Author: Bernie

In context: Germanium and gallium are instrumental in manufacturing power chips, radio frequency amplifiers, LEDs, and many other silicon-based components. They aren’t scarce metals, but China has been providing the world with cheap germanium and gallium for decades. However, new policy changes could affect global supplies. China recently announced new export restrictions on germanium and gallium – two fundamental elements for chip manufacturing. As of Tuesday, Chinese companies interested in doing business abroad need to secure a proper export license from Beijing authorities. “Pure” germanium and gallium export, as well as export of any product which includes the two elements,…

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Samsung Galaxy S23 FE became the rumour mill’s favourite phone soon after the debut of new Galaxy foldable handsets. All thanks to a Samsung official from South Africa who confirmed the upcoming fan edition is in the works and will launch soon. Carrying forward the trend of leaks, the camera specification of the device has now emerged via a leak. According to GalaxyClub, the S23 FE may have a 50MP primary lens on the back. Same as the S21 FE, an 8MP telephoto (with 3X optical zoom) lens is expected on the back. No details about the ultra-wide lens are…

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The Lords of the Rings: Gollum launched in May with myriad issues, making it tough to play through at various points throughout the action-adventure game. Head here to read Game Informer’s Gollum review. However, developer Daedalic Entertainment is targeting many of those problems in the game’s PC version with a new patch that’s now live.  Daedalic published an extensive list of changes for the PC version on the Gollum Steam page. It’s unclear if any of these changes are coming to the game’s console versions, but Game Informer reached out to Daedalic to ask and will update this story if…

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Enlarge / Ryugu’s rubble pile includes some small fragments left over from our Solar System’s formation. When JAXA’s Hayabusa-2 spacecraft delivered samples from asteroid Ryugu to Earth in late 2020, anticipation was high. What could the space rock possibly be waiting to tell us? Asteroids are time capsules of the Solar System, containing material from early in its history. As a 2021 study found, the Ryugu samples contained carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen, all necessary ingredients for life, and a 2022 study discovered evidence of water (and possibly a subsurface lake) that had long since dried up. Ryugu and its parent…

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Twitter or “X” CEO Elon Musk today said that he plans to speak with Apple CEO Tim Cook about lower App Store fees for creators who earn money through subscriptions on the Twitter/X social network. In a post on creator support, Musk said that he plans to ask Apple to collect 30 percent of the creator fee that Twitter keeps rather than 30 percent of the total fee that a creator on Twitter earns. That would potentially give Apple a much lower cut of the money that Twitter is paying out to creators. Musk said that Twitter does not plan…

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Ulanzi has announced a new Camera Cooling Fan for select Sony, Canon, and FUJIFILM mirrorless hybrids. The Ulanzi Camera Cooling Fan is being touted as an affordable cooling solution for select mirrorless hybrids that are prone to or can overheat when being used in hot environments for sustained periods of time. Camera cooling fans like this are nothing new and I previously reviewed the Tilta Cooling Kit for the Canon EOS R5 on the site more than a year ago. What I found with the Tilta offering was that the actual recovery times and subsequent recording times were better than…

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With your help, I’m trying to answer the biggest question: what’s the best thing in video games? With a new wholly sensical face-off each week, we’ll surely soon discover the single absolute best thing. Last time, you overwhelmingly decided that going on the roof is better than one in the chamber, you little rapscallions. You’re going to get in so much trouble when someone finds out! This week, I have death on my mind ahead of the much-belated scattering of my dad’s ashes, so let’s talk about death. ‘The long sleep,’ some say. ‘Making the little flowers grow,’ Lee Hazelwood…

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When Marc Raibert foundedBoston Dynamics in 1992, he wasn’t even sure it was going to be a robotics company—he thought it might become a modeling and simulation company instead. Now, of course, Boston Dynamics is the authority in legged robots, with its Atlas biped and Spot quadruped. But as the company focuses more on commercializing its technology, Raibert has become more interested in pursuing the long-term vision of what robotics can be.To that end, Raibert founded the Boston Dynamics AI Institute in August of 2022. Funded by Hyundai (the company also acquired Boston Dynamics in 2020), the Institute’s first few…

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The Australian Tax Office (ATO) paid out more than half a billion dollars to cyber criminals between July 2021 and February 2023, according to an ABC report. Most of the payments were for small amounts (less than A$5,000) and were not flagged by the ATO’s own monitoring systems. The fraudsters exploited a weakness in the identification system used by the myGov online portal to redirect other people’s tax refunds to their own bank accounts. The good news is there’s plenty the federal government can do to crack down on this kind of fraud – and that you can do to…

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The day is fast approaching when generative AI won’t only write and create images in a convincingly human-like style, but compose music and sounds that pass for a professional’s work, too. This morning, Meta announced AudioCraft, a framework to generate what it describes as “high-quality,” “realistic” audio and music from short text descriptions, or prompts. It’s not Meta’s first foray into audio generation — the tech giant open sourced an AI-powered music generator, MusicGen, in June — but Meta claims that it’s made advances that vastly improve the quality of AI-generated sounds, such as dogs barking, cars honking and footsteps…

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