"What to get for the person who has everything?" (2021 edition)
January 15, 2021 11:27 AM Subscribe
Its not too soon to start planning for next-years Christmas gifts! A little bulkier than your standard DSLR camera, the wine-barrel sized Canon CE-SAT-1 isn't equipped for your next safari or birding trip... instead its Canon's promise of "consumer electronics" satellite camera. Or perhaps you'd prefer to be peddled different wares? From lab-grown human milk, to a robot for every need, to a refrigerator that makes round ice cubes!, there's more tech -real and only imagined- at CES2021.
Hide your valuables (medication even, according to the Wired article) an an "Internet-of-Things" (IoT) Bluetooth-enabled lockbox?
Whatever could go wrong?
Remember kids, the "S" in IoT stands for Security!
posted by rozcakj at 12:08 PM on January 15, 2021 [4 favorites]
Whatever could go wrong?
Remember kids, the "S" in IoT stands for Security!
posted by rozcakj at 12:08 PM on January 15, 2021 [4 favorites]
For further creative use of Canon hardware to look at space, see the Dragonfly and Huntsman telescopes, which use arrays of Canon 400 mm f /2.8 Canon IS IIs connected to CCDs. Sort of the opposite of the CE-SAT-1, which appears to be a telescope connected to a Canon camera (well, at least a sensor using parts from the EOS 5D mk.3.)
posted by zamboni at 12:19 PM on January 15, 2021 [5 favorites]
posted by zamboni at 12:19 PM on January 15, 2021 [5 favorites]
The B-Box beehive (mentioned in the Wired article is neat, but crazy overpriced at €597. Seems like it would be easy to devise open-source plans that could be made from a few pieces of plywood.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 12:27 PM on January 15, 2021
posted by escape from the potato planet at 12:27 PM on January 15, 2021
Thank you rozcakj!!!! I wanted to include that link but felt it was too distracting to include the original post. The threat seems slightly more benign for the pernium electrocution patch to prevent orgasm and the musical vibrators offered this year at CES2021, for which one wonders if this won’t be a feature for some users in the future, but we’ve just been waiting for someone to crack wireless enabled sex toys and medical devices (like pacemaker).
posted by rubatan at 12:27 PM on January 15, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by rubatan at 12:27 PM on January 15, 2021 [1 favorite]
It just seems to me that the "move fast and break things" mentality is just so, so, so geared towards everyone buying/selling/advertising an endless parade of shiny new things/services, without realizing the amount of information they are either trading or leaking for convenience that is nebulous. I can get my fat butt off the couch to turn off my lights, without having to rely on a flaky app (collecting who knows what info) which is completely dependent on some cloud datacenter being available - or the vendor being in business after 3 or more years...
I am no luddite - I love technology - but, it just seems to be a race to the bottom. Probably just getting old.
posted by rozcakj at 12:41 PM on January 15, 2021 [2 favorites]
I am no luddite - I love technology - but, it just seems to be a race to the bottom. Probably just getting old.
posted by rozcakj at 12:41 PM on January 15, 2021 [2 favorites]
There's a whole new level of technological literacy that needs to go along with new technology, especially IoT devices and other "connected" stuff. Right now we don't have that, at least in a broad-based way; securing consumer electronics basically requires you to be a network engineer, at best, and at worst it's impossible.
What we have right now is a sort of "future shock" scenario where the technology has outpaced society's ability to learn how and when to use the stuff, or whether to use it at all.
posted by Kadin2048 at 12:56 PM on January 15, 2021 [1 favorite]
What we have right now is a sort of "future shock" scenario where the technology has outpaced society's ability to learn how and when to use the stuff, or whether to use it at all.
posted by Kadin2048 at 12:56 PM on January 15, 2021 [1 favorite]
Is this the FPP where I can put the link to the $3,000 dog door?
posted by JoeZydeco at 1:14 PM on January 15, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by JoeZydeco at 1:14 PM on January 15, 2021 [1 favorite]
securing consumer electronics basically requires you to be a network engineer
Exactly... I have my own wifi router, a "PiHole", a decent switch - and have for years, used to be a programmer and I have yet to figure out how to secure IoT devices using a "VLAN" - it might as well be magic.
posted by rozcakj at 1:56 PM on January 15, 2021
Exactly... I have my own wifi router, a "PiHole", a decent switch - and have for years, used to be a programmer and I have yet to figure out how to secure IoT devices using a "VLAN" - it might as well be magic.
posted by rozcakj at 1:56 PM on January 15, 2021
Right now we don't have that, at least in a broad-based way; securing consumer electronics basically requires you to be a network engineer, at best, and at worst it's impossible.
