Author: Press Room
As a musician and audiophile, I tend not to cut corners on audio gear, especially when it comes to sound quality. I was therefore happy to pay the relatively high price of $200 for a pair of premium Sennheiser headphones, which have served me well over the last few years. Then a pair of $20 Soundpeats clip-on headphones landed in my lap unexpectedly. At first, I thought that these wouldn’t be of any use to me at all, as using cheap headphones would mean compromising on quality. However, in real-world usage, the cheaper pair held its ground in ways I…
The Iron Claw is a 2023 biographical sports film that arrived on Netflix in February, meaning a lot more people can now watch this depressing masterpiece. The movie is about the Von Erich wrestling dynasty, a family that was involved in pro wrestling for generations. That sounds fairly glamorous, but the Von Erichs endured so much tragedy it almost beggars belief. In fact, writer-director Sean Durkin chose to omit some of the bleakest details just so audiences could get through the film. The unbearably sad, mostly true story of the Von Erich family Iron Claw directly to your heart The…
Streaming services all try and separate themselves from one another. While the content is the main factor that differentiates them, they all have their own look and features that make them unique. The driving force will always be the content, which is what has made the streaming wars fun to observe over the years. But it has also led to comparisons about how each platform looks. If you’re like me and subscribe to too many of them, you have used them enough to know your way around them. Whether it’s Netflix, Disney+, Apple TV+, Peacock, Prime Video or the hundreds…
On April 1, NASA launched Artemis II, a manned mission around the Moon designed in part to spot potential landing sites. This lays the groundwork for a future manned mission to the surface, and maybe even the building of a base sometime down the line. Just imagine: mankind living on the Moon. It’s an intoxicating idea that gets people excited about scientific progress, which is something of a rarity at a time when a lot of science news has to do with, say, artificial intelligence threatening your job, or climate change accelerating to the point where it will be all…
Do you know how much I like the PlayStation Portal? Enough to keep it for a whole four days before returning Sony’s remote streaming device. Though its DualSense-aping ergonomics are excellent, its lousy LCD screen means I couldn’t justify keeping the expensive, first-party accessory. Sending back the PS Portal has proven to be an even better decision in hindsight, after I recently discovered I could transform my Steam Deck OLED into a portable PlayStation 5. Thanks to one free piece of software that can be installed on the Linux-based handheld in a relatively straightforward fashion, my beloved portable PC can…
Summary YouTube is raising prices on YouTube Premium and YouTube Music. Some plans are going up as much as $4 per month. These increases go into effect immediately on April 10. In a move that should surprise no one, YouTube has been announcing price hikes for its major streaming services. Both YouTube Premium and YouTube Music are seeing price increases, with some plans going up by as much as $4 per month. Related I still refuse to pay for YouTube Premium — 3 reasons why it’s not worth it The basic YouTube package isn’t as bad as some people make…
For years after it ended, sitcom fans were looking for a worthy successor to 30 Rock, the NBC workplace comedy from Tina Fey and Robert Carlock famous for packing in an incredibly high number of jokes per minute…and they found it, in a Netflix show from Fey and Carlock called Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. It ran for four seasons in the late 2010s and it was great. But after that ended, fans needed yet another successor, and it looks like one has arrived. Created by Robert Carlock and Sam Means (with Tina Fey executive producing), The Fall and Rise of Reggie…
Streaming services are getting more expensive all the time, with Netflix raising its prices again just this past March. It’s getting to the point where it doesn’t make sense to keep up with all of these subscriptions. Happily, there are plenty of free streaming services out there that make better-than-expected substitutes. That includes Tubi, the best free streaming service you’re not using. Full disclosure: there is a lot of chaff to sort through on these services; when the price is free, sometimes you get what you pay for. But there’s also a lot of high-quality stuff if you know where…
HBO is working on a new TV show based on J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter book series, about a kid who lives an unhappy life with his cruel aunt and uncle until he finds out he’s a wizard and gets whisked away to a magical boarding school where he makes friends, develops his powers, and even saves the world. The Harry Potter books are the most successful novels of the 21st century. The movies based on the books, which came out between 2001 and 2011, are modern classics. And that’s not even getting into other off-shoots like the stage show, the…
A while back, I asked Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini to build a solar system simulator. This was back when Claude was the talk of the town, and more people, myself included, were realizing that maybe they shouldn’t limit themselves to ChatGPT. That test produced one of the clearest results I’ve had. Claude knocked it out of the park and won decisively. Gemini produced working but not especially impressive code, and, interestingly, ChatGPT failed. Today, I decided to test a different parameter. This time, instead of writing code, I tasked the LLMs with debugging code. Specifically, I asked them to fix…