Savant Smart Budget lets you add more capacity than your breaker box can technically support. | Image: Savant
At CES this week, Savant Systems announced Savant Smart Budget, a feature of its Smart Power system of modular relays and equipment that integrates with your existing circuit breaker box.
If you’re already at the limits of your breaker box’s capacity, Smart Budget lets you get around that with automated control of individual circuits. That way, you can add more high-draw connections, like appliances or EV chargers, than your electrical box can supply at once. For instance, you could set it so that power only goes to your EV overnight after you’re done using your oven. That sort of control can also be useful if you’re using a house battery or running on solar power.
Image: Savant
Savant’s Smart Budget software.
Savant says its system, which starts at $1,500 and requires installation by a licensed electrician, is more affordable than the alternative of working with your electric utility provider to upgrade to higher amperage service, which “could cost in the tens of thousands of dollars.”
Those parts fit into “most major electrical panels” that “standardize on 1” breaker spacing,” company CMO JC Murphy tells The Verge, including panels from Schneider, Eaton, GE, ABB, Siemens, and others.
The Smart Budget kit will include two 30-amp single-pole circuit breakers, which Savant calls “Power Modules,” along with a double-pole 60-amp one and a current tracker for circuits you only want to monitor, according to Murphy. It also includes a Savant “Director” hub and sensors. The company sells additional Power Modules that cost $120 for dual 20-amp or single-pole 30-amp versions and $240 for a 60-amp double-pole module.
SteamOS was always supposed to be bigger than Valve’s own Steam Deck, and 2025 is the year it finally expands. Not only will Lenovo ship the first third-party SteamOS handheld this May, Valve has now revealed it will let you install a working copy of SteamOS on other handhelds even sooner than that.
Pierre-Loup Griffais, one of the lead designers on the Steam Deck and SteamOS, tells me a beta for other handhelds “is slated to ship after March sometime,” and that you might discover the OS just starts working properly after that happens!
Griffais and his co-designer Lawrence Yang would not confirm which handhelds might just start working, though there are some obvious candidates: the company confirmed to us in August that it had been adding support for the Asus ROG Ally’s controls.
Also, quite a few PC gamers have also discovered that Bazzite, a fork of Valve’s Steam Deck experience that I loved testing on an Ally X and vastly preferred to Windows, also works wonderfully on the Lenovo Legion Go. There still aren’t that many handhelds out there at the end of the day, and I would think Valve would take advantage of work the Linux gaming community has already done on both.
Speaking of Bazzite, Valve seems to be flattered! “We have nothing against it,” says Yang. “It’s a great community project that delivers a lot of value to people that want a similar experience on devices right now,” says Griffais, adding later “In a lot of ways Bazzite is a good way to kind of get the latest and greatest of what we’ve been working on, and test it.”
But he says Bazzite isn’t yet in a state where a hardware manufacturer could preload it on a handheld, nor would Valve allow that. While users can freely download and install the SteamOS image onto their own devices, companies aren’t allowed to sell it or modify it, and must partner with Valve first.
There are some non-selfish reasons for that. Among other things, Griffais explains that the Lenovo Legion Go S will run the same SteamOS image as the Steam Deck itself, taking advantage of the same software updates and the same precached shaders that let games load and run more smoothly, just with added hardware compatibility tweaks. Valve wants to make sure SteamOS is a single platform, not a fragmented one.
“In general, we just want to make sure we have a good pathway to work together on things like firmware updates and you can get to things like the boot manager and the BIOS and things like that in a semi-standardized fashion, right?” says Griffais, regarding what Valve needs to see in a partnership that would officially ship SteamOS on other devices.
Valve isn’t currently partnered with any other companies beyond Lenovo to do that collaboration — Yang tells me the company is not working with GPD on official SteamOS support, despite that manufacturer’s claim.
Valve’s also not promising that whichever Windows handheld you have will necessarily run SteamOS perfectly — in a new blog post, Valve only confirms that a beta will ship before Lenovo’s Legion Go S, that it “should improve the experience on other devices,” and that users “can download and test this themselves.”
As far as other form factors, like possible SteamOS living room boxes, Valve says you might have a good experience trying that. And partnerships are a possibility there too: “if someone wants to bring that to the market and preload SteamOS on it, we’d be happy to talk to them.”
Valve wouldn’t tell me anything about the rumors that it’s developing its own Steam Controller 2, VR headset with wands, and possibly its own living room box, but did tell me that we “might expect more Steam Input compatible controllers in the future.”
OpenAI rival Anthropic is in talks to raise $2 billion in new capital in a funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, according to The Wall Street Journal. The round, which The Journal reports would value Anthropic at $60 billion, would bring Anthropic’s total raised to $15.7 billion, going by Crunchbase’s data. It would also […]
Xpeng Aero HT, the aerospace company under Chinese EV startup Xpeng, unveiled at CES 2025 its “modular flying car,” the so-called Land Aircraft Carrie. It’s ssentially an electric minivan with a small folding eVTOL (vertical takeoff and landing vehicle) tucked in the back, which can be rolled out and launched into flight. The company says […]
Apple is preparing to kick off its annual Swift Student Challenge again this year, with entries opening in just under a month and lasting three weeks only. Here are the details.
