Month: September 2017

Fallout 1 celebrates 20th anniversary, is now totally free to own on Steam

(credit: Bethesda) What’s stopped you from playing the original 1997 version of Fallout in recent years? Can’t find your old install CD? Too busy playing other games? Afraid to once again run into a deathclaw? Bethesda wants to fix that with a 20th anniversary gift: a free copy of the very first Fallout game. The giveaway is a Steam exclusive, so you can’t head to shops like GOG or Humble to claim a copy, but it’s otherwise as simple as logging in and choosing “install game” from its Steam store listing . As of right now, you have a little over 24 hours to claim the freebie, which expires at midnight Pacific time on Saturday, September 30. (That was the game’s exact release date in 1997, if you’re keeping score.) Sadly, no other games in the series have received a discount to honor the game’s birthday, and Bethesda has not timed any other new game or content releases to honor the date. You’ll have to wait until December 12 for the next big one: Fallout 4 VR , which will launch exclusively for the HTC Vive headset on that date for $59.99. (That price will likely only include that game’s core content, as opposed to  Fallout 4 ‘s “game of the year” edition that includes its extra DLC for free.) Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Fallout 1 celebrates 20th anniversary, is now totally free to own on Steam

Essential Phone review: Impressive for a new company but not competitive

We have a new contender in the smartphone space. “Essential” is a new OEM that came seemingly out of nowhere, announced by Andy Rubin a mere nine months ago . Rubin is the co-founder and former CEO of Android Inc., a little company that was snatched up by Google in 2005 and went on to build the world’s most popular operating system. Rubin left Google, and Essential is his new startup with ambitions in the smartphone and smart home markets. Amazon, Tencent, and Foxconn have already invested in Essential, and the latest round of funding values the company at  more than a billion dollars—and this was before it even shipped a product. With the launch of the “Essential Phone,” we finally have that first product: a high-end, $700 smartphone running the operating system Rubin helped create. The phone more or less leaves Android alone, and, with the backing of hardware manufacturer Foxconn, most of the innovation here is in the hardware. Read 79 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Essential Phone review: Impressive for a new company but not competitive

SNES Classic launches with digital trove of classic instruction manuals

Enlarge / Cranky Kong pops up a lot in the Donkey Kong Country manual to tell you how bad everything is. (credit: Nintendo) Last year, the NES Classic’s launch was met with something that I argued was more interesting and valuable in the game-preservation sense: a gigantic dump of NES and Famicom instruction manuals , all free to download in PDF format. They included a range of weird and rarely seen game-instruction books from across the world, and unlike their source product, people could actually get them. We are passionate fans of the days when games actually included printed instruction manuals, so one of the first things we did with review units of the SNES Classic was tap through its menus to the “instructions” tab, then jot down the URL where Nintendo would eventually dump a similar motherload of SNES and Super Famicom instruction manuals. That day has arrived. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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SNES Classic launches with digital trove of classic instruction manuals

Disney merges its kid-friendly streaming options into a single app

Disney has combined four of its kid-friendly streaming apps into one all-encompassing one called DisneyNOW . It has everything that the separate Disney Channel, Disney XD, Disney Junior and Radio Disney apps had, but all of the content is now consolidated under a single main app. DisneyNOW has full show episodes and livestreaming of shows airing on Disney Channel, Disney Junior and Disney XD when you use a valid cable, satellite or digital service — such as Hulu and YouTube TV — login. Multiple users can create their own profiles and the app will hold their spot in shows they don’t finish and suggest content they might like based on what they watch. DisneyNOW also has games, more of which will be added monthly, and Disney Channel original movies. However, it doesn’t have theatrical releases . Disney is saving those for its Netflix rival set to launch sometime in 2019. DisneyNOW is available now on iOS, Apple TV, Android, Fire tablets and Roku with Fire TV, Android TV and web support coming in 2018. Via: TechCrunch Source: Disney

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Disney merges its kid-friendly streaming options into a single app

