Philips modem

In addition to tearing apart an Xbox One , the iFixit folks also recently pried apart Sony's latest console, the PlayStation 4 . One of the immediately noticeable differences between the two consoles is the accessibility of the primary storage. The Xbox One requires a considerable amount of disassembly to pull out and replace the hard disk drive, and iFixit calls it a warranty-voiding procedure. Sony, on the other hand, makes pulling out the 2.5-inch 5400 rpm SATA II drive relatively simple—it requires only a single Philips-head screwdriver. However, aside from the user-replaceable HDD, getting into the system's guts is a little harder than with the Xbox One. The One uses standard T9 Torx screws, while the PS4 uses Torx Security screws, which won't seat a screwdriver with a regular Torx bit. Once inside the cover, the iFixit crew first removed the system's large internal power supply. Many people consider this design decision to be a serious point in Sony's favor since it means … [Read more...] about iFixit opens up the Playstation 4—replaceable hard drive earns big props

It was Tom Wolfe's book The Right Stuff that told me the reason airline pilots all sound the same is because they're all emulating the West Virginia drawl of test pilot Chuck Yeager. Published in 1979, it was the story of the beginning of the American space program and the Mercury Seven astronauts. But it was also the story of how NASA was a bunch of weenies because when they picked test pilots to be astronauts, they left out the greatest test pilot of all: Chuck Yeager. And it's a story that Philip Kaufman stuck with in 1983 when he adapted The Right Stuff into an overly long movie that only an aerospace nerd could love. The inherent superiority of Chuck Yeager over the Mercury Seven is not a story you will learn in the new Disney+ series The Right Stuff , which starts streaming on October 9. "Based on" Wolfe's book and produced by National Geographic and Leonardo DiCaprio's Appian Way, this new adaptation wisely chooses to keep things focused on the space race's first … [Read more...] about feels familiar as 1960s prestige TV comes to Disney+

This Tuesday, Eero—one of the first and most popular Wi-Fi-mesh providers—announced a new hardware and software program that targets ISPs rather than retail customers. Ars spoke about the new program at length with Nick Weaver, Eero founder and CEO, and Mark Sieglock, Eero's GM of Software Services. Further Reading New Amazon hardware: Ring drones, Echo Dot 4th Gen, Wi-Fi 6 Eero, and more The short version of Eero for Service Providers is simple: deploy new Eero 6 series hardware, let your customers self-install using a co-branded app with the ISP's own name on it, and provide the ISP with Eero Insight, a dashboard allowing them to view metrics from the entire fleet-level down to individual households. The telemetry exposed to the ISP includes outages, speed-test data, client network topology, RF diagnostics, and more. Weaver told us that the vanilla Eero Insight dashboard itself wasn't the whole story, though. The metrics, charts, and graphs the dashboard … [Read more...] about Eero for Service Providers: Eero Wi-Fi mesh targeted at ISPs