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Apple launched HomeKit in 2014, and for many users it remains a bit of a mystery—an outlier in the smart home space that is wound up with the iPhone, Siri, and an unintuitive corner of the smart home universe. What is HomeKit, and is it appropriate for your home? Let’s dig in and break down what it is and how it works today. WHAT IS HOMEKIT? While HomeKit is exclusive to Apple and its licensees, it is really just a communications protocol, a framework of technologies that lets your iOS device work with any number of smart home products. Apple currently claims that more than 100 brands of products are now included in the HomeKit universe, including all the usual smart home suspects, such as smart plugs and switches, light bulbs, thermostats,…

Apple might not always be first to the party, but there’s no denying the company goes above and beyond with hardware and software to deliver cutting-edge consumer experiences. But Apple’s slow and steady approach needs to change. With Siri lagging behind rivals and AI changing everything, WWDC 2023 will determine the future success of the company. SIRI IS LAGGING BEHIND Apple’s digital assistant Siri was once the market leader in voice-based AI assistants, but in recent years, it has fallen behind the competition, particularly Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant. However, with the rise of large language models that drive groundbreaking AI tools like ChatGPT, Apple is struggling to keep up with AI innovation. In a new behind-the-scenes report in The Information, Apple’s efforts to catch up with competitors are explored, as well…

Moins connus sur le marché français, les pneus Panaracer méritent pourtant qu’on s’y intéresse. La marque japonaise a pris le temps de cerner les besoins des utilisateurs pour tenter d’en faire des pneus polyvalents et efficaces, même lorsqu’ils sont confrontés à des sollicitations extrêmes. Leur design général est facilement reconnaissable et se distingue aisément des autres modèles de ce comparatif. Leur profil est bas, minimaliste et constitué d’une multitude de petits crampons incisifs sur les côtés. La marque communique sur le fait qu’elle a fait le choix d’employer trois gommes différentes. “Ce Panaracer DriverPro est un pneu léger qui n’entraîne aucun phénomène d’inertie.” Une base recouvre l’ensemble du ballon. Sur celle-ci va être positionnées une gomme Super Soft sur la bande de roulement, tandis que sur les portions latérales, on retrouve la…

Printing your own images is very rewarding, which is why most serious photographers buy a photo-capable inkjet printer as the heart of their digital darkroom. It’s only when they start making prints that the first issues arise and, since inkjet photo paper is often expensive, the costs mount up. This can be very discouraging. In this article we’ll outline some simple ways to prevent paper wastage, starting with loading media in your printer (which is where many problems occur). We’ll also provide some tips to help you make your prints as close as possible to the images on your computer screen. 1. Paper loading Not all inkjet printers are the same – even if they come from the same manufacturer. It’s important to understand the different feed paths your printer has and what…

Welcome back! This month, we’re going to dip back into theory. Learning bass is a constant rotation of the three aspects of how we understand and execute any musical idea—what it sounds like, what it looks like on the fingerboard, and how we explain it via music theory. Technical exercises are a combination of all three, as are composition and improvisation. These three ways into any piece of music can help us out if we get stuck with any one approach. If we can hear it but don’t understand what’s happening theoretically, we might have more chance once we’ve worked out the pattern on the fingerboard. Alternatively, if we know that a piece is in the key of D, that might give us a starting-point for working out the notes available…

MICHAEL C. HALL can guess what you’re thinking, Dexter fans: Eight years later, you’re probably still mad about that final episode—the one that ended up on countless “worst series finales of all time” lists. And he’s mindful of how devoted you are, especially those who’ve asked him to autograph their kitchen knives. So yes, he feels your pain. “It was so confounding for people,” Hall, 50, says of the series ender, in which Dexter Morgan—forensic-blood-splatter analyst by day, vigilante serial killer, um, also by day—threw his dead sister, Deb (Jennifer Carpenter), into the angry waters off Miami. “I can appreciate how it was pretty dissatisfying for anyone who was hoping for something definitive or some sense of closure,” the actor adds of Dexter faking his own death and moving to a…

Troy Sanders … “Hushed And Grim is six years’ worth of albums for us, because we release an album every three years” The concept of the double album has always been suspect. How many truly great double LPs can you name? Songs In The Key Of Life, Electric Ladyland, ‘The White Album’ perhaps, but beyond those, you’re stepping into “Why not take the best 10 songs and make it a single album?” territory. However, the double album’s murky history hasn’t deterred the Atlanta metal quartet Mastodon from the format, with their new one, Hushed And Grim, extending to 15 cuts. Fortunately, when we meet bassist Troy Sanders, he knows exactly what the pitfalls of a double entail. “We know it’s a lot to absorb!” he chuckles. “There’s a lot of drums, and a lot…

The outdoors is a great place to experience life. My guess is that most readers who enjoy AF magazine would say they enjoy the warmth of the sun, the smell of the woods and the sounds of birds. For one reason or another, we feel the most alive in the natural world. But the reality of nature is a bit less romantic than that. Although the great outdoors offers an abundance of positive experiences, there is a flip side to that coin: There are also plenty of discomforts and dangers lurking as well. The warmth of the sun can blister into a painful sunburn. The smell of the woods can aggravate allergies. The sound of birds could be the clicking of vultures’ beaks on bleaching bones. While this is tongue-in-cheek humor,…

