Author: Press Room
The more streaming, gaming, and audio devices you add to your TV setup, the more remote controls you’ll inevitably have to manage. Eventually, it becomes too much. Your TV screen has its own remote to kick things off, and you might have a gaming console or streaming box with its own remotes. Add a Blu-ray player, turntable, or AV receiver to the mix, and you’ve doubled the number of remote controls in your setup already. If you have a particularly extravagant home theater or listening station, a CD player or a Chromecast could further convolute the experience. The answer might…
If you have an OLED TV, congratulations! This TV will afford a fabulous cinematic experience at home, with deep blacks, vibrant colors, and fantastic wide-angle viewing. Chances are you invested quite a bit into the TV since OLED TVs are among the most expensive you can buy. So, you’ll want to ensure that you protect that investment. But there are a few things you might be doing right now that are already shortening its life. Like any technology product, OLED TVs require proper care and use. With small changes to your habits and settings, you can prolong the TV’s lifespan…
YouTube was built for passive watching, not active learning. But it’s a gargantuan online learning platform in its own right. Like everyone else, I save a lot of long YouTube videos. Like everyone else, my YouTube History list and Watch Later is a long lineup of unfinished videos. Now, I am using Gemini to change that (thanks to my OCD about leaving things unfinished). Gemini helps me decide if a video is worth a watch. Then, it gives me the power to query the content and learn from the answers. I bought into the idea after using YouTube and the…
I’ve been a loyal acolyte of the House Gabe Newell Built since ye olden times of 2004. Or, in other words, I’ve loved Steam ever since Valve launched its digital PC gaming platform more than two decades ago. Over those years, I’ve been wowed by Steam Big Picture Mode and my beloved Steam Deck OLED. Yet recently, one key Steam feature has massively disappointed me. Doubly so in an era where cloud gaming got so good so fast that I genuinely regret buying my gaming laptop. In short, Steam Streaming/Steam Remote Play sucks. Considering we’re talking about a company that…
Between Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max, and the three hundred other streaming services we’re expected to keep up with, watching movies and TV shows at home can be extremely expensive. But there’s a whole world of free streaming services out there that often go overlooked. Take, for instance, Roku, one of the oldest players in this game. With the purchase of a Roku device, which run anywhere from $20 to $100 and plug right into your TV, you’ll get access to 80,000 movies and TV shows to stream for free, many of which are absolutely fantastic. Let’s explore some of the…
Our smart TVs are typically the centerpiece of our home entertainment setup and the focal point of our living spaces. I remember a rare piece of amusing dialogue in “Friends” where Joey Tribbiani exclaims: “You don’t have a TV? Then what is all your furniture pointed at!?” It’s funny because it’s true. However, right out of the box, our TVs are set up for eye-catching showroom modes rather than optimized home viewing, with default settings that prioritize convenience over performance or security. With a few small setup adjustments, it’s easy to make your TV sharper, faster, safer, and more user-friendly,…
A lot of the time, people suggest a local LLM as an alternative to big AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini because it is ostensibly free. You don’t need to pay a subscription. You just download it and run it. And although that does seem like a great benefit at first, there are other benefits involved. Another one is, of course, privacy. With a local LLM, when you’re working strictly on your computer, your material and your work don’t have to leave your computer, go to a server, and then come back. No third party collects or stores your…
When ChatGPT burst onto the scene, it felt revolutionary. It could answer almost any question, help solve math problems, and even correct my code, and the whole thing felt magical. But ChatGPT always sounded flat, like something overtly trying to please you, even at the cost of being wrong. My introduction to Claude came months later, and only because I needed help with a small web project I had a week to complete. After some searching, Claude kept coming up as the recommended option, especially among people who used free AI coding tools like Cursor and its alternatives. So I…
GarageBand was one of the few pieces of software to make it into the Stuff top 50 Apple products. Why? Well, from its earliest days, GarageBand was something special: an approachable yet powerful app for making music. Which made it all the more staggering when the app arrived on iPhone. These GarageBand tips help you get started writing your own tunes. Just remember Stuff when you have your fifth top-ten album, eh? Before you begin, download GarageBand (free) on iPhone or iPad. There’s also a Mac version (free), but its interface and features differ. GarageBand tips: the basics Get set…
James Bond is undeniably the world’s most famous secret agent, so it is not really a surprise that he has had as much history in the world of video games as he has on the big screen. Granted, quite a lot of these were quite naff cynical cash-ins (as is the fate of many licensed games), while the earliest text adventure games were arguably closest in spirit to Ian Fleming’s original novels. Ultimately, more fell in the ballpark of uninspired run-and-gun 2D shooters, whether that’s the side-scrolling platforming of James Bond 007: The Duel on the Mega Drive or the…