Popular Vtuber CodeMiko provided her fans with an exclusive look at what really goes on behind the scenes during her much-loved Twitch streams.
The amount of planning and prep required to set up a livestream is complicated for any content creator. However, it can be a whole other ballgame for Vtubers.
For these streamers, they not only have to organize their computer setup but they also have to create their own 3D virtual world using various pieces of technology, including motion capture suits and computer graphic engines.
One of the most popular Vtubers is South Korean-American Twitch streamer CodeMiko, who gave her viewers a brief look into some of the work that goes into building her persona for her livestreams.
Twitch: CodeMiko
After being laid off from working at Nickelodeon due to the pandemic, CodeMiko took up streaming full time.
CodeMiko shows off her virtual setup
On May 12, CodeMiko gave fans a rare glimpse into what goes on into how she and her team animate her avatar for her livestreams.
Splitting her camera frame in two, she showed viewers a side-by-side comparison of her avatar with herself IRL wearing a motion capture suit, gloves, and headband.
She then demonstrated how her suit tracks her movements along with her facial expressions which are then recreated in avatar form in real-time. Although, it can be “laggy” at times.
Not only that, CodeMiko showed that one of her gloves also contains a built-in selfie cam that allows her to take “Instagram photos.” Although, she took the opportunity to use the cam to show off her virtual room leaving fans blown away with the technology used to create her animated world.
In the early days of her career, CodeMiko created her avatar herself using Unreal Engine. However, as her popularity soared, she acquired an engineer, animator, publicist, personal assistant, and a manager to help her with the workload.
There were fears over the misuse of the Vtuber tag by some popular streamers and the damage it could have on up-and-coming Vtubers. However, with the Vtuber community continuing to thrive thanks to characters like CodeMiko, we could yet see more Vtubers making their way to Twitch.
It looks like it’s soon to be lights out for the Mars InSight lander. In the two years that the lander has been studying the geophysics of Mars from its lonely post on Elysium Planitia, InSight’s twin solar arrays have been collecting dust, and now are so dirty that they’re only making about 500 watt-hours per sol, barely enough to run the science packages on the lander. And that’s likely to worsen as the Martian winter begins, which will put more dust in the sky and lower the angle of the Sun, reducing the sunlight that’s incident to the panels. Barring a “cleaning event” courtesy of a well-placed whirlwind, NASA plans to shut almost everything down on the lander other than the seismometer, which has already captured thousands of marsquakes, and the internal heaters needed to survive the cold Martian nights. They’re putting a brave face on it, emphasizing the continuing science and the mission’s accomplishments. But barely two years of science and a failed high-profile experiment aren’t quite what we’ve come to expect from NASA missions, especially one with an $800 million price tag.
Closer to home, it turns out there’s a reason sailing ships have always had human crews: to fix things that go wrong. That’s the lesson learned by the Mayflower Autonomous Ship as it attempted the Atlantic crossing from England to the States, when it had to divert for repairs recently. It’s not clear what the issue was, but it seems to have been a mechanical issue, as opposed to a problem with the AI piloting system. The project dashboard says that the issue has been repaired, and the AI vessel has shoved off from the Azores and is once more beating west. There’s a long stretch of ocean ahead of it now, and few options for putting in should something else go wrong. Still, it’s a cool project, and we wish them a fair journey.
Have you ever walked past a display of wall clocks at the store and wondered why someone went to the trouble of setting the time on all of them to 10:10? We’ve certainly noticed this, and always figured it had something to do with some obscure horological tradition, like using “IIII” to mark the four o’clock hour on clocks with Roman numerals rather than the more correct “IV”. But no, it turns out that 10:10 is more visually pleasing, and least on analog timepieces, because it evokes a smile on a human face. The study cited in the article had volunteers rate how pleasurable watches are when set to different times, and 10:10 won handily based on the perception that it was smiling at them. So it’s nice to know how easily manipulated we humans can be.
If there’s anything more pathetic than geriatric pop stars trying to relive their glory days to raise a little cash off a wave of nostalgia, we’re not sure what it could be. Still, plenty of acts try to do it, and many succeed, although seeing what time and the excesses of stardom have wrought can be a bit sobering. But Swedish megastars ABBA appear to have found a way to cash in on their fame gracefully, by sending digital avatars out to do their touring for them. The “ABBA-tars,” created by a 1,000-person team at Industrial Light and Magic, will appear alongside a live backing band for a residency at London’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. The avatars represent Benny, Bjorn, Agnetha, and Anni-Frid as they appeared in the 1970s, and were animated thanks to motion capture suits donned while performing 40 songs. It remains to be seen how fans will buy into the concept, but we’ll say this — the Swedish septuagenarians look pretty darn good in skin-tight Spandex.
