When it was released in 2017 VCV Rack quickly became a hit. The free, open source virtual modular synth with thousands of modules to choose from (including recreations of popular physical ones) gave many of us a way to explore the world of Eurorack without dropping thousands of dollars on gear. And now, after a long and arduous road — VCV Rack 2 is nearly upon us. 

When it launches in November VCV Rack 2 will include a complete redesign of the UI, including a dark mode and a greatly improved browser. That last part is huge because, the library of nearly 2,700 modules is overwhelming to say the least. And chances are you're going to end up downloading a lot of them. Here you can filter by category or even just highlight your most used modules. And you can easily import, export and duplicate module selections. 

The big news though, is the introduction of a proper VST plugin so you can use VCV Rack in Ableton, Logic, or whatever your DAW of choice might be. Squeezing the power of an entire virtual modular synth into a plugin is no easy task. It took time and effort and VCV along with its founder Andrew Belt are hoping that some people will be willing to pay to keep the project alive. So, while VCV Rack will continue to be a free and open source application, the VST plugin will be exclusive to the Studio Edition and will include proper technical support (not just forums). 

VCV Rack 2 will be available in November for an introductory price of $99. Eventually that will go up to $149, but even then it's still cheaper than many virtual instruments with far less flexibility. 

Apple didn't even touch on the HomePod line during its iPhone 13 event, but that doesn't mean the smart speakers will go untouched this fall. 9to5Macnotes an impending version 15 update will make the HomePod considerably more useful, particularly if it's part of a larger smart home. To start, you can set two or more HomePod minis as your default speakers for an Apple TV 4K. You won't have to specify them when it's time to sit down for a movie. They won't exactly produce thunderous audio, but they could save you from buying separate smart speakers or a pricier soundbar.

You also won't have to approach your HomePod to use Siri. The update enables Siri voice control through supporting HomeKit accessories. While Apple's smart home ecosystem isn't nearly as large as Amazon's or Google's, that could be handy if you want to quickly turn the lights on.

Other improvements are subtler, but could be valuable in the right circumstances. You can ask Siri to turn on your Apple TV, play a title and control playback. You'll automatically see playback controls on your lock screen if a nearby HomePod mini is playing music. You'll get notifications if compatible HomeKit Secure Video cameras and doorbells detect a package at your door. This is also a big update if you've ever woken your partner or neighbors by mistake — Siri will adjust its speaking volume based on both the room and your own voice, and you can specify a lower bass level to avoid irritating people in the apartment below.

Apple didn't outline the HomePod update's release timing, but it's likely to arrive on September 20th alongside iOS 15 and watchOS 8. Don't assume you'll get the vaunted spatial audio or Apple Music lossless updates, however. The release notes don't indicate support will be available with version 15, so you'll likely have to wait for a follow-up patch to experience more immersive HomePod sound.

Battlefield 2042, the next entry in EA's long-running first-person shooter series, has been delayed. Instead of coming out on October 22nd as previously announced, the game is now scheduled to debut almost a month later on November 19th. EA announced the delay in a message attributed to Oskar Gabrielson, the CEO of series developer DICE. Like many other studios over the last two years, DICE blamed the delay on the coronavirus pandemic.      

"Given the scale and scope of the game, we had hoped our teams would be back in our studios together as we move towards launch," Gabrielson said. "With the ongoing conditions not allowing that to happen safely, and with all the hard work the teams are doing from home, we feel it is important to take the extra time to deliver on the vision of Battlefield 2042 for our players."

DICE promised to share details on Battlefield 2042's upcoming open beta later this month. While the delay means series fans will have to wait longer to play the sequel to 2018's Battlefield 5, it's still coming out in 2021. That's not something you can say of some of the games that were pushed back this year like Dying Light 2 and Horizon Forbidden West.  

SpaceX is making history by launching the first ever all-civilian mission to orbit, and you can watch it happen live. The aerospace corporation is opening a five-hour launch window for the mission called Inspiration4 today, September 15th, at 8:02PM Eastern time. Inspiration4 was paid for a billionaire who was relatively unknown before this: Shift4 Payments CEO Jared Isaacman. He's bringing three more people with him, and none of them are trained astronauts or have been to space before.

Isaacman, who's an experienced pilot, will be the mission's commander, while Hayley Arceneaux will be its medical officer. Arceneaux is a physician assistant at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital who had cancer herself as a child. According to The Atlantic, one of the goals for this mission is to raise $200 million for the hospital, and Isaacman wanted to bring one of its employees. 

