Author: Press Room
Wired headphones are back, and it’s not before too long. I find it a little amusing that people are heading back to wired audio tech after two decades of being told cables are the enemy. The tangle-prone, pocket-snagging, easily breakable relics of the past are back, and I’m here for it. But the reality of using wired headphones in 2026 is very different from even just 2016 — when the first headphone jacks started to disappear from iPhones. Related I Love Earbuds, but They Have These 5 Undeniable Problems As convenient as earbuds are, they’re certainly not perfect. No charging,…
Summary Roku’s redesign trims menus and spotlights preferred apps, keeping the layout familiar. AI Quick Access and a collapsed menu should put your frequently used apps first. However, promoted recommendations still seem likely to dominate and clutter the home screen. Unlike many smart TV interfaces that bury apps beneath layers of recommendations and advertisements, Roku has traditionally kept things fairly straightforward, making it a genuinely great smart TV interface. That’s why Roku’s newly announced home screen redesign immediately caught my attention. The company says the update will reduce clutter and make navigation easier, but after looking over the changes, I’m…
Summary YouTube is rolling out changes to how photo-realistic AI-generated content is labeled. Labels will be in more prominent locations, and an automated system will add these labels to content when a creator forgets to disclose. Creators can remove incorrect labels in YouTube Studio — except for content with metadata indicating generative AI was used. On May 27, YouTube announced some significant changes to how it labels AI content on the platform. The changes are geared towards providing viewers with more transparency into what content is created with AI while still leaving control in the hands of creators. Related YouTube…
Portable PCs are the absolute best. Forget the Nintendo Switch 2 and its disappointing LCD screen. For me, it doesn’t get any finer than the Steam Deck OLED. The ultimate version of the most accessible and best-designed handheld PC on the market, I can’t get enough of Valve’s breakout device. Annoyingly, I’ve been having a nightmare with my Deck as of late. After two years of flawless service, one day, my OLED model stopped functioning as it should. Enter an unskippable, desktop-like boot menu, and far more importantly, the major issue is that most of the buttons on my Steam…
Plenty of TV shows have ended only to continue on as movie series, either right after they were finished or years later. The Muppets had a successful run of big screen outings back in the day. Star Trek resurrected itself from the dead with a series of movies before returning to the small screen, and Downton Abbey capped off its six-season run with a trio of feature films. It happens all the time. It’s rarer for a TV show to spin off into a movie series while that TV show is still running, but it does happen. For instance, South…
Summary YouTube Music has finally added Title, Artist and Album sorting to playlists. The service still lacks crossfade, device handoff and lossless audio that rivals offer. The rollout appears to be staged, so if you don’t see it yet, keep your eyes peeled. YouTube Music appears to be getting a major update to playlist sorting that should solve one of users longest-standing complaints. While that’s great news, the fact that this wasn’t a feature before is baffling — and it’s not the only obvious feature that’s missing from Google’s music streaming platform. Related I ditched Spotify for a self-hosted music…
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie dropped into theaters on April 1, 2026, and immediately became a smash hit. In fact, it looks like it’s going to be the first movie of 2026 to make over a billion dollars at the box office. As of May 19, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is also available to stream at home through services like Prime Video, Apple TV, Google Play, and YouTube. The catch is that you have to pay for it, generally around $24.99 to rent or $29.99 to buy. And right now, there’s just not enough reason to do that. The…
I have confidently recommended VLC to people. And that’s with the energy of someone who really knows what they are talking about. “Just use VLC,” I would say, as if that settled the matter. What I failed to mention, because I had no idea, was that I had been using roughly 50 percent of what the application could actually do. I was the equivalent of someone who owns a cooker and only ever uses it to boil rice. So for many years, I kept boiling my metaphorical rice and calling myself experienced. Every time a media task came up that…
Brandon Sanderson is the most prolific fantasy authors working today; his book series Mistborn and The Stormlight Archive are about to be adapted for the screen, and the biggest question is why it took this long. Sanderson is also an author who’s very open with his opinions about books, movies, and TV; he’s quick to share what he loves, and also what he doesn’t. In a snippet from a recent episode of his podcast Intentionally Blank, he weighed in on his favorite shows from 2025. “K-Pop Demon Hunters is my top film of the year, and Arcane and Residence are,…
Nvidia does more than make AI chips. While it’s true that their chips power the data centers that run most of the large language models (which you can now run locally) for OpenAI for ChatGPT, Anthropic for Claude and others, Nvidia also makes the Tegra X1+ processor which has an insane 256-core GPU and is used to power a device that I’ve been using in my living room for years for all of my TV watching needs. It’s a device that you can still buy today if you want the very best in streaming, TV apps (though be aware of…