Whether you’re drafting a simple letter or crafting a comprehensive report, Microsoft Word 2024 is a powerful tool that transforms document creation and editing. If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by the myriad of features in Word, you’re not alone. But fear not, this guide is designed with you in mind, breaking down the essentials into […]
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Apple has unveiled the latest iteration of its iconic all-in-one desktop computer, the M4 24″ iMac. This sleek and powerful machine promises to deliver an exceptional user experience, combining innovative technology with Apple’s signature design aesthetics. In the video below, Brandon Butch takes a closer look at the M4 iMac’s key features, performance, and overall […]
The post Is This the BEST iMac EVER? M4 24″ Unboxing & Review! appeared first on Geeky Gadgets.
Nintendo is set to show off the Donkey Kong Country expansion of its Super Nintendo World theme park today (Monday, November 11) at 5PM ET, the company revealed in a post on X. That means the new Universal Studios Japan area might finally open soon, after being delayed from the previously announced launch window of Spring 2024.
The new park attraction featuring Mario's barrel-throwing nemesis was first revealed in 2021. The centerpiece is a ride called Mine Cart Madness, named after the best level in the 1994 SNES game Donkey Kong Country. After being blasted out of a barrel cannon, you'll take a mine cart ride through the jungle that includes a "leap across a collapsed track" as Nintendo showed in a render earlier this year.
Tune in on 11/11 at 2 p.m. PT for a SUPER NINTENDO WORLD Direct livestream! The stream will be roughly 10 minutes and showcase Donkey Kong Country of #SuperNintendoWorld at Universal Studios Japan. No game information will be featured. #NintendoDirect
— Nintendo of America (@NintendoAmerica) November 10, 2024
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The direct livestream appears to be focused on Donkey Kong world alone, and Nintendo specifically pointed out that "no game information will be featured" — so don't expect any news on the next-gen Switch 2 console either.
Donkey Kong Country will expand the park size by up to 70 percent, Nintendo said when it was announced. Current attractions at the Japan park are the Mario Kart: Kuppa's Challenge rollercoaster and Yoshi Adventure. Nintendo recently announced that it would open a Super Nintendo World attraction at Universal Studios Orlando on May 22nd, 2025 with the same attractions as the park in Osaka.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/nintendo/nintendo-will-show-off-donkey-kong-country-theme-park-expansion-at-live-event-today-130015655.html?src=rss2024 has been a rough year for Sonos. The company’s would-be triumphant entry into the crowded headphones market was overshadowed by a disastrous app redesign. In the fallout of the botched software update, the company decided to delay products that were ready to be shipped to give itself more time to right the course. Consumer trust eroded, and people who already owned Sonos gear were living in a cycle of constant frustration.
Thanks to a number of rumors, we already knew that one of the pending product releases was the Arc Ultra ($999). A few weeks ago the company decided not to wait any longer to reveal it. While the design is mostly unchanged from the Arc that debuted in 2020, there are several key changes on the inside that make this a better all-in-one solution for people who don’t want to add more speakers to their living room setup. Sonos is promising better bass performance thanks to new speaker tech that’s debuting in the Arc Ultra, but just how good can it be?
The refined design of the original Arc was a massive upgrade from that of the Playbar, and showed a progression from Sonos’ compact Beam soundbar. Honestly, the aesthetic is pretty timeless, in my opinion, and it’s a look that should age well for years to come. That said, it makes sense that Sonos would keep the design for the Arc Ultra, only making some minor changes to the exterior.
The Arc Ultra still comes in both black and white options, allowing you to choose what looks best in your living room or home theater. Sonos updated the controls to mirror what’s available on the newer Era 100 and Era 300 speakers, moving them to a top-facing bar at the back. There’s a volume slider on the right with play/pause and skip controls in the center. On the left side, Sonos gives you a microphone control so you can mute the built-in mics as needed.
And that’s really it in terms of design changes that you can see. The Arc Ultra is slightly shorter height-wise than the Arc, and it’s a little wider than its predecessor. Neither of which make a huge difference, and they won’t drastically change how you position the speaker beneath your TV.
