Unlimited data on mobile networks used to be the norm when you couldn’t use very much of it because of sluggish devices and speeds. Metered data was all the rage for a while but has since been supplanted by unlimited data plans. Are they really unlimited, though? Over the past few years, the big four US carriers have been working to twist the definition of the word “unlimited” until it has no meaning. AT&T may have finally succeeded with its new plans that determine when the carriers will throttle your connection to unusably slow speeds.
AT&T’s new data plans come in three flavors. At the bottom is the Unlimited Starter for $65 per month. Next up is Unlimited Extra for $75, and AT&T’s top of the line is Unlimited Elite for $85 monthly. Naturally, all the plans have pricing breaks if you add more than one line.
All of AT&T’s plans have a suspicious number of limits for an unlimited plan, but the entry-level option is particularly galling. With Unlimited Starter, you get full speed LTE and SD-only video for as long as AT&T thinks you should. The carrier can, at any time, start “deprioritizing” your data. That means your LTE connection will drop to sub-3G speeds, making many services unusable. There’s also no hotspot data included with the Unlimited Starter plan.
The next step up is closer to the experience we’re accustomed to on other carriers. With Unlimited Extra, you get LTE speeds until you’ve used 50GB in a billing cycle. Then, you’re throttled for the rest of the month. You get 15GB of hotspot data on this plan, but video is still SD. Unlimited Elite boosts the deprioritization threshold to 100GB, and there’s 30GB of hotspot data. You do get HD video on this plan, though.
AT&T previously offered a free subscription to Spotify, HBO, or a handful of other services with its unlimited plans. Now, you only get that with Unlimited Elite, and HBO is your only option. However, AT&T will throw in access to the upcoming HBO Max streaming service.
Even in the context of fake-unlimited data plans, these plans seem to have a whole lot of limits. The three plan levels with different deprioritization caps just seem a lot like the tiered data caps of years past. AT&T Unlimited Starter and Unlimited Extra launch on November 3rd, and Unlimited Elite will launch later.
After decades of only minor changes, the last few years have brought us an onslaught of high-tech updates to traditional cooking devices. Among those have been a variety of smart ovens and connected thermometers. As someone who cooks dinner almost every night, I can both appreciate how useful more technology can be in the kitchen, but also that it can sometimes just make life more complicated. So I set out to test the Cinder Grill ($429) and Meater’s completely wireless thermometers ($69-$269) with that in mind. Would they make life easier for a tech-enthusiast cook, and would they produce better results than the devices they aim to replace?
Cinder Is a Cool Name for a Grill, but What Does It Do?
When you first see a Cinder Grill it is hard not to think of the George Foreman grill. But the Cinder is light years ahead of the Foreman. Yes, it is a grill (technically, more of a griddle or “flattop” since it has flat surfaces), but it is a high-precision and versatile version. You can dial in just about any temperature, and use either one or both cooking surfaces. Speaking of which, the surface isn’t huge, so like the Foreman, you’re constrained to how much you can cook at once. I found I could cook four eggs or four burgers at once, but either filled the entire 9-inch by 10-inch grilling surface.
Cinder Promises Sous-Vide Without the Water
I’ve been using a thermal bath and vacuum-sealed bags to help get meat and fish cooked to a precise temperature for 15 years because the results are excellent. The trick is that the water bath is held at a specific temperature so that your food can’t get hotter than that — meaning you won’t overcook or burn it. However, it’s a bit of a cumbersome process, and the resulting texture and color aren’t typically appetizing, especially for steaks. So an additional step of patting the meat dry and searing it is needed (aka a reverse sear).
The Cinder Grill provides a remarkably evenly-heated cooking surface as shown using this thermal image from a FLIR ONE Pro camera.
