Could have been my phone. Does it switch screens automatically? Also they have scheduled races, I need to try that. For Zwift : you could mention Zwiftpower to keep track of your race results. Let us help answer the Rouvy question for you! It felt weird so changed it back and slogged on pedalling squares! Nope, not in my laptop windows 10 app. I go into training mode and I cannot adjust the reality level in in-ride setting.
Hey Dave! Oddly, if i run the program on my andoid tablet, it picks up every sensor on or near the bike. You can find all the different versions of FulGaz and their download links here link to fulgaz. GC is probably more geared towards folks that want to dive into every detail of the workout and do deep analysis of your metrics. PerfPro is a bit more stripped down, but it comes with a metric shit-ton of workouts to choose from. Yup, I agree that for the core ERG-style functionality, those two are great.
Or you can create your own. Hi Great write-up. I just started using Xert and love it. The way Xert constantly adjust and the way it make you work hard for that next breakthought effort. With Xert you dont need to do that dreaded 20 min. FTP test. Xert calculate your FTP from all you rides and pretty accurate. I then did a FTP test and it was within 1 watt of what Xert had calculated. I use the Tacx app exclusively for ad hoc workouts.
Basically my coach creates workouts for me to do. It was great because it used to allow you to make quick changes to power through the app. But they cut that feature out in the new version.
It sounds like trainer road has this kind of ad hoc feature. Is it also easy to adjust power. Do you have subscription numbers for Trainer Road and the rest of the bunch? If this past week is any indication, I think the future is super bright for a number of apps.
And I think the next month or so will cement long-term interest. I tink RGT is probably the best example of that. When I first started taking screenshots for this 10 days ago, I was seeing barely a dozen users in RGT at any point in the day, on any given course. Yesterday, mid-afternoon EU time, as I was grabbing a few missing screenshots, the numbers per course were riders. Same goes for apps like Rouvy and others that show user counts per course — huge jumps from my initial screenshots last week to my clean-up round of screenshots yesterday.
Bkool is next behind them pretty closely, and then Sufferfest after that a bit back. Beyond that the numbers are significantly smaller. Good to hear that other platforms are doing well, too. As almost always, variety is a good thing for us as customers. I kinda feared Zwift might be on the way to take a lot of air out of the market.
Based on his podcast appearance, it sounded like Jan Frodeno was confident there was a future for Zwift Running. As an investor she should probably know about their plans? I want to give my money to Trainerroad, the depth of product is amazing and the podcast is genuinely funny as well as informative. I think the team listened to those people who, during early Zwift, were just banging on about real climbs etc a bit too much.
Additionally the workout function is a bit clunky with you needing to go through a 3rd party. Apps among just about everything in life is about compromises.
We need to look at our desires and needs, compare those to the available options, and pick the one that seems to meet those best. So, setting relative priorities is essential and people should choose based on those.
This option saves the time of having to manually upload your workouts into Rouvy to ride them on your smart trainer. Thanks for the update. What would be nice is a sort of App comparison guide like you do for Product hardware. This way you could pick say Sufferfest and Kinomap and do a direct feature by feature comparison between the two. Its a mind-boggling and rapidly developing environment that could benefit from community input. And short courses can loop e. I think many of us are spending multiple hours trying to figure this stuff out yet for most apps there are insufficient discussion boards out there.
Plus a few of the apps have limited customer support. Perhaps it could be a Supporter only feature?? Thanks so much for that great review of The Sufferfest, Ray. So pleased you enjoyed it and, yes, you really should spend more time in Sufferlandria.
More on that here: link to thesufferfest. Ah, those platforms are like my holy grail or something. Without going into details, we keep getting thrown off track by other, unexpected issues. In the meantime: parts of our app are now available on the web e. I just want to give a shout-out to you and to The Sufferfest in general. I use it exclusively and love it. Thank you, so much. Keep up the great work! Excellent review. One of the things that the review does not cover in detail is the community aspects of app.
As someone who uses the Sufferfest, the online community that mostly congregates on FB, is one of the most valuable and supportive aspects of the app. The spirit, encouragement, and support that come from the community is really incredible especially around the time they do the Tour of Sufferlandia.
