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"Sam, how many times do we have to tell you: Stop putting expensive VR equipment down your pants!" (credit: Sam Machkovech)

As much as we love the latest virtual reality rigs for Windows PCs, playing a game doesn't always feel realistic. The Oculus Rift and HTC Vive track head motion incredibly well, and the Vive adds solid hand tracking, but the rigs are bad at other things you'll want to do once you feel transported—particularly any movement beyond the size of your office or living room.

So far, the solutions to long-distance VR movement have left us a bit wanting. Pressing a control stick to virtually move while sitting still in real life usually results in instant nausea, so that's out. "Teleportation" systems let users point at a spot in the distance and automatically appear there, which works fine but feels a little limited, while giant walk-simulation treadmills are too expensive, hot, and bulky for realistic home use. The latest solution, introduced by a game maker out of Boston, is the most realistic-feeling yet—so long as you're fine with sticking a plastic controller down your pants.

Video edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

A British Airways A320 like this one reportedly struck a possible drone today at Heathrow, again raising concerns about consumer drone operators flouting regulations and endangering aircraft. (credit: British Airways)

Police at London's Heathrow Airport are investigating a possible drone collision with a British Airways jet while the airliner was landing. The pilot of the Airbus A320, carrying 132 passengers, reported that an object had struck the front of the aircraft around 1pm British Standard Time on Sunday.

The aircraft was inspected for damage by British Airways engineers and cleared for its next flight, an airline spokesperson told the BBC. Any damage done to the aircraft was apparently superficial. But the incident adds to fears, supported by recent aviation safety reports released by the British government, that consumer drones pose a danger to commercial aviation.

Flying a drone near an airport in the UK is already a crime punishable by up to five years in prison. And rules set by the UK's Civil Aviation Authority ban flying drones above 400 feet anywhere and flying drones out of a direct line-of-sight of the operator. The US has similar guidelines, with most metropolitan areas essentially designated as no-fly zones for drones because of how the Federal Aviation Administration defines airports—a definition that includes any hospital or building with a helicopter pad.

If you want a forecast for July, 2016, in Houston AccuWeather has one for you. (credit: AccuWeather)

The ability to throw more computer processing power at forecast models has substantially improved the ability of meteorologists to predict the weather. A recent analysis found that a modern five-day forecast is as accurate as three-day forecast was in 1995. In the last three decades, thanks largely to numerical weather prediction, the useful window of forecasting has moved out from about 7 days to 10 days.

Yet beyond 10 days, most meteorologists will say, there is little predictive skill. This is largely due to the "butterfly effect," in which only a very small change in initial conditions will have huge changes after about 10 days. However, in August of 2013, this basic mathematical principle didn't prevent AccuWeather from beginning to issue 45-day weather forecasts.

According to an analysis by the Capital Weather Gang, a widely respected site that forecasts conditions for around Washington DC, these 45-day forecasts showed no "skill" after about 10 days. "AccuWeather is a for-profit company and they have every right to pass off less-than-accurate forecasts as they wish, but the public deserves to know that these 45-day forecasts are not rooted in any science currently available to meteorologists and have not demonstrated value," the site concluded. "Caveat emptor."

Andrew Cunningham

OWC's Aura drive for newer MacBook Airs and Pros.

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MacBooks (and iBooks and PowerBooks before them) have never been renowned for their repairability, but post-2010 MacBook Air models have been particularly bad. RAM is soldered to the motherboard. Drives use proprietary connections. The Retina MacBook has no user-serviceable parts on the motherboard, which is so tightly integrated that it’s more like an iPad motherboard than a Mac.

There’s not much you can do about parts that are soldered to the motherboard, but when it comes to proprietary connectors, the folks at Other World Computing are pretty good about offering aftermarket upgrades. OWC’s Aura SSDs, launched last month, finally give owners of post-2013 MacBook Airs and Retina MacBook Pros a way to increase their internal storage, in some cases well beyond the capacities that Apple itself offered.

We got a 1TB drive in for testing and came away mostly impressed. The drive isn’t perfect, but it's a decent way to lengthen the life of your Mac and give yourself more storage space if you regret buying one with a 128GB or 256GB SSD.