Image: Marvel Studios I’ve been making more of an effort to keep up with movies lately and even managed the rare feat of seeing one in an actual movie theater. I saw Guy Ritchie’s The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, which stars Henry Cavill, Alan Ritchson, Alex Pettyfer, Elza González, Babs Olusanmokun, and others in what I interpreted as a goofy spaghetti western / spy / heist film. I suppose it’s also a war movie, being based (very loosely) on a true story about a collection of unstoppable guys set on an unsanctioned secret mission to destroy a German U-boat resupply ship during World War II. It doesn’t try to ruminate on the weight of the mission, which was to clear the way for American ships to cross the Atlantic and join the war effort. Ministry is... Continue reading…

Back in May 2022, Microsoft started Project Monarch to deliver a unified Outlook app on Windows. Often known as One Outlook, its a progressive web app (PWA) designed to replace the Win32 and UWP apps for Windows and even Mac. Fast-forward to today, Microsoft has already announced that it will retire and replace the default Mail app with a new Outlook client on Windows. I gave the new Outlook app a fair shot on my laptop and came away frustrated.

Did you see when someone ported thousands of Windows 98 apps over to Windows 95 by implementing .NET into the latter? If you haven't, you may be tempted to think: "Why go through such a huge effort over an ancient operating system?" The guy behind the feat said that he did so because Windows 95 was very dear to him, and heavily influenced his decision to get into computing. And for that, I can see why he did what he did.

If you just bought one of the latest Macs, such as the MacBook Pro (2023), then personalizing it is one of the first steps you may want to take. After all, the default macOS settings leave a lot to desire and may not match your workflow. And thankfully, you do have several options to customize your Mac like a pro. The Mac's application Dock happens to be a common element that many users like to tweak. Whether you're on macOS Sonoma or an older OS version, all you have to do is follow the steps below to change the size and position of your Mac's Dock.

X4: Foundations is a popular space simulation game released for Linux and Windows in 2018. Developed by Egosoft, the Germany-based studio is responsible for a successful series of X games with the predecessor to X4 being X: Rebirth. X4: Foundations has been updated with multiple large free updates and four downloadable content (DLC) expansions, the most recent being X4: Kingdom End in 2023. Update 7.0 will be released sometime in 2024 with the next major expansion called X4: Timelines. This could make the space sim I enjoy playing one of the best in class.

Image: Bethesda Game Studios A sampling of the four modern games in the series for those jumping in after the Amazon show. Continue reading…

Delta is about to get better on the iPad. | Image: Riley Testut The Delta emulator made a huge splash when it hit the Apple App Store earlier this month, quickly rocketing to the top spot in Apple’s free apps, where it remains today. Now, developer Riley Testut says an iPad-specific version is “near completion,” and will be released with Delta version 1.6. Testut says the app is already available for his Patreon supporters through “the regular AltStore,” which I take to mean the non-EU-specific one, rather than the Apple-approved AltStore PAL.Of course, the iOS version already works on the iPad (and the Vision Pro, where I’ve been playing Metroid Prime Hunters). But a native version would let it take advantage of the full iPad screen real estate for better skins, including one that turns your tablet... Continue reading…

That’s too cold! | Image: Amazon I don’t know about you, but when I have a nasty case of the hot phone, I have to get rid of that heat this instant. Just kidding, I usually just put it down for a while or restart it when it’s being especially stubborn. But there are companies out there marketing a different solution: little stick-on phone-cooling fans that purport to draw all that heat away. And their product images are a little, uh, excessively icy.How did it come to this? What kicked off this arms race of increasingly frosty phones? I have to assume things started innocently enough, but these RGB-riddled things are pretty squarely aimed at gamers — I’d guess it didn’t take long for these product shots to snowball into the wildly unrealistic pictures on Amazon today.... Continue reading…

There are plenty of Rasberry Pi projects out there, but rarely do they use an eInk reader. However, it's usually something amazing when they do put one to use. Someone has proved this trend right by making their own storybook using a Raspberry Pi and an eInk reader. The best bit? The stories and art are all generated by the Raspberry Pi itself, meaning you have essentially infinite stories on one reader.

If you're looking a brand new pair of ANC headphones, you can't go wrong with something from Bose. The brand has been around for decades, and still manages to produce some of the more compelling devices on the market in 2024.

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge It was Valentine’s Day when Meta’s ad platform started going off the rails. RC Williams, the co-founder of the Philadelphia-based marketing agency 1-800-D2C, had set one of Meta’s automated ad tools to run campaigns for two separate clients. But when he checked the platform that day, he found that Meta had blown through roughly 75 percent of the daily ad budgets for both clients in under a couple of hours.Williams told The Verge that the ads’ CPMs, or cost per impressions, were roughly 10 times higher than normal. A usual CPM of under $28 had inflated to roughly $250, way above the industry average. That would have been bad enough if the revenue earned from those ads wasn’t nearly zero. If you’re not a marketer, this might feel like... Continue reading…

Smart speakers like the Google Nest Audio are great, but bugs, glitches, or connectivity problems can sometimes ruin the fun. To fix most issues on a Google Nest device, a factory reset is the way to go. It's also important to reset your devices if you just need to safely dispose of them or pass them on to a new owner.