Great for those that do, though. Additionally, the online Facebook group is simply awesome. I left Zwift two months Ago, lever looked back. I have been a user of The Sufferfest for a decade and a seasonal user of Rouvy for two years. I also have tried RGT in its early iteration but gave up when it required two devices to run and while TrainerRoad is excellent for what it is I find the chart format not very motivating..
Zwift is not for everyone and I am one of those. Plus there are separate videos the Open series, for example that are very good for recovery. I like that the Sufferfest videos can be minimized so that you can do your workout while watching something else like live coverage of races back when we had that sort of thing! With everything The Sufferfest offers—videos, training plans, yoga, strength training and even mental training—it is an excellent value.
For days when I just want to ride and look at scenery, I enjoy using Rouvy. There are regular challenges to motivate you. The video varies a bit in quality but has improved greatly in the last year. I use Zwift and Rouvy and also have Fulgaz. I use a Windows laptop so Fulgaz is having difficulty staying connected although I need to try again. I like Rouvy as it allows me to travel around the world including places I have traveled.
The only issue I have is with the Augmented…the cartoon rider goes at FTP pace…I do not always want to ride that hard. I dumped it a while back and I lost all my levels so having to start over.
It has been a bit boring being limited in course selection in Watopia until I get my levels up…. Hey Chris, did you cancel your account or delete it? If you just canceled, all of your levels and progress should remain.
Pretty comprehensive! Also, I never talk about the Sufferfest because, well, I race. It was honestly one of the biggest draws to me when choosing a platform. Love the detailed write up. For what its worth I have been a TR sub for over 3 years now and just love it. The team, forums, calendar, workout builder, podcast and community are top notch. If you want to get faster it will do that for sure. For others that want something with a little more interaction zwift group rides are a lot of fun and Fulgaz works well.
What about CVRCade, is it still not ready for primetime? I see bloggers mentionning it sometime…. Fun to virtually ride along a marathon course, to see it from a different perspective. Things stretch out, rinse, repeat. I use Garmin, Trainpeaks, Strava, and Zwift. However, I run outdoors so my Garmin updates Training Peaks as well and my bike rides are doubling up and possibly messing up my fitness level in Training Peaks.
Wish I could limit the garmin upload to Training Peaks to run only. Not sure how many other apps that Speed Transmitter works with? Great post, Ray. I can understand how it took so long, but well worth it. Both are fantastic apps, and work well although pairing with Zwift is easier on the companion app than my Mac. I agree that Sufferfest is always hard, and have to psyche myself up before a workout, so Zwift is good to just ride on.
Cheers and stay safe. Hi — Has anyone outside China managed to pay for the subscription to One-Lap? I would like to give it a go I am in the UK. But if you were using a setup like mine, with a wheel-on tacx vortex and vector 3 pedals, would you still disable it? Where I think it makes sense is on very inaccurate trainers. Nice write-up. I still flick between Zwift and TrainerRoad depending on mood, having tried most of them.
Just for info, Kinomap is very unhappy about connecting to Tacx trainers using Bluetooth. So FTMS support is kinda funny these days. Tacx has had the equiv for their trainers, inclusive of the NEO, for years too. And every app I know of has adopted it. No beta firmware for me there. Are any of the new apps able to provide this same functionality i.
Most underappreciated feature of Zwift is the seamless integration with TrainingPeaks. My coach puts a structured workout into TP, and it shows up that day for me to do in Zwift without me doing a thing.
You mention TP integration with Rouvy. I assume that works the same way, but the integration in Zwift is pretty much the single biggest reason that I continue to use it as opposed to TR which seems, in part, to want to be a competitor to TrainingPeaks.
Great — and timely — review, much appreciated. Uniquely, you can add strength straining, yoga and mental toughness some at various levels to your training plan. This feature allows tremendous variety among the rides since many can be adapted to a specific prescription.
Awesome review. I too mainly use TR for last 4 years. Tried sufferfest but novality wore off on me. Think seasoned athletes like just plans and target. Follow the numbers. I just watch Netflix or YouTube on trainer. Thanks again Andrew. Great reviews and very timely!
As always, very detailed information on each app. But because I prefer riding outside, the simulators and virtual apps held little interest for me. Obviously that has changed. I can imagine that it is very difficult to cover every aspect of a particular app adequately. And that 4DP test can seem really daunting. I have viewed it like taking a final exam, with my results forever shaping my destiny.
