The content below is taken from the original ( How to use a Chromebook if you’ve switched from a PC), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

The content below is taken from the original ( Alphabet’s Wing introduces an air traffic control app for drones), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

This spring Alphabet subsidiary Wing LLC became the first drone delivery company to receive FAA certification, and the company has successfully launched drone delivery service in Australia and Helsinki. Now, with more drones in the sky, it needs a wa…

The content below is taken from the original ( 5 tips for onboarding your first employees using G Suite), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

The content below is taken from the original ( CloudJumper and ThinPrint Extend Partnership to Provide Remote Printing for Windows Virtual Desktop), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

CloudJumper, a leading provider of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, Workspace as a Service, and Desktop as a Service solutions, and ThinPrint ,… Read more at VMblog.com.

The content below is taken from the original ( Arm’s new licensing option lets its partners experiment and test for free before they pay), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Arm today launched Flexible Access, a new licensing scheme in addition to its existing model, that will make it easier for startups to gain access to a wide range of Arm’s intellectual property (IP) without any upfront licensing costs.

Intellectual property licensing schemes for chips may not strike you as the most exciting thing. But as the number of companies that are building their own silicon, often for very specialized use cases, having access to the IP from companies like Arm is something that more companies than ever a looking to have. Until now, the only way to get access to Arm’s IP was to select the products you wanted to license upfront. That works for large companies that know exactly what they want, but for smaller companies, that’s a bit of a barrier, given that they are likely still trying to figure out what exactly they need.

Under the Flexible Access terms, partners get access to the IP and only pay a per-unit royalty fee once they go into production. Under the existing scheme, license fees were due before partners could access the IP.

“The reason we’re doing this is because we see that the industry is evolving quite significantly — lots of transformation that’s happening, new companies coming into doing custom silicon,” Dipti Vachani, Arm’s SVP and GM of  its automotive and IoT business, told me. “We believe that enabling this is easy access to IP and experimentation allows for the growth and the usage of our IP across the trillion connected devices.”

Vachani stressed that the company believes that this move will allow a whole range of new companies to use Arm’s IP portfolio since it significantly lowers the barrier of entry.

“This allows for a  lower barrier to entry for for anyone. It’s very straightforward. You go online, there’s a process to do so,” Vachani said. “And smaller companies that may not have the infrastructure that our traditional silicon companies have had — this makes this really simple and easy for them.”

That flexibility, the company hopes, will result in even more companies using its IP and hence driving more revenue as those companies sell their products. “I expect that this will
increase the scale,” Vachani said. “It’ll allow for the trillion connected devices that we internally talk about at ARM and enable those trillion connected devices to be on Arm and it builds on top of the ecosystem that we already have and that it will absolutely be accretive to our company and our business.”

Flexible Access includes about 75 percent of all Arm Cortex licenses from the past two years. This includes CPU architectures from the Arm Cortex A, R and M families, in addition to select GPUs, interconnects, security IP, system controllers and more — essentially everything you need to build your own system. It also includes software development tools and additional tools and models for building systems on a chip.

You’ll notice, though, that some of the newest high-end CPU architectures are not part of this license.  This, Vachani said, is due to the fact that the companies that need a high-performance CPU — say an A75 — typically know what they are creating from the outset.

Flexible Access, it’s worth stressing, does not replace Arm’s existing licensing system. The two will live in parallel. “What we did here is we looked at what is necessary for these endpoints in the IoT market […]. That’s where there’s a disruption happening and where the transformation is happening. We looked at the portfolio of IP that’s absolutely necessary for that kind of testing in that plane. […] When you look at the low end, that’s where all the experimentation is – the mid- and low-end.”

The program is now live and available to all chip companies that want to move to this licensing model, no matter whether they are a large chipmaker or a startup that is only dipping its toes into this business.

