You can still snag the 10.2-inch iPad (WiFi only) for only $250 at Amazon and Best Buy. This is one of the lowest prices we’ve seen on Apple’s most affordable iPad, which normally costs $330. We gave the base iPad a score of 86 for its slightly larger display, good battery life and decent starting price (even when not on sale, it’s still a good value).
Also, the base iPad with WiFi and cellular connectivity is still on sale for $380 at Amazon. This is about $80 off its normal price of $460 and a good deal if you want an iPad that’s always connected.
One of our favorite laptops is still on sale at Dell — you can get a 2019 XPS 13 laptop with a 10th-gen Core i5 processor, a 13.3-inch FHD touchscreen, 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage for $833. This isn’t the lowest price we’ve seen on the XPS 13 but it’s very close to it. Keep in mind that this isn’t the 2020 model of the laptop, which has smaller bezels and a new keyboard design. Nevertheless, we still recommend the 2019 XPS 13 (it earned a score of 93 from us), especially when it’s available at a price as low as this.
Today is the last day you can get a free Razer Viper mouse when you purchase a Razer Huntsman Tournament Edition gaming keyboard for $130. The Huntsman keyboard has a tenkeyless layout, double-shot PBT keycaps and Razer-made linear red optical switches, and it’s generally well-liked among PC gamers. The Viper mouse, which came out last year, is an ambidextrous wired gaming mouse that typically costs $80. This is a good opportunity to upgrade your PC gaming peripherals if you’ve been itching to do so.
HBO Max’s official launch is right around the corner (May 27th) and you can still get it for a discounted monthly rate of $12. The only catch is that you need to sign up via the HBO Max website and not from any other distributor, which is easy enough. The normal monthly price is $15 so HBO is clearly trying to drum up as many subscribers as possible before launch with this promotion.
Now through May 25th, BioLite is having a Memorial Day sale that slashes up to 35 percent off many of its products. We’ve recommended BioLite headlamps before and this sale brings some of the deepest discounts ever to those devices — now the Headlamp 200 is $34 and the Headlamp 330 is $45. BioLite’s fire-pits and camping stove bundles are also deeply discounted as well. This is a good time to stock up on outdoor gear before summertime is in full swing.
The biggest and most capable Google smart speaker, the Google Home Max, is on sale at Belk for $230 — that’s $70 off its recent going price of $300 and $170 off its price when it first debuted. In addition to being a solid home for the Google Assistant, the Home Max (which we gave a score of 88) has excellent sound quality, a tasteful design and support for connected audio devices via a 3.5mm audio jack and Bluetooth.
The 500GB model of the Samsung T5 portable SSD is on sale for $80 at Amazon and Best Buy. This is a reliable and ultra-portable SSD that can hold pretty much any digital information you need it to — photos, documents and more. It has one USB-C port but it comes with multiple cables so you can use it with USB-C and USB-A devices. While it’s not the newest version of Samsung’s portable SSD (the T7 was announced earlier this year), it’s still a good drive that you can easily take anywhere.
If you need a dock for your new home-office space, you can get the excellent CalDigit TS3 Plus for only $230. Normally priced at $275, this dock has all the ports you could ever need (and more) and it can connect your main laptop to up to two 4K displays. We also like its sleek, unassuming metal design and the fact that it will charge your laptop when it’s connected using up to 87W of power.
Vanguard has two main components: a traditional scanning service that boots up when the game does, and a device driver that loads at system start. The driver runs the entire time your PC is on, even if you’re not playing Valorant. Players even have to reboot their computers before starting the game for the first time, in order to properly install Vanguard’s kernel-mode component.
“The driver itself doesn’t do any of the scanning or communicate with the network or anything like that,” Chamberlain said. “It’s there to make sure that from the start of your computer booting until when the game starts, the system hasn’t been compromised or tampered with. It does this by starting up before any cheats could be loaded on your system. And then as new drivers or modules load on your computer, it checks them for security vulnerabilities. If it finds them, it doesn’t let them load. This is unusual.”
Operating in the kernel, or ring 0, means Vanguard has access to every bit of a computer’s hardware. It’s the most privileged level of a PC, reserved for only the most trusted bits of the operating system. From ring 0, attackers can modify game memory, crash an entire system or access files from other users on the computer. And hackers don’t even need to be involved for the driver to cause problems — Vanguard is crashing some computers as it blocks otherwise harmless software from operating properly. We’re talking like blue-screen-of-death failures.