Additionally, I treated as workout of immeasurable agony. Of course, it is neither of those. It has only 27 minutes of intense intervals. Treating it as just another workout has solved the dread of riding it. As a fellow numbers geek, my last Full Frontal test had an IF of. I used rouvy, liked some of the rides. A bit of a pain. Next I guess is kinomap. Question to anyone. If you are just the normal recreational rider, no coach, no plan, just want to ride beautiful scenic rides that does well simulating those rides on my trainer, which is the best platform for that?
Kinomap rouvy? Be sure to take full advantage of the search function! In addition to the map search, you can also find routes by filtering through classifications such as the average grade, distance, or total ascent. That search is easily accessible through the website. Hi Ray — awesome review, as always. Great to hear you have a Peloton bike — I look forward to the review. One datapoint for your review — with the current CV situation, Peloton usage has boomed and nearly everybody is getting bad buffering problems.
The Peloton IOS app has a class preload feature for times when you may have no internet access. That feature is not available on the bike — but it needs to be. It would be a quick and easy fix to this annoying problem which is making the bike app almost unusable. The FB page is absolutely lit up with complaints. Regarding Tacx App…. Yeah, lots of options once you get the file.
The way the. Same goes for any time bias, definitely on the app itself. I get my Peloton data into TP via Strava and Tapiriik — it kinda works sync is usually immediate but sometimes takes hours! But if you know a better way, please share! You can look at the ZwiftPower history and there have been events in the last 7 days. So just over per day. Started writing this about two weeks ago.
Will update. Amazing write up as always. If I have them all set to share with each other I get duplicate rides in both Garmin and Strava. Yeah, I know, stupid. Any ideas? Thanks Ray.
Always enjoy your insight. I have been on the fence regarding TrainerRoad for a while now. Just tried Fulgaz today. I like it! Bkool is really frustrating — so much functionality hidden behind a complex and confusing interface — well, interfaces. Do you have any thoughts on which of these would be best without any internet connection for multiple week periods?
Whereas most other video apps have no real dependencies on sync, except for getting a completed workout to 3rd party apps like Strava. So FulGaz, Kinomap, Rouvy, etc… all support pre-caching the videos. Hi Ross — Our app needs access to the internet for a few functions like training plans and to download videos.
Because its unreadable by the vast majority of Westerners?? I searched for 20 minutes and could not find any translation. After installing a fresh Windows 10 and updating to the latest patch, I find that Fulgaz crashes ignominiously moments after starting. I did half of one ride, stopped after an hour. Went back to finish it another day, which it gave me option to do — except it recorded total miles for the second session as if I started from the beginning 34 miles instead of 18 miles.
Did another ride today Cap Formentor — after the initial climb, during the descent the power reading was stuck at W. Had to quit it and restart the ride — doing that climb all over again — but then this time the app would no longer display total feet climbed nor the average power output. It did let me finish the ride — but then when I tried to end it the app blinked out — have no idea whether it will save the ride and send me the.
FIT file for records. With Rouvy, try riding some of the AR routes to feel more realistic incline ramps. Hyundai also wants to play in the world of hydrogen vehicles, though it is wisely focusing on freight movement rather than personal-use vehicles.
But that's a different story altogether. What matters now is understanding how Hyundai became a force to be reckoned with in this all-important, high-stakes battle. Stanford engineers Alex Kolchinski, Alex Gruebele and Max Perham paired up with Michelin-star chef Eric Minnich to start Mezli , a company building fully autonomous modular restaurants. TechCrunch reports: Mezli's prototype robot restaurant is making a minority of the bowls served to customers and is supplemented by a human-powered kitchen.
It is up and running and serving customers from the company's KitchenTown location in San Mateo. The machines take up a foot by foot space and are freestanding. They are loaded with ingredients, initially offering Mediterranean-style grain bowls, side dishes and drinks. Diners can order directly from the restaurant or order online and pick up the food or have it delivered.
The company is now working on its third version of its prototype that will be ready for a public launch next year, he said. That new funding will enable the company to add more talent, parts, food and operational expenses. Once the company can scale, Mezli will be able to mass produce thousands of the modular restaurants and deploy them in a fraction of the time and money it takes for traditional restaurants to get up and running, Kolchinski added.
