Anker, which made its name building device batteries and chargers, is now making gear for all of the devices you own. Or at least all of the devices in your home, since it just unveiled its Solix home energy system, which can be bolted onto existing or new domestic solar setups. Like many other home battery companies out there, Solix is scalable, with the smallest unit sized at 5kWh – enough for a few hours backup power – all the way up to 180kWh. It won’t arrive until 2024 but, when it does, it’ll be paired with an EV charging system Anker is presently cooking up.

The company is no stranger to this world, since it already builds small solar and battery sets for off-road types. But it’s pleasing to see it also entering the home battery market which, Tesla aside, is full of companies that don’t have as big a presence in the consumer space. It’s also heartening to see Anker building gear for smaller setups, like apartments, where sometimes the only thing you can do to clean up your energy is hang a solar panel off your balcony.

– Dan Cooper

The Morning After isn’t just a newsletter – it’s also a daily podcast. Get our daily audio briefings, Monday through Friday, by subscribing right here.

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Zwift launches dedicated game controllers for its bike-based fitness platform

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Microsoft-Activision Blizzard merger temporarily blocked by US judge

Ubisoft needs a reboot

What happened to the once-loved gaming giant?

Our Summer Game Fest coverage turns its eye toward Ubisoft, home of several big franchises, including Far Cry and Assassin’s Creed. The last few years, however, have seen the company wobble, releasing half-baked, half-loved titles to middling results. A sharp left turn into freemium gaming and, sigh, NFTs, only helped to accelerate the erosion of its good name. Curious about what behind-the-scenes drama caused the slide? So was I, until I read this.

Continue Reading.

Twitter is getting evicted from its Colorado office over unpaid rent

Wait, there are consequences for refusing to pay for things!?

A judge has evicted Twitter from its Colorado offices after the building’s owner sued for three months’ back rent totalling $75,000. The location presently houses around 150 employees, who have until the end of July to pack up their things and move out. This won’t be the only time Twitter lawyers see the inside of a courtroom over their owner’s refusal to pay for things, either. It’s currently being sued by (deep breath) its cleaners, its San Francisco landlord and several of its former employees for sums which are reportedly owed to them.

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Sennheiser SoundProtex Plus review: Concert earplugs that don't kill the vibe

Protect your hearing while you rock out.

Photo by Billy Steele/Engadget

If you’re a big live music fan, you’ve probably been warned about the harm all of those big PA systems can do to your hearing. It’s a problem the audio mavens at Sennheiser are looking to address with a pair of earplugs designed for live music events. Billy Steele has been testing out the SoundProtex Plus by spending his time at noisy gigs to see if they help you enjoy the music without compromising your ability to do so in the future.

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Google Home's new script editor can make smart device automations even more powerful

Some programming knowledge required.

Google

Google’s redesigned Home app is introducing a script editor, enabling users to program their own smart home routines. This includes “if this” style directions, like dimming the living room lights and lowering the blinds when the living room TV is on after dark. It’s designed for folks who have some programming experience, but it should be easy enough that most committed amateurs should feel comfortable at least giving it a try.

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Microsoft may own almost half of OpenAI, but a recent expose hints the pair aren’t the happiest of bedfellows. The Wall Street Journal claims the AI company warned Microsoft not to incorporate GPT-4 into Bing search without further training, but it did so anyway. It resulted in several high-profile examples of odd behavior, including bots arguing with users, and at least one instance of a user being urged to dissolve their marriage and elope with Bing instead.

There’s resentment, too, on Microsoft’s side, finding its own internal AI projects overlooked in favor of OpenAI. Which, despite the close financial ties, is very much free to work with Microsoft’s rivals in plenty of fields. It’s led to a situation where the pair are working together, and yet against one another. And that’s never a recipe for success.

– Dan Cooper

The Morning After isn’t just a newsletter – it’s also a daily podcast. Get our daily audio briefings, Monday through Friday, by subscribing right here.

