In a pop landscape characterised by flavourless mush, Lux by Rosalía feels like a minor miracle, writes Tony Stamp. Read...

If the holidays bring more people knocking on your door—whether it’s family, neighbors, package deliveries, or strangers—then you’re gonna want to boost your home security. And as Black Friday deals roll in, we’ve already found a lovely 50% discount on the Ring Battery Doorbell, bringing the price down to just $50 (was $100). View this Amazon deal This is the newest version of the Ring Battery Doorbell and it records head-to-toe 1440×1440 video, which is absolutely fantastic for home surveillance. Peek at your live video feed whenever you want via the app on your phone and spot everything you need to see right outside your door. You won’t miss a thing, plus this smart video doorbell has two-way audio so you can converse with visitors and couriers. You’ll get alerts whenever someone’s at your door, and if you subscribe to the Ring Home Plan, you’ll even get smart alerts that differentiate between people, packages, and other stuff. It’s also compatible with other Alexa devices, so you could pull up the live video feed on something like an Echo Show for that next-level smart home feel. As for installation, the battery-powered Ring is an absolute breeze. Just screw the mount into place, then click the video doorbell into the mount. When it needs charging, you simply pop it out and plug it into USB-C (a cable is included but a power adapter is not). Depending on how many features you have active, the doorbell will last anywhere from a few weeks up to a month on a full charge. Get this tried-and-true smart video doorbell for 50% offBuy now at Amazon Read...

The Apple Vision Pro is an expensive flop. I haven’t heard anyone mention the Meta Quest in months, despite it getting a new model just last year. I can’t even remember the name of Samsung’s incoming Android-based headset. While virtual reality gamers remain passionate, the excitement around the format seems to be slowly dying… again.  And then along came Zeus Valve. Easily the least mainstream of its three — THREE! — hardware announcements yesterday, the Steam Frame is everything I was hoping for. It’s a standalone, self-powered headset with its own software and apps, a la the Quest. With an internal battery, it’s ready to go on the road or just roam around your home without being tethered.  But it can also connect to a gaming PC or a Steam Deck or a Steam Machine (what’s the difference?) to access more powerful virtual reality games and non-VR media. And Valve is setting this up as a central feature, with a low-latency wireless dongle included in the box. It’s packing the latest VR tech such as eye tracking, pancake lenses, and expansion options for MicroSD and USB-C. It’ll be running on a powerful Snapdragon ARM64 processor, and the software is at least some flavor of SteamOS, giving it immediate access to a huge amount of both VR and standard games. This is big, and I say that as someone who’s very invested in VR gaming. The Frame is checking very nearly all the boxes that a VR headset needs to be a smash hit with consumers. And perhaps, most crucially, it’s coming with something gamers already know that they want: Steam itself. For all the billions that both Apple and Meta have invested into their VR platforms, they’ve yet to make a case to most users that these devices are anything more than novelty.  Remember when Apple was trying to convince us that haunting digital eyes on an external screen wasn’t incredibly creepy? That was just two years ago. Maybe I’m projecting, but Valve’s promotional video for the Frame might just have a nod to that, when an older lady lifts the headset up to see the viewer and give a cheeky smile. Ten years of work in VR gaming  Valve doesn’t need to pretend that the Frame is anything beyond a game machine, a frame — oh, I see what they did there — through which you can access all the stuff that’s already on Steam and where the most fleshed-out VR games already live. You could be forgiven for forgetting that Valve, along with partners like HTC and to a lesser extent Oculus, has been building a niche but solid foundation for virtual reality software for over a decade.  Valve Various flavors of VR headsets never really landed before, even with Steam as an access point. But you could say the same for Steam Machines, which floundered with an approach that focused on retail sales and OEM partnerships, and the original Steam Controller. Now with a decade of experience and perspective, not to mention the runaway success of Steam as the de facto platform for PC gaming and the Steam Deck redefining an entire form factor, it’s easy to see why Valve might have a little pep in its step.  Valve needs two more elements to make this thing a hit. One, a killer app. Something with a little more mass market appeal than, say, Half-Life Alyx, a somewhat experimental side-entry into a franchise best known for being in hibernation for almost two decades. (Incidentally, Alyx will probably be six years old by the time the Steam Frame gets into consumers’ hands, and on their faces.)  steampowered.com It needs something like Astro’s Playroom VR or Astro Bot on the PS5, an appealing tour of everything you can do with VR hardware. Preferably free with the purchase, and with some of that Valve developer soul that’s so hard to find since it basically became a storefront that only drops a new title once or twice a decade.  Incidentally, after the hardware announcements Valve said that it’s not currently working on a first-party VR game. Oh dear. The price is pivotal  And the second thing it needs is the one thing that was missing from all of the new Steam hardware announcements: a good price. That’s the one that I’m most concerned about. Samsung’s headset, the Galaxy XR (there, I looked it up) comes with similar specifications, a Snapdragon-based chip with 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage on the base model.  The Galaxy XR is $1,800. That’ll cause barely any less sticker shock than the $3,500 Apple Vision Pro, and will certainly shut down interest from gamers who are only tentatively interested in checking out VR gaming.  Chris Martin / Foundry It can’t have escaped Valve’s notice that the Meta Quest series, which at one point cost as little as $200, remains the most popular way to play PC-based VR games. I know it can’t, because Valve told me that statistic itself in its latest hardware survey. The Quest 2 and Quest 3 still make up over half of the Steam VR player base, even though they have to jump through a few hoops to use it for PC VR gaming.   I’m not saying that the Steam Frame needs to cost $200 to be a success. But Valve certainly understands that a low entry point is essential. That’s part of the formula for the Steam Deck’s top spot above an admittedly small heap of PC gaming handhelds. And if Valve is smart, it’ll price the new Steam Machine 2.0 at as small a price as possible, both to compete with the PlayStation and (I suppose, technically) the Xbox and to keep people engaged with the money-printing Steam platform.  Valve So knowing all this, something below $500 would make the Frame an instant buy for me and I might dare to hope for lots of other gamers. I’ll have to wait and see… but with a prospective launch date of “early 2026,” I may not have to wait too long. Read...