Researchers from the University of Southampton "have developed a fast and energy-efficient laser-writing method for producing high-density nanostructures in silica glass," reports Optica. The size, orientation, and position in three dimensions of the dots gives you the five "dimensions" used to encode data. Researchers say that a 5D disc could remain readable after In the shorter term, 5D optical media could also survive after being heated to 1, degrees Celsius.
The technique devised by doctoral researcher Yuhao Lei uses a femtosecond laser with a high repetition rate. The process starts with a seeding pulse that creates a nanovoid, but the fast pulse doesn't need to actually write any data. The repeated weak pulses leverage a phenomenon known as near-field enhancement to sculpt the nanostructures in a more gentle way. The researchers evaluated laser pulses at a variety of power levels, finding a level that sped up writing without damaging the silica glass disc.
The study reported a maximum data rate of one million voxels per second, but each bit requires several voxels in 5D optical systems.
That works out to a data rate of about kilobytes per second. At that point, it becomes feasible to fill one of the discs, which have an estimated capacity of TB. It would take about two months to write this much data, after which it cannot be changed. This work is still in the early stages, but the team managed to write and retrieve 5GB of text data using a 5D optical medium. All you need to read the stored data is a microscope and polarizer, and it should be readable for eons.
The findings appear in Optica , Optica Publishing Group's journal for high-impact research. Tesla launched a pilot project in the Netherlands this week in which non-Tesla electric vehicles will be allowed to use its Supercharger network , representing the first time that the automaker is opening up its proprietary charging stations to EVs from other companies. The Verge reports: Tesla's Supercharger network is often held up as the best possible example of an EV charging network: fast, reliable, and plentiful.
But Tesla's network is also exclusive to Tesla owners, meaning someone driving a Volkswagen or Ford EV wouldn't be able to use it. But that's now starting to change. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has, for years , talked about opening up his company's vast Supercharger network to other electric vehicles. And over this past summer, he started revealing key details about how it would actually work.
Now the company is ready to start the process by announcing its first pilot project. Vehicle owners will need to download the most recent version of Tesla's smartphone app version 4. After downloading the app, customers will be prompted to select "Charge Your Non-Tesla" in order to find the closest participating Supercharger site. Tesla owners can still use the stations just as normal. A team of researchers built a machine learning system to scan satellite images for solar energy-generating facilities greater than 10 kilowatts and then deployed the system on over terabytes of imagery "using several human lifetimes of computing.
Using the area of these facilities, and controlling for the uncertainty in our machine learning system, we obtain a global estimate of gigawatts of installed generating capacity at the end of Facilities ranged in size from sprawling gigawatt-scale desert installations in Chile, South Africa, India and north-west China, through to commercial and industrial rooftop installations in California and Germany, rural patchwork installations in North Carolina and England, and urban patchwork installations in South Korea and Japan Data like this allows us to study the precise conditions which are leading to the diffusion of solar energy, and will help governments better design subsidies to encourage faster growth.
Knowing where a facility is also allows us to study the unintended consequences of the growth of solar energy generation. In our study, we found that solar power plants are most often in agricultural areas, followed by grasslands and deserts. This highlights the need to carefully consider the impact that a ten-fold expansion of solar PV generating capacity will have in the coming decades on food systems, biodiversity, and lands used by vulnerable populations. Policymakers can provide incentives to instead install solar generation on rooftops which cause less land-use competition, or other renewable energy options.
A note at the end of the article adds that the researchers' code and data repositories have been made available online "to facilitate more research of this type and to kickstart the creation of a complete, open, and current dataset of the planet's solar energy facilities.
Then over the next four decades they built a reputation as a surprisingly tech-savvy band In they licensed "Start Me Up" for an ad campaign promoting Microsoft's Windows 95 the first version of Windows including a Start button. Now on the 40th anniversary of Tattoo You , the Rolling Stones have re-released the album with nine previously unreleased tracks from the same era, "recently completed and enhanced with additional vocals and guitar.
Repeat," quips a headline at CNET. It's being billed as a collaboration between Boston Dynamics and the Rolling Stones, and Friday the band's official Twitter account tweeted a highlight from the video — along with their reaction.
