Friday’s top tech news: a pair of DIY projects for the weekend

Fitbit recently filed a patent application (pdf) for a force-sensitive display that would enable blood pressure readings on wearables. But even if patents did guarantee success — which they don’t — the past few months make it hard to be confident in the future of Fitbit smartwatches.

First things first, you shouldn’t read too hard into any patent filing. While it can give you a sense of what a company’s working on, it’s a legal tool for companies to effectively call dibs on a particular innovation. In the claims section of this filing (via Wareable), Fitbit outlines a force-sensitive screen combined with a photoplethysmography (PPG) sensor that, when pressed, can estimate your blood pressure.

Reddit doesn’t seem to be too worried about the AI-powered conversational chatbots like the ones Google and Microsoft revealed this week, based on a statement the company shared with The Verge. Shifting from traditional search to ChatGPT-like bots could erase the strategy of appending “reddit” to your searches to find human-sourced information instead of SEO-optimized garbage.

But Reddit believes the chatbots won’t replace actual human connection.

A version of this story was first published in yesterday’s edition of my Command Line newsletter.

A monthslong leak investigation by Meta has uncovered the source behind renders of the company’s unannounced VR headsets that were published last year by a YouTuber named Brad Lynch. 

Modern life is stressful. The past three years have been particularly stressful thanks to a global pandemic, a worsening economy, and an aneurysm-inducing news cycle. But while most wearable companies have introduced features meant to help with mindfulness, recovery, and stress reduction, that’s not their main focus. But with the Nowatch, that’s the entire purpose.

You can tell from the name. Nowatch — pronounced Now-watch — centers on the idea that “time is now.” (You’d be forgiven for thinking it’s pronounced “no watch” given that there’s no watch.) The idea is to help you stay present and connected to the current moment. You get zero notifications, and you can’t even tell the time because there’s no screen (no watch, if you will). Instead, there’s a swappable disc made of gemstones or machined metal. But the Nowatch’s crown jewel is a Philips electrodermal activity (EDA) sensor, which gauges stress levels by measuring electrical changes in minuscule amounts of skin sweat. Using this sensor, Nowatch can purportedly predict when your stress levels will spike and send a gentle buzz to your wrist as a signal to reset and refocus.

If you want an EV that makes sense, you should not buy the GMC Hummer EV. If you want an EV that’s affordable, you should not buy the GMC Hummer EV. If you want an EV that’s efficient or luxurious, you should not buy the GMC Hummer EV. 

Is there any reason to spend $110,000 on this ghastly behemoth? I spent a week trying to figure it out, and frankly, I’m still left wondering.

Microsoft is getting ready to demonstrate how its new ChatGPT-like AI will transform its Office productivity apps. After announcing and demonstrating its Prometheus Model in its new Bing search engine earlier this week, Microsoft is gearing up to show how it will expand to its core productivity apps like Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook.

Sources familiar with Microsoft’s plans tell The Verge that the company is preparing to detail its productivity plans for integrating OpenAI’s language AI technology and its Prometheus Model in the coming weeks. The software giant is tentatively planning an announcement in March, highlighting how quickly Microsoft wants to reinvent search and its productivity apps through its OpenAI investments.

Microsoft is working to bring native support for RGB PC gaming accessories to Windows 11. The Windows lighting experience will include the ability for PC gamers to configure accessories with RGB lighting without having to install third-party software.

Twitter user Albacore has spotted early work for integrating this new lighting experience into Windows 11 in the latest public test builds of the operating system. Options for controlling brightness, lighting effects, speed, and colors can all be found in the settings interface of Windows 11. There’s even a feature that will match your accessories to the Windows accent color.

Wildebeest is a new project from Cloudflare that’s designed to make it easier for individuals to set up and run their own Mastodon-compatible servers. It highlights one of the key strengths of Mastodon over centralized competitors like Twitter, which is that anyone can host an instance of the microblogging service that’s connected it to the wider network (aka Fediverse).

“You can quickly deploy your Mastodon-compatible server on top of Cloudflare and connect it to the Fediverse in minutes,” Cloudflare’s Celso Martinho and Sven Sauleau write in a co-authored blog post. “You don’t need to worry about maintaining or protecting it from abuse or attacks; Cloudflare will do it for you automatically.”

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has exonerated Tesla’s Autopilot system as the cause of a fatal and fiery Texas crash involving a Tesla Model S in 2021. Investigators for the NTSB issued their final report this week that determined the driver was operating the vehicle up until it impacted the tree and that they had been under the influence of alcohol and drugs (via Ars Technica).

Here’s the probable cause as written in the NTSB’s final conclusion:

The latest Chrome beta, version 111, includes a trial for a feature that could make the browser’s picture-in-picture feature significantly more useful. Instead of being only for playing videos, Google’s looking into letting it display basically any web content in a floating window that stays on top of all your other windows.

There are quite a few ways this feature, which is called Document Picture-in-Picture, could be useful. Some of Google’s examples are mostly just spins on how picture-in-picture already works, such as video players but with custom UI (such as buttons to like or dislike a video, a timeline, or captions), or a miniplayer for video conferences that let you see a grid of people and access controls to mute yourself or raise a hand.

Game recognizes game. Framework, maker of the modular Framework Laptop, is now stocking a part for the other easily repairable portable PC that’s been making headlines — Valve’s Steam Deck. You can now buy a 2TB SSD upgrade from the company, and it might be the easiest way to do so yet.

See, while it’s fairly easy to replace the Steam Deck’s SSD, it’s not quite as easy to buy the right parts. The Steam Deck uses the smallest kind of modular SSD — the M.2 2230, which measures just 30mm long — and it’s only designed to fit a single-sided one, which has flash memory chips on one side.