Q My dad is prone to kidney stones (calcium oxalate stones) and is looking for natural ways to prevent them. Fortunately, so far, his stones have been small and he’s not required surgery, but he’s worried he may not be so lucky next time. Can you recommend any holistic solutions? S.P., via email A Kidney stones—when hard deposits of minerals and salts form inside the kidneys—are a common disease of the urinary tract.1 Usually made of calcium oxalate, the stones can cause symptoms when they move around in the kidney or pass into the ureters—the tubes that carry urine to the bladder. If a stone lodges in the ureters, it can block urine flow and lead to severe pain, nausea, fever and pink or brown urine. If you have small stones, you’ll probably…

I’ll admit, I was pretty skeptical before unboxing the first smartwatch from OnePlus, aptly named the OnePlus Watch. At $159, it’s less than half the price of our Editors’ Choice winner, the Apple Watch Series 6 (which starts at $399). And while it doesn’t work with iPhones, it offers many of the same features as Apple’s market-leading wearable. So far, my skepticism appears to have been unfounded. The OnePlus Watch offers a large color touch screen, built-in GPS, 2GB of storage, a 402mAh battery that promises two weeks of power, and the ability to make and receive calls. It also has plenty of health and fitness features, including support for more than 110 workout types, automatic workout detection for jogging and running, rapid-heart-rate alerts, guided breathing exercises, stress detection, and the…

When Oprah Winfrey’s interview with Meghan Markle and Prince Harry was broadcast, a week or so before this issue of The Rake went to print, I confess to thinking about one person in particular. It wasn’t a member of the royal family, or a commentator pleased to accept any word-rate to make their opinions known. No, I kept things in-house and thought of our Chief Subeditor, Stephen Wood. Why did I think of him? Well, let’s just say that when the Palace furore was unfolding, all I could imagine was Steve saying to himself, Oh, God, Tom’s going to write about the Queen in his letter, isn’t he? Well, yes. Yes, I am. But only briefly, and fortunately it is a neat gambit — the Queen’s gambit, if you will —…

It has been a while since the last comely blooms of the weighty garden peonies shed and withered on the ground. The remaining stems absorbed their sunlight (perhaps too much this summer, but we shouldn’t complain) and were cut back, which marked the end of summer and renewed preparations for blustery conditions and hopefully some snow. We Londoners are made to beg for snow. Yorkshire squires are always WhatsApping me to show off their Capability Brown gardens laden with the stuff, while the capital has that crusty, polluted air, too warm for anything close to a light powdering. As a result I can’t watch anyone make sourdough without feeling pure jealousy. All is not lost, however, because an October issue of The Rake always gives my life purpose and meaning. It’s…

Sitting in an isolated room at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Frank Nielsen steeled himself for the first injection. Doctors were about to take a needle filled with herpes simplex virus, the strain responsible for cold sores, and plunge it directly into his scalp. If all went well, it would likely save his life. Nielsen was a cancer survivor and, once again, a cancer patient. His melanoma, which had responded to conventional treatments the first time around, had returned with a frightening aggressiveness. Within weeks, a lump on his scalp had swelled into an ugly mass. Unlike the first time, options like surgery weren’t viable — it was growing too quickly. As a last resort, his doctors turned to a cutting-edge drug known as T-VEC, approved in 2015 in the…

December begins with the Sun, Venus and Mercury all in your sign. Yes, it’s all about you, but in the nicest possible way! It’s a good time to make a better plan on how you want to go forward. Include everything from health and diet, to hobbies, job, home and even relationships. Jupiter going into Aries for over four months on the 21st gives a tremendous boost to your creativity but also bodes well for your social life and your love life. What better birthday gift could you wish for! Work Are you being paid what you’re worth? Now is the perfect time to ask. By the 10th, Venus has moved into your solar 2nd house of earned income, Mercury is already there, and the Sun joins them on the 22nd –…

FOR ALL OF THE ATTENTION THAT leader character gets when we witness its negative extremes — such as when an authoritarian CEO presides over a corrupt or an abusive culture — most organizations give surprisingly little thought to what is actually one of the most significant available levers to effect positive organizational development. Organizations that fail to hire for and develop positive character among its leaders are missing an opportunity. In fact, one study found that organizations with leaders of high character — those whose employees rated them highly on integrity, responsibility, forgiveness, and compassion — had nearly five times the return on assets of those with low character.¹ Why is this aspect of leadership and organizational culture so overlooked? Over more than a decade of investigating leader character in organizations, we’ve…

Although we undoubtedly value speed over pretty much everything else when looking at the merits of any particular filesystem, sometimes that isn’t enough to differentiate any one over the rest. In that situation, we need to take other things into consideration. For instance, you might be choosing a filesystem for a more complex setup, such as a RAID array or an LVM volume, in which case you need to investigate each filesystem’s more advanced features. On top of this advanced extras such as automatic checksums and snapshot options all help secure your files and provide additional security. Let’s take a closer look at our five contenders to find out whether they have anything else to offer. Reiser5 8/10 About a year ago, Edward Shishkin – the sole Reiser5 developer – reported that…

