Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass platform just got a huge boost with the addition of 20 new Bethesda Softworks titles starting today, and now a quarter of those games will be getting performance boosts on the next-gen Xbox consoles in an upcoming update. The performance gains are in frame rate thanks to an appropriately named new feature Microsoft revealed last month called FPS Boost, which can roughly double frame rates of older games using new Xbox hardware without requiring developers do any manual work.
The games that will see performance boosts with frame rate jumps up to 60 frames per second include Arkane Studios’ Dishonored: Definitive Edition and Prey and Bethesda Game Studios’ The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition, Fallout 4, and Fallout 76.
The announcement was made during a YouTube live stream on Friday between Xbox Live programming director Larry Hryb (aka “Major Nelson”) and comms chief Jeff Rubenstein, in which Rubenstein discussed the benefits the new Xbox Series X/S can bring to older Bethesda titles. The games, while available now, don’t yet have the FPS Boost mode enabled currently, but Microsoft intends to add it as an optional toggle some time soon.
Microsoft said in its announcement yesterday that “a handful of these games will also benefit from FPS Boost on Xbox Series X / S,” though it did not specify which at the time. it also said 16 of the 20 Bethesda games coming to Xbox Game Pass would be available across PC and xCloud in addition to Xbox consoles. You can find a list of which platforms which games are available on here.
Filing taxes can be daunting, especially if you’re a professional streamer. Every penny that you make via Twitch, YouTube, or any other content creation platform needs to be reported. I’ve spoken to various CPAs, Tax Auditors, and tax filing companies to find some best practices when filing taxes as content creators.
Editor’s Note: We contacted a number of tax professionals and researched several sources for this story. But it is meant to be general guidance, not professional legal advice. Please speak to a tax professional about these and other filing concerns before submitting your tax return.
You’ll notice that, when you level up to Affiliate status with Twitch, the company asks you to fill out a tax form. Once you do so from any business you are responsible for reporting that income. At the end of the year, these companies will send you a 1099/ W9 if you’ve made $600 or more.
Twitch Yearly Payout Less Than $600
If you have not made at least $600 on their platform, Twitch is not obligated to send you a 1099 form, but you are still obligated to keep track of your earnings and report them to the IRS on a Schedule C.
If you agree to Twitch’s Affiliate/Partnership program but do not fill out a W9 to specify how much taxes should be withheld, the company automatically withholds up to 30%, as stated on Twitch.tv.
Non-U.S. residents are also subject to U.S. income taxes. “In most cases, a foreign person is subject to U.S. tax on its U.S. source income. Most types of U.S. source income received by a foreign person are subject to U.S. tax of 30%”, the IRS website states.
Hobbyist vs Self Employed
If you are planning to make money as a content creator, freelancer, or streamer you are self-employed and run your own business as a freelancer. According to IRS.gov, if you earn more than $400 in a year, you are subject to self-employment taxes of 15.3%, which go into retirement and medicare and must file 1040 or 1040-SR forms.
Also, you must determine if your streaming income is classified as a business or a hobby. If it’s a business, you can deduct expenses. The IRS lists nine criteria for determining whether something classifies as a business, including:
“Whether you were successful in making a profit in similar activities in the past.
Whether the activity makes a profit in some years and how much profit it makes.
Whether you can expect to make a future profit from the appreciation of the assets used in the activity.”
Kari Brummond, Tax Preparer with Tax Debt Help said, “When you have self-employment income, the IRS considers you to be a small business owner and lets you write off your business expenses. This includes everything you purchase to support your streaming business — microphones, PCs, cameras, and streaming software are all deductible…”
If you constantly are losing money year after year as a content creator, the IRS will automatically determine you to be a hobbyist instead of a business. If you are spending more money on equipment than you are earning, it is a sign that you are losing money as a creator.
Turbo Tax suggests keeping copies of receipts throughout the year and, if possible, using a business credit card to differentiate between content creator purchases and everyday purchases. Get oil changes at the beginning of the year so you can have proof of your mileage. These bookkeeping tips will help you determine if you are losing money and your yearly expenses.
Deductible Expenses for Streamers
Ms. ZaCorra Bronson, a Tax Professional with W.E.B.S. Tax Preparation & Bookkeeping Services states, “[Since passage of] the Tax Cuts and Job Act, it is harder to deduct expenses because it increased the standard deduction by almost half but eliminated many previous eligible deductions as well. Fees for tax preparation or investment management are no longer eligible deductibles.”
According to the IRS, deductible expenses for any business include rent, travel and assets (which could include equipment).
CPA Travis Guterman said that, as a content creator, your expenses can include internet services, Xbox subscriptions, games bought, computer equipment, gaming hardware and video equipment. Guterman offered a few tips to help you calculate how much of your internet and computer equipment you use for business.
“Claiming you use your home internet or telephone for 100% business use is not accurate,” Guterman said. “You’re going to use it for personal matters such as streaming Netflix, communicating with friends and family, and etc.”
If you’re trying to calculate how much is used for personal or business, think about how long you stream or edit videos. If you’re streaming 70 hours a week, there are 168 hours in a week, you use about 40% of your internet for business a week. If you only stream two hours for income, you use less than 10% of your internet for a business in a week. Calculating how much you use an Xbox subscription requires the same calculations.