The content below is taken from the original ( Who’s been copying AMD’s homework? Intel lifts the lid on its hip chip packaging to break up chips into chiplets), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Interconnects, never sexy but very useful for Chipzilla’s plans

With Moore’s so-called Law pretty much dead for now, and the shrinking of transistors proving more difficult, the name of the game today is packing multiple dies into chip packages rather than cramming more and more smaller transistors into more of less the same area of silicon.…

The content below is taken from the original ( News nybble: Southampton meeting – 9th July), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

If you’re a RISC OS user and you’re within shouting distance of Southampton on 9th July, then why not consider meeting up with other like-minded people that evening? That’s the date the Southampton RISC OS User Group (SROUG) will next […]

The content below is taken from the original ( Cozycozy is an accommodation search service that works with hotels and Airbnb), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

French startup Cozycozy.com wants to make it easier to search for accommodation across a wide range of services. This isn’t the first aggregator in the space and probably not the last one. But this time, it isn’t just about hotels.

When you plan a trip with multiple stops, chances are you end up with a dozen tabs of different services — on Airbnb to look at listings, on a hotel review platform and on a hotel booking platform. Each service displays different prices and has a different inventory.

While there are a ton of services out there, most of them belong to just three companies: Booking Holdings (Booking.com, Priceline, Kayak, Agoda…), Expedia Group (Expedia, Hotels.com, HomeAway, Trivago…) and TripAdvisor (TripAdvisor, HouseTrip, Oyster…). They all operate many different services in order to address as many markets and as many segments as possible.

Cozycozy.com wants to simplify that process by aggregating a ton of services in a single interface — you can find hotels, Airbnb listings, campsites, hostels, boats, home-exchanging apartments… You can filter your results by price or you can exclude some accommodation styles.

The company doesn’t work with hotels and doesn’t handle bookings directly. Instead, the service searches across all the usual suspects. When you want to book, you get redirected to the original listing on Airbnb, Booking.com, Hostelworld, etc.

The startup recently raised a $4.5 million funding round (€4 million) from Daphni, CapDecisif, Raise and many different business angels, such as Xavier Niel, Thibaud Elzière and Eduardo Ronzano.

Cozycozy.com co-founder and chairman Pierre Bonelli also previously founded Liligo.com. It is one of the most popular flight comparison website in France. It was acquired by SNCF in 2010 and then eDreams ODIGEO in 2013.

The content below is taken from the original ( Best free Email Finder tools for effective marketing), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Email is an important and effective channel to build a strong relationship. It is a productive way to foster business and boost efficiency. However, most of the people are not willing to divulge their personal or business email address to […]

This post Best free Email Finder tools for effective marketing is from TheWindowsClub.com.

The content below is taken from the original ( How to get back the classic Solitaire and Minesweeper on Windows 10), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Windows 10 came along a with a whole new set of improvements, but when it came to retaining the classics, it did take a step back. Referring to the classic Windows games from back in the day! For some reason, […]

This post How to get back the classic Solitaire and Minesweeper on Windows 10 is from TheWindowsClub.com.

The content below is taken from the original ( Adding a Default Photo to Azure Active Directory Guest User Accounts), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Guest Accounts Deserve to be Highlighted

Last year I wrote about how to add photos to the Azure Active Directory accounts created for guest users to make contributions from those users in apps like Teams more attractive. The article prompted a reader to ask if it was possible to set a default photo for guest accounts to use instead of the two-initial logo (for example, TR for Tony Redmond) that apps otherwise display.

The answer is “yes” if you’re willing to use PowerShell and run the Set- AzureADUserThumbnailPhoto cmdlet to add a default photo to all guest accounts. Let’s see how it’s done.

Visual Warning for Collaboration

The idea is to create a visual clue for tenant users that a person they communicate with in apps like Office 365 Groups, Planner, and Teams is not part of the company. In effect, we want to highlight the need for our users to be careful when sharing information with guests in case something confidential leaks.

Thinking About a Script

In approaching the problem, it’s important not to overwrite photos that might already exist for guest accounts. If a photo has been uploaded for a guest account, it’s likely there for a good reason and we should leave it alone unless told otherwise.