Inside, Sonos has re-engineered the Arc Ultra to improve audio performance. The biggest piece of this overhaul is the new Sound Motion woofer that enables better bass performance before you add a standalone wireless sub. The achievement here, thanks to the acquisition of audio company Mayht, is that the new component lays flat, taking up less room than a traditional cone-shaped woofer. The Sound Motion driver also helps deliver increased clarity and depth, on top of doubling the bass output of the original Arc.
Sonos redesigned the entire acoustic architecture of the Arc Ultra during the process of adding the Sound Motion woofer. The soundbar now houses three more drivers than the arc, a list that includes seven tweeters (two of which are upfiring), six mid-range drivers (midwoofers, as Sonos calls them) and the aforementioned woofer for a total of 14. The company also employs 15 Class-D digital amplifiers along with far-field mics for tuning and voice control.
There’s still only a single HDMI (eARC) port, which allows most modern TVs the ability to control the soundbar’s volume and mute options from your TV remote. Moreover, the Arc Ultra is compatible with Wi-Fi 6 and newly-added Bluetooth 5.3 connectivity allows you to stream from any device. And of course, AirPlay 2 is still on the spec sheet. One last thing I’ll mention here is that the Arc Ultra doesn’t ship with an optical adapter if you prefer that connection. The company will sell you one for $25.
Since the Arc Ultra is a Sonos product, there are a lot of core features that are the same as they are on the company’s other devices. You can use the soundbar as part of a multiroom setup and Trueplay tuning is here to adjust the audio to the acoustics of the room. There’s still an adjustable EQ with options for bass, treble and loudness and a Night Sound mode makes things less boomy when someone in your house may be trying to work or sleep.
While Trueplay will give you the best sound customization for the sonic characteristics of your living room, Sonos is enabling a Quick Tune feature for the first time on the Arc Ultra. Here, the soundbar will use its internal mics, as opposed to your phone, to offer a certain degree of improvement. The company says it wanted to give people the option of something quicker than Trueplay, although the full-fledged tuning process doesn’t take very long at all.
Speech Enhancement has been a handy feature on Sonos soundbars for a while, giving you the ability to improve dialog clarity as needed. Before now, it was an all-or-nothing feature, but on the Arc Ultra, the company introduced three levels of speech boost to give you more options to better suit your needs. This means the soundbar can help you hear clearly over background noise or simply follow along better by elevating dialog above the rest of the soundtrack mix.
The trademark feature of Sonos’ Ace headphones is the ability to beam the audio from a compatible soundbar to the cans for a private home theater. That TV Audio Swap tool is available on the Arc Ultra, so you can instantly send the sound to the headphones with the press of a button. In fact, Sonos bundles the Arc Ultra and Ace headphones in a $1,373 set. What’s more, the Ace supports spatial audio with dynamic head tracking, so you can count on immersive sound even when you’re employing it on an individual basis.
Despite all of the problems that Sonos has had with its app, some of which it's still working to resolve, I didn't encounter any issues during my testing. The software crashed on me once when the Trueplay tuning process completed, but everything had already run its course and I didn’t have to repeat it. Other than that, the app has worked reliably over the last week while I’ve been putting the Arc Ultra through its paces. Most importantly, the software is stable and the full suite of controls for the new soundbar is available at launch.
The original Arc already sounded great, so Sonos really had its work cut out for it to further improve the audio quality for the Arc Ultra. Thanks to the improved bass of the Sound Motion tech, a change that also takes up less space, the company says it had the ability to then overhaul the mid-range and high-frequency components as well. By using multiple sizes of mid-range drivers and tweeters, Sonos was able to tweak the speaker positioning inside of the soundbar for improved projection and more immersive sound.