Endless OS is a unique learning-oriented distro that helps users stay productive with their computers even when they’re not online. Version 4.0 introduces a plethora of changes, both in the background and on the desktop. For starters, the developers have dropped building every single package on their own, and instead borrow a majority of them from Debian. There are still about 120 packages they build themselves, since they need to customise them for their purpose, but the change in approach has helped cut down the development time significantly. Furthermore, Endless OS 4 is the first long-term support (LTS) release of the distro, which the developers plan to support for a number of years even after Endless OS 5 is released. Having an LTS release will complement the distro’s purpose of making tech…

The 1980s home computer scene was such an important time in our (GenX) lives. Intel was yet to make its mark in the UK, and we still favoured Commodore, Sinclair and Amstrad machines. In 1982 the Cambridgeshire-based Tangerine Computer Systems released its Oric-1. This was a 1MHz MOS Technology 6502 CPU powered 8-bit computer that came with either 16 or 48KB of RAM. It was designed and priced to compete with Sinclair’s Spectrum. The Oric-1 and the ZX Spectrum shared one design trait: an awkward keyboard. Where the ZX Spectrum used “dead flesh” rubber keys, the Oric-1 used small, thin plastic keys that were a typist’s nightmare. This issue was later fixed in 1983 with the introduction of the Oric Atmos, essentially an Oric-1 with a better keyboard and improved BASIC ROM.…

Current desktops have been designed to appeal to a large audience. Gnome has a lot of nice eye candy, and its extensions serve you with the weather, mail notifications and almost anything you are likely to need from the internet. In KDE you’ll find a different philosophy, but you can still get lots of widgets to add to your desktop. The idea of a button at the lower right corner of the desktop was, for a long time, unavoidable. When the Gnome developers decided to challenge this idea, many users were aghast. This is one reason why Cinnamon exists. The other contestants tested here work on the idea that anything can be thrown out if you have another solution. Enter the tiling, minimalist desktop environments; Awesome, Regolith and also dwm, where…

On the wake of the sudden demise of CentOS, a number of poorly written articles appeared on the web purporting to answer the complex question of “What can I use now that CentOS is gone?” in simple, SEO-friendly, oft’ listicleised form. We hope to do better here, and while we do hope you give Rocky Linux a try we really don’t want you to feel pressured into nixing your long-running CentOS machines so early in the game. There’s a summary of most of the other RHEL-derived distros in the box (right), and thanks to them all aping RHEL (the goal is to be bug-for-bug compatible, remember) they all should work much the same as Rocky. LOOKING BEYOND CENTOS “In all the confusion, lots of individuals are choosing to migrate away from…

“Foes are shrouded in a protective barrier of darkness, which you need to burn through with your flashlight.” FORMAT PS5, PS4 / RELEASED 2021 / PUB EPIC GAMES INC DEV REMEDY ENTERTAINMENT / GET IT NOW PLAYSTATION STORE, £24.99 We know what you’re thinking: ‘Last year is neither ‘retro’ nor ‘classic!’’ That’s true, but this story is a winding tale that begins on a completely different platform, and last year’s PlayStation remaster is far from the end. So, now you’re thinking, ‘Wow! Sounds twisty!’ It is. And now you’re thinking, ‘Wait, how do you know what I’m thinking?’ Well, that’s simple – we know because we wrote it down. In case you’re not familiar, here’s what it would say on the dust jacket: Alan Wake is a successful crime author, but writer’s block…

The legendary Supermarine Spitfire Mk.IX, to my mind, counts as one of the most elegant World War II fighter designs. How could it not, with its smooth aerodynamic lines, elliptical wing, and thin profile? Being Czech, I wanted to model the Spitfire DU-L MJ931 flown by Flying Officer Ladislav Světlík, a member of No. 312 (Czechoslovak) Squadron RAF, during the first half of 1944. In this aircraft, he shot down Lt. Georg Kiefner of I./JG 26 who piloted an Fw 190A. After the war, Světlík became a Czechoslovak Airlines captain. In 1950, he helped plan and execute the famous coordinated escape flight of three Douglas DC-3s from then-communist Czechoslovakia to U.S.-controlled Erding Air Base near Munich, Germany. FINAL THOUGHTS AT LAST, it was time to assemble the whole from the many subassemblies. For the…

Mathematics has never been my strong point and I blame my lack of numeracy to assess depths for secondary ports on my Secondary Modern education. But there is another way, of course, even on a boat without an echo-sounder. Even on a boat without an echo-sounder, heading for a short-cut over a sandbank on a falling tide, in a rising wind while sailing solo. It is the sapling. Mine is a very strong… twig. Sycamore, I think, picked up in woodland after a coppicing exercise and taken back to my shed where I measured and marked a depth gauge in feet along its length. At each mark I cut around the young bark with a knife, peeled it away and used white undercoat to paint a ring. Now, armed with my blind…

DINGWALL www.dingwallguitars.com Take a long look! These are two beautiful basses, carrying with them all the attention to detail and design ethos that you would expect of a Dingwall instrument. The Aquaflake model is a looker by any reckoning, and then we have the Hellboy Limited Edition—a bass, it is claimed, that comes straight from hell. It comes fitted with a Darkglass distortion circuit, so there’s no need for pedals, effect modeling, or amp tinkering—the Hellboy can be made to rip and tear into any band mix with the turn of a control. Read on! Build Quality Both instruments follow the D-Roc body template, with a sizable cutaway to allow extended access to the upper-range frets. To facilitate the Hellboy graphic on the body-facing, the standard raised central portion of the body, as…