The outline for our code is clear. Find guest accounts in the tenant and check each to see if it already has a photo. If not, update the account with the default photo. Here’s the PowerShell script that I came up with:

$Guests = Get-AzureADUser -Filter "Usertype eq 'Guest'" -All $True
ForEach ($Guest in $Guests) {
   # Does a photo exist?
   $PhotoExists = $Null
   Try {$PhotoExists = Get-AzureADUserThumbnailPhoto -ObjectId $Guest[0].ObjectId }
       Catch {  # Nope - so update account with default picture
       Write-Host "Photo does not exist for" $Guest.DisplayName "- updating with default guest logo"
       Set-AzureADUserThumbnailPhoto -ObjectId $Guest.ObjectId -FilePath C:\Temp\DefaultGuestPicture.jpg  }}

The Effect of a Default Photo

The script doesn’t take long to run. The longest part in the process is the background synchronization between Azure Active Directory and the Office 365 apps, which can take anything from a few minutes to many hours depending on service load and workcycle scheduling. Be patient and the default photos will make their way to the apps and start to appear.

Figure 1 shows the intended effect. In this case, I have an Office 365 Group used by 50 MVPs, all who are guests in my tenant. Photos are already present for some guests and now we see that OWA displays the default photo for the others. It would be nicer to have individual photos for each guest, but at least I now have a nice visual indicator of a guest’s status (everyone trusts an MVP, right?).

Ongoing Maintenance

Running a script is a one-time operation to update guest accounts that don’t already have a photo. To be effective, you should run the script every week or so to find and update newly added guest accounts.

I’m always amazed when administrators tell me that they don’t like PowerShell and won’t use it to help manage Office 365. Scripts fill in the gaps left by Microsoft or improve functionality to make life just a little easier, as in this case.

The post Adding a Default Photo to Azure Active Directory Guest User Accounts appeared first on Petri.

The content below is taken from the original ( Nio recalls nearly 5,000 ES8 electric SUVs over fire risk), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Chinese automotive startup Nio is recalling nearly 5,000 of its ES8 high-performance electric SUVs after a series of battery fires in China and a subsequent investigation revealed a vulnerability that created a safety risk.

The recall affects a quarter of the ES8 vehicles it has sold since they went on sale in June 2018.

A Nio-led team of experts that included the supplier of the battery pack module, investigated a reported fire involving an ES8 in Shanghai. The team concluded there was a vulnerability in the design of the battery pack that could cause a short circuit.

The battery packs in the vehicles involved were equipped with a module specification NEV-P50. These packs were pressing up against voltage sampling cable harness due to improper positioning, Nio said. The insulation on the cable may wear out due to this repeated contact and cause a short circuit, Nio determined.

Nio said other ES8 vehicles that have experienced issues had the same battery pack.

The recall affects 4,803 models produced from April 02, 2018 to October 19, 2018 that are equipped with NEV-P50 batteries. The company will be replace the battery packs, a process that could take up to two months.

All NEV-P50 batteries in the battery swap network will also be replaced to ensure, Nio said. 

Vehicles with 70kWh battery packs produced after October 20, 2018 are equipped with the NEV-P102 modules and have different internal structural designs. These packs don’t have the same risk, Nio said.

The recall comes at an inauspicious time for Nio. Nio began deliveries of the ES8 in China in June 2018. And while deliveries initially surpassed expectations, they have since slowed in 2019. The company reported loss of $390.9 million in the first quarter.

Nio said it would shift its vehicle production plans, reduce in R&D spending and cut to its workforce by 4.5% in response to the weak quarter.

Other automakers with electric vehicles have issued recalls over fire risk. Earlier this month, Audi issued a voluntary recall in the U.S. for the E-Tron SUV due to the risk of battery fire. No fires had been reported in the 1,644 E-Trons that Audi has sold. The company issued the recall after it found that moisture can seep into the battery cell through a wiring harness. There have been five cases worldwide where this has caused a battery fault warning.

In May, Tesla started pushing out a software update that will change battery charge and thermal management settings in Model S sedans and Model X SUVs following a fire in a parked vehicle in Hong Kong. The software update, which Tesla said at the time was being done out of “an abundance of caution,” is supposed to “protect the battery and improve its longevity.” The over-the-air software update will not be made to Model 3 vehicles.

The content below is taken from the original ( New PCI DSS Azure Blueprint makes compliance simpler), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

I’m excited to announce our second Azure Blueprint for an important compliance standard with the release of the PCI-DSS v3.2.1 blueprint. The new blueprint maps a core set of policies for Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standards (DSS) compliance to any Azure deployed architecture, allowing businesses such as retailers to quickly create new environments with compliance built in to the Azure infrastructure.

