Latest news with #H.R.Giger
WIRED
26-07-2025
- WIRED
Razer's Pro Click V2 Vertical Is the Ergonomic Gaming Mouse You're Looking For
Switching to a vertical mouse is a hard sell. Having to change how you use a mouse completely can be an intimidating task, especially with how unnatural the new hand position feels at first—you're going entirely against the muscle memory you've spent years building up. One of the largest challenges to the switch is the initial loss of pointer accuracy. If you're in an office setting, you may find yourself wandering around a bit or struggling to move your new mouse as quickly as you did before. But in a slow-paced setting like that, all you struggle with is a few mis-clicks or slightly slower navigation. If you try to make this transition with gaming, it's far more jarring, and the consequences are much more immediately noticeable. But even if it's difficult to adapt to, could vertical mice be the future of gaming? Razer's new Pro Click V2 Vertical Edition is a hybrid productivity and gaming vertical mouse. Vertical mice typically cater to office workers, but the focus on gaming performance makes the $120 Pro Click V2 one of a kind. Desk Presence The Pro Click V2 Vertical looks, more than anything else, like a modern gaming mouse. It has the textured exterior, metallic highlights, and slightly organic, H.R. Giger-esque curvature typical of Razer's design language. But everything has been shifted around. The curved, cutting thumb rest sits on top of the mouse instead of on the side. A flare juts out from the right side as a place to rest the underside of your hand. The gunmetal highlight sits at the peak of the mouse rather than between the two buttons. Even the USB port is vertical, a humorous attention to detail. It's intentionally designed as a gaming mouse that just happens to be vertical . Aesthetically, the only downside is the minimal RGB lighting. With only one section of lighting that runs along the bottom of the mouse, RGB lighting fans might feel disappointed. Still, it's bright, reactive, and has great color accuracy. It's more than enough for me, especially with how customizable it is with Razer's Chroma software. The Pro Click V2 Vertical has the same specs as the standard Pro Click V2, with a 1,000-Hz polling rate, a 2.4-GHz dongle that can be stored on the underside, Bluetooth multi-device connectivity, and a reprogrammable button on top. The only features lost are the mouse wheel's horizontal scrolling and toggleable non-ratcheted rotation. This mouse includes two major productivity features: app-specific profiles and multi-device connectivity, and both work effortlessly. Razer Synapse immediately detected different software and changed the active profile in response, and pressing the button on the underside of the mouse swapped between paired devices instantaneously. Beyond that, Razer Synapse is as impressive as always. I consistently find the software to be one of the best and most intuitive on the market, and that's the case here. All of the menus are simple and efficient, the settings can be changed in real time, and the adjustments all have tooltips and explanations to tell you exactly what you're changing. Annoyingly, Razer Synapse has advertisements on the homepage, something I've complained about when reviewing SteelSeries products in the past. However, unlike Steelseries GG, these 'recommendations' can be permanently disabled in the app's settings. Performance and Practice The overall hand position of the Pro Click V2 Vertical is natural, but incredibly upright. While some vertical mice, like those from Logitech or Hansker, find a middle ground between a standard and truly 'vertical' hand position, Razer opted for a nearly perpendicular shape. While this is technically an ideal ergonomic shape, it will be harder to adapt if you're moving directly from a standard mouse, and might not be as comfortable during the adjustment period. It felt unnatural for the first week or so, and required practice to use comfortably and confidently. Once I had acclimated, my speed and accuracy were nearly at the same level as a standard mouse, although consistent use still felt clunky and unfamiliar compared to the horizontal mice I'd been using for most of my life.
