There is something wrong with the tractor. The water-in-fuel sensor, a small device embedded in the John Deere machine that monitors the integrity of its diesel engine, is disconnected. And Iโve got to fix it.
Iโm not a mechanic or a farmer. Iโm poking at a laptop at John Deereโs corporate office in Santa Clara, California. Thereโs a cable connecting the computer to a 5130ML tractor sitting on the grass nearby. A bright red notification sits on the screen, telling me something is wrong. I type in a question and the software pulls up instructions and a few images from the user manual that matches the serial number of the machine.
This week on the GeekWire Podcast: A study commissioned by the City of Seattle says the city is not in decline but is in danger โ finding that 10 companies, nine of them in tech, pay three-quarters of the payroll tax on large employers, and that the tax structure uniquely penalizes the hiring of senior, high-compensation workers.
The report says Seattle should be most concerned about AI but most active in cleantech, the one industry the city can actually shape, since it owns the electric utility and controls permitting, building codes and land use.
Meanwhile, the Seattle Times and Newsday sue Microsoft and OpenAI, accusing them of copying hundreds of thousands of articles to train their AI models, putting Microsoftโs hometown paper against a company that helps fund some of its journalism.
Which leads us to a new GeekWire Trivia Challenge about the Microsoft products that Apple later turned into categories. Stick around to the final segment to see if you can figure it out.
Upcoming Event
AI meets real estate
GeekWire, in partnership with Real Estate at Work, is recording the GeekWire Podcast live at 4 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 16, with Toby Roberts, SVP of Engineering at Zillow. John Cook and Todd Bishop host with Real Residential broker Leka Devatha at Atmosphere Seattle. Grab a ticket.
FIRST LOOK Dell's UltraSharp 52 display is a joyously enormous head-turner, but probably too much monitor for most users. Dell debuted the display at the CES show earlier this year. It's now on sale for $3,000. Sadly, I lack a PC capable of driving the screen at its full 6144 x 2560 resolution and 120 Hz refresh rate. Even at a miserly 3840 x 2160, however, I often marveled at how much it could display. Consider the screenshot below, which shows 50 columns and 89 rows of a single Excel spreadsheet โ 4,450 cells in total. Here's another look at the monitor in full flight: a screen grab of Zwift, the virtual cycling metaverse I visit regularly as part of my exercise routine. At that size, Zwift felt more immersive and enjoyable than it does on a smaller screen. The display also handled motion smoothly during Zwift. other games, and streamed video. Getting used to it It took me a while to appreciate the monitor. When I first plugged it in, my occasionally-stiff middle-aged neck strained as I swiveled to view content at the edges and corners, while wielding my mouse to move its pointer between the screen's extremities felt like flapping my arms. My eyes didn't enjoy the experience at first either. I wear mild reading glasses while working, and found myself repeatedly refocusing as I looked across the curved display. For the first few days I spent with the screen, I therefore practiced "pillarboxing" โ running the display at 3840 x 2160 and only using the center of the monitor while pixels on the edges remained dark. That didn't feel odd or distracting, perhaps because I often use "letterboxing" while watching video on my TV or tablet โ leaving pixels at the top and bottom of the screen unused. As I grew accustomed to the enormo-monitor, I began using its entire area. Getting there was not straightforward: each of the three PCs I used with the monitor (one at a time, not together) required manual adjustment before I found a resolution that did not distort text and images. Dell's companion app was no help. It was slow to install, ran as if stuck in digital treacle, and is little more than a glorified front end for the Windows System/Display control panel. The HDMI connection to my desktop โ an Acemagic mini-PC โ repeatedly dropped out, forcing me to reseat the cable every day. The same PC and cable work reliably with my everyday monitor. I tried another cable and the problem persisted. I reached out to Dell, who suggested my two different cables were to blame. I connected my laptop โ a Dell Inspiron Plus 7441 โ over Thunderbolt and experienced some flickering that went away without needing to reseat the cable. A ten-year-old ThinkPad Carbon X1 connected fine over HDMI, but had even more trouble finding appropriate settings. But once I got the machine going and got used to its colossal size, my initial fatigue vanished. I realized I was squinting a little less than I do with my everyday display, a seven-year-old 32-inch Samsung that lacks the HDR feature the Dell machine includes. I sometimes use my lunch breaks to watch some rugby highlights, and the display handled those with ease. The easily observable nuances of small ads on team shirts would doubtless please sponsors. I was also pleasantly surprised by the display's speakers, which rendered my favorite tunes brightly and crisply. My current high rotation tunes include guitar feedback legends The Jesus and Mary Chain, spiky garage pop from Welsh outfit The Bug Club, and mumbly "power disco" by Getdown Services. JAMC's trademark fuzz was warm and deep, I felt like I could hear new strings on The Bug Club's guitars, and Getdown Services' beats thumped meatily. The speakers' location at the rear of the monitor led to a few "Where's that sound coming from?" moments, but those quickly became tolerable. Weighty issues I was impressed by Dell's packaging, which