Azure Blueprints is a free service that enables customers to define a repeatable set of Azure resources that implement and adhere to standards, patterns, and requirements. Azure Blueprints allow customers to set up governed Azure environments that can scale to support production implementations for large-scale migrations.

Azure Blueprints is another reason why Azure is a strong platform for compliance, with the industry’s broadest and deepest portfolio of 91 compliance offerings. Azure is built using some of the most rigorous security and compliance standards in the world, and includes multi-layered security provided by Microsoft across physical datacenters, infrastructure, and operations. Azure is also built for the specific compliance needs of key industries, including over 50 compliance offerings specifically for the retail, health, government, finance, education, manufacturing, and media industries.

Compliance with regulations and standards such as ISO 27001, FedRAMP and SOC is increasingly necessary for all types of organizations, making control mappings to compliance standards a natural application for Azure Blueprints. Azure customers, particularly those in regulated industries, have expressed strong interest in compliance blueprints to help ease their compliance burdens. In March, we announced the ISO 27001 Shared Services blueprint sample which maps a set of foundational Azure infrastructure, such as virtual networks and policies, to specific ISO controls.

The PCI DSS is a global information security standard designed to prevent fraud through increased control of credit card data. Organizations that accept payments from credit cards must follow PCI DSS standards if they accept payment cards from the five major credit card brands. Compliance with PCI DSS is also required for any organization that stores, processes, or transmits payment and cardholder data.

The PCI-DSS v3.2.1 blueprint includes mappings to important PCI DSS controls, including:

• Segregation of duties. Manage subscription owner permissions.
• Access to networks and network services. Implement role-based access control (RBAC) to manage who has access to Azure resources.
• Management of secret authentication information of users. Audit accounts that don’t have multi-factor authentication enabled.
• Review of user access rights. Audit accounts that should be prioritized for review, including depreciated accounts and external accounts with elevated permissions.
• Removal or adjustment of access rights. Audit deprecated accounts with owner permissions on a subscription.
• Secure log-on procedures. Audit accounts that don’t have multi-factor authentication enabled.
• Password management system. Enforce strong passwords.
• Policy on the use of cryptographic controls. Enforce specific cryptographic controls and audit use of weak cryptographic settings.
• Event and operator logging. Diagnostic logs provide insight into operations that were performed within Azure resources.
• Administrator and operator logs. Ensure system events are logged.
• Management of technical vulnerabilities. Monitor missing system updates, operating system vulnerabilities, SQL vulnerabilities, and virtual machine vulnerabilities in Azure Security Center.
• Network controls. Manage and control networks and monitor network security groups with permissive rules.
• Information transfer policies and procedures. Ensure information transfer with Azure services is secure.

We are committed to helping our customers leverage Azure in a secure and compliant manner. Over the next few months we will release new built-in blueprints for HITRUST, UK National Health Service (NHS) Information Governance (IG) Toolkit, FedRAMP, and Center for Internet Security (CIS) Benchmark. If you would like to participate in any early previews please sign up with this form, or if you have a suggestion for a compliance blueprint, please share it via the Azure Governance Feedback Forum.

Learn more about the Azure PCI-DSS v3.2.1 blueprint in our documentation.

The content below is taken from the original ( How to take full webpage screenshot in Chrome & Firefox), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Chrome and Firefox are not only popular because they are fast but also because they are readily customizable. Example, you can configure these browsers to take or capture a full webpage screenshot. So. Let’s see how to capture a full […]

This post How to take full webpage screenshot in Chrome & Firefox is from TheWindowsClub.com.

The content below is taken from the original ( Lightyear One debuts as the first long-range solar-powered electric car), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Electric cars are better for the environment than fossil fuel-burning vehicles, but they still rely on the grid, which can be variously dirty or clean depending on what sources it uses for its energy. The new Lightyear One is a prototype vehicle that would improve that by collecting the power it needs to run from the sun.

