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Sabtu, 04 Mei 2019

Ask Engadget: Which smart doorbell should I buy? - Engadget

The support shared among readers in the comments section is one of the things we love most about the Engadget community. Over the years, we've known you to offer sage advice on everything from Chromecasts and cameras to drones and smartphones. In fact, our community's knowledge and insights are a reason why many of you participate in the comments.

We truly value the time and detail you all spend in responding to questions from your fellow tech-obsessed commenters, which is why we've decided to bring back our "Ask Engadget" column. This week's question concerns dumb houses and smart doorbells. Weigh in with your advice in the comments -- and feel free to send your own questions along to ask@engadget.com!

My parents have an older home but really want a smart doorbell. Which ones are easy to install (and offer the best security)?

Jordan Brown

As a paranoid, first-time homeowner, naturally one of the first things I purchased (even before moving in) was a Ring video doorbell. I chose the Ring based on its price point, features and the polished app interface. A few of my friends had owned Rings for a while and were happy with the experience, so I decided it was enough for me to give it a shot. Also, based on the friends I knew with them, I assumed the install couldn't be too challenging; and I was right.

Ring's app has an easy-to-follow walkthrough for whatever your application is. In our case, I was lucky in that our house had an existing, wired doorbell with a transformer, and in a relatively ideal location; right next to the door with a nice clear view of the porch. If this is the situation for your parents house, installation is very straight-forward. You simply cut the power to the existing doorbell, remove it, wire the mounting plate up to the old doorbell power wire, and then slide the Ring onto that mount. The nice thing about this option is that the Ring uses the house's existing doorbell chime and shouldn't require any charging (although I've had to top off mine periodically during the winter months).

However, some older houses -- and this could be the case with your parents' -- might lack the appropriate wiring. They could even lack wiring altogether. But the beauty of the Ring's battery back-up is that this is a non-issue. In those cases, installation is just about as easy. You won't have the wiring to worry about, but you will have to spend a little more time finding a place to mount the plate, making sure it's level, etc. But other than that, and assuming you don't have to drill into any granite walls or anything crazy, you're all set.

This will mean you have to charge the unit periodically, as it won't be drawing its power from the old doorbell wire in this case. Ring says the doorbell should last six to 12 months on a charge, depending on the amount of activity that triggers it, but take that with a grain of salt. Real-world estimates put it closer to the three-month mark, but that's still not terrible to live with, and the app will let you know when it's time to charge. Also keep in mind that if it's not wired to an existing chime, you will only get push notifications on your paired devices, but Ring will sell you a separate wireless chime, which you can plug into any standard outlet if you want something akin to a standard doorbell notification.

In either application, the Ring app does a great job walking you through the entire process and the installation is a relative snap. In terms of the application and day-to-day experience, I've also found Ring's interface to be very intuitive and customizable. I've limited the motion alert sensitivity on the Ring so as to not get false positives from passersby. But it's handy getting notifications any time we get a delivery, and it's fun to dismiss door-to-door salespeople from the comfort of the couch.

Daniel Cooper
Senior Editor

The first-generation Ring is super easy to install: Just drill four holes into the wall, screw in the security plate and boom, it's on. The downside is that the build quality isn't great and it does rely upon you charging the battery regularly. The newer ones have removable batteries which make it easier to charge, and if you're halfway smart with wire, you can wire the Pro-models up to your existing door chimes with relatively little effort.

As for security, it's an Amazon company so they're not amateurs, but they did have (two!) security snafus a couple of months back so, as with all smart home products, go in knowing that it's possible that others can still access your stuff.

Nicole Lee
Senior Editor

I think Wirecutter explains it well enough, but tl;dr: The Ring is the easiest to install but the Nest has better security. That's because the cheaper Ring models lets you install the doorbell without hooking into your house's electrical (which often requires a certified electrician to come by, and the upgraded model). The Nest Hello also requires a connection to the house's electrical system, but it does offer 24/7 monitoring, AI motion detection and facial recognition; the Ring only records when motion is detected.

All products recommended by Engadget were selected by our editorial team, independent of our parent company, Verizon Media. If you buy something through one of our links, we may earn an affiliate commission.

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https://www.engadget.com/2019/05/04/best-smart-doorbell/

2019-05-04 18:30:32Z
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Hitting the Books: Ever wonder how audio sampling works? - Engadget

Welcome to Hitting the Books. With less than one in five Americans reading just for fun these days, we've done the hard work for you by scouring the internet for the most interesting, thought provoking books on science and technology we can find and delivering an easily digestible nugget of their stories.

