COMPUTERS

We Only Just Cracked A 33-Year Old ZX Spectrum Challenge

When the ZX Spectrum was released in 1982, a problem was posed in chapter 19 of the computer's manual. Now, 33 years later, that problem has finally been solved by a team at Oxford's Museum of the History of Science.

Chapter 19 of the manual explains 'BEEP', a BASIC command that made the Spectrum play sounds. It included a routine that allowed people to programme the funeral march from Mahler's first symphony, and suggests that people get better at BEEPing by programming the symphony in its entirety. That's a total of 50 minutes of music, so it's certainly not a challenge for the faint of heart.

The challenge ended up stuck in the mind of "retro electro media hacker type person" Matt Westcott, who was asked by the museum to contribute to an exhibition called 'Geek Out' that featured a section about 1980s technology. When tasked with assisting with the Spectrum, Westcott decidd it was the perfect opportunity to take on the Mahler challenge.

The video below explains how the challenge was tackled, but the jist of it is that BEEP can only play one note at a time - meaning Westcott's team had to rig together a network of Spectrums playing one note at a time. The Spectranet interface made this network possible, and the machines were co-orddinated by a Raspberry Pi.

The final result isn't going to put the orchestra out of business, but it's always nice when people band together to solve a seemingly impossible technological challenge. [The Register]

GADGETS

NASA's Ten Engine Electric Drone Goes From Chopper To Airplane And Back

Space missions get all the hype, but NASA Aeronautics is doing some pretty rad stuff, too. Their ten engine, unmanned electric plane, for instance, has just successfully transitioned from hover mode to wing-borne flight and back again.

Dubbed the Greased Lightning (GL-10), the current prototype for this UAV has a ten-foot wingspan, with eight electric motors along its wings and two on its tail. For take-off and landing, this clever plane points its wings up and hovers like a helicopter. Once airborne, the wings tilt forward and the drone switches to airplane mode. At least, that's what NASA has been hoping would happen. Transitioning from vertical to forward flight without falling out of the sky is no small challenge, as the engineers behind theV-22 Osprey have been made painfully aware.

But so far, so good! Here's a video released last week showing the drone's first successful transition from chopper to airplane. If the GL-10 continues to perform well, NASA hopes the small craft could eventually be used for a range of applications, including package delivery, long-endurance agricultural surveillance and mapping.

Zoom zoom zoom! [Engadget]

LAPTOPS

ASUS G501 Lightning Review: If The MacBook Pro Could Game

Want a thin gaming laptop? We have a whole guide for that-but the ASUS G501 wasn't the best laptop on our list. In fact, I kind ofdismissed it with just three sentences. It deserves more. Let's take a slightly deeper look.

What Is It?

Emblematic of what manufacturers seem to think a thin gaming laptop should be. Don't get me wrong, it's a good machine, but you can use the ASUS ROG G501 as a checklist for the category. Thin metal chassis? You betcha. Subtle colored accents? Yup. Enough graphics power to get away with being called a gaming laptop? Yes. A sturdy, strong frame that looks just a little too much like an Apple MacBook? Of course!

It's a laptop that's everything it's supposed to be and not much else. And that's fine.

Who's It For?

Anybody who finds the above list of traits appealing that doesn't see anything they like better in Gizmodo's Best Thin Gaming Laptop guide. You know, ASUS fans.

It might also work for folks looking for a thin laptop with a super high resolution screen who don't want a MacBook Pro with Retina display.

Design

This machine is about as simple as they come: a thin, 0.8-inch, four-pound aluminum computer draped in matte black with red highlights. The standard cavalcade of PC ports run around the machine's edge, including two USB ports, an audio jack, and an SD card reader on its right side, plus a mini DisplayPort, full-sized HDMI and a third USB plug on the left. Visually it looks almost exactly like the MacBook Pro would if it had a full sized keyboard and a black facade. So basically, a paint-by-numbers thin gaming laptop.

That doesn't mean it's not nice, though. The G501 has a solid, full-sized keyboard and a large mousepad that handles Windows 8 gestures with aplomb. It's screen isn't touch-capable, but it is a 15.6-inch super high resolution 3840 x 2160 display with wonderfully wide viewing angles. The speakers aren't anything to write home about, so let's move on.

Using It

Performance is the difference between a good gaming laptop and a great gaming laptop. The ASUS Republic of Gamers G501 is just a good gaming laptop-and this is what kept it out of the winner's circle in our big Bests round-up. The GeForce GTX 960M graphics chip at the heart of the machine is a good GPU, but it's definitely a middle-range performer. This means it can play everything on the market right now, but just not at their maximum settings or the laptop's native 4K resolution.

Want to play Far Cry 4? Go for it-as long as you keep the graphics settings at medium or lower with a 1080p resolution. Older games like Tomb Raider and Witcher 2 can flirt with higher graphics, but neither are completely playable on maximum settings.GTA V ran pretty well with a mixture of high and very high graphics settings, but it didn't get buttery smooth until it dropped down to "normal." Not bad at all-but it feels a little last year in terms of performance.

