Owners of the smart glasses in France, Italy, Ireland, and Spain will get Meta AI features starting today, the company announced.
For now, Meta AI can answer general questions, but it won’t get multimodal features like using the Ray-Bans’ camera to tell you about things you see — the company has called the EU regulatory environment too “unpredictable” to do that right now.
If you thought step counting and activity tracking was a new-ish thing, apparently not! This excerpt from Numbered Lives: Life and Death in Quantum Media goes into how wealthy people in the 1800s used pedometers as a form of surveillance — tracking naughty spouses, and checking to see if soldiers were properly patrolling... or just taking a nap during the night shift.
[The MIT Press Reader]
Although Casio’s first wearable calculators debuted in 1980, its new lineup of calculator watches pay tribute to even older hardware. They’re styled after the Casio Mini, the company’s first personal calculator from 1972, and feature inverted LCD displays plus five years of battery life. They’re available now for $35.95 each in black, ivory, or blue green colorways.
Google just announced several new family-oriented features for its kids’ tracker. Chief among them, families can now have group chats in the Ace app, and siblings can annoy — er, constructively chat with — each other via text or calls on the wrist. There are also new Family Quests and a new game called Solar Sword.
November’s Pixel Watch update is here to address last month’s botched Wear OS 5 rollout for older devices, but the curious thing is the update note says the next one is months away:
Pixel Watch 1, Pixel Watch 2, and Pixel Watch 3 devices will receive the November 2024 software update, with the next update planned for March 2025.
It’s odd since Google generally pushes out an update every month. There’s also simply no reason given. Well, a lot can happen in four months.
I became so mired in the smart features, I forgot to walk.
Unsurprising. Oura also found that there was a 2.3 percent increase in stressed minutes, a 19.5 percent decrease in restorative time and heart rates were 3.7 percent higher.
My own Oura data shows that I had 4 hours 30 minutes of stress on election day and eight whole hours of stress processing the results yesterday.