And finally, not that it has any hacking value at all, but there’s something shamefully hilarious about watching this poor little delivery bot getting absolutely wrecked by a train. It’s one of those food delivery bots that swarm over college campuses these days; how it wandered onto the railroad tracks is anyone’s guess. The bot bounced around a bit before slipping under the train’s wheels, with predictable results once the battery pack is smooshed.
From self-driving cars to space travel to NFTs, we answer your questions about where technology is heading.
While it might feel as if technology is speeding up, it follows a predictable formula called Moore’s Law, which has correctly predicted the pace of human advancements in technology for nearly six decades. Moore’s Law suggests that the number of transistors on a computer chip will double about every two years. This is a reliable indicator of how much and how quickly technology will change.
And while Moore’s Law has held true for all this time, it hasn’t stopped other key trends in tech from accelerating far faster than computer chips can keep pace.
From a new space race pitting billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos against each other to big advancements in the artificial intelligence, or AI, that powers robots and self-driving cars, we will answer some crucial questions to keep you on the cutting edge of the future of tech. Make sure you’re also up-to-date on these tech words so you sound cyber-savvy.
When will I have a self-driving car?
Like the jetpacks sci-fi writers have promised us since the 1920s, the vision of a self-driving car that whisks us to work while we read the news has proved to be more problematic to implement in practice than in theory.
Tavis Coburn for Reader’s Digest
So-called advanced driver-assistance system (ADAS) features are available in some cars, such as Tesla’s electric cars, but they’re not what would be considered self-driving. Tesla’s autopilot tool can help you stay in your lane while driving on the highway, but it’s graded only a Level 2 on the five-stage system of automation developed by SAE International, a driving standards organization. Level 5 would be a full self-driving experience with hands off the steering wheel. We aren’t there yet.
But that’s in the United States. Look further afield and the future is closer. “If you look at China, the big cities like Shanghai and Shenzhen have self-driving cars doing passenger transportation,” says Ferdinand Dudenhöffer, director of the Center for Automotive Research in Duisburg, Germany. The self-driving taxis, which are run by Chinese auto and tech giants, are part of a countrywide plan to increase the sales of Level 4 vehicles—which allow drivers to switch off mentally while still requiring them to keep their hands on or near the wheel—to around 20 percent of the total by 2030.
What works in China might not work elsewhere, admits Dudenhöffer— not least because of differing attitudes about how data should be used. Chinese citizens might accept having the journeys of their vehicles tracked and analyzed to improve traffic flows, but Americans may be reluctant to agree to that tracking. Privacy concerns may stymie the promise of kicking back on your commute. Self-driving cars must constantly generate data from their sensors and software to make driving decisions—otherwise they would crash.
What is the metaverse?
Tavis Coburn for Reader’s Digest
You’ve likely been unable to avoid talk of the metaverse in the past few months. The term, first coined by sci-fi author Neal Stephenson in a 1992 novel, has become a vision of the future of technology in our lives. And if the hype is to be believed, it’s where we’ll be living the rest of our digital lives.
“The metaverse is a further convergence of our physical and digital lives,” says Cathy Hackl of Futures Intelligence Group, a consultancy. Put plainly, the metaverse is a 3D virtual space that can be accessed through virtual reality goggles, adding elements of the digital on top of our day-to-day lives. You could attend concerts and conferences in the metaverse, staged in a 3D digital representation of a nightclub or conference center. Elsewhere, you’ll shop for shoes in a virtual Nike store, or order food in a virtual McDonald’s and have it delivered to your real-world home.
“It’s the future of the Internet. But it’s also about further connectivity,” says Hackl.
So far, most of the attention around the metaverse has been focused on the company formerly known as Facebook, which rebranded last year as Meta in an indication of how strongly it believes in the future of the metaverse. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg wants a billion of us to live, work, and play in the metaverse by 2030.
But Hackl warns people not to view the social media giant as the center of the metaverse. “It’s not just one company,” she says. “No single company can build it, either.” It’s also not enabled by a single technology, even though right now the way to “enter” the metaverse is to strap on a pair of virtual reality goggles.
