The Daytona 500, one of the most significant Nascar races of the year, is happening today. Today’s race officially kicks off at 1pm ET/10am PT and will be broadcast on FOX.
If you have cable or an antenna, then you should be able to tune into the race for free over the air. If you don’t, or will be away from your television this afternoon, you also have quite a few streaming options.
Almost every streaming service offers FOX as an option, so you can pretty much choose whichever option you’d like and be able to catch the game. Worth noting, FOX isn’t available in every market on every service, so you’ll want to double-check that FOX is offered in your area before you sign up.
Beyond that, most streaming services also offer free trials, So if you haven’t taken one out for a pin just yet, you can use that free trial to watch today’s race and then cancel your subscription before having to actually shell out any cash.
Here’s a rundown of your major options. The cheapest of the bunch of going to be SlingTV; however, if you want to use the service for watching more than today’s race, you’ll get a more robust channel lineup from some of the competition.
Samsung details the 108MP camera sensor tech packed in the Galaxy S20 Ultra smartphone
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Samsung has published technical details on the 108MP ISOCELL Bright HM1 ‘Nonacell’ image sensor found in its newly launched Galaxy S20 Ultra smartphone. The image sensor features 108-million 0.8μm pixels and a 1/1.33in size, as well as Smart-ISO and Nonacell technologies to produce what Samsung claims are ‘crystal-clear’ and ‘vivid’ 8K videos and high-resolution images.
Nonacell builds upon the Tetracell technology Samsung unveiled in 2017; rather than featuring a 2×2 array like the older tech, the Nonacell features a 3×3 arrays of the same color filter. This allows chunks of nine 0.8μm pixels to be merged into what is essentially a single 2.4μm pixel. This results in more than double the light absorption offered by the Tetracell tech, according to the company.
The downside is that there is a larger gap between pixels recording different colors, meaning that the ‘re-mosaic’ algorithm, that tries to reconstruct what a conventional 1×1 Bayer sensor would have captured, faces a more difficult challenge. So you won’t ever get the lever of color resolution that a conventional 108MP sensor would give.
Other ‘advanced pixel technologies’ like Smart-ISO help produce what Samsung calls ‘ultimate results under any lighting condition,’ including particularly challenging mixed-light environments. The camera’s HDR tech involves assigning exposure lengths to each and every pixel for multiple simultaneous exposures, enabling real-time HDR previews.
Rather than using a mobile processor, Samsung says its sensor directly converts pixels via ‘an embedded hardware IP.’ Other features include electronic image stabilization that uses gyroscope hardware, Super-PD phase-detection tech and up to 3x lossless 12MP zoom that doesn’t require upscaling.
The use of ISOCELL Plus tech, meanwhile, deals with the color interference that would otherwise arise from the Nonacell system, according to Samsung:
As the number of adjoined cells increase, so does color interference, making pixel-binning technologies more challenging, While such difficulties had limited Nonacell to a theory, the HM1 was able to realize the method by adopting Samsung’s ISOCELL Plus technology, which dramatically reduces crosstalk and minimizes optical loss as well as light reflection.
In addition to the 108MP sensor, the Galaxy S20 Ultra model features a 12MP wide-angle camera and a 48MP telephoto camera, 10x Hybrid Optic Zoom and ‘Super Resolution Zoom’ that uses AI for up to 100x zoom. The model’s ‘selfie’ camera, meanwhile, features a 40MP sensor with the ability to ‘shift’ to 10MP with larger pixels for higher quality images captured in low-light settings.
The S20 and S20+ models feature lesser specs with 12MP wide-angle and telephoto cameras, as well as a 64MP telephoto camera. A full breakdown of the camera hardware found in these three smartphone models is available on Samsung’s website.
photography
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Research funding guidelines are likely to tighten procedures for technology transfer
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White House science adviser Kelvin Droegemeier speaks on a panel at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting in Seattle. Other panelists include moderator Margaret Hamburg, AAAS board chair (on Droegemeier’s left side); Jodi Black of the National Institutes of Health; Pradeep Khosla, chancellor at the University of California at San Diego; and Mary Lidstrom, vice provost for research at the University of Washington. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)
Concerns about international intellectual property theft are feeding into the formulation of new guidelines for auditing federal research funding. And the White House’s science adviser, Kelvin Droegemeier, says he’s trying to make sure the guidelines don’t become too restrictive.
