DudeAsInCool
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Posts posted by DudeAsInCool
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The queen of Americana covers Denver's 1971 hit
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Five years ago, Minor Threat reunite to recreate the iconic Salad Days EP cover. Today, the hardcore heroes are sharing outtakes from Out Of Step in honor of its 40th anniversary.
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Claire Rousay has shared a few songs this year, including “i no longer have that glowing thing inside of me,” “Sigh In My Ear,” and “Deceiver,” the latter two with Helena Deland. For Bandcamp Friday, the Los Angeles ambient artist is sharing “meg.”
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The 2000 classic by the Puerto Rican band has been covered by several Mexican artists, including Lucero and Edith Marquez
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Nashy-Nashai and Wanda Original also join for a mix of Christmas covers and new tracks on A Neon Christmas
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Last month, Australian alt-rock trio Middle Kids announced Faith Crisis Pt. 1, the follow-up to 2021’s Today We’re The Greatest. So far, they’ve shared “Bootleg Firecracker” and “Dramamine,” and today they’re back with “Bend.”
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Bruce Dickinson has a lot going on. The Iron Maiden frontman is starring in a horror movie about an ABBA tribute band, and he’s getting ready to release his first solo album in 19 years, The Mandrake Project. Today, he’s sharing the lead single “Afterglow Of Ragnarok.”
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"Colombia has so much to show and this is just another piece of that," the musician wrote on Instagram
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“The individual parties to this litigation are two of the most well-known and celebrated musicians of our time,” the Nashville judge wrote in a ruling
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Enlarge / macOS Mojave's wallpaper. (credit: Apple)
Valve Software's Steam gaming marketplace and app will drop support for macOS 10.13 (High Sierra) and 10.14 (Mojave), according to a support page post. The change will go into effect on February 15, 2024.
What will happen exactly? Valve writes:
After that date, existing Steam Client installations on these operating systems will no longer receive updates of any kind including security updates. Steam Support will be unable to offer users technical support for issues related to the old operating systems, and Steam will be unable to guarantee continued functionality of Steam on the unsupported operating system versions.
macOS 10.14 (dubbed Mojave by Apple) shipped more than five years ago, and time has a way of marching on, so this might not seem that momentous at first glance. But there's a reason it's particularly noteworthy as these things go: this change means the end of support for the last versions of macOS that could run 32-bit games.
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"Collaborating again and starting from scratch would be a very big healer as well," Dinah tells Rolling Stone. "This planted the seed for us, I would say"
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A California labor commissioner contends that Brandon Blackstock overstepped his managerial duties by procuring work for her
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Daryl Hall and John Oates went to court in Nashville today to begin hashing out their dispute over Oates’ plan to sell his stake in their joint venture — a plan that Hall described in legal filings as a “betrayal” strategically timed to maximize harm.
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Enlarge / Left: Reddit's old logo. Right: Reddit's new logo. (credit: Reddit)
Writing a long comment providing detail about Reddit's refreshed logo, mascot, and typeface this week, a Reddit employee seemingly rethought the post and opted to conclude it with choice words. The post's last line currently reads:
"Edit: Obligatory 'Fuck Spez' for karma."
The Reddit employee, going by Acidtwist on Reddit and known as Tavish, says they're Reddit's head of brand creative (Reddit says it doesn't disclose the real identities of its workers on Reddit).
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By the winter of 2025, we’ll be a full quarter-century away from the 1990s — exactly the right amount of time for the ’90s nostalgia summer tour market to morph into a ’90s nostalgia concert cruise market. That’s when the simply and directly named ’90s Cruise will set sail. On deck for the maiden voyage will be Blues Traveler, Collective Soul, Gin Blossoms, Everclear, Lit, Color Me Badd, Fastball, C+C Music Factory, Jesus Jones, Digital Underground, Sophie B. Hawkins, and Lisa Loeb, who’ll be pulling double duty as host and performer. Former MTV personalities Downtown Julie Brown and Matt Pinfield will also be on board as hosts.
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Enlarge (credit: Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Hello fellow procrastinators. This is your last-minute warning that you have until the end of the day to log in to any inactive Google accounts before they start getting deleted on December 1. Google is going to wipe any accounts that have been "inactive" for two years, allowing the company to free up storage space, delete unused personal data, and continue the ongoing journey of intense cost cutting it has been on for the past year.
The plan to do this was announced in May, and Google says inactive accounts should get "multiple notifications over the months leading up to deletion, to both the account email address and the recovery email (if one has been provided)," so hopefully this isn't a surprise to anyone. The company says it will "take a phased approach" to deleting accounts, starting with "accounts that were created and never used again," so even if you're reading this on December 1, there's probably still time to log in to an old account and save it.