The Discrete Charm of the Machine: Why the World Became Digital
by Ken Steiglitz

We're living the audiophile dream! Our phones can hold a year's worth of music and stream more songs than anyone could listen to in a lifetime. But none of that would be possible without the efforts of one Harry Nyquist, an engineer at Bell Labs in the 1920s, and his research into improving turn-of-the-20th-Century telephone signals.

In The Discrete Charm of the Machine, author Ken Steiglitz -- himself a pioneer in digital signal processing -- examines the underpinnings of our culture's rapid digitization; explains in clear, concise language how today's technologies grew from their analog forerunners; and even provides a few hints at where we might be headed.

A signal in the real world is always limited in how high a frequency it can contain. The reason is similar to the reason that transistors are limited in their speed of operation; all electronic devices have a certain amount of capacitance, which limits the speed with which charge can accumulate, which limits the speed with which voltages can change. Mechanical devices have a corresponding amount of inertia. These factors limit the highest frequency that a real signal in any particular physical environment can contain. The point is that we need to worry only about sampling the highest frequency in a signal. The lower frequencies are easier, not harder, to represent at a given sampling rate.

The idea of a "pure" tone of a given frequency is often introduced as a sine wave, the familiar waveform that goes up, levels off, then goes down, levels off, and so on. The function sine is referred to as a "circular" function, for the following reason: Picture a rotating circular disk, horizontal, a roulette wheel if you like, with a point of light (from an LED, say) glued to a fixed point near its edge. If we darken the room, we see the light rotating continuously at a given rate, at a certain frequency in "cycles per second," or Hz. If you kneel down and look at the disk from the side, the light goes back and forth, and, in fact, it will describe precisely the waveform called a sine wave. This is a great convenience, because we can now think about the rotating disk, which is much easier to visualize, and a more precise picture than an undulating wave. As an aside, I point out that physicists and engineers make heavy use of this alternative representation of a sine wave, albeit mathematically, in the form of a complex-valued function called a phasor. Richard Feynman wrote a marvelous little book, called QED, explaining quantum electrodynamics in simple terms, and he uses the picture of a little spinning disk throughout.

Now, instead of leaving the LED on steadily as the disk rotates, flash it periodically. Each flash corresponds to a sample of the position of the little light as it turns with the disk. If we sample many times for each rotation of the disk, we have no trouble representing the true rate at which the disk is turning. However, if we try to get away with slower sampling, we reach a point where we are sampling exactly twice for each rotation of the disk, and the little point of light will just flip back and forth between two positions 180◦ apart. If we now try to get away with slower sampling, flashing (sampling) the light a little less often than twice per rotation, slower and slower, a rather bad (but interesting) thing happens: the little light appears to turn in the direction opposite to its actual direction. If we slow the flashing down to only once per rotation, the flashing light appears stationary. If we flash even slower than once per rotation, the little light appears to start rotating in the correct direction but at a very slow rate—much slower than the true rate of the disk.

This is exactly what happens in an old Western movie when the stagecoach draws to a stop. The wagon wheels appear to turn in the wrong direction, slow down, start turning in the right direction, and so on, until they appear to be turning in the correct direction, more and more slowly, until they finally draw to a stop. The sampling behind this phenomenon is the frame rate of the movie camera, which is standardized at 24 frames per second. When the wagon wheel is turning faster than 12 times a second, we are in effect sampling at a rate less than twice per rotation, and the image shows a fraudulent representation of the speed of the wheel. In fact, practitioners of digital signal processing (DSP) call such a fraudulent frequency an alias of the true frequency.

We can now draw the promised elegant conclusion from this imaginary experiment: To capture faithfully the frequencies in a signal, we must sample at a rate at least twice the highest frequency present in the signal. Put the other way around, if we sample at a given rate, we must limit the highest frequency present in the signal to half the sampling rate. This latter rate is now called the Nyquist frequency.

Harry Nyquist worked for Bell Telephone Laboratories, which was very concerned with communication problems from the early days of the twentieth century, for obvious reasons. He explains his principle in Nyquist (1928a), but his explanation is in terms of telegraph terminology that is 90 years old, and he is not always easy to interpret. But Nyquist's principle, sometimes called his sampling theorem, is there.

What this means in our modern world, for example, is that audio signals, which are usually limited to frequencies (well) below 20 kHz, need to be sampled at a rate of at least 40 kHz. In fact, the standardized sampling rate used by compact discs is 44.1 kHz. Exactly the same ideas apply to A-to-D conversion of video signals, but the rates are much higher.

