EastWest Ethereal Voices Bundle offer EastWest have announced a limited-time sale on their Ethereal Voices Bundle, a collection that brings together three of their popular vocal sample libraries. 

Art Alexakis Chats About Vinyl Reissues, Touring, Disinterest in Releasing New RecordsShortly before the arrival of the vinyl release of their platinum-certified Songs from An American Movie Vol. 1: Learning How to Smile and launch of the tour, Alexakis spoke to AllMusic about both topics, as well as the stories behind a few Everclear classics.

Bitcoin ‘could very well catch fire’ as next generation of investors matureEconomist and podcast host Suze Orman is bullish on Bitcoin, but says ETFs are the way to go.

Self Driving Cars Learn from Our Eyes[Michelle Hampson] reports in IEEE Spectrum that Chinese researchers may improve self-driving cars by mimicking how the human eye works. In some autonomous cars, two cameras use polarizing filters to help understand details about what the car sees. However, these filters can penalize the car’s vision in low light conditions.
Humans, however, have excellent vision in low-lighting conditions. The Retinex theory (based on the Land Effect discovered by [Edwin Land]) attributes this to the fact that our eyes sense both the reflectance and the illumination of light. The new approach processes polarized light from the car’s cameras in the same way.

The images pass through two algorithms. One compensates for brightness levels, while the other processes the reflective properties of the incoming light. They mounted cameras on real cars and drove them in actual dim environments to test everything out.
The result? Studies show that the approach improved driving accuracy by approximately 10%. However, the algorithms require extensive training on difficult-to-obtain data sets, so that is one challenge to adoption.
Self-driving cars certainly need improving. Oddly enough, navigation can be done with polarizing filter cameras and a clear view of the sky. Or, you can look under the road.

The Try Guys say their subscription strategy is workingAfter a rough couple years, YouTube creators The Try Guys said they’re on-track to reach profitability, with subscriptions to their three-month-old, ad-free service 2nd Try now accounting for 20% of the company’s revenue. Of course, those numbers also mean The Try Guys remain reliant on other revenue streams, including YouTube advertising. But in an interview […]
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Reverse Engineering The Web API of an Akaso EK7000 Action CameraRecently, [Richard Audette] bought an Akaso EK7000 action camera for his daughter’s no-smartphones-allowed summer camp, which meant that after his daughter returned from said camp, he was free to tinker with this new toy. Although he was not interested in peeling open the camera to ogle its innards, [Richard] was very much into using the WiFi-based remote control without being forced into using the ‘Akaso Go’ smartphone app. To do this, he had to figure out the details of what the Android app does so that it could be replicated. He provided a fake camera WiFi hotspot for the app in order to learn its secrets.
Normally, the camera creates a WiFi hotspot with a specific SSID (iCam-AKASO_C_1e96) and password (1234567890) which the Android app connects to before contacting the camera’s IP address at 192.72.1.1. The app then shows a live view and allows you to copy over snapshots and videos. Initially, [Richard] tried to decompile the Android app using JADX, but the decompiled code contained so many URLs that it was hard to make heads or tails of it. In addition, the app supports many different Akaso camera models, making it harder to focus on the part for this particular camera.

No worries! A Raspberry Pi SBC provided a fake camera WiFi hotspot. A simple application records HTTP requests from the app and provides responses. This was easier than setting up a man-in-the-middle attack, although — since the traffic isn’t encrypted — this was a possibility.
Ultimately, this allowed [Richard] to determine the relevant URLs to retrieve photos and videos, while the RTSP live stream URL was discovered from the decompiled Akasa Go app. Using the fake WiFi camera setup, the parameters to set the stream resolution and FPS were then determined, giving [Richard] full remote control over the camera without the need to use the mobile app.
We’ve seen a lot of camera WiFi reverse engineering. WiFi hotspots are handy for hacking. They also are handy in hotel rooms.

Casio Sessions 2024: Winners announced This year’s Casio Sessions event saw two incredibly talented singer-songwriters named as the winners following an evening of performances at Ninety One Living Room in London, UK.

Telegram reportedly ‘inundated’ with illegal and extremist activityA New York Times analysis of more than 3.2 million Telegram messages from 16,000 channels found that the messaging platform has been “inundated” with illegal and extremist activity. Specifically, The Times found 1,500 channels operated by white supremacists, two dozen channels selling weapons, and at least 22 channels where MDMA, cocaine, heroin and other drugs were […]
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Roblox will allow devs to skip Robux and charge players in fiat moneyThe company has also partnered with Shopify to enable physical merchandise sales from directly within Roblox experiences.