The National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration is investigating the remote parking features in some Tesla vehicles. The tools in question are Smart Summon and the unfortunately acronymed Actual Smart Summon, which uses cameras in the car to automatically control the parking process.
The agency's Office of Defects Investigation has received 12 complaints of alleged crashes from the Smart Summon feature and one complaint about Actual Smart Summon use allegedly resulting in a crash. It has also reviewed three media reports of seemingly similar collisions involving Actual Smart Summon where the driver did not have the time to react to avoid a crash. The remote parking feature is available in an estimated 2.6 million vehicles, including the 2016-2025 Model S, 2016 Model X, 2018-2025 Model Xs, 2019-2025 Model 3s, and 2019-2025 Model Ys.
Tesla reported its first ever drop in deliveries at the start of the month. The company reported about 1.78 million vehicle deliveries over 2024, compared with 1.81 million in 2023.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/transportation/nhtsa-opens-investigation-into-tesla-remote-parking-features-194559802.html?src=rss
Nvidia has good news and bad news for people building or buying gaming PCs.
The good news is that three of its four new RTX 50-series GPUs are the same price as or slightly cheaper than the RTX 40-series GPUs they're replacing. The RTX 5080 is $999, the same price as the RTX 4080 Super; the 5070 Ti and 5070 are launching for $749 and $549, each $50 less than the 4070 Ti Super and 4070 Super.
The bad news for people looking for the absolute fastest card they can get is that the company is charging $1,999 for its flagship RTX 5090 GPU, significantly more than the $1,599 MSRP of the RTX 4090. If you want Nvidia's biggest and best, it will cost at least as much as four high-end game consoles or a pair of decently specced midrange gaming PCs.
From left to right: a pair of Reolink’s new Altas cameras, the Home Hub, and Reolink’s solar panels. | Image: Reolink
Reolink’s new Altas series of consumer-oriented surveillance cameras can continuously record video to a local SD card 24 hours a day for up to seven days off of battery — or almost two years when recording based on motion.
The company’s cameras can also be connected to Reolink’s new Home Hub to store video footage in a central location on your home network — not in the cloud — so no subscription fees are required. Reolink cameras connected to the Home Hub will also continue to record footage, even when the internet goes down.
The endurance of Reolink’s Altas cameras can be attributed to their very large (for a camera) 20,000mAh battery paired with a new ultra-low power chipset. It’s also believable based on my own experience with Reolink’s Argus 4 Pro camera (review coming). Runtime for Reolink’s Altas cameras can even be extended indefinitely when connected to Reolink’s 6W or 12W compact solar chargers.
Image: Reolink
The new Altas series includes an updated version of the Altas PT Ultra that goes by the same name but includes a more power-efficient chipset that supports 24/7 recording.
The Altas series consists of three cameras capable of 24/7 continuous recording: the Altas Go PT with a 360-degree blindspot-free view and 4G connectivity, the bullet-style 2K Altas with Wi-Fi connectivity, and — confusingly — a new version of the 4K Altas PT Ultra that already launched in September, only now with a more power-friendly chipset.
Each camera is fitted with a mic and speaker for two-way audio and a 1/1.8-inch image sensor that can record color footage even at night thanks to a large F1.0 aperture. The cams also capture a 10-second prerecording of events to make sure you don’t miss anything when operating in longer-lasting motion-triggered modes. Video can be recorded locally to an SD card up to 512GB or sent to one of Reolink’s hub solutions.
Image: Reolink
A Reolink Altas paired with a Reolink solar charger.
The new Reolink Home Hub is billed as a beginner-friendly solution (compared to the Home Hub Pro) for homeowners to manage video footage, create security routines, and receive detailed security reports. It supports up to eight of Reolink’s Wi-Fi cameras with up to 1TB (two 512GB SD cards) of locally encrypted storage for recordings — it ships with a single 64GB SD card. The Home Hub also supports RTSP and NAS storage and is compatible with Home Assistant, Google Assistant, and Amazon Alexa. The hub connects to your Wi-Fi router and communicates with Reolink’s cameras over 868MHz in Europe and 915MHz in the US.
The Altas cameras with 24/7 continuous recording are set to launch in Q3 for unknown prices, while the Home Hub is available now for $99.
Only one evening news broadcast closed out the year with positive momentum, and that was the CBS Evening News with Norah O'Donnell. CBS News' flagship newscast recorded week-to-week gains in total viewers and Adults 25-54, while its ABC News and NBC News rivals saw modest dips in the last week of 2024. Still, ABC World...
Google is rolling out the latest Android Auto update, v13.5, in beta which brings with it improvements to support for vehicles that are not cars, and more.
Apple Intelligence’s ever-growing feature set has brought additional storage requirements on your device, but it’s also come with new controls over which features are enabled. Here’s how to manually disable certain Apple Intelligence features on your iPhone and more.
