Technology

Yesterday, SpaceX received a contract worth more than $149 million from the Space Development Agency (SDA), tasking the company with building a new satellite for the US military capable of tracking and providing early warnings of hypersonic missile launches. Another company, L3 Harris out of Florida, was given more than $193 million by the agency to also build tracking satellites. The satellites are meant to be the first crucial part of the SDA’s Tracking Layer Tranche 0, which is designed to provide missile tracking for the Defense Department from space using infrared sensors. SpaceX and L3 Harris will together build eight satellites to deliver to the DOD for the Tracking Layer — the first satellites in a planned constellation. Designed to provide missile tracking from space using infrare...

Miso Robotics is one of the many firms trying to automate food preparation, and today, it announced that its latest machine — which places its burger-flipping bot Flippy on rails to move it about the kitchen more easily — is now on sale globally. Prices for the contraption (known as Flippy Robot-on-a-Rail or Flippy ROAR) start at “around $30,000,” according to VentureBeat, though Miso Robotics reportedly wants to bring the cost down to $20,000 over the next year. The company is also offering the option to hire Flippy ROAR for $1,000 a month, a fee which includes maintenance and upgrades. Like Flippy before it, Flippy ROAR is designed to automate simple food prep, specifically anything involving fryers and grills. The robot uses machine learning to identify foodstuff and a camera array (whi...

Amazon shared with us that more Prime Day 2020 deals would start on October 6th, and that’s today. Starting now, you can save on more TVs and other smart home products, if you’re in the market for those. Keep in mind, though, that you’ll need to be signed in with a Prime account to be able to see some of the price drops take place. One of the newly discounted devices is the Amazon Echo Show 5 smart display, which is $45 instead of $90 — a full 50 percent price drop. The Echo Show 5 is Amazon’s smallest smart display, though it’s loaded with the same features you’ll find on the bigger Echo Show 8. If you want a small, relatively unobtrusive display that you can use to watch movies or look through your Blink or Ring smart home cameras, this is a solid (and now, affordable) option. Image: Ama...

A virtual reality version of Bloober Team’s Blair Witch game is coming to Oculus Quest on October 29th, featuring improved dog interaction mechanics. Blair Witch: Oculus Quest Edition adapts the 2019 survival horror game that’s set in the same world as the cult 1999 film. Its new features take advantage of VR’s hand controllers, giving players more ways to interact with the world. And by “the world,” we mean “your dog” — the game’s friendly canine companion, Bullet. Actually, Blair Witch’s VR edition includes a variety of new things to do with your hands. Besides stacking and throwing objects you couldn’t interact with in the original game, you can do things like map out your progress by drawing on a map. There are also some unspecified new encounters. Crucially, however, you can now pet B...

Instagram launched ten years ago today: the photo-sharing app first hit the App Store on October 6th, 2010, a few months after the release of the iPhone 4. To celebrate, Instagram has added an easter egg to the app that lets you change its home screen icon. The icons available include the classic Polaroid-style camera designs that were used for more than five years. There are themed variations on the current logo, too, including Pride rainbow colors and monochrome options. The app update also includes another feature: a private map and archive of your stories from the past three years. To access the new icons, go to the settings within the app and do a long swipe down on the screen to reveal some emoji. Once you’ve swiped down far enough, the icons will be unlocked and you’ll see a message...

Google is announcing a big rebranding and redesign for its suite of office apps today, rebranding G Suite with a new name: Google Workspace. Along with the new branding for the product that encompasses Gmail, Docs, Meet, Sheets, and Calendar are new features designed to make all those products feel like they’re more integrated with one another. Google is also changing up its pricing tiers just a bit, adding a new “Business Plus” level with more device management features. As an example of the new features, a Chat window can spawn a new document for everybody in the group without needing a new tab. And in Google Docs, instead of chasing each others’ cursors around or opening up a chat window, you can immediately just start a video call right in the same window for everybody who’s active in ...