As for the caveats around "inactivity," Google says this will only apply to personal accounts that don't have any subscriptions running, so Google Workspace and Google One users have nothing to fear. The company says you'll count as "active" if you "sign-in at least once every 2 years," which is pretty easy to do. Confusingly it also lists certain activities you can perform that will count as "activity," but those seem rather moot, since you would already need to be logged in to do them. The "Sign in with Google" OAuth platform on other websites also counts as account activity, and so does being signed in on an Android phone.
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Enlarge / The enhanced edition trilogy includes Grand Theft Auto 3, Grand Theft Auto Vice City, and Grand Theft Auto San Andreas. (credit: Rockstar Games)
Netflix subscribers will be able to play the three original 3D Grand Theft Auto games on iOS and Android starting in December, according to a blog post from the streamer.
The titles included are 2001's Grand Theft Auto III, 2002's Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, and 2004's Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
All three released initially on the PS2 and Xbox. The first 3D entry in the series, Grand Theft Auto III, was a crossover cultural sensation when it debuted, and it is credited as one of the main originators of the open-world genre, which remains one of the most popular genres in triple-A games to this day.
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Enlarge / The active cooling chips are labeled and located in the upper-left corner near a custom heatsink in the 15-inch MacBook Air.
What if laptops could get fan-level cooling without moving parts? We could get thinner laptops, for one. We could also potentially squeeze more performance out of today's already impressively thin designs.
That's what San Jose, California startup Frore Systems is trying to convince laptop makers of as it looks for the first OEM to adopt what it describes as the first solid-state active cooling chip.
Most recently, the company equipped the M2 15-inch MacBook Air with three of its chips, dubbed AirJet Minis. Media witnesses to a recent demonstration reported that the chips helped bring MacBook Pro-comparable performance to sustained heavy workloads on the MacBook Air.
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Enlarge / A vintage 1981 BBC Micro computer. Fun fact: it was rather tricky to determine which version of BBC Basic a Micro was actually running. (credit: Getty Images)
BBC Basic did a lot of things, and often quite well. During the early 1980s, it extended the BASIC languages with easier loop structures, like IF/THEN/ELSE, and ran faster than Microsoft's version. It taught an entire generation of Brits how to code, both in BASIC and, through an inline interpreter, assembly language. And it's still around to teach newcomers and anybody else—except it's now on far, far more platforms than a mail-order computer from the telly.
BBCSDL, or BBC Basic for SDL 2.0, uses Simple DirectMedia Layer's OS abstraction to make itself available on Windows, x86 Linux, macOS, Raspberry Pi's OS, Android, iOS, and inside browsers through WebAssembly. Version 1.38a arrived in mid-November with quite a few fixes and niceties (as first noticed by Hackaday and its readers). On the project's website, you can see BBCSDL running on all these devices, along with a note that on iOS and in browsers, an assembler and a few other functions are not available, due to arbitrary code-execution restrictions.
BBCSDL, or BBC Basic for SDL 2.0, running on iOS devices, in graphical mode. (credit: Richard Russell / R.T. Russell)
Richard Russell has been working on ports, interpreters, and other variations of BBC BASIC since 1983, starting with interpreters for Z80 and Intel processors. By 2001, BBC BASIC for Windows was available with a graphical interface and was still compatible with the BBC Micro and Acorn computers from whence it came. BBCSDL has been in development since 2015, providing wider platform offerings while still retaining decent compatibility with BBC BASIC for Windows.
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Enlarge (credit: Google Drive)
Did Google Drive lose some people's data? That's the question swirling around the Internet right now as Google announces it's investigating "sync issues" for Google Drive for desktop. On Monday The Register spotted a trending post on the Google Drive forums where a user claimed that months of Drive data suddenly disappeared, and their files went back to a state from May 2023. A few other users chimed in with the same issue, the worst of which says: "This is going to cause me major issues if I cannot get the files back. It's all my work for the last 1-2 years. All my business work, all my personal files. Everything, just vanished. It must be 100's of files suddenly gone."
Google has a post up on the Google Drive help forums more or less acknowledging the issue. The post, titled "Drive for desktop (v84.0.0.0 - 84.0.4.0) Sync Issue," says, "We’re investigating reports of an issue impacting a limited subset of Drive for desktop users and will follow up with more updates." Google adds an ominous list of things to not do in the meantime like:
- Do not click “Disconnect account” within Drive for desktop
- Do not delete or move the app data folder:
- Windows: %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Google\DriveFS
- macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Google/DriveFS
- Optional: If you have room on your hard drive, we recommend making a copy of the app data folder.
