Author: Press Room

Music listening can be as simple as you make it, or it can become a very expensive and complicated hobby quickly. There is a seemingly never-ending list of features, upgrades, and settings you can use to improve or change the way your music sounds. Not all of them are worth using, however — some are complete gimmicks, while others require the right hardware to maximize. Sound quality is subjective, so you might love a feature or setting the person beside you hates. There’s no better example of that principle than spatial audio. It’s one of the biggest buzzwords in the…

With modern TVs, it can be all too easy to lose yourself in a sea of distracting settings menus. Dynamic contrast levels, expression enhancers, tone mapping, true motion, MPEG noise reduction; we’ve come a long way from the days when all you really had to worry about on a CRT set was adjusting brightness levels. While many of these settings will only subtly tweak how your favorite movies or shows look, one option many of you should definitely have enabled is game mode. If your TV offers such a preset and you regularly play PS5, PC, or Nintendo Switch 2…

One Piece, Netflix’s live-action adaptation of Eiichiro Oda’s monumentally successful manga series about a crew of plucky pirates chasing their dreams, is a hit. The first season dropped on Netflix in 2023 and quickly dominated the charts. The second season, which dropped on March 10 of this year, also did very well, snatching 16.8 million views in its first four days of availability. Critics and fans love the show: season 2 has a rare 100% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes; and over on IMDb, fans rate the second season even higher than the first. It’s pretty rare to find a…

Every time you open a new AI chat, you start from scratch. You re-explain your job, your preferences, and your current project. Some of us do this even in every chat, though we know preparing a personal context template can save us so much time. With all AI models, a prompt is just the first step. Giving the AI your personal context template is like programming software with your specific user preferences. A personal context template can be as simple or as complicated as you want it: not unlike a master AI prompt for any scenario you paste or upload…

Manga was always one of my guilty pleasures growing up in the early 2000s. While it’s much more mainstream now, being a fan of popular manga like Dragon Ball Z or even One Piece when I was younger was a completely different battlefield than it is now. Even in my 30s, I’m still quick to jump onto the manga and comics bandwagon, even if I am a bit behind on the trends. When one of my coworkers recommended Komga, I knew I needed to get on board with what it had to offer. As long as I supplied the manga…

There’s a Pixel 4a sitting on my shelf right now, plugged into a random USB port, doing nothing. It doesn’t take calls, send messages, and there’s no SIM card in it. All that phone does is sit on a shelf and host my music library, using a tool that’s likely the perfect self-hosted music server. It happens to be the best music server I’ve used, and it cost me nothing except some time during setup. Most of us have old phones like that. Too good to recycle, not good enough to use daily, but still perfectly functional. So, if you…

Android TVs aren’t exactly known for their speed. And as apps pile up and storage fills, even simple tasks like opening a menu or switching apps can start to feel slow. That’s exactly what was happening to me too, so I finally decided to unlock the Developer Options settings on my TV. All it took was a couple of quick changes, and my Android TV felt quicker and more responsive than before. Android TV’s best-kept secret Credit: Shimul Sood / MakeUseOf If you’ve used an Android phone or tablet for a reasonable amount of time, you probably already know about its…

There is a new way to watch YouTube, and it might be my favorite of all time. It turns YouTube into a full cable experience that even looks like an old cable UI, complete with scanline effects similar to your old, chunky CRT TV, and best of all, it’s completely free. Channel Surfer is a surprisingly fun alternative to watching YouTube on the site itself, and making the switch to its list of 20+ channels comes with another big benefit: no advertising interruptions. YouTube is cable, and it’s surprisingly awesome? It’s a different way to watch Channel Surfer is a…

In the past, I’ve sat down to watch something on Plex, only to be met with endless buffering — and it turns out I’m not alone. A quick check on Reddit revealed scores of posts dating back years seeking help with this very issue. It’s especially annoying, as streaming apps are supposed to “just work” straight out of the box with minimal tweaking, regardless of the device or network conditions (although a few handy setup tips never hurt). However, as I found out, this lies at the root of the problem. It turns out that, by default, my Plex server…

Prime Video has a new tentpole series it’s been promoting: Scarpetta, a crime thriller starring Nicole Kidman as Dr. Kay Scarpetta, a brilliant forensic pathologist who uses advanced forensic technology to solve crimes. Oscar winner Jamie Lee Curtis is on board as Kay’s older sister Dorothy, while Emmy winner Bobby Cannavale plays Dorothy’s husband. It is a star-studded affair, but that doesn’t make it the best thriller in Amazon’s arsenal. There’s a twistier, more challenging series just a few clicks away. Time for The Devil’s Hour From (some of) the people who brought you Doctor Who The Devil’s Hour is…