Author: Press Room
Convenience isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I once thought it was. But I was wrong. The thing is, I come from the era of tapes. For music. For TV shows. Even for computer games. You think it’s bad now when your console decides to download an update? Try waiting 20 minutes for a game to – possibly – load from tape, before allowing you to feast on pixels so sharp they almost slice up your eyeballs. Hence, you know, me being quite glad when things sped up a bit. Floppy disks! Shiny discs! The magic of on-demand! A hundred million songs…
Netflix doesn’t lack for fantastic thrillers, but there are few that can be compared to The Guilty, a 2021 movie starring Jake Gyllenhaal as a cop desperate to save a kidnapped woman. That doesn’t sound terribly unique — Gyllenhaal has played cops before in movies like Prisoners and End of Watch — but The Guilty has a gimmick that’s too interesting to pass up: it’s set in a single room, and Gyllenhaal is more or less the only actor we see. The premise by itself makes The Guilty worth a look. That the movie makes it work is more impressive…
If you have a newer Apple phone in your pocket, you’ve got a bunch of excellent cameras in easy reach. They’re superb for stills, but also take fantastic video footage, and iPhone Action Mode is a big reason why. Action Mode was introduced in the iPhone 14 series, and is meant to prevent your vids from being ruined by shaky hands. The digital image stabilisation tech helps keep those otherwise blurry frames from Saturday night looking clean and crisp – which may not be a good thing, depending on what you got up to. To get smoother shots, follow our…
Okay, so the Apple iPad Mini 8 technically doesn’t officially exist. But we all know it’s coming. After all, Apple isn’t the type to rest on its laurels when it comes to refreshes, and tablets are no exception. Nothing has been officially announced, of course, but there are enough whispers, rumours, and analyst insights to paint a reasonably clear picture of what to expect. Here’s everything we know so far about the iPad Mini 8. Oh, and all the images in this article are of the current-generation iPad Mini 7. We haven’t got a super-secret Apple prototype or anything. Honest.…
Streaming music puts millions of songs in our hands at a low monthly cost, but it encourages the use of wireless protocols with serious bottlenecks. When streaming high-resolution lossless music through a Wi-Fi network or cellular connection, speed and bitrate become concerns. Using a Bluetooth connection to connect your streaming device to earbuds, headphones, or speakers means you’ll be further limited to the bitrate of the Bluetooth audio codec used. Streaming sounds “bad” when your gear and wireless communication protocols aren’t good enough to support the quality of files you want to play. I use Ethernet throughout my home, but…
Plex’s recent push toward subscriptions and remote ad-supported streaming has many people looking for a way out, but the idea of running your own media server still scares them off. The word server makes it sound like you need a closet full of blinking lights and a computer science degree to keep it running. If you’ve been waiting to use Jellyfin, you should try it out. You can build something that plays your library on any device in the house, transcodes on the fly, and never asks you for a credit card. You can use hardware you already have Linux…
The history of television is littered with failed revivals of old TV shows. That ’90s Show, a revival of That ’70s Show, flamed out after a few seasons. A reboot of the iconic sitcom Frasier lasted two. One of the first beloved sitcoms to revive itself years later was Arrested Development, which aired its first three seasons on Fox in the mid-2000s, gained a passionate cult following, and then came back on Netflix in 2013 to muted applause. In all of these cases, the magic that had made the show popular in the first place just wasn’t there anymore. Somehow,…
Mirroring or casting my phone to a smart TV is a feature that often comes in handy for sharing media with friends and family, immersive mobile gaming, and watching movies and shows stored on my phone. However, it’s not always as straightforward as I’d like. Some apps only work with specific devices, others bombard me with ads, and many require complicated setup processes that leave me wondering whether it would have been easier to plug in an HDMI cable. There’s always going to be a solution among the vast array of apps available, and in this instance, I found one…
I’ve worn a fair few of the best smart rings over the past couple of years, and almost all of them have shared the same problem: they look like smart rings. Chunky, slightly clinical, and weird enough to make people ask “what’s that on your finger?” The new Oura Ring 5 is the first smart ring that actually looks like a piece of jewellery. After a month of wearing it day and night, I’m convinced this is the smart ring’s iPhone moment – the point when a product reshapes what users expect by default. So, should you buy one? Here’s…
No one, and I mean possibly no one, likes ads. Sure, the people behind them and the people earning from them have their reasons for keeping them around, but as a regular person trying to watch a YouTube video or read an article without five banners fighting for my attention, I’m obviously not a fan. Ad-blocking extensions are everywhere, and while I’m not here to recommend one, I figured building one would be a fun way to test what AI coding tools do when handed a problem that sounds simple on the surface but gets messy fast. So, I gave…