Fish, beef, lamb and chocolate led the surge according to the Infometrics–Foodstuffs New Zealand Grocery Supplier Cost Index. Read...

“Redstone” is the code name for AMD’s next-gen graphics software that leans heavily on frame generation via machine learning, and the first major game to get a taste of it is Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, a mouthful of a shooter that’s launching today. According to promotional messages from AMD, Radeon 9000 users get “Ray Generation” at launch. Machine Learning Ray Generation (to give it its own mouthful of a name) is how a Radeon card learns patterns for an advanced lighting engine and then applies those patterns, in an approximate manner, in real time. This is a further development of the sort of thing that Nvidia applied with DLSS years ago, now taken to greater heights with more complex lighting systems that can reduce noise and grit in ray tracing by rendering at a lower resolution and then upscaling in a very targeted manner. In layman’s terms? ML Ray Generation makes game lighting look really good, at least on supported hardware. But it likely requires “training” on each game, which could explain why it’s so limited in the initial release. As VideoCardz notes, ML Ray Generation is only one of the four features outlined in AMD’s FSR Redstone. The latest versions of frame generation, super resolution, and neural radiance caching don’t appear to be live in Black Ops 7, at least not at launch. So far, the Radeon RX 9000 series has only launched five cards since debuting in March: the Radeon RX 9060, 9060 XT, 9070, 9070 XT, and the limited release 9070 GRE. Though it’s being heavily featured by Call of Duty developer Activision—and continues to gain major ground in the desktop CPU space with its Ryzen X3D series—AMD has nonetheless fallen further behind Nvidia in consumer market share for graphics cards. Read...

Back in mid-October, some data miners found code in one of the beta versions of ChatGPT that indicated it would soon be possible to have “group chats” in the app. Now, OpenAI has confirmed that ChatGPT will support group chats with up to 20 participants. OpenAI sees group chats as an opportunity for families, groups of friends, and/or coworkers to use ChatGPT when making holiday plans, booking restaurant outings, or planning new projects. OpenAI Group chats will be available in the ChatGPT app as well on the web (if you’re logged in). To start a group chat, simply tap the new icon in the top-right corner of the app in either a new or existing conversation. You can then choose to whom you want to send the group chat invite link. If you invite people to an already ongoing chat, a private copy of the conversation will be saved and kept separate from the new group conversation. The group chat will then be available in a new tab in the side window of ChatGPT. The first time you start a group chat in ChatGPT, you’ll be asked to create a short profile with your name, username, and a photo to make it easier to keep track of who is who. OpenAI has initially rolled out the group chats feature of ChatGPT only in New Zealand, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea. The feature will be available to both free and paid users. Read...

The Vile family are now patiently waiting for a chick to fledge. Read...

A new report reveals ethnic businesses contributed $87b to New Zealand`s GDP in 2023, an increase from $64b in 2021. Read...

A $55,000 reward for information leading to those responsible for killing endangered sea lions in the Catlins a year ago has been extended to cover the killing of three sea lions at the Waitaki River mouth. Read...

For years, a father has been fighting for Waka Kotahi to do more about the dangers of a vehicle braking system involved in his son`s death. Now a coroner`s report backs him up, but NZTA still disagrees. Read...