Tom's Guide
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Tom's Guide
Disney Plus and Hulu summer preview trailer offers fresh look at 8 upcoming shows — here's the 3 I'm adding to my watchlist
If you're serious about streaming all the best stuff, it seems like you're going to want access to Disney Plus (and Hulu) throughout 2025. That opinion is based on the exciting teaser that Disney just shared, which showcases what the House of Mouse has primed for release on its two streaming services throughout the back half of 2025. The trailer showcases the streamers' range of content: new and returning comedies, another brief glimpse of Marvel's "Wonder Man" project, and a fresh look at the hotly anticipated new "Alien: Earth" series. Check it out below: Of course, this new clip is only a sizzle reel of what's coming our way, so it's not like we've got a ton of fresh info about any one show in particular. That said, getting excited about streaming is literally my job, and so here are the three things that I'm currently most looking forward to watching (plus a quick rundown of everything shown off). And remember: everything shown off can be streamed via Hulu on Disney Plus for bundle subscribers. Let's get the most obvious project out of the way: "Alien: Earth" looks awesome. Get instant access to breaking news, the hottest reviews, great deals and helpful tips. That trailer that dropped at the start of June was gripping stuff. It boasts some engrossing visuals and feels like it has nailed the "Alien" aesthetic and the lingering dread that H.R. Giger's nightmarish biomechanical creations have been spreading for decades. I look forward to cowering behind my sofa when the beasts are unleashed once more. I watch football, I like comedy, and I think Glen Powell is one of the most watchable stars on our screens right now. As such, "Chad Powers" — the upcoming Hulu comedy show — feels practically tailor-made for me. The half-hour comedy comes from Powell and Michael Waldron, and is based on the character of the same name from "Eli's Places." It sees Powell stepping onto the pitch as QB Russ Holliday. When bad behavior nukes this hotshot's college football career, he disguises himself as Chad Powers, an affable, talented player who walks onto a struggling Southern football team. I grew up with Rick Riordan's "Percy Jackson" books, and after those less-than-stellar movie adaptations, I didn't necessarily have high hopes for the 2023 series adaptation. Season 1 of "Percy Jackson and the Olympians" well and truly proved me wrong, however, and I have been patiently awaiting the fantasy series' return ever since. The first batch of episodes was great fun, and I really can't wait to see the team's take on book 2; it's been on my radar since the start of the year. SUMMER AUTUMN DECEMBER
New York Times
20-05-2025
- New York Times
This Robot Vacuum Has a Claw That Tries (and Mostly Fails) to Pick Up Your Socks
The Saros Z70 mostly works like any other robot vacuum-mop combo, sucking up debris and wiping up light grime. But the main attraction is the OmniGrip arm, which promises to grab and sort the type of clutter that robot cleaners, until this point, haven't been able to tidy up on their own. The arm spends most of its time tucked inside the robot, behind a hatch. It's programmed to recognize socks, slippers, small towels, and tissues (that's all, for now), extend the claw, pick up the items, and then drop them off in designated areas. Socks, towels, and tissues go into a cardboard bucket that comes with the robot, and slippers go to another floor-level spot of your choice. Setup took me about 10 minutes. You need to start by sending the robot out on a training run to draw a map of your home's floor plan, a process that's quick and mostly automatic. Then you coach it, through the smartphone app, so that it knows where you've put the sock bin and where you want the slippers to go. Depending on which settings you have enabled, either it'll sort your things as it finds them or you can set it to finish cleaning first and then go on a separate sorting-only run. If it comes across other obstacles, it'll just steer around them. It also has a remote-control mode that lets you peer through the bot's camera, drive up to obstacles, and then tell the claw to do its thing. The claw isn't exactly a piece of heavy-duty precision machinery, but it doesn't strike me as flimsy, either. When it pops out of its hatch, tiny motors whirring, sometimes I stop to marvel at how far robot vacuums have come. Other times it strikes me as cartoonish and over-the-top, and occasionally I shudder, as though I'm gazing upon a techno-dystopian torture device from an H.R. Giger painting. My dog hates it. The Saros Z70 clamps down on socks, tissues, and slippers with a crablike pincer grip and then carries the item to a designated sorting area. Liam McCabe/NYT Wirecutter Down to business: The claw doesn't collect stuff as reliably as advertised. I gave it a few chances to pick up a normal mess that my dog and my 7-year-old leave out on any given day, but it grabbed only about a quarter of the items. If a sock was anywhere near a piece of furniture — as it often is when you live with a first-grader who reflexively tears off their footwear as soon as they plop down on the couch — the Z70 wouldn't even attempt to pick it up. It's probably a good thing that the robot is smart enough not to snap off its own appendage while driving under a coffee table. But even when I carefully staged a bunch of socks and slippers that didn't seem like they would cause the Z70 any obvious problems, it still worked only about half as often as I thought it should. It