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Google's Pixel Watch now offers overnight blood oxygen tracking

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Reddit's CEO reportedly told staff the community's API protest will blow over

Popular subreddits plan to extend API protests indefinitely

There’s almost nothing in the human spirit as indomitable as the phrase, “You sure about that, pal?” It’s something Reddit CEO Steve Huffman seems unable to stop milking in his user base after sending a memo to staffers saying the API protests would “pass.” His internal missive added that, despite tens of thousands of communities going dark, there was no “significant revenue impact.” Consequently, those in charge of the communities have pledged to keep their protests running indefinitely, with one user inviting Reddit’s leadership to “f- around and find out.”

Continue Reading (Huffman)

Continue Reading (Protests)

Toyota claims its future EVs will have a range of over 600 miles

And something about hydrogen.

Daniel Cooper / Engadget

Toyota has announced its next-generation EV battery will have a range of 621 miles, or 1,000 kilometers. It’s part of a long series of announcements from the company that kickstarted the EV revolution finally embracing the technology. Of course, it wouldn’t be a Toyota announcement without plenty of sweet words about hydrogen, but we all know the writing’s on the wall for that one, at least for small and mid-size vehicles.

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Paul McCartney is using AI to create a final song for The Beatles

It’s likely to be a 1978 demo written by John.

Sir Paul McCartney has announced he’ll release one last song from The Beatles, which was recorded with the help of AI. It comes from the same trove of John Lennon demos used to make “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love” in the mid ‘90s. A third song, “Now and Then,” was on the same tapes, but electrical interference rendered Lennon’s vocals unusable. McCartney was inspired to go back to the material after watching Peter Jackson’s Get Back, which used AI to extract clean dialog audio from the studio noise. The song will be released later this year, but be warned – George Harrison didn’t think much of it when they tried to re-record it in the ‘90s.

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Embracer announces layoffs and game cancellations after a $2 billion deal falls through

It could have implications for some mid-tier game revivals in the works.

You’d be forgiven for not knowing the name Embracer, a publisher that has spent big to pick up a roster of big, if not blockbuster, games franchises. It’s the name behind the names behind series like Borderlands, Homeworld, TimeSplitters, Tomb Raider and The Lord of the Rings. Sadly, it also managed to tie itself in financial knots after an unnamed deal, reportedly worth $2 billion, fell apart back in May. Consequently, it’s announced it’ll need to restructure to survive, with several as-yet unannounced games on the chopping block and the potential for mass layoffs in the near future.

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In a world where every Apple laptop is thin and light, do we still need to market some of them based on that alone? In many ways, a 15-inch MacBook Air makes you wish Apple would bring back the suffix-free MacBook name for its mainstream machines. But, silly branding aside, is the biggest, newest Air worth your cash? Your friend and mine, Nathan Ingraham has spent the last week running the rule over the new hardware to see what’s good.

On paper, the 15-inch Air (nope, still sounds weird) is just a bigger version of its 13-inch sibling. You’ll get the same design language, port selection and chip options carried over, but that’s no bad thing. After all, the M2 MacBook Air marked a quantum leap in Apple’s hardware design, building a gorgeous and speedy machine into such a slender body. The only real downside is the Air’s focus on affordability means you’ll get a 60Hz display rather than the 120Hz on the new Pros.

– Dan Cooper

The Morning After isn’t just a newsletter – it’s also a daily podcast. Get our daily audio briefings, Monday through Friday, by subscribing right here.

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FTC files injunction to block Microsoft's purchase of Activision Blizzard

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'Skull and Bones' is still somehow still alive and will apparently have a closed beta in August

Reddit sees more than 6,000 communities go dark in protest over API changes

The protests caused the site to temporarily break.

If Reddit CEO Steve Huffman’s AMA was meant to defuse tensions between the company’s leadership and its users, it wasn’t very successful. More than 6,000 subreddits have now gone dark in protest of the service’s API changes that have boxed out several third-party apps. This includes several of its biggest communities, all of which going dark at once being enough to temporarily topple the site.

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Apple Mac Studio review (M2 Ultra, 2023): A better Mac for pros

Who needs a Mac Pro now?

Devindra Hardawar / Engadget

Reading Devindra Hardawar’s review of the M2 Mac Studio left me wondering why the Mac Pro still exists. Sure, expandable RAM and having free PCI-E slots are still valuable for some use cases, but for everything else? This tiny machine has the raw grunt, if you spec it up enough, to make even the most powerful pro computers weep into their cereal. Read on to learn how jaw-droppingly swift this thing is, and if it’s worth your cash.

