Month: February 2024

Enlarge (credit: Floogle/X)

Nintendo has made some bold, weird choices with its hardware designs. But none were so bold and weird as 1995's Virtual Boy, a "woefully premature commercial curio," as one Ars writer put it, that "quickly passed unlamented into history," as remarked another. The awkward red-on-black tabletop headset system wasn't so much ahead of its time as beamed in from an alternate reality. In this reality, it didn't sell much and was largely forgotten.

Nintendo has seemed eager to let the Virtual Boy fade from the collective memory, but clever coders have labored to keep the system accessible outside vintage hardware collections. The latest, and perhaps most accessible, is Red Viper, which plays Virtual Boy games on a (lightly hacked) Nintendo 3DS, the other Nintendo system on which 3D features were underappreciated. It is full-speed, it supports homebrew games, you can change the drawing color to something other than red, and it is free. It's built on top of the work of earlier 3DS emulator r3dragon, which itself drew heavily from the Reality Boy project for Windows.

Red Viper makes use of the 3DS's top screen for game display and turns the lower screen into a system options panel. It maps the Virtual Boy's own face buttons onto the touchscreen. In the Twitter thread announcing Red Viper's general release, coder Floogle notes that the emulator is only roughly translating the Virtual Boy's 50 Hz refresh to the 3DS' 60 Hz by pushing a frame every 20 ms. There is, Floogle supposes, some hardware headroom for improvement.

Enlarge (credit: South_agency)

Earlier this month, the US Department of Energy (DOE) announced its intention to gather basic information about the energy consumed by bitcoin mining. In making the decision, the DOE noted that the share of bitcoin mining happening in the US has shot up by a factor of over 10 just within the last three years, leaving the activity consuming as much electricity as a fairly populous state.

To understand what this means for the US grid and its reliability, the DOE planned to gather information from large bitcoin mining operations within the US. But that plan has now been put on hold by a judge, who issued a restraining order against the DOE in response to a lawsuit filed by miners. In the decision, the judge suggested that bitcoin miners' issues with the plan were likely to see it permanently blocked.

Mining suit

While it's theoretically possible to mine bitcoin only during periods where production of renewable energy exceeds demand, doing so would leave a lot of hardware idle most days. In making its decision to monitor these operations, the DOE also gathered evidence that showed mining operations had inflated demand for power from a number of fossil fuel plants and were thus either competing with other users of that power or causing unnecessary carbon emissions. Both of those issues are within the DOE's purview.

Enlarge / The Fire OS home screen advertising Ford. (credit: Bodhi Wire/YouTube)

Amazon has issued an update to Fire TV streaming devices and televisions that has broken apps that let users bypass the Fire OS home screen. The tech giant claims that its latest Fire OS update is about security but has refused to detail any potential security concerns.

Users and app developers have reported that numerous apps that used to work with Fire TV devices for years have suddenly stopped working. As first reported by AFTVnews, the update has made apps unable to establish local Android Debug Bridge (ADB) connections and, therefore, execute ADB commands with Fire TV devices. The update, Fire OS 7.6.6.9, affects several Fire OS-based TVs, including models from TCL, Toshiba, Hisense, and Amazon’s own Fire TV Omni QLED Series. Other devices running the update include Amazon’s first Fire TV Stick 4K Max, the 3rd-gen Fire TV Stick, as well as the 3rd and 2nd-generation Fire TV Cubes and the Fire TV Stick Lite.

A code excerpt shared with AFTVnews by what the publication described as an “affected app developer," which you can view here, shows a line of code indicating that Fire TVs would not be allowed to make ADB connections with a local device or app. As pointed out by AFTVnews, such apps have been used by Fire TV modders for abilities like clearing installed apps’ cache and using a different home screen than the Fire OS default. Other uses include advanced tweaks, like console emulators, as How-To Geek noted.

Enlarge / The Galaxy Ring. It's shiny. (credit: Samsung)

Samsung's big item at Mobile World Congress is the odd little "Galaxy Ring," a fitness and health-tracking device shrunk down into a tiny, finger-worn circle. There are fitness rings out there already, like the Oura Ring and a few others, but this is the first one from one of the world's largest tech companies. Samsung already teased this device last month at the Galaxy S24 launch, and what we're getting at MWC are renders, brief glimpses of prototypes, and a few scraps of information.

What can you say about the design of the Galaxy Ring? It's a circle. Samsung's primary color has a shiny metal outside (the colors are not finalized yet) and what looks like a black plastic interior for the ring, which is packed full of sensors. Fitting health-tracking sensors, a battery, CPU, and Bluetooth into a ring form factor is a huge challenge, so it's no surprise that the whole contraption is thicker and wider than a jewelry ring would normally be.

Like all smart rings, the Galaxy Ring is bigger than a normal piece of jewelry. (credit: Samsung)

We don't have a comprehensive list of features, battery size, or other specs right now, but The Verge spoke to Samsung and says the ring can at least track "sleep, activity, resting heart rate, and heart rate variability" and includes period and fertility tracking. All of this data will be built into the Galaxy Health app. The Verge couldn't get a battery-life estimate out of Samsung, but Korean site FNNews was told the ring would last "about 5 to 9 days" before needing to be charged.

Enlarge / A photo of "Willy's Chocolate Experience" (inset), which did not match AI-generated promises, shown in the background. (credit: Stuart Sinclair)

On Saturday, event organizers shut down a Glasgow-based "Willy's Chocolate Experience" after customers complained that the unofficial Wonka-inspired event, which took place in a sparsely decorated venue, did not match the lush AI-generated images listed on its official website (archive here). According to Sky News, police were called to the event, and "advice was given."

"What an absolute shambles of an event," wrote Stuart Sinclar on Facebook after paying 35 pounds per ticket for himself and his kids. "Took 2 minutes to get through to then see a queue of people surrounding the guy running it complaining ... The kids received 2 jelly babies and a quarter of a can of Barrs limeade."

The Willy's Chocolate Experience website, which promises "a journey filled with wondrous creations and enchanting surprises at every turn," features five AI-generated images (likely created with OpenAI's DALL-E 3) that evoke a candy-filled fantasy wonderland inspired by the Willy Wonka universe and the recent Wonka film. But in reality, Sinclair was met with a nearly empty location with a few underwhelming decorations and a tiny bouncy castle. In one photo shared by Sinclair, a rainbow arch leads to a single yellow gummy bear and gum drop sitting on a bare concrete floor.