billion in customer payments over the next two decades. This rosy outlook is based on a number of societal and regulatory factors, specifically the American people’s willingness to adopt solar power. The fact that Congress extended the Investment Tax Credit, which gives homeowners a tax credit for 30% of the roof’s installed cost, to 2021 doesn’t hurt either.

For its part, Tesla touted its own impressive growth over the past few years, including Q3 2016’s whopping 145 revenue growth over the previous year. Furthermore, the company reports that it is sitting on $3 billion of cash plus another $750 million of liquidity as working capital. Together, Telsa hopes to strengthen its position within the $12 billion American solar energy market and maintain an annual 15 to 20 percent growth rate over the next five years.

Source: Tesla

VR porn: The Ultimate Guide [NSFW]

VR porn isn’t a thing of the future. It’s here now, and easier to find and access then you may have thought.

When it comes to watching videos on VR, one of the first questions many people asked was whether or not you’d be able to watch porn or other adult content. From apps that let you speak with camgirls, to full blown 360 degree adult videos, porn in VR is here and it’s making it’s mark. Whether you’ve got a Gear VR, Oculus Rift, or even Playstation VR, there is plenty of adult content just waiting for you out there.

Read more at VR Heads!

Best Cases for LG V20 (so far)

What are the best cases for the LG V20?

Life is full of unfortunate surprises, which is why you want to be prepared in case you drop your sparkling clean LG V20 onto the ground. Protect your new smartphone with one of these affordable insurance plans.

Note: The LG V20 is still a new phone, and cases are still being designed and released for it. We’ll be updating this list when more cases are released.

• Otterbox Defender Series
• Incipio Dualpro
• Ringke Defensive Case
• Tridea Power Guard Leather Bumper

Otterbox Defender Series

Your smartphone use may not be harsh enough to warrant the double-duty protection offered by the Otterbox Defender Series. But like my second-grade teacher used to say: You’re better off safe than sorry.

Since the V20 is positioned as the kind of smartphone you want to take with you to document a trip or a family reunion, you might as well consider this triple-layer, drop-proof case. The Defender Series features a built-in screen protector to keep the V20’s display crystal clear, and there are port covers to block out dirt, dust, and lint from getting into the headphone jack and charging port. There’s also a holster that doubles as a kickstand.

The Otterbox Defender for the LG V20 is only available in black.

See at Otterbox

Incipio Dualpro

Whether you’re looking for a plain black case or a bright pink one, Incipio is worth considering for its veteran case-making status. The DualPro Case for the V20 features an impact resistant plastic frame on top of a shock absorbing rubber sleeve. You can choose it in four colors, all of which will keep your shiny new smartphone protected while you’re out making mobile movies.

The Incipio Dualpro is available in black, champagne, rose gold, and pink.

See at Incipio

Ringke Defensive Case

If the Otterbox is just too much protection for you, the considerably more affordable Ringke Defensive Case will do just fine. The case is made of durable plastic material and features a textured look that adds a bit of James Bond-style personality to the V20. That textured pattern helps provide a but of grip to the phone’s chassis, too.

The Ringke Defensive Case is available in black, blue, and gray.

See at Amazon

Tridea Power Guard Leather Bumper

Class up your LG V20 with the Tridea leather case. Though it’s not real leather, the inside is lined by a carbon fiber frame to help the V20 against impact. There’s also a recessed card slot on the inside which works for attaching a metal plate for a magnetic mound or placing a transit card for tapping at the turnstiles.

The Tridea Power Guard Bumper is available in carbon black, too.

See at Amazon

LG V20

• LG V20 review: Built for power users
• LG V20 specs
• All LG V20 news
• LG V20 vs. Galaxy Note 7
• Discuss the V20 in the forums!

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How to get the best PlayStation VR stream on Twitch

Share your PlayStation VR adventures with the world! We’ll show you how.

While you’re fully immersed inside your virtual world with PlayStation VR, there’s no reason you wouldn’t want to share it with everyone else, right? Twitch is the biggest platform on the planet for gamers to broadcast their adventures to friends, family, and complete strangers.

Read more at VR Heads!

Latest Roku TV update makes any smartphone a wireless headset

One of Roku’s smartest features was the company’s decision to pop a headphone jack right into the remote, turning it into a wireless headset and saving your housemates from overhearing potential spoilers in the process. With Roku’s latest OS 7.5 update, users can now get that same feature on any Roku TV model using any iOS or Android device connected to the same WiFi network.

Rather than plugging into the remote, users running the latest update to the Roku TV can listen and control playback through the Roku mobile app on their mobile device. It’s a feature that was already available on some of the company’s streaming boxes — now available on TV sets with Roku’s built-in tech.

In addition to private listening, the latest OS update now allows Roku TV users to pause live broadcast TV when they’ve got a digital antenna connected to their Roku set. (You’ll need somewhere to store all that digital video though, so you’ll have to bring your own USB stick with 16GB or more of storage.) Finally, Roku OS 7.5 allows multiple iOS and Android devices to share photos to the big screen at the same time through Play on Roku, and there’s also expanded screen mirroring support for Roku Premiere, Roku Premiere+ and Roku Ultra.

