Author: Press Room

I’ve used noise-cancelling headphones for years, and I always noticed the same strange sensation. Every time I turned ANC on, it felt like my ears were filling with pressure — like being on a plane mid-descent or diving deeper underwater. I assumed that was how ANC worked for everyone; a slightly pressured feeling that, while not uncomfortable, I could definitely do without. It turns out I was wrong. That feeling of pressure isn’t normal, and most importantly, it’s not something you have to put up with. ANC doesn’t actually create, but it can feel like it does My poor little…

Whenever you search for something on Google, or like something on social media, or talk to a chatbot, some company somewhere is recording what you did. Very often, they’ll then take that data and sell it to advertisers, which is why we so often see ads on the internet that are responsive to what we’re looking for right at that moment. These systems seem to know what we want before we do. This is surveillance capitalism, an economic system where the unilateral capturing of personal human experience is turned into behavioral data and then resold for profit. In the 2020s,…

I absolutely love Nvidia G-Sync. Team Green’s take on Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) tech first captured my heart several years ago when I bought my first G-Sync Compatible monitor. Ever since, I’ve been enjoying the smoothest PC gaming experiences of my life. So it was with great alarm that I was recently forced to stop using G-Sync for a solid week due to an issue with my entertainment setup. Those seven days of stuttering were an absolute nightmare for my obsessive eyes. Happily, Nvidia’s form of VRR is working for me again, and I can honestly say I’ll never take…

The trailer for Dune: Part Three, director Denis Villeneuve’s epic climax to his sci-fi movie trilogy, has dropped, and the next movie looks just as spectacular as the first two. Maybe Dune: Part Three will finally net Villeneuve and his collaborators some of the Oscar gold that eluded them with Parts One and Two. These movies are based on the Dune novels by Frank Herbert. The first two movies covered 1965’s Dune, and followed Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) as he transformed from the scion of a noble house into the leader of the desert-dwelling Fremen people on the planet of…

Whether you’re using your TV to watch shows, movies, or for gaming, you want one that’s going to suit your needs properly. You likely did a lot of research into what TV you wanted or needed for your main purposes before you bought it. You’d be silly not to, considering it’s going in your home and you’re going to be spending a good amount of time looking at it. While buying a TV online can be easy, if you really want to make sure your purchase is exactly what you want, you should go to a store to look at…

Samsung makes some of the best OLED and LED TVs with excellent picture settings to match. I’ve personally used Samsung LEDs for the longest time and recently got a new 55″ LED 4K TV, except that the picture quality didn’t look right out of the box. After living with washed-out colors and inconsistent brightness for months, I finally dug into the settings and realized the problem wasn’t the panel itself. Samsung ships its TVs with several defaults turned on that look impressive in a showroom but hurt picture quality at home. Once I disabled a handful of these and adjusted…

Project Hail Mary is now out in theaters, and it’s dominating the box office. The movie, based on the novel by Andy Weir, is about a teacher and former microbiologist named Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) who gets drafted into an effort by the world’s greatest scientists to figure out why the sun is dimming. His journey will take him light years away from home to investigate one of the few stars in the galaxy that doesn’t seem to be getting dimmer. He forms an unlikely bond with a space alien named Rocky who’s in the area for the same reason,…

We’ve talked a lot about the Ethernet vs. Wi-Fi debate for smart TVs. Ethernet is preferred wherever possible — but TVs make things a bit trickier. Most TV manufacturers (and streaming boxes) cheap out on Ethernet. They either don’t include a port at all, or if they do, it’s usually a Fast Ethernet port limited to 100 Mbps. 100 Mbps is plenty of speed, but newer Wi-Fi technologies can deliver much more — hence the debate. I wasn’t particularly bothered by this. I was perfectly happy with the 100 Mbps Ethernet port on my TV — until I did something…

Every year, I visit family for a month over the holidays, knowing full well that I am entering an entertainment black hole. Being based overseas, I found that single-household-per-streaming-account rules throttle any attempts to circumvent them, even with a quality VPN, so I resigned myself to using the free services available on my Amazon Fire TV Stick for the foreseeable future. I expected a downgrade, with endless ads, low-quality content, and a frustrating viewing experience, but what I found was surprisingly different. Free streaming felt less like scrolling fatigue and more like rediscovering TV as I remember it, where you…

I don’t remember the first time I ever used VLC. It has just been the standard for years and is one of the few apps that I install on every PC. It’s probably the only app I don’t remember troubleshooting or second-guessing. The rule has been simple: as long as a file exists, VLC plays it. It was only when I started watching more 4K videos that I noticed cracks in this “flawless” tool. I needed a tool that was just as good as VLC but better able to handle 4K, so I settled on SMPlayer. SMPlayer is comparable to…