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Watch the first 'Star Wars Outlaws' gameplay trailer

Ten minutes of scoundrel wish fulfillment.

Massive Entertainment / Ubisoft

Waiting on an open-world Star Wars game? You won’t have to wait much longer, thankfully. Star Wars Outlaws has broken cover entirely. At its Ubisoft Forward event on Monday, the game publisher shared 10 minutes of gameplay footage that touched on exploration, stealth and good ole-fashioned gunplay. You’ll be able to traverse the game's world on a speeder bike and even take to the skies and space with a starship, with seemingly no loading between game elements. (I think I’ve heard of that before…) Star Wars Outlaws will be available next year on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and PC.

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'Alan Wake II' stands out in a sea of sequels

More of the same, but better?

Remedy Entertainment

Engadget’s Jessica Conditt watched a 30-minute hands-off preview of Alan Wake II at Summer Game Fest, and she liked what she saw. The original Alan Wake came out in 2010, so the timeline in the sequel has also progressed by that same period. In it, writer Alan Wake has been missing for 13 years, while FBI agent Saga Anderson is hunting the ghost of FBI agent Robert Nightingale, who was killed off at the end of the first title. The big innovation in Alan Wake II is the ability to swap between Saga and Alan, playing as both characters throughout the game. Chapter one begins with Saga in the driver’s seat, and after that, players can choose to play as her or Alan at the beginning of each new section. Intrigued? Read on for more first impressions.

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The Xbox Series S occupies an interesting space in Microsoft’s gaming lineup, given it can play every current-generation title available for the Series X. It may be significantly less powerful, but it’s also smaller and a lot cheaper, making it a “good enough” option for plenty of mainstream and casual gamers. Now, at 2023’s Summer Game Fest, Microsoft is addressing one of users’ biggest bugbears about the machine, which should make it a lot easier to live with.

At the event, the company showed off a new “carbon black” version of the console with 1TB storage, double what’s presently available. It’s a big deal for owners of the all-digital console since, with just 512GB, the current Series S users are often forced to delete downloaded games or buy a pricey expansion card to make room for whatever’s just landed on Game Pass. The new Series S will be available on September 1st, days before Microsoft’s latest blockbuster release, Starfield.

– Dan Cooper

The Morning After isn’t just a newsletter – it’s also a daily podcast. Get our daily audio briefings, Monday through Friday, by subscribing right here.

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Watch the Summer Game Fest keynote in under 20 minutes

'Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty' will take you back to Night City on September 26th

'Metaphor: ReFantazio' is a fantasy RPG from the team behind 'Persona 5'

Roguelike ‘33 Immortals’ has 33-player co-op

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Twitter has reportedly refused to pay its Google Cloud contract

It could have dire consequences for its automated moderation system.

Back in 2018, Twitter signed a billion-dollar deal with Google to host some of its platform on the latter’s cloud servers. Now, with a new owner trying to avoid paying for anything, ever at all, the company has decided to renege on that obligation. Reports say Twitter hasn’t paid Google the latest installment of what’s owed and is now racing to migrate key functionality away from Google Cloud before June 30th, but might not make that deadline. That could put some key Twitter functionality at risk, including the automated moderation platform which combats spam and CSAM.

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Ubisoft's open-world Star Wars game is 'Outlaws'

The company promised to share gameplay footage later today.

Ubisoft / Lucasfilm

Ubisoft's long-awaited open-world Star Wars game will arrive in 2024. The publisher announced Star Wars Outlaws on Sunday during Microsoft's Xbox and Starfield Direct showcase with a cinematic trailer that introduces fans to the game's Han Solo-like protagonist, Key Vess. Ubisoft is billing Outlaws as the first-ever open-world Star Wars game — though it's worth noting many past games in the franchise, including the recently released Jedi: Survivor, feature open-world elements.

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‘Mortal Kombat 1’ made a great first impression at SGF 2023

Yes, that’s its name.

Warner Bros.