Those instructions sound like they are aimed at preserving whatever possible file cache would exist on your computer. The description of this being a "sync" issue doesn't really make a ton of sense, since no matter what, the Drive web interface should show all your files and let you download them. If the problem is uploading, you should still have your local files.
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2023's ugly Microsoft sweater is based on the Windows XP Bliss wallpaper. [credit: Microsoft ]
Windows XP was an actively supported Microsoft product for 13 years, including five years where it was the newest version available and another three years where it was vastly more popular than its successor. That longevity—plus Microsoft's total domination of personal computing in the pre-iPhone, pre-Android world—helped make its default wallpaper one of the most recognizable images on the planet.
Microsoft is returning to the Bliss hill once again with this year's entry in its now-traditional ugly retro-computing sweater series. Blue hemming at the bottom and on the sleeves evokes Windows XP's bright-blue taskbar, and in case people don't immediately recognize Bliss as "a computer thing," there's also a giant mouse pointer hovering over it.
The sweater is available from size small up to a 3XL, and costs $70 regardless of which version you buy. All sizes are currently expected to arrive sometime between December 2 and 6.
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Enlarge / It's not a Razer device unless it's posed next to a bunch of custom RGB lighting, right? In great news, the Razer Kishi V2 includes zero glaring lights, which we prefer here at Ars Technica. (credit: Razer)
With smartphones getting more powerful processors and integrated graphics, gaming on mobile is a firmly established thing at this point. However, while the touchscreen on most smartphones is great for doing phone things, it's not always the best gaming interface (and having your hands obscure the screen can make playing some games particularly difficult). If you find yourself spending serious time gaming on your device, a dedicated gaming controller can make a huge difference, leaving you with something similar in form factor to a Nintendo Switch.
Sure, you could also pack a dedicated handheld gaming device like the Lenovo Legion Go, Valve Steam Deck, or Nintendo Switch—but that's just another piece of gear you'll need to remember to charge and pack into your gear bag each day. Gaming on a mobile phone brings convenience and eliminates the need for a separate, standalone device, and with mobile silicon getting faster every year—especially on the iOS side, where this year's iPhone 15 gets you ray tracing—you're getting rich graphics in a pocket-friendly form factor.
Backbone One mobile gaming controller, Playstation edition (USB-C 2nd gen)
The Backbone One gaming controller. (credit: Simon Nguyen)
Backbone One USB-C 2nd Gen
(Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs.)The Backbone One mobile gaming controller is a solid accessory. The buttons are crisp and satisfying to press, and they provide console controller-like responses. While playing a game (in my case, Chrono Trigger for iOS), the D-pad allows for easy maneuvering and doesn't munge inputs together like some cheap controllers do. A removable piece also allows the Backbone One to fit a phone with or without a case, which is a nice addition. (We tried out the USB-C version of the controller for this guide, although it also supports Lightning devices.)
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Enlarge / A blog post from AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr shows the Workspaces Thin Client setup. (credit: Jeff Barr/Amazon)
Amazon has turned its Fire TV Cube streaming device into a thin client optimized for Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Amazon's Workspaces Thin Client also supports Amazon's Workspaces Web, for accessing virtual desktops from a browser, and AppStream.
The computer is a Fire TV Cube with a new software stack. All the hardware—from the 2GB of LPDDR4x RAM and 16GB of storage, to the Arm processor with 8 cores, including four running at up to 2.2 GHz—remain identical whether buying the device as an Alexa-powered entertainment-streaming device or thin client computer. Both the Fire TV Cube and Workspaces Thin Client run an Android Open Source Project-based Android fork (for now).
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Since the beginning of the year, Peter Gabriel has been sharing a song from his new album i/o every month. i/o, Gabriel’s first LP of new material in over 21 years, is officially out on December 1 physically, but today he’s shared the album’s final song and single, “Live And Let Live.”
Lana Del Rey – “Take Me Home, Country Roads” (John Denver Cover)
in Music & Entertainment News
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Lana Del Rey has released a cover of the John Denver classic “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” Del Rey previously referenced Denver on “The Grants,” the opening track of this year’s Did You Know That There’s A Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd, shouting out and paraphrasing a line from his 1972 track “Rocky Mountain High.” Her version of “Take Me Home…” was produced by frequent collaborator Zach Dawes.
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