This is the first look at Nvidia’s wild new 750,000 sq ft building

Nvidia is preparing a new, massive building in Santa Clara, CA and this is it. Called Voyager, it will be larger than the building Nvidia just finished constructing by 250,000 square feet. And just like the other building, Endeavor, Voyager will share the same wild design that’s distinctly Nvidia.

Nvidia opened the first building, Endeavor, in in 2017 and it feels like if a person could go into an Nvidia GPU. There’s green and sharp angles everywhere. Triangle skylights pepper the roof, which is also a triangle. It’s just two stories due to local zoning laws and it appears the new building will following much of the same trends.

Voyager will be 750,000 square feet and situated next to the Endeavor in Santa Clara. This puts the combined buildings square-footage at 1.25 million, which is a little less than half of Apple’s new HQ in Cupertino. Nvidia tells me the company is still planning the building’s staffing but expects the building will house its growing engineer teams. The company has 11,500 employees around the world with 5,000 in Santa Clara.

Nvidia is using Gensler to design the building and it will be constructed by Devcon, the same companies tapped for the first building. Construction is expected to start next month and take up to three and a half years.

I asked Nvidia why these buildings are named after notable spacecraft. The response is interesting. Endeavor and Voyager have the initial sounds of “En” and “V”, hence the initial sounds of Nvidia, while the names also suggest a sense of pushing frontiers. Cheesy? A bit, but still clever and I’ll buy it.

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Meet Super Anthony, the fighting robot that lands mighty blows

If you’ve always wanted recreate the fighting scenes in Big Hero 6 with your own little fighting robots, now is your chance. Super Anthony is a rocking, socking robot that can punch, kick, roll, and jump and has enough torque to knock any other little robot off its little robot legs.

Super Anthony costs $1,299 for early birds and consists of a little frame 14 inches high and a set of 45 kg per servo punch force motors. The system is controlled via a standard game controller or phone app and it is “wear resistant” so you can keep fighting. This particular model won a straight-line walking competition so you know he has great legs.

“Super Anthony has a customized 15-axis crafted structure that provides intuitive control for full freedom of mobility. He can fight more swiftly and accurately than other robots,” the creators write.

The robot is shipping on November 2018 and it looks to be an interesting little opponent. While you probably need a few Super Anthonys to get a real fight going – a multi-pack costs $5,199 – you can still have fun and experiment with a single robot until you and your wacky friends invent nanobot technology that eventually kills your brother but lets you learn about teamwork along the way.

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Apple releases iOS 11.4 with support for Messages in iCloud, AirPlay 2 and more

Apple this afternoon will officially release the latest version of its iOS software for your iPhone and iPad, iOS 11.4, which at last adds support for Messages in iCloud, along with other new features, including most notably, AirPlay 2 and an update that allows two HomePod speakers to work together as a stereo pair.

Messages in iCloud was first announced a year ago at WWDC 2017 as a way of keeping conversations up-to-date across all your Apple devices, including iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and Mac. Its introduction means you’ll now be able to access your entire Messages history when you set up a new Apple device, and, when you delete a message from one device, that change syncs to all your devices.

In addition to the benefit of being able to access your entire conversation history, Messages in iCloud will be especially helpful to those who tend to save their all their conversations, but have a device without a lot of storage.

Typically, this has led to those conversations taking up a sizable amount of space – sometimes even gigabytes of storage, thanks to all the photos and attachments that are shared across iMessage these days. With Messages in iCloud, however, everything – including attachments – are stored in iCloud, which frees up local storage space for other things – like music downloads, videos, podcasts, books and apps, for example.

The messages are also end-to-end encrypted for security purposes. They’re protected with a key derived from information unique to the device, combined with the device passcode – which only the device owner should know. That means no one else could access or read the data.

The Messages in iCloud feature had first appeared in early betas of iOS 11 last summer, but was later pulled before the iOS public release. It later popped up again in the iOS 11.3 beta, but it was unclear when Apple would launch it, given that it had been left out of earlier iOS releases, despite all the beta testing.

