Nothing, the company led by OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei, will announce the phone (1), its first phone, on July 12th, 2022. Rumors about a Nothing-branded phone are as old as the company itself, and there were reports Pei was showing off a prototype back at Mobile World Congress. The company has already teased that the handset will use a Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset and a custom version of Android that highlights the operating system’s “best features.”
Pei made his name with OnePlus, making affordable phones for Android diehards with high-end specs. But the economics of the mobile industry has moved on and so has OnePlus, merging with stablemate Oppo to become a mainstream brand. It’ll be interesting, therefore, to see what Pei has planned to set Nothing apart from the rest of the industry. And if he’s got the power to achieve this feat a second time after making such a big splash the first time around.
Disney has announced it won’t be exhibiting its next big animated movie, Strange World, in French cinemas. This is in protest of the country’s fairly strict rules for how and when movies can be broadcast once they’re done in theaters. The complex rules, which were recently tweaked, essentially mean if Disney had put Strange World into cinemas, it wouldn’t be able to properly add it to Disney+ for the better part of two years. Instead, it'll just bypass theaters (and the rules) to go straight to the streaming platform. That could be a problem for France’s movie theater industry, which relies on the big money Disney movies bring in for a hefty chunk of their revenue.
Do you like cats and wish you could roleplay as one while still working through a dystopian action puzzler? Well, Stray is a new PlayStation and PC title launching on July 19th. You play from a feline point of view, as a small orange tabby trying to escape a futuristic city. But rather than an efficient departure, you scratch at walls, knock stuff over and generally behave… as a cat. That you can interrupt two robots’ playing a board game and they just find you adorable speaks volumes.
The HoloLens group will now be split into separate hardware and software teams.
Alex Kipman is leaving his role as head of Microsoft’s HoloLens project after allegations of misconduct published by Insider. Kipman reportedly engaged in inappropriate touching and comments toward female employees. Following his departure, Microsoft is splitting the HoloLens team in two, with the hardware group now reporting to Windows + Devices chief Panos Panay. Software developers on the project, meanwhile, will report to Experiences + Devices head Jeff Teper.
Our enormous virtual shopping spree through the world of Father’s Day continues with two new guides for 2022. The first is a list of little trinkets you can get to celebrate whoever filled the role of father in your life, all of which are under $50. If, however, your parent is the sort of person who talks about what “gear” they’re “shooting on” to random strangers, then our photography gift guide should be your first destination.
It’s another installment in the saga between Twitter and the person who really doesn’t want to buy it but signed a contract saying he would. Elon Musk said Twitter has failed to give him enough data to understand the platform’s bot and fake account problem. Twitter says it has, but in response to the new charge has reportedly decided to give Musk access to the “firehose,” the stream of raw data that includes details on more than 500 million tweets posted to the service every day. In many ways, it’s the most spitefully clever thing Twitter can do, burying Musk in so much data it can’t be accused of hiding anything. Although I don’t know if Twitter users will be thrilled to know how much of their information has been handed over to the meme-happy billionaire.
There’s a big day coming up on which you’re kinda obliged to buy gifts to thank a parent for raising you. Obviously, you want to buy them something cool and techy, since that’s pretty much what every person is looking for these days. For that special person in your life, irrespective of their gender, we’ve put together a list of the best tech gift ideas you could buy.
The list ranges from the best audio and video gear through to the best gadgets to help them keep an eye on their health. And whoever put the list together (and I’m sure they’re really cool) also threw in some tips on how to find cutting-edge gear for less. Especially since so many of last year’s flagship gadgets are still around as lower-cost options for 2022.
Microsoft has announced a second generation of its Surface Laptop Go, and we’ve got our hands on it for a sneak peek. The new base model costs $50 more than its predecessor, but it looks like the extra cash has gone on some much-needed upgrades. Crucially, Microsoft has added an 11th-generation Intel CPU and a new SSD, dropping the eMMC storage found on its predecessor. Those tweaks should improve performance well beyond the original, and the inclusion of a (slightly) better webcam and (slightly) better speakers are similarly pleasing. Sadly, Microsoft didn’t want to raise the price any higher, so you’re still left with a 1,536 x 1,024 PixelSense display, although for $600, can you really grouse too loudly?
This has good intentions, but the implementation will be interesting.
The European Union has, for years, been trying to tackle the problem of e-waste by enforcing a common charger standard for mobile devices. Now, the bloc has reached a deal to make USB-C the standard for all “small and medium-sized portable electronic devices.” Buyers will also be able to specify if they want a charger added when they purchase a new piece of gear, such as smartphones, tablets, earbuds, cameras, headphones, portable game consoles and speakers. Laptops, meanwhile, will be subject to the same rules, but not for a while yet. Of course, the ramifications of this are vast, so it’s incredibly important the EU nails the fine details, especially given the range of amperages – from 5W to 240W – one standard is expected to deliver.
Volocopter, the German makers of a would-be drone taxi of the future, has reached another milestone toward running passenger flights. The four-seater VTOL drone, the VoloConnect, has begun making test flights to prove the airworthiness of the prototype. Each trip has, so far, been fairly short, but engineers are confident the maneuvers and aerodynamics of the vehicle are solid. The company still expects to begin some limited passenger service by 2024, with the larger suburb-to-city VoloConnect due to start flying in 2026. We’ll believe it when we see it, ideally at a safe distance, or while riding our own preferred suburb-to-city mode of transport: a train.
Investors believe Gemini wasn’t adequately protecting user security.
Gemini, the Winklevoss Twins’ crypto exchange, was hacked back in February leading to the loss of $36 million worth of Bitcoin and Ethereum. Now, retirement savings firm IRA Financial Trust has sued the company, saying it failed to do enough to protect people’s cash. It alleges Gemini didn't put the proper safeguards in place initially and was slow to freeze accounts to prevent the mass withdrawal. It marks another bump in the road for the Winklevoss’ outfit, which recently laid off 10 percent of its staff after the value of crypto began to slide.