Writing Off Purchases
(Image credit: Shutterstock)
If you’re using a car for streaming purposes, you can keep track of the miles and deduct them on your taxes. Your business expenses can be write-offs up to a certain amount.
“As a general rule of thumb, you write off the entire cost of small purchases and routine expenses (office rent, electricity software subscription fees) in the year of purchase, and you deduct large expenses such as computers incrementally over time,” Brummond said. “However, the Section 179 deduction lets you claim the full cost of many equipment expenses in the year of purchase.”
Using an EIN Instead of an SSN
If you are in the early stages of creating content you don’t have to file for an LLC just yet, suggests Guterman. If you’d like to acquire a free EIN, you can do so via the IRS.gov website.
Having an EIN doesn’t mean you have to file separate taxes for your business; it just means that you don’t want to give out your social security number to every company you work with. Everything made is added or subtracted from your overall annual income.
Tips and Donations Count as Income
You have to count donations sent to your PayPal, CashApp, or Venmo because those aren’t just gifts; they are part of your income. Ms. Bronson and TurboTax both suggest you subtract the service fees from platforms like PayPal. If someone gives you $30, Paypal charges you three cents per donation, which leaves you with $29.97.
What if You Spent More Than You Made?
I spoke with Guterman about losses and how to calculate them into your income. He gave me this formula. If you buy a new camera that costs $300 but only made $400 from Twitch, your income from that platform would be $100. Or, if you buy a $300 camera, but only make $200 on the platform you’ve lost money and can subtract $100 from your overall income, but you need to itemize those expenses on your Schedule C.
Finding and speaking with an accountant is going to be in your best interest. Using tax preparation software can help you prepare your taxes as well.
Annie M. Yang, Accountant Manager suggests using FreeTaxUSA.com as the cheapest option to file your taxes.
“If you use any other tax software company, they charge around $100 to file a tax return with Schedule C, which is way too much money for someone who earned less than $600 last year from their business,” she said.
The IRS site is a great resource that will also help you file your taxes. You can call 1-800-829-1040 to get answers to your federal tax questions 24 hours a day. The deadline for filing is April 15th. If you need an extension visit IRS.gov.
Teaching AI systems to understand what’s happening in videos as completely as a human can is one of the hardest challenges — and biggest potential breakthroughs — in the world of machine learning. Today, Facebook announced a new initiative that it hopes will give it an edge in this consequential work: training its AI on Facebook users’ public videos.
Access to training data is one of the biggest competitive advantages in AI, and by collecting this resource from millions and millions of their users, tech giants like Facebook, Google, and Amazon have been able to forge ahead in various areas. And while Facebook has already trained machine vision models on billions of images collected from Instagram, it hasn’t previously announced projects of similar ambition for video understanding.
“By learning from global streams of publicly available videos spanning nearly every country and hundreds of languages, our AI systems will not just improve accuracy but also adapt to our fast moving world and recognize the nuances and visual cues across different cultures and regions,” said the company in a blog. The project, titled Learning from Videos, is also part of Facebook’s “broader efforts toward building machines that learn like humans do.”
The resulting machine learning models will be used to create new content recommendation systems and moderation tools, says Facebook, but could do so much more in the future. AI that can understand the content of videos could give Facebook unprecedented insight into users’ lives, allowing them to analyze their hobbies and interests, preferences in brands and clothes, and countless other personal details. Of course, Facebook already has access to such information through its current ad-targeting operation, but being able to parse video through AI would add an incredibly rich (and invasive) source of data to its stores.
Facebook is vague about its future plans for AI models trained on users’ videos. The company told The Verge such models could be put to a number of uses, from captioning videos to creating advanced search functions, but did not answer a question on whether or not they would be used to collect information for ad-targeting. Similarly, when asked if users had to consent to having their videos used to train Facebook’s AI or if they could opt out, the company responded only by noting that its Data Policy says users’ uploaded content can be used for “product research and development.” Facebook also did not respond to questions asking exactly how much video will be collected for training its AI systems or how access to this data by the company’s researchers will be overseen.
In its blog post announcing the project, though, the social network did point to one future, speculative use: using AI to retrieve “digital memories” captured by smart glasses.
Facebook plans to release a pair of consumer smart glasses sometime this year. Details about the device are vague, but it’s likely these or future glasses will include integrated cameras to capture the wearer’s point of view. If AI systems can be trained to understand the content of video, then it will allow users to search for past recordings, just as many photo apps allow people to search for specific locations, objects, or people. (This is information, incidentally, that has often been indexed by AI systems trained on user data.)
Facebook has released images showing prototype pairs of its augmented-reality smart glasses. Image: Facebook
As recording video with smart glasses “becomes the norm,” says Facebook, “people should be able to recall specific moments from their vast bank of digital memories just as easy as they capture them.” It gives the example of a user conducting a search with the phrase “Show me every time we sang happy birthday to Grandma,” before being served relevant clips. As the company notes, such a search would require that AI systems establish connections between types of data, teaching them “to match the phrase ‘happy birthday’ to cakes, candles, people singing various birthday songs, and more.” Just like humans do, AI would need to understand rich concepts comprised of different types of sensory input.
