This week Tom brings the joyous news that Nintendoland is coming! Ray wants fast passes to the Mario Kart ride. But none of the guys want to ride on a Boeing 787 after Ray tells the guys that some of the planes are turning off… in mid air. Not good. Oculus finally announces a consumer model of the Oculus Rift. People are breaking/not breaking their Microsoft Surface 3 tablets. Twitter broke MS-DOS games, and Tesla just brought the future one step closer to today. All that on this week’s episode.

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THIS WEEK’S RUN DOWN

Nintendo Theme Park

Who is up for Mario Kart in real life? Nintendo announced during an earnings call this week that it is partnering with Universal Parks and Resorts which runs the Universal Studios theme parks to create Nintendo-themed rides and attractions. Nintendo has not announced specific details on which of its properties it would adapt, but it seems like a safe bet that it will leverage long lasting and popular characters and games like Mario, Zelda and Donkey Kong. In fact, Universal executive Tom Schroder said pretty much exactly that in a press release: “The immersive experiences will include major attractions at Universal?s theme parks and will feature Nintendo?s most famous characters and games.”

Have you tried turning your plane off and on again?

The FAA sent out a warning on May 1st that Boeing 787s may have some computer problems that could cause your terrible, terrible death. Mashable reports that the administration discovered the computers in 787s have a “software counter” that periodically shuts down all electrical systems, which results in “loss of control of the airplane.” Now, I’m not an aviation expert, but I think that is a bad thing. Am I right in assuming that guys?

Boeing is working out a software update that will eliminate the problem, but until then, they have issued a work around. If you work in the IT industry or have ever worked technical support you are probably familiar with it:

“Have you tried turning it off and on again?”

Yes folks, it’s the I.T. Crowd fix.

Call Roy and Moss or your plane will crash to the ground.

Oculus announces “Q1 2016” release for Rift

In other news that is sure to have gamers everywhere jumping for joy, Oculus announced this week that the first commercial release of their hotly anticipated virtual reality headset the Oculus Rift will be in early 2016.

The company also released promotional images of the sleek final consumer product after several years of prototypes.

Oculus first made a splash at the E3 gaming expo in 2012, followed by a very successful Kickstarter campaign. They also kicked off a virtual reality race, with other big companies like Sony and Valve and HTC working on releasing their own VR products.

How low can you go?

One of the most interesting tablets to come out, other than the iPad, has definitely been the Microsoft Surface. Sure, it’s had its share of troubles. It came out with Windows RT, which was this weird, stripped down version of Windows. It had two interfaces, the desktop and the “tablet” UI which really confused people. But, it was an incredible design that really changed the market, making it a serious contender for a laptop replacement. One of its signature features was the coveted kickstand that can hold the tablet in one of three positions. Well, now the Verge is reporting that Redditors have discovered a secret fourth position for the Surface 3 kickstand. Apparently, if you keep pressing the kickstand back after the third position it will break away and fold all the way back.

Microsoft said in a statement that the kickstand “contains a safety mechanism unique to Surface 3 to help protect the device, but the mechanism is not designed for use as a fourth kickstand position.”

So it might work once, twice or maybe even a few times, but it’s probably going to ruin your Surface 3.

The lesson here is, don’t play too rough with your toys. Just like a Slinky, once you bend it out of shape, you can’t bend it back, no matter what happened in Toy Story.

MS-DOS games on Twitter update

Last week we told you how you can embed and play classic MS-DOS games in tweets. Sadly, it looks like Twitter has put a stop to that.

It was discovered last week that Twitter users could embed these games from the Internet Archive?s site into tweets using Twitter?s Cards widget (that?s the system that allows videos, images and other media to be displayed in-line in the Twitter stream). But it turns out that embedding interactive media, specifically games, is against the terms of service for Twitter Cards.

You can, however, still play the MS-DOS games at the Internet Archive?s site, archive.org.

Powerwall

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, the maker of powerful electric sports cars recently announced that his company will begin manufacturing batteries for homes. This week Elon Musk announced that demand for their ?Powerwall? batteries was ?crazy off the hook?. He said they have received over 38,000 reservations, a level of demand which could take them up to a year to fulfill. Orders included over 2,500 from companies for their commercial-ready Powerpack.

The Powerwall batteries are designed for a 24-hour charge-and-discharge cycle, which would be ideal in combination with a solar power system that could charge them during the day letting them run the house at night. The batteries are designed to be mounted on the wall and a 7kWh unit starts at $3,000.

Note from Ray: The Powerwall is apparently not nearly as bad as the Power Glove.

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Everything in the news this week was pretty shocking.

