There have been other credit card-sized Find My trackers on the market, but I believe this is the first rechargeable one. Bonus points for being compatible with MagSafe.
Update: Nomad wasn’t the first to have a rechargeable tracker in this class. The Chipolo CARD Spot, which I had in mind when writing this, is not rechargeable.
David Pierce has reviewed the Humane AI Pin, and it seems pretty, pretty, pretty bad. We already knew — from Humane’s recent video — that the device could be quite slow to respond. That was after the initial video, which was full of examples of the Pin giving downright incorrect information in response to requests.
Product videos (even bad ones) are one thing; reviews are another. Here’s Pierce, writing for The Verge:
I came into this review with two big questions about the AI Pin. The first is the big-picture one: is this thing… anything? In just shy of two weeks of testing, I’ve come to realize that there are, in fact, a lot of things for which my phone actually sucks. Often, all I want to do is check the time or write something down or text my wife, and I end up sucked in by TikTok or my email or whatever unwanted notification is sitting there on my screen. Plus, have you ever thought about how often your hands are occupied with groceries / clothes / leashes / children / steering wheels, and how annoying / unsafe it is to try to balance your phone at the same time? I’ve learned I do lots of things on my phone that I might like to do somewhere else. So, yeah, this is something. Maybe something big. AI models aren’t good enough to handle everything yet, but I’ve seen enough glimmers of what’s coming that I’m optimistic about the future.
Weather forecasts are often seen as just a nice thing to have. Useful when planning a Sunday barbecue, or when we want to know if we’ll need an umbrella for the day. But in many ways weather forecasts are absolutely crucial: they can be a matter of life and death.
Accurate forecasts can save lives by giving early warnings of storms, heat waves, and disasters. Farmers use them for agricultural management, which can make the difference between a lost harvest or a harvest of plenty. Grid operators rely on accurate forecasts of temperatures for heating and cooling demand, and how much energy they’ll get from wind and solar farms. Pilots and sailors need them to carry people across oceans safely. Accurate information about future weather is often absolutely vital.
John Rokos is running an interesting Kickstarter:
OpenCase is an iPhone case that significantly reduces the issues with MagSafe accessories. It does this by creating an “open” space that holds the MagSafe accessories (we call this the “Accessory-Hold” area). It makes accessories thinner, it makes the case lighter, and it holds MagSafe accessories much more securely.
The OpenCase system finally realizes the full promise of MagSafe by making it significantly more reliable and secure. And, since you always have your phone with you, it makes for the ultimate EDC (Every Day Carry) upgrade.
Benj Edwards, writing at Ars:
In a move that marks the end of an era, New Mexico State University (NMSU) recently announced the impending closure of its Hobbes OS/2 Archive on April 15, 2024. For over three decades, the archive has been a key resource for users of the IBM OS/2 operating system and its successors, which once competed fiercely with Microsoft Windows.
In a statement made to The Register, a representative of NMSU wrote, “We have made the difficult decision to no longer host these files on hobbes.nmsu.edu. Although I am unable to go into specifics, we had to evaluate our priorities and had to make the difficult decision to discontinue the service.”
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy has written a sobering update on where the One Smart Home Standard to Rule Them All is here at the end of 2023.
What a day so far:
I don’t need Teenage Engineering’s new synthesizer, but my word, I love how it looks:
After a lot of hype — and a massive last-minute leak — Humane has launched its first product, the AI Pin.
(Humane spells the product name differently in various places on its website, but I’m going with this style.)
I encourage you to take ten minutes and watch the introductory video, which shows off the hardware, software and services that the team has stitched together to create the $700 device.
And what a team it is. Humane is led by husband and wife Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, who both had long careers at Apple before leaving in 2016. What came next is detailed in a New York Times profile of the pair and their new device:
The Nintendo 64 was the console of my childhood and I could not put my email address into this website fast enough.
Netflix’s DVD business is winding down on Friday, and Janko Roettgers has a great look at what made it tick.