Month: April 2018

Enlarge (credit: Lucasfilm)

If you're one of those people who must not know a single detail about the Solo movie before seeing it, DO NOT READ THIS POST. It briefly discusses the trailer, and you may learn something about the plot or casting of the film you did not wish to know. Then again, if you are that sensitive to spoilers ruining your cinematic experience, you should not even have clicked this post to watch the trailer in the first place.

On Sunday night, Disney dropped a new trailer for the forthcoming Han Solo biopic Solo. Set years before we meet the galaxy's most irrepressible smuggler in A New Hope, it will be the second non-trilogy (or non-nonology, if we're being accurate) movie set in the Star Wars* universe, following the smash hit Rogue One from 2016. Free of the restraining bolt that is the main franchise and the main plot thread it drags along, these (sort of) standalone movies give Disney the chance to tell slightly different stories in the Star Wars universe. Rogue One mixed elements of espionage thrillers and gritty war movies; Solo looks set to mix up westerns and the good old heist caper.

The new trailer gives us a better look at how Han Solo is played by Alden Ehrenreich, who managed to hold his own in the Coen Brother's red scare Hail, Caesar! The journey from bright-eyed pilot to scruffy looking nerf-herder looks like it happens on a number of different worlds, and I'm pretty sure it involves a robbery on the kind of weird-looking train that only makes practical sense in the Star Wars universe.

Apple

Red joins gold, silver, and space gray in the color lineup for Apple's iPhone 8 and 8 Plus. Today, the company announced new Product Red special editions of two of its iPhones, both of which will be available for preorder starting tomorrow, April 10, and widely available online and in stores on Friday, April 13.

The Product Red iPhone 8 and 8 Plus have the same specs as regular models, including Apple's A11 Bionic chip, dual camera setup with Portrait Lighting mode, and wireless charging. But they both now have that signature red case that has appeared on iPhones and other Apple products since 2006.

"SpaceX main body tool for the BFR interplanetary spaceship." (credit: Elon Musk/Instagram)

Elon Musk has been talking about SpaceX's large BFR rocket for a few years, but so far we've seen precious little hardware. In 2016, Musk showed off a large, composite fuel tank that will contain pressurized liquid oxygen. The company has also shared limited video of the rocket's Raptor engines.

Now, as SpaceX moves forward with a facility to manufacture the rocket in Long Beach, Calif., we probably will see more hardware associated with the BFR—known as the Big Falcon Rocket in polite circles. To that end, on Sunday night, Musk shared a photo of a tooling that will be used to make carbon-fiber composites for the rocket's upper stage, the spaceship. This appears to be a mandrel, or mold, around which carbon fiber is wound for the main body of the spaceship, or BFS.

Carbon fibers, which are generally woven into a fabric, possess desirable qualities such as high tensile strength, low mass, high temperature tolerance, and low thermal expansion. Using carbon-fiber composites instead of aluminum to manufacture tanks for a rocket booster allows a manufacturer to save tons of mass, and in a rocket as large as the BFR, that will translate into many fewer tons.

HP

Acer ushered in the "Chromebook tablet" era with its Chromebook Tab 10 slab last month, and HP wasted no time entering the new space. The company announced the Chromebook x2, a Chrome OS detachable with a keyboard and Wacom AES stylus that isn't meant to be confined to the classroom. While Acer's tablet is meant for education and commercial customers, HP's Chromebook x2 was made with regular customers in mind, particularly those who are attracted to the versatility and efficiency of Chrome OS.

The Chromebook x2's specs immediately differentiate it from Acer's device: it runs on a 7th-gen Y-series Intel processor, 4GB of RAM (and supports up to 8GB), and 32GB of storage that can be expanded to 256GB through the microSD card slot. Designed with a similar size to HP's other "x2" detatchables, the Chromebook x2 has a 12.3-inch 2400x1600 IPS display that supports touch and pen input, and it has a 5MP WideVision camera and a 13MP rear-facing camera. It has two USB Type-C ports in addition to the microSD card slot and the standard audio in/out jack, and its 48Wh (watt-hour) battery is estimated to last 10.5 hours on a single charge.