While the early running may be made by Meta, the momentum will be picked up by others. And just because we have an idea of what the metaverse will look like now, it doesn’t mean that’s what it’ll end up as, Hackl cautions. “The way I explain it is, we’re in a high-speed train, destination metaverse,” she says. “We don’t know the stops, but we kind of know where we’re heading.”
Will robots take my job?
Science fiction movies often turn into a dystopian nightmare partway through—and for blue-collar workers who are the bedrock of the labor force, there’s a suspicion about the way the robot revolution story will end. By 2035, one in three jobs could be automated by robots, predicts PwC, a business consultancy.
“Robotics is traditionally applied to problems that fall into the categories ‘dirty,’ ‘dull,’ and ‘dangerous,’” says Jonathan Aitken, a robotics expert at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom. “Automation of a repetitive process is always achievable. The lack of variability means that the process is the same, time after time. This is the reason that robots fell naturally into automotive production.” It’s been the case since the first robots appeared on production lines.
But it’s not just blue-collar jobs that are feeling the squeeze from the rise of the robots. White-collar roles are also affected, particularly those focused on data sorting, a task well-suited for artificial intelligence. Financial services is one area that has turned to automated robots to enact trades. When a computer can pick stocks better and quicker than a human, it makes sense to utilize them, and almost all Wall Street firms do.
Tavis Coburn for Reader’s Digest
Jobs where workers are less likely to be replaced by robots include those in health care, although surgical robots, which are controlled by remote health care professionals in order to carry out more precise procedures, are already being used in hospitals. However, the gentle touch and caring reassurance of a well-trained nurse or doctor can’t be replicated by a robot automaton.
“It’s important to ask the question of whether we want robots doing certain jobs,” says Aitken. “In replacing a human, especially in a human-facing role, we’re being asked to accept the robot. This is something that’ll take time to achieve. People still like people.”
What is an NFT?
Few things worth $44.2 billion are as misunderstood as NFTs, but then few things have captured the zeitgeist like NFTs. The letters stand for “non-fungible tokens,” which are one-of-a-kind digital objects that can’t be exchanged for each other or copied because of their encryption.
“What most people see as an NFT is art,” says Nick Donarski, founder of ORE System, a company that deals in NFT technology. For example, instead of owning a physical painting, you could buy ownership of an NFT, an original piece of digital art. Some of the world’s biggest celebrities, including Gwyneth Paltrow, Paris Hilton, and Jimmy Fallon, proudly show off their NFT collections.
Celebrities have often spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy the right to an NFT from collections with themes such as “bored apes” and “pixelated punks.”
But despite the big-name endorsements, NFTs have faced a wave of criticism. They have ended up being stolen or found to be using images that don’t legally belong to the artists behind them. Other NFT projects have been uncovered as get-rich-quick scams for the creators, while those who own the artwork are left holding the bag.
If NFTs can overcome the bumps and bruises of their early negative publicity, they could become a commonly used bit of technology. The key word is “if.”
What’s next in space travel?
Tavis Coburn for Reader’s Digest
Fifty years ago, astronauts traveled to space in rockets designed, built, and maintained by NASA and paid for by government funding. Today, the astronauts are often billionaires enjoying a journey into low orbit on a rocket they paid for from their billion-dollar bank accounts.
The change feels like a giant leap, but it makes sense, says Laura Seward Forczyk, founder of Astralytical, a space consulting company. “More and more of modern civilization relies on space,” she says.
Huge numbers of satellites orbit the planet, connecting us to everything from cell phones to GPS to Netflix, and there is big money in maintaining those systems. “This doesn’t get a lot of headlines, typically, but there are profit reasons why private companies want to go into space,” says Forczyk.
And as private enterprise learns more about putting rockets and satellites into space, they’re able to help the likes of NASA on their missions. That’s important, because NASA itself has become financially constrained. From its 1966 peak, when spending on the space race took up 4.4 percent of the federal budget, that spending is now less than 0.5 percent of the country’s total budget.
“NASA is using commercial companies to build a lot of the hardware to do a lot of those services of taking scientific payloads to the surface of the moon,” says Forczyk.
The hope is that people will follow—possibly by 2025, but more realistically, says Forczyk, by 2030. If you’re wondering why we’re going back to the moon since mankind has already walked its surface, the answer is that we explored only part of it.
