In late May, someone posed an interesting, though odd, question about Facebook: "How much research has gone into developing the Facebook ping sound?" That ping, which the Quora questioner complimented, sounds off when you receive a video call on Facebook. Then something weirder happened: a former Facebook designer responded that a lot of work had gone into that ping, and he laid out exactly how they'd created it.

The Atlantic picked up the story, and Wired got in touch with the designer, Everett Katigbak, to find out more. He talked about designing the ping as the basis for Facebook's future audio identity; other sounds would take a cue from the incoming video call ping to establish a consistent sound for the brand.

Photo credit: Flickr user stevendepolo via Creative Commons.

Wired writes "He wanted Facebook's audio identity to be pleasant, inviting and familiar." And the breakthrough moment that led to the ping came, oddly enough, from the pronunciation of Facebook. "“I thought there was something interesting to the two syllables and the intonation happened when people would say it,” Katigbak told Wired. When he showed his collaborator, an audio engineer named Jim McKee, a hand-drawn sketch of an audio wave with F-A-C-E-B-O-O-K written out below it, they had a revelation.

FACE coincidentally spelled out an F Major 7 chord (composed of the notes F, A, C, and E).

In his Quora response, Katigbak added more detail on why this chord worked so well:

Last month, Garrett Brown, who invented the Steadicam, was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. It’s a well-deserved honor. The Steadicam is indeed a wonderful innovation that’s taken the bumps and shakes out of camerawork, and as much as we love the shakicam scenes we’ve seen in horror flicks like the original Evil Dead, any movie fan knows there are innumerable incredible segments and camera moves that wouldn’t have been possible without the Steadicam.

And if you’re a horror fan, you also know that two of the best movies in the genre had very innovative use of the Steadicam: Halloween and The Shining. Once Stanley Kubrick found out about the Steadicam, he knew it would be the perfect tool to help making The Shining, and John Carpenter was able to get his great Steadicam work on the big screen first for the opening segment.

As Carpenter told me, “I’ve always admired long tracking shots. Touch of Evil comes to mind, and there’s one in the original Scarface. An acquaintance of mine had done a short film that was all one take, and it was really an engrossing way of moving the camera through an environment.”

Dean Cundey, the cinematographer of Halloween, who also shot Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Jurassic Park, says the opening scene “was written to be one fluid shot. We didn’t have a lot of time or money. How do you tell three pages of a story, one shooting day, that has no dialogue? We couldn’t have done it without the Steadicam. There was no other piece of equipment that would have been able to go across the street, look into the house, go into the kitchen, up the steps, into a bedroom, and back down again.”

As Cundey further explains, because the Steadicam was a completely new device at the time, “There were very few guys who were able to operate it and carry it around with them. It was a new technology that we learned to use by the seat of our pants. It was the most intricate use of the Steadicam of anybody at the time, no matter what the budget.”

Amazingly, the opening scene in Halloween wasn’t storyboarded.

Google's image search is smart, but it's not smart. When you search for an image, Google looks at a lot of different data to bring back results--the filename of the image, its age and filetype, the text of the website where it's hosted. Searching personal photos, Google explains, is far more difficult, since there's rarely a useful filename or other identifying data. That's why Google is especially pleased with its new photo search technology, which it just rolled out for Google Plus at photos.google.com.

"This is powered by computer vision and machine learning technology, which uses the visual content of an image to generate searchable tags for photos combined with other sources like text tags and EXIF metadata to enable search across thousands of concepts like a flower, food, car, jet ski, or turtle," writes the Google Research blog. That sounds smart smart. And impressively, Google built the thing in six months.

As explained by the blog, computers, even highly advanced ones running complex algorithms, have trouble identifying what's going on in a photograph. It says toddlers are better at photo recognition. But a new technique demonstrated last October at a computer vision competition caught their eye. Google prototyped a similar system and found it twice as successful as anything they'd tried before, so they bought the startup's technology and turned it into a smart image recognition system within six months.

