Author: Press Room

We’re more than a decade into the music streaming era, and if we’ve learned anything thus far, it’s that physical media and streaming services can coexist. Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube Music combine to account for roughly a billion users, and there’s no underestimating the behemoth that is the streaming industry. However, physical media isn’t exactly hurting either. Vinyl is the most popular physical media format, with 46.8 million EPs and LPs sold last year in the U.S. The medium started making its comeback in the late 2000s after virtually dying in the heyday of CDs, and it’s officially surging…

I’ve owned OLED TVs since 2015. Over the past decade, I’ve sweated over OLED burn-in for the longest time. Thankfully, my obsessive routines have so far prevented the threat of permanent image retention. Yet when it comes to my latest TV tech defect, there’s really no hard and fast way to fix the problem. Color banding might not be nearly as well known as OLED burn-in, but for mega AV dweebs like myself, it’s an absolute thing. Color banding has semi-ruined some of my favorite PC games, yet if you know what TV settings and software measures to deploy, this…

Backrooms is a new horror film from A24, based on the series of Backrooms short films that director Kane Parsons has been releasing on his YouTube channel since 2022. And the original germ of the story can be traced to a creepy bit of internet folklore. Backrooms is something of a home-grown internet success story; the movie taking in over $70 million in its debut weekend, demolishing its $10 million budget. Kane Parsons is all of 20 years old, and was just 16 when he started uploading his Backrooms shorts to YouTube. Some people have had a hard time believing…

I have been deep into OpenClaw for a while now. It is a great tool, genuinely, but at some point I started wondering if there was something that did everything it does and then some. So I went looking. I am the kind of person who, once something is working, immediately starts wondering what the ceiling is. The ceiling on OpenClaw turned out to be lower than I wanted. So I went looking, found Hermes, and things got a lot more interesting. Hermes beats OpenClaw in the ways that actually matter Do more, with fewer tokens If you have not…

Driving in India means learning to expect your signal to disappear at the worst possible time. One moment you have full bars, and the next you are crawling through an underpass, stuck in a basement parking lot, or driving across a highway stretch where the network simply gives up. I cannot even count how many times an app has frozen mid-drive because it suddenly needed an internet connection to function. That is exactly why I have come to appreciate a handful of Android Auto apps that keep working even when connectivity fails. They do not panic the second the network…

When deciding on a streaming device, you have a lot of options. Most people don’t need the insanely powerful Nvidia Shield TV which has a 256 core CPU. By far the most economical options are streaming sticks; these sticks usually cost under $50 and simply plug into an empty HDMI port on the back of your television and are powered by one of the TV’s USB ports. They connect over Wi-Fi, and give you full access to all the streaming options you could ever want. The vast majority of people will pick a Roku or Amazon Fire TV streaming stick,…

The Last Kingdom is an excellent historical drama that ran for five seasons between 2015 and 2022. Set in the country that would become England in the ninth and tenth centuries, it follows Uhtred of Bebbanburg (Alexander Dreymon), the dispossessed son of an English lord who grows up among Dane raiders. That puts him in a unique position to understand people on both sides of the long-running, violent conflict between native Saxons and Dane invaders. We watch him as he tries to reclaim his home and in the process becomes an unsung hero of history. The Last Kingdom has a…

A while ago, I made a pretty big change to how I watch movies and shows — I canceled my monthly Netflix subscription and turned my NAS into a personal streaming setup using Plex. When I first set everything up, I used Plex for free for months. But over time, I got deeper into the ecosystem — remote streaming, better media management, hardware transcoding, and the convenience of having everything work smoothly across devices. Eventually, paying $250 for the Plex Pass lifetime subscription felt justified. That’s why the recent price jump hit so hard. With Plex Pass now sitting at…

I grew up in an age of games with pixels so chunky they made Duplo look refined. The era was bookended by the Atari 2600 and the Game Boy, with the likes of the Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, BBC Micro, Amstrad CPC, Sega Master System and NES in-between. I love them all. Even the Amstrad. But my favourite retro console these days is the Pico-8. Which is a bit strange when you consider the Pico-8 never physically existed. Instead, Pico-8 is a fantasy console – a virtual platform dreamt up by Joseph ‘zep’ White. It started out as a sandbox for a game before mutating into an entire ecosystem.…

If you own an automatic watch (like one in our best watch guide), a watch winder is one of those purchases you might debate getting for years. Then you buy one and wonder why you waited so long. I’ve tested a fair few watch winders over the years, and Barrington’s single winder has long been one of my favourites, so I was very excited to test the latest model. This is how I got on… The Barrington makes a strong first impression out of the box. It looks premium on a desk or bedside table. It’s painted in a gloss…