An anonymous reader writes: I have a decent video camera, but it lacks a terminal for using an external mic. However, I have a comparatively good audio recorder. What I'd like to do is "automagically" synchronize sound recorded on the audio recorder with video taken on the video camera, using Free / Open Source software on Linux, so I can dump in the files from each, hit "Go," and in the end I get my video, synched with the separately recorded audio, in some sane file format. This seems simple, but maybe it isn't: the 800-pound gorilla in the room is PluralEyes, which evidently lots of people pay $200 for --and which doesn't have a Linux version. Partly this is that I'm cheap, partly it's that I like open source software for being open source, and partly it's that I already use Linux as my usual desktop, and resent needing to switch OS to do what seems intuitively to be a simple task. (It seems like something VLC would do, considering its Swiss-Army-Knife approach, but after pulling down all the menus I could find, I don't think that's the case.) I don't see this feature in any of the Open Source video editing programs, so as a fallback question for anyone who's using LiVES, KDEnlive, or other free/Free option, do you have a useful workflow for synching up externally recorded sound? I'd be happy even to find a simple solution that's merely gratis rather than Free, as long as it runs on Ubuntu.

SlappingOysters writes: One of the biggest challenges for gamers during this generation of consoles is ensuring you have enough hard drive space to hold the latest blockbuster. Given that every game needs to be installed in order to be played, and games often weigh in at over 40GB, the 500GB of storage that comes as standard doesn't stretch far. Finder.com has provided a handy resource, listing the install sizes for every PlayStation 4 game (460 and counting) and every Xbox One game (290 and counting). The list is searchable, and can be ordered.

MojoKid writes: Alienware has been relatively quiet for the past 18 months or so with respect to their X51 small form factor gaming systems. However, Intel's recent Skylake processor launch and NVIDIA's further optimizations in their Maxwell GPU architecture have given the company a fresh suite of technology to work with to enhance performance and reduce power consumption. As such, the Alienware X51 was given a complete overhaul of the lastest technologies, all of which play very well with the tighter power budgets and thermal constraints of this class of machine. Alienware calls their new machine simply the X51 R3, as it's the third revision of the product. One of the more unique design changes that Alienware made was to the graphics riser card which plugs into a X20 PCI Express slot on the motherboard. This is a rather unique approach to design efficiency which allows the Samsung NVMe M.2 gumstick Solid State Drive in this machine to ride along shotgun with the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960, on the side of a custom riser card. Performance-wise the machine is capable of strong standard compute performance on the desktop and in the latest game titles it's able to offer up playable frame rates up through 1440p resolution with high image quality settings. Not bad for a console-sized small form factor PC, actually.

New submitter jddj writes: The Next Web reports on a hilarious design failure built into Cisco's 3650 and 3850 Series switches, which TNW terms "A Network Engineer's Worst Nightmare". By plugging in a hooded Ethernet cable, you...well, you'll just have to see the picture and laugh. They write: "The cables, which are sometimes accidentally used in datacenters, feature a protective boot that sticks out over the top to ensure the release tab isn’t accidentally pressed or broken off, rendering the cable useless. That boot would hit the reset button which happened to be positioned directly above port one of the Cisco switch, which causes the device to quietly reset to factory settings."

An anonymous reader writes: I've started a second career, teaching English at a High School in a middle class area. While the large majority of students have a computer and internet access at home, about 10-15% do not. I assign papers that must be typed, I have papers turned in online, and I plan to freely refer to texts, videos, and other resources that are available online. This gives an extra disadvantage to students that may be from the poorer end of the strata, and also means extra inefficiency for me, as I have to make allowances for students who don't have a computer available at home.

