Amazon will offer Prime Gaming members an extra batch of PC games later this month at no extra cost. Along with a few Metal Slug titles, SNK 40th Anniversary Collection and a few others, you can snap up Arcane Studios' Dishonored 2 between December 27th and January 3rd.
A few years before it unleashed Deathloop, Arcane's Lyon studio developed another sneaky action-adventure game in Dishonored 2. As with the first game in the series, it enables players to be creative in how they tackle missions, depending on their preferred playstyle. You can, for instance, take a non-lethal stealthy approach or battle enemies head on. This time around, you can play as two characters, each of which has their own supernatural abilities — Deathloop fans will certainly see some of that game's DNA here.
It's not yet clear whether Amazon will offer Dishonored 2 through Steam, the Epic Games Store or the Amazon Games app. However, it's worth noting this game is unsupported on Steam Deck. That's a bit odd, considering its decade-old predecessor should run on the handheld without any hitches. Still, a free(ish) game that's as good as Dishonored 2 is nothing to sniff at, especially if you end up looking for something to play during the holidays.
Before Dishonored 2 and the other games hit the Prime Gaming lineup later this month, there are a few other notable titles that members can snag at no extra cost right now as part of the regular monthly drop. Classic first-person shooter Quake and Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons(from A Way Out and It Takes Two director Josef Fares) are up for grabs for another few weeks.
At this point it’s easier to list the features that Arturia’s Pigments doesn’t have than ones it does. The company has been rolling out regular updates for a few years now, and each new version adds something worth getting excited about. New synth engines, new effects, whole new utility sections – it’s both a place for Arturia to experiment with new ideas, and show off some of highlights from its lineup of vintage emulation.
At first blush Pigments 4 seems like a comparatively minor update. There’s some new effects, a handful of enhancements to the various oscillators, but there’s not much to reach out and demand your attention from a simple headline. This seemingly subtle upgrade hides a lot of quality of life enhancements, though.
For one, now you can simply drag and drop modulation sources to their target. Granted, clicking LFO one and then clicking on the filter cut off wasn’t particularly difficult. But now you can just drag the little tab over an LFO to whatever you want to modulate. It should make Pigments a little less intimidating to those just learning how to navigate the synth. There’s also now left and right arrows on multimode modules, like the filter, that lets you quickly change types, where previously you had to click and open a drop down menu to select a new option.
Arturia
The most dramatic UI changes are thankfully optional. First is the new Play tab, which strips away most of the sound design options and focuses on a core set of tweakable parameters. You can’t change effects here, or set modulation preferences. It’s designed to just get you making noise without too many distractions. It’s fine for live performance or if you prefer to stick with the presets, but hides a lot of the depth that makes Pigments so compelling.
The other major interface change is a bit of a head scratcher. See, while most companies are rushing to implement dark mode to save your eyes, Arturia has decided that Pigments is too dark and added a light mode. I’m sure there are those out there who will enjoy its bright gray panels, but I’m personally not a fan. Not only do I think the original theme is easier to stare at for prolonged periods of time, but it’s also just more consistent. There are many elements of the interface that remain dark even in light mode and it looks a bit cobbled together.
That’s a pretty minor nitpick though, considering that once you get past the UX, there’s a handful of new toys to play with in Pigments 4. There’s a new filter borrowed from the company’s MS-20 emulation, ring mod in the wavetable oscillator, super unison in the analog oscillator, a dedicated mod oscillator, an improved bit crusher and (wait for it) shimmer reverb!
Arturia
The MS-20 filter might seem unnecessary considering Pigments already had 10 different filter options, many with multiple modes, but it does bring something special to the table. Rather than using it as you would any other lowpass filter, the MS-20 begs to be run at extremes. Crank the resonance and turn on keyboard tracking, and you can transform simple white noise into a delicate plucky key sound with a subtle crackle. Or just crank the volume on it and hit it with the hottest signal you can (though make sure to turn down the master volume or you'll risk blowing out your ears) to get some crunchy saturation.
Ring Mod delivers some nice icy timbres. Though, this is not something that Pigments was exactly lacking before. It’s a welcome addition, but definitely not something that you’d miss too dearly if it quietly disappeared. The more exciting changes are to the Bit Crusher effect (as opposed to the one built into the sample engine). The addition of jitter, scale and new decimator options really let you fine tune the exact flavor of digital destruction you’re looking for.
