The DIY project mixes nostalgia with one of tech's most iconic designs. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. The Apple Macintosh personal computer is an iconic piece of tech history--with an emphasis on the word Compared to the 32-bit PCs of yesteryear, today's hardware is so advanced that it often feels like trying to compare a gas-guzzling Ford Model T to today's all-electric cars . Combine that emotion with one of the best examples of computing miniaturization on the market, and you get a DIY project that pays homage to the computer's earliest days while celebrating how far the tech has come since then. I turned a CLOCK into a vintage Mac! YouTube channel This Does Not Compute recently showcased their journey to turn a tiny desk accessory into a full-fledged Macintosh computer.

Forty years ago this week, on 22 January 1984, a stunning advertising video was screened during the Super Bowl broadcast in the US. It was directed by Ridley Scott and evoked the dystopian atmosphere of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Long lines of grey, shaven zombies march in lockstep through a tunnel into a giant amphitheatre, where they sit in rows gawping up at a screen on which an authoritarian figure is intoning a message. "Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the information purification directives," he drones. "We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology."

On Sunday, 22 January 1984, the Los Angeles Raiders defeated the Washington (then) Redskins 38-9 in Super Bowl XVIII. With the exception of a few aging Raiders' fans, what we all remember better from that evening 40 years ago was one advertisement that set the tone for a techno-optimism that would dominate the 21st century. The ad showed an auditorium full of zombie-like figures watching a projection of an elderly leader who resembled the Emperor from 1980's The Empire Strikes Back. A young, athletic woman in red and white (the colors of the flag of Poland, which had been engaging in a massive labor uprising against the Soviet-controlled communist state) twirls a hammer and throws it through the screen framing the leader's face, just as armored police rush in to try to stop her. The ad explicitly invoked George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Like everyone else who got to test Apple's new Vision Pro after its unveiling at the Worldwide Developers Conference in Cupertino, California, this week, I couldn't wait to experience it. But when an Apple technician at the ad hoc test facility used an optical device to check out my prescription lenses, I knew that there might be a problem. The lenses in my spectacles have prisms to address a condition that otherwise gives me double vision. Apple has a set of preground Zeiss lenses to handle most of us who wore glasses, but none could address my problem. In any case, my fears were justified: When I got to the demo room, the setup for eye-tracking--a critical function of the device--didn't work. I was able to experience only a subset of the demos.

One of only two surviving prototypes of the original Apple Macintosh computer will go up for auction this week – at an asking price of £155,000. The prototype, which was made in 1983, features the aborted 5.25-inch'Twiggy' disk drive, and is going under the hammer at Bonhams in New York on Wednesday. The Macintosh began as a personal project of inventor Jef Raskin before the late Apple founder Steve Jobs took it over. The original plan was to use a 5.25-inch drive to greatly expand the capacity of standard floppy discs. But they proved unreliable, so a 3.5 inch drive, which was more robust and small enough to fit in a shirt pocket, was chosen instead for mass production.

Canada's busiest airport will soon be using artificial intelligence-powered technology to detect weapons. The operator of Toronto's Pearson International Airport says it has agreed to test the new system developed at an Ivy League American university and marketed by a B.C. company. Vancouver-based Liberty Defense Holdings Ltd. says the technology, known as Hexwave, can detect both metallic and non-metallic weapons ranging from guns and knives to explosives. It operates by capturing radar images, then using artificial intelligence to analyze those images for signs of a weapon concealed in bags or under clothing. Liberty says the technology is not able to recognize facial features and therefore does not pose a privacy risk, a position experts in the field view with some skepticism.

In this episode we talk about the future of Neuralink, Elon Musk's brain interface technology. It's recently gone through a new funding round and is planning a $51 million fundraising effort. How plausible is Neuralink's ambitious goal to connect a human mind to the cloud? We discuss; the ability to think of a question and you just "know" the answer just like knowledge you have today - Thought communication. You could connect your mind to someone else and have telepathic communication - You could experience someone else's experience.

A number of this week's milestones in the history of technology showcase two prominent computer industry showmen, Steve Jobs and Thomas Watson Sr., their respective companies, Apple and IBM, and how they sold smart machines to the general public. On January 22, 1984, the Apple Macintosh was introduced in the "1984" television commercial aired during Super Bowl XVIII. The commercial was later called by Advertising Age "the greatest commercial ever made." It appears IBM wants it all. Apple is perceived to be the only hope to offer IBM a run for its money.

Electronic Versions of ALL AAAI Proceedings are Now Available! This year's theme was bridging theory and practice: theorybased practical implementations and commercial applications. In keeping with this theme, part of the symposium focused on demonstrations of unique and innovative AI applications. There were 24 half-hour contributed talks and the following four 1-hour invited lectures: Reid Simmons (Carnegie Mellon University) presented "Creating Reliable Autonomous Systems," which featured monitoring and error recovery and formal verification techniques for intelligent systems. The Bar Ilan Symposia on the Foundations of Artificial Intelligence are a series of research meetings held in Israel every two years.

Apple may now be the world's biggest technology company, but in the eighties, its position wasn't so secure. The PC was market was small, albeit growing fast, and IBM's perceived dominance had Cupertino worried. Back then, computers were clunky and demanded a steep learning curve. Apple knew things had to change. "Insanely great" were the words Steve Jobs used when he introduced the first Mac, the Macintosh 128K, at the company's annual general meeting on January 24th, 1984.