Lightyear, a startup from the Netherlands born as Stella, has come a long way since it won a Crunchie award in 2015, with a vehicle that now looks ready for the road. The Lightyear One prototype vehicle unveiled today has a sleek, driver-friendly design and also boasts a range of 450 miles on a single charge – definitely a first for a car powered by solar and intended for the actual consumer market.

© Twycer / http://bit.ly/2YfWXXx

The startup says that it has already sold “over a hundred vehicles” even though this isn’t yet ready to hit the road, but Lightyear is aiming to begin production by 2021, with reservations available for 500 additional units for the initial release. You do have to pay €119,000 up front (around $136,000 USD) to secure a reservation, however.

Lightyear One isn’t just a plug-in electric with some solar sells on the roof: Instead it’s designed from the ground up to maximize performance from a smaller-than-typical battery that can directly grab sun from a roof and hood covered with 16 square feet of solar cells, embedded in safety glass designed with passenger wellbeing in mind. The car can also take power directly from regular outlets and existing charging stations for a quick top-up, and again because it’s optimized to be lightweight and power efficient, you can actually get around 250 miles on just one night of charging from a standard (European) 230V outlet.

The car should supplement existing electric cars for buyers who are more conscious of range anxiety and nervous about having enough charge, the company says. It still have to actually enter production, however, and even when it does it’ll be a fairly expensive and small batch product, at least at first. But it’s an impressive feat nonetheless, and a potential new direction for EVs of the future.

The content below is taken from the original ( The OS/2 Operating System Didn’t Die… It Went Underground), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

One problem with building things using state-of-the-art techniques is that sometimes those that look like they will be “the next big thing” turn out to be dead ends. Next thing you know, that hot new part or piece of software is hard to get or unmaintained. This is especially true if you are building something with a long life span. A case in point is the New York City subway system. Back in the 1990s the transit authority decided to adopt IBM’s new OS/2 operating system. Why not? It was robust and we used to always say “no one ever got fired for buying IBM.”

There was one problem. OS/2 was completely eclipsed by other operating systems, notably Windows and — mostly — has sunk from the public view. [Andrew Egan’s] post covers just how the conversion to a card-based system pushed OS/2 underground all over the Big Apple, and it is an interesting read.

The choice of OS/2 might seem odd today. However, you have to remember the operating system landscape back then. Unix wasn’t very commercial, for the most part, and the commercial versions like Xenix and SCO were often encumbered with odd and changing licensing arrangements. MSDOS was hardly suitable for any sort of reliable system, with a patchwork of hacks to get more memory, and multitasking including early versions of Windows which were little more than shells over MSDOS.

We might have suggested QNX, as both operating systems were robust and used a microkernel architecture which had many advantages, especially when fighting hardware limitations.

It seems OS/2 isn’t just the subway system, either. Some old ATM machines still use it and there are probably some other hold outs. In 2006, IBM discontinued the operating system and sold off OS/2 support to Serenity Systems and later acquired by Arca Noae.

While OS/2 doesn’t get the same retrocomputer love as some other operating systems, it was actually ahead of its time. Its failure to take hold wasn’t so much about the technology as it was about business decisions and the market conditions of the day.

If you want a look at modern OS/2 emulation, that does exist. If you think OS/2 is the oldest tech running the subway system, you’d be wrong about that.

The content below is taken from the original ( 6 common questions (and answers) for new Chromebook users), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

The content below is taken from the original ( India reportedly wants to build its own WhatsApp for government communications), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

India may have plans to follow France’s footsteps in building a chat app and requiring government employees to use it for official communications.

The New Delhi government is said to be pondering about the need to have homegrown email and chat apps, local news outlet Economic Times reported on Thursday.

The rationale behind the move is to cut reliance on foreign entities, the report said, a concern that has somehow manifested amid U.S.’s ongoing tussle with Huawei and China.

“We need to make our communication insular,” an unnamed top government official was quoted as saying by the paper. The person suggested that by putting Chinese giant Huawei on the entity list, the U.S. has “set alarm bells ringing in New Delhi.”

India has its own ongoing trade tension with the U.S. Donald Trump earlier this month removed the South Asian nation from a special trade program after India did not assure him that it will “provide equitable and reasonable access to its markets.” India called the move “unfortunate”, and weeks later, increased tariffs on some U.S. exports.

