Author: Press Room

I’ve never understood why streaming services keep asking us to pay more while offering less. Between rising subscription prices, ads creeping into paid plans, and restrictions on account sharing, the experience feels much more complicated than it used to. I considered canceling my subscriptions altogether, but I wasn’t ready to give up the convenience of on-demand entertainment. Instead, I turned my NAS into a Plex Media Server, and it completely changed how I watch movies and TV. I no longer pay for Netflix, I don’t sit through ads, and my family can access our shared media library without worrying about…

I spend a lot of my day moving between AI tools, and for the past several months, I’ve been paying for the premium tiers of Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT all at once. It sounds excessive when I write it out, and it probably is, but my work involves enough drafting, research, and repetitive busywork that I wanted to give each one a fair shot at earning a permanent place in my routine. I figured I’d settle into a clean split eventually: one tool for writing, another for quick lookups, and so on. That’s not what happened. What happened instead was…

The Apple Watch Ultra is an ideal smartwatch for adventurers, endurance athletes, and anyone who wants Apple’s best digital timepiece. And, if the latest rumours are to be believed, the upcoming Apple Watch Ultra 4 could bring some of the biggest – and best – changes yet. Here’s everything we know so far… Price and release date Apple is widely expected to unveil the Apple Watch Ultra 4 alongside its next iPhone 18 Pro lineup later this year, following the company’s long-established autumn launch schedule. While nothing has been confirmed, most reports point to a launch window around the same…

Introduction I quite liked the Leapmotor B10 when I drove it a few months ago and, before that, the dinky Leapmotor T03 was an ideal little city runabout. Now there’s the Leapmotor B05, an electric hatchback that slots nicely between those two and further bolsters this Stellantis group sub-brand’s portfolio. The B05 is a C-segment hatchback, which means that it’s nicely proportioned and has space but without the bulkiness of an SUV. What makes it more appealing though is the simplicity of what’s on offer. Leapmotor has adopted an ‘everything as standard’ policy which means the B05 comes fitted with…

I listen to music in all kinds of different ways, from streaming services like Apple Music to physical media formats such as CD or vinyl. I love MP3 players, and specifically the iPod classic, but I found it tricky to build a high-quality digital media library from scratch. If you haven’t purchased songs digitally in a while, it’s harder than you may think. For example, while Apple Music offers high-resolution lossless downloads with an active subscription, outright iTunes Store purchases are still limited to DRM-free files with 256 kbps AAC quality. The lack of Digital Rights Management (DRM) software is…

So you want to buy a thing? Congratulations! Only, you’re not sure which thing. Oh no. You could spend time researching what’s best phone / tablet / watch (or whatever you’re after) for you. But these days, surely ChatGPT or some other AI chatbot can do all the hard purchasing decisions on your behalf? “Tell me the best thing to buy”, you might type. And the AI will merrily churn out perfect recommendations by the time you’ve had a sip of coffee, right? Well, no. In fact, here are 7 reasons to think twice before relying on an AI chatbot when making purchasing decisions. 1. Chatbots…

With crushing inevitability, the UK government is to ban social media access for the under-16s. Having previously announced a ban on smartphones in schools, I half expect to soon hear that British children will be banned from the internet entirely. Or from using anything that has more technology inside than the average stick.  I don’t support the ban. I think the policy is incoherent, illogical and illiberal. Moreover, I don’t think it will work. Worse, it will cause what politicians will later label “unintended consequences” – despite said consequences being evident. We know that because countries like Australia have gone…

Most people assume a slow TV is just a slow TV, and that buying a better one is the only fix for the yearly slow down. The reality is more frustrating than that. The hardware inside your smart TV was already underpowered the day it shipped, and the operating system has been quietly making things worse ever since. Everything behind that panel is an afterthought, but there’s a thirty-dollar fix that does what a brand-new television can’t guarantee. Related 6 Reasons I Skipped a Smart TV and Bought a Streaming Stick Instead It took me a while to come around,…

Netflix may be one of the best streaming services out there, but it has drawbacks. For one thing, it’s infamous for canceling beloved series, a hazard when you produce so much content. Business realities being what they are, it’s too much to expect Netflix to keep producing new seasons of every series that isn’t performing well enough to justify their cost, but sometimes they give the axe to popular, critically lauded TV shows you’d figure were worth continuing. One of the best examples is Mindhunter, a sterling crime series that takes full advantage of our obsession with serial killers, presented…

VLC is clearly the best media player out there, with tons of features and support for 100s of media formats. So when I got my 4K HDR monitor, I naturally tried to play the few 4K HDR movies in my collection, and it was, honestly, meh. The colors looked washed out, the HDR tone mapping was all over the place, and there were noticeable micro-stutters. I’d already dialed in the HDR settings on Windows 11, so I knew my display wasn’t the problem. My attempts at tweaking VLC’s settings were futile. So I went looking for an alternative and found…