This Weeks Run Down

Apparently the FAA thinks it is 1967

This Sunday, the FAA finally released its proposal for regulations on unmanned commercial aircraft, a.k.a. drones. The proposed requirements, are surprisingly ? or unsurprisingly, depending on who you ask ? arcane and draconian.

The drones must be under 55 pounds or 25 kilograms. They can only be operated in daylight, and within the operator’s line of sight! They have to fly under 500 feet, no faster than 100 mph (Which those two aren’t unreasonable) But, they also can NEVER fly over anyone except for the people flying the drone.

This pretty much shoots down any plans that Amazon had for Prime Air since delivering packages with a drone, kinda requires the drone to be out of sight for it to be useful. And it would almost certainly have to fly over some people to get to my porch.

Some drone startups aren’t too concerned though. Drones could possibly be used for some commercial purposes, like a farmer surveying his field from the sky.

Lenovo got caught with its hand in the cookie jar

The Next Web is reporting that Lenovo has been installing adware on laptops. The adware, called Superfish, inserts third-party ads into your Google Searches and other websites, even those running with secure encryption, just like the kind of malware that doesn’t intentionally come with your new computer.

Once users started complaining about the ads Lenovo was quick to roll back the program and to post directions on its website about how to uninstall it.

Lenovo said,

Superfish was previously included on some consumer notebook products shipped in a short window between September and December to help customers potentially discover interesting products while shopping.  However, user feedback was not positive.

Unfortunately security researchers have discovered that simply uninstalling the software is not enough. Superfish also include a ?root certificate’ that allows any program that gains access to it to perform what are known as ?man in the middle’ attacks, potentially compromising the security of sensitive user information like banking passwords.

Lenovo initially denied the security vulnerability, but is now saying that it will release new software that will completely remove Superfish and any security certificates related to it.

In the meantime, laptops with Superfish installed are currently available from stores such as Best Buy. Caveat emptor.

After the story broke, a developer put together a website that lets Lenovo laptop owners find out if they are affected by the program, and Lenovo’s current instructions include how to uninstall the basic Superfish program.

LoopPay sold out to Samsung.

In an announcement Wednesday, LoopPay, the company that makes the electronic wallet/phone case for the iPhone, let everyone know that they have been bought by Samsung. They will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Samsung Electronics America, Inc.

They haven’t said anything about incorporating the LoopPay Digital wallet platform into Samsung devices. However, it seems to support the rumors that the next Galaxy phone will probably have LoopPay built into it.

Ray recently reviewed the LoopPay CardCase on a previous episode of Deemable Tech.

Apple iCar?

Wired is reporting that according to a lawsuit filed by electric-car battery manufacturer A123 Systems, Apple has been poaching engineers for its own large-scale car battery division. The lawsuit alleges that an A123 engineer has been helping Apple woo senior-level engineers over to their company. This is adding fuel to rumors that Apple is working on its own electric car.

Other things hinting at this: Apple has over 600 employees that used to work in the automotive industry, including 46 that were formerly with Tesla. Tesla CEO Elon Musk told Bloomberg earlier this month that Apple has been offering $250,000 signing bonuses to entice Tesla employees to leave.

Also, a mysterious van registered to Apple has been spotted driving around San Francisco with an array of equipment including cameras mounted on top. People are speculating that this could be for a self-driving car or a street-mapping system.

In another interview with Bloomberg, former GM CEO Dan Akerson said Apple should stay away from making cars. Akerson said “They’d better think carefully if they want to get into the hard-core manufacturing. We take steel, raw steel, and turn it into car. They have no idea what they’re getting into if they get into that.?

Sounds a lot like Steve Balmer’s advice to Apple many years ago about getting into making phones.

Cable Companies Behaving Badly

A Time Warner Cable customer reported to Ars Technica today that she received a letter from the company in which her first name had been changed to, well, a word we can’t say on this podcast. It starts with a ‘c.’

The letter read, ?Dear C*#! Martinez? and then went tried to convince the customer not to cancel her cable.

The other major US cable company, Comcast, has been in the news several times in the past few months for similar cases. Comcast customers have reported receiving notices from the company in which their names were changed to things like  “dummy,” “whore” and “super bitch.” Comcast and Time Warner Cable announced last year that they plan to merge, pending Federal approval. However, both companies are notorious for their poor customer service and stories like these will not help their case.

Time Warner Cable stated that the name change was due to the actions of a third-party vendor. It apologized to Mrs. Martinez and offered her a free year of cable.

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Photo credit: “Blog OMG!” by Mike Licht is used under CC BY 2.0.