Microsoft's best Xbox One and Xbox series wireless controller is the Xbox Elite Series 2, and the white Core version is now available at the lowest price we've seen yet. You can pick one up at Amazon-owned Woot for just $100, or $30 off the regular price.
The Elite Series 2 Core gives you the same exact controller as the Elite Series 2, without the additional accessories. It's designed with competitive gamers in mind, offering a wrap-around rubberized grip, shorter hair trigger locks and 40 hours of battery life. It feels and plays just as well as the Elite, offering Xbox wireless connection with the Xbox One and Series S/X consoles, reducing latency and letting you use the headphone jack. You can also connect it to a PC via Bluetooth. The Xbox Accessories app provides customization options like button remapping, sensitivity curve adjustments, dead zones, vibration intensity tweaking and LED colors.
If you decide you want the normal Elite Series 2 accessories after all, that's no problem — just purchase the $60 Complete Component Pack separately. That gives you everything missing from the Core model, including a carrying case, a thumbstick-adjustment tool, a charging dock, two classic thumbsticks, one tall thumbstick, one dome thumbstick, one cross-shaped D-pad, two medium and two mini paddles, as well as a USB-C cable.
With the sale, you could buy the component pack and Elite Series 2 Core controller and still save over purchasing the regular Elite Series 2 model. Just remember that Woot's return policy isn't quite as generous as its parent Amazon.
Easy To Build DIY Digital Multimeter using Arduino to Test Voltage, Resistance, LED, Diode and Continuity
A multimeter is a must-have tool in your arsenal when it comes to creating or developing electrical circuits. Without it, executing a job will be extremely tough. So, in this post, we chose to create a low-cost digital multimeter using Arduino and other basic components. When it comes to the multimeter's functions, it can measure voltage up to 24V, as well as diode, resistance, and voltage drop across an LED.
Good lighting can make your streaming dramatically better, which has been a big reason why Logitech's Litra Glow caught on after launching early last year. It already offers a lot of features $60, but now it has dropped back to an all-time low price of $50 on Amazon. In addition, you can find the new Litra Beam at a small discount as well.
The Litra Glow is safe on the eyes for all-day streaming, having cleared strict UL testing guidelines for all-day streaming. At the same time, it provides a "natural, radiant look across skin tones," according to Logitech. And the monitor mount is easy to set up thanks to three-way adjustable height, tilt and rotation settings.
You also get cinematic color accuracy via Logitech's TrueSoft technology, regardless of skin tone. It's ready to use out of the box thanks to the five presets with different brightness levels and color temperatures, or you can create custom options using the G HUB software. As a bonus, any presets you create can be assigned to the G Keys on a Logitech G keyboard or mouse.
The Litra Glow is now available at $50 on Amazon (17 percent off) matching its all-time low price. On top of that, you can grab Logitech's new Litra Beam for $96.79, saving a few dollars off the regular $100 price. That model offers soft and wide "key" lighting to reduce shadows and comes with its own stand for even easier adjustment.
You can find other soft- and ring-style lights from Elgato and others, but most from any recognizable name brand are considerably more expensive. The Litra products are already a great buy with Logitech's promised color accuracy, and Amazon's discounts makes them even more affordable.
Stroke patients in the US could soon take advantage of cutting-edge robotics during the recovery process. The Food and Drug Administration has cleared Wandercraft's Atalante exoskeleton for use in stroke rehabilitation. The machine can help with intensive gait training, particularly for people with limited upper body mobility that might prevent using other methods.
The current-generation Atalante is a self-balancing, battery-powered device with an adjustable gait that can help with early steps through to more natural walking later in therapy. While the hardware still needs to be used in a clinical setting with help from a therapist, its hands-free use lets patients reestablish their gait whether or not they can use their arms.
Wandercraft plans to deliver its first exoskeletons to the US during the first quarter of the year, though it didn't name initial customers. It only recently launched its commercial business in the country, but financial backer Quadrant Management says Wandercraft could "significantly scale" its operations within the next one to two years.
