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The original 'Inspector Gadget' is coming to Twitch December 17th
Inspector Gadget is back on duty. The first season of the 1983 animated series Inspector Gadget will be broadcast in its entirety on Twitch starting December 17th at 10:00 AM PST. The show will air in five-hour sessions on the Twitch Presents channel and will conclude December 24 at 9:00 AM PST. The stream will include all 65 episodes of the cartoon's inaugural season.
Tech host Will Smith needs help funding his VR talk show
News of tech journalist Will Smith's VR talk show broke in April and he's looking for help funding the first season. Smith has taken to Kickstarter to raise money for the The Foo Show's 5-episode affair that will debut on Oculus Home and Steam in December. After the premiere, the plan is to release two episodes in both January and February and the entire first season can be yours with a pledge of $20.
Tech journalist Will Smith launches a talk show in VR
When Will Smith (no, not that one) announced he was leaving Tested to start his own virtual reality company last September, it came as a bit of a shock. But sometimes you see something so powerful that you can't do anything to stop yourself from pursuing it. Now Smith has revealed exactly what he's doing: A talk show filmed entirely in VR called The FOO Show. "My goal with The FOO Show is to showcase amazing creators and their works in ways that were never before possible, using virtual reality," he writes on Medium.
Take an 18-minute look at how to fool Touch ID with Tested and fake fingers
It's possible to fool Touch ID but, as we've been saying since it came out, it isn't easy. The folks at Tested were curious about new methods of fooling the sensor and set out to find the perfect tool, a fake finger to trick them all. Their end results prove our original findings, that fooling Touch ID is still an incredibly difficult prospect. Of course largely failing to bypass the system doesn't mean their efforts aren't incredibly interesting. Using photos, finger prints, silicon pressings, etching, and computers Tested shows exactly how much effort it takes to make even the most ineffectual solution to "hacking" Touch ID. Obviously we wouldn't be sharing this video with you if we thought it would actually teach you how to break into someone's phone. Rather this is merely a fascinating look at the science of testing out mobile security features, a gift for those of you who want to debunk your scared Uncle who believes Touch ID can be easy fooled. Enjoy.
Thirty minutes of Team Fortress 2 in virtual reality caught on camera
The team at Tested got a chance play around with Team Fortress 2 using the upcoming Oculus Rift headset, and they recorded half an hour of gameplay for us to virtually enjoy. Not "virtually" as in we'll "almost" enjoy it, but "virtually" as in "virtual reality"-based enjoyment. Just watch the video.Kickstarter backers should receive their Oculus Rift dev kits by mid-April, with pre-orders hitting a little later in the month. For those expecting a kit, check out Valve's list of handy tricks for setting up VR in TF2.
LittleBigPlanet Karting gets player tested
Sony's San Diego Studio recently held a game jam to do some hardcore testing on the Create tools for the upcoming LittleBigPlanet Karting, and apparently it went pretty well because the studio has announced the game's going into beta soon. The beta test for the title will start next Tuesday, July 10, and then go through the end of the month.You can read some impressions from the game jam over on the forums, including some breathless (we imagine) excitement from the game's fans and players on how the title worked and what they made. Codes will go out soon to selected players, and the game itself is due out later on this year.
Qualcomm's 1.5GHz dual-core MSM8660 destroys the competition in majestic benchmark run
Take the 1GHz Scorpion core residing in Qualcomm's current flagship Snapdragon, the MSM8x55, duplicate it, overclock the resulting pair by 50 percent, and give them improved graphics in the form of Adreno 220. What do you get? A barnburner by the unsexy name of MSM8x60. Yes, the 1.5GHz Mobile Development Platform Qualcomm loosed on the world at CES earlier this year has found itself prostrate on a test bench, where it has produced some of the finest graphical performance scores yet seen on a mobile device. The taxing OpenGL ES 2.0 test you see above shows the new Snapdragon doubling the frame rates churned out by Motorola's mighty Atrix 4G (which admittedly has to work harder thanks to its higher-res display) and completely embarrassing older generation hardware like the EVO 4G. That's a theme carried on throughout AnandTech's benchmarking, which you may explore in full at the source link. If you're wondering when this world-beating dual-core chip will be coming to market, the answer is that it's already inside HTC's imminently upcoming EVO 3D and Pyramid devices, albeit running at a tamer 1.2GHz. Exciting, eh? P.S. - Do take note that the Qualcomm dev platform was plugged into the wall during these tests and was not subject to any power management software that may have otherwise restrained its performance as on the retail chips under test. Moreover, the Egypt benchmark can only run at native resolution, which is what's causing some seemingly aberrant results such as the iPhone 4 (960 x 640) ranking below the iPhone 3GS (480 x 320).
OCZ's Agility 2 SSD reviewed: despite limits, SandForce SF-1200 drive performs well
Contrary to popular belief, one solid state drive isn't the same as another solid state drive necessarily. OCZ's new Agility 2 is proof of that, boasting the final (v3.0.5) version of SandForce's SF-1200 firmware. The issue here is that Corsair's recently released Force series of SSDs are shipping (and continue to ship) with v3.0.1 installed, which -- according to SandForce -- will never be viewed as the final version ready for mass consumption. As the story goes, v3.0.1 may experience a reliability issue with a power management state, but v3.0.5 caps small file random write performance as to better separate the SF-1200 drives from the pricier SF-1500 drives. Our compadres over at AnandTech were able to put the (factory limited) Agility 2 SSD through its paces, and for the most part, it came out looking pretty decent. Critics found 5- to 10-percent performance gains when compared to Intel / Indilinx offerings, but unless you have to have the absolute best, paying extra for that bump may not be the most intelligent move. The other point here is that while the Agility 2 may be capped with the v3.0.5 firmware, at least its upgrade path is a lot clearer than the aforementioned Force; if you ever take v3.0.1 away from that unit, you can kiss that extra performance goodbye. Hit the source link for the full, drama-filled look.
Macworld 2010: Hands-on with the Parrot AR.Drone
We first heard about the Parrot AR.Drone, an iPhone-controlled RC quadrocopter, back when it made such a big splash at CES, but unfortunately, since we weren't there, we didn't get to see it in person. Fortunately Parrot did come by Macworld, and the day before the show, we finally got to see their iPhone-controlled, dual camera-equipped, high tech toy in action. So what's the verdict? It's not super easy to fly (we crashed it into the walls, the ground, and even their marketing guy), but it's the real thing -- the extremely light (3/4 of a pound, as our own Steve Sande estimated with remarkable accuracy) quadricopter is packed with all kinds of fun gadgets, including variable speed rotors, the ability to lift off, hover, and land on its own, and super-sensitive touch controls along with two 640x480 VGA camera feeds running back to the iPhone via 802.11G Wi-Fi. We're not sure how ready it actually is for market (or what it'll cost yet), but the AR.Drone does what it says on the not-yet-designed box: Allows you to control a real quadricopter with and through your iPhone. Read our impressions of the hands-on below, and don't forget to stay tuned -- we'll have video of our demonstration later on. %Gallery-85172%
