Author: The Tech Guy

While NASA is working with U.S. aviation to explore commercial supersonic technologies, the agency is also looking forward to an even faster era of flight – one of vehicles that can fly hypersonic, or five times the speed of sound. And to further that vision, NASA has issued two awards for studies into vehicle concepts.  Some types of vehicles – such as rockets – achieve hypersonic speeds by carrying supplies of oxygen to allow their fuel to burn, instead of using the surrounding air. In contrast, NASA’s Hypersonic Technology Project works to advance “airbreathing,” reusable hypersonic aircraft, which take in air as they fly, allowing for much longer sustained cruising at hypersonic speeds. …

Up in my loft, I have an Atari 2600 games console, which launched all the way back in 1977. Occasionally, I’ll bring it down and put on a few games. It’s always fun to make the kids play ET (launched in December 1982), struggling to comprehend how this could be considered a game (to be fair, that was the opinion at the time). I mention this because the original iteration of Atari is long gone, but at no point did I get a knock on the door with an engineer, screwdriver in hand, there to take the console and game…

File Pilot is an excellent File Explorer alternative. As of now, it’s in beta and free, but it will set you back $50 for a perpetual license once the stable release is available. While I still use it occasionally, I didn’t want to build my workflow around a tool that might require a license in the near future, so I’ve settled with File Explorer with Listary doing a lot of the heavy lifting. However, I still needed a full-fledged file manager that felt fast to open with rapid search and some advanced features. Initially, I tried the classic Total Commander,…

I like to think that I have pretty good taste in music. I’d go so far as to say I’m good at getting my friends to listen to new music, whether it’s through a playlist at a party or by attaching a new song to an Instagram post. However, with such a well-trained Spotify algorithm, even I find myself in a music rut on occasion. I’ll bounce from my pop mix to my Jason Isbell mix to my upbeat mix and somehow find quite a few of the same songs on each one. So, when Spotify introduced Prompted Playlists, I…

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCEA Yann LeCun–Linked Startup Charts a New Path to AGIJoel Khalili | Wired ($)”As the world’s largest companies pour hundreds of billions of dollars into large language models, San Francisco-based Logical Intelligence is trying something different in pursuit of AI that can mimic the human brain. …The road to AGI, Bodnia contends, begins with the layering of these different types of AI: LLMs will interface with humans in natural language, EBMs will take up reasoning tasks, while world models will help robots take action in 3D space.”ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCEGoogle Project Genie Lets You Create Interactive Worlds From a Photo or…

Affordable EVs are on a lot of people’s minds these days, but one name is missing from the conversation. Volkswagen launched its ID family of EVs seven years ago with the promise of electric mobility for “the millions, not millionaires,” but in the United States at least, the promise remains just that. The VW Group has lavished resources on its luxury brands Audi and Porsche, and even created the new Scout brand to challenge Rivian, but it’s let its namesake brand stagnate. VW only sells the aging ID.4 crossover in the U.S. It’s an unfortunate situation for what was one…

High-end home theaters are expensive to put together, but there are still some upgrades to make that don’t break the bank. Your speakers and receiver are the most expensive part of the setup, but once you buy those, the fun doesn’t stop. You still need to buy speaker wire, and if you want to live a hassle-free life, you should grab some banana plugs with the wire to plug into the back of your receiver — if you have one, of course. For a long time, I didn’t see the need for banana plugs, and it wasn’t until I had…

Last year, the Trump administration declared war on climate science. In the first two weeks of Trump’s second term, the administration started scrubbing critical environmental resources and datasets from federal agency websites and withdrew the United States from international organizations dedicated to combating climate change, dismissing them as a “waste of taxpayer dollars.” Trump himself has dismissed climate science as “woke,” while vowing to “drill, baby, drill” for fossil fuels as our planet stands at the edge of a climate disaster. Nowhere has that regressive agenda been felt more than at NASA. The agency announced in July that thousands of…

Ayaneo started teasing the Pocket Play, its first smartphone, back in November, and then in December it showed us what it would look like, Sony Ericsson Xperia Play vibes and all. Today, Ayaneo has finally revealed the chipset sitting at the helm of the Pocket Play. It’s MediaTek’s Dimensity 9300. That’s an odd choice, given that the SoC in question came out in 2023. Sure, it was MediaTek’s top dog of 2023, but it’s more than two years old. And if, we assume for pricing purposes, Ayaneo wanted to go with MediaTek instead of Qualcomm (since MediaTek’s top of the…

I had no idea that every time I took a photo, my phone was storing its precise GPS coordinates. Thanks to the photo’s EXIF data, someone could easily drop my pictures into an online tool to see precisely where I took them. This happens by default on most phones, which many people don’t even realize. It’s scary, especially for kids, but there’s a way to turn off this location storage on both Android and iPhone. Even if you want to keep it enabled, it’s good to know how to stop your phone from tracking your location every time you snap…