There’s a big day coming up, and plenty of pressure on you to hand over a gift that somehow represents all of your love and appreciation. It may be called Father’s Day, but this is an event for you to say a loving thank you to whatever person held that special role in your life, irrespective of their gender. Thankfully, we've collated a list of the best tech gifts you can buy to at least go some small way in saying thanks for all of that parenting you did, and probably still do.
Native Union Snap 3-in-1 magnetic wireless charger
Engadget
The first thing you’ll notice about Native Union’s Snap 3-in-1 Magnetic Wireless Charger is how good it looks. With a solid base and a gorgeous, slender neck that you stand your phone on, it blends retro futurism with minimalist chic. It’s the sort of charging gear you’d be proud to let other people see either on your nightstand or on your office desk.
You can magnetically attach an iPhone 12 or 13 to that swan neck, while a tabletop wireless mat is ideal for your AirPods. A charging puck for your Apple Watch is nestled behind, in such a way that you can use your watch as a clock when required. Not to mention the USB-C port ‘round back that’ll let you charge any other device you have lying around. Which, technically, makes it a 4-in-1 charger, but let’s not pick nits on Father’s Day of all days, please.
Sony’s XM series of headphones are the default option for pretty much every regular buyer these days. I’d already picked the XM4s for this guide when Sony dropped the WH-1000XM5 onto an unsuspecting world. The updated models offer a better looking design, a more comfortable fit and even better sound than its predecessor. As Billy Steele wrote in his review, if you thought the XM4s couldn’t get better, you’ll be staggered by the improvement here.
A lot of small things have been tweaked, including the fact there are twice as many noise cancellation microphones as on the XM4. That promises better high-frequency sound blocking, which should be great in crowded areas and on airplanes. For $400, they’re pricier than, say, Bose’s 700s, but that saving might be something of a false economy. If you just can’t stretch that far, then keep an eye out for the XM4, since the old flagship is remaining on sale at a discount.
Samsung made its first worthy AirPods alternative in the Galaxy Buds+, and the company made them even better with the newer Galaxy Buds 2. They’re smaller and lighter, and most importantly, the Buds 2 have better sound quality than their predecessors. Samsung added ANC and an adjustable ambient sound mode to these buds as well, so dad can use the companion mobile app to block out exactly as much of the world as he wants. They also do a better job minimizing background noise during calls, so he can use them to take and make calls without whipping his phone out. Overall, the $150 Galaxy Buds 2 combine a lot of essential and premium features into one fairly affordable gadget. Just be aware that they work best with Samsung phones; Android users will get almost all of the same features as Galaxy phone users, but iPhone owners will be stuck with the default settings.
Let’s face it: You want your loved ones to stay healthy, keep an eye on their heart and generally be around for as long as possible. One way to do that is by upgrading your bathroom scales to something like Withings’ Body Cardio smart scale. Designed to look as unobtrusive as possible, but hidden inside its shell is a number of extra special features you don’t get elsewhere.
You’ll get a heart-health check, automatic person tracking and a full body composition breakdown, telling you how much fat, water and muscle you’re carrying. I’d be remiss not to mention, too, Withings’ class-leading Health Mate app, which is great for collating large chunks of health data and helping you understand it in an easy-to-digest manner.
Mackie’s range of CR-X speakers are generally excellent despite their relatively low price, and that extends to the rest of its audio gear. Its Creator Bundle is designed as a one-stop kit for wannabe podcasters looking to get decent sound quality from the get-go.
First up, you’ll get a pair of CR3-X speakers, the same pair I recommended in this very guide last year. The CR3-Xs offer great sound in a small package, with a three-quarter-inch tweeter and a three-inch woofer. With built-in Bluetooth, balanced TRS and unbalanced RCA inputs, you’ve got a wide variety of ways to get this jacked into whatever you’re doing.
Alongside, you’ll get an EM-USB Condenser microphone which connects to your computer over USB-C with on-board headphone headphone monitoring and gain control. You’ll also get a pair of MC-100 pro headphones, Waveform’s audio editing app and an extra software bundle with various useful plugins thrown in, too.
If dad has a lot of files to keep track of for work or a bunch of family photos and videos he wants to save securely, he’ll welcome an SSD like Samsung’s T7 Touch. He’ll be able to move all of his important documents onto the drive quickly thanks to its support for 1,050 Mb/s read speeds and 1,000 Mb/s write rates, and it’s fairly durable with a shock- and drop-resistant body. It’s also quite compact with a palm-sized design and multiple layers of security, including AES 256-bit encryption, password protection and a fingerprint scanner. That means if dad doesn’t want to bother to remember yet another password, he can use his fingerprint to unlock the drive instead. If your father is particularly clumsy or works in a precarious environment, consider instead Samsung’s latest rugged model, the Samsung T7 Shield.
I’ve been obsessed with Dremel’s electric multi-tools ever since I watched Alexi Sayle ask “did I mention we cut?” back in the early ‘90s. And yet, despite being an adult with my own home, I’ve never needed to actually go out and buy a Dremel like the 8220 you can see here. Look at the thing, it’s like an electric Swiss Army Knife, complete with drill and screwdriver bits, sanding bits, polishing bits, metal-cutting discs, grinding stones and engraving tools! Just think about all of the things I can drill, screw, sand, polish, cut, grind and engrave if I had one of those right now.
I bet you there’s a whole host of parents and parental figures out there who are just itching to get a Dremel into their lives. But I bet they, like me, are also that little bit too scared to just go out and buy one since they probably don’t know what they’d use it for. That’s why you, as loving people, should go and buy them a Dremel much in the same way that I hope my kids, when they’re old enough to earn money, go out and buy me a Dremel. And maybe a book that will teach me how to use it.
For the majority of people, the Apple Watch is the only smartwatch they need to consider if they have an iPhone. There’s only a handful of watches on the other side that can match Apple’s timepiece for versatility, usefulness and affordability. If you’re worried about your parent’s health and frailty, then the fall detection features alone justify your investment. Not to mention the general health tracking capabilities, and the fact you can keep them healthy with a Fitness+ subscription thrown in. I haven’t even mentioned the built-in ECG, which these days is table stakes for a wearable in this class. And if dad doesn't have an iPhone, he can get many of the same features from Samsung's Galaxy Watch 4.