Oh, then of course there’s the shimmer reverb. It does what it says on the tin. Personally I think it’s an essential effect, and I’m shocked Arturia hasn’t added one until now. There’s nothing about it that stands out particularly, but if you’re using Pigments to create granular soundscapes or ambient plucks, then you’ll be thankful it’s here.
Arturia also added 63 new wavetables, 67 new samples and 36 new noise types, plus a pile of new presets. And, if the new library of included patches isn’t enough for you, there’s also three new sound packs: Wavelengths Lo-fi, Wavelengths Neuro Bass and Wavelengths Cinematic to broaden your sonic palette.
Pigments 4 is available now as a free upgrade for existing owners. New customers have a chance to pick it up at an introductory price of $99 until January 4th, after which the price will go back up to $199.
Scientists have just crossed one of the most important thresholds in the quest for fusion energy. A team at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has created the first known fusion reaction with a net energy gain — that is, it produced more energy than it consumed and ignited. The researchers achieved the feat on December 5th, when they used 192 lasers at the National Ignition Facility to blast a cylinder containing frozen hydrogen surrounded by diamond.
The reaction, which generated a flurry of X-rays, struck a fuel pellet of deuterium and tritium with 2.05 megajoules of energy. That, in turn, led to a wave of neutron particles and 3.15 megajoules of output. That gain was 'only' equivalent to about 1.5lbs of TNT, but that was enough to meet the criteria for fusion ignition.
The development has been a long time coming. The National Ignition Facility started work in 2009, but it wasn't until 2014 that the installation's laser-based fusion technology produced a meaningful volume of energy. Progress accelerated in the past year, however. Lawrence Livermore generated a much larger amount of energy last August, equivalent to 70 percent of that from the lasers. An attempt in September generated 1.2 megajoules using the 2.05-megajoule blast.
The lab and the Energy Department are quick to caution that "many" advancements are still necessary before fusion reactors are practical enough to power homes. During a presentation, scientists said they needed to improve the number of reactions per minute, simplify the process and otherwise make it easily repeatable. And of course, they need to improve scaling — a reactor would have to power enough households to justify its existence.
The Energy Department is in the midst of rebooting a coordinated fusion power effort, however. During the event, officials also noted that a functional plant wasn't as far off as you might think. While they didn't commit to a timeframe, they said it was less than the 50 or 60 years they might have predicted in the past. You might see the first commercial fusion reactor in your lifetime, to put it another way.
The technology could be vital to limiting global warming and otherwise fighting climate change. While renewable energy sources like solar and wind power are more eco-friendly than coal, they don't always meet demand and can require large amounts of land. Solar also isn't as effective in regions where sunlight can be limited. Sufficiently powerful fusion reactors could achieve the dream of clean powerplants that have enough capacity to serve large populations without the radioactive waste of nuclear facilities.
This might be your best opportunity yet to get a modern Mac desktop below sticker price while still having enough storage for everyday use. Amazon is selling the Mac mini M1 with a 512GB SSD at a record low of $750. That's well under the official $899, and enough of a savings that you'll have plenty of money for peripherals. Just note that it might arrive after Christmas if you're buying it as a gift.
This Mac mini is still a capable desktop. It's speedy for daily use and media editing tasks, and it should remain quiet even under more demanding workloads. It's also the most practical desktop Mac if you either want to use your own monitor or have USB-A devices you aren't ready to give up. Apple first pitched the Mac mini as an ideal gateway computer for newcomers to the platform, and that's arguably true even today — you can bring your own peripherals and get started with little trouble.
There's no denying that the Mac mini M1's two-year-old design has its limitations. It won't be as fast as newer computers, including Apple's own Mac Studio, and the 8GB of RAM in this configuration isn't ideal for heavy-duty use. You may also want to consider the iMac M1 if you like the simplicity of an all-in-one. At this price, though, it's easier to justify over more recent Mac desktops if you either have your own peripherals or want some flexibility in your setup.
The implosion of cryptocurrency exchange FTX has drawn the attention of politicians, with the House and the Senate set to hold hearings on the mess on Tuesday and Wednesday, respectively. The House's Committee on Financial Services is first up at 10AM ET with a hearing titled, "Investigating the Collapse of FTX, Part I."
Bankman-Fried said he'd participate after a back-and-forth on Twitter with Rep. Maxine Waters, the committee's chair. Previously, Bankman-Fried warned that he doesn't have access to much of his personal or professional data and, as such, expressed doubt over how helpful he'd be to the committee.