The rest of the post contains some interesting insight into how Google trained up its photo recognition system, which includes 2000 visual classes it can identify. Each class was trained with 5000 sample images, which is why a class like "car" can identify both exterior and interior shots. More impressive is when the system can identify more generic photographs, like picking out some kind of food to apply the "meal" class.

Even the image recognition system's mistakes are pretty smart--when it messes up, it makes mistakes a human might make, like thinking a banana slug is a snake. Those things are weird.

Arduino is, as I’ve written about before, a great hardware platform for anyone interested in building almost any sort of homebrew electronics project. One of the best things about it is that it’s undergoing constant innovation. There are dozens of different Arduino boards on the market, so you can find the perfect hardware for any kind of project you’re working on.

Unfortunately, that same huge selection of Arduino boards can make it hard for a beginner to get started with the platform. On the official site alone, there are almost 20 current- or last-gen Arduino boards listed, and there are dozens more unofficial boards for sale on other sites. Picking the one that's exactly what you need is daunting—especially if you're not familiar with the vocab used to describe the various microcontrollers and boards.

To help make the process a little easier, I'm going to look at the most common Arduino boards on the market right now, and I'll explain how to distinguish between them.

There are three broad ways to differentiate the various Arduino boards. The first is to look at the board’s processing capabilities—the microcontroller’s memory, clockspeed, and bandwidth. The processing hardware is generally entirely determined by which microcontroller chip the board uses, and constrains what kinds of software can run on that board.

The second way to differentiate between the boards is their feature set. This includes all the stuff on the board other than the microcontroller, such as input and output pins, built-in hardware like buttons and LEDs, and the interfaces available on the board (USB, Ethernet, etc).

Finally, because Arduino is meant to be built into physical projects, form factor is very important. Arduino comes a variety of shapes and sizes.

With all that out of the way, let’s look at the boards you're most likely to want to use in your project (as of June 2013). I’ll break down the distinguishing characteristics and features of each model, as well as what kind of project that board is best for.

Solid state storage is getting too fast for SATA. The most common interface for both SSDs and hard drives is serial ATA--it's been a computer mainstay since it replaced IDE about a decade ago. SATA revision 3.0 offers data speeds of approximately 600 MB/s, far faster than any 7200 RPM hard drive can read or write. But SSDs are now pushing up against that limit. They can go faster. What do we do? Turn to a new interface.

Judging by Apple's new Mac Pro, 2013 MacBook Airs and the way Ultrabooks are headed, that new interface will be PCI Express. PCIe and a new SSD product line called NGFF, or Next Gen Form Factor, are going to make Ultrabooks and flash memory-equipped laptops dramatically faster over the next two years. Let's look at how and why.

Photo credit: iFixit

A presentation from 2012's Flash Memory Summit does a good job of addressing why the industry is transitioning away from the SATA interface, at least in thin laptops. It's the data rate, as we already said--but why hasn't there been a new iteration of SATA to keep ahead of flash memory speeds? The presentation explains that "Enabling SATA beyond 600 MB/s is a long term development effort. Single lane scaling beyond ~8Gbps is challenging & requires trade-offs. Multi-lane SATA requires a new connector and modified chipset SATA controllers to make multi-lane software transparent."

PCIe doesn't have those issues. "To enable higher speed client SSDs in near term ('13/'14), PCIe is the only choice," the presentation states. "PCIe has bandwidth lead (1GB/s with Gen3). PCIe has multi-lane for scalability (x2, x4, ...). Software compatible PCIe SSDs can be built as a single port AHCI device.

Until now, mSATA has been a common SSD solution for Ultrabooks and other laptops. But beyond the speed concerns, mSATA presents some problems. At a whole five millimeters, it's too thick, and it's difficult to add extra NAND to. That's why the inudstry is moving to the Next Gen Form Factor, also called SATA Express, which is designed to support a number of sizes and interface via PCIe.

