As we mentioned in our previous post about Amazon cracking down on sellers of unsafe USBs, it’s now evident that many USB Type-C cables are just plain dangerous. With incredible utility does indeed come great responsibility but manufacturers and resellers have not been prioritizing manageable temps and safe power transfers in efforts to maximize data speeds. Fortunately, USBCheck has a solution to put testing for cable integrity directly into the user’s hands.
Earlier this month, tech giant IBM announced a more efficient way to use phase-change memory. This new method is a breakthrough with the potential to transition electronic devices from standard RAM and flash to the much faster and more reliable phase-change memory, or PCM. Phase-change memory is a type of non-volatile optical sotrage that manipulates the behavior of chalcogenide glass, the same method of data storage on rewriteable Blue-ray disks. Electric current applied to the PCM cells enables a binary modification from amorphous to crystalline structure which is the equivalent of a 0 or a 1 for the purpose of memory storage.
As computer hardware becomes cheaper and more powerful, leaps such such as NVIDIA’s new GeForce GTX 1080 are why it has never been a better time to be a PC gamer. The rise of virtual reality and the growing 4K trend makes the power and efficiency of the GTX 1080 heavily desirable. Not only that, but with a $599 price tag and claims by NVIDIA of faster speeds than the $1000 Titan X, the GTX 1080 is an incredible value for the most powerful graphics card on the market.
Understanding language can be difficult from human to human, much less for machines attempting to understand the intricacies of human speech and text. Google knows this as well as anyone considering the countless queries made every hour which take a user where they need to go, even in the face of abhorrent sentence structure and unfortunate spelling mistakes. Today, Google is open-sourcing something called SyntaxNet and specifically a component for it, Parsey McParseface. With an endearing reference to the polled name Boaty McBoatface for NERC’s research vessel earlier this year, Google is releasing the tools it uses to understand natural language when typed into a box or interpreted via spoken word.
As AI technology grows in popularity and complexity, the natural progression would then be to shrink the actual size this tool needs to function and that’s exactly what a Silicon Valley chip designer has done.
Chip designer Movidius has launched a USB stick with a supercomputer onboard, essentially taking the deep learning paradigm of artificial intelligence to the spacial efficiency of a USB drive. Deep learing involves training a computer which, as we saw with Google’s AlphaGo, can create a true force to be reckoned with. Dubbed, the “Fathom Neural Compute Stick”, the device has been designed to connect to existing systems and increase the performance of deep learning tasks by 20-30 times.
There have been many interesting hacks to increase the battery life of an iPhone since its release but hearing “light it on fire” has probably not been one of them. Lighting your phone on fire is still a terrible idea and should not be attempted to charge ANYTHING but a device called the FlameStower USB Fire Charger lets you harness humanities oldest discovery to power one of its newest inventions.
Printers, phones, laptops, even particularly high tech coffee makers. Everything in our daily lives has a network connection to the other devices around them. By utilizing this connectivity, the USB Network Gate allows you to connect to remote USB devices over the internet and local networks as if they were directly connected to your computer.
Smartphones are not in short supply when it comes to software gadgets. Rulers, levels, and calculators are great examples for the software, but hardware extensions to our powerful devices have been scarce in recent years. Android now offers a tool which utilizes the computation, camera, and display of a smartphone for an endoscope with incredible versatility.