One of the biggest reveals from a generally muted Summer Game Fest showcase was footage from Mortal Kombat 1. The 12th mainline game in the series restarts the universe with a once-mortal Liu Kang, now a full-fledged god of fire. Alongside this new world, the title also adds Kameos, summonable allies to fights. Read on for our first impressions of playing the game.

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Netflix's password sharing crackdown seems to be working

An analytics company says nagging users into paying has paid dividends.

We won’t know how successful Netflix’s crackdown on password sharing has been until we’ve seen its next one or two financial releases. But a third-party analytics company believes Netflix’s policy of nagging users into paying up has started to bear fruit. Its data suggests the streamer saw a spike in sign-ups towards the end of May, far outstripping the number of cancelations.

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Yesterday marked the start of Summer Game Fest, an event to fill the void left by the canceled E3. It’s a gaming industry shindig for developers and publishers to build hype for the titles they’re working on right now. But while the business has never been bigger or more profitable, there’s also a sense the gaming industry is shrinking.

Much of this is because two of the biggest players, Microsoft and Sony, are doing whatever they can to consolidate their power and influence. Both have bought, and are trying to buy, major independent publishers and studios to bolster their own ecosystems. There’s a risk both behemoths will pull up their drawbridges, further splitting an industry already prone to fracture.

But that’s not the only issue, with publishers forcing successful developers to work on titles they have no experience of. The most recent example is Redfall, which was reportedly created by a publisher looking to juice its online-multiplayer profitability boxes. The title was then handed to a team that had built its reputation on tightly crafted single-player experiences and told to get a move on, leading to a critically panned flop.

But that’s just one of many issues facing the gaming industry explored in Jessica Conditt’s State of the Union story leading into Summer Games Fest. If you’re wondering why it feels both like there’s so much possibility, and yet very little at all right now, then it’s well worth checking out.

– Dan Cooper

The Morning After isn’t just a newsletter – it’s also a daily podcast. Get our daily audio briefings, Monday through Friday, by subscribing right here.

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United is putting 4K displays and Bluetooth on its planes

Now, to get those planes to run on time.

Panasonic Avionics Corporation

United Airlines has announced it will buy 300,000 state-of-the-art in-flight entertainment units for its fleet of planes. The Panasonic Avionics-made units will have 10-inch (economy) or 13-inch (first) 4K OLED screens with Bluetooth built in. Sadly, the rollout of the screens won’t start until 2025, and it’s intended for the international fleet only, at least for now.

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Third-party Reddit app Apollo will shut down on June 30th

Reddit CEO will host an AMA on API changes as thousands of subreddits plan to ‘go dark’

LIONEL BONAVENTURE via Getty Images

Reddit recently announced a change to its API pricing, with massive ramifications for third party app developers. Apollo, a popular Reddit client, said the changes would mean it paying Reddit $20 million a year just to maintain its existing service – leading creator Christian Selig to announce the app would shut down on June 30th.

The move has sent Reddit users into turmoil, with more than 3,000 prominent subreddits planning to “go dark” for 48 hours in protest. Reddit CEO Steve Huffman subsequently announced he would address the site’s vast community in an Ask Me Anything (AMA) on Friday, June 9th. Although, interestingly, the terse announcement of the event neglected to mention the consequences for those potentially doomed third-party clients.

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'Sonic Superstars' gives classic gameplay another modern makeover

It’ll land pretty much everywhere this fall.

Sega

Now, I’m old, cynical and jaded, but it does feel like every two years or so, we get a “back to basics” Sonic the Hedgehog game. You know, one that proudly announces the series will go back to its roots as a side-scrolling action platformer, with a modern twist. Sonic Superstars is the latest, promising a return to side-scrolling action, albeit with more modern graphics and co-op gameplay. Unfortunately, I’m also at the point where I’m fully invested in giving it a go in the hope of rekindling my childhood love of Sega’s Blue Blur.

(OK, I looked, and Sonic Mania was 2017, and Sonic 4 was 2012, so it’s more like a five-year cycle.)

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‘Spider-Man 2’ launches on October 20th

It’s a PS5 exclusive.