Today, the feature is rolling out to all users, via iOS 11.4.

Also new in iOS 11.4 are features focused on media and entertainment, including the launch of AirPlay 2 and support stereo pair for HomePod.

AirPlay 2 allows you to stream your music or podcasts in your home to different devices, all in-sync. You can play music in any room from any room, move music from one room to another, or play the same song everywhere using an iOS device, HomePod, Apple TV, or by asking Siri. For example, you could say, “Hey Siri, play jazz in the kitchen,” while continuing to have different music played in another room. You can also adjust the volume across all devices (“Hey Siri, turn the volume up everyone”), or play or stop music across devices. 

A number of speaker manufacturers are already committing to support AirPlay 2, including Bang & Olufsen, Bluesound, Bose, Bowers & Wilkins, Denon, Libratone, Marantz, Marshall, Naim, Pioneer and Sonos.

The previously announced support for HomePod stereo pairs, meanwhile, lets you add a second HomePod to a room and create a stereo pair which play left and right channel content separately. The HomePod devices will automatically detect and balance with each other, and detect their place in the room in order to offer a better sound.

Apple has been positioning its speaker to better compete with more high-end audio systems, like Sonos or Bose. Stereo pair support will allow it to better compete on that front, but device sales could be held back by those who prefer Amazon’s Alexa assistant, which ships on the Sonos One, to Apple’s Siri.

Calendar support is also arriving for HomePod with iOS 11.4, along with the usual bug fixes and performance tweaks.

You can check for the iOS update from the Settings app, under “General –> Software Update.” HomePod owners can update from the Home app. The update is expected to start rolling out at 10 AM PT.

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How to Screen Capture Tweets with a Twitter Bot

Introducing Screenshot Guru, a new Twitter bot that will help you easily take high-resolution screenshots of tweets. There are a plethora of screen capture apps available, including the good old Print+Screen combo but with Screenshot Guru, you get crisp and beautiful screenshots sans the clutter.

Screenshot Guru offers 3 different options for screen capturing tweets. You have a web app for desktops, a Google Chrome extension and a Twitter bot @screenshotguru for people who are looking for a way to easily screenshot tweets on their Android or iPhone.

Let’s explore in more detail.

1. Web App – Go to screenshot.guru and type the URL of any web page or tweet that you would like to save as a PNG image. Solve the CAPTCHA and you’ll have a crisp retina screenshot ready in a second or two.

2. Chrome Extension – Install the Twitter Screenshots addon from the Google Chrome store and then switch to the Twitter website. You’ll see a little camera icon in every tweet – click the icon and it will instantly transform the tweet into a high-res PNG screenshot that will exist forever even if the original tweet is gone.

3. Twitter Bot – Screenshot Guru is available as a Twitter bot that works both on the Twitter website and mobile apps. You can DM tweets to the @screenshotguru bot and it will send a screenshot image back to you in a private DM.

Sending a tweet via DM is easy (watch video tutorial). Tap on the share icon from a tweet on your Twitter timeline and then tap “Send via Direct Message”. Type screenshotguru as recipient account and tap the Send icon.

The Screenshot Guru app is written in Node.js and hosted on the Google Cloud Platform. The screen captures are done through headless Chrome (Puppeteer) while the images are stored on Google Cloud Storage. The Twitter Bot is running on Google App Engine.

Also see: Write your own Twitter Bot

The post How to Screen Capture Tweets with a Twitter Bot appeared first on Digital Inspiration.

Kobo’s new entry-level Clara HD e-reader has a crisp, color-adjustable display

Kobo has announced a new e-reader, the Clara HD, which won’t set the world on fire but will be a perfectly good option for e-book readers who don’t want to spend a fortune. It basically revives the well-liked but discontinued Glo HD with a better frontlight and more memory.

The screen is 6 inches and 300 PPI, which is comparable to Amazon’s latest Kindles and high enough that you shouldn’t notice pixelation in the type. More importantly for some, it has the company’s improved frontlight, which can be dialed from the now-familiar cool LED tone to a much, much warmer one. There’s 8 GB of storage inside, more than enough for hundreds of books and comics — but no MicroSD card slot, which some do love to have.