“For research security in particular, I can tell you that we’ve developed a policy for guidance to agencies that is really good,” Droegemeier said today during a town hall session at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting in Seattle. “Let me just tell you, a year ago, I was concerned about where it was going to land, because I thought it was pretty heavy-duty. It would increase burden and wouldn’t actually address the challenges.”
Since then, the guidelines have been adjusted to respond to input received from international partners and from the Joint Committee on the Research Environment, or JCORE, which includes representatives from academia and industry as well as government agencies.
“The one thing that we don’t want to do is build really tall fences around really big areas,” Droegemeier, a meteorologist who heads the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, told attendees. “That would hamstring our research enterprises, and that’s not the right approach.”
After the session, Droegemeier told GeekWire that the guidelines would be released soon but didn’t provide a precise time frame.
Research security and intellectual property theft have become huge concerns in recent years, feeding into larger U.S.-China trade disputes. The controversy over Huawei’s 5G plans and the potential for security breaches is one example. A case at the University of California at San Diego, involving an eye doctor who was accused of receiving support from Chinese backers as well as U.S. federal grants, is another.
Droegemeier noted that the FBI is devoting significant resources to tracking the research security issue.
“We’ve heard from Director [Chris] Wray at the FBI that there’s a little over 1,000 open cases that have a nexus to China in particular, which are a mixture of those involving private companies and academia. A lot of those are not criminal cases, they’re breaking rules on disclosure, or whatever,” he said.
Jodi Black, deputy director of the National Institutes of Health’s Office of Extramural Research, said her office alone is working with 80 institutions on cases involving about 180 individuals. “That’s a small number in the context of the entire scientific enterprise, but there are some really very egregious things, and it normalizes that bad behavior,” she said.
Black listed several categories of bad behavior, such as receiving funds from multiple sources — including foreign sources — for doing the same research. Black said Chinese funding in particular can be problematic because of the strings that are sometimes attached to the money, such as establishing a Chinese-based lab or giving preference to Chinese students for post-doctoral positions.
She said the lapses extend to the peer-review process: For example, she’s seen cases of reviewers forwarding pre-publication drafts to foreign colleagues, complete with annotations, as well as efforts to manipulate the scores for papers submitted by favored investigators.
“That’s not fair,” Black said. “That’s cheating.”
Although the details of the new guidelines haven’t been released, the comments made today suggest there’ll be more attention devoted to auditing the disclosure forms that are submitted by researchers.
Microbiologist Mary Lidstrom, the University of Washington’s vice provost for research, said UW is already adding extra layers of scrutiny, including a targeted monitoring program for collaborations involving high-risk countries.
“This is a very streamlined process,” she said. “It only delays an agreement a day or two … and it’s invisible to the researcher.”
Droegemeier talked up the value of spot-checking the veracity of disclosure forms. “There are 54 FBI field offices in the United States. Universities are not equipped to go out and do a kind of TSA ‘pull someone out the line’ and spot-check a disclosure. Those disclosures are all self-disclosures, so the accuracy depends on the degree to which people are being audited. Well, that’s not enough these days,” he said.
“People have to understand that those things are being audited and spot-checked, just like your taxes occasionally get looked at for a potential audit,” Droegemeier said. “Just simply knowing that, not only is it a risk-based approach, but it’s a behavior-based approach. That’s the approach that this policy we’re developing is taking.”
Black said that should feed into the development of a research culture that fully embraces security concerns, and heads off bad behavior before it happens.
“Erring on the side of disclosure, and using that as your training mantra, I think will help resolve a lot of problems,” she said.
Dave Ramsey Gives Wife Empty Envelope For Valentine’s Day
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FRANKLIN, TN—Dave Ramsey knows a thing or two about marriage, having been married for more decades than most of us have been alive.
How does Ramsey woo his wife, Sharon, on Valentine’s Day? With an empty budgeting envelope, of course.
“Honey, I got you something special this year: a spending envelope of your very own,” Ramsey said, beaming, as he handed the custom-made paper envelope over to his wife. “You’re welcome.” Sharon then asked if they could go out to dinner but Ramsey shook his head: “Nothing left in the dining out envelope, honey. Sorry!”
“Just remember, don’t spend it all in one place. Actually, don’t spend it at all. Save it. If you live like no one else now, later, you can live like no one else.”