places the cables and included stand in clearly marked cardboard compartments within the shell protecting the screen. That matters because the box is a whopper that would be difficult to lug out of an IKEA and into a small car. Easy access to the assembly parts means a little less wrestling. At 12.95 kg (28.5 lbs), the monitor isn't problematically heavy โ but is maybe too weighty for Dell's stand, as it never sat perfectly level, and I could find no way to straighten it. The screen is also unwieldy: I recommend connecting any cables you plan to use in advance, because shifting and lifting it to access its ports is not easy, especially in constricted spaces behind a desk. Tucked under the monitor's bottom-left edge is a forward-facing USB hub with two USB-C ports and one USB-A port. Making one of them a Thunderbolt port would have made it easier to connect a laptop without rummaging behind the beast. I finished my time with this giant display convinced that it is a lovely machine, but not one I need, as my work consists mostly of writing and editing text and browsing the web. Those who work with visual material may adore its size and the immersion created by its gentle curve. Many of Dell's promotional images show the device displaying multiple financial data feeds. The company pitches it as a replacement for four smaller monitors, requiring only one power cable and dispensing with a complex collection of stands. That seems like a more sensible use of the screen than everyday knowledge work. To finish, here's one more photo. I started working from home in 2002 but had no room to dedicate to an office. I therefore splurged about $700 โ big bucks at the time โ on a 15-inch, 1024 x 768 Dell 1503FP LCD monitor so that a CRT did not dominate my lounge room. It still works, although when the time came to take this snap, I couldn't find the HDMI-to-VGA adapter I use to fire it up. Here it is anyway, posed in front of its giant descendant to offer some historical perspective on how monitors have grown. ยฎ
On a sunny morning in June, I walked to work with a quadruped robot beside me. Iโve never gotten more attention from strangers.
A bunch of people snapped pictures of my robot dog. Several people asked me questions. Was it mine? (Yes.) Did I build it? (No.) Was it being used for surveillance? (No.)
Biological dogs kept a safe distance from my mechanical companion. Some growled or barked at it.
Oracleโs proposed investment in 2 gigawatts of renewable energy projects for New Mexico comes as local opposition could delay development of the Project Jupiter data center that Oracle is building for OpenAI.
The two tech companies are developing the $165 billion Project Jupiter data center in Santa Teresa, New Mexico, as part of the broader Stargate AI infrastructure project announced by President Donald Trump in 2025. But Project Jupiter faces local protests and court battles over concerns about its environmental impactsโand the latest Oracle announcement on September 8 seeking proposals for renewable energy projects does not change the fact that the data center will be powered by fuel cells that consume natural gas.
โLike all matching programs, this would be synthetic in the sense that 2 GW of renewables wouldn't directly power the data center,โ wrote Michael Thomas, CEO of the Cleanview data platform that tracks renewable energy and data center projects, in a LinkedIn post.
Las Vegas Raiders running back Ashton Jeanty, an investor in Nukleus and a spokesperson for the platform. (Nukleus Photo / Ben Miller)
Hector Rivas spent a decade building ThriftBooks into one of the countryโs largest used-book sellers, before an unlikely second act: co-founding a sports agency representing NFL players.
That career change led him to the problem behind his newest startup, and to the Las Vegas Raiders running back who just invested in it.
Nukleus founder and CEO Hector Rivas. (LinkedIn Photo)
Nukleus, based in Issaquah, Wash., is building what Rivas calls an operating system for the business of sports. The idea is a single workspace for everyone in an athleteโs orbit: agent, lawyer, CPA, financial advisor, marketing team, and others. It lets them all work from the same contracts, deadlines and records, rather than each keeping a separate pile of emails and spreadsheets.
The idea came out of Rivasโs years at Disruptive Sports, the agency he co-founded in 2020 and left earlier this year.
Ashton Jeanty, who signed a four-year, $35.9 million rookie contract with the Raiders in 2025, has taken equity in the company and signed on to serve as its public face.
Nukleus has also named four strategic investors: Mat McBride, Microsoftโs executive vice president and CFO for commercial products and infrastructure; WaFd Bank President and CEO Brent Beardall; investor Skyler Nelson, previously of Vulcan Capital and its successor firm Cercano; and Dr. Brett Kindle of the Andrews Institute in Gulf Breeze, Fla.
The company has a team of 12 based out of its Issaquah office, plus a supporting engineering team in India. Most of the team is engineering.
Other executives include CTO Eric Ahlstrom, previously at Microsoft, Unity, Oracle and ESPN; chief creative officer Ben Miller, a former creative director at the University of Washington and CAA Sports; and CFO Matt Porter, who worked with Rivas at ThriftBooks, EcoGoodz and Disruptive.
Nukleus closed a pre-seed round from friends and family in 2025 and is raising again now. Rivas declined to disclose the amount raised by the company so far.
From books to football: Rivas was ThriftBooksโ first CEO, running the used-book seller for about a decade after it launched in 2003. Based in the Seattle area, the company grew during his tenure from a storage unit in Kirkland, Wash., to 10 distribution facilities in 10 states, by his account.
