Chapter 7: Siege - Part 2 in Doom: The Dark Agesfollows the Doom Slayer as he rushes to protect and rescue King Novik against Prince Ahzrak. This map, in contrast to the previous chapter, is extremely linear, reminiscent of a Doom Eternal level. Of course, there are still plenty of secrets you might miss while mowing down demonic hordes.

Most people think of 3D printing in terms of figurines, brackets, or cosplay armor. But once you start exploring the weirder side of functional prints, you’ll find plenty of oddball designs that actually solve real problems. Some of them are so surprisingly useful, you’ll wonder why you didn’t print them sooner. Let’s dive into some strange but genuinely practical things that you might never have imagined making out of filament.

Sony’s original PlayStation wasn’t just a game console but a full-blown cultural reset. While it would go on to spar with Microsoft’s Xbox in later generations, the PS1’s earliest battles were against Nintendo’s N64 and Sega’s Dreamcast. What’s wild is that we almost got a Sony-Nintendo hybrid with a disc drive, but that weird alternate timeline never came to pass. Instead, Sony went solo — and ended up making history.

The Greg Williams preset is the 16th photo filter to come to Leica’s Lux app. | Image: Leica CameraLeica is bringing a new kind of filter effect called “Artist Looks” to its Lux camera app for iPhones, with the first one adjusting your photos to resemble  the style and body of work of celebrity photographer Greg Williams. Artist Looks, like the other color and black-and-white looks in Leica’s app, are essentially one-click filter presets for easy photo editing. It’s the first time Leica Camera has collaborated with a pro on looks designed to mimic their personal aesthetic. In Williams’s case, his Artist Look is lightly inspired by Kodak Tri-X film, converting your color photos to black and white — with the white point shifted a touch to make the whites slightly off-white and yielding a more vintage warm-tone feel.The Leica Lux app update version 1.7 on the iOS App Store will offer the Greg Williams look for Lux Pro account subscribers paying $6.99 per month or $69.99 annually, or included for anyone who buys Leica’s phone grip that now costs $625 post-tariffs.The Lux app is Leica’s dedicated camera app for iPhones, allowing free and paid users to take smartphone pictures with a bit of Leica’s color science. In addition to a selection of Leica-tuned photo filters like Classic, Chrome, and one based on the vintage Leica I Model A camera, the app also offers some signature looks taken from specific Leica lenses. The in-app “lenses” are essentially portrait mode processing recipes modeled after lenses like the 50mm f/1.2 Noctilux or a 35mm f/1.4 Summilux.Leica is also releasing an update to its Fotos app that allows owners of the Leica Q3, Q3 43, SL3 and SL3-S to download the Greg Williams look directly into their cameras. And if you don’t have one of those newer models, the Fotos app can apply the filter to JPG files shot with any Leica with Wi-Fi that can upload images to the app. There’s no paywall for the Artist Look in the Fotos app, other than the barrier to entry of owning an actual Leica.Photo filters and film recipes are nothing new to mobile photography or users of Fujifilm cameras. While Fujifilm leans on its own film stocks for reference in its popular X100 line, other camera-makers typically go the standard route (vivid, neutral, etc.) or get creative, like Panasonic’s Lumix S9 camera and its many custom profiles. This new way of leaning on a pro photog’s own style is certainly novel. It might be cool to see some iconic Leica photographers get their own Artist Look, if I’m ever strolling down the street and feeling a little Elliott Erwitt-y. Though, I imagine some pros may charge a pretty penny to cop their style.

Home Assistant has gone on to be one of the must-have recommendations for any home lab setup, even if this simply consists of a single network-attached storage (NAS) enclosure. The company behind this impressive platform has launched a preview device called the Home Assistant Voice. It's essentially a smart speaker with some powerful microphones for picking up and using your voice to carry out commands. Unlike Alexa (and some other smart assistants), everything can be processed and carried out locally on your local area network (LAN).

The future of everything from smartphones, to military equipment, to electric vehicles hangs on 17 rare earth minerals and the magnets that they're made into. And China, the world's largest refiner and producer, is tightening its grip and threatening the US' largest automakers. Over the last 30 years, China has methodically cornered the market on mining and refining rare earth minerals, which are used to produce a variety of common items like passenger vehicles and everyday electronics. In the wake of US President Donald Trump's increasingly aggressive trade war, China is leveraging its position as the world's largest producer, at the expense of the American auto industry. "We're within 90 days of this becoming a critical problem for everybody," say Ambrose Conroy, founder of Seraph Consulting and a major investor in Democratic Republic of Congo mining operations."We're within 90 days of this becoming a critical problem for everybody."According to analysts, more than 90 percent of the world's supply of those 17 elements at the bottom of the periodic table are mined, refined, and turned into rare earth magnets in China. After Trump announced tariffs of up to 145 percent on …Read the full story at The Verge.

