from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

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Filed Under: daily deal

Starlink is getting ready to launch its second generation of satellites, and it’s expected to match the speeds of a traditional terrestrial network. During a keynote at Mobile World Congress, Starlink execs detailed the roadmap for the company’s upgrade towards the next generation of satellites called V2.

“The goal of Starlink Mobile … is to provide a terrestrial-like connectivity when you’re connected to the satellite system,” Michael Nicolls, SpaceX’s senior vice president of Starlink engineering, said during the MWC keynote. “In the right conditions, it should look and feel like you’re connected to a high-performing 5G terrestrial network.”

Nicolls detailed that the V2 satellite constellation could offer download speeds up to 150 Mbps in ideal conditions, comparing it to a broadband experience. According to Starlink, next-gen satellites will offer 100 times the data density of its predecessors, which should help users with faster streaming and browsing as well as more reliable voice calls. Notably, Nicolls added that the V2 satellite constellation would offer better coverage to Earth’s polar regions, which are known to have unreliable coverage with traditional networks.

Nicolls said that SpaceX is planning to send out more than 50 V2 satellites on each SpaceX launch starting in mid-2027, with a goal of building out a full constellation in six months. Outside its MWC presser, Starlink also announced a partnership with German telecommunications company Deutsche Telekom. The partnership would help Deutsche Telekom address internet coverage gaps in Europe using Starlink’s constellation, starting in 2028.

There are many chess robots, most of which require the human player to move the opposing pieces themselves, or have a built-in mechanism that can slide the opposing pieces around to their new location. Ideally, such a chess robot would move the pieces just like how a human would, of course. That’s pretty much the promise behind the Manya Cynus chess robot, which [Matt] over at the Techmoan YouTube channel bought from the Kickstarter campaign.

Advertising itself as a ‘Portable AI Chess Robot’, the Manya Cynus chess robot comes in the form of a case that unfolds into a chess board and also contains the robotic arm that contains the guts of the operation. Powered by the open source Stockfish chess engine, it can play games against a human opponent at a few difficulty levels without requiring any online connectivity or a companion app. It moves its own pieces by picking up the metal-cored chess pieces with its arm, while its front display tries to display basic emotions with animated eyes. A 3-MP downward-facing camera is located on the head section, along with a microphone.

As for how well it works, [Matt] isn’t the best chess player, but he had a fair bit of fun with the machine. His major complaints circle around how unfinished the firmware still feels, with e.g., invalid moves basically ignored with only a barely visible warning popping up on the screen. In general, he’d rather classify it as an interesting development kit for a chess robot, which is where the BLE 5.1-based interface and a purported Python-based development environment provided by Manya seem to come into focus.

From the site, it’s not clear where this documentation and software can be found, and the chess robot appears to be fully sold out on the Kickstarter page. In addition to this, a promised companion app seems to have gone AWOL, too.

With no clear support or even availability, it would seem that this is less of a crowdfunding scam and more of a confusing product which may or may not become available again, yet which could perhaps provide inspiration to some DIY projects, as the basic principle seems sound enough. Or, keep it simple and use a gantry.

There’s no bigger event for mobile tech enthusiasts than the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. While CES in January has seen fewer major mobile announcements over the years, MWC remains the go-to event for major breakthroughs in the mobile industry.

In 2026, the show will take place from March 2 to March 5 at Fira Barcelona Gran Via, once again bringing the biggest names in mobile together for one of the year’s most important tech events.

from the goons-with-tech-are-still-goons dept

Wow. Imagine if you could just make this shit up.

The U.S. military used a laser Thursday to shoot down a “seemingly threatening” drone flying near the U.S.-Mexico border. It turned out the drone belonged to Customs and Border Protection, lawmakers said.

It is to LOL. Not only did the military friendly fire a CBP drone into the dirt, it also caused a bit of disruption. The military is required to notify the FAA when it engages in any anti-drone “action” in US airspace.

So it did, which is how this came out. It would be great if it were an isolated incident, but apparently this is just the sort of thing we’re doing regularly in the El Paso area.

