Month: November 2016

Fresh off the launch of the Google Pixel, the new Google Hardware division is back with its second product: Google Home, a voice command appliance and Google Cast-enabled speaker. There is basically no interface at all to this product—it's all voice commands, all the time. I hope you like speaking to your electronics.

Google started its voice recognition journey all the way back in 2007 with "Goog-411," a completely automated phone number lookup service run over a 1-800 number. The human-powered 411 services offered by carriers would apply extra charges to your phone bill, but Google 411 was completely free. Google's goal wasn't to make money on the project, it just wanted to gather as much human speech as possible to build its speech recognition algorithms. Almost 10 years later, the company is finally ready to build a product that completely revolves around voice commands. Google Home is the "Star Trek Computer" the company has always talks about building—at least, it's version 0.1.

Video shot/edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

As the holiday season approaches, many companies are coming out with new fitness trackers and smartwatches in the hopes that you'll give them or get them to help with new year's resolutions. Huawei is one of those companies looking to capitalize on the season—aside from its Android Wear smartwatch, the Chinese manufacturer hasn't come out with a fitness device since its TalkBand series. The $130 Huawei Fit is its answer to the Fitbits, Garmins, and other trackers saturating the mid-range space.

Despite its a circular, watch-like look, the Fit is mostly an activity tracker, though it can still receive smartphone notifications. Huawei checked off all the necessary boxes that would make a fitness tracker capable at this price: it tracks steps, calories, distance, and sleep. It also has continuous heart rate tracking via an optical heart rate monitor, and well as call, text, and some app alerts in addition to connected GPS. Huawei developed the heart rate monitor in the Fit rather than outsourcing from another company, and it's quite accurate. Most of the time, it was within 5 bpm of the Apple Watch Series 2's readings.

Enlarge / From A to Z, as it were. This was fun. I liked making this. (credit: 20th Century Fox)

Here at Ars, we're always making lists (just like Liam Neeson). Lists of science fiction movies are a common item for discussion on the Ars staff Slack channel—particularly short lists of the best science fiction movies ever made. But "best" is an impossible word to quantify in any broadly applicable way—one person's "best ever" might be another person's worst, especially in a genre of movies as rich and varied as science fiction.

While the Ars staff has some bitter disagreements on which movies are better than others, it's undeniable that some science fiction movies are mandatory viewing for the modern geek. To that end, rather than try to pull together another tired "top ten sci-fi movies" listicle, we've instead polled the Ars staff to try to come up with a definitive "science fiction bucket list"—that is, a list of sci-fi movies that you should absolutely see at least once before you die. They aren't necessarily the "best" movies by any specific set of criteria, but every film on this list is outstanding in some particular way. Some were groundbreaking in their stories or subject matter, some were controversial, and some contained a character or plot twist that went on to become an archetype, referenced in and reused by countless other films. Some films on the list, like Fritz Lang's Metropolis, are pure cinematic poetry; others, like Pacific Rim, are pure popcorn fun. And, as a bonus, we even included a bonus list of a few absolutely terrible stinkers at the very bottom.

Strap in, dear reader, and pick through the Ars Technica sci-fi bucket list. Each staffer contributed a movie or two to the list, so we've captured a pretty broad range of must-see films. We're sure many folks are going to disagree over our choices—this is the Internet, after all, and arguments on the Internet about science fiction have been going on since the 1970s!—so you're welcome to tell us all of the movies we should have included but didn't down in the comments.