Of course, there are people who don’t want a smartwatch, or at least not one that looks like a smartwatch. It’s something that plenty of even designer smartwatches suffer from, and I get it, some parents don’t want to look like a neeeeeeeerd in their dotage. It’s for those people that I’d recommend Withings’ new ScanWatch Horizon, a hybrid smartwatch in the body of a classic diver’s watch.
The existing ScanWatch was already a best-in-class hybrid, with a digital subdial for notifications and an analog one for step counting. It offers automatic sleep and activity tracking, smartphone assisted GPS and the usual smartwatch bells and whistles. On top of that, it also offers built-in ECG and SpO2 (blood oxygen saturation) tests for keeping an eye on your heart health.
But Horizon steps up with its Dad Chic styling, a chunky case, band and choice of blue or green face colors. Put it on and you’ll instantly feel like a rugged outdoors-type ready to indulge in some wood choppin’ or other Bear Grylls-adjacent nonsense. Withings is even smart enough to throw in a whole bunch of tools to help you size your band without needing to trek to a jewelry store. And that’s before I get to the 30-day battery life.
One thing that COVID-19 rammed home for lots of people was the need for solid video calling to stay in touch with your loved ones. Keeping touch with my mom through WhatsApp calling in the early stages of lockdown was a perpetual irritant. It’s a problem that the new iPad Air, with its wide front camera and Center Stage, was born to solve.
It doesn’t hurt that the slate is also a world-class internet browsing device and doesn’t require a whole host of tech support. Plus, if your parent is of an artistic bent, you can pick up the compatible Apple Pencil and let them doodle to their heart’s content. Given that it’s packing an M1, you would hope this model iPad Air will have muscle to spare for years to come, drowning out any parental complaints about planned obsolescence before they begin.
There are a lot of Bluetooth turntables which are designed for the hip crowd who want to show off their ye olde-fashioned record player. But if you’re looking for something a bit more capital-S serious without shelling out for a high-end Technics unit, Audio Technica’s romantically-named ATLP120XBT might be worth a glance. The fact it could be confused for a Technics SL-1210, right down to the s-shaped tone arm is, I’m sure, just a total coincidence.
The sound is good, and you’ll get adjustable pitch control alongside the belt-driven turntable (sorry, no scratching on this unit). And connectivity-wise, it’s well-stocked, with Dual RCA-out, USB or Bluetooth 5.0, with support for aptX. It’s a unit I’m thinking about getting for my mum, since it’ll enable her to digitize her stack of 78rpm records over that USB connection.
LG’s C1 was one of the best TVs of 2021, and so you shouldn’t be surprised that its successor is even better. I could simply say “this is an LG OLED” and you could probably let its reputation walk you over to your TV store of choice. With a skinny body and almost non-existent bezels, the C2 is close to that perfect idea of a magic window for everything you’re watching, or playing.
But let’s drill down into the specifics: The C2 gets a faster processor which LG pledges will improve dynamic tone mapping, as well as improving webOS performance. Similarly, the screen’s brightness is a little higher than the C1, and contrast has been improved overall. LG’s focus this year was also on quality-of-life features beyond the picture quality, including an easier UI, new voice remote and the ability to add user profiles. Let’s also talk gaming, since if your beloved parent likes to play, you’ll find the C2 supports GeForce Now and, uh, Stadia.
(As an aside, the C2 is very much a luxury television for the sort of kids who really appreciate your parental figures. If your budget won’t stretch that far, you should look out for the C1 which is currently massively, almost stupidly discounted and still beats the pants off much of the TV market.)
Everyone, no matter their age, is going to set a cup of warm drink down somewhere and then forget about it. Maybe it’s on a shelf, or beyond peripheral vision on a desk, but that feeling when you suddenly wonder why you’re thirsty and find cold tea in front of you is the worst. It’s the reason Ember’s smart temperature-controlling mug exists, to help prevent you suffering from a sip of something unpleasantly cold ever again. A built-in battery will keep things running for 1.5 hours at a time, but the bundled charging coaster will give you a day’s worth of use. Not that we’d recommend drinking a latte that you made at 9am in the late afternoon, of course.
Projectors are a minefield, aren’t they? It’s a big investment for something you might not be sure you’ll use on a very regular basis unless you’ve got your own cinema room. I’ve always fancied building something in my backyard so I can run an outdoor theater in the warmer months. But I don’t know how much I’d actually use the thing after spending a hefty chunk on the initial investment.
Thankfully, if I ever do, I’ll likely buy BenQ’s HT2050A, which my colleague (and projector nerd) Steve Dent says is one of the best for performance and affordability. Coming in fairly cheap, it’s bright, has a 1.3x zoom and vertical lens shift, making it easy to place in tricky spots and easy to get the best picture quality out of its small body. It’s HD-only, of course, but then I’m not yet sold on the benefits of a 4K projector if you’re mostly watching live sports or old movies, or even your parent’s pictures of their most recent holiday.
Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors and the Drug Company that Addicted America is a book by Beth Macy which was adapted into the Hulu series of the same name. It charts the history, effect and battle against OxyContin, a slow-release painkiller that’s at the heart of the US’ opioid epidemic. The book takes you through the history of the drug, its chemical bases, and how it was handled before Purdue Pharma created a slow-release version. Of course, a combination of over-prescription, the hyper-addictive nature of the drug and a lot of incentives from Purdue helped destroy so many lives. It’s the sort of book that you feel it’s your duty to read just to understand what is, and has, been going on for so long.
Bad Blood by John Carreyrou is a similarly unbelievable true story of medical malpractice, this time centering on blood testing. Theranos promised to revolutionize the way the world tested for disease, and hoodwinked plenty of people who knew nothing about medicine. The book is in two rough halves, with the first covering the startup’s meteoric rise and the backstory of its enigmatic founder, Elizabeth Holmes.