Right now, I have to tell them to either use school computers during the day, or to pick up a $170 laptop (more than enough — I administer the class using such a laptop). However, I was surprised at the lack of a super-cheap option for students. I'd love to see something for $20 that any student could afford easily, or perhaps I could just gift to a few students. I feel like something in this price range could be sufficiently powerful for basic word processing, youtube videos, and internet searches (internet access is a separate issue). But looking over my options I see:

1) The very cheapest Chromebooks are also in the $170 range.
2) Android Sticks have been around for a while, and do cost in the $20 range, but don't seem to have matured into a generally usable technology. Surprisingly, there doesn't seem to be a community effort to easily turn these Android sticks into Ubuntu/Mint sticks.
3) Students can't be assumed to have the technical know-how to fix up a Salvation Army computer (I wouldn't mind helping out a bit, but I don't want to turn into tech support)
4) A Raspberry Pi costs $70 once you include a case/power supply/etc, and students would receive a big bag of parts.
5) Cheap Windows Tablets have glitches, and don't have an HDMI out.
6) There isn't a good solution to using a cell phone as a desktop computer.

Are any of my assumptions wrong? Are there any other options I'm not considering?

An anonymous reader writes: A lengthy new article details the history of the Oculus Rift, from the VR headset's stereotypical beginnings in a hacker's parents' garage to its $2 billion acquisition by Facebook. "Luckey got into VR by way of computer games, which he was obsessed with for a time. After building what he recalls as a "beautiful six-monitor setup," for extreme visual saturation, he wondered, Why not just put a small screen directly on your face?" At just 19 years old, Luckey built a prototype good enough to impress John Carmack, which brought him all sorts of further attention. Investors came running, and eventually Mark Zuckerberg took an interest. "When Zuckerberg arrived, Luckey introduced himself and then quickly walked away. 'I'm a big fan,' he said, 'but I actually have to get back to work.' ... Zuckerberg seemed taken aback by Luckey's brusqueness but also charmed. 'They definitely have the hacker culture that we have,' he says." As the device approaches release, they're all wondering how much VR will change the world.

An anonymous reader writes: An editorial in the Wall Street Journal rings a bell we've been ringing for years: "Who owns the knowledge required to take apart and repair TVs, phones and other electronics? Manufacturers stop us by controlling repair plans and limiting access to parts. Some even employ digital software locks to keep us from making changes or repairs. This may not always be planned obsolescence, but it's certainly intentional obfuscation." The article shows that awareness of this consumer-hostile behavior (and frustration with it) is going mainstream. The author links to several DIY repair sites like iFixit, and concludes, "Repairing stuff isn't as complicated as they want you to think. Skilled gadget owners and independent repair pros deserve access to the information they need to do the best job they can."

New submitter rgreid writes: Prototypes of a new type of rover designed to explore the surface of comets and asteroids have been demonstrated recently by JPL and Stanford. Videos of the rovers in NASA's "vomit comet" show the Hedgehog prototypes performing hopping and tumbling maneuvers in a low-gravity environment. The low gravity and rough terrains found on comets and asteroids make driving with traditional rovers difficult and hazardous— the Hedgehog rovers are specifically designed to overcome these challenges and use the low gravity environment to their advantage. A last-resort "tornado" maneuver shows how the Hedgehogs could leap upwards if they get stuck in a sinkhole. The team's concept was previously covered in 2013; this recent work goes a long way toward demonstrating that Hedgehog rovers could work on a real comet or asteroid.

JMarshall writes: Recordings on old audio tapes won't be worth much in another 20 years, and some are already too degraded to play. A team including members from the Library of Congress report that infrared spectroscopy can noninvasively separate magnetic tapes that can still be played from those that can't, without risking the tapes by sticking them in a player. Unplayable tapes can sometimes be rescued by heating, which can make them playable for long enough to digitize. This method could help archivists identify which tapes need special handling before they get any worse.