He went on to found EcoGoodz, a used-goods and overstock brokerage, and in 2020 co-founded Disruptive Sports Agency with agent Henry Organ.
Rivas, an NFLPA-certified contract advisor, worked the business side of the agency. He left earlier this year to build Nukleus full time.
The years inside the agency are what produced the idea.
Everyone in a playerโs orbit was working off โtheir own version of the truth,โ Rivas explained via email: the agent, the lawyer, the CPA, the financial advisor, the marketing team. The athlete, he said, โwas the one absorbing the cost of that disconnect,โ in slower decisions and deals that fell through the cracks.
The pitch in Las Vegas: Jeanty and Rivas knew each other from Rivasโs years at the sports agency, and Rivas said the running back had been tracking what he was building.
โBecause Ashton and I already knew each other, and heโd been aware of what I was building, the conversation came together naturally,โ Rivas said.
He flew to Las Vegas to walk Jeanty through the model, the team, and where the company was headed. Rivas said Jeantyโs equity reflects both money invested and his role promoting the platform.
In a statement, Jeanty described the job of running his own career.
โComing into the NFL, you become a CEO, directing a team of agents, advisors, and marketers, whether youโre ready or not,โ he said. โNukleus is what finally gets them all on the same page, so I can actually run that team the way it should be run. Thatโs why I invested in it.โ
Where things stand: The product is in a free beta with about 30 users, including athletes, agents, agencies, lawyers and marketing staff. Nukleus plans to charge $99 per user per month for a starter plan and $249 for a full-featured one, with custom enterprise pricing. Athletes join free.
Alongside contract storage, deadline tracking and a shared workspace, the company is building AI tools meant to answer questions about contract terms and league rules.
Others are working similar territory. Agent Live 360 sells software built specifically for sports agents, and Opendorse, which says it works with more than 1,000 sports agents, offers tools to negotiate, approve and track deals. Nukleus says it differs from narrower tools by serving everyone in an athleteโs orbit.
The bigger bet: The company is looking well past a single app.
โLong-term, I donโt see this as a tool athletes use, I see it as the infrastructure the entire business of sports runs on,โ Rivas said. โEvery athlete becomes the center of their own connected team, and every professional working with them, across every sport, at every level, operates on one shared system instead of a hundred disconnected ones.โ
ON CALL Friday morning is The Register's home for tech support stories, which we showcase in On Call โ the weekly column made possible by readers generously sharing their experience of what it takes to fix things for the furious, fatuous, or feebleminded users that infest every workplace. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Lucia," who was once ordered to report immediately to a company director's office. "All of my files have gone," the director fumed, before insisting this was all the fault of the IT team, who were all inept, incompetent, and unfit for duty. Lucia examined the director's PC and found an empty "Home" folder. "I saw that he had clicked on the 'Up' directory icon to get there," Lucia told On Call. "I casually clicked on the 'Documents' folder and his files magically reappeared." Guess how much gratitude the director showed Lucia. If you guessed zero, congratulations. When Lucia tried to impart a quick lesson in directory navigation, the director was having none of it. "He simply bundled me out of his office, yelling, 'And make sure it doesn't happen again!'" Have your users refused to learn a simple fix? If so, a single click here will speed your story to On Call, so we can share it on a future Friday. ยฎ
As longer, more complex passwords have become a necessity, remembering all those strings of numbers, letters, and special characters has become nearly impossible. Password managers can solve that problem, but what happens when you want to move to a different login organizer? Sure, you could manually type all your logins into a new app, but now Android can do that for you without the tedium.
Google designed the new login transfer process to happen entirely on your phone, so you need the corresponding apps installed with your credentials synced. To start the move, you'll have to find the import option in the app you want to use. The location of that feature will vary, but in Google Password Manager (built into Android), it's near the top under the settings tab.
The import option in Google Password Manager will plug in to the new migration system, while export still just creates an unencrypted CSV with your passwords that can be dumped into any app. It will be similar in other apps, so make sure to start the process in the app you want to use. Currently, this works in Google's app, 1Password, Bitwarden, and Dashlane.
Chinese-made drones are flying out the bodies of flood victims and delivering food to survivors in the aftermath of devastating flash floods on the border of Nepal and Chinaโs Tibetan region.
Nepalโs army has been using four DJI FlyCart 100 drones donated from China to make 10 to 16 aid deliveries each day, according to Reuters. This comes after a partial glacier collapse in the Himalayan mountains unleashed a sudden surge of water, mud, and debris that swept through border crossings, valley communities, and hydropower projects on August 26.
The DJI Flycart 100 Drones come with a 98-foot rope and winch system for picking up and dropping off heavy loads. The website of Chinese drone company DJI describes the drones as being able to carry between 187 and 220 pounds, depending on the battery configuration.
Apple Watch Series 12 adds a new health sensing system, Audio Intelligence, faster charging, longer workout battery life, and ceramic case options too.
Login
Credit:
Boone Ashworth