The Best Part

Most gaming laptops fail to last more than two hours under a heavy workload. This one can last me five.

The Tragic Flaw

That big, beautiful 4K display is way, way more than the laptop's mid-range graphics chip can handle. Sometimes it makes weird stuff happen: games configured to run full screen sometimes launch at 1080p in a tiny window on the desktop, and almost any game that tries to run at the screen's native resolution is completely unplayable.

We're just not ready for 4K gaming laptops, guys. Maybe next time.

This Is Weird...

Remember that full-sized keyboard I mentioned earlier? That was a minor fib: all the buttons are here, but the num-pad on the right hand side looks a little deformed. All of its buttons are about half as wide as every other key on the laptop. It's fine, but a mite odd.

Review Notes

• The entire touchpad clicks down for a left click, but pressing down on only the right-hand-corner of the pad activates a right-click. That takes some getting used to. 
• The power button looks just like a regular keyboard key, and is located above the num-pad. I forgot where it was multiple times. 
• ASUS has put a fair amount of pre-installed software on here. All of it is unnecessary, but most of it is at least complementary: an update utility, a ISP speed test tool and a hotkey tool for changing the color temperature of the monitor. 
• There's also a Windows 8 ASUS deals app. I uninstalled it on principle.
• These keyboard buttons definitely take a little more force to depress than I expected. It's not bad per se, but it's different enough that I noticed it.
• ASUS says the G501 is one of the coolest, quietest laptops on the market. It definitely gets warm, but I never got it so hot I was worried I was going to burn myself. I never thought it was too loud. This claim checks out.

Should You Buy It?

Are ASUS Republic of Gamers machines your absolute favorite brand of laptops in the whole world? Then sure-but if your fandom isn't as strong as your reason, hold off. The ROG G501 is a good machine that hits all the right notes to stand out as a quality thin gaming laptop-but it's priced like a great machine. It's good. Really good, even. It isn't great.

For the same $2,000 the G501 would set you back, you could have a 14-inch Razer Blade with a more powerful graphics chip, a smaller frame and a slightly better mouse and keyboard-for a little more (though I don't recommend this) you could even get the Blade with a super high resolution display. For less than the cost of the ASUS laptop, you could have a 15-inch MSI GS60 Ghost Pro with better internals and better speakers. Hell, you could even buy the Ghost's 17-inch brother, the GS70 Stealth, and still come away with a more powerful, less expensive computer.

Okay, but what if you don't really want a gaming machine: you want a 15-inch Windows laptop with a screen and chassis to rival the MacBook Pro with Retina that can still play games sometimes. Fine, maybe the ASUS ROG will work for you... but it'll cost you as much as that MacBook Pro and have less battery life. That doesn't mean it's not the right choice-it just means that the ASUS G501's higher-end graphics come at a price.

Bottom line: the ASUS ROG G501 is a good gaming PC, but it's not a good value.

ASUS ROG G501J Specs

• Display 15.6-inch 3840 x 2160 IPS UHD
• Processor: 2.6GHz Intel Core i7-4720HQ
• Graphics: NVIDIA GTX 960M
• Operating System: Windows 8.1
• Storage: 128GB boot SSD, 256GB data SSD
• Memory: 16GB DDR3L 1600 MHz SDRAM
• Connectivity: 3x USB 3.0, 1x Mini Displayport, 1x HDMI, 1x SD card slot, 3.5mm audio jack, Integrated 802.11ac or 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0
• Dimensions: 15.07" x 10.03" x 0.83"
• Weight: 4.5lbs
• Base Price: $2,000

CAMERAS

Here's How The LG G4 Camera Stacks Up To The IPhone 6 And Galaxy S6

Every flagship smartphone hypes its camera with a spicy mix of marketing-speak. Laser Focus. Ultra Pixels. Often it's just bullshit, but I've been using the camera on the new LG G4 and it it really does live up to the hype. Mostly.

The camera on the G4 should be great in theory, due to its 1/2.6-inch sensor size, which is larger than most phones' 1/3 inch sensors. It also has a bright f/1.8 lens and something called Laser Focus, which is supposed to be really fast. But specs and fancy names only get you so far.

To test LG's claims, I first did a quick comparison between the G4 and the G3 in daylight and low light. There is in fact a significant improvement. So that's great!

But I was more curious about how the G4 stacks up to the competition. I ran some tests comparing photos from the G4 to a couple of the current most popular smartphones-the iPhone 6 and the Samsung Galaxy S6. Swaths of the phone-carrying population swear by the iPhone camera, and in our recent testing, the Galaxy S6 proved to have formidable image snapping acumen. The perfect competitors. 

The following tests are 1:1 crops, and should be viewed large with the magnify button in the corner of each image.

Daylight

The first comparison is a simple daylight cityscape to look at the clarity of detail. Holy hell, the results. The G4 knocks it out of the park, showing clearer, sharper detail. The iPhone 6 looks like a mess next to it, with the Galaxy S6 somewhere in the middle. Remember, this has nothing to do with resolution. It's true that the iPhone has half the megapixels other two phones (8 vs 16), but that shouldn't matter. If you resize the G4 and S6 down to 8 megapixels, they still show superior detail to the iPhone.