Luckily for Ramsey, he picked up a nice couch at the thrift store recently to sleep on. He paid cash.
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Upload files to S3 with Laravel Vapor and Dropzone.js
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For a startup project in Laravel we’ll be launching soon I need to upload multiple files. With our AWS hosted stack deployed via Laravel Vapor the logical choice for storage is S3. To keep the load off our lambda “backend” I want it to upload to S3 straight from the browser using pre-signed URLs. For the frontend functionality I chose Dropzone because I have experience with it from previous projects.
I’m assuming you have an AWS account and permission setup with your access key and bucket configured in your .env and vapor.
At the end of this post we will have a drag-and-drop multi-file uploader directly to S3 using Vapor functionality.
Setting up Dropzone with Vapor
Let’s start with our front-end setup. Install Dropzone and the Vapor js package:
npm i dropzone laravel-vapor
Add a form element to your blade view. We don’t give it a dropzone class as we want to initialize it ourselves so we can target it later. Our action will be the record we will want to associate the uploads with. In this case a product will have many photos. So for every uploaded file we will store a photo associated to the product.
<formaction=""id="dropzone-form"></form>
On the JS side of things we initialize the Dropzone:
The uploadFiles method gets called with a number of items based on the parallelUploads setting and how many files are processing at that time. We call uploadFile for each:
The Vapor.store call does most of the work for us. It first gets a presigned url from our backend and then uploads the file to the given url. The progress callback ties nicely into Dropzone’s uploadprogress event. Notice that the maximum progress percentage is 90% here. That’s because we are not done yet. Continuing uploadFile:
s3response contains a key pointing us to the temporary file in the S3 bucket. We still need to report back to our backend so we can do something useful with the upload. We use axios to make the ajax call here. This is what the call in itemResponse takes care of. We report back to our own backend and set the progress to 100%. Let’s finish up our uploadFile function:
We finish up our JS by telling Dropzone we’re done with the file. The last call is to kick off processQueue again triggering dropzone to pick up some more pending uploads.
To summarize, we now have the following steps in place:
Show a dropzone
Generate a pre-signed URL
Upload directly to our S3 bucket
Receive the key where our file is located
Call our backend with the
Tying things up on the backend
Our form action points to the products.photos.store route, so let’s implement it in our PhotosController:
That’s all you need to get your file uploads going. Your store action would also be a great place to dispatch a job to generate thumbnails for your newly uploaded photos. But we’ll leave that exercise for some other time.
DriFire Laser Firearm Training System Lets You Improve Your Shooting Affordably at Home
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Getting to the range takes time, effort and money. Those are things lots of gun owners don?t have nearly enough of. So if you can?t get to the range as often as you?d like, how do you keep your shooting skills sharp?
Dry fire practice at home has always been a great way to work on your draw, presentation, and trigger control skills. But now there?s a way to take dry fire practice to a new, much more productive level.
The DriFire Laser Firearm Training System lets you not only practice all of that at home, it also gives you instant, effective feedback to improve your trigger control and accuracy with shooting metrics that let you watch your shooting skills improve over time with each session.
By using their signature target, laser bullet and smartphone holder in unison with their phone app (available in the Apple AppStore or Google play), you can safely practice your shooting in the comfort of your home, without breaking the bank on range and ammo fees.
DriFire laser bulletsare available in 9mm, .380 ACP, .40 S&W, .45 ACP, .38 Special, .357 Sig and .233/5.56, so there?s a caliber available for the handguns you shoot most. The laser bullets are rimless, so they won?t be ejected when you cycle your firearm. And laser bullets have rubber activation buttons in the primer position so they won?t harm your gun?s firing pin.
Best of all, the DriFire Laser Training System is truly affordable. You can get the full system with a 9mm laser bullet for only $89 using the discount code: TAG15. When you consider the time and ? most of all ? the cost of practice ammunition that DriFire will save you, the system pays for itself.
Not sure? Don?t worry. The DriFire Laser Firearm Training System is guaranteed to improve your shooting accuracy, or your money back. You can try it risk free for 15 days. If you don?t like it, send it back for a full refund.
Click Here to try the DriFire system for yourself.
The Liebherr LTR 1220 is a telescopic crawler crane with a 220-metric-ton (242 U.S. ton) maximum load capacity, with a boom arm that can hoist things 101 meters (331 feet) into the air.