The new components — which determine and set the best height for a nuclear blast — are now being paired with other engineering enhancements that collectively increase what military planners refer to as the individual nuclear warheads' "hard-target kill capability. The increased destructiveness of the warheads means that in some cases fewer weapons could be needed to ensure that all the objectives in the nation's nuclear targeting plans are fully met, opening a path to future shrinkage of the overall arsenal, current and former U.
Production of the first of many high-yield nuclear warheads containing the gear, developed over the past decade at a cost of billions of dollars, was completed in July for installation on missiles aboard Navy submarines, the National Nuclear Security Administration announced.
The Post notes that the U. The acting administrator of America's National Nuclear Security Administration called it "the culmination of over a decade of work.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from InterestingEngineering: Energy densities of lithium-ion batteries haven't reached the potential where long-range flights can be undertaken. So, a Colorado-based startup, H3X , looked to the electric motor for ways to improve its power capacity.
The team started from scratch, looking at the various components of the electric motor. Comprised of a gearbox, a power delivery system, and a main motor, these components are usually housed separately to allow sufficient cooling space, without which could result in engine failure.
However, using advances in material science and electronics, coupled with the ability to 3D-print structures such as copper, the team managed to put all components together into a single housing that weighs just 33 pounds 15 kg without impacting their cooling needs.
Their motor, called the HPDM, is much smaller than their contemporaries and has a lesser mass as well. According to H3X, this is sufficient to power any mass-sensitive or high-performance application such as electric boats and has urban air mobility applications. Among the other targets for the company that remain in the distance are short-haul, large commercial flights in the sub mile range.
Max Liben, Chief Technology Office at H3X, told TechCrunch that using advanced technologies made the manufacturing of their electric motor less laborious and yet not very expensive.
Even when putting the components together, the team was conscious of maintenance needs and has ensured that servicing their motors is hassle-free as well.
Whether powered by electric batteries or hydrogen fuel, these advanced electric motors are likely to play a role in enabling electric air mobility, even over longer distances.
At an event in Japan today, Toyota unveiled its first all-electric car: the bZ4X. Electrek reports: "bZ" stands for "beyond zero," which is Toyota's latest electrification strategy and a sort of sub-brand for its upcoming electric vehicles, starting with the bZ4X.
The electric SUV hasn't been updated much from the concept. It still features some sharp lines and aggressive design. In terms of specs, we finally have more details. Toyota has been clear that every spec it released today is for the Japanese version of the car.
Details on the US version are expected to come next month, but it should still give us a good idea. The vehicle is equipped with a As for what range it enables, Toyota is only releasing right now "cruising range per charge WLTC ," which it claims to be km miles for the front-wheel drive version and km miles for the all-wheel-drive version. The front-wheel-drive version is equipped with a single kW motor while the all-wheel-drive version is equipped with an 80 kW motor on each axle.
First off, it's capable of bidirectional charging for vehicle-to-home capacity. It's also offered with an optional solar roof, which Toyota says can "generates electricity equivalent to 1, km of driving distance per year. The electric SUV is expected to land first in Japan in mid More details about pricing, specs and features will be available in the coming months. An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, is developing a smartwatch with a front-facing camera and rounded screen , according to an image of the device found inside one of the tech giant's iPhone apps.
The photo shows a watch with a screen and casing that's slightly curved at the edges. The front-facing camera -- similar to what you'd see on a smartphone -- appears at the bottom of the display, and there's a control button for the watch on the right side. The image was found inside of the company's app for controlling its new smart glasses launched in partnership with Ray-Ban. The picture was located by app developer Steve Moser and shared with Bloomberg News.
The watch has a detachable wrist strap and what appears to be a button at the top of the watch case. Its large display mimics the style of Apple's watch -- rather than the more basic fitness trackers sold by Google's Fitbit and Garmin.
The camera suggests the product will likely be used for videoconferencing, a feature that would make Meta's device stand out. Apple's smartwatch doesn't have a camera, nor do rival products from companies such as Samsung. Learn more. Qualcomm and Microsoft reportedly have an exclusivity deal in place for Windows on ARM chip product…. Danish audio brand Copland has launched the CSA70, which sits in the company's line-up as its most ….