It was the second time in two weeks that a laser was fired in the area. The last time it was CBP that used the weapon and nothing was hit. That incident occurred near Fort Bliss and prompted the FAA to shut down air traffic at El Paso airport and the surrounding area. This time, the closure was smaller and commercial flights were not affected.

The Associated Press is being far too coy in this paragraph. First off, CBP did not coordinate with the FAA before firing the anti-drone laser, which resulted in a scramble to secure the airspace after the fact, leading to a shutdown that grounded flights and raised alarm.

The link in the paragraph doesn’t lead to the full story. Here’s what happened the last time the laser was fired at something that shouldn’t have been fired at:

The sudden closure of El Paso’s airspace Wednesday came sometime after U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials used an anti-drone laser that was provided by the military to shoot down objects that were later identified as party balloons, four people familiar with the matter said.

I can only hope the Defense Department’s downing of a CBP drone was the result of determining the CBP itself couldn’t be trusted with the tech. If this isn’t the case, there’s a non-zero chance the CBP will shoot down its own drone at some point in the near future. I mean, it really doesn’t look like anyone is learning anything from these experiences.

But here’s what we can learn: tech is fallible. And given this chain of events, one has every right to demand more answers on the US military’s drone strike program targeting alleged drug traffickers in international waters. Even if you choose to ignore the legal issues, the logistics issues should be enough to keep you up at night. I mean, we’re only seeing what the administration chooses to share with us. What’s happening out there that we’re not seeing on DoD X timelines?

If drone-detecting lasers are being used to (1) shoot down friendly drones and (2) FAIL to shoot down party balloons, why should we believe the drones themselves are a better option when it comes to neutralizing threats? In both cases, humans are making mistakes, but their mistakes trigger tech that’s capable of killing people. Fuck around enough and there’s a chance someone with a federal paycheck is going to down an airliner.

It’s not really a matter of “if.” It’s a matter of when. This administration cranked up the proverbial heat, encouraging a shoot-first, sort-through-the-wreckage-later approach to pretty much everything. For the love of all that is unholy, it has rebranded the Defense Department as the Department of War. It’s all hair triggers and under-trained personnel. A national tragedy awaits, willed into being by an administration that considers collateral damage little more than viral content.

Filed Under: cbp, defense department, drone strikes, dumbfuckery, el paso, national security

In the last few months, Meta has seemingly taken its foot off the gas when it comes to developing next-generation VR hardware and experiences. The Beijing-based Chinese competitor, ByteDance, the creator of TikTok, is going the other way — and it appears focused on expanding its work beyond just gaming.

The Pico Project Swan, announced at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week, is a lot of head hardware. Coming “later this year,” according to ByteDance, it doesn’t sound cheap. An onboard micro OLED display will have 40 pixels per degree of resolution density, which should be in line with what the Apple Vision Pro and Samsung Galaxy XR offer. The headset will have similar capabilities to create mixed-reality overlays of graphics in real-world settings using passthrough cameras.

The headset is also powered by its own dual-chip custom processors that ByteDance claims are twice as powerful as Qualcomm’s Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 chip that’s on Meta’s Quest 3 and 3S headsets, and in a stepped-up version on Samsung Galaxy XR. While that may still lag behind Apple’s M5 chip on the Vision Pro, it’s a lot for a mixed reality headset.

As for the price of Project Swan and what software it’ll run, that’s still a mystery. Pico headsets already run Android apps and can connect to Windows PCs, but the landscape of VR/AR is changing rapidly.

Apple and Samsung’s headsets feel like prototypes for future computers that still don’t have enough unique software yet. Meta’s emphasis on smaller AR glasses to come mirrors planned moves by Google and Samsung, and Apple could be following suit.

Meanwhile, Valve’s gaming-focused Steam Frame headset, coming later this year, shows another interesting wrinkle in the mix. Valve is running Steam on smaller ARM chips, which could mean Steam OS running on other XR hardware after that. Running more types of software on smaller chipsets is exactly what VR headsets needed more of in the first place.

I’m curious about Project Swan, though. At the least, it shows that other companies are keeping the ball rolling on high-end headsets, even if Meta currently seems not to be.