Wireless food probes are handy on the grill, allowing you to charge what you need without a maze of cables. In the case of Meter’s recent products, these devices let you monitor both food and ambient grill temperatures simultaneously.
There’s no doubting their usefulness, but often you need more than one to get the job done. Sometimes you need to cook steaks at different temperatures or accurately monitor the breast and thigh of your Thanksgiving turkey, for example. Meter already offers a four-probe option with the Pro XL, but that costs $349.95, and may be overkill for some backyard cooks.
Today, the Traeger-owned company launched the Meter Pro Duo, a dual-probe model that replaces Bluetooth with Wi-Fi to extend wireless range. The charger connects to your home network and then to the Meter cloud, which will allow you to monitor food and grill temperatures from anywhere on your phone. This dock also has its own battery (charges using USB-C), so you don’t have to worry about replacing batteries.
As before, Meter says the fully charged probes can last up to 24 hours, which is enough to cook even the longest brisket. If you find yourself in a pinch, a five-minute charge will give you two hours of use. Meter has once again opted for stainless steel probes, and both have six temperature sensors (five internal, one ambient). These components allow the probes to withstand temperatures up to 1000 degrees Fahrenheit.
The company says the internal sensors work up to 221 degrees Fahrenheit and are accurate to half a degree. Like previous Meter models, the probes are waterproof, which means you can use them for deep frying and sous vide. But, more importantly, this also means they’re dishwasher safe.
The Pro Duo probe sends cooking data to Meter’s app, which allows you to monitor progress on your phone. The software offers multiple cooking profiles depending on the food you’re preparing and a guided cooking system can guide you through every step of the process. There’s also a predictor algorithm at work here, which provides calculations of when your food will be ready (including resting time).
The Meter Pro Duo is available to pre-order now from the company’s website for $199.95. Shipments will begin on November 15.
While the use of generative AI in games seems almost inevitable, as the medium has always toyed with new ways to make enemies and NPCs smarter and more realistic, watching several NVIDIA ACE demos one after another made me genuinely sick to my stomach.
It wasn’t just slightly smarter enemy AI — ACE could create entire conversations out of thin air, simulate voices and try to give NPCs a sense of personality. It’s even doing this locally on your PC, powered by NVIDIA’s RTX GPUs. But while all of this might sound good on paper, I hated watching the AI NPCs in action for almost every second.
I think my deep dislike of NVIDIA’s ACE-powered AI boils down to this: there’s nothing charming about it. No joy, no warmth, no humanity. Every ACE AI character feels like a developer cutting corners in the worst way possible, as if you can see their contempt for the audience in the form of a boring NPC.
I would much rather scroll through some on-screen text, at least I wouldn’t have to interact with weird robot voices.
During NVIDIA’s Editors Day at CES, a gathering for media to learn more about the new RTX 5000-series GPUs and their related technology, I was also disappointed by a demo of PUBG’s AI Ally. Its answers were like something you’d hear from a pre-recorded phone tree.
Ally also failed to find the gun when the player asked, which could have been a fatal mistake in the crowded map. At one point, the PUBG partner spent about 15 seconds attacking enemies while the demo player was yelling at him to get in the car.