Android 10 continues to top Android 11 when it comes to installations, according to newly released …. Bluetooth tracking device maker Tile is to be acquired by tracking app company Life as competiti….
The privacy-focused DuckDuckGo browser app is launching a new feature on Android that will seek to …. Sony has been awarded a patent for the PS5's faceplate following a year-long kerfuffle with third-p…. Google is making a change to its stock Messages app that'll rid an annoyance for Android and iPhone…. Qualcomm has announced that it's changing the naming structure of its Snapdragon chips for smartpho…. Genuinely great Apple iPhone deals can be hard to come by, even on Black Friday, so this decent sav….
The App tells me that GPS isn't enabled in the car, but it is. But i've found the service to go and down and a few times. My vehicle is no longer listed in the app, and when I tried to add my vehicle back to the app, it tells me 'Adding Vehicle Failed'.
Sometimes the weather app does not load. Totally confusing. Bmw app does not work with android 4. I have used iPhone 7 and a new XR in mine without issue and Spotify works via spoken command. This option is not available in some countries among which the UK.
Software in the Bmw connected drive not working. Flash the lights. According to Apple's website, all major vehicle manufacturers are licensing CarPlay. BMW has introduced a built-in dashcam function for its latest models, utilising the parking cameras, and will offer it as a backdated option for older vehicles via a software update launching in the first quarter of Restart the head unit, holding down the volume button for 30 seconds.
Then, create an account with ParkNow. The news app is not working but I set up my customized news feed and it works. Connected drive and BMW assist. Heck, you can even see the location of your vehicle when logging on to the ConnectedDrive site itself if you had that GPS Tracking enabled. My app has been acting the same for a few weeks now. Download our new My BMW App now to continue using our digital services and discover the next generation of features.
Whilst the car depends on a mobile phone signal to receive Connected Drive information, the device from which the information is sent does not need a mobile signal. I am able to lock and unlock the doors etc but trying to send directions to my navigation is not working - any ideas? SmartThings fuels your passions, inside and outside of the home. Go to the connected drive screen and press options. Quote: Originally Posted by Schtingle. Check this video out to see how you can access all your music and playlists on your Spotify account within the BMW Connected Drive Menu.
My Garage. Beyond that problems can be caused by the position of the smartphone. It lets you complete tasks more quickly and easily and have more time for the most important things in life: your family, friends or leisure activities. There's a certain point where you're definitely unprofitable, and you're going to be likely to close because you're not getting enough money in power markets.
But if a bitcoin operation takes 10 to 15 to 30 percent of your power at a reasonable price, that tips you into profitability. This is especially a good idea while we wait for more renewables — and policies that favor them — to come online, in what could be the first real-world proof bitcoin is doing some societal good instead of being a waste of energy and resources A few small-to-medium reactors should be ready for licensing in a few years and some over the next decade, he said, helped along by private and federal funding.
To actually get to a point where the kinds of smaller reactors could be developed that would be competitive with the rapidly falling price of renewables, Gilbert said, would take a significantly larger bump from private capital — as well as more customers.
I'm not a technofuturist who dreams of a libertarian paradise, but I have to admit that there's kind of a cool idea here. If the bitcoin community really believes cryptocurrencies are the money of the future, let them be the first to invest in a budding technology that could be the energy of the future. In the interim, however, they shouldn't be allowed to rest on their greenwashing laurels while continuing to churn out emissions as they wait for fast reactor technology to become feasible in 10 years.
Government regulations are, of course, anathema to crypto true believers. But a mandate that any new mining facilities source power from nearby nuclear plants could go a long way toward cleaning up bitcoin's act and ensuring the carbon-free energy we desperately need stays on the grid while fancy fast reactors come online. When automakers were forced to make fewer vehicles with the chips they had available, Business Insider reports that "Naturally, they chose to prioritize those models that had the highest demand and made them the most money.
The result has been a boon for automakers. One dealer who sells upgraded pickups in Ohio told Morning Brew that his dealership recently closed a deal in 52 minutes that would have taken four hours before the chip shortage. Jim Farley, Ford's CEO, said in June that this new pricing power was "breathtaking" and indicated that the company wouldn't be returning to the days of guessing over how many cars it should produce and then marking them down until they sell.
