Month: June 2023

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  The Motorola Hotspot. It connects to the satellite network and has Bluetooth. That's it.

If you're still jealous of the iPhone 14's ability to do satellite messaging, Motorola has a Bluetooth accessory that will help you feel less left out. The Motorola Defy Satellite Link is officially for sale today, following its announcement in February. This is basically a satellite messaging hotspot—it's a box with Bluetooth, a battery, and a chip that will give you a satellite connection. You pair your phone to it, run the app, and you can start firing text messages into outer space. The hotspot is $150 and will work today on Android and iOS devices in the US.

The iPhone 14 made satellite messaging the hot new thing when it was announced last year, and competitors are just starting to appear. The big difference between Motorola's hotspot and an iPhone (and the reason why you might want Motorola's option even if you have an iPhone 14) is that the iPhone 14 only sends a specially crafted SOS message to emergency services—a keyboard is not involved in the process at all, it's just for emergency usage. The Motorola hotspot is not just for emergencies. It does full-blown messaging, where you can type whatever message you want to whoever you want, but via a satellite instead of the usual cellular network.

Motorola's messaging service works just like SMS, but it can only be delivered to other people running the special Bullitt Satellite Messenger app. The service will do SMS forwarding, though, so if you punch in a random number, that person will receive a message prompting them to download the Bullitt app so they can talk to you. It's probably best to set this up with someone beforehand, but it sounds like a great way to communicate when you're off the grid.

Enlarge / Blocks ahoy! (credit: Vince Weaver)

Nearly 30 years after its release on the Mac in 1993, Cyan's Myst is still as unstoppable as ever. As one of the most successful (yet sometimes divisive) computer games of all time, it sold 6 million boxed copies in the 1990s and later ended up on over a dozen platforms, with remakes counting for even more appearances, including a VR version. Now, thanks to an unofficial hobby project by Vince Weaver, Myst can add one more platform to the list: Atari 2600.

Vince Weaver is an associate professor at the University of Maine in Computer Engineering. Since last year, he has been working on a partial "demake" of the famous point-and-click adventure game that runs on Atari's 8-bit game system, and he just returned to the project to make updates last week.

For those not in the gaming community, the term "demake" might need some unpacking. A demake is essentially the opposite of a remake: instead of upgrading a game to fit modern standards, a demake takes a modern or classic game and adapts it for older, less powerful hardware.

Enlarge / A swimmer in the men's 200 meter breaststroke finals during a national championship competition on August 6, 2011, in Palo Alto, California. (credit: Getty | Brian Bahr)

Several college swim teams learned a stomach-churning lesson the hard way during a recent series of meets: regardless of skill or speed, the real winner of the meet will always be the gastrointestinal pathogen that enters the pool.

In an outbreak investigation that is destined to become a nauseating cautionary tale, health officials traced the spread of the water-based intestinal parasite Cryptosporidium (aka crypto) through several pools of competitive swimmers with the squirts. The case involved a lucky break: Health officials fished out the crypto rather quickly. But, it wasn't fast enough to keep the parasite from butterflying its way to members of another college's team, showing how quickly and easily it could have spread without intervention

It also highlighted "an ongoing need to promote healthy swimming, including recommendations for persons not to swim if they have diarrhea and to avoid swallowing swimming pool water to prevent waterborne disease," the authors of a case report on the investigation wrote. The report, led by health officials in Massachusetts, was published Thursday in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.