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https://www.engadget.com/2019/05/04/hitting-the-books-ever-wonder-how-audio-sampling-works/

2019-05-04 16:10:42Z
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This week in tech history: Microsoft announces its first 'real' laptop - Engadget

At Engadget, we spend every day looking at how technology will shape the future. But it's also important to look back at how far we've come. That's what This Week in Tech History does. Join us every weekend for a recap of historical tech news, anniversaries and advances from the recent and not-so-recent past. This week, we're looking back at Microsoft's first "real laptop," the Surface Laptop.

It's hard to believe that only two years have passed since Microsoft first announced the Surface Laptop. That's probably because the company had already built up a reputation with the Surface line of convertible tablets. Those computers tried to marry the portability and touch-screen convenience of the iPad with accessories, software and specs that made it more of a "real computer."

It took Microsoft a few years to hone in on what exactly made the standard Surface work, but by 2015 it had really nailed the concept with the Surface Pro 4. But still, there were plenty of people who longed to see what Microsoft could do if it applied its burgeoning hardware chops to a more traditional laptop design. Enter the Surface Laptop, a computer with no fancy hinges or detachable keyboard; its most notable design quirk was the fabric-covered keyboard palm rests. But people who loved the design prowess Microsoft showed off with the Surface Pro but wanted a package that sat better on the lap were delighted.

And with good reason: The Surface Laptop quickly became one of the best all-around notebook computers, a device that hit right in the intersection of style, capability and price. It was basically a more modern MacBook Air that ran Windows, a device that had lots of people interested.

Microsoft Surface Laptop

Of course, the Surface Laptop didn't launch without a slight controversy -- but it was about software, not hardware. You may or may not recall that Microsoft briefly dabbled with a Windows 10 variant called Windows 10 S. It was a slightly more locked-down version of Windows 10 that only allowed app installs from the Windows Store and only let users browse the web with Microsoft Edge. To some extent, it was meant to be a competitor to Chrome OS, which had found great success in the education market by 2017.

But consumers seemed more willing to accept the limitations of Chrome OS given how much inexpensive Chrome hardware was available. The Surface Laptop, on the other hand, started at $999, making it a harder sell for education-focused buyers. Initially, Microsoft offered free upgrades to Windows 10 Pro, but said it would charge $50 for upgrades starting in 2018.

Fortunately, Microsoft quickly realized the error of its ways and started shipping the Surface Laptop with the full Windows 10 Pro experience, The company still offers a streamlined "S" mode for Windows, but for the most part Windows 10 S is a blip in Microsoft's long and winding operating system history.

That's good news, because there's almost nothing else to complain about with the Surface Laptop, which was upgraded last fall. Sure, it could use a USB-C port for charging and connectivity, but that's basically one quibble. There are other laptops that are cheaper, or thinner and lighters, or more powerful. But it's not often we come across a computer that truly checks all the boxes for almost anyone who might be considering it.

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https://www.engadget.com/2019/05/04/this-week-in-tech-history-microsoft-surface-laptop/

2019-05-04 13:58:02Z
52780285645155

This week in tech history: Microsoft announces its first 'real' laptop - Engadget

Microsoft Surface Laptop

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https://www.engadget.com/2019/05/04/this-week-in-tech-history-microsoft-surface-laptop/

2019-05-04 13:30:24Z
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AirPods survive brutal durability test by passing through human digestive system without a scratch - Notebookcheck.net

AirPod inside the stomach and outside the bathroom. (Image source: Daily Mail/AsiaWire/edited)

It has been reported that an AirPod has managed to survive passing through the entire digestive system of an adult male human being. Fortunately, this is not some new horrifying development test by Apple nor is it an extreme benchmark created by a voracious tech blogger. It’s simply the result of a case of accidental swallowing while sleeping.

by Daniel R Deakin, 2019/05/04

Not long ago we reported on the potential harmful effects that wireless devices, such as Apple’s AirPods, can have on the human body. It seems a young Taiwanese man has accidentally tested one potential risk that may have been overlooked due to much of the focus being placed on possible chronic radiation syndrome; but fortunately the incident has a happy, if somewhat execrable, ending.

According to a report from the Daily Mail, Ben Hsu fell asleep while still wearing the AirPods in his ears. Somehow, one of the AirPods managed to fall out of his ear and into his open mouth, and he then subsequently swallowed it. Upon awakening, the navy recruiter realized he had lost the Apple device and used an iPhone app to locate the missing AirPod, which was now in his stomach. It was at this point Hsu came to the conclusion that a trip to hospital was a wise idea.

