As the pandemic enters its third year with cases and hospitalizations as high as ever, fresh data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reminds us that we already had a long track record of failing to manage our health.
The latest data from a decades-long health survey finds that—yet again—the vast majority of Americans have a poor diet and many of us are inactive. Specifically, just 10 percent of Americans eat enough vegetables, and only 12 percent eat enough fruit, according to recent responses to the CDC's survey, the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance system. Recent responses also reveal that 25 percent of Americans don't do any exercise outside of any work activity.
A poor diet and inactivity can both set people up for medical conditions, such as weak immune function, obesity, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and certain cancers, the CDC notes.
Bandai Namco, publisher of the Dark Souls role-playing game series, has taken down its player-versus-player servers while it investigates reports of a serious vulnerability that allows players to execute malicious code on the PCs of fellow players.
Word of the critical remote-code-execution flaw emerged over the weekend in Reddit threads here and here. An exploit that hit a user named The_Grim_Sleeper was captured in a video stream posted over the weekend. Starting around 1:20:22, the user’s game crashed, and a robotic voice mocked his gameplay and maturity level.
“What the fuck,” The_Grim_Sleeper said in response. “My game just crashed, and immediately Powershell opened up and started narrating a fucking” screed. “I didn’t even know that shit was possible.”
AT&T has started offering 2Gbps and 5Gbps symmetrical Internet speeds over its fiber-to-the-home network, the telecom company announced today. The multi-gigabit speeds are available to "nearly 5.2 million customer locations in parts of more than 70 metro areas, such as LA, Atlanta, and Dallas," AT&T said.
AT&T is charging $110 per month plus taxes for its 2Gbps home-Internet plan and $180 per month plus taxes for the 5Gbps home-Internet plan. Business fiber prices are $225 per month for 2Gbps and $395 for 5Gbps. Base prices for other fiber home-Internet plans are $55 for 300Mbps, $65 for 500Mbps, and $80 for 1Gbps. The fine print notes that a "$99 installation fee may apply."
AT&T imposes data caps on lower-end home-Internet plans but provides unlimited data on tiers with speeds of 100Mbps and above. AT&T's announcement said its new fiber plans have "no equipment fees, no annual contract, no data caps, and no price increase at 12 months." The 1Gbps and multi-gigabit plans also include HBO Max access.
Devs must update existing games to utilize handy new Dynamic Cloud Sync feature.
Enlarge/ Steam Deck's head is in the clouds—and thanks to Dynamic Cloud Sync, that's a good thing. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)
As Valve's first portable PC, the Steam Deck, approaches its estimated February launch, the back-end work to translate third-party PC games to a Switch-like form factor has ramped up considerably. While we expected to see the Steam ecosystem get updates for things like improved Linux support and Deck-compatible store flags, a surprise Monday announcement confirmed a cool feature that nobody necessarily saw coming: a major change to Steam's support for save files in the cloud.
Dynamic Cloud Sync is now live on Steam, and it's a first for any gaming platform currently in operation. It appears to be inspired by a specific use case: playing your favorite PC game on the go via the Steam Deck, then resuming that same game later on your home PC. That concept sounds well and good, but in practice, it requires the logistical step of making sure your game is saved and then uploading that save to the cloud. The idea of tapping through menus, saving, quitting, and watching your device upload a save to the cloud isn't necessarily compatible with the pick-up-and-go nature of a portable console.
In a statement on its official Steam Community site, Valve all but called out the Nintendo Switch by name in addressing this issue:
SCOBY-based membranes are more effective than commercial ones at preventing biofilms.
Enlarge/ Close-up of fresh SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast) used in kombucha. (credit: Whitepointer/Getty Images)
The refreshing kombucha tea that's all the rage these days among certain global demographics might also hold the key to affordable, environmentally sustainable living membranes for water filtration, according to a recent paper published in the American Chemical Society journal ACS ES&T Water. Experiments by researchers at Montana Technological University (MTU) and Arizona State University (ASU) showed that membranes grown from kombucha cultures were better at preventing the formation of biofilms—a significant challenge in water filtration—than current commercial membranes.