Chatbot upgrades, hot and fresh.The latest versions of OpenAI’s multimodal GPT AI models are now rolling out to ChatGPT. OpenAI announced on Wednesday that GPT-4.1 will be available across all paid ChatGPT account tiers and can now be accessed by Plus, Pro, or Team users under the model picker dropdown menu. Free users are excluded from the rollout, but OpenAI says that Enterprise and Edu users will get access “in the coming weeks.”GPT-4o mini, the more affordable and efficiency-focused model that OpenAI launched last year, is also being replaced with GPT-4.1 mini as the default option in ChatGPT for all users, including free accounts. Users on paid accounts will also see GPT-4o mini replaced by GPT-4.1 mini in the model picker options. Both GPT-4.1 and GPT‑4.1 mini are optimized for coding tasks and instruction following, and outperform GPT‑4o and GPT‑4o mini “across the board,” according to OpenAI. Both of the new models support a one million context token window — the amount of text, images, or videos in a prompt that an AI model can process — that greatly surpasses GPT-4o’s 128,000-token limit. OpenAI says that speed improvements also make GPT-4.1 more appealing for everyday coding tasks compared to the powerful OpenAI o3 & o4-mini reasoning models it introduced in April.GPT-4.1 and GPT-4.1 mini were made available to developers last month, alongside the GPT-4.1 nano model, which OpenAI described as its “smallest, fastest, and cheapest” offering to date. GPT-4.1 Nano is absent from this model rollout announcement, and it’s unclear when — or if — it’ll be generally available in ChatGPT.

Gearbox has finally shown off a substantial amount of gameplay for Borderlands 4. If you ask me, some promising features are worth diving into. On the other hand, Gearbox seems to be adding mechanics that have me worried. Overall, the gameplay looked solid, but I can't help but think that Gearbox is going easy on the fanbase by implementing mechanics that shouldn't be in the game. Those who have played Ubisoft games or any standard open-world RPG probably know what I'm talking about. Here's what I am worried about in Borderlands 4, and what I hope Gearbox changes before the game's final release.

Windows 11 was a strange shift in Microsoft's approach to new operating systems. Previously, if you wanted to install a new edition of Windows on your computer, it came down to whether your hardware was powerful enough to handle it. If you could use the new OS without slowing down or crashing regularly, you were all set. If you couldn't, you upgraded.

We've had the celebratory party from May's Patch Tuesday, and now we're suffering the nasty hangovers that come afterward. A few days after a new big patch goes live, it's not unusual to see lots of people make reports that their operating system isn't working as well as it used to. So, let's check out some of the reports that are coming in, and if you're experiencing any of these, it's worth noting that there's a high chance the issue lies with Windows before you start blaming hardware or other software.

Apple is up to its old tricks again. | Image: The VergeApple is trying to dissuade Europeans from using iOS apps that support alternative payment options by making them look scary. Daring Fireball’s John Gruber spotted that a red exclamation mark icon is being prominently displayed on the App Store listing for Instacar, alongside a message warning users that it doesn’t use Apple’s “private and secure payment system.”Instacar, a three-year-old Hungarian app for checking the mileage and value of used cars, isn’t available on the US App Store. But in Hungary, in the EU, it’s listed as one of the top five apps in the Business category, with thousands of positive reviews — not a typical service that would warrant heightened caution. The only gripe that Apple seemingly has is that Instacar uses an external payment system, and that App Store payment features like purchase history, Family Sharing, and unified subscription management won’t be available on such purchases.“When you create an account on a developer’s external website, you may have to provide personal information, including payment information, directly to the developer or third-party partners,” Apple says in a support page linked from its warning message. “You will be trusting the developer, as well as any partners and payment providers they work with, to handle your information based on their privacy and security controls.”Apple is already facing heat in the EU for its practices around scare tactics. In April, the European Commission issued preliminary findings that Apple “makes it overly burdensome and confusing” for users to install alternative app marketplaces, a process that involves clicking through several scare sheets that ask users to confirm if they want to proceed. This App Store warning message has also appeared in the wake of the recent Epic vs Apple ruling that bans Apple from restricting how developers can link to alternative purchase systems. A notable requirement implemented to address Apple’s scare tactics was that the company cannot interfere with consumers choosing to leave an app with anything beyond “a neutral message” about being directed to a third-party site, though that injunction doesn’t apply outside of the US.

A breach has affected gaming's beloved Valve, with some 89 million records relating to Steam users and 2FA codes being the trove of data up for sale, though we know now that Valve itself didn't suffer the breach. While many were quick to dispel the seriousness of the leak, others questioned whether it was even real. The data references Twilio as the "Vendor Name", though Twilio has denied suffering a breach, and Valve took nearly 24 hours to release a statement aside from confirming to MellowOnline1 that they do not use Twilio's services. I managed to get a copy of the sample data when the news first broke, and having reviewed it, I don't necessarily believe it's as much of a nothingburger as many are making it out to be.