Month: August 2022

Enlarge (credit: P. Gyory et al., 2022)

What's a frustrated game designer to do when stuck at home during a global pandemic? If that designer is Peter Gyory, a graduate student at the University of Colorado, Boulder, you figure out how to make a game out of the piles of discarded cardboard lying around the house.

The result is Tinycade, created by Gyory and several colleagues at UCB's ATLAS Institute. All you need to make your own Tinycade game is some cardboard, a smartphone, two small mirrors, rubber bands, and toothpicks. "The restriction I gave myself was that if you couldn't go to the grocery store and buy it, I couldn't use it in Tinycade," said Gyory. He and his collaborators presented their work in June at the Association for Computing Machinery on Creativity and Cognition in Venice, Italy, with a paper published in the conference proceedings.

Gyory is part of a growing community of game developers interested in building Alt Ctrl (alternative controller) games, which employ novel physical interfaces for players. Hot Swap, for example, involves steering and managing the sails of a ship with individual inputs that must be swapped while playing. Octopad will turn a Nintendo Entertainment System controller into eight distinct parts, turning any game played on the system into "a real-time co-op strategy game," per the authors, while Cook Your Way "educates players on how the immigration process strips people of their culture with its faux kitchen controller, complete with a knife and pot."

Enlarge / AMD's EPYC server processors are benefitting from Intel's delays. (credit: AMD)

Earnings reports for tech companies this quarter have been mixed at best. Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, and others have managed to eke out a little growth, while the likes of Meta and Nintendo shrank a little, and most companies' projections for the next quarter are also less-than-optimistic.

One company that has been hit particularly hard is Intel, which saw its revenues decline from $19.6 billion in Q2 of 2021 to $15.3 billion in 2022. The company's earnings presentation (PDF) showed weakness across the board for a variety of reasons: weaker demand for consumer PCs, money invested in getting the Arc dedicated graphics products off the ground, and "competitive pressure" in the server CPU market.

That competitor is AMD, whose EPYC line of server processors was just one bright spot in a record quarter for the company. Revenue increased from $3.9 billion in Q2 of 2021 to $6.6 billion this year, with $673 million of that additional revenue coming from EPYC processor sales and the company's data center division. This is a big deal for AMD, which had some success with its Opteron server CPUs way back in the mid-2000s but had mostly ceded that ground to Intel throughout the 2010s.

Enlarge / The NROL-87 mission successfully launched on February 2, 2022, from Vandenberg Space Force Base on a Falcon 9 rocket. (credit: NRO)

A Russian Soyuz rocket launched from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome on Monday around midnight local time. The military mission's payload was classified but has been designated Kosmos 2558 for tracking purposes.

The Russian satellite has since been placed in a nearly circular, 435 km by 452 km orbit, with an inclination of 97.25 degrees. This is notable, satellite trackers say, because it will allow the Kosmos 2558 satellite to come very close to a recently launched US spy satellite, which was designated NROL-87.

This US national security payload was designed and built for the National Reconnaissance Agency and launched on February 2 into orbit by a Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

Enlarge / The Aztec canals at the floating gardens of Xochimilco, The land was constantly replenished with soil dredged from the bottom of the lake and is extremely fertile. (credit: Werner Farmer | Getty Images)

On the southern edge of Mexico City, on a patch of land surrounded by water, a farmer and a scientist recently inspected rows of small cubes of mud that had sprouted seedlings. They were crouching on a chinampa, an island that appears to float in Lake Xochimilco, part of a complex ecosystem where the Aztec Empire once flourished.

The farmer, Dionisio Eslava, expects a good harvest of the mix of crops he planted this year. On this spring day in May of last year, he showed the agricultural scientist, Carlos Sumano, the sowing cubes he created with mud he scooped up from the bottom of canals, a Mesoamerican farming technique called chapín. “They’re just about ready for transplanting,” said Eslava, carefully pulling a single cube from the ground and, after a closer look, returning it to its place with other chili pepper plants.

Eslava and Sumano are working together to preserve the region’s chinampas, remnants of the branch and reed rafts that Mesoamerican farmers covered in nutrient-rich lake mud to grow fruits, vegetables, and flowers. They are part of a conservation partnership that is tapping Indigenous agricultural knowledge and scientific expertise to prevent the demise of Xochimilco, an ecosystem of more than 6,000 acres of protected wetlands that provides multiple environmental benefits, including food production, groundwater recharge, and carbon sequestration.

Enlarge (credit: Samsung)

Hot on the heels of Google and iFixit launching a parts store about a month ago, Samsung and iFixit's self-repair program is now live, too. iFixit hosts an official Samsung parts store that Samsung says sells parts "at the same pricing offered to our affiliated repair providers."  The repair site now has a series of official repair guides written in the usual excellent style, and Samsung will start selling parts and iFixit tools in its retail locations.

The official repair program is a good start, but it's nowhere near comprehensive. Currently, the parts store ships to the US, and only the S21, S20, and Tab S7 series of devices are covered. With three sizes of each phone, that's support for seven models total. Samsung releases around 40 devices per year, so there's a long list of devices left unsupported. That list also doesn't include the latest flagship models, like the currently-in-production S22 phone and the S8 tablet.

The only way to get a display is to buy this combo package of the display, phone body, and battery. It's like half a phone! (credit: iFixit)

The store's official guides and parts only cover the back glass, charging port, and a combination "display assembly" that requires you to buy "the phone screen, metal frame, bezel, and battery" in one package. A comprehensive list would look like iFixit's unofficial iPhone store, which has around 30 individual parts. iFixit has 17 guides for something like the S21, but only three of them are flagged as "official."

Enlarge (credit: Juan Pablo Machado)

Who among us isn’t depressingly familiar with the constant tug of war between putting off tasks that require focus, and, like a moth to a flame, being drawn to distraction?

Sometimes we blame ourselves, cursing our tendency to procrastinate. But we should give ourselves a break. We’re living in an unprecedented age where billions of dollars have been made by machines designed to tempt us away from doing what we had planned to do.

These thoughts are hardly new. But something happened recently, which—ironically—has captured no small amount of attention and provided me with a glimmer of hope that the Internet that has rewired our minds could also be used to untangle them.