The Cinder grill replaces the water bath with carefully heated heavy metal plates. A set of three high-tech heating coils under both a top and bottom plate allows you to control the temperature of the grill surface precisely. At least that’s what Cinder and a control knob calibrated to the nearest degree promised. I wanted to check for myself, so I used my FLIR ONE Pro to measure the surface temperature of the grill plates when I had the control set to 350 degrees. While it wasn’t perfect, the Cinder did a much better job than most grills. The middle third or so of the lower grill was within a degree of 350 (at least as measured by the FLIR), and most of the rest — except for the extreme corners — was within about 10 degrees. That compares well with a typical grill or oven, where temperatures can vary 20 to 40 degrees with time or across the cooking surface.
The Cinder Grill makes it a cinch to cook a perfect steak — simply pick your desired temperature for the doneness you want, and then use the Sear mode to get a great crust.
For its next trick, the Cinder can also sear. So you can accomplish both the initial cook of your food to the correct temperature, and then sear it. Cinder makes that a simple process. Simply take your food off, turn the temperature knob to sear, wait for it to heat up, and then put your food back on. If you want both sides seared, as you would for a steak, close the grill so both the top and bottom plates will be used, and then press the knob. The Cinder will do a 45-second countdown for you, which is just about the right amount of time for searing most meat and some fish.
The Cinder Also Makes an Accurate and Convenient Griddle
While some stoves come with a grill/griddle burner, most of them aren’t that accurate. If you have room for it on your counter, Cinder is a nice alternative. You can simply dial in the temperature you want — I taped the temperature chart from the Hester Cue on a cabinet over my review Cinder — and cook up anything you can make on a traditional flattop. I had great success with grilled cheese sandwiches, Reuben sandwiches, Smashburgers (using Cinder’s recipe), fried eggs, toast, and bacon.
In this mode, you are back to the standard cooking practice of checking your food for doneness and making sure it doesn’t burn. If it is thick enough to tolerate a thermometer I found that the Meater wireless probes worked perfectly. I loved that I could use them even with the Cinder closed, and not worry about wire leads needing to snake out between the very hot plates.
Comparing the Cinder and the Brava
The Cinder reminded me initially of the Brava smart oven that I reviewed last year, in particular, because they both claim to make it easy to cook a perfect steak. But after using it for a while, it’s clear they serve quite different purposes (once you get past the fact that they both do an excellent job of cooking steaks). The Brava lets you cook several elements of a meal at once, and can often do that automatically, without you needing to do more than prep and load the food according to directions, and then use the touch screen to pick out what you’re cooking. So the Brava is without question an excellent labor-saving device.
If you’re cooking a steak, or something similar, the Cinder can also save you a lot of labor (I don’t say time, because the process isn’t any faster than sous-vide and sear, and slower than the simple throw-it-in-a-skillet approach). But for most foods, the promise isn’t less work; it’s a better and more repeatable result.
Brava also has a very large array of recipes for ingredients and combinations, along with tons of videos. Cinder has a few recipes, a few videos, and a depressingly sparse food guide. That’s an area where I think they need to really step up their efforts, as I was often stuck with trial and error when cooking something they didn’t have instructions for. The Cinder also has more trouble handling either delicate fish (if you cook with the lid down to get the full effect, it squeezes the fish) and uneven-width ingredients (for example bone-in short ribs) as the top can’t heat them evenly.
On the other hand, the Brava is more than twice as expensive as the Cinder ($1,095 for the Brava versus $429 for the Cinder) and can’t be used as a traditional cooking surface. Both are fairly small and unlikely to replace the need for a traditional oven or stove or even microwave. However, either can certainly replace a toaster oven and take up about the same room on your counter. Note that both are heavy, so they are not something you’re going to want to pull out when you use it and put away afterward.
Meater: The First Truly Wireless Remote Food Thermometer
Meater block with four wireless probes
Whatever technology you use to cook perfect meat and fish — whether it is a skillet, a grill, a smoker, or a sous-vide bath — accurate temperature measurement is vital. If you’re a pro, like my friend who owns our local restaurant, you can tell the doneness of a steak by comparing it with the softness of the skin on your hand. But if you’re like most of us, a fast-reading digital thermometer is the way to go. It’s also your best option for getting consistent results with trickier foods like poultry and fish. And of course, if you’re cooking in a smoker, you need a way to know what’s going on without frequently opening the lid.
