Tag:

drones

Two Amazon Prime Air drones crashed in Arizona

by admin October 1, 2025

Two Amazon delivery drones reportedly collided with a crane this morning in Tolleson, AZ. The incident occurred about two miles from a fulfillment center run by the tech company and involved two of its Prime Air drones. No injuries have been reported. Law enforcement were called to the scene, however Sgt. Erik Mendez of the Tolleson police told local radio station KTAR that the Federal Aviation Administration would be taking over the investigation.

“We’re aware of an incident involving two Prime Air drones in Tolleson, Arizona,” Amazon representative Terrence Clark said. “We’re currently working with the relevant authorities to investigate.”

Amazon began offering a drone delivery option in the Phoenix area last year. The drones only fly during the day and if weather conditions are favorable. The company received FAA approval to ship several more products by drone in May.

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October 1, 2025 0 comments

Gaming Gear

Retail Stores May Soon Use Drones to Chase Thieves

by admin September 26, 2025

As if we weren’t already tracked enough, malls and stores across the U.S. might soon deploy drones to catch shoplifters.

Controversial surveillance company Flock Safety, which supplies drones and other invasive tech to police departments, announced on Thursday that it is now offering its drones to private security firms.

Drone use in policing is on the rise, and this move makes it likely that private companies will soon adopt the same tech. But as drones become normalized for public and private security, privacy advocates warn they could push the U.S. closer to a surveillance state.

“Security leaders are being asked to protect more with less across bigger footprints, tighter budgets, and real staffing constraints,” Rahul Sidhu, Flock Safety’s VP of Aviation, said in a press release.

The company says each drone dock can cover roughly a 3.5-mile radius with flight times up to 45 minutes, providing rapid response for warehouses, rail yards, hospitals, ports, malls, and business centers.

In its press release, Flock Safety pitched its drones specifically to retail stores, arguing that organized retail crime remains high. It cited an industry report showing that retailers saw a 93% increase in shoplifting incidents in 2024, and said the drones’ quick response could help reduce related costs over time. Of course, it’s worth noting that retailers’ claims of a shoplifting epidemic were largely debunked in 2024, but that didn’t stop police departments from going on a shopping spree for new toys.

Keith Kauffman, Flock’s drone program director, told the MIT Technology Review how the drones could work in practice.

When a store’s security team spots shoplifters leaving the scene, they can activate the drone, which is docked on the roof. Equipped with video and thermal cameras, the drone can track thieves escaping on foot or in a vehicle. Its video feed can then be sent to the company’s security team and transmitted directly to local police.

Flock’s technology is already in use in many police departments. Just this week, its license plate cameras were credited with catching a murder suspect in El Paso and locating a missing teen in Boulder, Colorado.

But not everyone is thrilled with the company’s tech. The city of Evanston, Illinois, ordered Flock Safety this week to uninstall 18 license plate readers after Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias discovered that Flock had given U.S. Customs and Border Protection access to the readers’ data. And in August, Congress launched an investigation into what one member called Flock’s “role in enabling invasive surveillance practices that threaten the privacy, safety, and civil liberties of women, immigrants, and other vulnerable Americans.”

ACLU Senior Policy Analyst Jay Stanley has warned in recent years that the expanding use of drones in policing and private security requires strict privacy guardrails, including limits on when and where drones can be used and how video and other sensor data are handled.

“We don’t want to end up in a nightmare scenario where drones are used for mass surveillance and the experience of having police flying cameras buzzing overhead becomes routine in people’s daily lives,” Stanley wrote in a recent blog post.

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September 26, 2025 0 comments

Game Updates

DJI Is Clearing Out Its Summer Stock of Mini 4K Drones, Prices Back to Black Friday Lows

by admin September 24, 2025

Choosing the right drone can feel like a real challenge with so many options out there. But if you’re just starting out or flying for fun, there’s one key thing to keep in mind: your drone should weigh under 250 grams to avoid the hassle of FAA registration and Remote ID requirements.

That narrows your choices quite a bit, and luckily, DJI offers two solid options in that category. The ultimate bang for your buck is the Mini 4K — and right now, it’s available on sale at an all-time low of $249, down from $299, at Amazon.

See at Amazon

The Ultimate Drone with Impressive Power and Precision

The DJI Mini 4K is not just light but it’s also designed to impress. Its small body is lightweight but it’s what it does in the air that truly counts: Loaded with a 4K Ultra HD camera and combined with a 3-axis gimbal stabilization system, it records video with silky, movie-quality smoothness. Whether capturing a sunrise, sunset, or nighttime scene, the sharpness and clarity are excellent. This means you don’t necessarily need to be an expert to create professional-grade videos.