Photo credit: Anandtech

Anandtech wrote a bit about NGFF last fall, noting that it supports two sockets, one for SATA and PCIE x2 interfaces perfect for lower-end SSDs and other add-in cards like Wi-Fi. The second socket supports PCI Express up to 4 GB/s, which is crazy fast. Four gigs a second. Perhaps even crazier: SATA Express cards are even smaller than mSATA cards.

The Flash Summit Presentation also shows how this standard is going to allow for much more flexibility than mSATA, so while all NGFF cards will be thinner and narrower than mSATA, some will be longer. That's to support a standardized approach to SSD sizes. The smaller cards will be for minor storage and caching and will be either 42 or 60 millimeters long. 80 and 110 millimeter cards will hold more flash storage.

Electrical engineer and maker of things Star Simpson has taken apart her Google Glass Explorers Edition so we didn't have to. The beautifully documented teardown (sponsored by Sparkfun, and licensed under Creative Commons) revealed several new facts about the glasses:

• The housing required lots of prodding and spudging to pry open, and an internal screw was difficult to access without doing some physical damage.
• The side touchpad is run by a custom Synaptics module with a T1320A controller.
• The main board houses a TI OMAP 4430 processor and 16GB of SanDisk flash storage (of which 12GB is accessible)
• Battery capacity is marked at 2.1Wh or roughly 570 mAh, and is not user replaceable.
• The tiny display has a native resolution of 640x360, but pixels are 1/8th the size of that on an iPhone.
• The main display and computing module could be removed from the titanium housing and attached to regular prescription glasses, but the experience was subpar.

Photo credit: Catwig

And in case you're wondering, Simpson and her colleagues were able to reassemble the Google Glass after the teardown, and report that it still operates perfectly.

At the WWDC opening keynote on Monday, Apple announced a new Mac Pro. People were surprised--because Apple has ignored the Pro line for years, and because the new computer looks less like a computer and more like a classy trashcan. Ars Technica has taken a smart, critical look at the Mac Pro to talk about what's new, exciting, and not-so-exciting about the freshly engineered computer.

Ars' Dave Girard praises the engineering that went into the cylindrical body, which is cooled by a single large fan near the top. That's impressive, given the CPU power and dual-GPU setup of the Mac Pro. You can see how the whole thing fits together in a cool animated page on Apple's site. Girard also praised the PCIe storage in the system, which will offer speeds approximately double current SATA-based SSDs.

So where does the criticism come in? Expandability. The new Mac Pro is clearly engineered around external, rather than internal, expansion. Apple's website says as much. The lack of internal drive bays means the system will be relying on that PCIe memory or external hard drives, likely RAID arrays or network-attached storage. Granted, the professionals who buy Mac Pros will often have RAID setups already, but some of them will still pine for internal storage.

"The four internal drive bays of the existing Mac Pro enclosure became a comfy standard for me and my work," writes Girard. "Anything more seems like too many—but zero extra drive bays is, to put it mildly, too few. Now I will be forced to replace my existing eSATA RAID enclosure since eSATA/Thunderbolt adapters are stupidly expensive and there are no PCI slots in the machine to accommodate an eSATA adapter card. Considering the still-high price of external Thunderbolt enclosures, the price of the Mac Pro better be reasonable because it’s clear that many of us will be forced to take this route as well."

Girard makes another strong point: the focus on external expansion may encourage Thunderbolt adoption, both by the companies making hardware and the professionals deciding between PC and Mac for video editing. If the Thunderbolt market thrives, it's very good for Mac.

Two more expandability problems: the dual workstation GPUs are built onto the Mac Pro's motherboard, and there are only 4 USB 3.0 drives. Again, Apple's obviously pushing Thunderbolt over USB 3.0, but the GPU situation is troubling. It looks like Apple is putting some really powerful cards in the Mac Pro, but not being able to upgrade them 3-4 years down the road limits the computer's longterm usability.

Check out the rest of Girard's post for more on Apple's implementation of GPUs, Crossfire support, and the lack of an Nvidia option.