“We know a lot more, but we also know so very little,” says Forczyk. “So we want to go back with people to learn more, but more important, we want to go back to live and work there.”
Some even see the moon as an eventual staging area for human exploration of deep space. Mars is seen as the next stepping-off point toward the final frontier—though whether we’ll get there in our lifetimes is another question.
Next, learn more about personal technology with these iPhone tricks and hacks you need to know.
On May 3, shortly after 8 p.m., Andrey Klen had a decision to make. Bombs had just dropped near his apartment in Lviv, Ukraine, but he had a conference call at 9 p.m. Klen was huddled, along with his dog, in his apartment hallway, trying to stay away from glass windows that could shatter.
As the clock struck 9, he decided to take the meeting.
Amid air raid sirens, flickering lights and family members texting to inquire whether he was safe, Klen — the founder of a technology start-up called Petcube that creates interactive cameras for pets — logged on and sped through the day’s entire agenda. After finishing, he scanned his phone trying to find out whether it was safe to take his dog outside for a much needed bathroom break before the 11 p.m. curfew.
“Unfortunately, that’s the new norm,” Klen said. “But it’s not like I’m a hero — we do this all the time.”
Nearly three months into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the country’s once booming tech community is trying to rebound back to life. As the war continues, tech founders and their employees have settled into new routines, working amid bombs, gunshots and air raid sirens. They build Power Points, take meetings and write emails and pitch decks from apartment hallways, bedroom closets and underground bunkers, trying to meet work deadlines regardless of the circumstances.
Most devote their off-hours to helping the country’s war effort in any way they can. Others, unsure when the conflict will end, are trying to resume normal life by resuscitating a once vibrant start-up ecosystem that has seen many flee.
“While the war is going on, you cannot persuade somebody to come back,” said Pavlo Kartashov, director of the Ukrainian Startup Fund. “But once it’s over, you have to have a very comfortable environment … for start-ups to come back.”
In Ukraine, despair and bloodshed in the backdrop of a somber holiday
Since 2019, Ukraine’s tech community had been thriving. Kyiv, the country’s capital, had transformed into Ukraine’s largest tech hub, boasting more than 1,000 start-ups and tech companies, according to the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry. Investment in the country’s start-up sector increased tenfold, from $39 million in 2014 to $509 million in 2019.
But in late February, when Russia invaded Ukraine, the momentum came to a halt. Tech workers went from stressing over client deadlines to worrying about where to relocate their families. Companies funneled portions of their revenue to workers who needed money to get somewhere safe. Chains of command were disrupted as many men of fighting age took leave from their jobs to join the front lines.
Alyona Mysko, a 29-year-old chief executive of the Ukrainian start-up Fuelfinance, which creates cloud-based finance departments, said interruptions started right from the beginning. On Feb. 24, the day the invasion started, she had to cancel the launch of her company’s new website. In the days after, Mysko relocated from Kyiv to western Ukraine with her family and worked to get employees safe.
Since then, her company has had to adapt constantly. In the first few weeks after the invasion, customers understood her team was busy staying alive, but pretty soon the deadlines for international clients came roaring back, she said.
Mysko and her employees had to find ways to meet deadlines from wherever they were. Often, that meant working from coat closets or underground bunkers on their phones or laptops with spotty WiFi, trying to keep safe as bombs fell nearby.
Employees started regularly recording videos to explain what projects they were doing and who their clients were. That way, Mysko said, if an employee was stuck in a bomb shelter without Internet, was called to fight on the front lines or had to flee a dangerous situation in a moment’s notice, another teammate could pick up their workload.
“We’ve started to understand that we cannot be in a safe place in Ukraine — it’s simply impossible,” she said. But now, she said, “we understand how to manage for the most part.”
In Ukraine, a perilous journey to bury a 13-year-old girl
Kartashov, of the Ukrainian Startup Fund, said the invasion has altered the balance of start-up life in Ukraine. Of the tech workers who stayed in Ukraine, many fled to the west to areas such as Lviv and its surrounding regions, which was seemingly safer. That has caused rents to rise in the area and made it overcrowded.
Many who fled went to Poland, Kartashov said. Since that country has existing initiatives to relocate and fund start-ups, Kartashov is worried they might not come back. “With all these reallocation and easy access to money [initiatives] — start-ups have drained from Ukraine,” he said.