In addition to the enhanced bass performance, the second thing that was immediately apparent on the Arc Ultra was those improvements to the dimensional sound. Whether it was a quidditch match in a Harry Potter movie or zooming F1 cars in Drive to Survive, the soundbar now has better directional, immersive sound than its predecessor. Sonos says the Arc Ultra now renders Dolby Atmos content in a 9.1.4-channel setup, versus 5.0.2 with the Arc, which further contributes to the enveloping audio. Interestingly, I haven’t seen any of the competition claim four up-firing channels from the soundbar like Sonos does here (those that do are usually accounting for up-firing drivers in the rear speakers). You can really hear the difference from the second you fire up the Arc Ultra, and the effect is consistent across content sources.
The increased bass performance makes the Arc Ultra a much better speaker for music without a separate subwoofer. You won’t get the bombastic low-end tone the newly updated Sonos Sub 4 can produce, but there’s enough from the soundbar to give Kaytranada’s Timeless, Phantogram’s Memory of a Day and Bilmuri’s American Motor Sports plenty of booming backbone when a track demands it. There’s also still the trademark Sonos clarity I’ve come to expect over the years, which means finer details like the texture of synths, layered guitars and the nuance of acoustic instruments cut through the mix cleanly.
And speaking of clarity, the company’s new Speech Enhancement settings are also a big improvement. Being able to select how much of a boost this feature offered depending on either my needs right then or based on the overall tuning of the content is really nice. It allowed me to max out the dialog when watching movies after my toddler was asleep so that speech didn’t suffer when sound effects were louder during intense scenes of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.
There’s no doubt the Arc Ultra packs in deeper, more immersive sound than its predecessor, but some people will still want a more robust setup to wring every ounce of audio out of a Sonos living room setup. The high-end choice for this is what Sonos calls the Ultimate Immersive Set, which includes the Arc Ultra, two Era 300s and the Sub 4. Right now, that will cost you $2,561. For something less expensive, you can get the Arc Ultra and the new Sub 4 (normally $799) for $1,708 (Premium Entertainment Set). And therein lies the biggest problem with Sonos soundbars: expanding your living room setup to get the most immersive experience gets very pricey very quickly when the centerpiece is already $999.
If you can live without all the conveniences of Sonos products, you can get an all-in-one package from Samsung for $1,500. With the Q990D, you’ll get the soundbar, two rear speakers and a wireless subwoofer in the same box. The setup offers 11.1.4 audio for excellent Atmos sound, thanks in part to up-firing drivers in the rear speakers. Samsung offers a host of handy features, from Q-Symphony audio with TV speakers, SpaceFit Sound Pro room calibration, Adaptive Sound audio enhancement, a dedicated gaming mode and more. The Q990D remains my top pick for the best soundbars for a lot of reasons, a key one being everything you could need comes in one all-inclusive package.
The Arc Ultra is an obvious improvement over the Arc in the sonic department. New technology delivers on its promise to boost bass, clarity and immersive before you start adding extra components. Expanded features like Speech Enhancements and a quick-tune option offer new tools for dialing in the sound, while the stock Sonos experience remains intact. And thankfully, that includes an app that’s more stable than it was a few months ago. The Arc Ultra is still pricey at $999, but it exhibits a lot more sonic prowess than its predecessor for only $100 more.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/audio/speakers/sonos-arc-ultra-review-new-tech-powers-a-big-audio-upgrade-130011149.html?src=rss
Editing can be challenging, especially when you’re deeply invested in your writing. Often, it’s hard to identify what needs fixing. AI tools like AutoCrit and ChatGPT are transforming the editing process, allowing you to refine your work while staying true to your creative vision. These tools offer a fresh perspective, helping writers improve their manuscripts […]
The post Unlock the Secret to Perfect Writing with AI Editing Tools appeared first on Geeky Gadgets.
If you’re ready to kickstart your journaling journey then you’ve reached the right spot. Embarking on this journey doesn’t simply involve putting pen to paper, you need to collect the right tools to inspire you and urge you to write and reflect. If you’re looking to explore this wholesome world, then we have curated a collection of five minimal tools to help you kickstart this journey. Each tool is designed to enhance and elevate your journaling experience.
These five journaling tools are blessed with unique and handy features that will aid you in your journaling experience. From the beautiful and sustainable Kintsugi Plain Notebook to the durable and innovative Everlasting All-Metal Pencil – these products will inspire you and support you. Whether you’re looking for a reliable pen, a stylish paperweight, or a convenient sharpener, these tools provide the perfect combination of functionality and aesthetics to elevate your journaling practice.