Geoscience professor and former NASA astronaut program finalist Sian Proctor will serve as the mission pilot. Finally, data engineer and Iraq War veteran Chris Sembroski will serve as mission specialist. Proctor won an online competition organized by Isaacman, while Sembroski got his slot from a friend who won a raffle for a seat on the mission.

The team trained together for six months and completed a full rehearsal of launch day activities on September 13th. They'll spend three days orbiting our planet aboard SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule that will blast off on top of a Falcon 9 rocket. While they're hurtling across space, the team will conduct scientific research meant to provide more data on the effects of long-duration spaceflights on the human body. 

SpaceX has started streaming the event on its website and its YouTube page. Netflix will also stream the launch on YouTube.

Psyonix has revealed details for the next Rocket League Championship Series season, and it's looking to take the esport to new heights. Not only will the 2021-22 RCLS have the biggest prize pool of any season with $6 million up for grabs, there will be three new regions in the biggest expansion to date.

The inclusion of the Asia-Pacific North, Asia-Pacific South and Middle East & North Africa regions mean that players in dozens more countries can compete in pro Rocket League in the upcoming season. Teams in Japan, South Korea, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Algeria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and several other nations can take part in the RCLS for the first time.

Although the Sub-Saharan Africa region won't have full participation in the 2021-22 RCLS, teams there still have a shot at getting to the World Championship. Two wildcard spots are earmarked for the best teams from tournaments in that region. 

The 2021-22 RCLS regular season will run from October 15th until July 3rd, with the World Championship wildcard and main event tournaments scheduled for later that month. Sixteen teams will qualify for the wildcard tournament. The top eight will join another eight squads that progress directly to the main event. The championship-winning team will earn $600,000.

Psyonix hopes to hold events with fans depending on how the COVID-19 situation evolves. The Fall Major in Stockholm, Sweden will take place without a live audience.

It's neat to see Rocket League take a step toward becoming a true global esport. It might secretly be the best esport for casual viewers. As long as you know the basic rules of soccer (get the ball in the goal), it's super easy to follow and understand what's going on. It's a blast to watch with a crowd. Here's hoping things are safe enough for Psyonix to run events with fans this season.

You no longer need to use the likes of Chrome or Safari if you want the occasional suggestions for web searches. Mozilla is rolling out a Firefox Suggest feature that, as the name implies, offers relevant links when you're typing in a search, whether from the general web or from Pocket. Look for Costa Rica, for instance, and you'll get a Wikipedia link to help you learn more about the country.

The company is also working on contextual suggestion that rely on sending typed searches, click info and "city-level" location info. That may raise concerns given Firefox's historical focus on privacy, but Mozilla stressed the handful of early US users would have to opt-in.

The larger concern may be the objectivity of some Suggest links. Mozilla also plans to recommend content from "sponsored, vetted partners," such as an eBay link when you look for Vans shoes. While Mozilla is promising "credible" material, these won't necessarily be the most logical, organic suggestions possible. You can simply launch a standard web search to ignore these de facto ads, but this does mean you'll want to look carefully at some links before you click them.

From the opening scene of Iron Man back in 2008, the military-industrial complex has been stitched into the fabric of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Captain America, the Hulk, War Machine and Captain Marvel are all involved in it to some extent. But the portrayal has always tilted toward the positive due to Hollywood’s long-standing partnership with the US military. This week’s What If…? uses the freedom offered by animation to go a little dark on the subject and show us how easily the business of war could have overrun the narrative.

The point of divergence this time around is that Erik Killmonger is apparently assigned to an undercover mission with the Ten Rings and, in the process, ends up saving Tony Stark’s life. So Tony is never injured and forced to build the Iron Man suit, instead continuing his war profiteering ways — though now with a new BFF at his side. Instead of becoming someone who buries himself in his work (and builds a literal suit of armor to protect himself) Tony instead lashes out, with Killmonger all-too-ready to point him in the direction of taking down Wakanda.

This pulls Wakanda into the narrative a lot sooner than its main-timeline debut in 2006’s Captain America: Civil War. The country’s isolationist policy has been used as the retcon for why we never heard a peep from Wakanda sooner but it quickly comes to the forefront here, in lieu of all the stories that spun out of the initial attack on Stark: the conflict with Obadiah Stane and Tony’s palladium poisoning in the first two Iron Man films, and then later the attack on Sokovia in Age of Ultron and Baron Zemo’s revenge scheme in Civil War. General Ross even makes an appearance here, casting doubt on whether the events of The Incredible Hulk even still happened the same way. Instead of being introduced to Wakanda through a UN peace conference, instead they’re a country on the defensive against a horde of mechanical forces.

