The housing doesn’t feel too cheap or too luxurious. It’s toylike, but not in a chintzy way. The unit can run on three AA batteries (a set is included) or on the included USB-A to DC adapter (you’ll need your own wall charger). The included instruction manual helps you make sense of what the heck all the knobs, levers, buttons, and lights mean.

You’ll start with the sequencer, which is where you’ll find a selection of hundreds of premade melodies with or without drum beats. Then you’ll use the other controls to manipulate this sound. The tempo lever controls the speed, the AMP(lifier) release controls how long or short each note is, and the filter lever adds or removes frequencies from the sounds you’re generating. There are also buttons for kick and snare drums to add percussion. An entire area of knobs and buttons is dedicated to sound modulation using either Low Frequency Oscillators or Modulation Envelopes.

That array already gives you a lot of control, but the BlipBlox After Dark also has two buttons that throw chance into the music-making mix: a Randomize button that resets everything (and saves the current settings, so you can press and hold it to go back to the most recent settings and parameters), and a Soundfreak button that adds a random sound or effect to whatever is currently playing. The latter button in particular is very entertaining to press.

It was fun sitting down and just winging it. I felt a little bit like Charli XCX at her Boiler Room set and a little bit like 8-year-old me trying to figure out how to make my church choir’s keyboard sound more like the chords in the background of Britney Spears’ “I’m a Slave 4 U.” I tested this machine heavily during the week I quit nicotine, and it was a welcome distraction. I lost hours just fiddling with it, trying to see what sounds I could elicit.

I realized at one point that this must have been how my friends felt during quarantine. I might not have had patch cables or seven rows of modules or whatever spark makes Fred Again … himself, but I could make the womp … womp … womp … noise turn into different womps, and damn if that wasn’t the neatest thing in the entire world at that moment in time.

Button Mashing

The instruction manual does have some really good information that could answer all my burning questions, and there are YouTube videos galore that show you how to navigate the controls.

In the manual you’ll find a signal flow map, which helpfully shows exactly what the electrical signals are doing inside the unit, and how to manipulate them at any point. There are also detailed notes on what each button and component of synthesis does.

• SLSH is recruiting women to increase effectiveness of social engineering on IT helpdesks
• Applicants are paid between $500 and $1,000 per call depending on success
• Participants must pass screening questions and follow a scripted set of instructions

The notorious hacker group Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters, also known as SLSH, is reportedly recruiting women to improve the effectiveness of its social engineering operations.

Telegram posts dated February 22 and collected by Dataminr indicate the group is offering payments between $500 and $1,000 per call, depending on “success and hit rate.”

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

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Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

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