The new update is available today and will continue rolling out to Roku devices over the next few weeks.

Source: Roku Blog

Roli Blocks is an affordable, modular way to make electronic music

British music-gear company Roli is mostly known for its attempts at reimagining the piano. The full-size Seaboard and smaller Seaboard Rise may bear similarities to traditional keyboards, but their rubberized, touch-sensitive buttons let you modulate, pitch-bend and slide between notes in a way that’s far different from what you can do on a standard keyboard or synthesizer. However, price is a big barrier to entry — the Seaboard Rise starts at $800, while its full-size counterpart will set you back $2,000 or more.

But Roli has been working on a way to bring its unique music-creation tools down to a much lower price point, and it’s taking the wraps off those efforts today. Roli Blocks are a set of modular synth controllers that snap together and hook up to your iPhone or iPad via Bluetooth. They’re tiny and inexpensive: The main controller, called the Lightpad, is a small square (less than 4 inches to a side) that sells for $179. That’s significantly cheaper than Roli’s other products. And while you can’t play the Lightpad like a keyboard, the short time I spent playing with it and the other Roli Blocks convinced me that it’s still a powerful, flexible and fun music-making tool.

At a high level, the Lightpad is essentially a MIDI controller; it’s useless without hooking it up to an iOS device. But once you do that and install the free Roli Noise app (only for iOS at the moment, but coming to Android soon), you can tweak the Lightpad in myriad ways. In the app, you can pick from 128 different software instruments like synths, bass instruments, pianos, guitars, pan flutes, drum sets and so on. Roli says it’ll continue to release more free instrument updates, and it will also sell instruments created by professional musicians like Grimes, RZA and Steve Aoki. But most of the content you’ll use to make the Blocks system work is already there in the free app.

Once you pick a sound you’re interested in, the Lightpad…err… lights up in a 5×5 grid pattern, with each box representing a note in the chromatic scale. The fun starts when you press your finger down on the Lightpad’s silicon-covered surface. The whole surface is pressure sensitive, so the harder you bear down, the louder the initial tone will be. Holding your finger lets the note ring out, while different slides across the pad will let you tweak the sound in some major ways. If you slide horizontally, you’ll bend the note to whatever pitch your finger lands on. But if you move up and down, you’ll apply each instrument’s modulation effect. You can move your fingers slowly in short strokes to apply a subtle effect, for instance, or quickly move your finger across the Lightpad to really tweak out your chosen sound.

That’s the basic gist of the Lightpad, but there is of course a lot more you can do inside the app. You can pick your scale (say, D major vs. E minor) and it will light up the pad with only the notes that fit into your chosen scale. That makes it a lot easier for someone who doesn’t know much music theory to hit the “right” notes when making a composition.

And the app offers way more than just major and minor scales too. If you’re a fan of the mixolydian mode, that’s an option as well. You can still play “dark” spots on the pad outside of your chosen scale, but the lit-up points help you stay in line. You can also have arpeggiated patterns play when you tap a note.

But while you can technically perform live on the fly with the Blocks system, it also has a fully developed recording and looping system. You can record multiple patterns, assign them to different “blocks” on the Lightpad and trigger them at will. You can also start by recording a drumbeat, layering a lead line and bass over it, and record that entire segment as one piece in a longer composition. I didn’t get to play around with it too much, but in my brief demo it seemed like a fairly robust system.

And we haven’t even gotten into the modular nature of Blocks yet. Each component has magnetic conductors on its side, so you can take two Lightpads and slap them side by side and the system will automatically recognize that you’ve extended your canvas and set it up appropriately. Roli is also offering two other blocks alongside the Lightpad: the Live Block and Loop Block. (They cost $79 each.) The Loop Block gives you instant access to the system’s recording and playback features so you don’t have to jump back and forth between your iOS device and the Lightpad while recording a new creation.

The Live Block is meant for, well, performing live; many of the features buried in the iOS app are exposed here. You can page up and down between software instruments, switch keys and scales, change tempos and effects and so on. While I was able to grasp how these additional blocks gave physical controls to features in the app, it’s a bit harder to say how useful they’d be to most users. There’s a definite learning curve here, though people who more proficient than I am at using sequencers and live electronic music gadgets might master it faster.

Even so, Roli Blocks piqued my interest. I’ve always wanted to get a small, electronic music-making setup but have never quite found what I was looking for. Playing the Lightpad felt intuitive to me, and the vast array of sounds and other variables built into the Roli Noise app make it a very flexible system, particularly at this price. I don’t know if the extra Live and Loop blocks are necessary just yet, but fortunately you don’t have to decide right away. In fact, the free iOS app includes a Lightpad-like view, so you can just start messing around there — and if you get hooked, you can buy the physical hardware controller. If you’d rather try this all out in person, Roli’s new gadgets will be available at Apple Stores this fall as well.