Well, HomeKit on the Apple side, and whatever Google and Amazon calls their stuff, solves like 90% of the finicky horseshit you have to go through to get your home automation stuff to work, let alone be (somewhat) secure. Google/Amazon leaves the privacy door a bit open, their customers are used to
It.
posted by sideshow at 1:56 PM on January 15, 2021
Well, HomeKit on the Apple side, and whatever Google and Amazon calls their stuff, solves like 90% of the finicky horseshit you have to go through to get your home automation stuff to work, let alone be (somewhat) secure. Google/Amazon leaves the privacy door a bit open, their customers are used to
It.
posted by sideshow at 1:56 PM on January 15, 2021
The Verge has a recap of what happened to last year's CES 2020 things. Not a lot of things were actually released, and one of them (Quibi) actually released and went out of business.
CES was Kickstarter before Kickstarter.
posted by meowzilla at 2:40 PM on January 15, 2021 [2 favorites]
CES was Kickstarter before Kickstarter.
posted by meowzilla at 2:40 PM on January 15, 2021 [2 favorites]
to a refrigerator that makes round ice cubes!,
I've honestly never understood why ice crushers, even on expensive fridges are so lame. If you can buy a fridge that can make tiny crushed ice like a standard fastfood one can, or can make anything like shaved ice, I've never seen it. Seems like there is a market, they just don't invent much with fridges. They just make them bigger if they are more expensive.
posted by The_Vegetables at 2:41 PM on January 15, 2021
I've honestly never understood why ice crushers, even on expensive fridges are so lame. If you can buy a fridge that can make tiny crushed ice like a standard fastfood one can, or can make anything like shaved ice, I've never seen it. Seems like there is a market, they just don't invent much with fridges. They just make them bigger if they are more expensive.
posted by The_Vegetables at 2:41 PM on January 15, 2021
The crushed ice makers that I've seen - it doesn't actually crush the ice, but extrudes it in gravel-ey form.
Unless you're using it up very quickly, a lot of it just melts and goes down the drain. It makes very little sense (electrical, waste of potable water) to have it continually fill the hopper unless you're using it almost as fast as it's produced.
In the lab, we turn them off overnight and first person in (usually ahead of most everyone else) is responsible for starting it up.
They're also atrocious for fungal contamination and growth. It's cool enough that bacteria generally don't thrive, but a super cheapo super stupid lab I worked at had a machine that got a grey/ green mold infestation in the only one in the facility and it was really really nasty. Because there wasn't air conditioning, a styrofoam box of crushed ice (everyone needed at least one fresh one when putting together PCR reactions or doing protein preps or for lots of other molecular stuff) would develop a skim of black spores after a couple of minutes.
It was fascinating to see the (hydrophobic) spores percolate up to the top to thicken the skim as the ice melted over the course of ten(s of) minutes.
Of course, since I was the person whocomplained about it notified management about the condition and the consequences, I was responsible for getting rid of it. What a fucking nightmare.
It kept coming back because the inoculum source was endemic to the facility. This wasn't even close to being the worst thing about that place - the lab packaged* lentivirus (tamed HIV) for research use and the biosafety controls were so lax and the people doing it so untrained that every non-individually-prepackaged PCR tube in the facility would be PCR positive for HIV pol.
For crushed ice makers in bars - what is cleaning protocol at the end of day?
*"packaging" involves putting in (cloning) some desired/ engineered DNA you want to express in a cell into one plasmid vector, mix it up with a couple of other plasmids coding different parts of re-engineered HIV, then infecting some tamed mammalian cells with all three; those cells then "packages" it up inside viral molecules which are harvested and can then be used to infect other mammalian cells - and makes those cells express the desired DNA.
posted by porpoise at 10:02 PM on January 15, 2021 [1 favorite]
Unless you're using it up very quickly, a lot of it just melts and goes down the drain. It makes very little sense (electrical, waste of potable water) to have it continually fill the hopper unless you're using it almost as fast as it's produced.
In the lab, we turn them off overnight and first person in (usually ahead of most everyone else) is responsible for starting it up.
