Tag: digital

Valve’s Steam Link: better than a 50-foot HDMI cable

Steam Machines are finally here — real gaming PCs designed to live in your entertainment center and play the role of hardcore gaming console. There’s just one problem: I’ve never wanted one. Don’t get me wrong: Valve’s quest to drag PC gaming into the living room is awesome, but I already have an incredibly powerful gaming rig in my office. I don’t need a second, redundant machine in front of my couch. On the other hand, I’m an insane person who drilled holes in his wall to run 50 feet of cabling from his gaming PC to the back of his television set. There’s an easier way, according to Valve, and it’s called the Steam Link. This $50 micro PC was announced at GDC earlier this year with one express purpose in mind — piping high-end PC gaming over a home network on the cheap. That sounds pretty good, but can it outperform my power drill and various lengths of cable? Note: Valve says it plans to continue rolling out software updates ahead of the Steam product family’s official launch on November 10th. We plan to update our story as these new features come out. We will also hold off on assigning the Link a numerical score until Valve begins shipping final hardware. Hardware and setup The Steam Link isn’t much to look at: It’s a simple black box that’s the same size as a US passport and a little thicker than a wallet. Picture a portable hard drive etched with a tiny Steam logo on its top, and you’ve got the look down pat. There isn’t much in the way of connectivity here, either: The Link’s back edge features just two USB ports, Ethernet, HDMI output and a tiny hole for an AC adapter. An extra USB port can be found on the Link’s side, but that’s all there is to it. The device doesn’t even have an LED light to indicate if it’s powered on or off. It’s extremely discreet, and disappears behind my television as easily as a Chromecast or Roku box might. Setup is pretty simple: All I had to do was plug the Link into the wall, connect it to one of my TV’s spare HDMI ports and snap in an Ethernet cable. That was it — the Link automatically powered on (and turned my TV on via HDMI-CEC ), and then connected to the internet and updated its firmware. Nice. Slideshow-330217 The Link’s main menu doesn’t offer much, but at least it’s easy to navigate. Only three options appear on the device’s home screen: Start Playing, Settings and Support. There’s not much to the Start Playing and Support sections (one starts Steam’s In-Home Streaming feature and the other simply redirects to a support site), but the Settings menu actually has quite a few options. Here, you can adjust the display for overscan compensation, change your WiFi and network setting, tweak language preferences, check for firmware updates and choose among three streaming quality options: fast, balanced and beautiful. I left the rig to its default “balanced” setting; if this box is going to beat out my absurdly practical wire-through-the-wall approach, it’s going to need to “just work” without a second thought. I backed out to the main menu, selected “Start Playing” and watched the Link automatically find my gaming PC over the wired network. It found my Windows tablet too, actually — any device on that network that’s logged into Steam locally will show up here. It’s pretty convenient, but my media tablet is kind of a joke when it comes to playing games. I selected my custom-built gaming tower instead. The first time I connected the Link to my gaming rig, it offered me a one-time passcode to enter on the host computer; after that, it connected automatically, without hesitation. This actually surprised me a little: when I use Steam In-Home-Streaming to push my gaming PC’s content to my tablet, Steam requires me to log into the desktop client on both devices. The Link didn’t need me to log in at all; it just pulled up the Steam Big Picture interface and gave me control of the PC from my couch. Performance As I launched my first Steam Link-streamed PC game, something seemed a little off. Visually the game looked okay, with very light artifacting visible on only the brightest colors on screen — but the experience seemed a little slow. I dove into Steam’s In-Home Streaming settings and found an option to display stream performance data in real time. Despite my powerful rig, strong network and hardwired connection, the Link only displayed the video feed at an average rate of 30 frames per second. That’s not good enough. I went back to the Steam’s streaming menu and kicked the stream quality up to “beautiful.” No change. I knocked it back down to “fast.” Nothing. What was I doing wrong? Eventually, I stumbled across a checkbox labeled “enable hardware encoding, ” and everything changed. The Link immediately started to stream video at almost the same frame rate as my PC. The stream was sharper, with less artifacting. Try as I might, I couldn’t find a perceptible difference between when I pressed a button on my gamepad and what happened on screen. A quick trip to Google taught me that Steam In-Home Streaming has supported hardware encoding from Intel and NVIDIA gear for a while, but it can cause issues for folks without the correct equipment and it’s not usually enabled by default. Still, it’s hard to complain: Even