Author: Lee Hutchinson

Enlarge / "Asari? I'm sorry, too!" (credit: Electronic Arts / Bioware)

The Internet was abuzz with rumor and speculation prior to today’s Sony PlayStation 4 event that BioWare might sneak in with some surprise information about the next game in the Mass Effect series, Mass Effect: Andromeda. Since formally announcing the game way back at E3 2015, Bioware has played things very close to the vest—in spite of a few teases since, there are few concrete details on the game’s plot or the characters.

The rumors proved right: BioWare General Manager Aaryn Flynn took the stage and showed us a three-minute video that included a bit of gameplay and a bit of exploration—in addition to announcing that the game will take advantage of the Playstation Pro's 4K and HDR capabilities (as will FIFA 17 and Battlefield One). "You'll be totally immersed in Andromeda," he said to the crowd, "discovering all new alien worlds, brought to life with sharper graphics and high dynamic range lighting. We're also able to create more lifelike characters, which will continue to allow you to experience the best stories you can play."

We already know that Mass Effect: Andromeda takes place in the Helios Cluster, a region of space located in the distant Andromeda galaxy. The game breaks from previous Mass Effect titles and features a whole new cast of humans and aliens. Based on tweets and other hints, the humans in the new cast of characters appear to be part of a family with the surname "Ryder," with the story (possibly) centering around the young woman shown in the 2016 E3 trailer.

(credit: Synology)

Storage vendor Synology this morning announced the availability of two additions to its rack-mounted storage appliance line-up: the 1U RS816, which has room for four internal disks, and the 2U RS3617xs, with 12 internal drive bays and up to 36 disks with additional enclosures.

Although it has been a while since we last did a review, Synology’s network attached storage (NAS) devices are pretty popular with Ars staff and readers. But these new rackmount offerings are meant for data centers, not home server closets—not unless you’re the kind of person with a 19" rack at home (and we know you folks are out there!). The 1U RS816 has a Marvel Armada dual-core CPU and a gigabyte of RAM on board, as well as a pair of gigabit Ethernet ports; the bigger RS3617xs uses a quad-core Intel Xeon E3-1230v2 CPU and comes with 4GB of ECC RAM and four gigabit Ethernet ports. The RS3617xs also has a pair of PCIe 3.0 8-lane slots which can each be filled by a 10Gbps Ethernet card.

On the low end, the RS816 lets you chop up your disks into a number of different redundancy schemes, including RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, and 10, and also Synology’s proprietary Synology Hybrid RAID containerized format (which lets you mix and match different sized disks without sacrificing as much space as with standard RAID layouts). The bigger RES3617xs doesn’t support Synology Hybrid RAID, but it does let you format its disks with the next-gen btrfs file system, which carries a number of advantages over the default ext4 file system.

It’s been two years since we took our first sip of Soylent (which means it’s been two years since a few thousand people started following me on Twitter because I talked about farts). The liquid food product has been through a bunch of iterations since, including a premixed variant, but it’s remained essentially the same product: a beige liquid of indeterminate taste that purports to give your body everything it needs to survive. But today, Soylent founder Rob Rhinehart announced that the company is moving in a new direction: breakfast.

This morning’s announcement marks the release of Coffiest, Soylent’s first spin-off product. The new offering has the same ingredient makeup, nutritional mix, and 47/33/20 percent fat/carb/protein calorie distribution as the 2.0 premixed version, but it also adds coffee flavoring, 150mg of caffeine per serving, and 75mg of the nootropic L-theanine. According to Rhinehart, a bottle of Coffiest supplies the drinker with about 400 kilocalories and about 20 percent of the daily recommended values for "all essential vitamins and minerals." Soylent provided us with a copy of the drink's nutritional information sheet for folks who want to take a peek.

"A lot of people are skipping breakfast," Rhinehart told Ars in a phone interview. "We wanted to provide a convenient and also really tasty option for them to enjoy in the morning."

