Ben Funk
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Recent posts
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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Whether you're streaming, video podcasting, or working from home to join meetings on Zoom or Microsoft Teams, visual fidelity is important. Video calls are hard to handle when we can't understand each other and body language is important. Streams on Twitch or YouTube video with poor quality are an easy pass, as well...
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After months of rumors and speculation, and then an accidental slip-up by AMD itself, the company finally announced the Radeon RX 6700 XT on Wednesday. The new GPU comes with a cut-down version of Big Navi, dubbed Navi 22 (not-so Big Navi?), which has 40 compute units with 12 GB of 192-bit GDDR6 VRAM. AMD targets...
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The never-ending parade of security vulnerabilities continues. Just as quickly as software vendors can tackle and resolve one set of exploitable issues -- i.e. the troubles at SolarWinds -- attackers find other vectors to break into networks and steal data. This time, it appears that tens of thousands of firms have...
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Using a graphics processor or GPU for tasks beyond just rendering 3D graphics is how NVIDIA has made billions in the datacenter space. Of course, NVIDIA's proprietary CUDA language and API have been exclusive to the company's GPUs since the beginning. There have been tools to port CUDA apps to widely-supported...
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Apple's latest M1 Macs -- and many Intel-based ones, for that matter -- all use the company's T2 security chip, which encrypts the system's built-in storage. The issue with highly-integrated motherboards with onboard storage is that if the onboard SSD wears out, the whole system becomes a brick of e-waste. And as...
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If you're currently using the microphone built into your webcam, it might be time to up your audio game. Whether you're streaming for fun or working from home, the mics including with USB cameras aren't the best around. While many laptops have noise-canceling arrays, desktop users with discrete cameras don't always...
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Back in September, the World of Warcraft team asked players what they would want as their next mount. The options players had to choose from were pretty varied, including a spider-like Nerubian Swarmer and a Soaring Spelltome -- an actual book that players would be able to fly around the world with as a mount, should...
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While users may never want to have to rely on them, it's comforting to know that PCs running modern operating systems have fail-safes and recovery modes that can help get the system back up and running when disaster strikes. Back in the day, PCs came with a collection of floppy disks or a recovery CD that would...
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Sometimes old video game consoles never truly die, they just transcend into something something nostalgic and better. Thanks to the wonder of FPGAs, we've seen some pretty incredible demos, such as real-time ray tracing on the Super Nintendo. That was an interesting tech demo, but we desired something that both went...
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Animal Crossing: New Horizons is closing in on its one-year anniversary since release in March of 2020, and Nintendo is finishing up the last several holiday-themed events that haven't yet happened in the game. There are actually three concurrent events happening right now, so it's time to get into town and check out...
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Browser extensions like password managers and shopping aids can be very handy tools, or they can be up to no good, such as hidden crypto miners and keyloggers. Some of them even embed game console emulators and ROMs as a means to bypass typical download sites or torrents. In one weird case, however, Microsoft itself...
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When Intel announced its higher-performance Tiger Lake notebook CPUs with a 35 Watt TDP, the company proclaimed that it had snatched the single-threaded performance crown back from AMD. While Intel compared its new offerings to Ryzen 4000 CPUs based on the Zen 2 architecture, the new Core i7-11375H still surpassed its...
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Intel officially announced its upcoming Rocket Lake-S family in its keynote during virtual CES 2021 last month, but those processors have been leaking onto the internet for the last several months. The leaks all seem to indicate that Intel is about to snatch the single-threaded performance crown back from AMD's potent...
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Samsung has long dreamed of the modern smartphone extending its usefulness to more PC-like use cases, such as functions you might otherwise drive on a desktop or laptop. To that end, the company has poured resources into DeX, a Chrome OS-like interface that works remarkably well with a traditional keyboard and mouse...
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For those of us who are a certain age, the 1980s had the best after-school cartoons and comic books. Little did we know it at the time, but the toy companies were the masterminds behind some of our favorite '80s action heroes. For instance, He-Man and the Masters of The Universe created by Mattel, and both The...
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Over the course of the last 11 months or so, tens of millions of Americans have been tested for the SARS-CoV-2 virus which has caused the COVID-19 pandemic. Many, many more people globally have undergone the same tests. Amidst the scramble to test for and identify the virus responsible for a long-term global health...
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Complete honesty is not a mantra for many online retail sites, at least according to a study released by Princeton University. The school conducted an automated crawl of more than 11,000 online shops and found that around one in six used some form of deceptive practice to hawk their goods. While some of those online...
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