Marvel Studios

The episode makes it quickly apparent how much of the MCU was dependent on Tony Stark’s participation, though not in a feel-good George Bailey It’s a Wonderful Life way. In Civil War, Vision points out that the power shown since Iron Man’s debut invites challenge. Here, we end up in a major conflict anyway, showing that the aggressive energy that created the MCU’s Heroic Age already existed, spurred on by advancing technology. Without superheroes to pick up the banner, it’s the military that becomes the beneficiary of all that power.

Marvel Studios

However, the military is a system as much as it is people, and there’s a weird sense throughout the episode that responsibility isn't in any particular person’s hands, even Eric Killmonger’s. We’re clearly shown where he’s pulling the strings, but characters like Tony Stark and General Ross are all too willing to be tugged along. But even they don’t feel fully in control of what happens. The conflict just escalates quickly and disproportionately in the episode’s half-hour runtime, perhaps a victim of the show’s need for expedited storytelling.

It’s no coincidence that the war that started the MCU was the conflict in Afghanistan, though it is happenstance that this episode aired only a month after the US brought its involvement to a messy close. It’s been a way of life for so long that it’s easy to feel swept away by the whole thing, especially if you were born after 9/11. This episode reinforces the MCU’s role as escapism during this era, a place where we could move beyond all this ugly terrestrial conflict and address more cosmic issues. By removing the heroes from the equation, the MCU becomes a grim mirror of the mindset we’ve been living in for two decades.

Following a pandemic-related delay, the Unicode Consortium has finalized Unicode 14.0. In all, the update adds 838 characters to the text standard. Of those 838 characters, 37 represent new emoji that will make their way to your devices before the end of the year and throughout 2022. The selection includes all the emoji the Unicode Consortium included in its final candidate list back in July. That means characters like “beans,” “troll,” “mirror ball” and “melting face” made the cut.

Emojipedia

Notably, the finalized list also includes multiple skin tone variations of the handshake emoji. Due to some technical limitations, it was one of the few characters in previous releases you couldn’t modify to represent different skin shades. The Unicode Consortium and its volunteers spent the better part of two years working to fix that, and now they have.

The ghost of Quibi is giving up the Turnstyle rotating video tech that let users watch its short-form content in either landscape or portrait mode on phones. A company called Eko filed a lawsuit over the feature a month before Quibi's ill-fated launch. Eko accused Quibi of patent infringement and claimed it used stolen trade secrets to build the tech.

The companies have settled their legal claims against each other, and Quibi is transferring the Turnstyle tech and intellectual property to Eko. The financial terms of their settlement haven't been disclosed, as Variety notes. Eko sought over $100 million in damages from Quibi.

“We are satisfied with the outcome of this litigation, and proud of the independently created contributions of Quibi and its engineering team to content presentation technology,” Quibi founder Jeffrey Katzenberg said.

Eko filed its suit in March 2020. That July, a court ruled that Quibi could keep using Turnstyle pending the outcome of the lawsuit. As it turns out, the case lasted far longer than Quibi's streaming service — the app shut down last December, less than eight months after it debuted.

Quibi sold its content library to Roku, which won an Emmy for one of those series this past weekend. After selling its shows, a Quibi holding company called QBI Holdings was formed as the legal battle played out.

The settlement is another nail in the coffin for a big, expensive, failure of a bet on mobile streaming. Quibi was designed for on-the-go viewing, but it launched in the midst of a pandemic, when most people weren't moving around. Still, at least we'll always have memories of "The Golden Arm."

Sony’s upcoming live-action adaptation of Twisted Metal has found its leading man. Altered Carbon and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier star Anthony Mackie will play the role of series protagonist John Doe. Deadline was the first to report on the casting. “We’re thrilled to have Anthony Mackie on board. His ability to blend comedy, action and drama is perfect for the Twisted world we’re creating,” Asad Qizilbash, the head of Sony’s PlayStation Productions unit, told the outlet.

News that Sony was developing a live-action adaptation of the Twisted Metal franchise first came out at the end of February. The company is billing the project as an action comedy, with Deadpool and Zombieland writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick set to produce the series. Cobra Kai scribe Michael Jonathan Smith is also on board to write and produce.

Twisted Metal is just one of the properties Sony is in the process of adapting for television and film. At the end of March, the company announced it was making a Ghost of Tsushima movie. Its The Last of Us series at HBO also recently found its Joel and Ellie in Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey.