Author: Press Room
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…
It doesn’t matter if you spend $30 and buy a cheaper, Walmart-branded streaming box or Google’s own streaming devices. Google TV can be bloated, unresponsive, and somewhat nasty to try to muck through. And this is coming from one of their biggest fans, as I switched from Fire TV to Google TV and haven’t looked back once. But if you’re hoping to get the most out of your streaming box, I can’t blame you. There are a few great ways you can bypass the bloat and get what you paid for, without having to invest in a different streaming box…
I’ve been using VLC as my default media player for as long as I can remember. Mostly because it plays anything you throw at it, and this was the whole pitch as far as I was concerned. Then, I used it to extract audio from a concert video on my computer, which subsequently led me to explore what else was buried in those VLC menus. Turns out, quite a lot. What’s more, these features aren’t limited to just making video playback better, and other adjacent stuff. VLC has a video converter and audio extractor hiding in plain sight You may…
LLMs can do a lot more than just generate code; they can also help you debug it. When the bug isn’t obvious, and the console output is actively throwing you off, handing over a snippet to your AI coding assistant and letting it comb through to find issues is a great way to save a ruined Tuesday. We have a number of options available for this—free, paid, and you can even run the biggest open models locally. So I put together a small test, a JavaScript file with three distinct bugs in it, and handed it off to Gemini, ChatGPT,…
Yellowstone is a five-season modern western from Taylor Sheridan, the TV mogul behind hits like Landman and Tulsa King. It stars Kevin Costner as John Dutton, the patriarch of a Montana ranching family willing to defend his way of life at any cost, and the cost gets very high indeed. Yellowstone was a massive hit that is still spawning prequels and spin-off shows. But it’s hardly the first TV series to wring drama out of our long obsession with gunslingers, lawlessness, and dysfunctional families. It’s also not the best. In fact, there are quite a few shows that beat Yellowstone…
I’ve spent the last few weeks writing about the Royal Pop – seeking out every leak, watching the hype build on Instagram, tracking the rumours, and somewhere along the way, I got properly swept up in it. I love an unusual watch, and there’s something about a collaboration this unlikely, Swatch and Audemars Piguet making a multi-coloured pocket watch, that got under my skin. So I did something I’ve never done before – I camped out in front of a store. Here’s exactly how it went… Friday – 5pm: Covent Garden is already a write-off I walked down to the…