In response to reviews of the Humane AI pin, which tries to do a lot of things and mostly fails at all of them, Harry McCracken pens an ode to a beloved gadget that does exactly one thing, but does it very well.
The Hue Sync TV app for Samsung QLED TVs — previously only available as a one hundred and thirty dollar single-TV unlock — is getting a $3/mo subscription option that works on up to three Samsung TVs. It’s also getting music sync and better SmartThings integration. The update rolls out in spring to 2024 TVs and later for 2022 and 2023 models.
Aftermath, the video games website, has published its first strategy guide: a dive into min-maxing your use of NYC’s bike share program, complete with fetch quests, rewards, and weird point multipliers. It’s good.
[aftermath.site]
I kinda love this not-Lego-brick model gaming rig, complete with build-it-yourself components including motherboard, RAM, “GeForce RTX” graphics card, power supply, and two SSDs. And RGB lighting, obviously.
There’s also a 90’s beige box PC kit with a tiny brick floppy drive and CD-ROM drive, as well as a little keyboard and mouse.
The $49 Video Game Module is a collab with Raspberry Pi that fits right on top of the Flipper Zero to combine all the features of that device with tilt controls, video out, and all the code you can run on an RP2040. It also works standalone.
Read the full announcement at the Flipper Zero blog. I can’t wait to see what neat uses people come up with for this thing.
Bard can generate images now, but Google might be playing it safe in light of recent events. When I asked it to “make a stop sign that reads ‘don’t stop’,” I got a lecture about safety. But it was perfectly happy to create the image if I asked in a slightly different way.
I just got my copy of Shift Happens, an absurdly overengineered, utterly lovely, two-volumes-and-change book by Marcin Wichary on the history of the keyboard. It’s astonishing.
A small number of extras will be available soon.
The Verge’s Jon Porter spoke to Wichary last February just as the book’s Kickstarter launched. Check it out.
Solar power feeding into the Texas energy grid set two records on January 28th. Production hit 15,222 MW at around 10am, and at 3:10pm, solar power met 36.1 percent of electricity demand, a new peak. Solar met around a third of overall demand every hour from 11am to 4pm.
This doesn’t even count rooftop solar. The sun, y’all!
[Texas Public Radio]