Mary Barra, GM's CEO, has also said that customer orders will play a larger role in her company's production strategy.
Kevin Tynan, an auto analyst for Bloomberg, told Insider earlier this year that the industry has been trying to get off the incentives and discounting model for decades. The outage marks the latest milestone in the unraveling of Lebanon, which is undergoing what the World Bank has described as one of the world's three biggest financial collapses of the past years. The banking system was the first to implode in , triggering a 90 percent slide in the value of the currency that has left the government unable to afford fuel , food and medicine imports while plunging millions of Lebanese into poverty.
The electricity grid ground to a halt after the country's two main power stations, Deir Ammar and Zahrani, ran out of diesel fuel, leaving the nationwide network without the minimum amount of power required to sustain it, said Energy Minister Walid Fayyad. The government is working to secure emergency fuel supplies from other sources, including the army, to bridge the shortfall until a shipment of Iraqi oil due to arrive Saturday night can be offloaded and distributed into the network.
At most, he said, the total outage can be expected to last only a couple of days, and he hoped to find a stopgap solution faster. But the collapse is a reminder of the dire state of Lebanon's electricity sector, which has been unable to provide hour power for decades. In recent months, its capacity has been further eroded by the lack of money and by corruption, with smugglers diverting state purchases of fuel to sell at a profit in neighboring Syria.
A recent deal struck with Iraq to supply 80, tons of fuel a month still falls short of the minimum amount required to ensure a stable grid and at most will be able to keep the power on for about four hours a day, Fayyad said.
The Texas Tribune an Austin-based non-profit digital news site reports that climate change "has made the Texas heat worse, with less relief as nighttime temperatures warm , a report from the state's climatologist published Thursday found. Those trends are expected to accelerate in the next 15 years, according to the report, which analyzes extreme weather risks for the state and was last updated in The report was funded in part by Texas , a nonpartisan economic policy nonprofit group named for the state's upcoming bicentennial.
The average annual temperature in Texas is expected to be 3 degrees warmer by than the average of the s, the report found. The number of degree days is expected to nearly double compared with , especially in urban areas. The entire baseline of temperatures in the state has shifted upward — a trend that is likely to continue to cause problems for the state's aging infrastructure, experts said.
While global temperature analysis had already shown that trend, he said, it is now very clearly happening on the local level in Texas. Italian winemakers have increasingly relied on migrant workers for the autumn harvest, but travel restrictions and soaring wage costs are pushing many to turn to machines. From a report: Last year's grape harvest was a harrowing scramble at Mirko Cappelli's Tuscan vineyard.
With the Italian border closed because of the pandemic, the Eastern European workers he had come to rely on couldn't get into the country. The company he had contracted to supply grape pickers had no one to offer him. He ultimately found just enough workers to bring the grapes in on time.
So, this year Mr. The coronavirus pandemic is pushing the wine industry toward automation. Covid-related travel restrictions left severe shortages of agricultural workers last year, as Eastern Europeans and North Africans were unable to reach fields in Western Europe.
Though the shortages have eased this year, the difficulty of finding workers has accelerated the shift, which was already under way across the agricultural sector. While harvests of some crops, like soybeans and corn, are already heavily automated, winemakers have been slower to make the switch.
Vintners debate whether automated harvesting is more likely to damage grapes, which can affect the quality of the wine. The cost is a deterrent for many small farmers. Some European regions even ban machine harvesting. For many vintners in Europe and the U. It is a change that will outlast the pandemic and could shift longstanding migration patterns that bring tens of thousands of foreign workers to Italy, France and Spain for agricultural harvests each year.
Ritano Baragli, president of Cantina Sociale colli Fiorentini Valvirgilio, a winemaker's group in Tuscany, said it has been getting harder to find pickers for several years, as locals increasingly shun the physically demanding, low-paid, short-term work while the demand for pickers has increased. But last year was the worst labor shortage of his half-century career in wine. An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Valve has posted an official teardown of its upcoming handheld gaming PC, the Steam Deck.
Before diving into the teardown, though, the company spends about a minute to strongly caution against taking one apart unless you're sure you know what you're doing. In the video, Valve shows how to swap out two parts of the system. First, Valve shows how to replace the thumbsticks. The company cautions that they are completely custom, but says that it will offer a source for "replacement parts, thumbsticks, SSDs, and possibly more" in the coming months.
