Author: Press Room
Sure, an Apple Watch can track your VO2 max, take an ECG and ping you the second your Uber arrives. By any sensible measure, it’s a more useful tool than a mechanical watch. And yet mechanical watches aren’t going anywhere. If anything, the high-end watch industry is having one of its strongest stretches in years. Here are seven reasons why I think tiny metal machines with no battery and no app stores still deserve a place on your wrist. 1. They can mark the moments that matter This is the most important point for me. A smartwatch is a gadget…
Most of my TV happens on free, ad-supported apps. They run on my Samsung Frame sets in the main rooms, the TCL Roku TV in my basement, and my Hisense Canvas, and once I’d sorted out a setting buried in the TV that mattered more than any HDMI cable, the picture held up across all of them. What I still hadn’t settled was which free app actually had the stuff I wanted to watch. So four got a month of real use: Tubi, Pluto TV, The Roku Channel, and Plex’s free tier. Anytime I wanted to watch something, I jotted…
The third season of HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel series House of the Dragon is off and running on HBO. It’s the biggest fantasy event of the month, and expectations are high. Season 3 has to make up for the dip in energy at the end of Season 2, mollify fans angry that the show is straying from the source material, and ramp things up ahead of the big finish in the fourth and final season. Does it do those things? In order: yes, not really, and hopefully. There are NO SPOILERS in this advance review of House of the…
Ask ChatGPT who won last month’s election, a recent soccer score, or what the new iPhone costs, and you’ll likely get a confident, detailed answer. You’ll also have a decent chance it’s wrong. The reason isn’t a bug or a glitch in the Matrix. It’s a knowledge cutoff – the point where an AI model simply stopped learning. Every chatbot is built by training on a vast pile of text, hoovered up to a fixed date. After that, the model is frozen. It doesn’t keep reading the news, scrolling social media, or watching the world move on, no matter how…
I don’t mind paying for good software, and YouTube Premium is actually a decent subscription even after the recent price hike. But now that I’ve tried LibreTube, I don’t think I’ll ever subscribe to YouTube Premium again. LibreTube is a free, open-source YouTube client for Android that offers a cleaner, more privacy-focused way to watch YouTube. I first tried it while exploring open-source alternatives for Google’s apps, and the more I’ve used it, the more it has become my default way to watch YouTube. Related 7 video sites that are better than YouTube If you’re done with YouTube, here are…
Most people assume their existing media server can handle audiobooks the same way it handles music. Since the files are audio, the app has a library view, and everything seems fine right up until you try to actually listen. Unfortunately, if a server is not built for audiobooks, it tends not to handle them well. It’s hard to find a good Audible alternative, but one exists that I love. Related I get full-length audiobooks for free legally — here’s the site I use I found the most generous corner of the internet for book lovers. Plex doesn’t really know what…
Most people are familiar with the feeling of reading a great book only to watch a screen adaptation later on and be deeply disappointed. Something like that happened with the 2007 film The Golden Compass, adapted from Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. The movie gets the names and the general plot right, but destroys the overall spirit of the story. The Golden Compass was not a hit, and promised sequels never arrived. It took over a decade for someone to try adapting the books again, but when it finally happened, we got fantasy TV perfection. His Dark Materials finally…
Jellyfin is one of the best things on my growing list of self-hosted services. It has clients for almost every platform, which makes it a sweet deal — no matter how dumb a TV is, it’s more than enough for me if it can run nothing but Jellyfin. There was just one catch: it lived entirely inside my network. I’d been reaching it through Tailscale, but that meant adding every single device I wanted to watch on to my tailnet. And if I ever wanted to share the server with a friend, what was I supposed to do, hand them…
Steam made me feel glum for years. I’d be told about an indie gem and dart over to Steam, only to discover the game was Windows-only and not available for Mac. Even so, I bought quite a few titles, on the basis that, at some point in the future, I might actually be able to play them. But I wasn’t terribly keen on investing in a Windows PC after my last adventure with one. And although I did wheel out the deeply impressive Parallels Desktop for the odd session, manually tweaking a virtual machine for games has always felt like too much of a…
Dolby Vision is arguably the best HDR standard there is for content consumption. Dolby’s proprietary HDR standard uses an enhancement layer to provide 12-bit color, which is an upgrade over the 10-bit color offered with HDR10 or HDR10+. Moreover, Dolby Vision offers manual controls and profiles for colorists, giving studios more precision over their high dynamic range (HDR) releases. This is why Dolby Vision ended up as the superior format, despite HDR10 and HDR10+ being free to use. There’s a catch, however — many TVs branded as supporting Dolby Vision are only compatible with the basic version. Dolby Vision IQ,…