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.
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.
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.
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.
While there has been a recent push for more customizable mobile phones, most carriers offer a fairly limited of variety in the hardware customers can receive. There isn’t much a user can purchase to make their iPhone battery last longer, but the SanDisk iXpand flash drive is coming up strong as a compact solution to make the standard 16GB iPhone a little less standard.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The obvious size discrepancy and the not so obvious set of protocol difference between SD memory and a standard disk drive has made it difficult to utilize SD cards as a primary or even secondary storage space on a standard computer. Fortunately, converters to bridge the gap between these two types of memory have become smaller and faster to finally utilize a set of SD cards as a SATA SSD.
The 10 x Micro SD to SATA converter utilizes a RAID 0 level which increases system performance, read speeds, and write speeds. RAID setups link multiple storage mediums together for better results and hardware RAID does not use the host computer’s CPU to function. Available for $64.00, this converter is an excellent way to take advantage of the speed of Micro SD cards for a desktop.