Looking to the future, the combination of smart glasses and machine learning would enable what’s referred to as “worldscraping” — capturing granular data about the world by turning wearers of smart glasses into roving CCTV cameras. As the practice was described in a report last year from The Guardian: “Every time someone browsed a supermarket, their smart glasses would be recording real-time pricing data, stock levels and browsing habits; every time they opened up a newspaper, their glasses would know which stories they read, which adverts they looked at and which celebrity beach pictures their gaze lingered on.”
This is an extreme outcome and not an avenue of research Facebook says it’s currently exploring. But it does illustrate the potential significance of pairing advanced AI video analysis with smart glasses — which the social network is apparently keen to do.
By comparison, the only use of its new AI video analysis tools that Facebook is currently disclosing is relatively mundane. Along with the announcement of Learning from Videos today, Facebook says it’s deployed a new content recommendation system based on its video work in its TikTok-clone Reels. “Popular videos often consist of the same music set to the same dance moves, but created and acted by different people,” says Facebook. By analyzing the content of videos, Facebook’s AI can suggest similar clips to users.
Such content recommendation algorithms are not without potential problems, though. A recent report from MIT Technology Review highlighted how the social network’s emphasis on growth and user engagement has stopped its AI team from fully addressing how algorithms can spread misinformation and encourage political polarization. As the Technology Review article says: “The [machine learning] models that maximize engagement also favor controversy, misinformation, and extremism.” This creates a conflict between the duties of Facebook’s AI ethics researchers and the company’s credo of maximizing growth.
Facebook isn’t the only big tech company pursuing advanced AI video analysis, nor is it the only one to leverage users’ data to do so. Google, for example, maintains a publicly accessible research dataset containing 8 million curated and partially labeled YouTube videos in order to “help accelerate research on large scale video understanding.” The search giant’s ad operations could similarly benefit from AI that understands the content of videos, even if the end result is simply serving more relevant ads in YouTube.
Facebook, though, thinks it has one particular advantage over its competitors. Not only does it have ample training data, but it’s pushing more and more resources into an AI method known as self-supervised learning.
Usually, when AI models are trained on data, those inputs have be to labeled by humans: tagging objects in pictures or transcribing audio recordings, for example. If you’ve ever solved a CAPTCHA identifying fire hydrants or pedestrian crossing then you’ve likely labeled data that’s helped to train AI. But self-supervised learning does away with the labels, speeding up the training process, and, some researchers believe, resulting in deeper and more meaningful analysis as the AI systems teach themselves to join the dots. Facebook is so optimistic about self-supervised learning it’s called it “the dark matter of intelligence.”
The company says its future work on AI video analysis will focus on semi- and self-supervised learning methods, and that such techniques “have already improved our computer vision and speech recognition systems.” With such an abundance of video content available from Facebook’s 2.8 billion users, skipping the labeling part of AI training certainly makes sense. And if the social network can teach its machine learning models to understand video seamlessly, who knows what they might learn?
PmsProxy, a partnered Twitch streamer who has 147,000 followers, was tired. Tired of streaming Grand Theft Auto roleplay, and of streaming herself playing games more generally — something she’d been doing nearly every day for around six years. “I didn’t just want to sit and play games all day, I realized,” she says when I reach her by Discord. “I want to either tell a story through roleplay or just do something that made it feel fulfilling, and roleplay wasn’t that.” So she decided to make a change: instead of streaming herself playing games, she’d stream herself making things for her business.
That business was leatherworking. Proxy made the jump from full-time game streamer to full-time crafting streamer at the beginning of this year; it was a nerve-wracking but ultimately necessary step. “It’s been unbelievably different in the best way possible,” she says. “My viewers have gone up, my subs have gone up. And I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that my community members are seeing me be happy, right? They’re seeing me do something that I love.” The people who stayed, she says, want to buy her work and learn how she makes it.
Twitch is usually thought of as a place for streaming video games. And while that reputation is deserved — yes, a lot of people stream their gaming on Twitch — the site also has a surprising breadth of channels. Makers & Crafting is one of them; the category was created in 2018, after Twitch renamed “Hobbies & Crafts” to better represent the many pros who streamed in it (in their words). According to Twitch Tracker, a website that logs Twitch statistics, the category averaged 520 viewers in September 2018, the month it was created. As of January 2021, Makers & Crafting was averaging 1,520 viewers, or about three times more.
The people who stream in the category do everything from embroidery to woodworking; it’s mesmerizing to bounce among them. Makers & Crafting is a warm, welcoming category that feels a little intimate. The streams can run long — I mean, they’re making physical goods — but every streamer I’ve seen seems to vibrate at a slightly different frequency than the people who stream on the rest of the site. They’re calmer. Less frenetic. The vibe is aggressively wholesome. In other words: it’s about as close to an oasis as you can get online.