As we've reported previously, you need three basic ingredients to make kombucha. Just combine tea and sugar with a kombucha culture known as a SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast). The culture is also known as the "mother," tea mushroom, tea fungus, or Manchurian mushroom. (Kombucha tea is believed to have originated in Manchuria, China, or possibly Russia.)
Whatever you call it, it's basically akin to a sourdough starter. A SCOBY is a firm, gel-like collection of cellulose fiber (biofilm), courtesy of the active bacteria in the culture creating the perfect breeding ground for yeast and bacteria. Dissolve the sugar in non-chlorinated boiling water, then steep some tea leaves of your choice in the hot sugar-water before discarding them.
Back in November, the Zelda Reverse Engineering Team announced that it had completed its months-long project of decompiling The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time's ROM into fully human-readable C code. Now, a group building on that work says it is nearing the release of a fully moddable PC port of the game.
The Harbour Masters coding team (which shares some members with but is separate from the Zelda RET project) says its porting project is currently about 90 percent complete. The project will hopefully be ready for release as a public repository by late February, lead developer Kenix told Ars Technica. But while the massive project of decompiling the game provides a good base, getting from C code to a fully functional PC version of Nintendo's 1998 classic isn't simply a matter of telling a compiler to "build for PC."
Actors and assets
When the Harbour Masters began to work in earnest on the PC port in December, Kenix said they "started by removing all of the actors [e.g., interactive objects like enemies, signposts, and bombable walls] and a lot of the game's systems to simplify the build process and what needs to be changed to get it to load." Those actors and systems were slowly added back once other problems with asset loading had been handled. "This gave us great results after only a few hours of work due to what we learned on the 'minibuild,'" Kenix said.
When the Microsoft Surface Duo dual-screen smartphone first launched the streets in September 2020, the phone shipped with Google Android 10 and some custom Microsoft software designed to make the operating system more dual-screen friendly. When Microsoft unveiled the Surface Duo 2 a year later, it was running Android 11. At the time, Microsoft said […]
When the Microsoft Surface Duo dual-screen smartphone first launched the streets in September 2020, the phone shipped with Google Android 10 and some custom Microsoft software designed to make the operating system more dual-screen friendly. When Microsoft unveiled the Surface Duo 2 a year later, it was running Android 11.
At the time, Microsoft said it would also make an Android 11 update available for the first-gen Surface Duo by the end of 2021. That didn’t quite happen, but Microsoft is only a few weeks late: the company released the update today. Along with a major OS update, it brings some new features and behavior changes to the Surface Duo.
While Microsoft didn’t roll out an Android 11 update for the Surface Duo in 2021 as originally promised, it’s here now, bringing a major Android update plus device-specific features including UI tweaks, app launching preferences and more. Here’s a hands-on video from the folks at Windows Central:
It looks like Lenovo has more than one gaming smartphone on the way. According to Evan Blass, the one code-named Halo will have a design that doesn’t scream “gamer,” but premium specs including an FHD+ pOLED 144 Hz display, up to 16GBRAM and 256GB of UFS 3.1 storage, a 5K battery, triple cameras (50MP, 13MP, and 2MP), and a Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 processor. It’s expected to ship in the third quarter of the year. Lenovo also has a Legion Duel follow-up code-named “Diablo in the works. That’s likely the model known in China as the Legion Y70.
Here’s a brief history of why it took so long to develop a viable color E Ink display for consumer devices, how it finally happened, why it still has some limitations, and what’s next.
Walkthrough for installing and configuring Windows on a OnePlus 6T smartphone, allowing you to dual boot Android and Windows on the 2018 phone with a Snapdragon 845 processor.