Ray, a corporate restructuring veteran who oversaw Enron's bankruptcy process, said FTX was in an "unprecedented" mess and that he'd never "seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information." Ray also claimed that Bankman-Fried has been making “erratic and misleading public statements” about FTX. The former CEO has given several interviews since leaving the post.
As of the time of writing, Bankman-Fried is not scheduled for the Senate Banking Committee's hearing on Wednesday. "Crypto Crash: Why the FTX Bubble Burst and the Harm to Consumers" will feature testimony from American University Washington College of Law professor Hilary J. Allen and Jennifer J. Schulp, the director of financial regulation studies at the Cato Institute's Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives. Investor Kevin O’Leary and actor and crypto critic Ben McKenzie will also testify. That hearing will start at 10AM and you can watch it on the committee's website.
After more than a decade, Flipboard is adding a new layer of social features to its platform. The service is adding new commenting and creation tools to its magazines as part of a broader “shift in emphasis towards community and conversations.”
Flipboard has had commenting features for years, but it’s been fairly basic, and hasn’t been a prominent part of the service, which until now has mostly been known as a place to read and share articles rather than a destination to talk about them. But with its latest update, the company is hoping to turn its signature magazines into the types of communities you might find on Reddit or Twitter.
To start, Flipboard is introducing “notes,” which allow users to add original content — whether it’s photos, videos, links or commentary — and add it to shared magazines. Other members of the magazine can then jump in with their own comments and add to the conversation. The idea, according to Flipboard CEO Mike McCue, is for these notes to become lively areas of discussion for people interested in the same “micro-communities.”
The company is also adding a new “communities” section to its app, which will highlight magazines and specific curators (Flipboard’s term for the people who manage topic-based magazines) to follow. All the new features are out now on the web, and are launching on its iOS and Android apps in January.
The company has been quietly testing the updates since July. It says there’s already been a noticeable uptick in engagement in magazines where the new interactivity is enabled.The changes also help make Flipboard into more of an alternative to Twitter for those who primarily use the Elon Musk-run service for consuming news. McCue says that Flipboard’s new social features predate Musk’s takeover of the company, and that he’s still a “Twitter believer.” But he acknowledges Flipboard’s shift is well-timed as some people are increasingly looking for different spaces to interact.
“It's not like you're in a giant open town square, and everyone's just shouting at the top of their lungs,” McCue tells Engadget. “It's more like we're the little restaurants around the town square and people are at different dinner tables talking. There's a different tone when you have these smaller groups.”
Amazon is rolling out new Echo Show accessibility features today. The company announced new gestures, text-to-speech (TTS) features and caption settings using the device’s screen to help customers with disabilities.
The Echo Show 8 (2nd Gen) and Echo Show 10 (3rd Gen) now let you dismiss timers with a gesture. If a cooking timer goes off while your hands are messy, you can raise your palm towards the camera to silence it. Of course, Alexa already supported dismissing timers with voice, but the hand-wave accommodates people with speech disabilities (or those who don’t feel like talking to a computer).
The Echo Show is also adding text-to-speech capabilities. Tap to Alexa, an accessibility hub that uses the touchscreen instead of spoken commands, now lets you type phrases for Alexa to read aloud. Additionally, it can create shortcuts for commonly used phrases, which you can organize with icons and colors. The TTS feature was already available on Fire tablets, but this is its Echo Show debut.
Amazon
Finally, Consolidated Captions turns on captions universally without repeating the process on every device. Activating captions from the Echo Show’s accessibility settings now enables Call Captioning, Closed Captioning and Alexa Captioning on all of your account’s supported Echo Show devices.
The updates arrive as Amazon reshuffles its priorities amid economic uncertainty. Last month, it began laying off employees, reportedly cutting around 10,000 jobs. Its Devices & Services division, which handles Echo Show and Alexa, reportedly bore the brunt of it. In October, Amazon also killed off Glow, its kid-focused video-calling device.
Meta said it spent $5 billion on global safety and security last year and employs hundreds of people dedicated to anti-terror work. Not every company has those kind of resources, but Meta has shared a new open-source tool that can help combat child exploitation, terrorist propaganda and other types of abusive content for free. The tool is called Hasher-Matcher-Actioner (HMA), and it builds on the company's previous image and video matching software that it also released three years ago.
HMA can keep websites free of unsavory content with the help of its users who label images and videos that violate rules and laws. The system will create a "hash" or a unique fingerprint of each piece of content that gets saved onto a database. Companies can use the tool to create and run their own databases, but they can also use existing hash databases to make sure they have everything covered. That means they don't have to save the offending images or videos themselves and can simply run all their content through the databases they use to find posts that potentially violate their rules.