Streaming anything is difficult. In every broadcast you have to be a host, producer, audio engineer, and video technician — all at the same time. Streaming your crafts, however, is harder: making things for an audience is a special kind of difficult, especially if the products you’re making are eventually going to be sold. What’s perhaps more interesting is how learning crafts has changed with the accessibility of the internet. Proxy and another streamer and woodworker I spoke to, WorkedLettuce3 — whose handle was chosen by the Xbox gamertag gods — both learned their crafts from the internet.
“I watched a lot of YouTube videos,” he says. “I just never thought it would be something I would take up. Because, you know, a lot of woodworking YouTubers in particular, they like to flex their shop, they like to flex all the hundreds of thousands of dollars they spent on their tools, right? And, yeah, I mean, that was never gonna be me.” Even so, he found a channel that he says motivated him to be a woodworker — one that emphasized that you didn’t need tons of gear to pick it up as a hobby. “I’m very, very glad I found it because I’ve been loving just messing around woodworking, hanging out with people in the garage like we’ve been doing now,” he says.
Proxy also learned some of the tools of her leatherworking trade from the internet. Her foray into the Makers & Crafting section coincided with the first time she tried her hand at leatherworking. “I started leather crafting January of this year. Like my first time really getting my hands on my own stuff was in January,” she says. “But I spent the last year researching. So starting in 2019 and all through 2020, I did nothing but watch YouTube videos and Instagram videos. I did tons of research.” Proxy says she’s always been gifted in working with her hands. Leatherworking is just the most recent outlet. (She also went to art school.)
Lettuce is in a similar position; before six months ago, he’d never sawn a board in half.
He’d never streamed before, either. His first streaming setup was just streaming directly to Twitch from his phone; these days, he’s got a dedicated PC in his garage, a couple webcams, and the TV from his living room to read chat on. And his chat is important: among his viewers are veteran woodworkers and other crafters, along with people who’ve just stopped by to watch. The woodworkers help him when he’s stuck; he says there are people there who have coached him through his entire woodworking career. That kind of interaction is unique to Twitch, and to the Makers & Crafting section in particular.
Even so, he says he finds woodworking on stream scary sometimes. “Like, before the first time I turned my table saw on, I was terrified. Before I turned my router on for the first time, I was terrified. Before I ran a circular saw for the first time, I was terrified,” he says. And he did fall into some bad habits — like reading chat from his phone while working on things. “My chat would see me reading the chat from my phone. And a couple people in there just like stepped in and they were like, ‘Yo, like, for real. You can’t be doing that.’” He credits chat with keeping him honest.
“No one is coming in to backseat you,” says Proxy. “They’re not like, ‘Oh, you should go here and you should do this. And oh, you didn’t kill my favorite boss.’” Viewers are there to watch someone make something, and maybe learn a little in the process.
Proxy also makes just about everything in her store live on stream. Which she says is intimidating but also rewarding — because viewers (who are also buyers) can see exactly how much labor goes into making what they’ve bought. “They get to see what work is actually being put into this,” she says. “It’s not just, you know, a quick two hours, and it’s done. It’s a grueling two hours. Like everything is hand cut, and hand stitched and glued and stamped.”
Not everyone sells what they make on stream. Another crafter I spoke to, LaserGeekCreations, says that he doesn’t usually create the things that show up in his shop on stream. “Mainly because a lot of the stuff that’s on my Etsy shop is like, quick and easy to make,” he says. “It’s kind of boring to make a lot of the time.” (He assuages this boredom by creating things like a giant wooden dinosaur, which he also destroyed on stream.) LaserGeekCreations also happens to be the streamer who raided Lettuce when he was just starting out — which gave Lettuce his first real start on Twitch.
It’s not all fun and games on Twitch. The larger viewer community can sometimes be brutally toxic to people who don’t fit its notions of who can and can’t be a streamer; recently, Twitch partner Negaoryx lamented, at Twitch’s 2020 Participation Ceremony event, that the chat was targeting presenters with tons of hate speech.
There’s more than 42,000+ viewers watching the Twitch Participation Ceremony on the offical @Twitch channel now. Users in chat are spewing hate speech & harassing the guest streamers. 3 mod names in the chat list but since I’ve been watching, have seen ZERO messages get deleted.
— negaoryx (@negaoryx) January 23, 2021
Makers & Crafting feels different, though. It’s smaller, for one thing. But all the people I’ve spoken to who’ve been involved with the category think it’s a uniquely welcoming space nestled within the larger Twitch community. “It was almost like — it’s gonna sound fucking hilarious — but it was almost like walking into a warm hug,” says Proxy. “It was just like everyone was so welcome.” During her first week in the section, Proxy says she went from getting around 100 viewers to getting more than 500. They were leatherworkers and other crafters; they dropped tips and ideas and support.
Lettuce had a similarly warm experience. “The Makers & Crafting community is — I’m gonna say in my opinion, but I’m pretty sure it’s a fact — that they’re the most welcoming and loving community-minded community I’ve ever seen in my entire life.” Once the pandemic is over, Lettuce says, he’s considering driving from Las Vegas, where he lives, to New Jersey, where his parents are, and visiting his friends from Twitch on the way.