Due to its brushless motors, the Mini 4K supports wind resistance as high as 38 kilometers per hour — that’s Level 5 wind resistance. It also comes with the ability to take off and fly at altitudes as high as 4,000 meters. This guarantees that your flying experience is still stable and sensitive even if the weather gets a bit challenging.

The increased battery life adds an important plus to your flight duration: You can purchase sets that include one battery for 31 minutes (like that one on sale at Amazon), two batteries total of 62 minutes, or even three batteries where you can fly for up to 93 minutes.

Casual flyers and beginners will appreciate its simplicity and safety features: With one-tap takeoff and landing, GPS-enabled “Return to Home” and automatic hovering, even those new to drones can quickly get comfortable behind the controls. Plus, the DJI Fly app offers in-app tutorials to speed up the learning process so you’ll be flying and capturing your best shots in no time. The Mini 4K also comes with intelligent QuickShots like Helix, Dronie, Rocket, Circle, and Boomerang that make tricky flying maneuvers a breeze and capture stunning shots with only a few taps.

If you want to try aerial photography, this drone is the ideal friend.

See at Amazon

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September 24, 2025 0 comments

Game Updates

Here are 239 imaginative, daft or broken falling block games featuring laser drones, LocoRocos and playing cards

by admin September 22, 2025

It is written that when the Sumerian king Gilgamesh first beheld the gleaming ramparts of Uruk&hyphen;Haven, many centuries ago, he said unto his architects: “be sure to save up gaps for those long straight ones, and try your best to start a multiplier”. But then Gilgamesh realised that, by means of temporal fluctuations too nonsensical to explain, he was actually looking at the submissions page for Falling Block Jam 2025, the latest Itch.io “make a thing with a theme” festival, which ran from last week till today.

Falling block games! Such a simple concept, capable of so many perversions. I have played a handful of the jam’s 239 entries and found them to be enjoyable, if often rudimentary. As is the style round these parts, I will now try to briefly communicate their enjoyableness to you using words. This is honestly going to be quite difficult, because I keep seeing another entry I want to try.

A pretty one to start: Bloquecitos is a Tetrislike with real-time physics, and blocks that merge to create different-shaped blocks when you match their patterns. It’s a crafty rejig of the developer’s previous Pancitomerge. I’m fond of the mosaic tile patterns, and I like engineering cascades by merging two blocks so that others tumble together.

Image credit: Fáyer / Joven Paul / Rock Paper Shotgun

This Side Up, meanwhile, trades the “falling” component of the “falling block” genre for a gradually retreating 3D camera. You’ve got a shipping crate and you’re trying to fill it with vintage household objects such as cacti, cathode-ray televisions, Nintendo Gamecubes, and lizard tanks.

I strongly relate to this one inasmuch as I had a bunch of stuff in lock-up during a flat move last year. There’s a dark art to filling shipping crates so as to optimise both storage space and retrievability. I do not claim to have mastered this art. After all, I managed to divide up all my paired belongings between separate crates. I had left socks and saucepans in one box, right socks and saucepan lids in another. Get ye behind me, This Side Up! You are bringing back traumatic memories.

Image credit: Apotheum

Professor Gambler’s Bone Scrambler is a falling block game born of the fateful realisation that a thrown die is a kind of falling block. Each turn, it rolls out a line of dice. You then slide the line horizontally to match the blocks below and create combos, or spend points to reroll the set. How do you earn points? From combos. It’s got nice chiptune aesthetics, as you might expect from a game that has also been submitted to GBJAM 13.

A Pico-8 one next. In Recycled Blocks, you control a little laser drone that has to sculpt blocks as they fall to complete work orders and remove them from the board. I found the control scheme a bit confusing, but I love the concept. Ditto the self-explanatory Circuit Makers.

Jelly Well, meanwhile, gets two thumbs up for its subliminal hatred of LocoRocos and for its soundscape of human mouth noises. More of this kind of thing, please. Call of Duty games would sell twice as much if all the gun effects consisted of voice actors yelling “bang”. I would hire Sir Anthony Hopkins to voice an AK47, myself.

Image credit: Walaber Entertainment

Simply scrolling the Falling Block Jam submission feed makes me feel as though I’m losing badly at Tetris, so I’ll resist the urge to write up any more. OK, one more, but only because it doesn’t require a computer: Doctor Vs Virus is a table-top falling block game you can play with a standard deck of cards.

If you see any others you like, please rotate and slide them dextrously into the comments below. Why not see if you can form a line with people recommending the same game – I’ll try to add some block-clearing score attack functionality to our moderation software.

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September 22, 2025 0 comments