Author: mangakiko

Two new Samsung Galaxy Watches launched at the company’s August unpacked event. the Galaxy Watch 5 will replace last year’s Galaxy Watch 4, and a new Watch 5 Pro model brings beefier battery life and a more premium titanium body. CNET Editor at Large Scott Stein’s Galaxy Watch 5 impressions article focuses on some of these refinements, but over here I’ll compare the specs of the two Galaxy Watch 5 models against last year’s Galaxy Watch 4 — with a handy chart at the end!

As with the previous model, the Watch 5 comes in two sizes; 44mm and 40mm. The smaller size of the 40mm model means a lighter design which you might find more comfortable to wear, but it also means a smaller display and a smaller battery inside. You won’t have to compromise on any health-tracking features, with things like blood oxygen tracking, sleep and a new skin temperature sensor featured in both models.

The Watch 5 Pro comes in just the larger 44mm size, packing the same 1.36-inch display as the 44mm Watch 5, but adding a much larger 590-mAh battery, which could keep the Pro model going for a few days between charges. The titanium rather than aluminum design will also make it appeal to outdoor enthusiasts who want a more rugged smartwatch. That extra battery does come with a weight tradeoff however, with the Pro model tipping the scales at 46 grams against the Watch 5’s 32.8 grams.

Other specs like the various health-tracking tools, the waterproofing, memory, storage and Wear OS operating system are the same across all new models.

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It’s been a few weeks since Google unveiled the mid-ranger Pixel 6a, bringing several notable upgrades over previous Pixel-A series phones. Besides the availability of the Android 13 beta, the factory images and the kernel sources for the Pixel 6a have been published as well, which are just the right ingredients for the modding enthusiasts to start tinkering with the device.

We’re starting to see more and more people getting their hands on the Google Pixel 6a, so for those of you looking for some help in rooting your device, here is a simple step-by-step guide for you. This guide will walk you through how to unlock the bootloader of the Pixel 6a and gain root access on the phone using Magisk. TWRP, the most popular custom recovery there is, will take some time to be ported to the latest Pixels, hence the current rooting method is a bit more involved than what you might be used to.

Google Pixel 6a XDA Forums

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How to root the Google Pixel 6a

Before we get into how to root your Pixel 6a, you are going to want to do a few things. First, you will want to back up all the data on your phone. That’s because rooting requires wiping all the data on your phone, which includes not only installed apps but also all files saved to the internal storage.

You also want to make sure you have about 5GB of available storage on your PC, as you will need to download the factory image for your phone. After you’re done, though, you can delete these files to free up space. Nonetheless, it’s a good idea to keep the latest factory image saved in case you have any problems in your post-root adventure and need to restore to stock.

It is important to note these steps may not work on US carrier models of the Google Pixel 6a. Verizon, for example, likes to prevent bootloader unlocking altogether, making it impossible to root your phone. Sometimes, though, people find unofficial workarounds, and we’ll let you know if any are found.

Step 1 – Get the stock boot image for the Pixel 6a

Before we can root, we need to get our hands on the stock boot image that matches the current software build the phone is running. We will patch this boot image with Magisk.

To get the boot image, you need to extract it from the Pixel 6a factory image, a file that contains all the images of your phone needed to make a full restore. To make sure you download the right factory image, you need to check which software version your phone is currently running. To check this, go to Settings > About phone. At the bottom, look for the build number section. Find the matching build number on the factory image download page and download that file.

Download Android 12 for Google Pixel phones || Download Android 13 for Google Pixel phones

Next, extract the factory image ZIP file. Locate the image-bluejay-[version].zip file (yes, there’s a ZIP within a ZIP) and extract the boot.img file from it. This is the stock boot image, which you need to transfer this to your phone’s storage.

Step 2 – Patch the stock boot image using Magisk

With the boot image file on your phone, you are next going to need to download and install the latest Magisk app. In fact, you can patch it on a different Android device than the Pixel 6a, but you need to install the Magisk app on the secondary device as well.

Download Magisk

In the Magisk app, you will need to click the Install button on the topmost card. Choose Select and Patch a File under Method, and select the stock boot image. This will open the Android file picker. Go ahead and find the boot.img you transferred from your PC and select that. The Magisk app will patch the image to the Download folder on the phone. You must transfer this patched file (should be named as “magisk_patched_[random_strings].img”) back to your PC, because next, we’re going to unlock the bootloader which will wipe all data as we warned previously.

Notably, if you browse the XDA Forums for the Pixel 6a, you may be lucky enough to find a pre-patched boot image. It might save you the hassle of performing steps 1 and 2, but make sure that any Magisk-patched boot image you download matches your software build version, otherwise you will face several anomalies post-flashing. That’s why we always recommend to grab the official firmware and patch the stock boot image yourself.

Step 3 – Enable OEM unlocking and unlock the bootloader

In order to flash third-party software on the Pixel 6a, we have to unlock the bootloader. To do so, go to Settings > About phone > build number and tap on this entry 7 times to enable Developer options. After enabling it, go back to the main settings page and tap on Systemthen go to Developer options. From there, toggle the OEM unlocking option. Keep in mind that you need to enter your password/pattern/PIN to validate some of the actions.