Hertzsprung at English Wikipedia
“The other thing is that there are certain parts of the operating system that need to be able read and write to your game memory,” Chamberlain said. “They start when the computer starts as well. A common technique for getting a cheat into a game is to hijack one of these system components. Since the system components are running the whole time, you can’t verify their integrity unless you have a component that’s running the whole time. And that’s most of what the kernel driver does.”
Chamberlain presents the system as a bubble of security shielding the entire computer from cheating software, but Rashid said Vanguard has a blind spot when it comes to ring 0 attacks. He said, “Vanguard’s premise is that they can use a kernel driver to detect a specific kind of cheat injection that happens in ring 3, in user mode. But when cheat developers also move their cheats into the kernel, they can modify game memory in a way that Vanguard’s driver cannot detect. This technique is already used to bypass existing anti-cheat mechanisms.”
This analysis is playing out in real-time, as cheaters have been active in Valorant since week one. Of course, no anti-cheat system is completely fool-proof and Riot expected attacks, even with Vanguard’s extra layer of protection.
Riot Games
The problem, according to Rashid and other experts, is that Vanguard isn’t just blind to some kernel attacks — it’s actively inviting cheaters and hackers to target a computer’s most privileged level. Chamberlain agreed that this concern is valid, but he said most existing malware has no interest in ring 0.
“If I’m running a driver and I get a virus on my PC, the virus can exploit that security vulnerability in the driver to also run in ring 0, in the kernel, and then do anything in the kernel,” Chamberlain said. “This is actually relatively rare because most malware doesn’t have any interest in kernel-level access to a computer because all the things that are valuable on your computer are accessible from user mode. The things that I want protected like my browsing history or my credit cards, and all the fanfiction that I’m writing, that’s all accessible to anything on my computer. You don’t need a kernel driver for that.”
Operating systems use exploit mitigations to protect user-mode applications from attacks, but this security blanket doesn’t cover kernel code. Cheat developers and hackers can still use security vulnerabilities in Vanguard and other trusted drivers to target the kernel and install software there, bypassing security certificate requirements entirely.
Both the Surface Earbuds and Headphone 2 feature a plethora of microphones, which was particularly helpful whenever I need to jump on phone calls and Zoom chats. According to my colleagues, both sets sounded crisp and clear. That’s more than I can say for many other wireless headphones. Microsoft’s mics are also useful for activating virtual assistants and dictating text in Microsoft Office. I rarely had to repeat myself or correct any transcriptions.
As much as I liked the Surface Earbuds, though, it’s worth noting that they have some limitations if you just want to use one earpiece, which is my preferred way for listening to podcasts (or while walking around NYC, when that was possible). Throughout my testing, I noticed that the left earbud would start to lose reception if I moved too far away from the right bud. After chatting with Microsoft, it turns out that’s because only the right Surface Earbud pairs with your phone. The left one basically feeds off of that connection.
That’s a surprising design choice for Microsoft, since it was a connection method used by first-generation wireless earbuds. These days, devices like the AirPods Pro and Sony’s WH-1000XM3 pair each earbud to your phone individually. That typically makes the reception better, and it also gives you the flexibility of using either side on their own. Perhaps Microsoft can fix this connectivity method with the next Surface Earbuds, but for now single-headphone users will have to live with the right bud.
At least the Surface Headphones 2 offer more flexibility. I was able to pair it with my Apple TV and iPhone at the same time, and it was smart enough to switch audio from both sources. That’s a feature I’ve been longing for with Sony’s WH-1000XM3, which can only pair with one device at a time. For the past few years, I’ve had to manually disconnect those cans from my Apple TV whenever I used them with my phone. The Surface Headphones 2, meanwhile, just worked. This is the beauty of competition, though. Now Sony has more of a reason to fix this issue in its otherwise perfect headphones.
Microsoft claims the Surface Headphones 2 last up to 20 hours with noise canceling turned on, while the Earbuds are rated for eight hours per charge (with another 16 hours of charge in their case). In my testing over the past week, which typically involved watching a few hours of TV, or jamming to music at night, the Headphones 2 have lasted over seven days without a recharge. The Earbuds typically sit around 50 percent after four hours of playback, and together with their charging case, I’ve been able to use them for six days without needing more juice.