The second, meanwhile, focuses on Carreyrou’s own part in the story, as he investigated and reported on the unfolding scandal. This is, by now, well-trodden ground – the book is due to be adapted into a movie for Netflix, while a Hulu miniseries was based on an ABC Podcast. But Carreyrou’s authoritative, I-was-there take is still the authoritative version of the story, at least until the dust settles and we get some even juicier stories out of this particular saga.
Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference, an event you should, out of principle, refuse to call Dub Dub, has kicked off. The show started with the customary lengthy keynote showing off all the new software and hardware Apple wants you to get excited about. Including the launch of Apple’s second-generation of homegrown silicon, the M2.
The M2 is very much an evolution of its immediate predecessor, designed to address some of the performance issues from the original vanilla M1. Memory bandwidth has been increased by half, and you can now spec the unit with up to 24GB “unified memory,” more than the maximum cap of 16GB on that first groundbreaking system-on-chip. Apple’s still sure it won’t be beaten on efficiency, claiming the M2 is 18 percent faster than the M1 while drawing the same amount of power.
Of course, with a new chip should come new computers to sit around it, and Apple has finally redesigned the MacBook Air for the Apple Silicon age. Gone is that elongated wedge in favor of a more MacBook Pro-esque body, albeit even smaller. You’ll also get a full-size row of function keys this time around and a bigger 13.6-inch Liquid Retina display that’s brighter than the previous model and has a webcam notch up top. Alas, it’s also $200 more than the M1 MacBook Air, but hopefully we’ll see plenty of retailer discounts in the coming weeks and months. You’ll also find the new M2 in an updated 13-inch MacBook Pro, but there’s no glossy redesign here to get all excited about.
Of course, the point of WWDC is to talk about software, and Apple had plenty to share about iOS and iPadOS 16. The biggest change for the former is a revamped lock screen that’ll give you a choice of fonts, accent colors and layouts for you to customize. You’ll be able to add widgets up front, too, enabling you to check vital data without unlocking your phone. (Sounds like the sort of thing that would be really useful if your phone had an always-on screen, too, doesn’t it?) iPadOS, meanwhile, will let you use overlapping windows just like a real computer, and Apple is even bringing the Weather app to the humble slate, just 12 years after the first model was released.
The next version of macOS, meanwhile, is dubbed Ventura, and the headline feature is the ability to better sort and organize your open applications. Stage Manager will enable you to group windows to the side of your desktop, organizing them by app, letting you switch between each group in turn. You’ll also find incremental updates to Spotlight, gain the ability to search for text in photos and notice long-overdue refreshes to Safari and Mail. But the most exciting feature might be the ability to use your iPhone as a webcam, giving you one fewer excuse to hide your face during those interminable work Zoom calls.
But it might not be that easy for Musk to back out.
Let’s be honest, who hasn’t publicly pledged to do something, made a big show and dance about following through, then got cold feet? It’s something Elon Musk might be feeling right now after he filed paperwork with the SEC to claim Twitter has committed a “material breach” of its deal terms. The Tesla CEO is claiming Twitter is refusing to disclose detailed data about the amount of fake, spam and bot accounts in its user figures. And that it has nothing to do with both Twitter and Tesla’s valuations dropping in recent months, making the deal a lot less enticing (for Musk) than it was when he started the process. For its part, Twitter says it has, and will, continue to share information with the billionaire, and that it fully intends to “close the transaction and enforce the merger agreement at the agreed price and terms.”
There’s plenty riding on NASA’s next-generation Space Launch System, the modern-day rocket that will carry the Artemis missions. But after delaying its most recent test to make urgent repairs to the fuel system, the SLS is once again ready for another milestone. Today, the craft is on its way over to Launch Pad 39B to prepare for its “wet” dress rehearsal (so they fuel it, even if they have no intention of launching) later this month.
That test will take the rocket all the way to the countdown procedure while fully fuelled, giving engineers plenty of new data ahead of a planned real-world launch. If that all goes to plan, we could be a few months away from sending an uncrewed vehicle into orbit around the Moon. Give it a couple more years, and we’ll hopefully send a crew beyond Earth’s gravity for the first time since 1972.
The Diablo Immortal reviews all said pretty much the same thing: There’s a good game hidden beneath all of that loot-box crud. Unfortunately, if you were using a Samsung phone with one of the company’s own Exynos chipsets, the game feels a lot more broken than that. It appears as if the title isn’t working well with that silicon, making the title almost unplayable. A Blizzard spokesperson said the company is exploring the problem and may block downloads of the title to some affected phones while they scramble for a fix.
NASA has purchased an extra raft of crewed missions from SpaceX to ensure the International Space Station retains its full personnel complement until 2030. The five trips are enough to provide an “uninterrupted” US presence on the station until its planned retirement date. Not only will it help give NASA options during its launch program, it’ll also cover any gaps made by Boeing’s yet-to-be-certified Starliner vehicle, which isn’t due to fly until next year. If nothing else, that’s some egg on the face of the aerospace giant, which has lost ground to its upstart rival in the spaceflight world for some time now.
It’s the week of Apple’s big developer event, which means we’re likely to get a whole host of new hardware and software announcements as part of the main show. But if you were hoping the next-generation MacBook Air would have the same bunch of color options as the new iMac, prepare for disappointment. Those in the know claim an updated M1 MacBook Air will only sell in four hues: space gray, silver, blue and gold. That said, it’s hard to know what the company will announce given the factory closures caused by China’s fresh round of COVID-19 lockdowns.
The country’s homegrown space station is getting a big push toward completion.
Astronauts aboard China’s Shenzhou-14 mission have successfully arrived on the nation’s Tiangong space station. The crew of three will spend the next six months on the station to make a significant stride toward completing its setup. Next month, the country will launch a lab module to expand the station’s footprint, with a second unit going up in October, and astronauts will conduct several EVAs to get everything connected and ready. If successful, the nation expects Tiangong to be fully operational by the end of the year.