Enlarge / Slaw Device RX Viper pedals, serial number 0002, w/ personalized "AD ASTRA" engraved plate. There aren't many like it, and this one is mine. (credit: Lee Hutchinson)

Last year I spent more money than I ever thought I’d spend on a peripheral to import a set of Slaw Device BF109 flight sim pedals. The pedals, when they arrived, weren’t just functional—they were beautiful. Powder-coated aluminum struts, shiny chrome nut-and-bolt accents, those artfully skeletonized foot stirrups—the device was undeniably the work of a skilled craftsman, and the pedals played as good as they look. From space to sky, from Elite: Dangerous to DCS World, they’ve kicked up my immersion and provided smooth, jitter-free rudder control. I thought I’d be happy with them forever.

Forever, as it turns out, lasts about 16 months. One fine May afternoon some new pedals caught my eye, and my BF109s suddenly looked old and busted. I saw unforgivable flaws where before I'd seen none—the old bumper-arm mechanism wasn’t nearly as smooth as a rolling cam would be, and the foot-in-stirrup position couldn’t be nearly as comfortable as foot-on-floor! And, oooh, look at the colors! The new ones come in colors!

And now I’m $693 poorer. But, man, my flight sim pedals—let me show you them!

Enlarge (credit: /u/TheZ1mb1nator)

Space flight sim Elite: Dangerous has been officially available on PC for about 19 months (and on Xbox One for about nine), but players have still explored only a vanishingly small fraction of the game’s 400,000,000 suns. Frontier Developments has repeatedly said that there are plenty of strange things out in the galaxy that no one has yet found—though one of those mysteries might soon be coming to a head.

Strange objects called "unknown artifacts" have been showing up in the game for months, all appearing as a rough sphere a bit more than 100 light years in diameter surrounding a particular star system: Merope. The artifacts would transmit strange messages to ships that got close enough to scan them. Sleuthy players eventually decoded the signals, revealing them to be encoded wireframe images of the players’ ships. The unknown artifacts also seemed to cause problems when collected by players—shutting down systems and even disabling entire space stations if sold on those stations’ black markets.

Call of the wild

Now, a second class of unknown objects, called "unknown probes," have recently been spotted. These appear to point at a particular planet in the Merope system, Merope 5C. Further, the probes exhibit some remarkable behavior when players scan them with system discovery scanners:

Enlarge (credit: Lee Hutchinson)

Back in May, networking OEM Ubiquiti announced its new Ubiquiti Labs division and that division’s first product: a home mesh Wi-Fi system called Amplifi. With Amplifi, Ubiquiti intends to stretch its reach out of SMB/enterprise "lite" networking and into home territory—and not just the homes of crazies like me, either. Amplifi is targeted at the plug-and-play crowd for whom a single, central Wi-Fi base station doesn’t quite cut the mustard. It’s a market squarely occupied by Eero, Luma, and a few other players—home mesh Wi-Fi, where you throw down a few devices and every nook and cranny of your home gets solid coverage (in theory, at least).

Ubiquiti sent Ars a preproduction Amplifi unit last week, and I’ve spent the weekend getting some initial impressions. This isn’t going to be an exhaustive review, since I’ve only had a few days with the system, but my impressions so far are generally positive.

Specs at a glance: Ubiquiti Labs Amplifi
	Standard	LR	HD
Wi-Fi standards (base/mesh)	802.11b/g/a/n/ac 802.11b/g/a/n	802.11b/g/a/n/ac 802.11b/g/a/n	802.11b/g/a/n/ac 802.11b/g/a/n/ac
Max TX power (base/mesh)	24 dBm 22 dBm	26 dBm 24 dBm	26 dBm 26 dBm
Radios (base/mesh)	4 4	4 4	6 6
MIMO chains (base)	10	10	18
MIMO (mesh)	2x2	2x2	3x3
Wi-Fi antennas (base)	3x (dual-band)
Max coverage	10,000 sqft (930 m2)	20,000 sqft (1,860 m2)	20,000 sqft (1,860 m2)
Ethernet interfaces	1x GbE WAN, 4x GbE LAN
CPU	Qualcomm Atheros QCA956X
RAM	128 MB
Dimensions	99.5mm x 97.8mm x 99.6mm base 46mm x 195.7mm x 27mm mesh points (ea)
Weight	410g base 205g mesh points (ea)
Price	$199	$299	$349
Release date	July 20 (North America)

The quick takeaway

The Amplifi system isn't something I’d buy for myself, but it is something I’d happily buy for my parents, who have a large home thanks to Houston’s absurdly cheap housing market and struggle to get solid Wi-Fi coverage throughout. Amplifi doesn’t support several features that I depend on (especially WPA2 Enterprise for 802.1X), but setup is painless, reasonably quick, and the handoff between the various mesh components works seamlessly. It's also a competent router with an actual firewall (the device runs BusyBox and uses iptables under the hood). And, if you already have a router you're happy with, it can function as a pure Wi-Fi access point and mesh network.