Amazon commissions three new sci-fi shows: Lazarus, Snow Crash, and Ringworld

(credit: Image Comics) Finally, we have some good news for the end of the week. According to Variety , Amazon is going on a bit of a sci-fi binge. The streaming network, which has already given us delights like The Man in the High Castle and an excellent new version of The Tick, has commissioned three new series: the Larry Niven classic Ringworld, Neal Stephenson’s cyberpunk Snow Crash, and (the one that brightened my day most)  Lazarus  by Greg Rucka and Michael Lark. Assuming all three remain true to their source material, each will be a very different vision of the future. Ringworld takes place nearly a thousand years from now in a post-scarcity culture. Written in 1970 and the first of a long-running series of books, the titular Ringworld is a vast habitat in space. In Ringworld, our hero is a bored 200-year old hired by some aliens to investigate this artificial world—a 600 million-mile (950 million km) ribbon orbiting a Sun-like star. It’s been awhile since I’ve read the book but it’s easy to see how previous attempts to adapt it for the screen have ended in failure. But with an Amazonian budget and and ever-more capable CGI, now might be the perfect time to try. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Amazon commissions three new sci-fi shows: Lazarus, Snow Crash, and Ringworld

This $120 HDMI cable claims to make your picture better… and it does

Enlarge (credit: Marseille ) Well, this is a turn-up for the books. Normally an HDMI cable that claims to improve your picture quality would be just so much audiophool [editorial standards prevent me from using an appropriate noun here]. HDMI cables carry digital signals, and bits are bits, right? Add to that a “directional” claim—you’ve gotta plug the right end into the TV—and normally our eyes would be rolling. But the Marseille mCable Gaming Edition appears to be a working, legitimate product. It’s an HDMI cable that makes the kind of claims that we’ve come to expect from audiophile con men, but there’s a key difference: Marseille isn’t making its performance claims on the basis of specious nonsense about construction, materials, and chakras. Rather, this cord works because the Gaming Edition HDMI cable has a microchip in it. That microchip performs anti-aliasing of the signal passed through the cable. The cable is intended for console gamers. While the Xbox One X is set to shake things up a bit when it’s released later this year, the consoles currently on the market are, especially from a GPU perspective, relatively underpowered. While PC gamers can readily achieve 1080p or better with a wide range of anti-aliasing options—which offer all kinds of trade-offs between performance, image quality, and the visibility of jagged edges—console gamers have far fewer options. Their graphics processors just aren’t strong enough to offer the same kind of flexibility and image quality. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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This $120 HDMI cable claims to make your picture better… and it does

Critical EFI Code in Millions of Macs Isn’t Getting Apple’s Updates

Andy Greenberg, writing for Wired:At today’s Ekoparty security conference, security firm Duo plans to present research on how it delved into the guts of tens of thousands of computers to measure the real-world state of Apple’s so-called extensible firmware interface, or EFI. This is the firmware that runs before your PC’s operating system boots and has the potential to corrupt practically everything else that happens on your machine. Duo found that even Macs with perfectly updated operating systems often have much older EFI code, due to either Apple’s neglecting to push out EFI updates to those machines or failing to warn users when their firmware update hits a technical glitch and silently fails. For certain models of Apple laptops and desktop computers, close to a third or half of machines have EFI versions that haven’t kept pace with their operating system system updates. And for many models, Apple hasn’t released new firmware updates at all, leaving a subset of Apple machines vulnerable to known years-old EFI attacks that could gain deep and persistent control of a victim’s machine. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Critical EFI Code in Millions of Macs Isn’t Getting Apple’s Updates

Delta to offer free in-flight use of WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and iMessage

 Starting October 1, passengers on most Delta will have free access to WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and iMessage. To access the feature, a passenger will have to log into Delta’s in-flight wifi portal powered by Gogo. This is first time an airline has offered such a service throughout its fleet. Traditional SMS messages will not work. Only the aforementioned mobile messaging services… Read More

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Delta to offer free in-flight use of WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and iMessage

Moscow officially turns on facial recognition for its city-wide camera network

 Like many cities, Moscow has an enormous network of CCTV cameras, but unlike many cities, thousands of those cameras are now hooked up to a powerful facial recognition system that can track criminals (and trash collectors) wherever they go. The privacy implications are serious, of course, but a large scale rollout like this will help make them part of the public discussion. The facial… Read More

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Moscow officially turns on facial recognition for its city-wide camera network