Month: April 2021

Enlarge / Lifestyle photo of Fitbit Luxe. (credit: Fitbit)

Fitbit has just announced its first fashion-focused, bangle-style tracker—the Fitbit Luxe. True to its luxurious name, the stainless-steel Luxe will come in a $200 special edition, styled with Gorjana jewelry as its band (coming in June) but the $150 silicon band version is available for pre-order now.

Both will come with six months of the Fitbit Premium membership (usually $10 a month or $80 per year), which affords users some guided fitness programs, over 200 workout videos, deeper sleep analysis, about 60 nutrition articles and recipes, and other resources to learn about and improve health and wellness. Of course, getting people healthier has always been the name of the game for Fitbit, so with the Luxe, the company is attempting to strike a better balance between style, price, and casual activity tracking.

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  The Fitbit Luxe is the company's jewelry-inspired fitness tracker.

Sporting an OLED color touchscreen, the Luxe is the company’s first fitness band, not smartwatch, to add this bit of flair and functionality. You can swipe through your latest activity metrics, notifications from your phone (you can receive texts, calls, emails, etc. but cannot reply to them on the band), stress stats, menstrual cycle information, or do guided breath work and start tracking a workout.

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  You'll need Chrome Canary to check out Memories—and you'll need to enable an optional flag as well. [credit: Jim Salter ]

Google seems to be working on a UI revamp for the traditional browser history interface, which it's calling "Memories." The new feature is only available in Chrome Canary, and it's hidden even there behind a developer flag that defaults to "off."

If you have a copy of Canary installed and want to check out Memories, the first place you need to go is chrome://flags/#memories. Once you've enabled the Memories flag, you'll be prompted to relaunch Canary, after which you can see the actual interface at chrome://memories/.

The new interface is clearly still in an alpha state, with a non-functional hamburger menu on individual entries, broken thumbnails, and so forth. But it's functional enough to give us a general idea of what it's all about—basically, replacing History's simple row-based, item-by-item log view with a card-based interface that groups activities by time blocks. This design also collapses repeated activity on a single page in a short time frame into single entries.

Enlarge (credit: Samsung)

Samsung is finally starting to support eSIM in the US. XDA Developers reports the first working combo is the Galaxy Note 20 and Note 20 Ultra on T-Mobile. You'll need an update to enable the feature, but then you'll be able to throw off the shackles of your ancient plastic SIM card. Samsung flagships began shipping with eSIM starting with the Galaxy S20 in March 2020, but it never got US carrier support. With T-Mobile now supporting the Note 20, hopefully other carriers and models will follow suit.

Samsung has been pretty slow on the eSIM uptake overall. The world's first eSIM phone was the Google Pixel 2, which launched in 2017 and was quickly supported on Google Fi. Apple started supporting eSIM with the iPhone XS in 2018, and carriers quickly enabled support.

eSIM removes the need for plastic, physical SIM cards that link your phone to your phone bill and get you up and running on the cellular network. Physical SIM cards are one of the many ways carriers cling to outdated technology. In order to be identified for service, carriers demand we reserve space in our phones for a 12x9 mm plastic card that holds 256KB of information. This might have sounded like a good idea in the '90s when carriers cooked up the SIM card standard. But today, when a similarly sized (15x11 mm) MicroSD card can hold 1TB of data—or about 4.2 million times more data—SIM cards seem laughably out of date.

Enlarge / An Atlas V rocket launches in December 2012. (credit: United Launch Alliance)

Amazon announced on Monday that its first Project Kuiper satellites will launch into low Earth orbit on an Atlas V rocket.

The announcement provides concrete evidence that the ambitious Internet-from-space project is making progress. It is also notable for the choice of launch vehicle—Amazon is not employing the New Glenn rocket, which is under development by Jeff Bezos' rocket company, Blue Origin.

Amazon did not say when the first launch will occur, but the company said it had contracted with United Launch Alliance for nine launches to begin building out its constellation of 3,236 satellites in low Earth orbit. A spokesman declined to say how many of the satellites each Atlas V rocket would be capable of launching.

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Open a can of mixed nuts, and chances are you'll find a bunch of Brazil nuts topping the heap—whether that's a good or bad thing depends on how you feel about Brazil nuts. It's such a common phenomenon that it's known as the "Brazil nut effect" (though muesli mix also gives rise to the same dynamics of granular convection). Now, on video for the first time, a team of scientists from the University of Manchester in England has captured the complicated dynamics that cause the Brazil nut effect, according to a new paper published in the journal Scientific Reports.

From a physics standpoint, those mixed nuts are an example of a granular material, like a sand pile. As I wrote at Gizmodo back in 2016, the primary mechanisms behind the Brazil nut effect are percolation and convection. Percolation causes smaller grains to move through larger grains to the bottom of the pile, while convection pushes the larger grains toward the top. Complicating matters is gravity, pulling down on every grain, as well as the fact that every individual grain is jostling against all the others in the container, producing friction and mechanical energy (lost as heat).

Enlarge / A prototype SX Core device soldered to a Nintendo Switch motherboard. (credit: Team Xeceuter)

Months after his arrest on 11 felony counts last year, Nintendo has filed a civil lawsuit against Gary "GaryOPA" Bowser, the leader of notorious Switch hacking group Team Xecuter, in a Seattle federal court.

The suit (as obtained by Polygon) seeks significant monetary damages and disgorgement of all profits from Team Xecuter's sale of the piracy-enabling SX OS software and a line of hardware devices that use various exploits to install the OS on Switch units. The suit alleges that "at one point, the SX OS was pre-installed on 89% of modded/hacked Nintendo Switch products available for sale," though the suit doesn't provide a source for that number.

The lawsuit calls out Bowser as "one of only a handful of key members of Team Xecuter," and it quotes Ars' own assessment (without credit) that Bowser is "the closest thing to a public face for the team of coders and foreign manufacturers that made up the [Team Xecuter] supply chain." In promoting and selling SX OS, Bowser "worked with a network of developers; established a distribution chain of resellers, testers, and websites; and designed the marketing and content of other public-facing websites for Team Xecuter," the suit alleges.