I’ve been using the Clara HD as my daily reader for a week or so and I can vouch for the type quality and usual features — in terms of loading books onto the device, reading and navigating them, this reader is much the same as Kobo’s other ones.

The improvements are small basically because the Clara HD will likely replace the Aura Edition 2, which it outperforms by a huge amount, as the company’s entry-level device. At $130 it’s just $10 more than Amazon’s Paperwhite (the version with built-in ads, that is), but I’d go with the Kobo every time.

The simplicity of managing your books and articles on the Kobo is one selling point — I love being able to just drag and drop files like epubs and CBRs onto it like it’s a USB drive, and my Pocket articles jump onto it automatically.

And the color-changing light might help attract people who aren’t sure about the illumination they’ve seen in other readers. That cold blue tone can really put people off, and the ability to warm it up is great. If you’re like me you’ll find both tone extremes too much, then pick something in the middle and keep it there.

The design is nothing to shout about, but it’s quite light and thin and gets the job done — except for one nuisance that just baffles me. The power button is dead center on the bottom edge of the device.

Why?

Whose idea was that? If you’re holding the device by the side and bottom edges, there’s always a risk you’ll grab the button by mistake and put the device to sleep. It’s dumb, but it’s not enough for me to change my mind and switch to Kindle. I’m also not a big fan of the texture on the back (it feels like it will collect dirt), but that too is far from a deal-breaker.

The Clara HD is available for pre-order now, and if you’re in the market for an all-purpose e-reader, this is a great option and I would say a solid value. It ships in June in the U.S. and some other regions, with more coming later. From the press release:

The device will also be available France on June 1, and as of June 5 in Canada, the UK, Italy, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, and Turkey; Hong Kong in July; with Australia, New Zealand, and Mexico to follow later this year.

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ZenScreen could help you achieve a ‘balanced digital diet’

Skyfire co-founder Nitin Bhandari is working on a new approach to cutting our addiction to social media and reducing screen time with a startup called ZenScreen.

The startup has raised $700,000 in funding from Opera (now Otello) and assorted angel investors. It launched iOS and Android apps last month, as well as a Chrome browser extension.

Bhandari, who also served as senior vice president of consumer apps at Opera after the acquisition of Skyfire, said that during his work on mobile browsers and apps, he started to worry about whether creating more engaging — even addictive — apps was a worthwhile goal: “The cognitive dissonance was really eating at me and my team.”

Existing apps lock you out of your browser or smartphone for limited periods of time — for example, I use Forest to cut down on distractions when I need to focus on writing. But Bhandari said the “don’t even touch your phone” approach is “just not practical” for many people.

So ZenScreen includes a number of different features that are designed to create what Bhandari said is “almost like a balanced digital diet.” (In fact, ZenScreen created an “AppKins Digital Health Pyramid” showing which apps you can use as much as you want, and others that should  be limited.) Adults can use it to control their own app usage, as well as that of their kids.

For example, instead of trying to keep you off your phone for, say, an hour each morning, ZenScreen offers something called Smart Mornings, where you have 10 minutes to access social apps, followed by 20 minutes where you can only open work apps and utilities. Similarly, you can set limits on how much time you spend on social/entertainment apps during the day and restrict social media again when it’s close to bedtime.

To do this, Bhandari said ZenScreen had to solve “a really hard problem to figure out which app is being used and how long it’s in the foreground.” The company uses VPN technology to monitor your app usage, though Bhandari said, “We have a very unique VPN where all of the technology runs right on your device and sensitive data never comes to our servers.”

ZenScreen offers access to personal app usage analytics and its Quiet Time feature for free, then charges $4.99 per month for everything else.

“I actually compare our pricing to a gym membership — that’s kind of what we’re doing for your brain,” Bahndari said. “When you compare it to $80 a month, or $100 a month for the gym, $4.99 seems like such a no brainer if this topic is important to you.”

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