Author: Press Room

I just fished a watch out of Lake Zurich, and no, that wasn’t an accident. Certina has launched the DS Super PH2000M, rated to a genuinely ridiculous 2000 metres. That’s double the depth rating of anything the brand has made before, and it’s not just a small spec bump either. It’s the next chapter in a story that started back in the 1960s, when Certina’s PH watches (PH stands for hydrostatic pressure) first went chasing depth. The first PH model topped out at 200m. By 1970, the DS-2 Super PH1000M had doubled that. Now it’s doubled again. I got the…

Fantasy author George R.R. Martin published A Game of Thrones, the first book in his A Song of Ice and Fire novels, in 1996. He published four more books in the series over the next 15 years, ending with A Dance With Dragons in 2011. Since then, fans have been waiting for him to complete The Winds of Winter, the sixth book in the saga, without luck. In fact, Martin has now been working on The Winds of Winter for longer than it took him to write the first five books in the series. That is a sobering statistic, and…

Summary Kobo now syncs with StoryGraph to auto-log finished eBooks and audiobooks. Progress, finishing stamps, and journal prompts appear automatically; highlights/notes don’t sync yet. Connect via Kobo account Integrations; syncing needs Wi-Fi and can be manual or paused by turning Wi-Fi off. If you love a neat digital library, or just get a kick out of watching your reading stats go up, you know how annoying it is when your eReader and tracking app don’t talk to each other. Good news — the anticipated Kobo and StoryGraph sync is finally live, meaning your accounts are finally on the same page.…

I pay for a handful of streaming services, but YouTube Premium is never one of them — at least, not directly. I swear by Paramount Plus, and I’ve resisted regularly subscribing to platforms like Netflix to cut down on monthly costs. That said, I get Apple TV free as part of my Apple One plan, and my Google AI Pro subscription now includes YouTube Premium Lite. I’ve been using the premium version of the latter for the first time, and I have to say, I’m unimpressed. Don’t get me wrong, the ad-free videos and offline downloads are useful, but I…

As unfortunate as it is, barely anyone goes to Google or YouTube instantly to look something up anymore. The reflex is to open ChatGPT (or whatever chatbot you prefer) and ask. It hurts me to write that as someone who writes content for the web, but I’d be lying if I said I was any different. Unlike Google or YouTube though, the chatbot I’ve been leaning on isn’t free, and I pay it a fair bit of money just to keep asking it questions. It also comes with other strings attached, like my privacy and a quiet trust that the…

What happens when a luxury audio specialist takes over the townhouse in New York’s affluent Chelsea neighbourhood previously owned by Lady Gaga and is given carte blanche to show off its gear in the best possible light? You get House of Sound, an ultra-exclusive demo space that helps properly minted music lovers visualise what millions of dollars of McIntosh and Sonus Faber kit would look like in their lavish homes. Spread across six floors, there’s enough Hi-Fi equipment here to fill a mansion multiple times over, along with art and photography documenting the brands’ involvement in iconic music events like…

I’m always fixing bits of tech for friends and family, and I had a real noodle-scratcher recently. Despite plugging their smartphone into their TV using a USB-C port, nothing happened, despite having a USB-C port, cable, and input on the TV. It turns out that the port on their smartphone was actually running USB 2.0, even though it was bought in 2023, and that comes with a whole host of problems: no video output, no DisplayPort Alt Mode, and no fun. Related I finally learned why my TV needs HDMI while my PC needs DisplayPort DisplayPort is the go-to standard…

Dolby Atmos adapts to the devices and audio gear you have, and this can be a blessing and a curse. You might fire up Apple Music on your phone and hear Dolby Atmos start playing out of your device’s stereo speakers. It’s a different experience on every platform. The important thing to remember is that every piece of the chain needs to support Dolby Atmos for it to work. The fewer hardware and software points in the mix, the simpler unlocking Dolby Atmos becomes. This explains why experiencing spatial audio on your TV or home theater setup is so difficult.…

Over the past few decades, HBO has produced an embarassingly large number of classic TV series. Shows like The Sopranos, Game of Thrones, and Sex and the City all became cultural phenomena, and the network is still pulling it off with more recent series like Succession and The White Lotus. There’s something about HBO’s willingness to take chances combined with its consisently high level of polish that consistly produces fantastic work. That said, not every gem HBO turns out ends up getting found. The network has produced plenty of shows over the years that can stand up to the greats…

Introduction I was blown away by the Mercedes-Benz CLA when I drove it at the tail-end of last year. It drove like a dream, was super-efficient and the base level 250+ Sport trim wasn’t short on kit. Now that I’ve spent some time behind the wheel of the Shooting Brake version, though, it’s absolutely the estate that gets my vote. Yes, CLA 250+ AMG Line Premium Plus Shooting Brake is a ridiculously long name, but it clues you in as to the abundance of extra features and functions to expect in the cabin – as well as a more generous…