FDA-cleared exoskeletons are still relatively rare, and are still limited to helping with specific conditions. Last June, Ekso Bionics received permission to market its EksoNR device for multiple sclerosis rehab. Wandercraft's approval makes the technology accessible for a wider range of patients, and may be especially helpful when strokes are a major cause of long-term disability in the US. Over 795,000 people have a stroke in the country each year — this could help some of them regain freedom of movement.
With this week’s return of the HomePod, you might think it would make sense for Apple to start working on a new HomePod mini. After all, the company hasn’t announced a hardware refresh for the device since its introduction in 2020, and the smart speaker market is one of the most competitive in tech. However, it appears no such update is in the works.
In his latest Power On newsletter, Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman says he believes the company is not “actively working” on a new HomePod mini. Pointing to the second-generation HomePod, he notes it “doesn’t include any major new functions that aren’t already in the $99 mini, so there isn’t an obvious reason to update the model.” Gurman suggests Apple is more likely to improve the mini by releasing software updates that address shortcomings involving Siri and app integration because that’s where “real improvements probably need to be made.”
To that point, Apple recently updated the HomePod mini’s software to activate a temperature and humidity sensor that had been lying dormant in the device since release. As Gurman points out, the newly reintroduced HomePod adds features previously exclusive to the HomePod mini, including ultra-wideband support and Thread connectivity.
While a new HomePod mini could be years away, Apple likely has other smart home products on the horizon. In August, Gurman reported the company was working on a smart display, as well as a device that combines the functionality of an Apple TV, camera and HomePod into a single offering. At the time, he said those could arrive by early 2024.
In honor of this year’s Penguin Awareness day, the British Antarctic Survey announced the existence of a previously undiscovered emperor penguin colony in one of the most remote and inaccessible parts of Antarctica. Scientists spotted the colony, the 66th to be found on the continent, by comparing satellite imagery captured by the European Space Agency’s Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission and Maxar’s WorldView-3 satellite.
The photo you see below is the one that led the British Antarctic Survey to the colony. The brown stains that contrast against the stark white ice and snow of the Verleger Point in West Antarctica are the accumulated “guano” droppings seabirds like emperor penguins leave behind when they need to relieve themselves. For the last 15 years, the British Antarctic Survey has been searching for new penguin colonies by using satellite imagery to spot the tell-tale poo stains. Of the 66 colonies humans know about in Antarctica, exactly half have been found using satellites.
Maxar Technologies
“This is an exciting discovery,” said Dr Peter Fretwell, one of the researchers who led the study. “[But] like many of the recently discovered sites, this colony is small and in a region badly affected by recent sea ice loss.” As The Guardian points out, emperor penguins are the only known penguins to breed on ice. That makes them particularly vulnerable to climate change. The birds need the ice around their colonies to last between April and September to give their offspring enough time to grow. “If the ice breaks up before that, the chicks fall into the water and drown or freeze,” Fretwell told the outlet. One recent study predicted most emperor penguins could become extinct by the end of the century if the world’s nations don’t find a way to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
Halo Infinitedeveloper 343 Industries took to Twitter on Saturday to share a brief message about the franchise's future. “Halo and Master Chief are here to stay,” 343 said in a statement attributed to studio head Pierre Hintze. “343 Industries will continue to develop Halo now and in the future, including epic stories, multiplayer, and more of what makes Halo great.”
The statement comes after Microsoft confirmed that it would lay off 10,000 employees before the end of March. According to Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, 343 Industries was “hit hard” by the restructuring and lost Halo veteran and creative director Joe Staten – who joined the studio in 2020 to help bring Infinite over the finish line – to Microsoft’s publishing division. Staten’s reassignment follows a handful of other high-profile departures, including that of Slipspace Engine lead developer David Berger and 343 co-founder Bonnie Ross. Schreier couldn’t put a number to the cuts at 343, but he said Infinite’s campaign team was particularly affected by the cuts. Prior to the layoffs, the studio also had a “long-running” hiring freeze in place and had lost a lot of contractors in recent weeks and months. One former 343 staff member blamed the layoffs on "incompetent leadership up top."
