Ben Funk
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Recent posts
After a full year of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, we wondered if Nintendo would keep the same old holiday celebrations or wrap them up in a fresh coat of paint. It's pretty unusual for a game with not much multi-player appeal to captivate gamers for more than 12 months, but that's exactly what Nintendo's modern...
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The detachable hybrid 2-in-1 laptop category may sound somewhat exotic, but these convertible tablet PCs aren't exactly a new thing. Hybrid devices with keyboard docks -- either first-party or made by other manufacturers -- are available that run Android, iPad OS, and of course Windows 10. Perhaps the most well-known detachable hybrids are...
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When it comes to password management, users really have just a handful of options, and all of them have their caveats. If we choose to just use memorable passwords and recycle them between accounts, one account becoming compromised can lead to a group of them being in a bad state. On the other hand, relying on a cloud...
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Digital assistants are designed to make our lives easier and fit naturally into our lives. Whether it's the Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, or Apple Siri, voice commands are just a keyword away. However, some voice prompts like "Hey Google, stop the alarm" may be getting easier if some secret sauce codenamed...
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There's a struggle deep within every portable PC between the need for maximum performance and a desire for longer battery life. Reduced power consumption is why modern processors spin down to very low frequencies when they're not busy. At the same time, maximum performance is why seemingly every processor these days...
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At CES 2020, ASUS unveiled the ROG Zephyrus G14, which as its name implies is a 14" gaming notebook. It was our first experience with Zen 2-based APUs from AMD, particularly the 35-Watt Ryzen 9 4900HS. That processor had eight cores with AMD's best CPU architecture at the time, and despite the thin design and tight thermal budget of the G14,...
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Over the last few years, AMD has made big changes to its Radeon Software control panel on an almost yearly cadence. This time around it's been a little longer than that, as those updates typically launch around the end of the year, though this specific roll-out was extended to April. What has AMD's Radeon team been up...
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Mining cryptocurrency is just one small part of the problem that plagues the semiconductor industry related to chip shortages, with the increased demand for GPU compute power. However, NVIDIA has been catering to this market in hopes of alleviating demand pressure on gaming graphics cards with its CMP HX family of...
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Last year's Overwatch League was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and that temporarily pumped the brakes on some interesting AI projects, as well. At the time, Blizzard and IBM were set to announce that Big Blue was about to become the cloud, AI, and machine learning analytics partner for the game's official...
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The 20-year span between 1985 and 2005 saw the release of literally hundreds of classic game titles that were -- and are still -- beloved by millions of people around the world. From Super Mario Bros and The Legend of Zelda, to modern classics like Halo and Metal Gear Solid, most of gaming's biggest franchises...
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After a lengthy technical preview, Parallels has officially released Parallels Desktop version 16.5 which includes official support for Apple's latest Macs. That includes support for the 2020 Mac mini, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro which all bear the Apple Silicon M1 processor. Supported guests include Windows 10's...
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In 1984, Hasbro and Takara-Tomy released The Transformers upon an unsuspecting world, and this six-year-old was hooked. Led by Optimus Prime, a red and blue cabover Peterbilt semi truck that turned into a friendly alien robot, the Autobots had to defend Earth from the evil Decepticons. At least, that was the case...
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Whether it's playing Duck Hunt on the NES with a Zapper or pumping quarters into Area 51 or Time Crisis in arcades, just about everyone is familiar with light gun games. The simplicity of these games is born from their "on-rails" design where players are automatically taken from area to area, and then just point and...
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The Microsoft Store Spring Sale is on, and it's running through April 15. Just about everything is on sale, from PC and Xbox Series X (and One) games to Surface PCs. Microsoft even has some really nice prices on other manufacturers' PCs with discounts on gaming notebooks Acer, Asus, and others. If all that isn't quite...
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From the beginning of the Pixel program, Google's phones have always run on Qualcomm Snapdragon mobile platform silicon. In fact, you'd have to go all the way back to 2011's Galaxy Nexus, which ran on a Texas Instruments OMAP 4460 to find a Google phone that didn't have some form of Snapdragon inside. While most Pixel...
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When it comes to high-end content creation, time is money. Businesses with employees that are stuck sitting around waiting for compute-intensive tasks to finish, simply can't get as much accomplished as those with speedy hardware that can power through the most demanding tasks. Tons of parallel processing power and...
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Don't blindly click that link or assume the notification about a system update that you received is real. Zero-day exploits in popular server applications like Solarwinds and Exchange may grab headlines, but the biggest problems most users face with tech security are of the socially-engineered variety. That's the case...
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Graphics cards are in short supply at retail prices everywhere, but it hasn't stopped AMD and NVIDIA from pushing their latest tech further down the price ladder. We've heard in recent weeks about a lower-end Navi 23 GPU from AMD, and it seems that NVIDIA has a cut-down Ampere GPU on the way, too. The release of...
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Sometimes, a work of art hits our culture at just the right time, when it can transcend its medium and become something greater. Such events are exceedingly rare in video games, but we old folks remember Pac-Man Fever and Fred Savage in The Wizard playing Super Mario Bros. 3. More recently, video games have become...
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It feels like forever ago, but it's only been a few months since Apple kicked Fortnite out of the App Store and suspended Epic's developer account. Of course, you know how the rest of this story goes: Epic filed a lawsuit against the iPhone maker charging that the App Store itself represented a monopoly. In a case...
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In case you missed it, the OnePlus 9 and 9 Pro smartphones are coming on March 23. That announcement seemed inevitable, since smartphones tend to launch on a roughly a production schedule. While the price of OnePlus smartphones has crept up over the years, shifting its reputation from that of value-priced flagship...
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Last year, the COVID-19 pandemic ended the NCAA college basketball season early, but this year, Selection Sunday is tomorrow afternoon. And of course there's still plenty of time to upgrade the living room TV prior to the play-in game on March 19. We're here to help with some hot March Madness-themed deals on some...
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