Acer Aspire 5 Score Details “The Acer Aspire 5's awful display ruins what would have been a decent budget laptop.” Solid connectivity Superior expandability Good keyboard and touchpad Atrocious display Chassis is too flexible Mediocre battery life Poor performance MSRP $480.00 Acer’s Aspire 5 has been one of our favorite laptops for a few years now, earning a spot on our best budget laptops list. Right now, the 2020 version of the Aspire 5 is listed as the best Windows 10 laptop under $500 , an important segment that the machine dominates. Acer has introduced a slightly redesigned Aspire 5 for 2021 that boasts the latest 11th-gen Intel Core CPUs and makes a few meaningful changes to the chassis design. I received an entry-level model with a Core i3-1115G4 CPU with Intel UHD graphics, 8GB of RAM, a 256GB PCIe solid-state drive (SSD), and a 15.6-inch Full HD (1,920 x 1,080) display. The price for this Aspire 5 configuration is … [Read more...] about Acer Aspire 5 (2021) review: Not easy on the eyes
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Mind-bending MIT project uses lasers to generate music from spiderwebs
Spiders may typically have eight eyes, but very few have good eyesight. Instead, they rely on vibrations to navigate and seek out their prey. That’s, in essence, what a spiderweb is: A giant, enormously complicated crisscross of tripwires that can tell a spider exactly when — and where — some delicious bit of food has landed on its web. As humans, we’re not exactly privy to what that experience would feel like. But Markus Buehler , a Professor of Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has come up with an intriguing way of simulating it — and it involves laser scanning, virtual reality, and the medium of music. “We have given the silent spiderweb, especially often-overlooked cobwebs, a voice, and shed light on their innate intricate structural complexity,” Buehler told Digital Trends. “[We] made it audible by developing an interactive musical instrument that lets us explore sonically how the spiderweb sounds like as it is being built.” According to this … [Read more...] about Mind-bending MIT project uses lasers to generate music from spiderwebs
Raspberry Pi Pico: Tutorials, Pinout, What You Need to Know
The Raspberry Pi Pico is a radical change from previous Pis, because it’s not a Linux computer, but a a microcontroller board like Arduino . The biggest selling points of the Raspberry Pi Pico are the price, $4 and the RP2040 chip which provides ample power for embedded projects and enables users of any age or ability to learn coding and electronics. If you have a Windows, Apple, Linux computer or even a different Raspberry Pi , then you are already well on your way to using the Raspberry Pi Pico in your next project. Getting Started with Raspberry Pi Pico The Raspberry Pi Pico is vastly different from any model before it. It is the first device to use RP2040 “Pi Silicon” which is a custom System on Chip (SoC) developed by the Raspberry Pi team which features a dual core Arm Cortex M0+ running at 133 MHz, 264KB of SRAM and 2MB of flash memory used to store files. The one downside of the Raspberry Pi Pico is that there is no wireless connectivity. The RP2040 is the first … [Read more...] about Raspberry Pi Pico: Tutorials, Pinout, What You Need to Know