Microsoft released Halo Infinite in 2021 to generally positive reviews, but the game has since struggled to maintain a consistent player base. On Steam, for instance, Infinite is currently averaging about 4,000 players per day, a steep drop from the 100,000 players it was averaging at launch. More than a year after the game’s release, Microsoft also has yet to announce new campaign content for Infinite. Halo fans rightfully have reason to be worried about the franchise’s future.
Electric, plug-in hybrid and fuel cell vehicles accounted for 18.8 percent of all new car sales in California this past year, according to data shared on Friday by the state’s Energy Commission (CEC). In 2022, California residents bought 345,818 zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs), a 38 percent increase from a year ago and a 138 percent jump compared to 2020. In what should come as no surprise, Tesla vehicles made up most of the ZEVs people in California bought last year. About two-thirds of the 345,000 ZEVs sold in the state in 2022 were made by the automaker, per France’s AFP News Agency.
With EVs and other zero-emission vehicles making up nearly one-fifth of new car sales in California, the state still has some work to do on the adoption front. In Norway, for instance, electric vehicles made up 65 percent of new car sales in 2021 and 79.3 percent in 2022. That said, the country’s largest car market did some heavy lifting relative to the rest of the US. The CEC says 40 percent of all ZEVs sold in the US were sold in California. It’s also worth taking a moment to point to the scale of the California car market. When EVs made up 65 percent of new car sales in Norway, the country’s dealerships sold 113,715 EVs. That’s about a third of the number of zero-emission vehicles sold in California last year.
In any case, EV adoption in California is likely to increase significantly over the next few years. Ahead of the state’s 2035 ban on the sale of new gasoline and diesel-powered cars, the CEC announced last month it would spend about $2.6 billion to build 90,000 new chargers across the state. The California Air Resources Board set aside another $2.6 billion to incentivize consumers and companies to switch to electric vehicles.
Riot Games, the studio behind League of Legends and Valorant, says a recent security breach may affect its short-term content release schedule. In a tweet spotted by BleepingComputer, Riot disclosed on Friday its development systems were compromised in a social engineering attack that occured earlier in the week.
“We don’t have all the answers right now, but we wanted to communicate early and let you know there is no indication that player data or personal information was obtained,” Riot said. “Unfortunately, this has temporarily affected our ability to release content. While our teams are working hard on a fix, we expect this to impact our upcoming patch cadence across multiple games.”
Heads up, players. This may impact our delivery date for Patch 13.2. The League team is working to stretch the limits of what we can hotfix in order to deliver the majority of the planned and tested balance changes on time still. https://t.co/DJ8qAKSdQi
The studio promised to share more information as it becomes available. On Friday, the League of Legends development team said the incident could affect its ability to release the MOBA's upcoming version 13.2 update. Before this week, Riot had planned to release the patch on January 25th. Now, some aspects of the release, including a long-awaited art and sustainability update for Ahri, one of the game’s more popular champions, could be delayed until the arrival of patch 13.3 in February. “The League team is working to stretch the limits of what we can hotfix in order to deliver the majority of the planned and tested balance changes on time still,” the official LoL Twitter account said.
“Nothing that would have been in 13.2 will be cancelled, we might just have to move things that can't be hotfixed (e.g. art changes) to a later date instead,” Andrei van Roon, the head of Riot’s League Studio, added. Riot did not immediately respond to Engadget’s request for more information on the incident. We'll update this article when we hear back from the studio.
San Francisco has long sought to square its deeply-held progressive ideals with the region's need for tangible, technological progress. SFO international airport, which opened for business in 1959 and has undergone significant expansion and modernization in the years since, is a microcosm of that struggle. On one hand, the Bay Area likely wouldn't be the commercial, technical, and cultural hub that it is today if not for connectivity the airport provides. On the other hand, its installation and operation has had very real consequences for the local environment and the region's populace.
Dr. Eric Porter, Professor of History, History of Consciousness, and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, examines how San Francisco International came to be and the challenges it will face in a climate changing 21st century in his latest work, A People's History of SFO: The Making of the Bay Area and an Airport. Porter's connection to the topic is a personal one. "My grandfather worked as a skycap there beginning in the 1940s," Porter wrote in a recent UC Press blog. "Carrying white people’s luggage and the racial baggage that came with it was servile but good-paying work."