After that, Valve shows how to swap out the SSD, which could be helpful for people who may have reserved the cheapest version of the device with an eMMC hard drive with the intention of upgrading it themselves. Be aware that all versions of the Steam Deck use an m. On Tuesday, D-Wave released its roadmap for upcoming processors and software for its quantum annealers.
The company is also announcing that it's going to be developing its own gate-based hardware, which it will offer in parallel with the quantum annealer. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report: The simplest part of the announcement to understand is what's happening with D-Wave's quantum-annealing processor. The current processor, called Advantage, has 5, qubits and 40, connections among them.
These connections play a major role in the chip's performance as, if a direct connection between two qubits can't be established, others have to be used to act as a bridge, resulting in a lower effective qubit count.
Starting this week, users of D-Wave's cloud service will have access to an updated version of Advantage. The qubit and connection stats will remain the same, but the device will be less influenced by noise in the system in technical terms, its qubits will maintain their coherence longer. This will see another boost to the qubit count, going up to somewhere above 7, But the connectivity would go up considerably as well, with D-Wave targeting 20 connections per qubit. D-Wave provides a set of developer tools it calls Ocean.
In previous iterations, Ocean has allowed people to step back from directly controlling the hardware; instead, if a problem could be expressed as a quadratic unconstrained binary optimization QUBO , Ocean could produce the commands needed to handle all the hardware configuration and run the problem on the optimizer. D-Wave referred to this as a hybrid problem solver, since Ocean would use classical computing to optimize the QUBO prior to execution.
The only problem is that not everyone who might be interested in trying D-Wave hardware knows how to express their problem as a QUBO. So, the new version of Ocean will allow an additional layer of abstraction by allowing problems to be sent to the system in the format typically used by people who tend to solve these sorts of problems. The biggest part of today's announcement, however, may be that D-Wave intends to also build gate-based hardware.
Baratz explained that he thinks that optimization is likely to remain a valid approach, pointing to a draft publication that shows that structuring some optimization problems for gate-based hardware may be so computationally expensive that it would offset any gains the quantum hardware could provide. But it's also clear that gate-based hardware can solve an array of problems that a quantum annealer can't.
He also argued that D-Wave has solved a number of problems that are currently limiting advances in gate-based hardware that uses electronic qubits called transmons. These include the amount and size of the hardware that's needed to send control signals to the qubits and the ability to pack qubits in densely enough so that they're easy to connect but not close enough that they start to interfere with each other. One of the problems D-Wave faces, however, is that the qubits it uses for its annealer aren't useful for gate-based systems.
While they're based on the same bit of hardware the Josephson junction , the annealer's qubits can only be set as up or down. A gate-based qubit needs to allow manipulations in three dimensions. So, the company is going to try building flux qubits , which also rely on Josephson junctions but use them in a different way.
So, at least some of the company's engineering expertise should still apply. Researchers at Northwestern University have devised a new method for recording information to DNA that takes minutes rather than hours or days. Interesting Engineering reports: The researchers utilized a novel enzymatic system to synthesize DNA that records rapidly changing environmental signals straight into its sequences, and this method could revolutionize how scientists examine and record neurons inside the brain.
To record intracellular molecular and digital data to DNA, scientists currently rely on multipart processes that combine new information with existing DNA sequences. This means that, for an accurate recording, they must stimulate and repress the expression of specific proteins, which can take over 10 hours to complete. This way, they would synthesize completely new DNA rather than copying a template of it.
The method enabled the data to be recorded into the genetic code in a matter of minutes. Tyo, the paper's senior author, said, in the press release. Our method is much cheaper to write information because the enzyme that synthesizes the DNA can be directly manipulated.
State-of-the-art intracellular recordings are even slower because they require the mechanical steps of protein expression in response to signals, as opposed to our enzymes which are all expressed ahead of time and can continuously store information.
When Facebook went down yesterday for nearly six hours, so did Oculus' services. Since Facebook owns VR headset maker Oculus, and controversially requires Oculus Quest users to log in with a Facebook account, many Quest owners reported not being able to load their Oculus libraries.
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