“I don’t think I’ll ever leave Twitch. I mean, live-streaming and the community in general,” he says. “The stream will still be a thing, but I think interpersonal communication and hanging out and, you know, giving someone a firm handshake is my end goal.”
LaserGeekCreations has been streaming crafting for longer than Lettuce and Proxy, and he confirms their assessments of the community. “The makers community is such an amazing community. I think you’ve probably heard that from other people already,” he says. “Because it doesn’t matter what you’re making. We’re all makers, we all like seeing what other people are doing. Everyone’s so supportive of each other.”
That kind of supportive community feeling can be invaluable if you’re trying to finish something. As anyone who’s tried to make anything knows, creating things is hard because going from idea to reality requires a number of steps, which sometimes aren’t particularly obvious. On Twitch, the Makers & Crafting community makes it just a little easier.
As both a software engineer and an avid player of strategy games, chaosparrot struggled to reckon with the damage his work and hobbies had done to his hands. By 2017, the consistent pain of his repetitive stress injuries was bad enough that he could no longer type comfortably or enjoy the games he loved to play. While searching for solutions, he came across a video of someone using speech recognition software to code. He decided to try using the same tech — not for coding, but for playing games.
“I started the process of trying to play the old games that I couldn’t play anymore with sounds instead,” chaosparrot says. The project started in Python, which he used to create a full voice control program that enables him to play games hands-free. And it worked: he was able to reach just one tier below the rank in Starcraft he had attained before his injuries, and he also beat Hollow Knight, a twitchy game that’s likely to frustrate players even with a traditional controller, using just his voice.
Games have slowly gotten more accessible over time, but when features are missing or controls don’t work, the onus falls on disabled players to find their own ways to play. Many disabled players use a combination of adaptive hardware — such as mouth-operated controllers and specially designed joysticks — and various apps to enable features like eye tracking, screen resizing, or voice control. Chaosparrot’s use of voice is just one of the many customizable, bespoke solutions players have turned to.
“That’s like life when you have a disability. Anything that I kind of want, or need, and it’s not available, we have to make it ourselves,” says Kyle Abbate, who runs onehandmostly, a YouTube channel focused on accessibility in games. That might be a cup holder for his wheelchair, attachments for his keyboard and mouse, or the software setups he uses to play games. “A lot of stuff for disabled people is trial by error, and making your own accessible tech, and whatever works for you, and experimenting and trying to find what’s best.”
Chaosparrot’s program, Parrot.Py, was inspired by Talon Voice, a freely available voice recognition software for writing, coding, and theoretically any other computing task. By teaching Parrot.Py specific clicks, hisses, and clucks and associating them with button inputs in a game, chaosparrot is able to vocalize commands — selecting units in Starcraft or attacking and dashing in Hollow Knight — in addition to using eye tracking for movement. He hopes to get it working in a variety of game genres, and has even tested it while playing Among Us, though that involved explaining to friends why he was hissing into his mic on the way to electric.
There are other players who use older, preexisting voice control programs like VoiceAttack and GAVPI as viable alternatives to typical controllers. But regardless of the program, there are still hurdles that come with voice as a control method. Voice controls create a time delay between giving a command and the move being executed in the game, which makes for a more difficult gameplay experience, especially in games that call for fast reaction times.
There’s also more mental labor involved in setting up voice commands before diving into a game. Both VoiceAttack and GAVPI require more tech literacy than just running a game by itself, and Parrot.Py requires at least a basic familiarity with coding. Using any of these programs involves extra steps on top of the existing barriers that come with playing as a disabled person. “It’s gonna be hard to bridge that gap,” says chaosparrot. Like Abbate has done for VoiceAttack, he plans to make videos explaining how to use his program.
Beyond the quirks of setting up voice controls, some games are just more difficult to play than others. A game like Celeste, which requires fast decision-making and movement, presents a challenge, but is more playable thanks to a built-in assist mode that allows for adjustments in speed, stamina, and invincibility. For games without an assist mode, adjusting elements like health or attack damage with a program like Cheat Engine can make the game adapt to the player, meeting them in the middle between what they’re capable of and what the game requires. “I think if you look at the future of accessibility, I think [an assist mode] is a great thing to add, at least to single-player games,” says chaosparrot.
Inclusive design requires time, careful consideration, and a willingness to solicit feedback from people with a variety of disabilities. Developers don’t always have adaptive play styles in mind, and don’t necessarily have the best track record for considering how disabled people might interact with their games, from button-mashing triggering chronic pain flare-ups to flashing lights potentially causing seizures.
Improvements in gaming accessibility have often been the result of disabled people advocating for themselves. Microsoft’s Xbox Adaptive Controller was developed with guidance from advocacy groups like AbleGamers to better address the needs of disabled players. A letter from a disabled player is what pushed Naughty Dog’s team to consider accessibility in their games. They prioritized accessibility in The Last of Us Part IIas a result, and the game was praised for its wide range of customizable options like remappable controls and audio cues for players with low vision.
Those pushes for more accessible features are also found on social media platforms, where disabled people band together to bring awareness to what’s missing in games and what fixes have been made. “The disabled community on social media has been growing and becoming more and more vocal,” says Courtney Craven, founder of Can I Play That, an accessible game review site.