didn't accurately identify every piece of detritus, even from its approved-item list. One of my black socks blended in with my navy blue rug, and the Z70 couldn't spot the sock. A Roborock representative told us that the vision system struggles to spot objects on dark carpets in general. The vision system later mistook that same sock for a dog turd, even though it was on a bare wood floor that time. It didn't register my slippers at all. The AI vision system on the Saros Z70 sometimes misidentifies objects, like when it thought my black ankle sock was dog poop (left). You need to spend at least a few minutes coaching the robot through the rich but busy smartphone app (center) to take advantage of all the features. Most of the time, it offers tips along the way (right). Liam McCabe/NYT Wirecutter Then again, it did pick up a Birkenstock sandal, which I guess it had pegged as a slipper (it must be hard to train AI on those subtle differences). It's a positive sign that the arm is strong enough to handle that much weight, and I was impressed when the bot set the sandal down exactly where I had coached it to. The other half of the Birkenstock pair wasn't so lucky, though; it sat sole-side up on the floor, and the Z70 stared at it for a second and then left without attempting to lift it. Sometimes, when the Z70 did identify a sock correctly, the arm just couldn't quite grab it. Considering the slew of cameras and sensors built into the arm and the main chassis, you'd think it would find the right angle, but it's not there yet. The Z70 was also way too conservative around furniture and fixtures for my tastes. It wouldn't even try to pick up socks that were within a foot of my TV stand or toilet, and it balked at grabbing a sock under my dining room table, where there's ample height for the arm to do its thing. Then there are other obstacles that it should have steered clear of but didn't. It promptly tried to pick up a sock next to my dog's wire playpen — and ended up hooking itself to one of the crossbars and not letting go until the front of the bot had risen a few inches off the floor. Occasionally, it just looked lost, twitching in place with its claw hanging out, calling out 'sorting items, sorting items' over and over for about a minute at inconsistent intervals, before retracting its arm and moving on. Here's the claw cavity inside the Saros Z70. It doesn't feel like cheap machinery, though it's not exactly heavy-duty, either. Liam McCabe/NYT Wirecutter I tested it for about three weeks. It remains to be seen whether the claw will hold up over time, what with all its moving parts and all the crevices where dust and grit can gather. My sense is that these robots are not easy to repair. When I've spoken to Roborock representatives about the durability and repairability of the company's products in the past, they've told me that it doesn't plan to offer major replacement parts because it expects customers to upgrade every three years or so anyway. The Z70's arm is very much a work in progress, and Roborock has a big challenge on its hands. Getting the arm tuned correctly, across all the image recognition, mechanical engineering, and choices about risk management and bot behavior, will be quite a feat of engineering. And the solution probably won't come to this first-generation model: In an email, a representative from Roborock said that the company probably won't be able to solve some of the pickup and image-recognition problems with software updates alone. For now, it falls well short of being Roborock's promised panacea for all your floor-level messes. You shouldn't count on Roborock (or any company) to catch up with its promises through software updates over time. It might — but I've seen too many examples of gadget makers not delivering on their promised improvements to navigation systems and other features.
Yahoo
22-02-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
AI Designed an Alien Chip That Works, But Experts Can't Explain Why
From smartphones to modems to air traffic radar, you'll be hard pressed to find communications infrastructure that doesn't use wireless chips. So far, those chips have been designed by humans — but that might be set to change: an international team of engineering researchers has demonstrated a wild new approach to wireless microchip design powered by AI. The effort, published in the journal Nature, describes how deep learning was used to dream up new chip layouts — and while the chips seem to work, the researchers say they're not entirely sure how. The designs "look randomly shaped," lead researcher Kaushik Sengupta, an electrical engineer at Princeton, told Live Science. "Humans cannot really understand them." Indeed, photos of the chips have a bit of an alien design, as if H.R. Giger's career took a detour into electronics design. That's not entirely surprising; researchers including Harvard's Avi Loeb have suggested that AI could be better understood as an alien intelligence than an imitation of our own cognition. (After all, experts argue, even the people building today's AI don't quite understand how it works.) In tests, the deep learning model came up with highly optimized electromagnetic structures that, when tested, outperformed their human-designed counterparts. The researchers found that their model was well suited to an inverse synthesis design approach, basically starting from the desired result and letting the model work backward to fill in the blanks. And on a practical level it's a potential bellwether for the future of millimeter-wave wireless chips, a $4.5 billion dollar industry that's expected to grow triple in size over the