Although it can move around on jobsites under its own steam, it of course moves too slowly and takes up too much space to drive it there; so like a stationary crane, it is broken down into pieces and trucked to the jobsite. But it is designed in such a way that once it arrives, it can "self-assemble," with some human help:
Ruger’s New Ruger American Rimfire Long-Range Target Bolt Action Rifle
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Ruger’s New Ruger American Rimfire Long-Range Target Bolt Action Rifle
Courtesy Ruger
From Ruger:
We are pleased to introduce the Ruger American® Rimfire Long-Range Target. This new rimfire offering bridges the gap between traditional wood stock rifles and full-featured chassis rifles. The accuracy of the exceptional Ruger American® Rimfire platform comes from a combination of the long, 22″ free-floating barrel, Ruger Marksman Adjustable™ Trigger and Patented Power Bedding® system. This new rifle delivers long-range performance in a .22 LR package.
Courtesy Ruger
Two-tone target stock features a two-way adjustable comb, adjustable length of pull with soft rubber buttpad, QD attachment points and flush-mounted lower M-LOK® rail.
Includes the patented, detachable, flush-mounted BX-1, 10-round rotary magazine and accepts all 10/22® magazines, including the BX-25®, BX-25®x2 and BX-15®.
Easy-to-use, extended magazine release provides smooth, no-fuss removal of the flush-mounted magazine.
Patented Power Bedding® integral bedding block system positively locates the receiver and free-floats the barrel for outstanding accuracy.
Ruger Marksman Adjustable™ trigger offers a crisp release with a pull weight that is user adjustable between three and five pounds, allowing shooters to make that perfect shot.
Features a visible, accessible and easy-to-actuate tang safety that provides instant security.
Threaded 0.860″ bull barrel with factory-installed knurled thread protector is cold hammer-forged, resulting in ultra-precise rifling that provides exceptional accuracy and longevity.
Factory-installed one-piece aluminum scope rail.
A 60° bolt provides ample scope clearance and the easy-to-use, receiver-mounted bolt release allows the bolt to be readily removed without requiring a pull of the trigger, a unique safety feature among rimfire, bolt-action rifles.
Committee hearings to begin again on HB 178 (Constitutional Carry, Concealed Weapons License & Remove Duty to Notify)
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Representative George Lang (R-West Chester Twp.), who chairs the House Criminal Justice Committee, has announced that his committee will hear sponsor testimony on House Bill 178 (Constitutional Carry, Concealed Weapons License & Remove Duty to Notify) on Thursday, February 13 at 11:00 a.m. in Room 017.
HB 178, introduced last year by Reps. Ron Hood (R-Ashville) and Tom Brinkman (R-Mt. Lookout), seeks to, among other things, have Ohio join the growing number of states which allow "constitutional" carry, or lawful carry of a concealed firearm without a license.
The bill has already been given eight hearings and been passed by the House Federalism Committee last year, after which House Speaker Larry Householder (R-Glenford) re-referred the bill back to another committee for further review.
New Political Bible Adds (R) Or (D) After Each Character’s Name
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GRAND RAPIDS, MI—Zondervan has announced an exciting new edition of the Bible that specifically mentions each character’s political affiliation.
Every name in the Bible will be followed by an “R” for Republican or a “D” for Democrat.
“Obviously, right off the bat, God is followed by an R, while the serpent is followed by a D,” the project’s chief editor, Dr. Gary Leyland, told reporters. “Those ones are easy. Some of the other characters are a little tougher, as we have little written evidence of their modern American political ideology. But we can usually figure it out with context. For instance, if a character works a lot and is rich, they’re a Republican. If a character is poor and wears sandals, definitely Democrat. Except for Jesus.”
“The weird characters no one likes are probably libertarians.”
Here are some of the characters whose political identity is revealed for the first time:
The whore of Babylon: Democrat
King David: Republican
Balaam: Republican
Balaam’s ass: Democrat
Crying baby Jesus: Democrat
Adolescent Jesus: Libertarian
Mature, grown-up Jesus: Republican
Judas Iscariot: Never Trumper but labeled as Democrat for accuracy’s sake
Paul: Democrat before conversion, Republican after
Greedy servant: Republican
Every name in those really long genealogies is assumed to be a Republican, since Democrats are against having kids.
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