An anonymous reader writes: The Raspberry Pi has been enormously successful, but one frequent request has been for the Foundation to create a simple touchscreen to go along with it. Gordon Hollingworth said, "I honestly believed it would only take us six months from start to end, but there were a number of issues we met (and other products diverted our attention from the display – like Rev 2.1, B+, A+, and Pi 2)." Now, after two years of development, they've launched a 7", 800x480 LCD that runs at 60 fps. The capacitive screen supports 10 simultaneous finger touches and has a 70 degree viewing angle. The Raspberry Pi Foundation's blog post provides some interesting technical background on electromagnetic compliance and how to connect and use the display.

Amazon has been dogged with criticism for its high-end, somewhat oddball phone, but done rather better with its high-end Fire tablets, and has mostly defined the market for e-ink book-reading devices with its long-lived Kindle series. Now, according to a report in the WSJ echoed by Fortune (and by Ars Technica and many others), the company is said to be working on a tablet aimed at the low end of the market, with a 6-inch screen, a mono speaker, and a tiny pricetag -- which could be as low as $50. "At the bottom end of the range at least, the devices won’t be priced to make a profit," writes Fortune. "The dirt-cheap price tag is intended to maximise the reach of its e-book and Amazon Prime video streaming content."

Mark Wilson writes: If you have not recently updated the firmware for your Seagate wireless NAS drives, now is the time to do so. Researchers at Tangible Security have discovered a series of vulnerabilities in a number of devices produced by Seagate that could allow unauthorized access to files and settings. An undocumented Telnet feature could be used to gain control of the device by using the username 'root' and the hardcoded default password. There are also other vulnerabilities that allow for unauthorized browsing and downloading of files, as well as permitting malicious files to be uploaded. Tangible Security says that Seagate Wireless Plus Mobile Storage, Seagate Wireless Mobile Storage, and LaCie FUEL drives are affected, but there may also be others. The security issues are confirmed to exist with firmware versions 2.2.0.005 to 2.3.0.014.

New submitter jalvarez13 writes: I'm in my early 40's and I will become a dad in less than a month. Until now I've been quite happy with a Canon Powershot S110 for taking pictures and video, but now I'm thinking in longer terms. If some of you have already thought or done something about this, what did you consider when buying photo/video equipment? What about a plan to store the files you generate? I guess there are important decisions you made about to image quality, file formats, storage type, organizing and labelling software, etc.

I'm also wondering if there are any other technologies (stereoscopic cameras?) that I haven't thought about and may be interesting to look at.

schwit1 writes: A 30-kilogram robotic yellow submarine is keeping sea stars in check with poison. The sea stars periodically have huge population booms, and a square kilometer of reef can be home to 100,000 of them. They'll kill off the reefs if left unchecked, but humans can only kill a couple sea stars per minute. The task is overwhelming but simple and repetitive, and thus ripe for automation. The COTSBot has "a maximum speed of over two meters per second and an endurance of over six hours. Five thrusters give it the capability of briefly hovering in the water column, giving it time to attack crown of thorns sea stars with an integrated poison injection system. It's completely autonomous, down to the identification and targeting of [sea stars] lurking among coral."

Brady Forrest is co-author of The Hardware Startup: Building Your Product, Business, and Brand. He has extensive experience building both products and startups, including staffing, financing, and marketing. If you are thinking or dreaming about doing a startup, you should not only watch the video to "meet" Brady, but read the transcript for more info than the video covers.

Lucas123 writes: Several companies are now beginning to roll out translucent photovoltaic films or solar cells embedded in windows that can supplement a significant amount of energy in the buildings where they're used. SolarWindow Technologies, for example, is preparing to launch a transparent product made with organic PVs, while another company, Solaria, is cutting solar cells into thin strips and embedding them in windows. Both companies admit their products can't produce the 20% efficiency ratings of today's best rooftop solar panels, but they say that's not their objective. Instead, the companies are looking to take advantage of millions of skyscraper windows that today are simply unused real estate for renewable energy. One company is aiming at supplementing 20% to 30% of a skyscrapers power requirements. Meanwhile, universities are also jumping into the solar window arena. Oxford University has spun off a PV window company that produces semi-transparent solar cells made of semi-transparent perovskite oxide that has achieved a 20% solar energy efficiency.