The move to step away from foreign communication apps, if it comes to fruition, won’t be the first time a nation has attempted to cautiously restrict usage of popular messaging apps run by foreign players in government offices.

France launched an encrypted chat app — called Tchap — for use in government offices earlier this year. Only those employed by the French government offices can sign up to use the service, though the nation has open sourced the app’s code for the world to see and audit.

Of course, a security flaw in Tchap came into light within the first 24 hours of its release. Security is a real challenge that the government would have to tackle and it might not have the best resources — talent, budget, and expertise — to deal with it.

China, which has restricted many foreign companies from operating in the nation, also maintains customized versions of popular operating systems for use in government offices. So does North Korea.

It won’t be an unprecedented step for India, either. The nation has been trying to build and scale its own Linux-based desktop operating system called BOSS for several years with little success as most government agencies continue to use Microsoft’s Windows operating system.

Even as India has emerged as the third-largest startup hub in the world, the country has failed to build local alternatives for many popular services. Facebook’s WhatsApp has become ubiquitous for communication in India, while Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Windows power most smartphones and computers in the nation.

The content below is taken from the original ( Raspberry Pi 4 launched), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

A few months after Pi Day, and a few days before 2Pi Day!1 A new version of the Raspberry Pi has been announced, at the customary price point of US$35 – which just happens to translate to a very similar […]

The content below is taken from the original ( This robot crawls along wind turbine blades looking for invisible flaws), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Wind turbines are a great source of clean power, but their apparent simplicity — just a big thing that spins — belie complex systems that wear down like any other, and can fail with disastrous consequences. Sandia National Labs researchers have created a robot that can inspect the enormous blades of turbines autonomously, helping keep our green power infrastructure in good kit.

The enormous towers that collect energy from wind currents are often only in our view for a few minutes as we drive past. But they must stand for years through inclement weather, temperature extremes, and naturally — being the tallest things around — lightning strikes. Combine that with normal wear and tear and it’s clear these things need to be inspected regularly.

But such inspections can be both difficult and superficial. The blades themselves are among the largest single objects manufactured on the planet, and they’re often installed in distant or inaccessible areas, like the many you see offshore.

“A blade is subject to lightning, hail, rain, humidity and other forces while running through a billion load cycles during its lifetime, but you can’t just land it in a hanger for maintenance,” explained Sandia’s Joshua Paquette in a news release. In other words, not only do crews have to go to the turbines to inspect them, but they often have to do those inspections in place — on structures hundreds of feet tall and potentially in dangerous locations.

Using a crane is one option, but the blade can also be orientated downwards so an inspector can rappel along its length. Even then the inspection may be no more than eyeballing the surface.

“In these visual inspections, you only see surface damage. Often though, by the time you can see a crack on the outside of a blade, the damage is already quite severe,” said Paquette.

Obviously better and deeper inspections are needed, and that’s what the team decided to work on, with partners International Climbing Machines and Dophitech. The result is this crawling robot, which can move along a blade slowly but surely, documenting it both visually and using ultrasonic imaging.

A visual inspection will see cracks or scuffs on the surface, but the ultrasonics penetrate deep into the blades, making them capable of detecting damage to interior layers well before it’s visible outside. And it can do it largely autonomously, moving a bit like a lawnmower: side to side, bottom to top.

Of course at this point it does it quite slowly and requires human oversight, but that’s because it’s fresh out of the lab. In the near future teams could carry around a few of these things, attach one to each blade, and come back a few hours or days later to find problem areas marked for closer inspection or scanning. Perhaps a crawler robot could even live onboard the turbine and scurry out to check each blade on a regular basis.

Another approach the researchers took was drones — a natural enough solution, since the versatile fliers have been pressed into service for inspection of many other structures that are dangerous for humans to get around: bridges, monuments, and so on.

These drones would be equipped with high-resolution cameras and infrared sensors that detect the heat signatures in the blade. The idea is that as warmth from sunlight diffuses through the material of the blade, it will do so irregularly in spots where damage below the surface has changed its thermal properties.