They're also atrocious for fungal contamination and growth. It's cool enough that bacteria generally don't thrive, but a super cheapo super stupid lab I worked at had a machine that got a grey/ green mold infestation in the only one in the facility and it was really really nasty. Because there wasn't air conditioning, a styrofoam box of crushed ice (everyone needed at least one fresh one when putting together PCR reactions or doing protein preps or for lots of other molecular stuff) would develop a skim of black spores after a couple of minutes.
It was fascinating to see the (hydrophobic) spores percolate up to the top to thicken the skim as the ice melted over the course of ten(s of) minutes.
Of course, since I was the person who
It kept coming back because the inoculum source was endemic to the facility. This wasn't even close to being the worst thing about that place - the lab packaged* lentivirus (tamed HIV) for research use and the biosafety controls were so lax and the people doing it so untrained that every non-individually-prepackaged PCR tube in the facility would be PCR positive for HIV pol.
For crushed ice makers in bars - what is cleaning protocol at the end of day?
*"packaging" involves putting in (cloning) some desired/ engineered DNA you want to express in a cell into one plasmid vector, mix it up with a couple of other plasmids coding different parts of re-engineered HIV, then infecting some tamed mammalian cells with all three; those cells then "packages" it up inside viral molecules which are harvested and can then be used to infect other mammalian cells - and makes those cells express the desired DNA.
posted by porpoise at 10:02 PM on January 15, 2021 [1 favorite]
...but a virtual CES kinda edits out the just plain weird-ass shit people bring to show off on the fringes of the convention floors.
I have a good friend who works for a semi-high-end boutique speaker company. CES has always been their big showcase for the year. They'd have a nice floor space set-up to show their wares and a suite set-up in a hotel in which they could demo the speakers for interested buyers and dealers. V-CES has put a big damper on things for them, as it's pretty impossible to demo speakers without having a physical space in which to, y'know, actually hear the things.
posted by Thorzdad at 7:31 AM on January 16, 2021 [1 favorite]
I have a good friend who works for a semi-high-end boutique speaker company. CES has always been their big showcase for the year. They'd have a nice floor space set-up to show their wares and a suite set-up in a hotel in which they could demo the speakers for interested buyers and dealers. V-CES has put a big damper on things for them, as it's pretty impossible to demo speakers without having a physical space in which to, y'know, actually hear the things.
posted by Thorzdad at 7:31 AM on January 16, 2021 [1 favorite]
I’m just a bit weirded out at the idea of women shipping their own mammary tissue off to a lab to outsource milk production. Instead of, you know, making it at home. Sure making it at home isn’t always easy or convenient (my wife had a really rough time with our son, it sucked, it was truly inconvenient for her to pump at work, etc - I am NOT trying to make light of how hard it can be, believe me) but surely there is a better option than handing your cells to a lab. Will you get milk back? Sure. What else will they do with your cells? Who fucking knows. Is it all really your milk? Is there any benefit to this over formula, when the lab-produced milk won’t include all the antibodies and etc. that would be present from the mom? When there’s no correlation between mom’s diet and milk composition? Again, who fucking knows.
It SEEMS like a noble idea - why struggle with breastfeeding when we can produce the milk for you! - but there are so many ethical and privacy issues with it that I just can’t make myself see the good here.
posted by caution live frogs at 10:00 AM on January 16, 2021
It SEEMS like a noble idea - why struggle with breastfeeding when we can produce the milk for you! - but there are so many ethical and privacy issues with it that I just can’t make myself see the good here.
posted by caution live frogs at 10:00 AM on January 16, 2021
V-CES has put a big damper on things for them, as it's pretty impossible to demo speakers without having a physical space in which to, y'know, actually hear the things.
Yeah, the just ridiculous high end audio guys showing off their stuff in hotel suites away from the convention floor was one of the specific examples I was thinking of. Seeing cool looking and awesome sounding stuff was always fun, but having a discussion with some incredibly earnest dude singing the praises of $1.2k a foot solid silver speaker wire would just overwhelm me.
posted by sideshow at 1:17 PM on January 16, 2021
Yeah, the just ridiculous high end audio guys showing off their stuff in hotel suites away from the convention floor was one of the specific examples I was thinking of. Seeing cool looking and awesome sounding stuff was always fun, but having a discussion with some incredibly earnest dude singing the praises of $1.2k a foot solid silver speaker wire would just overwhelm me.
posted by sideshow at 1:17 PM on January 16, 2021
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posted by sideshow at 11:36 AM on January 15, 2021 [1 favorite]