Marvel / Sony / Insomniac

The long-awaited Spider-Man 2 will be released on October 20th, with pre-orders for the PS5 exclusive opening on June 16th. In it, Peter Parker will team up with Miles Morales, and you can switch between the two characters on the fly. Insomniac Games’ James Stevenson added both protagonists will have their own specific storylines and missions for you to complete. Although given that Parker and Morales share top billing, surely the game should be called 2 Spider-Man, or Spider-Men or 2 Spiders 2 Men, right?

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Wildfires in Canada have led to a surge in air pollution levels in the US, with New York currently having the worst air quality of any major city. There are plenty of images of N95-mask-wearing people walking down smog-blighted streets that wouldn’t look out of place in many a dystopia. Many states and cities have urged folks to stay inside unless they absolutely need to leave, and they’re pumping out as much Air Quality Index data as they can.

But do you actually know what the Air Quality Index is, or what it’s for? We’ve done an AQI deep dive, exploring how it works and how you can keep yourself informed and safe.

And, on the subject of being safe, we’ve also knocked up a guide for how to make a quick-and-dirty box fan air filter. All you’ll need is a box fan, some AC air filters and some duct tape, and you’ll be able to screen out a lot more of the bad air floating around your home in the next few weeks.

– Dan Cooper

The Morning After isn’t just a newsletter – it’s also a daily podcast. Get our daily audio briefings, Monday through Friday, by subscribing right here.

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lvo officially unveils the EX30, its compact electric SUV

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Where was all the AI at WWDC?

It’s one buzzword you’ll rarely hear an Apple executive say.

Devindra Hardawar / Engadget

Apple has always been one to eschew the buzzword of the day in favor of coining its own terms or, like at this week’s WWDC, just not talking about it at all. After analyzing Apple’s big keynote, we found “AI” was never mentioned, despite its obvious prevalence in so many of its products. Instead, the company prefers more accurate terms like “machine learning,” or talking about how its models are trained on thousands of people.

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Samsung will focus on foldables in its upcoming July Unpacked event

The writing’s been on the wall for a while.

I don’t think it’s unfair to say Samsung’s king of the folding-phone hill right now, despite the number of rival companies in the space. The winds of change have hinted for a long while now that the Korean giant would put greater emphasis on its premium foldables as time went on. At its next big Unpacked event, scheduled for late July in its hometown of Seoul, Samsung has let slip it’ll be a foldables-heavy show, maybe to the exclusion of all other categories.

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Wordpress' Jetpack AI will write your blog posts for you

Sadly, no AI has yet been invented that will bother to read those posts.

Wordpress, which enabled countless people to find their voice online, is now offering an AI to write your blog posts for you. You’ll be able to type in a prompt and let the system churn out hollow but professional-sounding content for people to think about reading. Wordpress says Jetpack AI will even be able to switch the tone of its posts from informative to funny or sarcastic with the touch of a button. It won’t be long and maybe someone can cook up a bot that’ll even live your life for you, making humanity an entirely redundant part of the system.

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The following article discusses matters of a sensitive nature.

Meta vows to take action after report found Instagram’s algorithm promoted pedophilia content

It’s yet another wake-up call for the company.

Researchers from Stanford and UMass have found a vast network of CSAM accounts in the darkest corners of Instagram. It’s the latest in a series of controversies about the power of the algorithms Meta’s companies use to connect people, as well as its inconsistent moderation. Meta has pledged to launch an internal taskforce which will address the researcher’s findings. But Facebook’s former chief security officer Alex Stamos was damning in his indictment, saying that if “three academics with limited access could find such a huge network, [it] should set off alarms at Meta.”

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Receiving an unsolicited image is an unpleasant experience at the best of times, and one that technology has made all too common. At WWDC, Apple announced iOS 17 will use an on-device machine learning model to scan both images and videos for nudity. When detected, you’ll get a pop-up, telling you the system thinks the file may be inappropriate.

I wonder how much of this is a response to the practice of AirDropping inappropriate images to an unsuspecting person’s phone. One notable incident from 2022 saw a person removed from a flight after they had shared an image of themselves with other passengers. That AirDrop images have visible previews, too, currently makes it harder for people to avoid catching an eyeful.

– Dan Cooper

The Morning After isn’t just a newsletter – it’s also a daily podcast. Get our daily audio briefings, Monday through Friday, by subscribing right here.

