Month: December 2019

Enlarge / Rene Auberjonois speaking at a fan convention. (credit: Steve Potter on Flickr)

Esteemed character actor Rene Auberjonois died in his home in Los Angeles on Sunday at the age of 79, The New York Times reports. The cause of death was lung cancer.

Auberjonois was a prolific actor whose 55-year career spanned well over 200 roles. To many, he was the shapeshifting security officer Odo from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. To others, he was Father John Mulcahy from M.A.S.H. or Clayton Endicott III from Benson. Others still may know him as Paul Lewiston from Boston Legal or as Dr. Burton from Batman Forever. Many more would recognize him from his numerous guest roles on TV series like Stargate SG-1, Madam Secretary, The Good Wife, Archer, Grey's Anatomy, Criminal Minds, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and many more.

He also played numerous roles in video games. He voiced Mr. House, a central character in 2010's Fallout: New Vegas. He also appeared as Karl Schafer in Uncharted 2, Talos in God of War, and Janos Audron in the Legacy of Kain series. Additionally, he was an acclaimed audiobook reader, and a regular performer on the theatre stage.

Enlarge / A member of the last tour group to leave the island, Michael Schade, took this photo and posted it on Twitter. (credit: Michael Schade)

Monday was a tragic day at New Zealand’s White Island, as the volcano that forms the popular tourist destination erupted. Of 23 people taken off the island after the eruption, five have died. About two dozen more were on the island at the time, but police have seen no signs of survivors.

White Island (also known as Whakaari) is located about 50 kilometers (30 miles) from the country's North Island and is the exposed summit of a stratovolcano that rises from the seafloor. Stratovolcanoes are prone to violent eruptions, as the chemistry of their magma makes it viscous, bottling up gas pressure.

New Zealand sits on a complex set of tectonic plate boundaries, including a subduction zone where the Pacific seafloor is colliding with and sliding beneath the North Island. Water released from the Pacific Plate deep below the surface allows mantle rock to melt, producing magma that rises up to fuel volcanoes like White Island.

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  This is the new Mac Pro. [credit: Samuel Axon ]

Apple has emailed its customers notifying them that its new Mac Pro desktop computer and accompanying Pro Display XDR will be available for order starting tomorrow, December 10. However, the company has not yet revealed when units would actually ship to buyers or any details about build-to-order configuration pricing. This news came around the same time that records of FCC approval of both tower and rack-mount configurations of the Mac Pro surfaced.

The Mac Pro is Apple's attempt to answer six years of complaints about the 2013 Mac Pro. The 2013 version was not as customizable as some users wanted and bet on a video architecture that did not pan out for segments of the computer's target audience, such as video production professionals. The new device is a sort of middle ground between the Mac towers of yore, which could house certain industry-standard components that users could select themselves, and the company's current focus on proprietary hardware. Users will be able to purchase modular upgrades made specifically for the Mac Pro, made by Apple and its partners.

The Pro comes with eight PCIe expansion slots and offers anywhere from eight to 28 cores, plus memory up to 1.5TB and 12 DIMM slots. Pricing starts at $5,999, but we'll have to wait until tomorrow to see how much various upgrades add to that price.

Enlarge / A man tests out a Hovertrax hoverboard produced by Razor at the International Toy Fair 2017 in Nuremberg, Germany, 01 January 2017. (credit: Getty | picture alliance)

An Alaskan dentist accused of fraudulently billing Medicaid and needlessly sedating patients was also found to have pulled a patient’s tooth while riding on a wheeled "hoverboard" scooter.

Dentist Seth Lookhart had the July 2016 hoverboard operation captured on video, which he shared with several people. He joked over text that it was a “new standard of care,” according to a lawsuit filed by the state of Alaska in 2017.

The footage—played in court last week and broadcast by Anchorage’s KTUU-TV—shows Lookhart standing over a sedated patient, swaying slightly on his hoverboard while extracting a tooth. Once done, he rolls out of the room, strips off his gloves, tosses them, and triumphantly throws both hands in the air as he zooms away down a hallway.

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  Let's fly through the skies with Oculus Quest hand tracking. (Be warned: this is a 360-degree video within a media app, not a hand-compatible VR game.) [credit: Oculus ]

Starting this week, the Oculus Quest VR headset becomes even more tantalizing by adding a feature we've never seen ship as a built-in option in a VR system: hand tracking. VR users will be able to put down their controllers and use their fingers to manipulate VR worlds, as tracked by Quest's array of built-in cameras.

The feature received a tease at October's Oculus Connect 6 conference and got an "early 2020" launch window from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. But someone on the Oculus engineering team clearly ignored Lord Zuck in getting this feature out the door a bit early, and it will land in an "experimental" tab in Quest's settings menus as a free update by week's end.

Today's news comes with two important asterisks. First, there's no fully fledged VR software available for the feature yet. At launch, the experimental feature will only work within Oculus Quest's root menu, which at least includes photo and multimedia viewing tabs. Within "a week" of the toggle going live, a Software Development Kit (SDK) for Quest hand tracking will go live for Oculus developers, which will allow them to tap into Oculus' hand-tracking system and potentially implement it in various games and apps.