Technology

As Nadia Vulvokov realized how she was trapped in a never-ending cycle of death and do-overs in Russian Doll’s first season, her familiarity with the concept of time loops helped her escape one. Nadia’s self-awareness about her predicament was a major part of what kept Russian Doll from feeling like a simple Groundhog Day riff with little to add to the genre. That cosmic knowingness is also one of the reasons Russian Doll’s second season makes for such an unexpectedly different and fascinating puzzle box as it takes the series to its next level with another tale of metaphysical birthday madness. Russian Doll’s second season picks up a few years after the previous and just days before Nadia’s (Natasha Lyonne) 40th birthday. As always, Nadia fully intends to spend the day of her birth with l...

Hello Games has released yet another large free update to No Man’s Sky. This one’s called Outlaws, and it delivers a set of missions where the player can acquire black market tech and other essential goods from other ships in a less-than-savory manner — and then smuggle it for a profit. There are also bounty missions and planetary raids. There will be high-conflict zones in areas where outlaws have captured space stations where you’ll have plenty of chances to engage in dogfights. Oh, and there are now capes and hoods that you can unlock for your character. The studio says that combat has been improved with “speed and excitement” being the focus. Ships should handle better, but for those who want more accessibility during fights, there’s a new option called “Auto-Follow” to let you focus m...

If you’re a fan of racing games, Thrustmaster’s T248 steering wheel and pedal setup is a nice way to make the experience feel more immersive. Designed for both PlayStation consoles and PC, it’s a great all-in-one package that can help beginners get started with a racing setup, one that requires little in the way of preparation. It’s an even better buy today given it’s currently on sale at Amazon, Best Buy, and B&H Photo for $299.99 instead of $399.99, a new all-time low. Thrustmaster’s T248 is an excellent force feedback wheel, which means it offers a strong level of resistance while duplicating the effects of the track on your car in great detail. As an added perk, the wheel also comes with a handy LCD screen, which can display your speed, position, and other useful information depend...

Asus always finds a way to surprise me. It’s a company that can produce the elegant ROG Zephyrus G14 and G15 gaming laptops — up there with the best in the business in terms of design and thinness. It can also make the Flow Z13, a thin gaming tablet with powerful specs inside. Then, it can go completely in the opposite direction to make something like the Strix Scar 17, a powerful but far less refined laptop that starts at $1,999 and goes up from there. I would say that it’s a device made explicitly for gamers, but I know plenty of gamers who wouldn’t want to be seen using this thing. Its thick chassis is partially translucent, with multi-colored LEDs shining through, and the enclosure for its display has an angular cut out — just because! You can even swap between a few included “armor ca...

FIFA launched its free streaming service — named FIFA Plus, of course — that includes a mix of live soccer matches, archived content, original features, and much more. It’s available globally on the web and mobile devices, in five languages (English, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish) with more to follow. The service will stream over 40,000 live matches per year from 100 Member Associations across all six confederations, including 29,000 men’s games and 11,000 women’s matches. FIFA promises to cover a wide range of games from “Europe’s top-flight leagues to previously unserved competitions.” Today, for example, you can stream matches from the Mongolian 2nd League, Nepal Women’s Football League, and 3F Superliga. FIFA says 1,400 matches will be streamed live in the first month, with t...

If you have a relatively recent phone, you probably have a dedicated night mode in your camera app. These features have transformed the possibilities for night-time photography, blending multiple images together to create a single bright exposure. But there are limitations to this approach — you have to stay still, for example, and it doesn’t work with video. The makers of a new camera called the Duovox Mate Pro, which just launched on Kickstarter, are betting that there’s still a place for dedicated low-light hardware. The Mate Pro is a compact camera with a Sony STARVIS 2 CMOS sensor that Duovox claims is a thousand times more sensitive than the sensor in an iPhone 13 Pro and has 148 percent more dynamic range than a Sony A7S III. Sony’s STARVIS image sensors are primarily designed for s...

The pandemic sparked a running boom, with one study finding that roughly 28 percent of current runners got their start during quarantine. To cater to this new crowd, Polar announced today that it’s launching two new GPS watches designed to help runners get better at the sport. The $199.90 Pacer is aimed at novices, while the $299.90 Pacer Pro is meant to help serious runners up their game. Polar says that both smartwatches will feature faster processors than their predecessors, with 5MB of RAM. It’s an upgrade that’s meant to improve performance and deliver a better user experience. That’s been sorely needed in Polar watches, which sometimes lag during syncing and occasionally struggle with menu transitions. Both watches also have Polar’s Precision Prime heart rate monitoring tech. As far ...

NASA has now discovered the largest comet nucleus ever observed thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope. Named C/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli-Bernstein), the massive comet spans more than 80 miles across in diameter, making it larger than the state of Rhode Island. At roughly 50 times the size of an average comet, it boasts a mass of a staggering 500 trillion tonnes. According to NASA, the comet has been falling towards the Sun for well over a million years and is now headed towards Earth at a whopping speed of 22,000 mph. Fortunately for us, the behemoth comet will never reach us to cause any destruction. NASA says it’ll never get any closer than 1 billion miles away from the Sun, which is just slightly farther than where Saturn is located, and it’ll reach that location by 2031. “This comet is ...