As automation of these systems improves, the opportunities open up: A quick pass by a drone could let crews know whether any particular tower needs closer inspection, then trigger the live-aboard crawler to take a closer look. Meanwhile the humans are on their way, arriving to a better picture of what needs to be done, and no need to risk life and limb just to take a look.

The content below is taken from the original ( Google Drive tests a full offline storage mode in Chrome), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Cloud services are great until you can't access an important file while you're on the road with frustratingly slow internet connection. Google Drive introduced offline mode for Documents, Slides and Spreadsheets as a solution for that. Now, it's also…

The content below is taken from the original ( poshwal now has initial support for the new Windows Terminal – PowerShell in style!), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

submitted by /u/jantari to r/PowerShell
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The content below is taken from the original ( Windows 10’s redesigned Terminal is available in preview), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

It's a good time to be a Windows power user. Microsoft has released a preview version of Windows 10's redesigned Terminal (known as just Windows Terminal) through its app store, giving you a considerably more powerful command line tool. You can run…

The content below is taken from the original ( Game Builder Lets Kids — Even Old Kids — Build Games), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

One rite of passage back in the good old days of owning a TRS-80, Commodore 64, or similar vintage computer was writing your own game. It probably wouldn’t be very good, but it wouldn’t be much worse than most of the stuff that was out there, either. Today, trying to get a kid interested in “hunt the wumpus” is probably not going to fly and having them create a modern-looking is out of the question. Or is it? Disguised as a game itself, Game Builder offers an interactive way to create interesting games without having to get too detailed into programming. On the other hand, it supports JavaScript, so you can get to programming if you need to or want to. We could easily see a kid — or even an adult — easing into programming using this game which is free, from Google.

In the old days, hardware was a limiting factor and Basic made it pretty easy to whip out some text or crude graphics. Our favorite was a high low game that guesses your number. But everyone had some little game they’d create so they said they could. Today’s games, though, have good graphics and music and 3D shapes and a host of other things you didn’t have to contend with back then. Game Builder, though, makes it pretty simple. You can work on a game by yourself, or with friends, or with the general public. Everyone involved can play the game, but they can also edit the game. The tool runs under Steam so even though it is marked for PC or Mac, it will also run on Linux if you have Steam installed properly.

Playing at Editing

There is very little difference between playing and editing. You can start with a template or a blank canvas. At any time during game play, you can switch to edit mode with a mouse click or the tab key. If you start with the blank template, you get four player characters on a big green field. But you can change anything you want. You can hide players, change their representations, or even their physics.

When you enter build mode you get a menu down at the bottom that lets you pick: create, move, rotate, scale, terrain, text, logic, or edit. Most of these are exactly what they sound like. You can create from a wide number of models that tie into Google poly. The terrain mode is like Minecraft where floors are built from blocks. The logic menu is what’s really interesting though.

In the Cards

Each actor can have a number of cards arranged in panels. For example, a player might have a panel for health. A card within would set how many life points the player has and what to do when there are no more. Another card might register a collision with an object that has a weapon tag and use it to deduct points from the player’s life. Other cards control motion, display attributes, and so on. There are cards that have if/then/else logic and cards that react to events like collisions, time, or the start of the game.

In the figure, you can see a card on the left making a platform on the right move back and forth. Each card has settings that vary depending on its function. In this case, you can control the speed, for example.

The cards actually have JavaScript behind them, which you can convert into if you want finer control. The edit menu command lets you set an actor’s appearance and also their physics. You can, for example, make objects heavy or immovable. You can determine how they bounce and if you can push them. There are handy presets for common items like characters and walls.

Just Try It

It sounds a little complicated, but if you do the tutorial it is really quite simple. The nice thing too is if you are in a game and you see something you want to know how to build yourself, you can just slip into build mode and look at the logic behind it. In fact, one of the demos is nothing more than things to look at in that way. There is a rocket to launch and a tree you can cut down with an ax. You can even paint rocks.

You might enjoy the video from [Shojib] below to see how it works, but it is more fun to just go load it and try it. There’s also an official tutorial video below the first one. It isn’t hard to pick up, especially if you work the tutorial and the card fair demo.

Often when we are talking video games around here, we mean something old fashioned. We’d like to see someone do some classic games with this, such as Space Invaders or PacMan. We think you could do it.

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