As Black skycaps protested changes to their working conditions during the spring and summer of 1970, a different group of activists, largely white and operating primarily as homeowners rather than as workers, were engaged in their own SFO-focused struggle. The issue was jet noise, a long-standing nuisance that had become more unbearable as the airport grew and as environmentalists and government agencies deemed it a form of pollution that could have detrimental effects on human well-being. That November, after months of unsuccessfully lobbying airport and government officials for changes to SFO flight operations, thirty-two property owners from South San Francisco, a then largely white working- and middle-class suburb located northwest of the airport, filed claims with the San Francisco Airport Commission seeking compensation for the disruptions caused by jets taking off over their neighborhoods. The commission denied the claims, so the following February the South San Franciscans filed a $320,000 lawsuit ($10,000 per plaintiff) against the City and County of San Francisco on the grounds that jet noise had “diminished and damaged” the “reasonable use and quiet enjoyment of their property.” Subsequently, ten individuals from the tonier suburbs of Woodside and Portola Valley, located southeast of the airport, filed their own lawsuit, requesting the same per-person damages caused by noise from aircraft on approach to SFO.
These lawsuits, ultimately settled by the Airport Commission’s promise to institute a $5 million noise mitigation program, were among the many antinoise actions undertaken by outraged SFO neighbors following the introduction of jet aircraft to the facility in 1959. Their communities had grown in symbiotic relationship with SFO in ways physical, social, political, and economic. Jet sounds helped to compose their soundscapes, or acoustic environments, offering their inhabitants references through which they conceptualized and lived their urban experiences. The sounds oriented local residents toward the sky, providing a generalized sense of being urban, while also defining their relationships to SFO through the horizontal positioning of homes, workplaces, recreation sites, schools, and other places they inhabited in relation to takeoff and landing vectors and the facility itself.
How people experienced this relationship to place via jet sounds — whether positive, negative, or ambivalent—was affected by people’s proximity to such sounds, the frequency and duration of them, their relative audibility in relation to other components of the soundscape, and the social and political meanings they were conditioned over time to hear in them. When Bay Area residents heard jet sounds as “noise,” it was often simply because they were loud and profoundly disruptive. But at other moments jet noise was a more subjective, socially determined “unwanted sound.” Such determination happened, in part, as anthropologist Marina Peterson’s work on LAX and its environs helps us understand, because of what these insistent sounds had come to symbolize as they catalyzed relationships among an expanding ensemble of individuals and community groups; government officials, agencies, and regulations; activists and their organizations; scientists and other researchers; the airport and its operations; and a broad set of social, political, and economic forces.
Some local residents were willing to tolerate the noise. It was an inconvenience to be put up with in exchange for the benefits of living, working, or doing business near the airport. Noise itself, and the impunity to make it, might have signified the financial and political interests of airlines, airport officials, and other powerful interests, but these entities offered something (jobs, construction contracts, airport employee spending, convenient travel, and so on) in return. For others, however, this loud component of the soundscape signified differently on the pros and cons of living near the airport as well as on the relationships in which they were immersed. Jet noise, in other words, could be heard as a manifestation of the forms of power that defined the regional colonial present, and it raised the question of how local residents would live out their attachments to them.
Anti–jet noise activism by individuals, homeowner associations, political figures, environmental groups, and others around SFO usually reflected their relative degrees of privilege and aspiration as mostly white beneficiaries of accumulated colonial power in the region. Yet their activism simultaneously articulated critiques, explicit and implicit, of the ways elements of the power—economic, legal, bureaucratic, and so on—that lay behind the noise had diminished human thriving in the region more generally. Airport and local government officials, labor unions, and others who opposed, deflected, or sought to incorporate strategically the goals of these activists also expressed or otherwise engaged multiple forms of social, economic, and bureaucratic power while seeking to advance or protect their own accumulated interests.