without the encoding feature, my network piped a pretty solid looking frame that bounced between 30 and 45 fps. That wasn’t fast enough to keep up with the racing game I used in my initial tests, but it would be plenty for slower-paced games. It also wasn’t a hard problem to fix. That said, it dawned on me that my setup may be a little too perfect. My PC is running a CPU with a compatible Intel hardware encoder, with two NVIDIA GTX graphics cards running in SLI on top of that. Worse (or rather, better) still, both my gaming setup and the Steam Link were wired directly into an ASUS RT-N66U router. Of course it was working — my house is the ideal showroom testbed for Steam’s In-Home Streaming service. I decided to try and make things a little more fair. What if my router wasn’t so close to both my television and my gaming rig? I’d have to use WiFi. So I did. I noticed an immediate difference. Removing the Link from my physical network and connecting over 2.4GHz WiFi didn’t seem to change the frame rate of Steam’s video feed, but it had a definite effect on audio and visual quality. It was still a playable experience, but every now and then the game’s audio would stutter, or the stream would hang for a brief moment. The graphics also seemed to suffer a little color fidelity, like a faded wash of video artifacting was always threatening to pop up. Upgrading to my router’s 5GHz connection helped a little, but the experience still wasn’t on par with what I saw over Ethernet. It wasn’t bad, per se — it just wasn’t as good . I ran a few additional tests — attempting to stream from one of my Windows-based media tablets and an old ThinkPad — and confirmed the glaringly obvious: Steam in-home stream quality is heavily reliant on the capabilities of your home network and your host computer. Gameplay When Steam In-Home Streaming works (and it works perfectly on my network), playing games over the Steam Link is a lot like playing games on Alienware’s Steam Machine or in the desktop app’s Big Picture mode . Most of the time, it just works… but not all the time. Once or twice, my PC gave me an error that either broke the experience, or simply wasn’t present when I performed the same task on a SteamOS-based PC. Early on in my testing, for instance, I encountered a pop-up window asking for administrator privileges, which somehow disabled my Steam Controller’s ability to manipulate the mouse cursor, forcing me to walk to my desk to dismiss the window. It only happened once, but it happened. I guess not even the Link and Steam Controller can overcome the foibles of gaming on Windows. I also had some inconsistent control issues; the native Steam Controller support Valve baked into Portal 2 refused to work on my Windows PC for some reason, despite working flawlessly on Alienware’s SteamOS console. Non-Steam games were happy to stream through to the Link if I added them to my Steam game library, but I could never get the dual-touchpad controller to play nice with these titles. These issues were frustrating, but hardly unique to the Steam Link: Almost every issue I had persisted when I reverted back to my extra-long HDMI cable. These aren’t Steam In-Home-Streaming problems; they’re just regular Steam problems. The platform has come a long way in terms of getting Windows on my big-screen TV, but it’s still a work in progress. It probably always will be — Microsoft’s desktop OS has never felt at home in the living room. At the end of the day, I could only identify two problems I could blame on the Steam Link. Sometimes, after disconnecting from Steam In-Home Streaming, my PC would crank up some internal brightness setting and become unreadable — forcing me to reboot to restore normal visual parameters. I also experienced some odd audio issues while streaming to the Link that I could never sort out: Every now and then, the PC-streamed audio would be significantly quieter than the ambient menu noise the Link played before I started streaming. Hopefully, Valve will be able to patch these kinds of glitches before the Link hits the consumer market. Early thoughts At the end of the day, all I really want is an easy, reliable way to put my gaming PC in my living room without actually physically moving the hardware in there. In the past, this meant running excessively long HDMI cables through my home’s walls, under its carpets and behind bookshelves. This worked for me, but the install process was tedious and frustrating — and an absolute nightmare to troubleshoot when a cheap cable shorted out on me. The Steam Link, on the other hand offers a potentially less crisp image, but the difference is negligible when stacked against how much easier it is to set up. There are still some inherent drawbacks to using your PC as a game console — namely those Windows errors and some inconsistencies with what, when and how Valve’s Steam Controller works. Still — installing my stupid cable took me over an hour. I had Steam’s little streaming box up and running in less than 10 minutes. For $50 (or $100 with a Steam Controller), that’s a tempting proposition. The next time my HDMI cables give me trouble, I’ll probably abandon them for the Steam Link. It’s just easier for me. If you have a reliable, fast home network, it’ll probably be easier for you, too.