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Apple bought the AR company behind the tech in Nintendo’s ‘Mario Kart’ ride

Mira also had several military contracts.

Universal Studios / Nintendo

Apple has bought Mira, the company that built the AR headsets used in Super Nintendo World’s Mario Kart-themed ride. It had previously built its own smartphone-based headset, which we tried in 2017. Back then, it garnered some praise despite its low price and low tech. As well as the Mario headsets, the startup was also supplying heads-up display gear for the US military. It’s not clear when the deal happened, or if any of Mira’s technology went into the Vision Pro. But it’s likely, if it hasn’t already, Apple will be quietly scooping up plenty of small AR and VR startups in the coming years.

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Twitter's ad sales have reportedly dropped by 59 percent since last year

Advertisers are nervous about the content Twitter is happy to host.

Twitter has reportedly seen ad revenue fall by 59 percent in the last year as brands flee the platform. After Elon Musk bought the company to remake it in his own image, advertisers have backed off due to the surge in hate speech and adult content. In 2021, under the old regime, Twitter cleared annual revenue of $5.1 billion, while the first year of Musk’s tenure is expected to make just $3 billion. Maybe, just maybe, gutting the moderation and ad-sales staff of a platform reliant on moderation and ad-sales wasn’t the smartest business move.

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Western Digital's first Xbox Series X/S storage cards start at $80

No more are users locked into Seagate’s storage options.

Western Digital

If you wanted to expand the storage of your Xbox Series X or S, you had the choice of any manufacturer you wanted, so long as it was Seagate. Now, however, Western Digital has launched its own range of expansion cards to boost the size of your local library. The WD Black C50 starts at $80 for a 500GB model, with a 1TB card costing $150, a fair bump cheaper than Seagate’s offerings. Not to mention it’s just nice to have a choice.

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Chinese startup says its new EV battery doesn’t lose range in the cold

It says the Phoenix cell has a top range of 621 miles.

EVs have countless benefits over their gas-powered rivals, but battery degradation in low temperatures isn’t one of them. It’s an issue Chinese company Greater Bay Technology says it’s now fixed, claiming its new Phoenix battery can reach ideal temperature in six minutes. It added Phoenix has a potential range of 1,000km (621 miles) and will be in a new EV made by (Chinese manufacturer) Aion at some point next year. If true, this could be the quantum leap that will see EVs trounce the competition once and for all.

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Ford has become the first major automaker to leap into bed with Tesla after the US government pushed to make EV charging more widely accessible. The carmaker has signed a deal, starting spring 2024, so selected Ford EVs can slurp down power at some Tesla Supercharger stations. As part of the pact, Ford said, from the 2025 model year, it’ll switch to Tesla’s open-source North American Charging Standard (NACS) on its vehicles. Meanwhile, existing models that still use the (more or less) global standard Combined Charging System (CCS) will be able to pick up a Tesla-designed adapter to bridge the gap.

The deal is surprising, especially given the relative power, size and prestige of the two companies involved. Ford, one of the world’s biggest car makers, is ceding control of its charger future to a relative minnow, albeit one that built a sizable own-brand charging network. Not to mention it runs the risk of creating a NACS–CCS EV-charging format war, which may erode consumer faith in EVs. After all, if you pull up at a gas station anywhere in the US, there should be a one-size-fits-all way to get fuel in your tank without worrying about the size of the pipe.

– Dan Cooper

The Morning After isn’t just a newsletter – it’s also a daily podcast. Get our daily audio briefings, Monday through Friday, by subscribing right here.

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TikTok is testing an AI chatbot for content discovery

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Google begins opening access to generative AI in search

At least for those who signed up for the Search Labs waitlist.

At I/O, Google showed off SGE, its experimental system to incorporate generative AI inside its search results. Now, the company’s answer to Bing AI is open for testing, at least to users who signed up to the Search Labs waitlist. Once they’ve received the email saying they have access, they can type into the Google search bar – there’s no separate chat window like Bing – to get AI-generated search results, which they can either expand or choose to ask follow-up questions.

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Neuralink receives FDA clearance to begin human trials of its brain-computer interface

It’s a small but vital step on the road to Elon Musk getting wires into people’s brains.