Move slowly With the fast-paced nature of most cities, it is easy to get caught up and move around too quickly. Take your time and look around to truly take in your surroundings. I guarantee you will find shots that you may otherwise have missed. Travel light In general photographing cities will include a lot of walking, so only pack the equipment you are going to need for that day. The last thing you need is to feel so exhausted from carrying a bag full of kit around with you that you don’t need, that you are too tired to shoot when the light is right. Shoot in bad weather Don’t be afraid of adverse conditions. Often, we photographers hate the rain but a wet, moody city can look just as appealing as it normally…

DISTRIBUTION OF POWER Bring the comforts of home on your next weekend getaway or extended off-grid adventure with REDARC’s new Manager30R with RedVision Display Screen and mobile app. The REDARC Manager30 combines a multi-stage 30-amp DC to DC charger, a multi-stage 30-amp AC to DC charger, solar regulator, dual battery isolator, load disconnect controller, and remote battery monitor all into a small and simple system. The Manager30R is a state-of-the-art battery management system designed to maintain and charge auxiliary batteries using the DC output from your starting battery/alternator, 110V AC shore power, or your solar panel array. The Manager30R is compatible with all vehicle alternator systems and battery types, including lithium batteries. The Manager30R features a color LCD screen that displays live system data and transmits live to the company’s mobile…

ORANGE www.orangeamps.com $299 Orange and Glenn Hughes have been a match made in heaven for over 10 years—and this new GH signature combo gives the Orange Crush Bass 50 a purple makeover, with an improved speaker in the rear-ported cabinet and a simple but versatile front end. It’s said to deliver smooth clean lows and biting mid-range, alongside a spiky top end... let’s find out. Build Quality Built in China, the Purple Crush bears all the hallmarks that you might expect of an Orange bass combo. The well-built chassis is covered with the obligatory vinyl—in purple, tipping the hat to Hughes’s time with Deep Purple, in case that needs explaining—with black piping trim. The cabinet corners are fitted with metal corner covers for added protection, while the rear of the cabinet features a…

Phil Thornalley, songwriter and bass player, laughs as he recalls the creation of a certain iconic bass part. Back in 1983, he was producing the British band The Cure when their long-time bass player Simon Gallup stepped away from the band for a while. In Gallup’s absence, a single called ‘The Love Cats’ was given an unusual bass part. “Robert Smith, the Cure’s singer, had shown me the principal bass-line when we were on tour, and I’d learned it on electric bass. When we got to the studio to record it, I saw this double bass—and Robert said to me, ‘You’ve gotta play that!’ I had to get a tuner out and put some marks on the bass neck, because I had no idea where the notes were. When we started…

“Bass is really my first love,” says Brandon Schmidt when we catch up on a video call—and as we talk, I notice an old Precision bass hanging on the wall behind him. Squier’s head honcho is speaking to BP today from his home in Hollywood, just a few miles from his office—but a long way from his origins, he tells us. “I was originally from North Dakota, and I moved to California to study bass at CalArts. It was a great time to be there—I had some lessons with Charlie Haden and Alphonso Johnson.” After finishing college, Schmidt went to work at Guitar Center, primarily as a way of meeting potential bass students for his teaching work. During his time there, he discovered a passion for the instruments he was selling,…

Led Zeppelin’s widely acclaimed fourth album was released in November 1971. In the wake of the lukewarm response to the band’s third LP—which had included a significant acoustic and folk music influence—the group elected to release their fourth album without a title. In fact, the outer sleeve contained no text at all, although each member of the band chose a personal symbol for inclusion on the inner sleeve. Because of this, the album is sometimes referred to as Four Symbols, but is now most commonly known as Led Zeppelin IV. Despite these eccentricities, the album was a huge hit for the band, and went on to become their best-selling release. Although any conversation about the album is typically dominated by the eight-minute epic ‘Stairway To Heaven’, for most bass players the…

Nobody in Kansas Territory history is as controversial as John Brown. Even to this day, historians argue about his motives, his sanity and his actions. In the summer of 1856, Brown centered his activities around Osawatomie, Kansas. The area around Osawatomie was a lightning rod of activity. Founded as a free-state town, Osawatomie was close to the Missouri border and susceptible to raids from pro-slavery Missourians. A free-state militia group called the Pottawatomie Rifles was active in the area in 1856 and was under the overall command of Brown’s son, John Brown Jr. Today, 165 years later, one of the muster rolls of the Pottawatomie Rifles survived and is in the collection of the Kansas State Historical Society. This document gives us a rare glimpse into the past. It not only…

mRNA Covid vaccines increase rate of myocarditis 133 times, CDC admits The mRNA Covid vaccines can increase the chances of myocarditis (heart inflammation) by as much as 133 times in boys up to the age of 15, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has admitted. Older males also face a dramatically increased risk after having either a Pfizer or Moderna jab. Researchers from the CDC admit the real risk could be far higher still because of under-reporting of adverse reactions. Most cases happened after the second dose. The greatest risk was among adolescent boys between 12 and 15 years old, with reported myocarditis cases 133 times higher than would be expected. Cases were 79 times higher among teenage boys between 16 and 17, and there was a 32-fold increase in young…