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Valve’s Steam Link: better than a 50-foot HDMI cable

Tesla takes the wheel: driving a Model S hands-free

Elon Musk isn’t happy just introducing an automobile and walking away to work on next year’s model. Instead his company continues to offer over-the-air upgrades to current vehicles. The latest software enhance is landing in its electric cars tomorrow with a slew of new autopilot features . They won’t drive you around town, but will make highway driving and parking a bit easier. While the new Autopark does exactly what you would expect, Autosteer is a bit more ambitious. With it, you’re supposed to be able to go for miles on the open road with it doing most of the heavy lifting. The car tracks lane markers and uses enhanced GPS data to keep the car from launching off into the median. I had a chance to drive a Tesla on the highway with its new ability — without using my hands — and it was outstanding, but also a bit weird. The big feature, Autosteer, is less autonomous driving and more of a very advanced version of cruise control. For those looking forward to getting a robot car to drive them to work, Musk expects Tesla will have a fully autonomous vehicle ready to go in three years. In the meantime, this new autopilot feature will maintain the cruise control speed while keeping a safe distance between itself and the vehicle in front of it and stay in its lane. It’s a gradual step toward the future that’ll make commuting less of a pain. After setting the mode in the car’s updated UI and double-tapping the cruise control arm, the car does the driving for you. It’s an eerily smooth transition. If the vehicle determines you’re not centered in a lane, it adjusts itself without jerking the vehicle. After that, I removed my hands from the wheel and the Model S tracked itself along Interstate 280 better than most of the other drivers on the road. It had no trouble with meandering corners. It kept a safe distance behind the car in front of it (something you can manually adjust if you would like more cushion). Adjusting the speed was a matter of flipping the cruise control arm: up to go faster and down to slow down. Meanwhile you just sit there. Because you’re hurtling down the freeway, you’re still paying attention, but it lowers the stress level a bit. If you’re stuck in traffic, it takes the pain out of the stop-and-go experience because it does it for you. You’ve gone from driver to driver/passenger. This is the first step to the pure passenger experience of truly autonomous cars. While it’s cool, Musk stresses that this is a public beta of the feature and that drivers should keep their hands on the wheel at all time: “We want people to be quite careful.” That warning becomes an audible alert in the vehicle when the lane markers become faded or another car slides into your lane. At that point, you’re reminded that, yeah you’re still the driver. The entire Autosteer system is built around the vehicle’s confidence that what’s about to happen is safe. If the roadway is less than optimal, you can’t engage it. If while engaged, it detects something out of the ordinary, an audible and visual warning inform you to take control. If you ignore that, the warning gets more persistent and the system will eventually slow the car down and bring it to a complete stop. That confidence spills over into the Auto Lane Change feature. While in Autosteer, I attempted to automatically move to the left lane. A vehicle was approaching at a rather quick pace on my left and the car wouldn’t complete the move on its own. At that point, it got a little too careful and wouldn’t automatically move itself into any lanes. After having the passenger turn the feature off and then back on again (just like a router, but speeding down the highway), I was switching lanes (when it was safe) without checking my blind spots or even grabbing the wheel. For someone that’s completely obsessed with safe driving, it’s unnerving letting the car take over like this. But with a quick brake tap or slight turn of the steering wheel, I was back in control. While existing the freeway, I was able to complete a few automatic lane changes, but when the car detected a car that was behind and to the right of me, it again wouldn’t go on its own. I accelerated and pulled into the right lane as I would with any other car. The car errors on the side of caution without making you feel like you’re being coddled. Yes, it’ll be abused (get ready for more texting and driving), but even while driving down a surface street, it avoided a bus sticking out in the road. But it’s not even close to infallible. Hence the repeated warnings from Musk during a briefing. It also has difficulty with sharp turns and inclement weather conditions like rain, snow and fog. Tesla is adamant that the feature is “hands on” so you’re supposed to keep those mitts on the wheel. So don’t starting updating Twitter while you’re supposed to be driving. Yet, It’ll get better as more and more Teslas drive in autopilot mode and feed road information back to companies highly detailed mapping system. The update also brings enhanced versions of traffic-aware cruise control, side collision warning, vehicle hold (keeping the car rolling on inclines), Autopark and better climate control that cools or heats the interior quicker without using more energy. All of that is wrapped into a brand new UI. Tesla is still a few years away from getting us from point A to Pint B without our interaction. But in the meantime, it’s tackling the commute, the worst aspect of the driving experience by letting its cars take the wheel. It’s a smart move and for anyone that sits in a traffic, a welcome relief. Source: Tesla

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Tesla takes the wheel: driving a Model S hands-free