When the Microsoft Surface Duo dual-screen smartphone first launched the streets in September 2020, the phone shipped with Google Android 10 and some custom Microsoft software designed to make the operating system more dual-screen friendly. When Microsoft unveiled the Surface Duo 2 a year later, it was running Android 11. At the time, Microsoft said […]
When the Microsoft Surface Duo dual-screen smartphone first launched the streets in September 2020, the phone shipped with Google Android 10 and some custom Microsoft software designed to make the operating system more dual-screen friendly. When Microsoft unveiled the Surface Duo 2 a year later, it was running Android 11.
At the time, Microsoft said it would also make an Android 11 update available for the first-gen Surface Duo by the end of 2021. That didn’t quite happen, but Microsoft is only a few weeks late: the company released the update today. Along with a major OS update, it brings some new features and behavior changes to the Surface Duo.
While Microsoft didn’t roll out an Android 11 update for the Surface Duo in 2021 as originally promised, it’s here now, bringing a major Android update plus device-specific features including UI tweaks, app launching preferences and more. Here’s a hands-on video from the folks at Windows Central:
It looks like Lenovo has more than one gaming smartphone on the way. According to Evan Blass, the one code-named Halo will have a design that doesn’t scream “gamer,” but premium specs including an FHD+ pOLED 144 Hz display, up to 16GBRAM and 256GB of UFS 3.1 storage, a 5K battery, triple cameras (50MP, 13MP, and 2MP), and a Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 processor. It’s expected to ship in the third quarter of the year. Lenovo also has a Legion Duel follow-up code-named “Diablo in the works. That’s likely the model known in China as the Legion Y70.
Here’s a brief history of why it took so long to develop a viable color E Ink display for consumer devices, how it finally happened, why it still has some limitations, and what’s next.
Walkthrough for installing and configuring Windows on a OnePlus 6T smartphone, allowing you to dual boot Android and Windows on the 2018 phone with a Snapdragon 845 processor.
Google’s Chromecast devices have been offering a small, affordable, and simple way to stream media content to televisions since the first model was introduced in 2013. But Google shook things up a bit in 2020 by launching Chromecast with Google TV – it was the company’s first media streamer to come with a remote rather […]
Google’s Chromecast devices have been offering a small, affordable, and simple way to stream media content to televisions since the first model was introduced in 2013. But Google shook things up a bit in 2020 by launching Chromecast with Google TV – it was the company’s first media streamer to come with a remote rather than relying on your phone or other device for controls. And it brought the brand new Google TV user interface.
At $50, the Chromecast with Google TV is still a reasonably affordable way to stream internet video to a TV. But at a time when Amazon, Roku, Walmart, and others are all offering models that cost half as much, it looks like Google is preparing a more affordable option.
Keep in mind that nothing is official until Google actually launches the product. It’s possible that the information may be inaccurate or just premature – even if Google is planning to launch a lower-cost Chromecast, that doesn’t mean the company will actually do it. That said, here’s what Roettgers has found out about the new device so far:
It’s code-named “Boreal,” but the actual name could be something like “Chromecast HD with Google TV.”
Boreal is expected to have an Amlogic S805X2 processor with ARM Mali-G31 graphics, 2GB of RAM (or less).
It would support the AV1 video codec, but top out at 1080p video resolutions streaming at up to 60 frames per second.
By comparison, the $50 Chromecast with Google TV (which was code-named “Sabrina” before launch) can handle 4K/60 fps video playback, but it doesn’t support hardware-accelerated AV1 video decoding. Google seems to have recently begun adding a 4K label to the packaging this model comes in, which could help differentiate it from an upcoming 1080p or HD model.
There’s no word on when Google plans to launch the new, cheaper model although likely possibilities could include the company’s annual Google I/O developer conference (which typically takes place in May) or fall hardware launch event (which is usually in October) although it’s also possible that the company could introduce the new model at pretty much any random time, since it doesn’t seem like a major update to the company’s hardware lineup.
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