Instagram is adding new features to help users find old stories posted over the last three years and to reduce abusive behavior. The stories archive now includes a new monthly calendar view, which shows the days you posted each story, alongside a map which shows story locations, TechCrunch reports. Instagram also announced a pair of new anti-bullying features which attempt to automatically hide potentially abusive comments while discouraging users from posting them in the first place. Given that stories are designed to disappear automatically after 24 hours, it’s likely surprising to many that Instagram has an archive of them going back years. The stories archive actually dates back to 2017 — the new calendar and map just offer a better way to find old stories. The archive is private, visi...

Google is replacing its iconic Gmail envelope logo with a design that’s a lot more in keeping with other Google products. The new Gmail logo is now an M made out of Google’s core blue, red, yellow, and green brand colors. It more closely matches similar logos for Google itself, Google Maps, Google Photos, Chrome, and many more Google products. The envelope is no more. Fast Company reports that Google considered dropping the M altogether or fully removing the Gmail red color, but people involved in user research studies weren’t happy with the changes. The studies did, however, help Google realize that the envelope part of the Gmail logo wasn’t a critical design element, allowing the team to experiment with keeping the M and adding Google’s traditional color palette. [embedded content] The n...

Apple’s CarPlay and Google’s Android Auto are meant for, well, cars and automobiles, but despite the emphasis on landlubber locomotion, there’s technically no reason that one couldn’t use them for navigating the high seas. And that’s just what Boss Audio’s new aftermarket MRCP9685A head unit promises: a weatherproof module that offers the ability to use CarPlay and Android Auto not just in regular cars, but in off-road vehicles like Jeeps and even boats. Installing an aftermarket head unit into a boat isn’t a new concept, but getting a weatherproof one that supports both CarPlay or Android Auto and the rigors of the seafaring life is more difficult. At least one enterprising Reddit user has already tried to jury-rig a similar implementation by installing a standard car unit, noting that Ca...

Today’s announcement of a Dune delay meant that Warner Bros. would have to shuffle its schedule, and now we have new dates for the studio’s biggest upcoming movies. Deadline and Variety report that The Batman is getting delayed yet again, moving from the October 1st, 2021 date now occupied by Dune to March 4th, 2022. That March 4th slot was intended to be for the as-yet unrevealed Minecraft: The Movie, which is now without a release date. Black Adam, the DC Comics movie starring Dwayne Johnson, has also been taken off the schedule after previously being set for December 22nd 2021. Filling that slot is a movie that will actually now come sooner than expected: Lana Wachowski’s Matrix sequel. The Matrix 4 was originally planned for release on April 22nd, 2022. The Batman was said to have hit ...

A Ugandan environmental activist was suspended from Twitter in the midst of a high-profile campaign — a suspension he believes is connected to his opponents in the country’s government and industries linked to deforestation. Twitter won’t say what caused the account to be frozen, but environmental groups worry it’s part of a broader trend of powerful stakeholders exploiting Twitter’s moderation system to silence climate activists. The suspension happened on the night of September 12th, after 22-year-old Nyombi Morris had just finished a television appearance about the preservation of the Bugoma Forest. The morning after the interview, he woke up to find his account was frozen without explanation. He says he contacted Twitter’s Help Center at least five times during the weeks his account wa...

If you’ve decided against paying for YouTube Music but have still found yourself using the service as a cloud locker for your uploaded tracks, you can now cast that content to devices and speakers around your home. Initially, only premium subscribers were able to cast — a restriction that angered some people after they made the switch from Google Play Music to YouTube Music. As noted by Android Police, YouTube Music also now works better with Google Assistant when it comes to your personal playlists. You can request them by name when speaking to Assistant, and the right playlist will come on. Somehow that didn’t work before, and it’s odd that it took this long for Google to make two of its own services work better together. Browse through the YouTube Music app on your phone and you’ll noti...