AT&T NumberSync lets one phone number rule all your connected gadgets

We’re encumbered with more connected silicon than ever before, and having to juggling multiple phone numbers for a phone, a smartwatch and a tablet, well, really sucks. To that end, AT&T just announced NumberSync, a free service that links all your other connected AT&T gizmos (think 3G smartwatch or tablets) to your main phone number. Better yet, incoming calls and text messages will get routed to all those devices at once — none of this hokey call-forwarding nonsense. When you add a NumberSync-enabled device to one of AT&T’s Mobile Share plan buckets, you’ll get the option to turn on NumberSync totally free of charge . AT&T SVP Jeff Bradley says the feature will launch later this month with one supported device from a hush-hush phone maker (our money’s on Samsung), with a few more to follow by the time the holidays roll around. Ultimately, the carrier would like to see its full line of connected devices play nice with NumberSync’s sharing tendencies, but that’s a little easier said than done. And for folks like me, who have no less than five phone numbers running at the same time because of review phones, NumberSync doesn’t really help. It’s all about those other, non-phone connected gadgets AT&T wants to sell you. What AT&T’s basically doing here is taking advantage of the network upgrades it developed while rolling out Voice over LTE to kill a growing consumer headache and give their hardware partners a better shot at selling stuff at the same time. Clever clever. But why the slow rollout, especially if most of the heavy lifting is handled on AT&T’s end? Can’t they just flip the switch for everyone at one? I asked Bradley what the deal was, and it’s because NumberSync isn’t a completely one-sided affair — phone makers have to modify software like the dialer and messaging apps to play nice with AT&T’s network modifications. Thankfully, most of this technical legwork *should* be invisible to you and me — enabling NumberSync on a secondary device like a tablet would require one final new step at the end of the normal setup process. “The good part, ” Bradley pointed out, “is they get better [at integration] once they get the first one under their belt.” One of the few good things about the way our domestic wireless carriers work is that they’re totally fine stealing good ideas — it might give the originator ammunition to fire back, but whatever. In the end, it means benefits eventually flow to all consumers instead of just one subset of customers, and AT&T isn’t the only carrier that’s working on a network infrastructure that makes NumberSync possible. AT&T might have the head start on this, but seriously, the rest of you carriers had better get cracking too.

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AT&T NumberSync lets one phone number rule all your connected gadgets

Facebook’s ‘On This Day’ feature has controls to filter out sad times

Facebook’s On This Day tool is a nice feature when it recalls good times that may have slipped your mind. It has a tendency to bring up events and people that you might prefer to forget, though, and the social network added preferences to curtail the sadness. On This Day now has controls that’ll let you filter out specific people and dates so the feature doesn’t remind you of those bits of nostalgia you’d rather not revisit. Facebook has come under fire for toying with our emotions and digging up the past before, and there’s already been some criticism of On This Day since it launched in March. By adding preferences, Zuckerberg & Co. are offering a way to keep those bad memories at bay. It’s a nice touch, since you never know exactly when the memory machine will pop up in your News Feed. If you’ve noticed On This Day posts there, the new controls should be available for you to tweak. Via: The Verge

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Facebook’s ‘On This Day’ feature has controls to filter out sad times

Adobe and Dropbox make it easier to edit PDFs from the cloud

Dropbox got cozy with Microsoft Office back in the spring, offering a way to easily edit files stored in its cloud-based repository. Now, Dropbox is getting friendly with Adobe Document Cloud, too. More specifically, the company is playing nice with Adobe Acrobat DC and Acrobat Reader to serve up quick and easy access to edit PDF documents . Once you connect your Dropbox account with the Adobe apps, you’ll be able to pull in files without leaving the app. What’s more, when you’re browsing files in Dropbox, you’ll have the option to open a PDF in the appropriate Adobe app to edit, e-sign, comment and markup the file as needed. And as you might expect, no matter how you open the document or which device you’re using, everything automatically syncs in Dropbox across desktop and mobile. PDFs are by far the most common file format stored with the could-driven storage service, and now its improving the workflow for power users. The new functionality goes live on the desktop today with iOS integration arriving “in the coming months.” Android users can expect to employ the PDF-editing workflow next year. Slideshow-328120

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Adobe and Dropbox make it easier to edit PDFs from the cloud