Had you taken a stroll on Wimbledon Common during the latest U.K. lockdown and encountered a conspicuously elegant woman muttering Gallic phrases to herself — she would have been shy of five-feet-six, with auburn hair, and dressed in a style she herself has referred to as ‘French punk’ — it’s likely the woman in question would actually have been born north of la Manche, in the Kent town of Gravesend. “Sometimes I’ll go out on a walk and I’ll speak to myself in French, like a crazy person, just to see if I can remember certain words and things,” Gemma Arterton tells The Rake. She learned to speak the language fluently for the 2014 comedy-drama adaptation of Posy Simmonds’ graphic novel Gemma Bovery. “I’m quite lucky where I live because I’m…

One meeting with Ken Grier is enough to tell you that he’s not the kind of guy who sits on an idea. Exuding a restless energy, he speaks with such a degree of knowledge and conviction that one can’t help but pay attention. Ken has a seemingly insatiable appetite for data, opinion, art, side projects and risk-taking. In the course of our short interview, he mentions attending two conferences in as many months (one on how AI will disrupt retail and another focussed on how to pitch luxury to millennials); how he casually read a copy of Annie Leibovitz’s 247-page Women, gifted to him by the author, in one night so he could talk to her about it the next morning; and how the Macallan M decanter was the result…

Driving winds blew blinding snow across the deck of the U.S. Navy aircraft carrier Oriskany on November 18, 1952. Inside the cockpit of his Grumman F9F-5 Panther, Lt. Royce Williams watched the blizzard while waiting for the signal to take off from the Essex-class carrier as it plowed through the Sea of Japan. Snow was not uncommon at that time of year along the upper coast of North Korea, not far from the Soviet Union’s easternmost seaport of Vladivostok. Williams was preparing to fly a combat air patrol to cover the naval task force to which the carrier belonged. This mission turned out to be different than he expected, though. Instead of flying a routine patrol, Williams made history by tangling with seven Soviet Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-15s and, according to his account,…

Nine years ago, I found myself in the hospital, lying on a table in a darkened room. I’d been finding it hard to catch my breath, and my dad, a retired GP, insisted I go to A&E to get checked out. I expected to go in, have a chat with the doctor, roll our eyes collectively at my father’s over-protectiveness and be back in the office by lunch. But instead of dashing into Pret, I was about to have an echocardiogram. Apparently, I had a hole in my heart that I’d had since birth, and I’d been unaware because somehow my body had managed to chug along until it got to the point where it simply couldn’t. I have spent a lifetime listening to music but when my heart spoke to me…

Taking a day off work to test motos is always a good time and this day wasn’t going to be any different. Well, actually, it was going to be a fair bit different as we were on board some trick E-bikes, two wild-looking machines manufactured by CZEM and called the Drill One. These funky weapons were fresh off the boat, with Briggsy and me chomping at the bit to get out in the primo conditions. The Drill One comes in three models and Nic Ellis from EBMX had prepped us up an Enduro version which has a 21-inch front wheel and 19-inch rear wheel. The second bike we had at our disposal was a Trail 16, which has a 19-inch front and 16-inch rear. They came in Neon Yellow and Aquamarine…

STANDALONE MUSIC MAKERS NI Maschine+ £1,099 Full Review: FM363 | There are some limitations, but Maschine+ delivers the core Maschine workflow in standalone form: inspiring and fun in the process. Polyend Tracker £449 Full Review: FM357 Less esoteric than it first appears, this is a well-designed sampler that’s both fun and inspiring. Worth a look whether you’re experienced with trackers or not. Roland MC-707 $999 Review: FM349 It lags behind some rivals on the sampling front, but on the whole the 707 is a powerful and well-designed groovebox. A welcome return for the company’s MC line. Akai MPC Live II £1,040 Full Review: FM358 A truly go-anywhere production experience – and now better equipped than ever. The Live II remains the high point of the current MPC range. Elektron Octatrack II £1,150 Review: FM327 The v2 update gives existing users…

SPECS OS: Atari Linux OS (Debian based) CPU: AMD Ryzen embedded R1606 2.6GHz, two cores, four threads GPU: AMD Radeon Vega 3 1.2GHz RAM: 8GB DDR4 SSD: 32GB eMMC fixed, M.2 slot Comms: Wi-Fi 802.11n 2.4/5GHz, Bluetooth 4.0, Gigabit ethernet Ports: HDMI 2.0, four USB 3.1 (two front, two rear) Size: 29.5×15.0 ×4.8 cm Weight: 1.3kg Modelling itself after the venerable Atari 2600 that launched in 1977, the modern VCS made its debut via a YouTube teaser in 2017. The company followed that up with a crowdfunding campaign the following year, promising to deliver devices in mid-2019. Here we are a couple of years later, and the VCS has finally made its way to retail. Available in either basic black (Onyx) or the more 2600-like Black Walnut, the device (let’s call it a console, though it also has a PC Mode)…

The future is in the cloud, they say. But whose cloud? Google? Microsoft? AWS? Why not your own? There was once a time when people ran their own servers from home – under the stairs, in the back bedroom or from a lovingly kitted out homelab in the stripped-down carcass of the garage, meaning the vintage BMW restoration project is left to moulder on the drive. A server is a simple beast at heart. It’s a computer (usually running Linux), with an internet connection, which receives requests for resources such as pages and serves them back to the machine that made the original request. Server. It’s in the name, innit. But servers serve far more than web pages these days. There are progressive web apps, content management systems, databases and a whole…