The activists had some successes. SFO and its surrounding communities eventually became less noisy because of changes in aircraft technology (especially engine technology) and also because the FAA, airport operators, civic leaders, and others eventually started to listen to anti-noise activists and made significant efforts to mitigate jet noise. But jets continued to generate noise at and near SFO, and some people are still complaining about the problem today. Still, the history of antinoise activism around SFO—the version in this chapter runs from the late 1950s into the 1980s — is still worth exploring because it makes audible some of the complex ways that challenging and reproducing power in the mid- and late twentieth-century regional colonial present occurred through the synergies, conflicts, and missed opportunities for cooperation among largely white homeowner, environmentalist, and worker movements when they collided with SFO as manifestation of broader economic transformations and modes of governmental infrastructure development and resource stewardship.
• • •
Aircraft noise had been the subject of intermittent complaints in the Bay Area going back to the early days of aviation. Concern that loud air planes might depress real estate prices was among the factors that led to the shuttering of San Francisco’s early civilian airstrip in the Marina District. Noise was initially not a problem around Mills Field. Aircraft of the 1920s and 1930s were not terribly loud, and there was little residential development nearby. That began to change after World War II as commercial air operations at what became SFO increased, aircraft grew in size and sound-generating capability, and residential neighborhoods encroached upon the airport. As was the case elsewhere in the United States, growing local concern about airport noise dovetailed with fears of aircraft crashing into homes or businesses below, as happened near the Newark and Idlewild airports in late 1951 and early 1952. Two pre–jet age incidents of aircraft developing engine trouble after taking off over South San Francisco increased the level of anxiety about that community’s proximity to SFO in particular. Complaints, emanating primarily from five surrounding cities, grew exponentially with the arrival of jet aircraft in April 1959. Residents of San Bruno, Daly City, and, most vocally, South San Francisco were primarily affected by aircraft departing to the northwest from runway 28, oriented to allow aircraft to take off into the wind through the “gap” between San Bruno Mountain and the Santa Cruz Mountains. South San Franciscans formed neighborhood jet noise committees, but their complaints were often channeled through city councilman and later mayor Leo Ryan and City attorney John Noonan. The two officials began a dialogue with airport representatives, pilots, airlines, and federal officials about the coming jet noise problem in 1957, commissioned an engineer’s report on the matter, and stepped up their efforts after the jets arrived.
As complaints from South San Francisco increased, and as technological advancements permitted more takeoffs in crosswinds or slight tail winds, flights were shifted to the intersecting, perpendicular runway 1 in an effort to redistribute aircraft noise. This made things more difficult for residents of Millbrae and northeastern Burlingame and especially for those living in Bayside Manor, a Millbrae neighborhood established in 1943, across the Bayshore Freeway from the end of the runway. Bayside Manor residents were primarily affected by the “jet blast” (i.e., noise, vibration, and fumes) from aircraft as they began their takeoffs just seven hundred feet away from the edge of the development. Residents organized primarily through the Bayside Manor Improvement Association, formed in 1948, which had for several years been fighting the placement of industrial facilities on undeveloped land near their subdivision.
Local residents experienced a variety of dramatic and disruptive effects from jet engine-produced sound waves. According to a Millbrae woman, “We thought the old planes were bad enough. But jets are terrible. The house shakes, light bulbs burn out from the vibration, and we can’t hear TV programs when the planes are taking off.” People also complained about frightened and crying children, sleepless nights, distractions in schools, disrupted church and funeral services, interrupted in-person and telephone conversations, jumping phonograph needles, the inability to entertain outside, and actual physical damage to their property from sonic vibrations: cracked walls, stucco, chimneys, fire places, gas lines, and windows, as well as dishes breaking after falling from shelves. They worried about falling home values and about their physical and mental well-being. Some were exhausted. Others complained of headaches, earaches, temporary hearing loss, and other ailments. According to one petition, some South San Franciscans were “in a constant state of anxiety and have had to undergo medical treatment for nervous conditions said to have been induced by the noises created by the jet aircraft and the anxiety due to the passage of jet aircraft over their homes.”