Stellantis, parent company of Fiat Chrysler and PSA Group, has pleaded guilty to charges of criminal conspiracy after covering the extent of its diesel emissions. The automotive giant was accused of violating the Clean Air Act, misleading regulators around tailpipe emissions and installing defeat devices to cheat government tests. As part of the settlement, the company must submit compliance reports to the Justice Department for three years. Meanwhile, three of its employees are awaiting criminal charges. Given the outsize impact that tailpipe emissions have both on people’s health and the climate, and that the company’s net profit was reportedly nearly $15.2 billion in 2021, the penalty seems like something of a bargain.
London has the oldest underground railway in the world, and on May 24th, it will welcome its newest addition to the family. Crossrail is the realization of a dream first mooted in 1941, but one that would only start being built in 2009. It is one of the biggest infrastructure projects in the western world, arriving several years late and several more billion pounds over budget. But it’s hoped that this gigantic system will spur growth, relieve congestion on its Victorian-era network and remind the world of what Britain can do when it puts its mind to something. No pressure, then.
The London Underground as it exists today was borne out of a historical railway boom, with competing companies building routes to serve the city’s major economic hubs. Its many quirks are a consequence of nearly 200 years of politics, commerce, geography and geology shaping how things work. It comprises eleven lines, 272 stations and 250 miles of track, which is now under the aegis of a dedicated body, Transport for London.
Despite the wealth of transport links, many of the lines were built to serve a city far smaller than its present population. Not to mention that London is the center of gravity for far more than just the people living within its metropolitan area – it dominates much of the southeast of the country. It’s for this reason that Crossrail was given the green light, as both a way to relieve congestion on its tiny, Victorian-era tunnels, and to recognize just how broad London’s influence had become.
Crossrail Ltd.
Crossrail runs from Shenfield, a commuter suburb 35 miles northeast of London in the neighboring county of Essex, via the Great Eastern Main Line. It then runs through the city, connecting to the Great Western Main Line and then on to Reading, a large town 40 miles west of London. When fully running, it is expected to serve 200 million passengers a year, increasing London and the south east’s total rail capacity by around 10 percent in total. Crossrail is primarily an above-ground line, aside from the Central Operating Section (COS); the tunnels that run through London itself.
“It’s hard to fathom how there is space in this city to put in new stations, new infrastructure,” says Olga Konopka, Principal Delivery Engineer at Crossrail. She cited an example of how when the new Crossrail tunnels pass existing Jubilee line tunnels, the gap between them is just two meters (6.5 feet). A fleet of eight 1,000-ton Tunnel Boring Machines (TBMs) were tasked with weaving a new route through some of the most congested soil anywhere in the world. It’s one of the reasons that Crossrail’s birth hasn’t been an easy one – since you’ve got hundreds of years worth of infrastructure that you can’t touch during the construction process.
The TBMs pulled around seven million tonnes of material out of the ground, but Crossrail’s leaders said that almost all of it was re-used. For instance, around three million tonnes of soil was donated to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. This was used to construct a new wetland nature reserve at Wallasea Island in neighboring Essex. The rest of the clay soil was used to restore landfill, raise land and, in one instance, help build a golf course.
Luca Marino / Crossrail Ltd.
Some 26 miles of tunnels have been dug below the city, which took between May 2012 and May 2015 to complete. Konopka explained that as well as being “the biggest civil engineering project in Europe,” it also produced the largest tunnels dug for the London underground. The Central Line, for instance, has a diameter of roughly 3.5 meters (around 11.5 feet), while Crossrail tunnels are 6.2 meters (around 20 feet) wide. “Crossrail tunnels have an emergency walkway in them, which is a massive improvement to health and safety from the current infrastructure,” she said.
Konopka explained that there was some art and artistry baked into the system to help things run smoother and smarter. For instance, the gradient of the railway line gently inclines in the tunnel sections approaching a station. That way, a train slows down more efficiently since some of its forward motion is being sapped by the hill it has to climb. The situation is reversed when you pull out of a station, the track sloping almost imperceptibly downward in order to give the train a speedy departure.
It should be clear by now that Crossrail, despite the fact that it is an electric railway running under a city, is not a regular subway. It may feature on the Underground Map, and even has a line name – The Elizabeth line – but it’s not an official part of the underground itself. (Pedants beware: Crossrail denotes the project, the Elizabeth line is the thing you’ll actually be riding.) Because it connects to mainline stations at either end, and uses full-size mainline trains, it is a railway unlike anything else in the UK. In fact, the closest comparator is Paris’ Réseau Express Régional (RER), a series of lines that connect commuter suburbs to the city itself, and then moves people between stops in the city – a railway that acts like a subway when it’s in the middle of a city.
Crossrail Ltd.
One thing that was often repeated was the fact that Crossrail was a project designed to marry the very old and the very new into one seamless whole. “Farringdon was the first part of the Underground,” said Konopka, “we need[ed] to somehow marry up the old and the new, and that’s been the biggest struggle.” And making a 21st century railway run in perfect harmony with a pair of railways built in the Victorian era is one of the reasons that Crossrail’s deadline slipped from 2018 to 2022. (COVID-19, of course, was the other.)
“Conceptually, the project is brilliant,” says Colin Brown, Technical Director of the Crossrail project, but “it joins up to railways that were built in Victorian times, and that’s where your problem starts,” he said. “The Great Western was built by [Legendary engineering pioneer Isembard Kingdom] Brunel,” he explained, “and the Great Eastern wasn’t far behind it.” “The technology on those two railways has evolved over many years,” he said “but hasn’t been changed since the ‘60s or ‘70s.”
Britain’s railways, including the two main lines that Crossrail connects, use an antiquated, analog signaling system to communicate hazard warnings to drivers. This system, after a series of fatal train disasters in the ‘90s, was updated slightly to improve safety, but remains a 20th century tool. The digital replacement is ETCS (European Train Control System), which brings digital technology into the railways and promises a much safer network overall. While Crossrail was built with ETCS as standard, it also had to play nice with its analog predecessors.