The company behind Relish wireless broadband makes a big loss

Relish’s dream to connect London homes with wireless broadband, rather than traditional landlines, could be in trouble. UK Broadband, the company behind the service, has reported losses of £37.5 million for 2014 — almost four times what it was the year before. To make matters worse, turnover slipped from roughly £2 million to £1.5 million over the same period. Relish was launched in June 2014 as a simpler, but capable broadband alternative to the likes of BT, Sky and Virgin Media. Instead of copper and fibre cables, the company relies on 4G connections to deliver the internet to its customers. The advantages are plentiful — you don’t need to pay for a landline, and because Relish’s network is already up and running, you don’t need an engineer to install anything. Once you’ve signed up, a router is sent round within the next working day and you can instantly get online. The concept is similar to the mobile broadband packages offered by EE, Three and other UK carriers, although here there are no restrictive data allowances. So what’s gone wrong? Well, it should be noted that the figures filed by UK Broadband aren’t just for Relish. The company also offers consultancy services and the “provision of wireless solutions, ” including design and the supplying of equipment, for instance. Even so, it’s evident that Relish hasn’t been a runaway success. At least, not in the six months following its launch, anyway. The company has been pushing its offering with ads on the Tube, but Relish still doesn’t feel like a household name. There’s also something of a stigma attached to wireless broadband at the moment. Adopters often tell stories of slow or unreliable connections, similar to those experienced on their phone. Relish promises “up to 50Mbps” speeds, but that’s also dependent on you being inside their catchment area. The company is focused solely on London, but its network doesn’t cover every household — to find out if you’re eligible, you’ll need to submit your postcode into its coverage checker first. Home broadband is still a messy quagmire in the UK, but traditional ISPs are pushing hard to improve speeds and coverage. Relish is an intriguing competitor, and could appeal to Londoners who move a lot and just want a decent, easy to cancel broadband package. Early demand appears to have been low though. Relish hasn’t failed just yet — business could have picked up in 2015 — but this is a worrying sign from the company. Via: ISPreview , The Telegraph Source: Companies House

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The company behind Relish wireless broadband makes a big loss

LastPass gets acquired by remote desktop service LogMeIn

The popular password manager LastPass will soon have a new home at LogMeIn , which runs a remote desktop management service, the companies announced today . But don’t fret if you’re an existing LastPass user: LogMeIn says it’ll keep the service and brand alive, while also adding in technology from Meldium, another password service it recently acquired. The news comes amid a busy year for LastPass. Back in June, the company announced that it was hacked , and a few months ago it added free mobile password support . For the most part, the acquisition seems to be about making LogMeIn a more desirable choice for businesses who want to give employees a simple way to secure their many passwords, across a variety of online services. Via: The Next Web Source: LogMeIn

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LastPass gets acquired by remote desktop service LogMeIn

Firefox will stop supporting web plugins (except for Flash) by the end of 2016

Horrible browser plugins used to offer extended multimedia features for website, often at the cost of a much worse overall experience — thankfully, they’re going the way of the dodo. Chrome recently banished plugins like Java and Silverlight (and made auto-playing Flash ads disabled by default ), and now Firefox is doing the same. Mozilla just announced in a blog post that nearly all old-school plugins will not be supported in Firefox by the end of 2016. That’s a long ways away, but it’s still good news. Naturally, the impossible-to-kill Adobe Flash platform is exempted from this doom, but everything else will be completely disabled. Mozilla also noted that new platforms, like the 64-bit Firefox for Windows, will launch without plugin support since they don’t have to support a legacy base of users. Let’s take a moment of thanks for standards like HTML5 making the web a better place to browse and start counting down the days until Flash can join Java in the internet’s trash pile. Via: PC World Source: Mozilla

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Firefox will stop supporting web plugins (except for Flash) by the end of 2016

Google is purging hacked spam from your search results

It’s bad when your web searches include sites that are mainly marketing fluff , but it’s much worse when that fluff has been hacked into legitimate sites that you wouldn’t visit otherwise. Well, Google has had enough of this attempt to game the system. It’s tweaking its algorithms to “aggressively” cull hacked spam from results, leaving you only with sites that intended to include the content you’re looking for. While the changes will only affect about 5 percent of searches when all is said and done, that could mean a lot if it helps you avoid compromised pages and the malware that might be lurking inside. [Image credit: AP Photo/Mark Lennihan] Source: Google Webmaster Central Blog

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Google is purging hacked spam from your search results

Windows 10 is now installed on 110 million devices

With Windows 10 being a free upgrade for Windows 7 and 8 users, it’s no surprise that many have jumped at the chance to see what Microsoft’s latest OS has to offer . In fact, only a day after its release, the company counted 14 million installs , which sky-rocketed to 75 million less than a month after that. At the “Windows 10 devices” event today, Microsoft’s Terry Myerson provided a brief update, announcing that figure has now reached a whopping 110 million. That’s quite the number, especially considering Windows 10 has only been out for around 10 weeks . The overwhelming majority of installs are coming from regular consumers, too, with just over 8 million attributed to business PCs. Get all the news from today’s Microsoft event right here .

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Windows 10 is now installed on 110 million devices