Month: July 2019

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  Since 1999, Hélicoptères de France has filmed the Tour de France. [credit: Tim De Waele | Getty Images ]

It's the time of year when the only bicycle race that most people pay attention to is at hand. The Tour de France began on July 6 and with it an intense competition that circles the country and ends in Paris with a yellow jersey presented to the winner. But for millions who watch it on TV, the race is secondary to the scenery. The Tour de France has been referred to as a travelogue for France, luring viewers worldwide with picturesque scenes of the French countryside and culture. The race began in 1903, and today the Tour is the third-largest sporting event in the world after the FIFA World Cup and the Olympics.

Many of the best views of the three-week-long competition come from video provided by helicopters that follow and shoot the action from overhead. Beyond the cyclists, the aircraft of Hélicoptères de France (HdF) capture jagged mountain slopes, ancient French castles, fields of sunflowers and the wide boulevards of Paris. Founded in 1991, HdF provides helicopter services from passenger transport and tours to cargo and medevac operations. But the company, which is based in the town of Tallard in southeastern France, is best known worldwide for its work as the official aerial film and support unit for the Tour de France, a status it has held since 1999.

Flying squirrels?

HdF uses a trio of AS355 and AS350 Écureuil (Squirrel) helicopters to film and relay live images of the Tour. Built by Eurocopter (now Airbus), the AS355 is a light, five-passenger helicopter powered by a pair of 566 shaft-horsepower (shp) Safran Arrius 1A1 turbine engines. The AS350 is basically the same helo with a single 732shp Safran Arriel 1D1 turbine. Écureuils are in civilian use around the world, including the US, and with numerous military/government operators.

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  Dragon Quest Builders 2 is a bigger and mostly better version of the original. [credit: Andrew Cunningham ]

The three-decade-old Dragon Quest franchise loves its traditions. While Final Fantasy has never been afraid to depart from its roots, there are big parts of Dragon Quest XI that are directly drawn from the very first Dragon Quest NES game from 1986.

So when 2016’s Dragon Quest Builders successfully combined the art, story, and general aesthetic with the open-world Lego-style building of Minecraft (itself seven years old at the time), it was paradoxically fresh. The games share exploration, crafting, and an intentional retro streak, and those elements formed the foundation of a short, sometimes limited, but ultimately entertaining game.

The game did well enough to make Dragon Quest Builders 2 a thing, and it’s a game that does what good sequels do. It gives you more of what its predecessor did well—both in that it is literally more content in the same style, but also in that the game is slightly larger and more ambitious in scope—while improving the core gameplay and jettisoning stuff that didn’t work. Builders 2 is fun enough, flexible enough, and charismatic enough to be fun even for people with zero knowledge of the source material.

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  The Galaxy Note 10. This is the smaller version. [credit: Ishan Agarwal ]

Samsung's next flagship, the Galaxy Note 10, is due out just a month from now, August 7. We've already seen interpretive renders from OnLeaks, but now thanks to two separate sources, WinFuture and Ishan Agarwal, we can get a look at Samsung's official press images for the Note 10.

It looks like the earlier renders from OnLeaks were spot on, with the official images showing the same very rectangular design, slim bezels, and centered, front-facing camera. These official images show us two color options so far: black and a shimmery "silver" color, which looks like it has a color-shift feature going on.

There are going to be two different sizes of the Galaxy Note this year, with the larger model called either "Plus" or "Pro." On the back of both devices you'll find a main camera module with three lenses, while the larger model has an extra depth-sensing camera setup on the back. The camera model protrudes a tiny bit out of the back of the phone, which is different from the earlier OnLeaks renders. There's no view of the bottom of the phone, but reportedly this will be Samsung's first flagship without a headphone jack.