Subway systems, however, use an entirely different signaling system called Communications Based Train Control (CTBC). Given the density of trains using tunnels under cities, and the need for accurate location data, CBTC is key to run services with small gaps between each train. Crossrail may not be a subway, but it will run 24 trains per hour inside the tunnels, and so needs to behave like one while it’s underground. Not to mention that CBTC is the only system that can also run the more subway-esque functions, like platform screen doors and tunnel vent interfaces.
Brown explained his dismay at the patchwork of systems and why it wouldn’t have been simpler just to pay to standardize the technology. For a variety of reasons, it wasn’t deemed feasible, and so engineers have spent years finding ways to make the old and new, analog and digital, above-ground and below-ground systems work as one cohesive whole. “You’ve [never had] a mainline train morphing into a metro train and then morphing back out again,” said Brown – at least not in the UK.
CBTC is also predominantly automatic, with drivers acting in a more supervisory role while the trains are underground.This automatic system will even operate the train when it needs to reorient itself ready for its next leg of the journey. “When it gets to Paddington,” said Pradeep Vasudev, Head of System Integration, “the driver pushes a button and then he walks from one cab to the other [at the other end of the train] while the train drives itself.” This system is also sufficiently smart that it can help find ways for the timetable to recover when a train breaks down or an incident causes a delay elsewhere on the line.
And because the system is now so much more complex, and broad, means that the timetabling systems are paramount. “For the first time, a train in Bristol [120 miles west of London] breaking down could affect a train on the Great Eastern [Main Line] in Shenfield [Crossrail’s Eastern Terminus, 35 miles northeast of London],” said Vasudev. And, of course, on the software engineering side, all of this information, and calculation, needs to be boiled down to a series of simple commands that a staffer can use to recover the service when things go awry.
One problem that Crossrail was also forced to address was the privatization of Britain’s railways in the early ‘90s. Rather than a centrally-planned and operated railway, the then Government decided to franchise each region’s railway operator. Consequently the Crossrail project had to engage with a variety of operators running different lines and find some happy harmony. “We have MTR driving, we have RFLI who owns the central section of the railway, we have London Underground, who operates a lot of the stations, we have Network Rail on either side, when we go into Heathrow, we’ve got Heathrow Express which is a different operator,” said Vasudev.
“Some of that, you’ll never get away from the fact that an operator is key, regardless of how much information the system can give you,” said Vasudev. Lee Price is one such operator, a former personal trainer and badminton coach who joined the company in 2016. Price’s story is common among new Crossrail drivers, coming from outside the train driving fraternity rather than within. This was because the project opted not to poach drivers from other underground or mainline services to avoid denting staffing levels elsewhere. (Not to mention that it helps bring the economic benefits of the system to more people, creating training and job opportunities.)
Andrew Parish / Crossrail Ltd.
Price is now a veteran of the service, and trains other drivers, although he too isn’t yet rated for the entire route. Since it’s being used as three separate railways, it will only be after the central section is opened that drivers will be running back and forth on a regular basis.
Unlike a mainline train, or a subway, the role shifts depending on where along the route the train is. “On the East and the West, you’ll be physically driving [the train],” he said, while in the COS, “in theory, the train is automatic, but we’re there for more of a safety [role].” “Although you’re doing less, you still have to remain alert,” he added, especially in the dark tunnels that require drivers to “keep their awareness up.”
Crossrail opens to the public on May 24th, with services running between Paddington and Abbey Wood. On the day, the various arms of the service will be rebranded from TFL Rail – a placeholder name – to the Elizabeth line. 12 trains per hour will run along the line, starting at 6:30am and ending at 11:00pm each weekday, with a fuller service ramping up over time. One of the new mainline stations, Bond Street, has yet to open thanks to service delays.
Work on the project is not likely to be complete for a long while yet, but if the railway does help boost London’s fortunes, it won’t be long before eyes look forward to the next project. Crossrail 2 is a proposed line running from Broxbourne and Cheshunt in London’s northeast down to Chessington, southwest of the city. It is designed to join up routes north and south of the city, and relieve congestion on those journeys as much as Crossrail is expected to do from east to west.
Unfortunately, COVID-19 and government funding cuts have put the project on ice for the foreseeable future. But one thing that is clear, is that the expertise, the lessons learned from Crossrail’s slower-than-expected birth, are currently embedded in the team that’s just finishing their work. To let all of that experience wither on the vine would seem like a criminal waste of resources. Then again, there will be voices asking why London deserves yet another expansion of its public transport network when other major cities have nothing. As always, politics, economics, geography and geology will determine the future of the most famous tube in the world.
Framework’s modular, do-it-yourself laptop has won the hearts and minds of plenty of laptop fans and right-to-repair-types alike. A year after launch, the company is back to offer the biggest test of its long term viability as a computer company: Chip upgrades. Today, the company is announcing new machines packing 12th generation Intel Core chips, as well as replacement mainboards with the new silicon for existing models.
While the company grows, users will need to lay down a refundable pre-order deposit of $100, with mainboard pricing running from $449 through to $1,049. If you’re looking to snag a Core i5-1240P, you’ll pay $449, while $699 bags you a Core i7-1260P, with high rollers looking for the i7-1280P laying down the full $1,049. Framework is using a batch system to fulfill orders, and so is advising would-be buyers to get their orders in early.
At the same time, the company is releasing a new Top Cover which is designed to add some extra rigidity to the system’s body. Whereas the original lid was aluminum-formed, the new units are CNC-milled from a solid block of aluminum. This, too, is available both in the new sold version of the laptop, and as an upgrade for the existing units already out in the wild, priced at $89.
As part of this annual upgrade, we’re also seeing the first new expansion card from the company in the form of a 2.5Gbit Ethernet adapter. Framework says that the new card uses a Realtek RTL8156 controller and will also support 10/100/1000Mbit Ethernet, and it will begin retailing later in the year. Rounding out the list of news is updated Linux support for both Fedora 36 and Ubuntu 22.04, as well as better power management while the machine is in standby mode.