Say hello to the Kintsugi Plain Notebook. This lovely notebook is a beautiful embodiment of the Japanese art of Kintsugi, where pottery cracks are repaired with gold lacquer, turning imperfections into something beautiful, instead of hiding them. The notebook isn’t simply designed to be a blank canvas, but a symbol of embracing imperfection and resilience.
It offers users a sacred space to freely jot down their thoughts, feelings, and ideas without the pressure of perfection. It serves as your safe space, helping you journal down your inner fears and deepest emotions. It allows you to vent your emotions and process them healthily and satisfyingly. If you’re planning to start journaling, then the Kintsugi Plain Notebook is a must-have.
This notebook features a charming and thoughtful design. It is made from sustainable materials like eco-friendly bagasse paper, which provides a smooth and seamless writing experience while supporting the environment. The notebook has a unique cover, inspired by the art of Kintsugi – a constant reminder that your flaws are beautiful. This makes the notebook a wonderful companion for those looking to grow and reflect.
Dubbed the Inseparable Notebook Pen, this pen is great for capturing inspiration and emotions the moment they strike you. Ideas can appear and disappear within seconds, hence it is important to have a trusty writing instrument with you. This nifty pen is designed to be an extension of your creative process, integrating with your notebook to offer you a safe and reliable space to note down your thoughts, feelings, and ideas.
The pen features a minimal design, which showcases its simplicity and functionality. It is designed to be a steady tool that doesn’t distract from the task at hand and instead enhances it. It features a magnetic clip that attaches it securely to your notebook, ensuring you never lose it and always have easy access to it.
What makes this pen unique and a total winner is that it seamlessly and naturally integrates with your notebooks, ensuring it is always ready for use. Whenever you’re in the mood to journal and write down your thoughts, you need to simply unclip the pen and start writing. It merges convenience and style in one body, forming a handy and clever writing instrument for all the journalers and creative individuals out there.
If you’re gonna start your journaling journey, then you definitely need a handy pen by your side. Meet the Levitating Pen – a one-of-a-kind writing instrument that artfully combines art, design, and precision engineering. This pen draws inspiration from cutting-edge technology, and functions as a gravity-defying pen. It stands tall vertically and is balanced without the presence of batteries or electronics. It is equipped with a pedestal that creates a magnetic field, ensuring the pen floats.
The pen isn’t simply a functional tool, but also a pretty visually appealing piece. You can place it on your desk, and it will serve as a wonderful conversation starter. It is blessed with a sleek and futuristic design, which makes the simple act of writing a surreal and satisfying experience.
The Levitating Pen is made using a high-precision CNC machine, with less than 0.1mm margin left for error. It was built with meticulous attention to detail, which allows the pen to float perfectly, and spin with fluid grace. This pen is manufactured in the same facility as Apple products, hence it showcases excellent craftsmanship and alluring aesthetics. It is designed to provide a seamless and comfortable writing experience.
Named the Everlasting All-Metal Pencil, this unique pencil offers innovation and reliability. It challenges the conventions of traditional writing tools and removes the need for constant sharpening. It provides a seamless writing experience that is practical and sustainable and is made with a special alloy core. It features a durable aluminum body, which delivers longevity.
The Everlasting All-Metal Pencil is essential if you’re starting your journaling journey. It features a unique and minimal design, which replicates the feel of a traditional pencil while ensuring the marks can be easily erased. It is also great for sketching, taking notes, and working with watercolors or markers.
You should consider purchasing the Everlasting All-Metal Pencil since it merges the best of traditional and modern writing tools. It leaves marks without wearing down, making it a sustainable option for long-term usage. Since it is compatible with different markers, it is a versatile choice as well, if you wanna use it for other activities besides just journaling and writing down your thoughts and feelings, or for artistic journaling.