Traditionally, there have been a couple of types of digital thermometers for food. One is a hand-held probe that you can stick directly into the food. I keep one of those near our stove and another near our outdoor grill. They’re simple and don’t need any wires. Then there are thermometers that use wired probes. They range from entry-level models, such as Weber’s iGrill, to more sophisticated versions like the excellent Fireboard 6-probe model. These now offer internet connectivity, but you wind up having to deal with untangling and routing the wires each time you use them.
So-called wireless thermometers before Meater still required wires to their probes, and they required separate probes for measuring ambient and food temperatures. Meater addressed both of these issues with a unique wireless probe that measures the food temperature at the point and the ambient temperature at the back end where the electronics live. The probes use Bluetooth to talk to a nicely designed wood base. You can either read the temperatures directly from the base’s display or have it connect to Wi-Fi so that you can monitor it from your mobile phone.
Cooking With a Meater Thermometer
To be honest, I have put off looking at Meater because I really didn’t think it would work with the probes in a large Faraday cage as with my pellet smoker. Much to my surprise, the probes worked great in it. They also worked well when I sealed them up with a steak I was cooking sous-vide in a thermal bath, and when I stuck them into a steak I was cooking in the Cinder Grill. The probes are limited to an ambient temperature of 527F (higher temps can damage them), so I’ve been nervous about trying them in my Brava oven.
The MEATER worked perfectly when I used it with my Memphis Advantage pellet cooker.
The Meater probes recharge by being placed in their base, and in turn, the base is powered by AA batteries. I’m used to similar devices recharging over USB, but it is easy enough to use rechargeable AA batteries instead. When I first got the Meater system for review, I found it hard to tell the probes apart (they have a tiny number 1-4 on their rear end), but shortly after that Meater sent out small metal number tags ($8 on their site), and now it’s easy. The only other small thing I found tricky is that the probes need to be inserted a couple of inches into the food. For large items, that’s easy. But in some cases like sausages or chicken thighs, it can take a little doing.
Overall, I really like the Meater system. When it first launched, Meater was pretty expensive, but the company has done a good job of providing some value-priced options. You can get a single probe plus a base without a display and with a 33-foot range for $69, or a 165-foot range version with a Bluetooth repeater for $99. The unit we reviewed has four probes, Wi-Fi, and a display, and sells for $269. So you’re definitely paying a premium over wired units like the iGrill, but you’re getting the convenience of no wires and having two sensors in each probe.
A 5G millimeter wave cell site in Minneapolis on a light pole.
5G technology is in the early stages of deployment in the United States and around the world. Here in the US, where 5G is being used at very high wavelengths (mmWave), the technology isn’t very good. Early service areas are very small and the range is terrible. Verizon has already admitted that its 5G network service is unlikely to deliver any significant benefits for rural users. There are a lot of reasons to be skeptical of 5G, even though the wireless industry is committed to painting the opposite picture.
But one thing 5G doesn’t do. It does not cause cancer. Scientific American is the latest to weigh in on this issue, following its own publication of an op/ed in which a public health and safety regulator called for further investigation of the potential health hazards of 5G. As Scientific American explains at length, the entire EM spectrum can be divided into two types: Ionizing and non-ionizing radiation.
Everything that kills you is on the right. Everything we use for communication in this context is on the left. Image via Wikipedia
Put simply, ionizing radiation kills you. Non-ionizing radiation doesn’t. There is a reason why we do not stand cancer patients in front of a 5G cell phone for 30 minutes, then declare them cured. It’s because 5G mmWave signals struggle to penetrate solid objects. Frankly, 5G range is lousy even in the open air. The reason we don’t stand cancer patients in front of an unshielded operational nuclear reactor for 30 seconds and declare them cured is that they would die of radiation poisoning. The difference between those two timeframes and outcomes is, at heart, the reason why 5G phones are completely safe to carry in your pocket while unshielded nuclear reactors are not.
