Month: August 2016

Last year's Windows 10 release was unlike any Windows release I've ever used before, and I've used most of them.

Almost every Windows release to-date had a sort of unfinished vibe that reflects the product's history. Parts of the operating system developed long ago have almost fossilized, being preserved verbatim in each subsequent release. It gives the entire operating system an overall incomplete feel.

Take Control Panel as an example. The oldest parts of Control Panel use dialogs for each group of settings, as this mouse window exemplifies. Those tabs are extensible by third parties. That SetPoint Settings tab, for example, launches Logitech's mouse app for configuring the various buttons on my Performance MX mouse. New systems to this very day continue to use this extensibility; most Windows laptops will have a tab to configure their touchpad.

(credit: Lawrence Berkeley Labs)

On Monday morning, Tesla announced that it has come to an agreement with SolarCity. Tesla will buy the company in an all-stock deal that would give 0.11 shares of Tesla stock to investors for every share of SolarCity sick they own. The Wall Street Journal estimates this would make the deal worth $2.6 billion.

On a phone conference early this morning, Tesla CEO Elon Musk—who is also a chairman on SolarCity’s board and who is cousins with the SolarCity CEO, Lyndon Rive—said the deal would create a “stronger balance sheet” for both companies and allow the two businesses to build an integrated product that combines electric vehicle charging, solar power, energy storage, and installation and servicing of the whole system.

In a press release from Tesla, the company said that a merger could generate $150 million in “cost synergies” in the first full year after the deal closes. Executives from both Tesla and SolarCity said those synergies would come from decreased marketing expenses and the ability to leverage Tesla’s retail footprint by selling SolarCity panels in Tesla stores, as well as reducing the cost to service customers by consolidating service visits.

(credit: Sony)

If you see someone still playing on a PSP, chances are it's because it's been hacked to hell. Sony's trusty handheld might not have been the sales sensation the company had hoped for, but—despite its best efforts—the PSP became the handheld to own if you were into homebrew software or retro gaming thanks to the ease with which it was hacked, the quality of the hardware, and a steady stream of unofficial software and emulators.

There was hope that the follow up to the PSP, the PlayStation Vita, would be similarly hacked, the improved hardware and additional analogue stick allowing for the emulation of more sophisticated consoles. Unfortunately, the Vita has been a much tougher nut to crack. Despite some early efforts, the best anyone had come up with was an exploit that only worked on an older version of the Vita firmware, and that required it to be tethered to a PC—hardly ideal for a portable console.

Fortunately, some clever folks at the hacking collective Team Molecule have come up with a solution that fully unlocks the Vita hardware for homebrew developers. Dubbed HENkaku, the jailbreak exploit not only works on the latest 3.60 Vita firmware, it requires very little user intervention to execute. All you have to do is head over to the official HENkaku website on the Vita, tap on the install button, and then sit back and let the hack work its magic. The one drawback is that the jailbreak isn't permanent, so if the Vita is fully powered off it needs to be reinstalled.

(credit: YOSHIKAZU TSUNO/AFP/Getty Images)

Despite the popularity of Pokémon Go, the game is flaky at best. Numerous bugs and glitches not only make it difficult to find Pokémon—giving rise to Pokemon tracking sites like PokéVision—but also to play the game without it crashing periodically. Fortunately, developer Niantic has pushed out the first major update to Pokémon Go, one that promises to nix several of the smaller, more irritating bugs, as well as remove features that were causing players issues.

The most surprising change—particularly since Niantic has been trying to shut down sites like PokéVision—is the removal of the footprint feature, which was supposed to help players find pokémon by displaying a set of paw prints in the nearby pokémon tracker. Unfortunately, the feature never worked, and rather than hack a fix together, Niantic has pulled it completely. Whether it makes a return or not Niantic isn't saying, but hopefully something comes along to replace it: currently the only way to find pokémon is through blind luck, or word of mouth.

Indeed, numerous players took to Twitter and Reddit over the weekend to express their frustration with Niantic removing the three steps feature and shutting down Pokémon Go tracking sites, leaving them with no way of accurately tracking down the pokémon they need. That said, while PokéVision has been shut down, the similar Trackémon website is still up and showing the real-time location of Pokémon.