next six years. The current approach to designing those chips is tedious, banking on a mix of expert knowledge, battle-tested templates, and good old trial-and-error. That process typically takes days to weeks of synthesis, emulation, and real-life testing, and even then, humans have a difficult time comprehending the astronomically complex geometry of the chips they produce. Sengupta is keen to point out that this is a tool, not the end-all-be-all for hardware engineering, especially because the deep-learning algorithm hallucinated faulty designs just as well as it produced effective ones. "There are pitfalls that still require human designers to correct," Segupta said in a blurb about the research. "The point is not to replace human designers with tools. The point is to enhance productivity with new tools. The human mind is best utilized to create or invent new things, and the more mundane, utilitarian work can be offloaded to these tools." The AI model's current output is small electromagnetic structures, but looking to the future, researchers will likely use these and similar findings to develop ever-more complex circuits by chaining these smaller structures together. It's an exciting find for researchers, but it does invoke an alarming possibility: that soon enough, we could be using AI-designed tech without quite understanding how it works. More on AI research: There May Be Downsides Now That Mark Zuckerberg Can Read Your Thoughts With a Scanning Device
Yahoo
13-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Wild party, erotic art exhibition The Dirty Show returns to Detroit for 2 weekends
One of Detroit's most unique annual events returns for the next two weekends when The Dirty Show celebrates its 25th anniversary. For a quarter of a century, North America's largest erotic art exhibition has enticed visitors from around the world for a party of epic proportions. While it began as a 'happening' in an office above a Royal Oak bump shop, the multimedia event now consistently attracts capacity crowds to its home of recent years, Detroit's 50,000-square-foot Russell Industrial Center. With over 300 juried paintings, sculptures, photos, films, and other media, immersive installations, raucous stage performances, and live demonstrations, Dirty remains a provocative, exciting, and inclusive place for attendees to explore and interact. In honor of its 'smut-tacular' Silver Jubilee, the event will celebrate by presenting work from all of its past headliner artists in an ensemble event, which includes contributions from artists such as John Waters, H.R. Giger, Niagara, Clive Barker, Glenn Barr, Bunny Yeager, and more. Other attractions include the Chappell Roan-inspired Pink Pony Club, which will transform into disco-era leather bar The Daddyhole during the second weekend; the Cinerotic Film Festival, which channels the vintage 'art house' erotic film experience; Japanese shibari binding/rope play; and numerous burlesque, striptease and sex-centric performers. 'You see a lot of happy faces here,' said Dirty Show founder and organizer Jerry Vile. 'It's awesome, a room full of happy people. Part of that is that your brain releases dopamine when your eyes connect with anything erotic; when you have over 300 pieces of erotic art, a lot of those are going to release dopamine. And then, we have skimpy-dressed stage performers, go-go dancers in cages, and above all, the patrons themselves – lucky for us. 'Patrons of The Dirty Show like to let their freak flags fly, and walk around in leather, rubber, drag, whatever they're into. It's one safe space for them to publicly reveal their inner kink. It's fun.' More: The Dirty Show, America's largest erotic art exhibition, returns to Detroit for wild fun More: Detroit's Dirty Show ranges from 'grandma safe' to criminally obscene As an example, Vile referenced perhaps the Show's most famous (or infamous?) annual attendee, fetish model Foxy Menagerie Verre – who sports the largest breast implants in North America and one of the biggest implanted pairs in the world. 'Foxy doesn't do anything onstage, but just to have her show up as a person walking through our door, instead of seeing a picture of her on the internet and trying to get her to appear, is priceless. Anybody who sees that is going to have some kind of opinion. You know, I don't think she can even drive? There's a lot of exhibitionism in our crowd, but I think she might be the most extreme example of a Dirty Show patron.' Verre said she spends all year waiting for the event to come back around. 'I always plan out what I'm going to wear for each one, because it's one of the events that I really look forward to,' she told the Free Press. 'I have something custom-made for it by a guy in Turkey, and it's a big deal for me to be able to see everyone there. I love seeing the different people when I go, and I always love catching up with Jerry Vile. He's a sweetheart. And I also love seeing the artists' work and touching base with them. 'Each year, they do different events, different games, have different booths set up. So you never really know what changes are going to be made, or what to expect. It's one show that always keeps you on your toes.' The Dirty Show runs from 7 p.m. to 2 a.m. on Friday and Saturday, Feb. 14 and 15, and Feb. 21 and 22. Tickets are $50 in advance and can be purchased at Ages 21 and up only. The event takes place at the Russell Exhibition Center, 1600 Clay St., Detroit. Contact Free Press arts and culture reporter Duante Beddingfield at dbeddingfield@ This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Wild party, erotic art exhibition The Dirty Show returns to Detroit