Devindra Hardawar/Engadget
After listening to countless podcasts, video game remixes and late-night TV shows, it’s clear to me that Microsoft has found a decent audio niche. It’s building quirky-yet-comfortable devices that are easy to use. Aside from the weird connectivity arrangement of the Earbuds, I don’t have many complaints. They’re still some of the best wireless buds you can buy today. And the Surface Headphones 2 prove that Microsoft can actually learn from its earlier mistakes. They’re both great choices for cranking up the tunes and drowning out the world.
“Fans fell in love with Anson Mount, Rebecca Romijn and Ethan Peck’s portrayals of these iconic characters when they were first introduced on Star Trek: Discovery last season,” said Julie McNamara, executive vice president and head of programming at CBS All Access. “This new series will be a perfect complement to the franchise, bringing a whole new perspective and series of adventures to Star Trek.”
We don’t have a release date yet, but it appears contentious Discovery showrunner Alex Kurtzman will play a role in Strange New Worlds. CBS says he helped write the series premiere and is serving as an executive producer. It’s not a surprise to see the company greenlight yet another Star Trek series. There had been rumors of a Captain Pike spin-off for months ahead of today’s announcement, and CBS says it’s also developing a series that follows Michelle Yeoh’s Discovery character.
Nintendo Switch Online is carrying on the legacy of the Wii’s Virtual Console, and four more games — one NES title and three SNES ones — are being added to the library on May 20th. Rygar may be regarded as a classic, but it hasn’t aged too well, and Operation Logic Bomb isn’t exactly a paragon of 16-bit gaming. Wild Guns and Panel de Pon, though, are heavy hitters.
Wild Guns is a mix of shoot ‘em up and light gun game genres. On paper, it shouldn’t work, but it’s actually fun, challenging and well designed. The game — which was created by Natsume and was first released in 1994 — takes place in a sci-fi version of the wild west and has players shooting and dodging at a frantic pace. The D-pad moves the characters around as normal, but once the fire button is held down, they stop moving and the targeting reticule can be moved around the screen. A remake of the game, Wild Guns: Reloaded came out in 2016, but this original version should be a good choice for anyone looking for some old-school arcade-style gaming.
Facebook has bought the GIF-sharing service Giphy, which will now be a part of the Instagram team. It plans to integrate Giphy’s library more deeply into Instagram (where GIFs are prevalent in Stories) and other Facebook services. Although Facebook didn’t reveal how much it paid for Giphy, Axiosreports that the price was $400 million.
In 2017, Spotify’s Safari web player vanished without any explanation. Users were forced to use another browser or the native Mac app. Now, just as mysteriously, Spotify has added Safari back to its list of approved browsers. After almost three years, loyal Safari users can finally listen to Spotify in the browser once again.
It’s always been a little strange that Spotify didn’t work in Safari. Even Google’s music service works fine with the browser. Of course, the public beta of Apple Music’s web player is also compatible.
Maia, a 19-year-old singer-songwriter from California, enjoys all the bona fides of a budding pop superstar.
The Bay Area teen sold out her first US tour last spring with only an EP released. Her anticipated debut album, The Masquerade, dropped in the fall and spurred a gushy profile in The New York Times, exalting her young career as “a bedroom pop empire in the making.” Her sweet and somber ukulele tunes have generated enough buzz to warrant a spot on one of Spotify’s Times Square billboards last year. She has 6 million monthly listeners on Spotify — comparable to Grouplove’s 5.7 million — but her following on YouTube and Instagram is more than three times the band’s.
Maia’s superpower isn’t necessarily her vocal prowess or strumming skills. It’s, well, everything else.
The artist better known by mxmtoon is a virtuoso of the virtual world, connecting daily with her millions of fans on YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and Twitch. She stresses that especially now, while viewers are anxious, isolated and craving personal connection, goofy is good.
“I painted my freaking Lactaid bottle and put it on YouTube,” she said. “I did ASMR with my family in the kitchen, I ranked my Animal Crossing villagers in a PowerPoint presentation. Doing things that feel oddly specific — almost like no one would want to watch it — instead makes people want to click on a video and be there to understand you as a person on a different level.”
Yet she couples her sillier stuff — cracking jokes with fans on Twitter, playing Overwatch and other games with them on Twitch three times per week — with videos catering directly to her art. Last month, she went live on YouTube for a stream she called “Come Write A Song With Me,” where she developed a chord progression on her ukulele and let fans help her write the lyrics in real time. In 30 minutes, she and her 1,100 live viewers (out of 600,000 subscribers) had co-written an earnest track called “Maybe Tomorrow,” detailing confinement and lost love.