We live in an age where the power of narrative is so strong that it has become the defining way to build organizations, products and brands. In recent decades, the tech industry has presented itself as the savior to all of our problems, and now dominates so much of our culture as a consequence. And there is a quasi-religious fervor to this, especially when we look at the lionization of certain individuals, or the fact that paid-for-marketing-types are called “evangelists,” and the in-group mentality that forms afterward.
If the model for this sanctified tech guru was Steve Jobs, then its most recent exponent must be Elon Musk. Musk’s rise coincided with a vacuum left in the wake of Jobs’ demise, and his image - his personal brand - has been tweaked several times in the last two decades. Compare this footage from the turn of the century when he received his first McLaren F1 to a more recent clip from last year. And Musk’s savviest piece of personal branding is to make him an aspirational figure both as an engineer and entrepreneur.
Noted philosopher Andre Agassi once said that “image is everything,” and that was back in the days before social media. It’s something that I’ve been thinking about a lot recently after watching Apple TV’s WeCrashed. There’s a scene where Anne Hathaway’s character enlists the help of a personal branding expert who asks her, deep down, what sort of person she wants to be. It’s a scene designed to emphasize her inner turmoil at the time, but it got me wondering. Were these consultants invented for the purposes of the story, or do they really do exist?
It turns out that there’s a whole industry of people helping the titans of industry massage their personal brand. But branding, in this context, isn’t the same as styling or something similarly superficial. Its boosters would say it’s a combination of psychotherapy and marketing that, when done properly, is about resolving deep-seated internal conflicts in your psyche. And yes, you might need to pick a pair of shoes that test well with adults aged 29-45, but it’s a lot more about crafting a story around you, about you, which you can present to the wider world.
Branding consultant Lucy Freeman says that many of her clients reach their late ‘30s or early ‘40s and feel suddenly unmoored from their own personalities. “They come to this realization that [having reached a point of leadership in a company] they’ve let themselves disappear,” she said. That’s a problem, especially if they’re now expected to take on a more public-facing role and now need to “fight their way out of the company brand.”
Branding expert Am Golhar says that, often, it’s about how people “want to be perceived” that drives them to seek out help. Ed Zitron, owner of PR agency EZPR, agrees, saying that the point of personal branding is to gain “attention with the media,” so a person can “position themselves as good at, or smart, about something.” He added that “third-party validation is huge: You’d rather listen to a reporter that’s ostensibly done research on something than an ad or piece of marketing collateral.”
Emerge founder Emily Austen recruits a behavioral psychologist as part of her process, with a mission to help identify “what [the client’s] POV should, or could, be to have the space to say something others cannot.” She added that being seen as an “entrepreneur has become a status symbol,” a phenomenon supercharged by the ability to broadcast what you’re doing over social media. “It satisfies the [public] fascination with success, and it looks glamorous and exciting,” she said.
I also asked if it would be possible to drag some random from the street, My Fair Lady style, and turn them into a branding superstar. Golhar says that there’s “got to be something there,” citing the example of Gemma Collins, a British reality TV star who leveraged her larger-than-life personality on The Only Way is Essex to become a household name.
All of the people I spoke to described, in one way or another, a process whereby the figure looking to change has to first interrogate themselves. Golhar says that it’s about them going through an “alignment process [to discover] who they are.” Thought Leadership PR founder Helen Croydon added that the questions you ask people include “why they chose this career path” and what are their “talking points.” Before you can brand, or rebrand yourself, you need to understand what it is that you’re selling.
One common anxiety that clients share is the belief that they’re about to become a strutting diva. After all, executives don’t need a brand, which sounds a little too much like caring about what other people think of you, do they? (I mean, we all do care about what other people think about us, but it seems gauche to do anything so drastic as to do anything about that.) Freeman says that the process is more about re-discovering your “non-negotiables and absolute truths.”
Another thing that came up repeatedly was a desire for these figures to demonstrate that they were an expert in the subject matter at hand. “They do care about their image,” said Croydon, “but [they’re] more concerned with portraying professional expertise in their industry.” The hope is, as always, that the greater your esteem, the more you’ll be able to leverage that into future opportunities.
There are shortcuts, if you can afford it, that will help cut some of the time it would normally take to build your new brand. Croydon, for instance, explained that agencies will hire journalists to ghostwrite material on behalf of their clients. She herself employs a number of writers who can produce such content in the service of furthering someone’s brand. Not, she explains, because the individuals can’t do it themselves, but often they’re sufficiently time-poor that they need the help.
Zitron has made his name as a vocal critic of much of what the PR industry does and isn’t a fan of the idea of personal branding at all. “There isn’t an honest [process],” he said, “personal branding is intentionally choosing what you want to share with the world at large.” That, however, “involves hiding specific things, or intentionally obfuscating parts of your life so you look better or are accepted by more people.” “If you are building a narrative for a singular person that is not ‘this is their history and this is where they’ve got to in their lives,’ then you are intentionally misleading people.” Zitron added that while there is “nothing wrong with trying to present your best self,” which, of course, we’re all doing a lot of the time, there’s a problem if “you are doing so with malicious intent.”
But despite Zitron’s warnings, I did want to explore the world of personal branding, hell, it might even help me in my career. Freeman was kind enough to sign me up for a 90-minute session where we would delve into what exactly my personal brand was, and what it could be. She started by asking me questions about what I like, what my values are and what brings me joy. Then we moved on to questions about what I’d like to do more and less of, looking for problems in my day that I’d like to get past.
Then we spent a long time discussing, for instance, how my friends, family and co-workers perceive me – or how I think they do. These were, I’ll admit, hard questions, and there’s a noticeable pause when I’m asked Who do you tell yourself you are? The follow up was harder: Who are you afraid to tell yourself that you are? It was heavy stuff. Now, in any normal story, this is the point where I reveal I’ve got lots of good tips on finding my own personal brand to share with you. But that didn’t happen, mostly because, based on my responses, Freeman told me “you have never, actually thought about [your authentic self] for a second.”