Players continue to advocate for accessibility in games by reaching out to developers and showcasing and sharing the kinds of solutions they use. Chaosparrot’s Parrot.Py is designed to address his needs, but he and other players know that accessibility will never be one-size-fits-all.
“I encourage devs to take a look at their game and their mechanics, and then think about ‘how do we make these accessible,’’’ says Abbate. “And then when you’re making your next game, ‘how can we iterate again, and make those changes, make it even better.’”
So this was a weird one: depending on the browser you’re using, your space bar may not have worked in the YouTube.com search bar for a little while today. Pressing it would make absolutely nothing happen, so your YouTube searches ended up being one long string of words. The bug seemed to be around for an hour, based on when people started sounding off about it on Twitter, but as of 3:50PM ET, the site appeared to be working correctly again on all browsers.
The bug affected the desktop site, but only browsers that aren’tbased on Chrome. Firefox wouldn’t take spaces in Windows, macOS, or even Android if you requested the desktop version of the website. Safari on iPhones worked as normal, but the problems showed up on Safari on iPad — probably because iPads request the desktop site, too. Asking for the mobile version immediately fixed it there, and requesting the desktop site on an iPhone immediately broke spaces.
The good news is that the lack of spaces probably didn’t affect your YouTube experience much — it’s very good at understanding your intent even on long, relatively obscure searches with a bunch of words smashed together.
YouTube’s search algorithm was still able to figure it out.
There was also another, way more annoying bug: if you were trying to watch a video and type in the search bar at the same time, your keystrokes would end up acting as shortcuts. Pressing the space bar wouldn’t do anything in the search bar, but it would pause your video. Your “T” might show up in the search bar, but it also switched my video into theater mode. This issue is also fixed.
Typing in the search bar made many awful things happen on your screen.
YouTube did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but the issue now appears to be fixed. Whew!
Update March 10th, 4:15PM ET: Updated to reflect that the bug appears to have been fixed.
Samsung has just announced an Unpacked event coming up on March 17th, 2021, its second for the year so far. The invitation calls the event “Galaxy Awesome Unpacked.” Between recent A-series leaks and the chaotic, “awesome”-themed promotional video for last year’s models, it seems safe to assume that we’ll see the Galaxy A52 and A72 devices debut.
An entire event dedicated to unveiling midrange devices is a little unusual, but the leaked information we’ve seen thus far has pointed to Samsung taking these phones very seriously. The A52 5G looks like it will receive monthly security updates — something Samsung has tended to reserve for higher-end phones — and spec leaks have indicated we can expect high-refresh rate screens.
If nothing else, we can hope that Samsung will bring the energy from last year’s unusual video to keep the event entertaining. You can watch by tuning in to Samsung’s YouTube channel on March 17th at 10AM ET / 7AM PT. And please accept our apologies for embedding last year’s ad for the A51 below.
Not satisfied with the temperatures of the memory on his GeForce RTX 3090 Founders Edition, a determined YouTuber (CryptoAtHome) replaced the factory thermal pads for aftermarket ones. The results are impressive as he managed to improve the temperatures by up to 25 degress Celsius — even while doing Ethereum mining.
Even though the GeForce RTX 3080 and GeForce RTX 3090 are two of the best graphics cards, their memory chips are notorious for running a bit hot if you stress the GPU long enough. Evidently, heat has been a problem from the beginning. An early investigation into the GeForce RTX 3080 already showed the memory hitting dangerous temperatures that surpassed 100C. In our own tests, the memory inside the GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 peaked at temperatures of 94 degrees Celsius and 104 degrees Celsius, respectively.
Micron rates its GDDR6X chips for operational temperatures up to 95C. Running the memory out of spec during prolonged durations is a recipe for disaster. Cryptocurrency mining takes an even bigger toll on the graphics card and was probably the primary motivation for the YouTuber to swap the thermal pads to improve its thermals.
Before surgery, the YouTuber’s GeForce RTX 3090 Founders Edition was pushing a hash rate up to 82 MH/s mining Ethereum. The performance is a bit underwhelming since the GeForce RTX 3090 can easily reach 100 MH/s, and aftermarket models with better GDDR6X cooling can put hash rates up to 125 MH/s. Even though the YouTuber dropped the memory speed to 18Gbps and cranked the fan speed up to 88%, his GeForce RTX 3090 Founders Edition’s memory was still hitting 110 degrees Celsius.
The YouTuber replaced the factory thermal pads with Thermalright’s Odyssey Thermal Pad 85x45x1.5mm. Admittedly, the thermal pads aren’t the best aftermarket offering that money can buy, as their thermal conductivity rating is only 12.8 W/mk. However, they appear to have done wonders for the memory chips inside the GeForce RTX 3090 Founders Edition.
After replacing the thermal pads, the YouTuber was able to restore the memory speed to 10,577 MHz (21.15 Gbps) and lowered the fan speed to 70% to pump out 100 MH/s. The graphics card’s memory was dancing around the 84C–86C range during an entire day of cryptocurrency mining.
