#Hardware

10 articles

Virtual model assists Wi-Fi 7 in making improved decisions within crowded networks

A strong Wi-Fi signal doesn't always mean a fast connection. In busy places like offices, apartment buildings and airports, neighboring Wi-Fi networks often compete for the same radio channels. To prevent interference, devices may need to pause before transmitting, even if they could communicate simultaneously.

8m ago The Register

HPE debuts hybrid storage configs: Rising SSD costs hit supercomputing

HPE aims for the market with faster, more cost-effective HPC storage to combat rising costs

12m ago The Verge

My favorite recipe app just got a big upgrade — and a subscription fee

Nearly 10 years after the launch of Paprika 3, the recipe-managing, pantry-organizing, grocery list-making app has gotten a big upgrade that adds more functionality to nearly every corner of the experience. I tested Paprika 4 for several weeks while it was in open beta, and the update recently launched across Android (the version I've been [...]

27m ago The Verge

Whoop launched a social network where every user has a ‘verified heartbeat’

Starting Thursday, Whoop members can share their data from its wearables on the app's new Whoop Humans social network. Users can make their metrics, activities, and achievements visible to other Whoop wearers, post Story-like "Moments" with photos and captions, and add comments and reactions on other members' posts. Whoop claims its platform is "entirely human," [...]

16h ago TechXplore

Hand gestures and vibrating belt enable drone control without visual feedback in early tests

Operating a drone manually requires pilots to watch a screen while coordinating controls. This divides attention between the aircraft and its surroundings. Researchers are exploring ways to make drone operation more intuitive and less dependent on continuous visual monitoring. A wearable interface developed at Jeonbuk National University combines hand gestures for sending commands with abdominal vibrations that indicate the drone's position relative to the user.

22h ago arXiv cs.AI

Trained on What Screen Readers Cannot Read: Accessibility Debt in the GUI Corpora Behind Computer-Use Agents

Computer-use agents learn to operate mobile interfaces from corpora of captured screens and accessibility trees. The same trees are what a screen reader consumes, so an agent trained on them inherits whatever labelling gaps the underlying applications carry. This paper measures one of those gaps, content-description coverage, in two Android corpora: Rico, collected in 2017, and AndroidControl, collected in 2024. Across 17,373,614 interface elements, 17.74% of the Rico elements that need a content description under our coding rule carry one, against 57.27% in AndroidControl. The difference of 39.5 percentage points holds under five alternative coding rules and when whole apps are resampled. It describes two datasets that also differ in app selection, capture method and platform version; it does not measure change over time. Input controls are the least labelled role in both corpora (2.20% and 27.21%, or 30.99% in AndroidControl if hint text counts as a name). Descriptions in the older corpus are also five times more likely to be placeholders (10.25% against 1.95%), so the difference is not an artefact of developers typing filler. Resolving 26,205 task actions to the elements they touched shows that, among tappable graphics with no text, demonstrations operate elements described 9.0 points more often than the others on the screens they visit, about 3.5 points of it from the choice of element within a screen. That is a selection effect inside the benchmark. A two-coder reliability check (kappa = 0.91 and 0.96) and the full pipeline accompany the paper.

1d ago The Verge

Hands on with Home Assistant’s new ‘smart home multi-tool’

Nabu Casa - the commercial side of the Open Home Foundation, which runs Home Assistant - just launched the Home Assistant Connect Aux-2, a multi-function box designed to help you bring more non-smart devices into your smart home. It's part of Home Assistant's ongoing efforts to become more user-friendly. And it's working. I've been testing [...]

1d ago Engadget