Here's the full G4 image:

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Low Light

The next test is low light, where things even out a bit. The G4 applies much more aggressive noise reduction than the other two phones, which usually makes for a blurry disaster. But it actually holds up pretty well against the S6 and iPhone. Where the G4 falters is accuracy of color. You can see the shadows and low midtones shift slightly purple. The iPhone has the best color balance of the three, which you can see most clearly in the white lettering on the beer bottle. But I would still call the G4 a decent performer in low light.

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Front-Facing Cam

LG made a big ado about its selfie camera being great, and not a compromise like it is on most phones. I put on my best creepy/frightened/cool guy face and snapped a shot. Unfortunately reality didn't align with LG's claim. The G4's front-facing camera produced a far blurrier image than what the Galaxy S6 and the iPhone 6 produced. It also made my skin sickly orange which I didn't appreciate.

From these limited tests, you can see that the G4 camera is a mixed bag, but really shines in some of the most common situations. Daylight photos absolutely sing, and low light photos are not bad! I didn't document it, but when comparing auto-focus speeds, the G4 was on par with the S6, both of which were clearly faster than the iPhone. And surely you could do other tests, gauging things like flash and stabilization.

But for us pixel-peepers, it's great to see such nice detail from a camera phone. I would say it's hard to do much better unless you go for a Nokia Lumia phone. But let's face it, that's not an attractive proposition to most. For Android fans, the G4 will get you great photos. Good job, LG.

APPS

Free Apps May Be Tracking Your Phone Without Your Consent

Free Android apps are getting a bit promiscuous. That, at least, is the conclusion of a group of security researchers, who find that poorly vetted apps on Google Play are connecting to a massive number of ad and tracking sites-without user being any the wiser.

While Apple rigorously vets everything that appears in its app store, Google Play is much more open,  only excluding apps that are obviously malicious. Many of us love the wild west app environment Google has cultivated, but a wider quality range can leave room for apps that play fast and loose with their users. That's why security researchers at Eurecom in France have conducted a massive sweep of free apps, monitoring the sites they connect to unbeknownst to the user. MIT Tech Review describes their recent study:

Vigneri and co began by downloading over 2,000 free apps from all 25 categories on the Google Play store. They then launched each app on a Samsung Galaxy SIII running Android version 4.1.2 that was set up to channel all traffic through the team's server. This recorded all the urls that each app attempted to contact.

Next they compared the urls against a list of known ad-related sites from a database called EasyList and a database of user tracking sites called EasyPrivacy, both compiled for the open source AdBlock Plus project. Finally, they counted the number of matches on each list for every app.

All in all, the 2,000 apps in question connected to a whopping 250,000 urls across almost 2,000 top-level domains. Most of these apps were minor offenders, only trying to connect to a handful of ad or tracking sites, but roughly ten percent of the apps in question connected to over 500 different urls. (Unsurprisingly, 9 out of the 10 most frequently contacted ad-related domains are run by Google.) Top offenders include "Music Volume EQ," which connects to over 2,000 distinct URLs, and Eurosport Player, which hooks up with 810 different user-tracking sites.

SAMSUNG

Samsung Wants More Developers To Make Tizen Apps

So what if Samsung hasn't made rapid strides in its mission to thwart Android from gaining more mobile supremacy with Tizen? There's always a next time right? And in order to keep their hopes up the Korean major has decided to open up things beyond India and other emerging markets in order to garner wider developer traction, despite the fact that these devices aren't available in these markets.

Samsung realised its misgivings about the Tizen Z1 (barely any reviews in the country) as soon as the product was announced. But surely they are looking to make things a lot better the second time and in anticipation of that the availability of Tizen apps across the world implies better experience on these devices in the coming times.

Having said that Tizen is not only available with the Z1 smartphone right as multiple Galaxy Gear and Gear S wearable devices are running on the same power. In addition to that Smart TVs are very much reliant on Tizen operating system as well.

If Samsung wants any piece of Android's market then future iterations of Tizen need to get upgraded at an ultra-sonic pace as merely updating versions isn't going work in their favour. It's a big ask but never say impossible to nothing.

APPS

Meerkat Debut On Android Before Periscope

Hail Meerkat! That's the kind of outcry that this app had attracted when it made a debut on the iOS few days ago. For those unaware, Meerkat is a carnivorous mongoose native to Africa, but in the app form, it brings live streaming to the social network.

After enjoy its stint on the iOS, the app is now available on Android. It is noteworthy, that Meerkat is managed to make its Android debut ahead of Periscope, which is Twitter's own native app created for almost the same purpose.

The app is painfully simple. After connecting Meerkat with your Twitter account, you've got two options: stream and schedule. Stream lets you immediately broadcast live straight from your camera to the Internet. Schedule, well, that seems self-explanatory. You also have "following" and "followers" just like Twitter.