Called the Japanese Drawing Pad, this lovely product is a specimen of the rich heritage and exceptional quality of Japanese paper. Japanese paper is loved by designers, artists, and stationery enthusiasts all over the world. It is renowned for its superior texture and durability. This drawing pad serves as a unique canvas that will elevate your creative process, allowing you to unleash your true thoughts and emotions.
It brings the beauty of Japanese paper to your fingertips, luring you into a world of creative and free-flowing expression. It is available in traditional white and black options, and they’re great for a wide variety of uses. You can jot down your thoughts, doodle for relaxation, or do some intricate art therapy.
The Japanese Drawing Pad is a worthy buy since it is equipped with exceptional paper quality and a thoughtful design. It merges the traditional craftsmanship of Japanese paper-making with modern functionality, providing you with a premium and contemporary surface to release your feelings and explore your creativity. It features a recycled cardboard base, which showcases the product’s eco-friendly ethos, making it a good sustainable option.
The post Top 5 Minimal Journaling Tools To Kickstart Your Journaling Journey first appeared on Yanko Design.
Get ready to embark on a transformative journey with iOS 18.2, as Apple prepares to unveil a suite of innovative features that will redefine your iPhone experience. With the anticipated release date of December 2nd just around the corner, it’s time to explore the innovative capabilities that promise to elevate the way you interact with […]
The post iOS 18.2 Beta 2: Getting Ready for December! appeared first on Geeky Gadgets.
According to leaked information from OpenAI it seems that Artificial Intelligence (AI) development, particularly in the realm of language models, might be experiencing a notable deceleration. This shift in momentum is most evident in projects like OpenAI’s highly anticipated Orion model or ChatGPT-5. You might be wondering why the excitement is tempered this time around. […]
The post ChatGPT-5 Exhibiting Diminishing Returns is AI Progress Slowing Down? appeared first on Geeky Gadgets.
Nintendo has filed a lawsuit against a streamer called EveryGameGuru, accused of streaming gameplays of pirated games before they were even released — and of providing viewers access to piracy tools and illegal copies of the games.
EveryGameGuru allegedly streamed Mario & Luigi: Brothership across five days, weeks before its official release on November 7. After Nintendo had the videos taken down from various platforms, including YouTube, they continued live streaming on Loco and even included a QR code for their CashApp handle.
Nintendo said EveryGameGuru sent the company an email, saying it has “a thousand burner channels” and “can do this all day.”
Don’t anger the house of Mario! The company is asking for $150,000 in damages per violation of its copyright. 404media did the math: That could add up to millions, seeing as the suit cites at least 10 games, streamed on at least 50 occasions.
— Mat Smith
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Sure, it’s not for most of us. The Vive Focus Vision isn’t for the same people as the PSVR2 or Meta Quest 3. This is meant to be high-end VR for businesses and creators: a cross between the Focus 3 and last year’s goggle-like XR Elite. The build quality is excellent, but it’s running on aging hardware. Worse, it’s riddled with software issues and is rather expensive compared to the Meta Quest 3.
If you’re aged 30 and up, you know the voice of Elwood Edwards, realize it or not. He recorded the phrase, “You’ve got mail!” and three other lines for Quantum Computer Services in 1989. That company became America Online (AOL), Meg Ryan made the movie with Tom Hanks and everything else. (AOL is currently owned by Yahoo, Engadget’s parent company.)
The latest patch for the PS5 version of God of War Ragnarok adds the option first seen in the PC port to tone down the boy’s excessive and unsolicited hints when Kratos is contemplating the game’s many puzzles. Enough, Atreus! (The patch also includes PS5 Pro upgrades, for smooth 60 fps and better visuals. But that’s not as funny.)
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/general/the-morning-after-nintendo-sues-pirated-software-streamer-for-millions-121630229.html?src=rss
In a world where smartphones are essential to our daily lives, the demand for faster, more powerful processors continues to grow. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite is an innovative mobile CPU designed to set new standards for performance, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible on handheld devices. With major advancements in both CPU and GPU capabilities, […]
The post Why Snapdragon 8 Elite is a Game-Changer for Mobile Gaming appeared first on Geeky Gadgets.