The Thermalright Odyssey Thermal Pad 85x45x1.5mm retails for $14.99 a piece on Amazon. Although the YouTuber bought four of them, he only needed three to completely substitute all the thermal pads on the GeForce RTX 3090 Founders Edition. It’s a pretty good investment no matter which way you look at it. For $30, one could shave off as much as 25C off the memory’s operating temperatures.
The memory’s thermals shouldn’t be as big of a concern if you’re not into cryptocurrency mining. We can’t generalize, but we expect the majority of custom GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 graphics cards on the market to come with better memory cooling solutions than Nvidia’s wacky Founders Edition design. If you suspect that GeForce RTX 3080 or RTX 3090 is suffering from thermal throttling, the latest version of HWiNFO64 now shows the temperature for the GDDR6X memory chips.
The only thing more beautiful than the red cloth stretched across the cover of Sarah Lesure’s handcrafted book is the swirling font filling up the pages inside. Each page is meticulously crafted to feel luxurious, like an expensive tome tucked on a back shelf in a little book shop. Lesure spends hours making sure each book looks unique and regal, but she has to be careful not to use any specific imagery that could land her in trouble.
That’s because the books Lesure crafts contain works of fanfiction, and she’s found an entire community of avid readers looking to turn their unauthorized digital favorites into physical treats.
Nothing about the process is simple. There are “literally hundreds of moments where I could do something wrong and everything falls to shambles,” Lesure, a student who started bookbinding during a gap year in 2019, told The Verge. Her process includes typesetting, redoing the typesetting, doing that again and again until it’s right, printing, folding, sewing, making the cover, and finally putting it all together.
Fanfiction has traditionally been confined to online sites like Archive of Our Own (AO3) and FanFiction.Net, but some of the most prolific artists within the space have found a way to help people enjoy their favorite titles in new ways: binding the stories into physical novels designed to read better and stand out on bookshelves. The crafts have helped bring some of the most popular unofficial stories set in Harry Potter, Star Wars, and other universes onto shelves where they can sit right alongside their authorized counterparts.
Bookbinding fanfiction has seen an uptick in recent months particularly, thanks to TikTok, according to a number of bookbinders The Verge spoke to. And as new fans come across their work, artists have started opening their DMs to commissions.
One of TikTok and Twitter’s most popular fanfiction bookbinders started out by gifting a physical copy of her favorite work to the original author in March 2020. Known for her intricate detailing, Sam, who goes by @omgreylo on Twitter and TikTok, has since created more than 150 books.
“When I actually started, I worked on the bedroom floor with my infant on the bed and nursery rhymes playing on TV,” Sam told The Verge.
Bookbinding started as a way to pass the time in quarantine for many of the crafters The Verge spoke to, letting them learn a new skill and feel connected at a time when the entire world feels isolating. TikTok is crowded with memes about twenty- and thirty-somethings returning to fanfiction, something they haven’t done in years. Salina Li, an Etsy seller who learned about bookbinding from her older sister, said her “whole life has revolved around Harry Potter,” adding that “everything I could think of doing it is related to it.”
To make every book, creators have to decide on an assortment of physical details, like the margin size and how to start a new chapter. They’ll work with customers to figure out what colors and designs they would like to see in the finished product, and which designs they don’t want at all. It’s as much a business and a science as it is an art.
Different creators hate different parts of the process. Sam loathes the literal printer process; watching the pages come out, making sure that everything looks right and the printer doesn’t run out of ink. Lesure hates typesetting. She relied on DIY videos she found scrounging through YouTube, and nearly came close to quitting the first few times because of the difficulty. Graphic design students learn the skill in school, but without a teacher guiding a newcomer to the art form, like Lesure, it can be a daunting and exhausting task.
When Lesure finally finished her first book, it wasn’t long until her business took off. “I handcrafted the first few books just for my friends, and when we tweeted about it, it quickly picked up traction and random people would come up to me and ask if I’d take commissions,” Lesure told The Verge. “It all snowballed to where I am today — 30 books currently in process and orders up to April.”
When selling a book, Lesure and Sam recoup costs for materials and shipping, but neither says they make a profit off their work out of concern for the legalities surrounding fanfiction.
Fanfiction by definition toes the line of copyright law, with advocates arguing that most freely available stories technically fall under “fair use” provisions. For decades, nonprofit groups like the Organization for Transformative Works have spent time defending sites like AO3 from studios, publishers, and other groups that have tried to use copyright laws as a way to have works taken down. But bookbinding poses further issues since there’s usually an exchange of money between two parties.
“There’s virtually no law on whether recouping costs qualifies as commercial or not,” Betsy Rosenblatt, a professor of intellectual property law at the University of California Davis and a member of the Organization for Transformative Works, told The Verge. “And when I say virtually no law, I mean no law. It just hasn’t come up. The reason it doesn’t come up is because if somebody is only recouping costs, they’re unlikely to generate a lawsuit.”
One of Sarah Lesure’s books.Photo by Sarah Lesure
Fan-inspired works can be tricky to market online. Bookbinders and fanfiction writers join other artists who sell unauthorized merchandise and face the threat of takedown notices. Li, a new fanfiction binder who operates an Etsy shop where she sells other artwork, said the legal consequences are rarely world-ending. “I’m just really hoping that they’ll look at me and be like, ‘Gosh, she barely gets anything, it’s fine,’” Li said.