Meta has shared the tool shortly before it assumes the chair of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) board next month. That's the group it formed with Twitter, YouTube and Microsoft to fight online extremism back in 2017. GIFCT runs a database that companies can use with the HMA, and Meta says when "more companies participate in the hash sharing database the better and more comprehensive it is — and the better we all are at keeping terrorist content off the internet, especially since people will often move from one platform to another to share this content." It added: "...many companies do not have the in-house technology capabilities to find and moderate violating content in high volumes, which is why HMA is a potentially valuable tool."
Those interested can checkout the Hasher-Matcher-Actioner tool on GitHub.
All I want for Christmas is for my glasses not to fog up. And Swiss scientists might deliver on that wish. ETH Zurich researchers have developed a gold nanocoating that heats glass by up to 46 Fahrenheit by absorbing a large amount of infrared radiation − and keeps your glasses fog free. Most protective treatments merely spread water around using hydrophilic molecules, but this nano-thin layer can stop the condensation from even forming.
The research group believes the layer could also reduce fog on car windshields, and future implementations could work on mirrors, windows and more. The coating lays gold between layers of titanium oxide, which amplifies the heating effect through refraction and protects the gold against wear – titanium is much tougher. And while gold is pricey, the amount needed is so small it shouldn't add much to the price of your glasses if the tech makes its way into mainstream spectacles.
– Mat Smith
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With Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon processor and a 1-inch camera sensor.
With the 13 and 13 Pro, Xiaomi is the second manufacturer to use Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 platform, following Vivo’s X90 Pro and IQOO 11 series. The 13 Pro’s camera is the main highlight: It packs a 50-megapixel (MP) f/1.9 main camera with a Type 1-inch sensor (it's really only 8.8 x 13.2mm, but it’s still significantly larger than most smartphone imaging sensors). It has a 50MP 3.2x zoom camera (75mm equivalent) with optical image stabilization (OIS) and a floating lens. And there’s also a 50MP f/2.2 ultra-wide camera (14mm equivalent) because lots of camera sensors is a trend that’s going nowhere. Prices start at 4,999 yuan ($720) for the Xiaomi 13 Pro and 3,999 yuan ($570) for the Xiaomi 13. But, you won't be able to buy them in North America.
After multiple delays, Square Enix’s next big game is almost here. Forspoken is the first title to come from the team that made Final Fantasy XV – a game from 2016. While we know the magical attacks in Forspoken are spectacular, a one-on-one battle with Sila, the Tanta of Strength, made the biggest impression during our preview session – and the best showcase for all the attacks and moves you can master. Once you’ve read our preview, be sure to check out the demo to test the spells and magical parkour for yourself.
Each received 14 television nods, while 'The Rings of Power' and Will Smith were shut out.
Streaming services once again dominated TV categories for this year’s Golden Globes nominees. Netflix and HBO Max had the best showings among streamers, tallying 14 television nods. Netflix’s The Crown received four nominations: Best Drama Series, Best Television Actress - Drama Series (Imelda Staunton), Best Supporting Actress - Television Series (Elizabeth Debicki) and Best Supporting Actor - Television Series (Jonathan Pryce).
Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story also received four: Best Limited Series - Anthology Series or Television Motion Picture and acting nominations for Evan Peters, Niecy Nash and Richard Jenkins. HBO’s The White Lotus picked up four nominations, but I haven’t started season two, so no spoilers, please.
Framework released its first modular laptop last year, and the company now offers it with ChromeOS. It’s not the most exciting laptop, but it’s extremely well designed, upgradeable and flexible. You can easily swap out ports, add RAM and replace any parts that might break over time. Couple that with an excellent screen and keyboard and you have a quality device that should last years longer than the average Chromebook, even if its $999 price is pretty high.
Following his arrest in the Bahamas, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has charged FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried with "defrauding investors," it announced. It alleges that Bankman-Fried "concealed his diversion of FTX customers' funds to [the] crypto trading firm Alameda Research while raising more than $1.8 million from investors."
At the same time, the US Attorney's Office or the Southern District of New York and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) also announced charges against Bankman-Fried in parallel actions, according to the SEC.
"We allege that Sam Bankman-Fried built a house of cards on a foundation of deception while telling investors that it was one of the safest buildings in crypto," said SEC Chair Gary Gensler. "The alleged fraud committed by Mr. Bankman-Fried is a clarion call to crypto platforms that they need to come into compliance with our law."
