Month: April 2022

Enlarge / BrightDrop made efficient use of GM's new electric vehicle platform, bringing the Zevo 600 from idea to reality in less than two years.

As new electric vehicles go, the BrightDrop Zevo 600 is pretty spartan. It has a full suite of the latest driver safety aids and a Google-powered infotainment system, but you can see bare metal skin when you look at the door from the driver's seat, and the innate quiet of its electric powertrain is offset by the ever-present clanking and banging from the rear roller door. But that's OK because the Zevo 600 is a commercial van, and that means being reliable, efficient, and safe is more important than being the last word in refinement.

We've followed BrightDrop's development for a while now. The startup first broke cover at the Consumer Electronics Show in 2021 through an announcement by General Motors' Mary Barra during her keynote at the conference. Making use of GM's new platform of batteries and electric motors, BrightDrop raced the new Hummer EV to be the fastest-developed vehicle in GM history at just 20 months.

As in the Hummer EV, you'll find a double-stacked slab of lithium-ion cells between the Zevo 600's wheelbase. In this case, there are 20 modules (versus 24 in the Hummer, or just 12 in the forthcoming Cadillac Lyric SUV), which is sufficient for a range of at least under 250 miles (402 km). And to prove it, the van drove from New York City to Washington, DC, on Thursday on a single charge.

Enlarge / The second generation Sonos Beam, which was introduced last year. It's slightly larger than the rumored cheaper cousin to come. (credit: Sonos)

Sonos smart speakers are known for their ease of use and audio quality, not their affordability. That's especially true for Sonos' home theater products like soundbars, which only address the midrange and high-end markets.

That's about to change, according to recent reporting by The Verge. The site claims to have seen photos of and gained access to information about a new soundbar codenamed the Sonos Fury, which has the model number S36. The new soundbar will retail for $249, according to the report.

There are still cheaper competing products from other brands, of course, but this would be Sonos' least expensive soundbar—the Beam retails for $449, and the Arc sells for $899.

Deep in the Amazon jungle, magnificent rocky tabletop towers rise abruptly from the foliage, often cloaked in thick clouds. They're called "tepuis" ("house of the gods"), and their plateaus, or mesas, are completely isolated from the forest below. That makes them a tantalizing potential source for exotic new species. National Geographic is marking Earth Day with the release of a new documentary, The Last Tepui, featuring renowned biologist Bruce Means teaming up with elite climber Alex Honnold and a veteran NatGeo team to become the first people to summit one of these remote structures.

(Some spoilers below.)

Anyone who has seen the Oscar-winning 2018 documentary Free Solo will be familiar with Honnold. He emerged seemingly out of nowhere in 2007 with a free solo climb of Astroman and the Rostrum in Yosemite National Park and soon became a dominant force in climbing. Free Solo documented Honnold's quest to become the first to complete a free solo climb of El Capitan—not without controversy, given the very real risk of Honnold dying in the attempt. (Spoiler alert: He survived, completing the climb in 3 hours and 56 minutes.)

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Andriy Onufriyenko)

The Federal Communications Commission unanimously voted to launch an inquiry into poorly designed wireless devices that receive transmissions from outside their allotted frequencies. The Notice of Inquiry (NOI) approved Thursday could result in new receiver regulations and is the first major step in the FCC's quest to prevent future conflicts like the high-profile battle between the aviation and cellular industries, in which a 5G rollout was delayed because airplane altimeters receive transmissions from the wrong spectrum band.

The FCC said it will "explore options for promoting improvements in radio frequency (RF) receiver performance, including through use of incentives, industry-led voluntary approaches, commission policy and guidance, or regulatory requirements." The inquiry will also "gather up-to-date information on receiver performance, advances in receiver technologies, and various approaches for promoting development and adoption of more interference-resilient receivers while fostering innovation in the marketplace."

In her statement before the vote, FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said, "Receivers that are not sufficiently resilient [to interference] can make it more difficult to introduce additional services in the same or adjacent airwaves [and thus] diminish the spectral environment and shut out new uses before they even begin."

Enlarge (credit: Framework)

We were fans of Framework's modular, upgradeable laptop when it was released last year, thanks to its nice design and user-replaceable RAM, SSD, and ports. Today the Framework folks are making it possible to buy the motherboard at the heart of the Framework laptop without buying any of the other laptop parts.

The base version of the board includes a Core i5-1135G7 CPU, to which you can add however much DDR4 RAM or M.2-based storage you want. A Core i7-1165G7 config will run you $549, while the top-end Core i7-1185G7 costs $799. Like the laptop, the motherboard is powered through its USB-C port, and you can add whatever additional port modules you like from Framework's Marketplace.

Framework has also released documentation and schematics on GitHub to help people design their own enclosures for the Framework motherboard and basic 3D-printable cases you can use to protect the board from the elements. One is a basic shell, and the other is a VESA-mount option for strapping the board to the back of a monitor or TV.

Enlarge / Welcome back. We've been expecting you.

Nine years ago, The Secret of Monkey Island creator and designer Ron Gilbert wrote a blog post laying out what he would do if he made another Monkey Island game. But now that Gilbert is actually working on Return to Monkey Island—his first work on the franchise in over three decades—he told Ars that the 2013 blog post seems like it was written by a completely different person.

"That article was just this weird stream of consciousness," Gilbert told Ars in a recent interview. "I don't remember the exact incident, but I remember I was feeling a little depressed that I wouldn't ever get to make another Monkey Island and that really kind of spawned that article."

"I think if I could redo that article, I would probably cage it a bit differently because these aren't things that absolutely will happen or absolutely things I'll do," Gilbert continued. "Anybody who's involved in any creative process knows that as soon as you start, everything changes. Coming up with ideas, you change the story, you change characters, you change puzzles. Everything is not written in stone."