Get Thee to GitWhile version control used to be reserved for big corporate projects, it is very mainstream these days. You can attribute much of that to Git, the software that has nearly displaced other version control. Git works well, it is versatile, and it scales well. It is easy to use as an individual developer or as part of a worldwide team. But Git is also one of those things that people don’t always study, they just sort of “pick it up” as they go. That motivated [Glasskube] to create “The Guide to Git I Never Had.”
If you are ready to click away because you are not a software person, hang on. Git is actually useful for many different kinds of data, and there are a number of hardware projects that use Git in some form. That’s especially true if the project has some code associated with it, but there are projects that consist of PCBs, reverse engineering documentation, or schematics.

Simplistically, Git tracks a bunch of files and lets you rewind in time to answer the question: what did this look like a month ago? Or a year ago? However, the real power lies in producing and merging branches.
For example, you might be working on a product and decided to add feature “A.” Meanwhile, your partner decides to work on feature “B.” No problem. You can each work in your own separate branch and get everything working. You don’t even have to be connected to a server until the very end.
When either of you are ready, you can merge your branch with the main branch. Often, this can be done automatically, but Git knows when it is in over its head and will ask for help. When you are both done merging, both of your changes are “live.” If you do it right, Git can also help answer the question: why did we make that change two years ago? It is surprising how often that’s important.
If you think Git is just for code, we can show you some strange examples. If you don’t fancy reading a blog post to learn Git, would you like to play a game?

Should You Run Servo Horns Or Direct Couplings In Your RC Planes?Whenever you buy a servo, it usually comes with a little baggie full of various plastic horns. Most of us pick our favorite and use it in our projects. Some of us hack them up, glue them back together, and do all kinds of weird things with them. And others skip them entirely, going for direct drive instead. In a new video, [Dynamix Systems] explores when going direct drive is the right solution.
The video primarily concerns servos as they’re used in the context of aero modeling. In this regard, the video points out that while stock servo horns are easy to use, they can be cumbersome and clumsy. For example, you often end up with horns and control linkages protruding out into the airstream, adding drag and generally making things a bit inelegant. They can also snag on things and easily damage your servos or controls.
Using direct shaft couplers can be a much tidier solution in some respects. The servo can be coupled directly to the axis of motion, allowing it to be hidden inside a wing or tail surface. It can require a little more finesse in installation and design, but they’re much less likely to snag on things or be damaged. There’s also a drag benefit if you do it right. [Dynamix Systems] notes that you’ll want to source some shaft couplers to do this properly, which you can make yourself or buy online fairly easily.
It’s great to see how tidy direct drive really is. We’ve seen some other nifty servo tricks of late, too. Video after the break.

Getting It Done: Last Week in D.I.Y. and Independent Musician NewsLast week, we shared expert tips and insights for indie musicians on how to split songwriting shares, musician time-management, and more… Last Week in D.I.Y. and Independent Music
The post Getting It Done: Last Week in D.I.Y. and Independent Musician News appeared first on Hypebot.

REWIND: New Music Industry’s Last Week in ReviewThe music industry had a packed week of headlines, featuring updates like the return of Bandcamp Fridays, Charli XCX changing Pop, and more…
The post REWIND: New Music Industry’s Last Week in Review appeared first on Hypebot.

IK Multimedia offers four FREE Stompbox Effects for AmpliTube 5 CS in September
IK Multimedia is giving away four free guitar pedal effects to AmpliTube 5 CS users throughout September.  AmpliTube 5 CS is a free guitar and bass workstation, 64-bit only, for macOS and PC.  The free effects for the September giveaway are the Fuzz Age, D-Comp, X-Time, and X-Space. The Fuzz Age is based on the [...]
View post: IK Multimedia offers four FREE Stompbox Effects for AmpliTube 5 CS in September

KVR Audio Giving Away FREE AmpliTube SVX Bass Amp Until September 22
KVR Audio and IK Multimedia have teamed up to give away a free copy of the latter’s AmpliTube SVX (usually €100) bass amp collection.  The competition is open now and will close on September 22, 2024.  The bass amp requires either AmpliTube 5 or the free AmpliTube 5 CS suite, available on macOS and PC.   [...]
View post: KVR Audio Giving Away FREE AmpliTube SVX Bass Amp Until September 22