Every frequency range that we use for cellular communication is in the non-ionizing part of the EM spectrum. This includes the 28GHz and 39GHz frequencies considered for mmWave 5G. Some of the other frequency bands for 5G are identical to bands we’ve already used for various wireless communication systems (spectrum assignments vary by country, so I can’t provide a universal breakdown, but there’s overlap with other, previous standards and spectrum allocations).
The studies that have come out that claim to find relationships between cellular exposure and lifespan or tumor rates in animals have all been badly compromised by poor quality controls. Proponents of these studies and the scareism around 5G often deliberately neglect to mention that the studies are effectively worthless. In one major example, a 2018 paper by the National Toxicology Program claimed to find evidence that rats exposed to high-RF fields used in 5G developed cancer. The problem is, the rats exposed to the high-RF field also lived longer than the rodents in the control group. Does this mean that high RF signals actually cause long life spans in rats? It does not. But a study with data showing that high RF fields cause long life in rats is a study with an obvious methodological problem. The 2018 report and others like it have been exhaustively deconstructed and criticized by publications like ScienceBasedMedicine and Ars Technica.
As Scientific American notes, the number of people using mobile phones has risen from essentially zero to basically the entire planet over the past 30+ years, yet no well-conducted study has found evidence of any health risks associated with mobile devices, beyond those caused by absentmindedly walking into a bus. This is less a joke that it might seem; cell phones are associated with the increase in pedestrian deaths in recent years. Long-term studies of radar workers don’t show an increased incidence of cancer, and radar workers absorb far more energy than anyone with a typical cell phone.
In 2019, I view 5G as a beautiful example of a worthless technology. Companies want you to care about 5G so they can sell you stuff. Realistically, I doubt 5G will be a practical benefit before 2022 or later, and it may never be a practical benefit to large sections of the United States. That’s reason enough to ignore the entire industry, at least for now. But there’s currently no known reason to avoid 5G based on medical data.
Studies to measure the impact of cell phone usage on the human body have been going on for decades in 13 countries. The reason you periodically hear about badly designed studies showing harm is not because any credible evidence of harm has been unearthed. In every case, the studies that claim to have found strong evidence of harm have failed to hold up under further analysis.
Do I believe we should continue to study these questions? I absolutely do. But I also believe in clearly communicating the findings from the methodologically rigorous studies that continue to show no links between cancer and cellular communications. 5G may drain your wallet and your battery. There is currently no credible evidence supporting a link between 5G and cancer.
DJI is the undisputed leader in the consumer drone market, with products running the gamut from a few hundred to thousands of dollars. Few people will jump right into drones with a $2,000 unit, so the entry-level is important. DJI is hoping to attract more drone pilots with the new DJI Mavic Mini. It’s less expensive than the company’s other drones, and it’s small enough that you don’t need a federal license to fly it.
The Mavic Mini isn’t DJI’s first foray into the world of entry-level drones. The company previously launched the Spark, an aircraft that started at about $500. The Mavic Mini costs a bit less at $400 — plus it’s more capable and easier to take with you. Unlike the Spark, the Mavic Mini folds up for transport, and it weighs just 249g. The low mass makes flight time impressive, too. DJI says the Mavic Mini can remain airborne for about 30 minutes. That’s on-par with the more expensive Mavic quadcopters and much more than the Spark. That drone topped out around 15 minutes of flight time.
The weight is important for another reason. The Mavic Mini is exactly 1 gram under the limit for federal registration. That means you can unbox and start flying the Mavic Mini without getting a license from the FAA. That license only costs $5, but it’s still nice to be able to skip that step for first-time pilots.
DJI has seen fit to include a controller with the Mavic Mini, another notable upgrade over the Spark. You will still have to use your smartphone to view the video feed, but the controller has a mount built-in. The controller will make it easier to keep the drone stable, which is good because the Mavic Mini doesn’t come with rotor guards (those cost extra). It also has a range of up to 2.5 miles.
As an entry-level drone, the Mavic Mini doesn’t have all the advanced camera features of the company’s more expensive products. The drone can record 2.7K video, but there’s no 4K option. The frame rate is also locked at 30fps — there’s no cinematic 24 fps option like you’d get on Phantom or Mavic Air.
