Author: Press Room
I spent the holidays overseas, with no access to my regular paid subscription services, and to be honest, I didn’t feel like I missed them all that much. Sure, it was nice to come home and catch up on my favorite shows, but it got me thinking about how much time and money I spend on streaming TV and how often I experience “burnout” from having too much content at my fingertips. I wasn’t prepared to stop streaming TV entirely — that would be unthinkable — but I wanted to reach a happy medium that would allow me to dedicate…
HBO is responsible for a great many classic TV shows, from The Sopranos to Sex and the City to Game of Thrones to Succession and beyond. The network has a well-deserved reputation for quality, but not everything can be a hit. Gentleman Jack is a period drama that HBO co-produced with BBC One. It’s dramatic, witty, beautifully photographed, and based on intriguing real-life events. For whatever reason, it never really caught on, and HBO canceled the show after its second season in 2022. And that’s too bad, because the show is entertaining, eye-opening, and unique. In fact, I’d go so…
I have been using VLC for so long that I forgot it was even a choice. A few weeks ago, though, I was watching a film late at night and, for whatever reason, I looked at the screen a bit more critically, and all I could see were buttons everywhere. Playback controls, equalizer icons, and a menu bar stretching across the top. Even though you can customize the look and layout of VLC Media Player to hide parts of it, none of it helped me watch the movie; it was just there, demanding attention. That small, slightly irrational irritation sent…
By now, you probably know that batteries are consumable components that degrade over time. Even if a battery is rechargeable, it will eventually lose capacity and stop working with enough normal usage. For consumer electronics, that’s a problem. If a battery-powered device isn’t designed with repair and replacement in mind, it’s destined to end up in a recycling center (or worse, a landfill) sooner rather than later. While phones, tablets, and laptops are engineered to make battery replacements possible, wireless earbuds have historically been a repair disaster. Your favorite wireless earbuds are built using soldered connections, water-resistant seals, and tons…
In 2020, the world was racked by a global pandemic that forced hundreds of millions of people indoors. MIllions lost their lives and many more got sick, and their suffering is obviously the thing that should most be remembered…but have you considered that movie theaters were also having a hard time? With everyone social distancing, few were willing to see movies in public, which was to be expected. But after COVID restrictions started to lift, it became clear that they weren’t coming back. Some pundits predicted that we were watching the death of the movie theater in real time. But…
Want the warmth of analogue audio with modern cordless convenience? The best record players offer exactly that There are plenty of reasons to listen to music using vinyl. Big sleeve artwork is one. Warm analogue sound is another. But while the former just requires your eyes to appreciate, only the best turntables will help you extract that audio loveliness from your record collection. And that’s whether you’re listening through an amplifier and a pair of passive speakers or through a wireless speaker. These record players can fire tracks from your favourite records through Bluetooth speakers – without a wire in…
In the mid-1990s, I was at art college when my supremely talented tutor, Paul Granjon, decided to show a few students this new thing called ‘the internet’. He plugged in his Mac and a modem. Plenty of screeching noises and a couple of minutes later, we were online. Which in those days meant you could type even a quite generic term into a search engine and get only a few dozen results. Paul then showed us the source code for a web page and, in a weird collision of nerdery and punk, insisted anyone could make one. To me, this felt…
Tubi is one of the best free streaming services around. Yes, it’s ad-supported, but it offers an excellent collection of classic movies and TV series that you can watch anytime, anywhere. However, like every streaming service, finding something new to watch is a chore. Most days, I spend so much time scrolling through the catalog that I’m done with my dinner before I’ve picked something to watch. That’s where AI has started to help me lately. I’ve already been using ChatGPT to catch phishing scams with surprising accuracy, so when I noticed that Tubi had quietly joined the long list…
With prices on the rise and more ads interrupting viewing, people are increasingly choosing to abandon traditional streaming services like Netflix. It’s just getting to the point where it’s not worth it, especially not when there are so many cheaper alternatives available. There is a whole world of free streaming services out there — including Tubi, The Roku Channel, Plex, and Pluto TV — that allow you to watch movies and TV shows for no money and with no subscription; you don’t even need to download an app, you can just go to the service’s website and it’ll work just…
2-in-1 turntables aren’t unique, but the Mixx Analog+ was the first I’d ever seen that completely disguises its hybrid nature once a vinyl is spinning. The top-loading CD player neatly integrated into the record platter promised to simultaneously scratch both my itches for physical music media, without needing twice as much space in my home Hi-Fi setup. British brand Mixx has also ticked plenty of boxes for my TikTok-addled brain’s need for instant gratification: fully automatic playback. Bluetooth connectivity. A remote control. Oh, and the £299 price (the Analog+ has yet to launch in the US) is practically pocket money…