Technology

Alamo Drafthouse wants to bring the feeling of independent movie rental stores to people in their homes, launching a video-on-demand service completely curated by Alamo Drafthouse employees. Alamo on Demand will include a library of films available to both rent and purchase, with titles selected and curated by the company’s programming team. The goal is to “champion innovative and exciting films” beyond the 41 locations its theaters exist in around the country. The theater chain partnered with Vista Cinema, a cinema management software company, to launch the service. Alamo Drafthouse is also partnering with studios like Sony Pictures Classics in the coming weeks to bring more films to the service on a consistent basis, and it’s “in discussions with all the other major studios,” according t...

Pittsburgh International Airport has put UVC fixtures on its floor-cleaning robots, making it the first airport in the US to test the use of the ultraviolet rays to scrub the coronavirus from surfaces. If effective, the UV-cleaning robots could be a model for other airports as they plan to reopen and try to persuade people to travel again. Allegheny County Airport CEO Christina Cassotis said the partnership with Pittsburgh-based Carnegie Robotics highlights how the burgeoning robotics sector in Pittsburgh works alongside the community to solve big-picture problems. “We have a whole innovation culture that is looking for ways to do things better, especially in the pandemic,” Cassotis said. “And one of the things that we recognized immediately is that while we have to manage the crisis day t...

In case you were worried that there weren’t enough ThinkPads out there, Lenovo has announced two more. Say hello to the ThinkPad E14 and ThinkPad E15; you can buy both in June for $639. The biggest news is that the ThinkPads will feature AMD’s Ryzen 7 4700U chip. This isn’t a huge surprise, as Lenovo announced in February that a number of other upcoming ThinkPads, including the T14s, T14, X13, L14, and L15 will be available with Ryzen processors (the Ryzen Pro 4000 series) as well. We have release dates for those now, too — they’re also coming in June. “AMD’s Ryzen for Business portfolio delivers advanced performance, security and battery life.” The Ryzen 7 4700U is a processor designed for ultra-thin laptops and has proven itself to be one of the fastest 15W processors in systems we’ve se...

AMD has announced its Ryzen Pro 4000 series of mobile business processors. The chips sport new security features and improvements to battery life and performance, according to the company, and are a direct challenge to Intel’s vPro. AMD says the new series aims to create a “new standard for modern business PCs.” Image: AMD The Pro 4000 series includes three chips: the Ryzen 7 Pro 4750U (eight cores, 16 threads, 1.7GHz base speeds with boost up to 4.1GHz), the Ryzen 5 Pro 4650U (six cores, 12 threads, 2.1GHz base speeds with boost up to 4.0GHz), and the Ryzen 3 Pro 4450U (four cores, eight threads, 2.5GHZ base speeds with boost up to 3.7GHz). The chips are the first business processors based on the company’s 7nm Zen 2 architecture. The Pro 4000’s primary calling card is security. The chips ...

Zoom has acquired Keybase, an encryption and security service meant to serve as a secure home for your online identities. The acquisition is meant to quickly add a team of security-focused developers to Zoom, which has been widely criticized in recent weeks for lapses in security inside its increasingly popular videoconferencing software. Keybase co-founder Max Krohn will now lead Zoom’s security engineering team. The Keybase team is supposed to help Zoom build end-to-end encryption for its videoconferences “that can reach current Zoom scalability.” Zoom has been working on building true end-to-end encryption for videoconferences since coming under criticism over the last month for making its calls incorrectly appear to be fully encrypted. The company plans to publish encryption designs on...

People in the United States spend upward of 90 percent of their time indoors — inside homes, apartment buildings, schools, and offices. With the threat of COVID-19 looming over every interaction, those indoor spaces (where the virus spreads more easily) can seem loaded with hidden threats. Fortunately, scientists already have the tools to make buildings better for people and less hospitable to pathogens like the coronavirus. “The science is decades old on all the benefits that come from healthy buildings, including infectious disease reduction,” says Joseph Allen, director of the Healthy Buildings program at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “But these strategies have not been fully deployed in buildings.” “The science is decades old on all the benefits that come from healthy ...

Swedish audio brand UrbanEars has announced its first pairs of true wireless earbuds, the Luma and the Alby. They’re modestly specced, but that’s understandable considering they’re priced at just $99 and $69 respectively. The UrbanEars Alby are the cheaper of the two at $69, and for that price you’re getting three hours of battery life from the earbuds themselves, plus an extra 12 hours from the USB-C charging case. They’ve got an IPX4 resistance to water splashing, and there’s a single microphone on each earbud for making calls. Stepping up to the $99 Luma gets you more battery life with 5 hours per charge, a wireless charging (or USB-C) case that provides 20 hours more, and an extra microphone on each earbud to reduce background noise when calling. Both sets of buds include touch and voi...

When Viacom and CBS closed their merger in December 2019, the latter company gained access to a plethora of networks — networks the newly merged company, ViacomCBS, is now bringing to distribution partner Google in a new deal with YouTube TV. Nickelodeon, MTV, Comedy Central, BET, CMT, Paramount Network, TV Land, and VH1 will all launch on YouTube TV this summer, the company announced today. The multi-year deal also includes prior CBS channels that were available to YouTube TV subscribers, including CBS broadcast stations, CBS Sports Network, Pop TV, Smithsonian Channel, and The CW. YouTube TV will also continue to carry ViacomCBS’ premium cable brand, Showtime, as part of the extended distribution agreement. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed. “We are thrilled to have rea...

A few days ago Marques Brownlee declared 2020 “the year of the ultraminor Apple update.” He’s got good evidence for doing so: the iPad Pro, iPhone SE, and even the new 13-inch MacBook Pros are all fairly minor on paper. I think I can both narrow and expand that declaration, though. I hold out hope we’ll see something more substantial this fall in a few products (looking at you, Pixel and iPhone), so let’s narrow it to this spring. But let’s also expand it beyond Apple: yesterday’s pile of new hardware announcements from both Microsoft and Sonos are the very definition of iterative updates. Microsoft put out new versions of the Surface Book, Surface Go, Surface headphones, and Surface Dock that amount to spec bumps. But the thing about spec bumps is sometimes they turn out to be transformat...

Microsoft is hosting an event today where it will show off the first gameplay footage from several games launching on its upcoming Xbox Series X console. One of those games will be Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, which was recently announced for the console (with Smart Delivery support, no less, like Cyberpunk 2077). And just to keep expectations at bay, we already know that Microsoft is waiting until July to show off Halo Infinite and other titles from its internal Xbox Game Studios. Still, that leaves a lot of open space for new and returning franchises to make their next-gen debut. How do I watch the Xbox Series X gameplay preview? We’ve posted the YouTube stream above, but it’s being hosted at a bunch of other places around the web. Take your pick: What time does the Xbox Series X gameplay ...

Nintendo Switch sales were up 34 percent year-on-year last quarter as the company moved 3.29 million units, despite acknowledging that production has been disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Animal Crossing: New Horizons was a big sales driver, with 11.77 million units sold as of the end of March 31st. That’s enough to make it the seventh-best-selling Switch title yet even with only ten days worth of sales data accounted for. Nintendo adds that New Horizons actually sold 13.41 million copies in its first six weeks, though, which likely takes it past Pokémon Let’s Go! into sixth place. Japanese sales figures had already revealed that New Horizons was a big hit. The game sold more in its first three days than any other Animal Crossing or Nintendo Switch title to date, also pushing Switch con...