Medical staff took an X-ray image that showed the AirPod sitting in the recruiter’s stomach, in what seemed like quite a snug fit. Hsu was given laxatives and a later call of nature at a railway station ended with the “lucky” man being reunited with his digested AirPod. Whether or not you find the next part of the story gross will likely depend on how much of an Apple fan you are: Mr. Hsu proceeded to clean and dry the AirPod and then tested it to see if it still worked, which it did, and it even still had 41% of its battery remaining.

It seems the plastic casing of the earbud had helped protect the AirPod digester from harm. He said he found the whole incident to be “magical” and may have inadvertently solved the argument of which is the best product out of the Apple AirPods and the Samsung Galaxy Buds – because clearly in this case the AirPods were number two.

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https://www.notebookcheck.net/AirPods-survive-brutal-durability-test-by-passing-through-human-digestive-system-without-a-scratch.420109.0.html

2019-05-04 10:35:30Z
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OnePlus 7 Pro won\'t have official IP67 certification despite ad showing it dunked in water - Notebookcheck.net

Please share our article, every link counts!

Sanjiv Sathiah, 2019-05- 4 (Update: 2019-05- 4)

I have been tech-obsessed from the time my father introduced me to my first computer, an Apple ][. Since then, I have been particularly interested in all things Apple, but also enjoy exploring and experimenting with any computing platform that I can get my hands on – I am the definitive early adopter! I have always been interested in how we can use technology to shape and improve our lives, most recently using it to record, mix and master my debut record, Acuity – Nature | Nurture.

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https://www.notebookcheck.net/OnePlus-7-Pro-won-t-have-official-IP67-certification-despite-ad-showing-it-dunked-in-water.420097.0.html

2019-05-04 09:18:08Z
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Your Firefox extensions are all disabled? That's a bug! - Ghacks Technology News

Some Firefox users started to notice that installed browser extensions were all disabled in the web browser suddenly. Extensions would display "could not be verified for use in Firefox and has been disabled" messages in the add-ons manager of the browser. Firefox would display "One or more installed add-ons cannot be verified and have been disabled" at the top as a notification next to that.

Affected extensions include LastPass, Ghostery, Download Manager (S3), Dark Mode, Honey, uBlock Origin, Greasemonkey, NoScript, and others.

Only options provided were to find a replacement and to remove the extension in question; this left affected users puzzled. Was this some kind of preemptive strike against policy violation extensions? Mozilla did announce that it would enforce policies more strictly.

firefox add-ons disabled

The answer is no. Turns out, the issue is caused by a bug. If you read carefully, you notice that verification is the issue. A new thread on Bugzilla suggests that this has something to do with extension signing.

Firefox marked addons due signing as unsupported, but doesn't allow re-downloads from AMO → All extensions disabled due to expiration of intermediate signing cert.

All Firefox extensions need to be signed since Firefox 48 and Firefox ESR 52. Firefox will block the installation of extensions with invalid certificates (or none), and that is causing the issue on user systems.

Related issues have been reported: some users cannot install extensions from Mozilla's official Add-ons repository. Users get "Download failed. Please check your connection" errors when they attempt to download any extension from the official repository.

Solution

Nightly, Dev and Android users may be able to disable signing of extensions; some users reported that this resolved the issue temporarily on their end. You need to set the preference xpinstall.signatures.required to false on about:config to disable signing. You could change the system date to the previous day to resolve it temporarily as well, but that can lead to other issues.

The issue can only be resolved on Mozilla's end. The organization needs to renew the certificate or create a new one to resolve the issue. I'd expect Mozilla to do that soon as the issue is widespread and affecting lots of Firefox users.

Users should not remove affected extensions from their installations; the issue will resolve itself once Mozilla fixes it.

Summary

Article Name

Your Firefox extensions are all disabled? That's a bug!

Description

Some Firefox users started to notice that installed browser extensions were all disabled in the web browser suddenly.

Author

Martin Brinkmann

Publisher

Ghacks Technology News

Logo

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https://www.ghacks.net/2019/05/04/your-firefox-extensions-are-all-disabled-thats-a-bug/

2019-05-04 05:03:44Z
52780285280165

Sabtu, 04 Mei 2019

The Discrete Charm of the Machine: Why the World Became Digitalby Ken Steiglitz

Solution

The Discrete Charm of the Machine: Why the World Became Digital
by Ken Steiglitz