The DJI Mavic Mini is available for pre-order today, and it should ship on November 11th. The base model costs $399, and $100 more gets you some spare batteries, replacement rotors, rotor guards, and a case.
This inexpensive laptop with its dual-core processor and 8GB of RAM offers solid performance for everyday home tasks like web browsing and school work. Lenovo claims this system should also be able to last up to 8.5 hours on a single charge. Right now it’s marked down from $449.00 to $279.00 at Walmart.
This version of Dell’s Alienware Aurora pairs a fast AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics card that’s able to run today’s latest games with the highest graphics settings. The system also has an Intel Core i7-9700K processor that comes overclocked from Dell to run at 4.6GHz on all CPU cores. This system typically retails for $1,869.99, but you can get it from Dell today for just $1,199.99.
If you are like me, then you hate taking time out of your busy work and gaming schedule to clean up around your house. Although this device can’t fold your laundry and put it away for you, Eufy’s RoboVac 30 is a nifty little device that can help save you time by keeping your floors clean so that you don’t have to. With a powerful 1,500Pa suction vacuum built-in, this device will roam your home removing any dust, hair, or misc. other dirt that gets tracked in. Currently, it’s marked down from $269.99 to just $199.99 from Amazon.
This AIO desktop utilizes laptop-based components including an Intel Core i5-8265U processor to give you energy efficient computer that fits behind the computer’s 23.8-inch 1080p touchscreen display. The system is also relatively inexpensive marked down from Dell from $858.99 to $549.99 with promo code PUN24RETAFF1.
Measuring just 9.7-inches diagonally with a LED backlit IPS display, this is one of Apple’s smallest tablets currently on the market. It also features a fast A10 64-bit processor and can last up to 10 hours on a single charge. You can get it now from Walmart marked down from $429.99 to $299.00.
Apple’s new AirPods Pro utilizes a new design that’s different from the company’s older AirPod headphones. The key new feature that these headphones have is active noise cancellation. The headphones also use a custom driver and they utilize a high dynamic range amplifier to improve sound quality. The headphones are available starting today for $249.00.
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We’ve seen engineers design some truly amazing robots that can walk, run, and even jump, but not all robots need to be so elaborate. MIT researchers have created a fleet of tiny robotic cubes that can move around and interact with each other autonomously. An individual “M-Block” robot is simple and not very useful, but if you bring the fleet together, they can link up to form new shapes and structures.
The M-Blocks were designed at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) under the supervision of professor and CSAIL Director Daniela Rus. The project started back in 2013 with the aim of designing a more scalable robotic system that doesn’t rely on complex movement mechanisms. The team started working with so-called “inertial forces” to move their 6-sided robots around, and that eventually led to the M-Blocks.
Each cube-shaped robot has a flywheel that moves at 20,000 revolutions per minute. The robot applies a brake to the flywheel when it needs to move, harnessing the angular momentum to roll and hop across a surface. Each side also has permanent magnets that help it connect to other M-Blocks, and small barcodes on the faces help the robots identify each other.
The M-Blocks might not be as quick to reach a destination compared with a wheeled or walking robot. They can only move in one of the four cardinal directions but can do so from any of their six faces. That’s a total of 24 different movement directions. The cubes also have to launch themselves at each other and rely on the magnets to straighten out the collisions. Luckily, they can cover a lot of ground with each leap and can even climb up “walls” composed of other M-Blocks.
This simpler method of locomotion brings several advantages to the M-Block program. The individual robots are inexpensive and easy to produce because there are fewer moving parts. They’re also less likely to accumulate damage or need maintenance compared with more complicated robots with actuators to control limbs. The team believes this design is more scalable and could potentially reach as many as a million modules.
Rus envisions networks of M-Blocks that can work together to become whatever you need in a given situation. For example, M-Blocks could link up to become a temporary staircase to allow access to a building damaged by fire. Currently, the M-Blocks can only form simple shapes, but improved algorithms and communication between the blocks could help them perform more advanced tasks.
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