Though the feature wasn’t mentioned in Apple’s WWDC 2016 keynote, I’m most excited about the introduction of the Apple File System, or APFS. The preliminary version of the developer documentation is online now, and it looks like the new file system introduces a whole boat-load of solid features—including a few out of the ZFS playbook.

APFS looks to be a major update over Apple’s old and creaky HFS+ file system, which has been around in one form or another for decades. It's been the subject of expansions and additions over the years, but HFS+ never approached the extensibility and flexibility of current next-generation file systems. Rather than continuing to bolt stuff onto the old code, we now (finally!) get a new file system that has some truly compelling features.

First, the caveats

But before we get into the good stuff, let’s real quick talk about the bad stuff—or, at least, the "this is still in development so here’s what doesn’t quite work" stuff. Apple’s documentation notes that because APFS is still a developer preview, you cannot use an APFS volume as a startup disk. You also can’t use it as a Time Machine volume or part of a Fusion Drive configuration, nor can you use File Vault encryption on it.

Now that the WWDC keynote is over, Apple has published the names of the developer sessions to attendees at the conference. Previously masked by placeholder names, there are a bunch of events that folks can now plan on attending—including, apparently, a session discussing Apple's new file system for macOS.

Dubbed APFS, for "Apple File System," the session description implies that the new file system is a replacement for the aged HFS+ file system, which has been used in one form or another by OS X since its launch back in 2001. We're pretty light on details at this point, but the session description says that APFS is designed from the ground up to be optimized for use on SSDs and other flash-based media, and that it was "engineered with encryption as a primary feature."

We don't know if the new file system is Apple's own creation or if it's an adaptation from an existing journaled, encrypted file system. OS X (now macOS) power users have long had hopes that ZFS will take over as Apple's primary desktop file system—and, indeed, for a while it looked like that's what was going to happen. With the introduction being made here at WWDC, it's very likely this is an Apple original.

As has become tradition at WWDC, Apple has announced the next version of its Mac operating system: Sierra. Of course, the real change is that, after fifteen years, Apple has finally ditched the "OS X" moniker. All things old are new again, and the new operating system will simply be called "macOS." We don't yet know if Sierra carries a "10.12" version number, but with developers getting their hands on the OS later today, we should soon have that question answered.

Apple's Craig Federighi ran through a whole bunch of new features to be included in the revised operating system. He started by mentioning Continuity and Auto-Unlock, which now combine to let you seamlessly unlock a desktop or laptop Mac merely by bringing your Apple Watch close, using what Federighi described as "time-of-flight networking" to detect the watch's proximity. It was unclear from the presentation whether or not this feature is an Apple Watch exclusive; Federighi did not explicitly say that Auto-Unlock would work with iOS devices.

Another Continuity-based feature showing up in Sierra is Universal Clipboard, which answers a longstanding complaint of Mac and iOS users. Copying and pasting now works automatically between an iOS device and a desktop Mac device. This appears to be a bidirectional service; you can copy an item to your iOS clipboard and see it on the desktop, and vice versa.

My ship is docked at one end of an abandoned space station, and I’m staring intently at a flickering schematic view of the facility. Jill, one of my three squatty remote maintenance drones, is funneling energy into a power inlet so I can operate a few doors. Twiki is gathering scrap in what looks like an abandoned corridor—scrap I desperately need in order to repair my ship’s video system, which has been on the fritz. Ron is carefully scanning rooms for hidden materials for Twiki to gather up.

The situation is tense but manageable. This outpost showed an unknown infestation type, but I’m being careful, closing doors behind my drones, making sure to not leave a drone for too long in a room with a vent—because things can crawl out of vents.

Without warning, a door flashes red. "DOOR 22 IS BEING ATTACKED" appears on the console. It’s the door to the room where Jill is powering the ship, and I quickly decide it’s time to get the hell out.