“I’ve done a lot of live streams where you sing a couple songs and then your time is over and you move on with the rest of your day,” Maia said. “But I mean, I would have wanted to watch someone who spent 30 minutes writing a song with their audience, and I would’ve loved to have been on the other side. So I figured, why not do that on my own?”
The multi-platform world in which Maia thrives has been dismissed by many veteran musicians who didn’t grow up with high-speed internet. Now, in the coronavirus pandemic, it’s their harsh, even frightening reality too. As most concerts have been cancelled or postponed since mid-March and medical experts forecast live music events as the last piece of society to return from crisis, an entire industry has been forced online.
Jesse Cannon, a Brooklyn-based record producer, artist manager and Atlantic Records podcast host, has literally written the book on how musicians can set themselves apart in all aspects of the business, from smart songwriting to deft Facebook advertising.
His pair of guides, called Get More Fans: The DIY Guide To The New Music Business and Processing Creativity: The Tools, Practices And Habits Used To Make Music You’re Happy With, are almost prophetic in their suggestions of alternative marketing and content forms to keep a band relevant.
“YouTube for years has been the greatest opportunity that musicians don’t take care of” – Jesse Cannon
Cannon said label executives are enthusiastic about the captive audiences whose eyes could be on their artists right now.
“The reason labels always discouraged [livestreaming] was the idea that no one’s going to be home,” he said. “Well, now that’s not the case. … You have such a great opportunity to cash in on this attention.”
But Cannon admits many artists have yet to figure out how to capitalize, especially on YouTube.
“YouTube for years has been the greatest opportunity that musicians don’t take care of,” he said. “The reason some terrible music-making YouTubers get ahead is because musicians haven’t figured out how to do this yet. We all are saying, ‘Now’s the time to learn that new skill, learn that new hobby,’ right? Well, learn how to use that camera, download the FiLMiC app on your iPhone, download [editing app] DaVinci Resolve, and for $20 you can start making YouTube work.”
Cannon is all for left-field approaches right now, like Travis Scott’s bombastic “Astronomical” mini-concert in Fortnite last month which broke the game’s participation record with more than 12 million simultaneous players turning up. In April, emo veterans American Football headlined a virtual festival built inside Minecraft which was attended by about 100,000 fans, many times the crowd size the band would typically play in person. But if simply streaming an at-home concert is more an artist’s speed, Cannon said “go for it” — and don’t worry about posting too often.
“There is so much competition, I don’t think people are going to tune in every night,” he said. “There have been three times during this that I’ve been like, ‘Oh, I want to watch this,’ and then there’s somebody else doing something and I’m like, “Oh, I wanted to watch that too. I hope that gets archived.’ I would not be very scared of saturation in the short term.”
Cannon cites Canadian rapper Tory Lanez, who boosted his profile and made headlines with his star-studded “Quarantine Radio” Instagram Live show, which runs as long as four hours several times per week (and broke a streaming record on the platform when Drake hopped on the show).
“This is a person who literally turned their career around in [self-quarantine] because they’re oversaturating,” Cannon said.
However, not everyone can get Lizzo to twerk on their stream. Scott Waldman, an artist manager in Los Angeles, cautions smaller artists against flooding the pool online.
“You have to use a similar strategy that you would being in a local band,” he said. “You wouldn’t want to play the same market every single day, because then you get into bar band or cover band territory. … You have to treat these shows professionally, make it an event.”
Some bands have already pulled out all the stops. Last month, the Pittsburgh hardcore-punk band Code Orange cut a high-definition, multi-cam version of its album-release show, recorded inside an empty venue after the concert was cancelled due to coronavirus concerns. And members of California punk stalwart Goldfinger took to their individual home studios to record a sharp, multi-panel live version of two fan-favorite tracks.
But by and large, Waldman has not been impressed with artists’ output so far.
“A lot of it is the equivalent of someone on Facebook writing cringey statuses about their exes,” he said. “It looks really unprofessional, people are saying ‘um’ a lot and not really sure what they’re doing.”
Waldman is confident all the mediocrity will fade once flesh-and-blood shows return.
“I think the livestream pivot is going to dissipate drastically,” he said. “It is 100 percent an exceptional reaction to exceptional circumstances.”
Meanwhile Hooper, of Grouplove, isn’t so sure.