To stem the permanent loss in talent, Kartashov and other leaders in the tech community are working to raise 20 million to 30 million euros in funding to restart Ukraine’s ecosystem. If they can raise the money, he hopes to use it to invest in start-ups, restart hackathons and organize get-togethers such as investor and mentor meetups.
And for Klen, the past three months have shown how resilient his workers can be. Every one of his roughly 50 employees continues to hold their day job and does some kind of volunteer work after-hours to support the country’s war effort, he said.
Looming ground battle is crucial phase in Ukraine, U.S. officials say
Some are helping fight on the front lines, while others are helping Ukrainian politicians lobby U.S. officials and others for war funding. Others help the country build technological applications used in fighting off Russians. “You no longer have a single job — you have multiple jobs,” he said. “Because as a Ukrainian, you have a s— ton to do.”
That camaraderie has united his team as never before, he said. “People want to keep their businesses running, they want to keep their family safe,” he said. “We want to have the same Ukraine we were used to … so we’ll keep going.”
It’s a no-brainer. Proactive ops systems can figure out issues before they become disruptive and can make corrections without human intervention.
For instance, an ops observability tool, such as an AIops tool, sees that a storage system is producing intermittent I/O errors, which means that the storage system is likely to suffer a major failure sometime soon. Data is automatically transferred to another storage system using predefined self-healing processes, and the system is shut down and marked for maintenance. No downtime occurs.
These types of proactive processes and automations occur thousands of times an hour, and the only way you’ll know that they are working is a lack of outages caused by failures in cloud services, applications, networks, or databases. We know all. We see all. We track data over time. We fix issues before they become outages that harm the business.
It’s great to have this technology to get our downtime to near zero. However, like anything, there are good and bad aspects that you need to consider.
Traditional reactive ops technology is just that: It reacts to failure and sets off a chain of events, including messaging humans, to correct the issues. In a failure event, when something stops working, we quickly understand the root cause and we fix it, either with an automated process or by dispatching a human.
The downside of reactive ops is the downtime. We typically don’t know there’s an issue until we have a complete failure—that’s just part of the reactive process. Typically, we are not monitoring the details around the resource or service, such as I/O for storage. We focus on just the binary: Is it working or not?
I’m not a fan of cloud-based system downtime, so reactive ops seems like something to avoid in favor of proactive ops. However, in many of the cases that I see, even if you’ve purchased a proactive ops tool, the observability systems of that tool may not be able to see the details needed for proactive automation.
Major hyperscaler cloud services (storage, compute, database, artificial intelligence, etc.) can monitor these systems in a fine-grained way, such as I/O utilization ongoing, CPU saturation ongoing, etc. Much of the other technology that you use on cloud-based platforms may only have primitive APIs into their internal operations and can only tell you when they are working and when they are not. As you may have guessed, proactive ops tools, no matter how good, won’t do much for these cloud resources and services.
I’m finding that more of these types of systems run on public clouds than you might think. We’re spending big bucks on proactive ops with no ability to monitor the internal systems that will provide us with indications that the resources are likely to fail.
Moreover, a public cloud resource, such as major storage or compute systems, is already monitored and operated by the provider. You’re not in control over the resources that are provided to you in a multitenant architecture, and the cloud providers do a very good job of providing proactive operations on your behalf. They see issues with hardware and software resources long before you will and are in a much better position to fix things before you even know there is a problem. Even with a shared responsibility model for cloud-based resources, the providers take it upon themselves to make sure that the services are working ongoing.
Proactive ops are the way to go—don’t get me wrong. The trouble is that in many instances, enterprises are making huge investments in proactive cloudops with little ability to leverage it. Just saying.
Google is taking steps toward improving skin tone representation across its products, including Real Tone for Pixel. And now, they’ve released a new skin tone scale designed to be more inclusive of the wide spectrum of skin tones we see in our society.
According to a company blog, in partnership with Harvard professor and sociologist Dr. Ellis Monk, Alphabet Inc’s Google unveiled a palette of 10 skin tones for anyone to use for research and product development.
The 10 shades of the Monk Skin Tone Scale (Courtesy of Google)
Monk has been researching and studying how skin tone and colorism affect people’s lives for more than 10 years. He especially focuses on colorism as it relates to artificial intelligence, machine learning, and computer vision.
An expert researcher, Monk, was tapped to curate Google’s new Monk Skin Tone (MST) Scale executed through Photoshop and other digital art tools.
