Month: July 2018

Enlarge / This electric double-decker bus from Alexander Dennis and Proterra will be put into service with Foothills Transit by 2019. (credit: Alexander Dennis)

On Thursday, a Los Angeles county transit agency purchased the first all-electric double-decker bus in North America. The bus will be made with batteries from electric bus designer Proterra, and the carriage of the bus will be designed by Alexander Dennis, the company that supplies double-decker buses in London, Hong Kong, Auckland, Singapore, Toronto, Ottawa, Seattle, and Mexico City.

Buses are prime candidates for electrification: their diesel counterparts are considerably polluting, and buses travel extremely predictable routes at relatively low overall speeds, so range anxiety can be eliminated with route planning and heavier, more powerful batteries. Proterra has been making electric bus batteries for years, and the company recently broke a record for electric buses by traveling 1,101.2 miles on a single charge.

Apple

Today, Apple begins shipping the new 2018 refresh of the 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Pro. The new machines are not major redesigns, but they offer configurations with 8th-generation Intel processors and more cores than before—a maximum of six cores on the 15-inch model (compared to four in last year's models) and four in the 13-inch model (compared to two). That means faster performance for many use cases. Maximum SSD capacity is also doubled, and the MacBook Pro line offers DDR4 RAM for the first time.

The laptops also borrow some features from the iMac Pro and the iPad Pro—the T2 chip and True Tone, respectively—and feature a revised butterfly keyboard, the third generation of the design Apple introduced in 2016 (the revision is a little more significant this time around). Apart from those tweaks to the keyboard, the basic design of the MacBook Pro is unchanged.

Enlarge / Say hello to Nintendo's weirdest and possibly most limited classic-mini release yet: the Shonen Jump 50th Anniversary Famicom Classic Mini. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

The collectability of Nintendo's "classic mini" consoles cannot be overstated. Even after restocking the NES Classic Edition's original, limited supply this year, the company has barely been able to keep up with demand for both its NES- and SNES-flavored dips back into the nostalgia pool, in the West or elsewhere.

But if you thought those systems were limited and coveted enough, you ain't seen nothing. This week, Nintendo went one further by releasing a special-colored, new-games version of one of these systems, designed and marketed specifically for fans of Japanese Shonen Jump manga series like Dragon Ball, Captain Tsubasa, and Fist of the North Star.

Shortly before Amazon Japan sold out of its allocation on Sunday morning, we slammed down $87 USD and placed an order to see what the Shonen Jump 50th Anniversary Famicom Classic Mini was all about. We quickly learned that this official Nintendo product is far from a slapdash release with a logo painted on.

Enlarge (credit: David Precious / Flickr)

More than 30 months after surfacing, a tech-support scam targeting Dell computer owners continues to raise questions about how the callers know sensitive information, including PC serial numbers and the names, phone numbers, and email addresses customers gave to the PC maker.

Most tech-support scams are opportunistic. A caller falsely claims she’s calling from Microsoft to warn of a serious, non-existent problem with a person’s Windows computer, even when the person happens to own only a Mac. The goal of the call is to trick the mark into purchasing software or technical support to fix the issue or to install software that gives the caller remote control over the computer. These types of rackets have been targeting owners of Windows computers from a variety of sellers for years.

A scam targeting Dell customers, by contrast, uses sensitive details tied to their specific PC purchase, including the PC model, service tag number, and the contact information the customers provided at the time they made the purchase. Armed with those details, the caller has a much better chance of tricking the person into thinking the call is legitimate and, from there, ceding control of the computer or coughing up hundreds of dollars in fraudulent support costs.