An anonymous reader writes: Bloomberg reports that ZTE and its cheap Android smartphones have been grabbing more and more of the market in the U.S. It's not that the phones are particularly good — it's that they're "good enough" for the $60 price tag. The company has moved up to fourth among smartphone makers, behind Apple, Samsung and LG. That puts them ahead of a lot of companies making premium devices: HTC, Motorola, and BlackBerry, to name a few. ZTE, a Chinese manufacturer, seems to be better at playing the U.S. markets than competitors like Xiaomi and Huawei, and they're getting access to big carriers and big retailers. "Its phone sales are all the more surprising because it's been frozen out of the more lucrative telecom networking market since 2012. That year, the House Intelligence Committee issued a report warning that China's intelligence services could potentially use ZTE's equipment, and those of rival Huawei Technologies, for spying. Huawei then dismissed the allegations as 'little more than an exercise in China bashing.'"

HughPickens.com writes: Gregory Meyer reports at the Financial Times that electricity generated by U.S. wind farms fell 6 per cent in the first half of the year, even as the nation expanded wind generation capacity by 9 per cent. The reason was some of the softest air currents in 40 years, cutting power sales from wind farms to utilities. The situation is likely to intensify into the first quarter of 2016 as the El Niño weather phenomenon holds back wind speeds around much of the U.S. "We never anticipated a drop-off in the wind resource as we have witnessed over the past six months," says David Crane. Wind generated 4.4 per cent of US electricity last year, up from 0.4 per cent a decade earlier. But this year U.S. wind plants' "capacity factor" has averaged just a third of their total generating capacity, down from 38 per cent in 2014.

EIA noted that slightly slower wind speeds can reduce output by a disproportionately large amount. "Capacity factors for wind turbines are largely determined by wind resources," says a report from the Energy Information Administration. "Because the output from a turbine varies nonlinearly with wind speed, small decreases in wind speeds can result in much larger changes in output and, in turn, capacity factors." In January of 2015, wind speeds remained 20 to 45 percent below normal on areas of the west coast, but it was especially bad in California, Oregon, and Washington, where those levels dropped to 50 percent below normal during the month of January.

szczys writes: Laser cutters are awesome, but you have to bring your mechanical engineering A-game if you want to build resilient stuff using laser-cut parts. Joshua Vasquez has been building up his bag of tricks using Delrin and a laser cutter to build with techniques like press-fitting, threading, snap-fits, etc. that aren't possible or are non-ideal with the laser-cutting steadfasts of plywood and acrylic. Delrin (PDF) won't shatter like acrylic, and it has more give to it, so even the less precise entry-level lasers can cut joints that will have a snug fit.

Lucas123 writes: Body cameras are the fastest growing segment of the police video camera business. The two largest police body camera manufacturers today — Taser and VieVu — say they've shipped devices to 41% of the nation's 18,000 police departments. But, the hardware is only the basis for the real business: video evidence storage. Last year, Taser's gross profit margins on hardware were 15.6%; the gross margins for video storage were 51%, according to Glenn Mattson, who follows Taser as an equity analyst for Ladenburg Thalmann. "There's no contest. They don't care about making money on the cameras," Mattson said. As of the first quarter of this year, more than a petabyte of police video has been uploaded to Taser's Evidence.com service. Just one of VieVu's clients, the Oakland PD, has uploaded more than a million police videos. The cost of storage, however, is so high that police departments have been forced to determine strict retention policies, that in some cases may effect the long-term handling of evidence. In Birmingham, Ala., for example, where they've deployed 300 cameras and hope to double that this year, the the video cameras themselves cost about $180,000, but the department's total outlay for a five-year contract including cloud storage with Taser will be $889,000.