NuTyx is a nifty little independent rolling-release distro that’s taken some of the best ideas from the CRUX distro to create a functional and lightweight desktop for the experienced Linux campaigners. Like most rolling-release distros, NuTyx occasionally issues snapshots that can be used to install the distro, such as the 21.10 release that ships with updated versions of critical components like the kernel, and the desktop environments. Despite being a one-man show, the distro supports a large number of desktop environments, from lightweight ones like Mate and LXQt to heavyweights like KDE and Gnome, and publishes different ISOs for them, including 32-bit ones for the lightweight desktops. For the past couple of years all NuTyx releases have sported a Live environment, which you can use to explore the distro and assess how well…

OSGeoLive is a Lubuntu based distro that pulls together a library of open source tools and applications to support all kinds of geospatial use cases. The distro isn’t designed as a general-purpose distro, but rather as a daily driver for individuals who work with geospatial tools. Geospatial refers to all data and the associated tech that’s used to acquire, manipulate and store geographic information. Geospatial tools are used by data specialists, science researchers, cartographic professionals and map hobbyists. There’s no dearth of robust open source geospatial tools. The OSGeoLive distro ships with several of them, which the developers claim are pre-configured to suit a range of geospatial use cases. The distro also caters to new users by helping them sort through the myriad options and find pre-configured tools to suit all workflows. The…

INFO FORMAT PS5 (reviewed), PS4 PRICE £59.99 ETA Out now PUB Techland DEV Techland PLAYERS 1-4 LENGTH 20 hrs (campaign) ACCESSIBILITY Left/right-handed controller setup; adjustable subtitle size and colour, and speaker volume; custom HUD; colourblind mode; three graphics modes – performance, quality, resolution The stakes in Villedor are getting higher but it’s hard to care. When a floating cigar jiggles menacingly in our direction instead of shock we feel confusion. Not since Daryl Hannah stared blankly at the shadow of Chevy Chase has so much heavy lifting been done with such little substance. While that 1992 Invisible Man movie (we’re old, okay) was meant to look as it did, unseen characters in Dying Light 2’s cutscenes is just one of many bugs that dampen the fun of parkouring across this world’s rooftops. It would be bad enough if characters simply weren’t…

Some file optimization and application removal programs on the Mac reach for the stars, trying to perform every possible task of optimization, file cleanup, operating system customization, and malware removal the developers can think of as part of an overarching package. Other apps have been more streamlined, seeking to perform fewer functions and executing them well. DaisyDisk, the brainchild of developers Taras Brizitsky (who programmed the original idea, interaction, and graphic design) and Oleg Krupnov (who now handles the code and technical support), as well as a large group of translators and contributors, belongs to the latter group. The application (version 4.20.3 reviewed here) focuses on locating file clusters, groups them by size, and offers a quick and easy means of dragging them to a delete icon and getting rid of…

Why take two distortion pedals out when you can take one? That’s the logic behind both of these handsome effects units, one from Ashdown and the other from Fender. The former is the signature overdrive of Dream Theater’s bassist extraordinaire John Myung, a user of Ashdown’s amps, and the latter an all-purpose unit that is half the size and half the price. This review isn’t a comparison of these two high-functioning units, though: Simply an exploration of what you can get for a certain outlay if you’re looking for a pedal with more than one drive option. Ashdown have produced their Double Drive pedal after consultation with Myung and his bass tech Maddi Schieferstein, the idea being to create a pedal that would sit well tonally with his signature Ernie Ball…

« L’ÉTAT D’USURE GÉNÉRALE EST À VÉRIFIER… MÊME SI C’EST UNE HONDA! » Ce qu’on en disait… 2019: ce 300 n’a que 50 cm3 de différence avec la 250, mais le gap de puissance en piste est flagrant. C’est assez étonnant, à se demander si l’on ne roule pas avec un petit 350. On récupère beaucoup de force en bas et surtout au milieu. Cette 300 n’est pas qu’une simple évolution de la 250, ce sont deux motos différentes qui n’évoluent pas dans la même catégorie. La contrepartie attendue est que le moteur a plus d’inertie et demande plus d’efforts pour manier l’ensemble entre les arbres. Les suspensions assurent dès qu’on augmente le rythme. C’est moins agréable en rando où la fourche se montre assez ferme et fatigante sur la durée. Quelques…

JACKSON www.jacksonguitars.com SQUIER www.fender.com £175 £149 Regular readers will know that in recent years we’ve reviewed increasing numbers of short-scale basses, not just because we think they’re cute but because they represent a very real, practical shift in players’ and manufacturers’ thinking. There’s a large number of emerging young players with small hands; likewise, there is a greater number of female bassists, a welcome—and long overdue—development in our world; there’s a growing concern about the world’s wood stocks; and there seems to be a growing reluctance among airline check-in staff to allow full-sized bass guitars on planes as carry-on luggage. (I admit this last point is based on anecdotal evidence rather than hard data, so if you happen to own a bass-friendly airline, don’t sue me.) The next logical step may be for luthiers…