“I can see people getting very, very comfortable with this,” she said, “and us just going to a space in a white room [to perform].”
As artists figure out how to bolster their fan relationships online, perhaps no YouTube star is closer to his supporters than Robin Skinner, a British singer and producer better known as Cavetown.
The 20-year-old artist, who produced mxmtoon’s album, interacts with his 1.3 million subscribers through not only his evocative bedroom pop but also advice and AMA videos, which often get personal. Fans ask Skinner how to handle feelings of depression, anxiety and isolation in school, and while he’s no therapist, he does his best to provide heartfelt, thoughtful answers. Skinner has also been open about his aromantic, or “aro,” sexual orientation and has discussed his views on the lesser-known term with fans who also identify as such.
“It’s nice for [viewers] to both hear other people’s struggles and perhaps find something they can relate to in that, and then also get an outside perspective,” he said. “So it’s connecting with them but also helping them out somehow, which I really enjoy. It feels like a group of friends helping each other out.”
Cavetown’s YouTube channel is also loaded with moments of lovable mundanity and dry comedy that humanize the singer — who released his debut label LP, Sleepyhead, onMarch 27 and also lost several live-performance dates — from Skinner feeding his pet chameleon to showing his mom a series of memes and gauging her reaction on camera.
Tessa Violet, a singer-songwriter from Oregon, started posting on YouTube more than a decade ago under the username Meekakitty. She has since bridged the gap from fringe internet personality to music-industry regular, with two LPs and a list of concert tours and festival appearances under her belt since 2014.
Now the pop artist livestreams twice per week for her 1.7 million subscribers while stuck at home, her spring tour with lovelytheband indefinitely postponed.
Tessa, 30 years old and a veteran of bedroom broadcasting, chooses to go long on her live videos: In her “Something to Look Forward to Tour,” she spends two hours playing songs, dueting with screen-shared guest artists and talking to fans. Making connections with your viewers should be paramount, Tessa said, even more so than the performance itself.
“There are artists that I love, and I see them go live and the high of ‘Oh, my gosh, I’m getting to see them right now, they’re playing’ wears off very quickly when I realize they are not going to engage me in any way,” she said. “I could just look up a video of them playing that would have higher-quality sound and more-thoughtful production.”
She urges artists who are new to streaming to make sure they differentiate between the energy of a packed concert and playing alone to a five-inch smartphone.
“A livestream is all about intimacy,” she said. “It’s not a communal experience; it’s a one-on-one experience. When you start streaming, instead of picturing a crowd, remember you’re being beamed into someone’s bedroom and you’re talking to one person. Change your energy. … Respect that the medium is a part of the art.”
If you want the tablet in a particular color, your choices are limited; both Amazon and Best Buy currently only have the space gray model in stock. Similarly, if you want more storage you don’t have much choice. Of the two retailers, only Amazon has supplies of the 128GB model. Moreover, at just $30 off, it’s also not the most compelling deal.
If you can get past its aging design, Apple’s entry-level iPad is one of the best tablets you can buy for the price. Engadget’s Chris Velazco gave the device a score of 86 when he reviewed it last fall. Despite its reasonable price, it has all the features we’ve come to expect from Apple’s tablet lineup, including a bright and vivid display, excellent first- and third-party software support and about 10 hours of battery life. It’s not the fastest iPad in Apple’s lineup, but it should have more than enough computing power for most people.
The closest competitor to the 10.2-inch iPad is Samsung’s Galaxy Tab S5e. It features a 10-inch Super AMOLED display, a midrange Snapdragon 670 processor and a more modern design. However, the most significant difference is that it comes with Google’s Android operating system. Generally, iOS boasts a greater variety of apps designed specifically for tablets. In recent years, Apple has also done an admirable job of building out features that take advantage of the iPad’s strengths.
Samsung will slowly shut down its XR service applications over the next few months until they’re completely gone by September 30th. The tech giant says it’s ending the service, because it’s “rethinking its immersive video distribution” method, “especially given that Gear VR is no longer available.” Samsung’s XR ecosystem, which is made up of several apps, gives users a way to view 360-degree images and videos on their phones and links their VR headsets with their mobile devices.
The tech giant has already suspended 360-degree video uploads and premium video purchases, and it won’t be rolling out any further updates. Oculus devices will no longer support the Samsung VR Video app starting on June 30th, and the Facebook-owned company will remove the application from its store, as well.