According to Reuters, Monk and Google found that a significant number of people—out of around 3,000—said a 10-point scale matched their skin as well as a 40-shade palette did.
Courtesy of Google
“In our research, we found that a lot of the time, people feel they’re lumped into racial categories, but there’s all this heterogeneity with ethnic and racial categories,” Dr. Monk said, as per the blog.
“And many methods of categorization, including past skin tone scales, don’t pay attention to this diversity. That’s where a lack of representation can happen…we need to fine-tune the way we measure things, so people feel represented.”
The company said the Monk Skin Tone Scale replaces the flawed current tech industry standard of six colors, Fitzpatrick Skin Type (FST). Tech companies have often used it to test whether products like facial recognition systems or smartwatch heart-rate sensors perform equally well for various skin tones. On the other hand, the new skin scale aims to better serve those with darker skin tones.
“The MST Scale will help us and the tech industry at large build more representative datasets so we can train and evaluate AI models for fairness, resulting in features and products that work better for everyone — of all skin tones,” the company blog stated.
Google has already begun applying the new skin tone scale. There is now an option to further refine your results by skin tone for beauty and makeup injuries. Images for “everyday eyeshadow” or “bridal makeup looks” can be found more easily to serve people of color better.
Windows 11 ships with a simplified right-click context menu for File Explorer (and the desktop) that is different from the Windows 10 context menu. If you’d like to use the classic Windows 10 right-click menu instead, you can do so by modifying your registry with a few clicks. Here’s how.
To get the full, legacy right-click context menu in Windows 11, you have two choices: You can edit the Windows Registry yourself or download our one-click hack in the section below.
Warning: The Registry Editor is a powerful tool. Misusing it can render your system unstable or even inoperable. Still, this is a simple hack, and if you follow the instructions completely, you shouldn’t have any problems. If you haven’t used the Registry Editor before, consider reading about how to use it before getting started. We also recommend backing up the Registry (and your computer) before making any changes.
Right-click the blank area in the right portion of the window and select New > Key, then paste 86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2 as the key name.
Next, right-click on 86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2 in the Registry Editor sidebar and select New > Key. Then name the new key InprocServer32 .
Next, double click the “(Default)” key under InprocServer32 to open it, then close it without making any changes by clicking “OK.” This will make the value entry for it blank instead of “(value not set).”
After that, close Registry Editor and restart your Windows 11 PC.
When you reboot and sign in again, right-click an item in File Explorer or on your desktop. You’ll see the classic right-click context menu. Hello, familiar friend!
If you change your mind and want to restore the default right-click context menu, follow the instructions in the section below.
RELATED:How to Restart a Windows 11 PC
Download Our One-Click Registry Hack
If you want to use the classic Windows 10-style right-click context menu without having to edit your registry manually, you can download a registry modification file we have prepared.
After you download the file, unzip it to any location, and you’ll have two files: “win11_classic_context_menu.reg,” which performs the hack, and “undo_win11_classic_context_menu.reg,” which removes the hack (in case you change your mind).
In general, you shouldn’t trust registry files that you find on the internet without checking them first. You can verify that it’s not malicious by opening the file using Notepad (right-click, select “Show More Options,” then choose “Edit”) and looking at its contents. It will look like this:
As you can see, it’s pretty simple. The “win11_classic_context_menu.reg” file contains two keys that will be added to your registry when you open it.
Once you’re ready, double-click the REG file, and you’ll see a warning stating that adding information to the Registry could potentially damage your system. Click “Yes” to continue.
After that, you’ll see another pop-up notifying you that the information was added to the Registry. Click “OK.” Next, restart your PC to make the change take effect. When you log back in and right-click a file, you’ll see the classic context menu.
RELATED:What Is a REG File (And How Do I Open One)?
This registry hack was working as of Windows 11’s initial release in October 2021. In the future, it’s possible that Microsoft will disable this registry hack with an update. Since application developers can add options to the new Windows 11 context menu, this hack may become less necessary over time as apps get updated to support Windows 11. Until then, enjoy your classic context menu!
Apple has today seeded the first macOS Monterey 12.5 beta to developers, giving them the chance to install the beta release and test it against their own apps.
Those who have the correct developer beta profile installed can download the new update right now via the internet and the System Preferences app. This new release comes just two days after Apple released macOS 12.4 to the world following its own lengthy beta process.