After enabling OEM unlock, turn off your phone. Hold both the Volume down and Power buttons to turn your phone back on and boot into the bootloader menu. Assuming you have the latest ADB and Fastboot binaries installed already, you can also use the following command to reboot to the bootloader mode directly from Android.

adb reboot bootloader

Make sure to keep your phone plugged into your PC/Mac/Chromebook. Next, in a terminal window, type:

fastboot flashing unlock

You will see a screen telling you that you are about to initiate the bootloader unlocking process. Use the volume button to navigate and the power button to accept. Again, this will wipe all the data on your phone, so make sure you have your data backed up before proceeding.

You’ll see the warning every time you boot your phone after unlocking the bootloader

Step 4 – Flash Magisk-patched boot image

After the bootloader of your Pixel 6a is unlocked and your boot image is patched, you are just one step away from root.

As soon as the bootloader unlocking process completes, the phone will boot back up after a few minutes. Skip the setup wizard at this stage and turn off the phone. You now want to boot back into the bootloader by holding the volume down and power buttons again. Once you are there, connect the phone to your PC/Mac/Chromebook and execute the following command:

fastboot flash boot path/to/magisk_patched.img

As soon as you hit Enter, the patched boot image will be flashed to your phone. Next, reboot using fastboot reboot and the Magisk app should appear on your home screen and/or app drawer. If it doesn’t (eg you can only see a stub icon), just install the Magisk APK manually. This is all it takes to root your Pixel 6a.

Keep in mind that you’ll have to repeat steps 1, 2, and 4 every time you update your phone because the boot image changes with each update.

What’s next?

If you’re looking for things to do with your newly rooted Pixel 6a, take a look at our curated list of best root apps. Once your device is up and running with Magisk, you can also try out the some of the best Magisk modules to seamlessly apply complex mods without touching the underlying system.

Image: Unsplash

The Californian organization Earth Species Project wants to decipher the language of animals. Artificial intelligence is supposed to make this possible.

The Earth Species Project (ESP) relies on open source. It is a non-profit organization founded in 2017, funded in part by donations from LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. The organization’s central concern is decoding non-human language.

The ten-person team believes that understanding non-human languages ​​will deepen our connection to other species and strengthen our ability to protect them, and thus positively change our ecological footprint. ESP aims to achieve its goal in our lifetime. Along the way, it also wants to develop other technologies that are already helping biology and conservation.

Earth Species Project focuses on large-scale language models

If ESP has its way, artificial intelligence will enable the understanding of non-human language. Using machine learning to analyze communication and other behaviors in the animal kingdom is not new. A research group led by the University of Copenhagen demonstrated an AI system that analyzes pig grunts. Project CETI aims to translate sperm whale calls. DeepSqueak helps understand the calls of mice and rats.

The ESP team has set its sights much higher. It’s not about decoding the communication of a single species, but of all species. “We are species agnostic,” says Aza Raskin, co-founder of ESP. “The tools we develop (…) can work across all biology, from worms to whales.”

Raskin, his co-founders, and the team draw their inspiration from recent advances in natural language machine processing. Raskin cites work that he has shown machine learning can translate between numerous languageseven without prior knowledge, as the motivating intuition for ESP.

Communication is a multitude of vectors in multidimensional space

Algorithms that geometrically represent words or word components in multiple dimensions form the basis of these successes. Distance and direction to other words in space thereby represent rudimentary semantic relations of individual words to each other. In 2017, several publications showed that translations can be generated by superimposing the geometric representations of two languages.

Another advance was made, for example, in a 2018 paper from Facebook’s AI Lab. The team combined self-supervised training with back-translations. They achieved high translation quality without prior knowledge, by the standards of the time.

Today, giant language models translate up to 200 languages ​​simultaneously, such as Meta’s NLLB-200. The ESP team wants to enable such representations for animal communication, both for single species and for numerous species simultaneously.

According to Raskin, this should also include non-verbal forms of communication such as bee dances. Such large-scale models could then be used to investigate, for example, whether there is overlap in geometric representations between humans and other creatures.

“I don’t know which will be more incredible – the parts where shapes overlap and we can directly communicate or translate, or the parts where we can’t,” Raskin said.

AI can help take off the human glasses

Raskin compares the journey to such a model to the journey to the moon – the road will be long and hard. Along the way, meanwhile, there would be many other problems to solve, and ESP has some ideas about how they plan to tackle them.

In a recently published paper, for example, the team looks at the “cocktail party problem.” This is basically about identifying individual voices in a social environment. Google, Meta and Amazon, for example, use AI solutions to this problem to better recognize voice input for their digital assistants.

The cocktail party problem also exists in the study of non-human communication, the team says. In their work, they provide an AI algorithm that can isolate individual animal voices in a natural soundscape.

In another project, an AI system generates random humpback whale calls and analyzes how they respond. The goal is to develop a system that learns to distinguish random changes from semantically meaningful ones. This brings us a step closer to understanding humpback whale calls, Raskin believes.

Yet another project will involve a self-supervised learning AI system learning the song repertoire of the Hawaiian crow, while another will use so-called ethograms to record all possible behavior patterns, their frequency, and general conditions for a species.

Will AI alone ultimately be enough to enable communication with other species? Raskin believes that AI will at least bring us a big step closer. Many species communicate in much more complex ways than previously thought. AI could help gather enough data and analyze it on a large scale, he said. Eventually, we might be able to take off our human glasses and understand entire communication systems, Raskin said.

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