La pointe d’Agon. Ses oiseaux. Son phare. Le vent qui siffle des chansons douces aux oreilles de ceux qui savent l’écouter. Les voiliers qui rejoignent fièrement les îles Chausey. Léché par la mer, ce petit coin de nature préservé faisait vibrer le coeur de Stéphanie Monfermé. Chaque été, elle aimait y reprendre des forces. Partager avec ses filles Anaïs et Élodie un peu de ses jeunes années. Leur raconter ses rigolades sur la plage avec les enfants de l’école communale de Montmartin-sur-Mer. Les bêtises, plus tard, à l’adolescence avec les copines du lycée Lebrun de Coutances, des années qu’elle n’a jamais laissé s’échapper en s’inscrivant sur le site Internet Copains d’avant pour garder le contact. Stéphanie aimait ces semaines d’été sur cette côte ouest du Cotentin aux plages infinies qui butent…

How did you get started on bass? MATTEO I officially started playing bass in 2010 with a band called Donkey Breeder, a progressive band from Modena, Italy, my home town. The guys were in need of a new bassist ,and the previous one was, like me, a guitarist playing on bass, so it was my job from the beginning. I gave it a try, the guys liked me, I loved bass from the first touch and I haven’t stopped since then. Thanks to Donkey Breeder’s bass playing, I got a job in Blindead, and my adventure with Me And That Man started when I joined the band in 2017. FOZ I picked up the bass for this band! Through school I messed about with other instruments, and one day Perry (drums) and…

JIM DUNLOP www.jimdunlop.com $299 Readers with keen memories may recall our review of Morley’s Cliff Burton Power Wah in 2015, in which we pointed out the advantages of combining fuzz and wah effects in a single heavy-duty pedal. Seven years later, we’re reminded of that thoroughly decent tribute to the late Burton with the arrival of this equally solid chunk of pedal: Tool bassist Justin Chancellor’s own signature Cry Baby. Like its earlier competitor, the Chancellor unit packs a lot into a single chassis. In this case, our $300 of taxed income gets us two wah circuits and a fuzz, the latter of which can work independently or with one of the wah effects. From the toe of the pedal rocker down, we have a footswitch that selects either wah, which are a…

INTRODUCTION The following excerpt from Ridgeline, Michael Punke’s follow-up novel to The Revenant, in our humble opinion truly captures what Jim Bridger’s life on the frontier was like. To set the stage for what you’re about to read, Bridger and his cohort James Beckwourth were hired on as scouts for the U.S. Army. In 1866, with the country barely recovered from the Civil War, new war breaks out on the western frontier—a clash of cultures between a young, ambitious nation and the Native tribes who have lived on the land for centuries. Colonel Henry Carrington arrives in Wyoming’s Powder River Valley to lead the U.S. Army in defending the opening of a new road for gold miners and settlers. Carrington intends to build a fort in the middle of critical hunting…

Although there’s a lack of consensus on what to call it—long Covid, chronic Covid syndrome, post-Covid-19 syndrome or long-hauler Covid-19—it’s now widely accepted that some people are experiencing lingering post-viral symptoms after being infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. These symptoms include debilitating fatigue, breathing difficulties, brain fog, aches and pains and many more. In a recent review of nearly 48,000 patients between 17 and 87 years old, 80 percent of those who had Covid developed one or more symptoms lasting beyond three weeks, the most common ones being fatigue, headache, attention problems, hair loss and shortness of breath.1 Another study reported symptoms that persisted for at least three months in patients with both mild and severe Covid-19.2 Comparisons are being drawn to chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), also known as myalgic…

I’m 67 and have just been diagnosed with benign prostatic hyperplasia. I’d like to avoid drugs if I can, as I don’t like the sound of the side-effects. Can you suggest any effective alternatives? C.P., via email More than half of men in their sixties suffer from benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH),1 an enlarged prostate gland that can cause a long list of urinary symptoms including increased frequency (the need to urinate a lot), incomplete emptying (when the bladder feels full after urinating), intermittency (the need to stop and start several times while urinating) and nocturia (waking up more than once to urinate at night). The usual treatment is drugs like alpha-blockers and 5-alpha-reductase inhibitors, but these can come with a range of nasty side-effects, from lack of energy and low blood pressure…

Before the guitar hero, before even the concept of ‘lead guitar’, there was Robert Johnson. To say his playing is underestimated would be a stretch — this is, after all, the man who was said to have sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads in exchange for his talent. But what Johnson played was truly remarkable, even without considering that he did it first. For historians, he was the pioneer of the boogie shuffle, the blues pattern that led directly to rock ’n’ roll, but that doesn’t really matter. Listen to a collection of his very few recordings from the 1930s and you hear an incredible range of tone, played with perfect accomplishment and feeling: the exuberant vamping of Sweet Home Chicago, the shivering bottleneck plucking of Crossroad…

Late one night in 1982, a Yale University medical student named Martin Yarmush witnessed a harrowing scene at a local hospital. A toddler was admitted, and several nurses attempted to insert an IV needle into one of the child’s tiny veins. Each time they missed the vessel, the child screamed more shrilly, and the mother grew more worried. There has to be a better way, thought Yarmush, now a professor of biomedical engineering at Rutgers University. The incident changed his outlook on medicine. Thoroughly unnerved by the anguish he’d witnessed, Yarmush started to imagine what would happen if the process of drawing blood could be automated. At the time, automation was found primarily on assembly lines for cars, where robots were so powerful and dangerous that they were bolted to the ground…