Neuralink, Elon Musk’s controversial brain-to-computer interface startup, claims the FDA has approved it to begin human trials. The regulator hasn’t yet confirmed the claim, and while the company has said it’s not yet recruiting for a human trial, this approval makes one possible. In a tweet, Neuralink wanted to celebrate the “incredible work” taken by its team to secure the FDA’s blessing, not mentioning it was rejected back in March after it was revealed that more than 1,500 animals implanted with the technology had died.

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MoviePass relaunches nationwide with a new pricing model

$10 a month for three movies ain’t such a bad deal.

After months of testing, MoviePass’ all-you-can-eat cinema subscription has relaunched itself across the US. This new version will offer you a tiered subscription plan, with the lowest offering charging you $10 a month for three screenings. It might not be the crazy bargain the previous version offered, but it’s still a damn sight cheaper than most single tickets. And if you’re a real cinephile, you can pay up to $40 a month for 30 screenings, which is staggering on a per-movie basis.

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Sci-fi strategy game 'Homeworld 3' has been delayed to February 2024

The further delay will enable developers to give the title more polish.

Gearbox Publishing / Blackbird Interactive

Homeworld 3, the long-awaited second sequel to the groundbreaking space-based RTS, has been further delayed until February 2024. It’s the second time the title has been pushed back, with developers Blackbird Interactive asking for more time to polish and refine the title. Given that Homeworld 2 debuted in 2003, the two-decade wait for a true follow-up (yes, I’m ignoring Deserts of Kharak) is going to test the idiom “good things come to those who wait” to its very limits.

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I’m never one to buy a product and then instantly pitch it our IRL strand, because I’m always worried that I’m still in the honeymoon period. I much prefer to use something that I’ve bought for months, or years, before I feel compelled to tell the world if it’s any good. But while I’ve had my Sage Creatista Plus for, now, just over a month, I already think it’s one of the better gadget purchases I’ve made in a while.

From 2011 to 2021, I didn’t really drink caffeinated tea or coffee, opting instead for green tea as my hot drink of choice. For many reasons, I was finding it harder to function in the morning, so I decided to make myself a single, at-home latte to start my day. Since I was out of practice, I just made my latte with a shot of instant coffee added to microwaved milk. After a while, however, I started to hunger for something that tasted a bit more like the real thing.

This March, I received a nice little £300 bonus in my wage packet, and thought it was high time I got myself a little Grown Up Treat. I started looking around for affordable bean-to-cup machines, devouring James Hoffman’s YouTube channel to look for his guidance. Hoffman, however, said that buying a bean-to-cup machine was going to become a hobby in itself, not ideal when I was looking for something more, not less, efficient than my current setup.

Since all I wanted was coffee with a little more flavor and some steamed milk in the morning, my friend urged me to try Nespresso. He said the convenience of a higher-quality drink (and he is a coffee snob) is worth the price, especially if you subscribe. And you could pick up an entry-level machine for either £150 at retail, or far less if you opt for a pod delivery subscription. To be fair to him, I did explore this possibility, but decided against it for two reasons.

First, I’m not a big fan of Nestle as a company given its fairly sordid history of controversial business practices. Its Wikipedia entry has 16 subheadings under the title “Controversies and Criticisms,” including the baby milk scandal, the use of slave and child labor and the union busting. In my mind, it’s second only to Coca-Cola and Uber on a list of companies I won’t buy from unless there’s no feasible alternative.

And then there’s the issues around the creation, consumption and recycling of the aluminum pods. Making them for a single-use purpose seems massively wasteful when you look at the energy cost involved to produce, ship and recycle them. And there are plenty of reports saying that only a fraction of the pods purchased and used are even sent back to be reused.

But after a long session inside an internet rabbit-hole, I did learn that you could swerve paying Nestle almost entirely. It was news to me to learn that there’s a whole world of third-party companies that make pods compatible with Nespresso machines. And many of those are made from plant materials that are compostable, and can be recycled in your household food waste.

Photo by Daniel Cooper / Engadget

So I took a look at some machines, and knowing that James Hoffman always spoke highly of Sage / Breville’s hardware, examined those pretty closely. Its Creatista series looks less like a futuristic pod-meal machine and a bit more like a real coffee machine, which helped. And I was on the hunt for a model with its own steam wand, because while I could use a standalone milk frother, I didn’t want to buy two appliances if one could do the job.