It’s currently too early to tell whether there are any big changes in this latest macOS Monterey update and we’re already expecting Apple to share more information about the next big version of macOS next month.
WWDC22 will kick off on June 6 with Apple set to share information about the new software updates that will be made available later in the year.
There is currently no indication of when we can expect macOS 12.5 to be made available to everyone, but given the beta process we saw with macOS 12.4 it is likely to be a number of weeks before this update is ready for primetime.
Apple will likely make a macOS 12.5 public beta release available within the next few days, assuming there are no big issues discovered by developers who get the update installed before then.
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A destroyed Russian T-90M Proryv battle tank seen in the Kharkiv region, Ukraine, on May 9, 2022.REUTERS/Vitalii Hnidyi
The US says Russia is putting chips from home electronics in tanks due to the effect of sanctions.
Russia’s military relies heavily on technology made by the US and allies, who have banned exports.
The US commerce secretary said Wednesday that sanctions “cripple” Russia’s ability to fix equipment.
Russia is having to use computer chips intended for home appliances to repair its military hardware due to the impact of US sanctions, according to a US official.
“We have reports from Ukrainians that when they find Russian military equipment on the ground, it’s filled with semiconductors that they took out of dishwashers and refrigerators,” commerce secretary Gina Raimondo told the Senate Committee on Appropriations on Wednesday.
Raimondo recently met with Ukrainian officials who told her that they found parts from refrigerators and commercial and industrial machines when searching captured or abandoned Russian tanks, The Washington Post reported.
Raimondo told the committee that exports of US technology to Russia have fallen by just under 70% as a result of sanctions, the first of which were imposed in late February.
Russia’s military hardware has long relied on technology made by the US or its allies, but US tech companies are now forbidden from exporting their products to Russia.
“Our approach was to deny Russia technology — technology that would cripple their ability to continue a military operation. And that is exactly what we are doing,” Raimondo told the committee.
The White House said Sunday that US sanctions are stymieing Russian attempts to repair equipment.
“Russia is struggling to replenish its military weapons and equipment. Russia’s two major tank plants — Uralvagonzavod Corporation and Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant — have halted work due to lack of foreign components,” it said.
Ukrainian forces have shared abundant evidence that Russia is struggling to equip its forces adequately.
Speaking on Monday, the UK’s defense secretary, Ben Wallace, said that wrecked Russian fighter jets were being found by Ukraine with rudimentary GPS receivers “taped to the dashboards” because their inbuilt navigation systems are so bad.
It used to be that when we featured one of [Frank Olson]’s DIY ribbon microphone builds, it was natural to focus on the fact that he was building them almost exclusively from wood. But despite how counterintuitive it may seem, and for as many comments as we get that his microphones shouldn’t work without metal in the ribbon motors, microphones like this wooden RCA Model 77 reproduction both look and sound great.
But ironically, this homage features a critical piece that’s actually not made of wood. The 77’s pickup pattern was cardioid, making for a directional mic that picked up sound best from the front, thanks to an acoustic labyrinth that increased the path length for incoming sound waves. [Frank]’s labyrinth was made from epoxy resin poured into a mold made from heavy paper, creating a cylinder with multiple parallel tunnels. The tops and bottoms of adjacent tunnels were connected together, creating an acoustic path over a meter long. The ribbon motor, as close to a duplicate of the original as possible using wood, sits atop the labyrinth block’s output underneath a wood veneer shell that does its best to imitate the classic pill-shaped windscreen of the original. The video below, which of course was narrated using the mic, shows its construction in detail.
If you want to check out [Frank]’s other wooden microphones, and you should, check out the beautiful Model 44 replica that looks ready for [Sinatra], or the Bk-5-like mics he whipped up for drum kit recording.
But ironically, this homage features a critical piece that’s actually not made of wood. The 77’s pickup pattern was cardioid, making for a directional mic that picked up sound best from the front, thanks to an acoustic labyrinth that increased the path length for incoming sound waves. [Frank]’s labyrinth was made from epoxy resin poured into a mold made from heavy paper, creating a cylinder with multiple parallel tunnels. The tops and bottoms of adjacent tunnels were connected together, creating an acoustic path over a meter long. The ribbon motor, as close to a duplicate of the original as possible using wood, sits atop the labyrinth block’s output underneath a wood veneer shell that does its best to imitate the classic pill-shaped windscreen of the original. The video below, which of course was narrated using the mic, shows its construction in detail.