, a company behind many great iPhone accessories for content creators, unveiled PLANCK at CES 2025. The company calls it the world’s smallest portable SSD, and it’ll be great for helping you record large videos on your .
At a surprisingly star-studded event this morning, BMW showed off the final form of its long-awaited and long-teased Panoramic iDrive system. It's a combination of an oddly angular touchscreen, a windshield-spanning heads-up display, and an LLM-powered AI assistant. The big news? It's coming to every future BMW.
Comedians Tim Meadows and Ken Jeong welcomed the assembled crowd into a studio designed to look like an oversized interior of the company's upcoming Neue Klasse. They did their best to goad BMW's Bavarian executives into a series of jokes and bits that mostly fell as flat as the central touchscreen that now dominates the iDrive experience.
Thankfully, it's not comedy that brought us to Las Vegas this week, and the good news for BMW is that the interface looks good. The software behind the scenes is called BMW Operating System X, and it powers a new iDrive that combines screens and voice commands to create a familiar but far more comprehensive interface than anything we've seen in a BMW before.
It all starts with that central touchscreen, but even that is different. Rather than being square or curved like in other BMWs, the new panel is rhomboid-shaped, a slanted polygon whose leaning posture doesn't seem to really augment the experience but does at least look distinctive.
The panel is also tilted slightly towards the driver and is running software that is at least familiar to anyone who's used the current iDrive interface. A static bar along the bottom provides quick access to the most important things, like controls for the heating system. Above that, a stylized, 3D view of the world makes sure you're always situated.
Things get more interesting when you move up the dashboard. Running along the base of the windshield is what BMW calls Panoramic Vision. It spans the width of the car, with the left-most portion handling typical gauge cluster duties like displaying current speed, active safety controls, and even warnings.
Tim Stevens for Engadget
The rest of the Panoramic Vision display is customizable, with six widgets that you can drag up from the central touchscreen covering things like outside temperature, navigation ETA, and even another widget showing you turn-by-turn information. It's much that we've seen in demos from BMW before, but now nearly ready for prime-time with the cars shipping at the end of this year.
Given the Panoramic Vision's importance in the overall in-car experience, I asked the guy who oversaw the development of all this, BMW's SVP of connected company technical operations Stephan Durach, whether there were any visibility issues in the bright sunlight.
"This technology is a little bit different than a traditional heads-up display... we're using black print on the bottom. In bright sunlight, it's even performing a little bit better," he said. "You'll not have any issues at all."
If that's not enough displays for you, there's another HUD situated on the left, up above the Panoramic Vision, which gives 3D navigation information for the driver. Yes, between the touchscreen, the Panoramic Vision display, and the HUD, you can get three separate feeds of turn-by-turn directions.
In other words, if you miss a turn in this thing, you have nobody to blame but yourself.
BMW
BMW also quickly demonstrated a new in-car LLM that, for now at least, is only for navigation. It was all pre-recorded, so it's anyone's guess how well this will work in reality, but in the demo, at least, it quickly found "the best beach" and navigated there. When our pretend driver left the city, the car even asked whether to automatically engage Sport Mode, which was a nice touch.
BMW's Durach confirmed that Android Auto and Apple CarPlay will still be supported. He also teased that there are some more fun tricks to come that will get passengers more involved in the experience.
BMW ended the presentation by confirming that Panoramic iDrive will not only be coming to the Neue Klasse when it finally hits the market at the end of this year but will be the standard interface for all new BMWs that launch after that. That means the days of the rotary iDrive controller are now officially numbered.
I asked Durach if he had any parting words for this once-revolutionary vehicular interface.
"We take a look at all of our data and usage... you can really see that the usage of our rotary controller is declining dramatically," he said. "People don't even touch it."
It's a harsh send-off, but these days you just can't cry over progress.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/transportation/ces-2025-bmws-vision-spanning-panoramic-idrive-will-make-sure-you-never-miss-another-navigation-prompt-192022046.html?src=rss
Most scientific literature is published in for-profit journals that rely on subscriptions and paywalls to turn a profit. But that trend has been shifting as various governments and funding agencies are requiring that the science they fund be published in open-access journals. The transition is happening gradually, though, and a lot of the historical literature remains locked behind paywalls.
These paywalls can pose a problem for researchers who aren't at well-funded universities, including many in the Global South, which may not be able to access the research they need to understand in order to pursue their own studies. One solution has been Sci-Hub, a site where people can upload PDFs of published papers so they can be shared with anyone who can access the site. Despite losses in publishing industry lawsuits and attempts to block access, Sci-Hub continues to serve up research papers that would otherwise be protected by paywalls.
But what it's serving up may not always be the latest and greatest. Generally, when a paper is retracted for being invalid, publishers issue an updated version of its PDF with clear indications that the research it contains should no longer be considered valid. Unfortunately, it appears that once Sci-Hub has a copy of a paper, it doesn't necessarily have the ability to ensure it's kept up to date. Based on a scan of its content done by researchers from India, about 85 percent of the invalid papers they checked had no indication that the paper had been retracted.
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