As I said, the Creatista and its Plus-named sibling are functionally identical, but the Plus has a more professional stainless-steel alloy look. I’m not particularly obsessed with one aesthetique but, I figured, I’m 38, damnit, if I want a fancy coffee machine, nobody can judge me. (It’s also pleasingly narrow, which enabled me to slide it into an otherwise-empty space on my cramped kitchen countertop.)

But there was no way that I was going to spend north of £400 for one, and so for a few days, I decided to abandon the plan. That was until I realized that European second hand gadget marketplace BackMarket has a dedicated section for refurbished coffee machines. A British company had a refurbished, nearly-new Creatista Plus for £249.99, a much easier pill to swallow. Especially since I wasn’t so much dipping a toe into this world as the whole foot and hoping for the best.

Rather than press buy, however, I decided to see if that same company was offering its wares on other sites for less, and it turns out that it was on eBay. The same eBay that had sent me a 20-percent off voucher that I’d forgotten all about until a menu item on the listing asked if I wanted to knock some cash off the price. That took the product down to £179.99, not much more than a low-end Nespresso machine, and an offer I quite literally couldn’t refuse.

Beyond the aesthetique, there’s a lot to love about the Creatista Plus, including being able to program in your settings for the perfect latte. A small display and push-down crown lets you select your coffee shot volume, milk temperature and froth level. Now, rather than microwaving my milk, I can just put my cup under the coffee nozzle, pour milk into the steamer jug, press the button and let it do its thing. (Well, in part – you have to come back to activate the milk frother once the coffee shot has been poured.) I like the fact that it’s very easy to clean, too, and the steam wand will purge itself after every use, so that I’m not getting nervous about built-up gunk.

And the end result is far better coffee than the stuff I’d been willingly slurping down for the previous two years. It may not hold a candle to a proper Barista-made cup, but it’s more than enough for me to start my day. The fact I was able to do so cheaply, buying a nice refurbished model and avoiding giving any money to Nestle at the same time isn’t a bad thing either.

The EU has issued a record-breaking €1.2 billion ($1.3 billion) fine to Facebook owner Meta over data transfers. After a lengthy investigation, officials found the social network’s practice of moving EU citizens' data to US-based servers was in violation of the bloc’s key digital privacy rules. In a statement, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission said that while Meta had attempted to address potential legal hurdles, “these arrangements did not address the risks to the fundamental rights and freedoms of data subjects” in the Union.

This is the latest chapter in a saga that has now run for more than a decade examining how EU citizens’ private data is handled by Big Tech. Put simply, European privacy law is thought to be a lot tighter than its American counterpart, especially with a focus on individual rights. But any big tech company with servers all around the world has the ability to move data from one server to another without much effort. That means that an EU citizens’ data could be sent to the US, where such stringent privacy laws don’t apply, opening the door for unnecessary surveillance.

It’s something that the EU, often pushed into action by Austrian lawyer and privacy activist Max Schrems, has been working to address. Schrems found the existing Safe Harbor provisions to be insufficient, something that the Court of Justice of the European Union agreed with. So, the bloc worked with the US on the EU-US Privacy Shield, which was meant to tighten data controls when information was pushed between the two territories. Naturally, that was similarly ruled invalid by the European Court of Justice, leading to further contortions as Facebook and others said that their businesses, for reasons known only to them, wouldn’t function without this data transfer.

As part of the decision, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission has ordered Meta to suspend any future data transfers of EU citizen data to the US within the next five months. It will also have to work to bring its operations “into compliance” with the GDPR, including any processing of EU citizens’ data on US servers, within the next six months. This will likely, however, be appealed and held up as a consequence of a wider political negotiation between the EU and the US as they look to agree a new framework to permit these data flows in a safe(r) way.

Sir Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, has written in his usual style that the company will appeal the fine, and the decision, saying that Facebook acted in good faith. He added that cross-border data flows are vital for many businesses, not just his own, and that he is “disappointed to have been singled out when using the same legal mechanism as thousands of other companies looking to provide services in Europe.”