Recently, I started to attend a Spiritualist church and it brought me great comfort and made me curious to find out more about the spirit realm. I joined a circle being run by the church and began training to be a medium. I believe everyone has psychic abilities, it’s just a question of learning how to nurture them. Between my circle and reading Spirit & Destiny, I’ve learnt so many new things and my connection to Spirit is growing stronger. I’m also training to be a bus driver and had a sense of a Spirit on the bus. I thought it was my instructor’s attachment, but a few days later, one of the other trainees explained that the instructor’s daughter had passed away under tragic circumstances. That opened a conversation between us, and…

In the past year, our homes have become our sanctuaries – and, yet, while many are reliant, both emotionally and physically, on bricks and mortar as their safe spaces, I am in my third year as a housesitter, and don’t have a home at all. Even through the pandemic, I was needed: To care for an old cat so her owner could flee locked-down Paris. To tend a friend’s bonsai trees near the Eiffel Tower. Tropical plants in the Gers were left in my care while people made essential travel to Kenya. Rootlessness has long been part of my life. My family moved from Stockport to Canada when I was nine, and while I spent my 20s back in the UK, I went on to teach in South Korea, Thailand and Saudi…

NIKON Z 9 REVEALED Nikon officially unveiled the Z 9, a new full-frame flagship for its mirrorless Z system. The Nikon Z 9 doesn’t disappoint in terms of specs and offers clear advantages for pros and serious photographers over the Z 7II, the company’s previous top performance full-frame model. Built upon a new Nikon-designed and -developed 45.7-megapixel stacked CMOS sensor and a new EXPEED 7 processor, the Nikon Z 9 can capture RAW format images at the full resolution of the camera at up to 20 fps with a buffer of 1,000 frames in a burst. For even faster shooting rates, you can opt for full-resolution JPEGs at up to 30 fps or 11-megapixel JPEGs at a blistering 120 fps with continuous AF/AE. The camera completely omits a mechanical shutter, but…

There’s a school of thought that states Linux is also all about choice. Then again, there’s also the website http://islinuxaboutchoice.com which says different (and in very large blue letters, too). Hearsay and single-page websites notwithstanding, users certainly do have a choice about which Linux distribution to use. And sometimes that choice is difficult. Ubuntu is often classed (along with its derivatives Mint, Pop!_OS, elementary OS and Zorin OS) as a beginner-friendly distro. Fedora, by comparison, is seen as a testbed for new (and especially Gnome-related) technologies that’s more suited to intermediate users. But this definition isn’t entirely fair. A beginner (with just a little bit of luck and no Nvidia hardware) would probably get on just fine with Fedora. And if they don’t then it’s unlikely they’d fare much better with…

Installing Linux is usually a matter of: boot from install media, run installer, make choices, drink a hot beverage, reboot computer and start configuring everything to your needs. NixOS turns this completely on its head. The starting point for NixOS is a configuration file called configuration.nix. This is where you specify everything about how you want your system set up, from which partitions to install to and the filesystems to use, to the list of packages to install and the users to create. You have to create the partitioning yourself – Gentoo users will feel at home here – then run nixos-generate-config to scan your hardware and create a basic configuration, which you then edit. Once you have done this, run nixos-install and sit back. After it has done its stuff, you…

The user interface is probably the most important distinguishing aspect of these programs. The all have the same core function, so it’s down to how accessible they make these tasks. It’s a fine balancing act between providing access to enough features without overwhelming the interface with a multitude of buttons and menu options. It is not just about the number of settings, but the way in which they’re organised. The programs that combine power and ease of use tend to have a fairly simple interface that you can do most things with, and options that open more detailed lists of settings should you feel the need. The ability to preview any video edits, such as cropping, beforehand is useful, as is the option to transcode a short piece of the video…

Last issue we studied Ubuntu 21.04, which marks the distro’s shift from the X.org display server to Wayland (on amenable hardware). But this isn’t the first time Canonical tried using Wayland by default. Ubuntu 17.10 shipped with this configuration, but users were displeased. Come to think of it, Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) also had an artful habit of bricking Lenovo laptops and had to be re-released. And it was disliked by fans of the Unity desktop who saw their favourite desktop replaced by Gnome. Anyway, that Wayland experiment never made it to the next Ubuntu LTS (Breezy Badger), and nor is it present in the current LTS (Focal Fossa). Things have stabilised by now, so barring any mishap the next Ubuntu LTS will finally make the shift to Wayland. But why do…

Shells.com is a relatively new player in the Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) arena and delivers pre-installed virtual desktops over the internet and into your web browser with the help of the SPICE protocol. All you need to do is select from one of the listed distros, and you’re good to go. The distro will boot on the remote machine and log you into the Linux distro of your choice. You can use this environment to run programs, pull-in additional ones, set up services, crunch numbers, download files or run a streaming server just as you would on a local desktop, without incurring any of the performance penalties. Since the heavy lifting is done by the Shells.com virtual servers, you can use the service on dated kit, as well as on mobile devices. While you…