Ah. Maybe it's true, then, that in order to cultivate a personal brand that there has to be some nugget of raw something that can be shaped into something more effective. I wonder, too, if you don't require a fairly hefty dose of self-belief, enough to propel you toward the idea of considering your brand in the first place. Clearly that is something I'll need to work on.
It was last August that Saints Row developer Volition unveiled its vision for a more grounded reboot of the open-world series. The new title was intended as a swerve away from the series’ trademark preposterousness and juvenalia. Now, with the game set to debut on August 23rd, the team would like to clarify that just because it’s grounded, doesn’t mean it’s not going to be fun. Saints Row hasn’t suddenly become a po-faced exploration of organized crime, and it remains just as cartoonish as you may expect, it’s just a bit more grounded in its cartoonishness.
Last year, Chief Creative Officer Jim Boone and Lead Mission Designer Jeremy Bernstein said that the Saints Row series had burned out its narrative runway. After all, when your character has conquered the Earth, descended into Hell and fought a hair-rock opera duel with the Devil, street-level crime is going to feel like a big comedown. “I’ve been wanting to clarify that!” said Creative Director Brian Traficante, “I believe you can continue that runway [...] but we didn’t want to.”
“In terms of going back to the grounded tone, it took some time,” said Traficante, as the team sought to analyze and define “what is Saints Row?” That series-defining formula seems to focus on meshing fun gameplay, silly jokes, cartoonish violence and a hefty dose of reference gags. “At times, it’s a gag for a gag’s sake, but there’s a consciousness of making sure that it’s exactly what we want to do, and it’s the right time to do it,” he said. There was a focus on ensuring that there’s plenty of light moments to balance out the times in the story when things go dark.
Writer Jennifer Campbell said that the team abides by “the rule of making sure that you’re punching up, not punching down.” Campbell added that “we’re exploring a more diverse group of characters so it gives us a lot more avenues to explore, anyway.” Traficante said that the developers created “internal mechanisms” to help ensure that a broad group of people could weigh in on some of the edgier gags in the game. He added that the team wanted to craft jokes that would enable “everyone [to] be a part of the joke.”
Saints Row’s use of parody reached a fairly extreme level during the fourth game, where it ran a series of relationship-simulation sequences in the vein of Mass Effect. (Except, of course, the camera wasn’t cutting away as quickly when two characters decided to spend some alone time together.) These parodies are “definitely in the recipe,” said Traficante, but that they aren’t “front and center” in the new title, so players will need to hunt out the nods.
Volition
And players will spend a lot of time being encouraged to hunt through the world of Santo Ileso in pursuit of storytelling, gameplay and entertainment. The team has laced the city with randomly spawning discoverables, like a security fan loaded with cash, for you to find as you walk around. Traficante said that it takes testers around a week, playing full time, to work their way through the bulk of the title, which is vast and ever-growing.
As well as the breadth of the city, Volition also wanted to emphasize the depth of features like character customization. Users can expect a level of tweaking that looks to be beyond the level offered in, say, Cyberpunk 2077. You’ll be able to customize your appearance, voice and clothing, as well as the looks of your cars and weapons. And none of these features will be pay-to-use, mercifully, with everything instead unlocking the further into the game you progress.
Interestingly, the new title has a little less narrative freedom than some of its predecessors as a consequence of this richer, deeper world. This, says Jennifer Campbell, is to help imbue the game with a greater sense of purpose and meaning, bolstering the story. “We were really focused on keeping a causal chain, because you’re doing things in response to something,” she said. “You’re shooting at things because you did something earlier in the mission to elicit a response from an enemy faction,” she added, with the aim of putting “reason behind the things that we asked the player to do.” Players will feel that “their actions are affecting the game state.”
Having now seen around 45 minutes of gameplay footage, I can say that the new title focuses on a narrower definition of silly. You can melee an opponent, stick a grenade down their throat and then throw their body over to a group of enemies to blow them up. Or you can ask a friend in co-op play to pick up your car with a helicopter’s trailing electromagnet and drop you off at a mission location. There are piñata guns and footballs that stick to people hurling them up into the air, as well as a new wingsuit mechanic that enables you to bounce off a pedestrian to give yourself more flight time.
Certainly, the arrival of this Saints Row game feels like it’s going to be more of an event than it did previously. The enduring success of GTA Online’s ever-present crime simulation sandbox has sucked so much air out of the genre that having a new alternative should be a big deal: We haven’t had a true “GTA-like” game since 2016’s Watch Dogs 2. The one risk is that Saints Row is looking to perfect a game that users have now moved on from.
Huawei is today launching the Watch GT 3 Pro, which takes much of the features from the existing Watch GT 3 and sticks them in a much nicer body. The three regular versions, each with 46mm cases, are getting a titanium body and, depending on which model you opt for, a rubber, leather or titanium strap. From there, you’ll get most of the same features as the GT 3, albeit with the ability to run your own ECG when Huawei gets permission to activate the feature.
Huawei
Of more interest is the new Ceramic 42mm version, which offers a white case with gold accents and a white strap. It may be aimed at a different demographic, but it also looks at first blush like the coolest, fanciest and most unique of the bunch. Otherwise, you’ll get much of the same health and fitness tracking found on the GT 3, plus a bunch of pre-loaded golf maps and a free diving mode to help folks who like going underwater without assistance.
At the same time, Huawei is also announcing the Watch Fit 2, a sports and activity tracker that offers coaching. The new 1.74-inch AMOLED display is nearly 20 percent larger than was found on the Fit 1, and the feature set has broadened to include quick replies for WhatsApp as well as Huawei’s own apps. With space for 500 songs on board, and Huawei’s latest optical heart-rate sensor on the back, it’s designed to scratch the itch for folks who want a fitness-focused gadget but don’t need a full-blown smartwatch.