Crafts that were listed for purchase on Li’s Etsy shop have been taken down because of copyright violations, she told The Verge. “It’s one of those guessing games you have to look out for, especially when you’re a small business owner,” Li said. She primarily charges for supplies and shipping of her bound fanfiction, she said, because “it isn’t my work.” She got permission to bind Harry Potter stories from an author named Sonia, but likewise, “Harry Potter isn’t hers either.”
Members of the fanfiction bookbinding community are also aware of another issue that lies just outside their tiny, innocuous world — self-printing shops. Artists like Sam and Lesure have publicly decried people using shops like Lulu or resorting to self-printing tools in stores like Barnes & Noble because of the increased legal risk that comes with it. Sam has heard fanfiction readers excuse using Barnes & Noble to print fanfiction, because “they have permission from the author.”
In those instances, she’ll remind people that “the fanfic author doesn’t have the right to say it’s fine,” trying to educate members of the community that the “material still belongs to Warner Bros., Scholastic, Disney or whatever.” A Barnes & Noble representative told The Verge, “We prohibit and rigorously enforce against the use of Barnes & Noble Press to post or print any content that infringes on copyrighted work.”
“I regularly get sent TikToks of teenagers bragging about illegally receiving their favorite fic from Barnes & Noble, and explaining to people how to do it,” Lesure said. “I love the enthusiasm for the concept of fanfiction as books, how crazy people go over it; it’s absolutely great. But especially on TikTok, the lack of legal understanding is very scary.”
The issue might never truly be solved, considering that what constitutes fair use of copyrighted material is determined on a case-by-case basis. But those fears shouldn’t stop fanfiction writers and bookbinders from creating, Rosenblatt said. Creators should “be aware, but they shouldn’t be scared,” she said.
“They’re engaging in something that’s too important to let fear stop them,” Rosenblatt said. “This kind of self-expression is too important, for finding meaning in life and for self-actualization and for building community, to let fear shut down something that is doing way, way more good than harm.”
Jacob Pustilnik built his first electric bike when he was 17 because he was tired of showing up at school drenched in sweat. Texas is notoriously humid, but Pustilnik only lived a few miles from his school in Houston and was reluctant to abandon his trusty Trek mountain bike. At first, he thought putting a milk crate on the rear rack for his backpack would be enough to eliminate the dreaded back sweat, but it was only a half measure. Eventually he settled on a much more challenging solution: converting his whole bike to run on an electric motor.
“I think I just knew about the idea of an electric bike, but not very much — just that they existed,” he said.
Jacob Pustilnik on his e-bike that he built from a kit.Photo by Mary Kang for The Verge
After mulling it over for a couple of months, Pustilnik did what any enterprising teenager would do when they needed some engineering guidance: he went on YouTube. From there, he found someone online willing to sell him a used $800 conversion kit — essentially a kit to convert a traditional bike into a battery-powered one — at a discount. Over the course of a weekend, he transformed his hardtail mountain bike into a throttle-assisted e-bike capable of speeds of up to 20 mph. He would arrive at school soggy no longer.
Conversion kits have been around for years, but have gained popularity as the number of e-bikes sold around the world has exploded. Also, with more how-tos and tutorials available through platforms like YouTube, many people feel like they can gain the skills they need to convert their bikes on the go. There are a variety of types of kits, from wheel kits, to mid-drive motors, to friction or chain kits. But the outcome is generally the same: transforming your human-powered bicycle into one supercharged with electrons.
Building your own e-bike can be more affordable than buying one, especially with most good e-bikes costing between $1,400 and $3,000. The really dirt-cheap kits can be had for around $100 or more. But it’s not without its pitfalls. Inexpensive kits often beget bikes that are lacking in power and performance. Sourcing and building your own battery can be challenging, especially for anyone without basic electrical and soldering skills. And occasionally you can end up spending way more money than you originally intended.
Photo by Mary Kang for The Verge
Pustilnik said he was motivated to do it himself partly by saving money — most of the e-bikes he was interested in cost over $2,000 — but also by a sense of freedom. “I like being able to tinker with things,” he said. “And to be able to fix stuff myself as opposed to buying expensive OEM [original equipment manufacturer] parts, or have to wait for someone else to fix it.”
For many DIY e-bike enthusiasts, it’s mostly just a hobby. But there’s also a tacit understanding that if they do an amazing job and really nail that conversion, they can earn some clout on social media, maybe start taking orders from other people — family, friends, perhaps even strangers — who want to buy one of their e-bikes, and suddenly they may find themselves at the helm of a multimillion-dollar e-bike empire.
That’s what happened to Mike Radenbaugh, founder and CEO of Seattle’s Rad Power Bikes. Over the last couple of years, Radenbaugh’s company has risen to the top ranks of e-bike makers in the US thanks to its ability to churn out fast, fun, and affordable products. And it all started very similarly to Jacob Pustilnik’s story, with the need to get to school on time.
Mike Radenbaugh on an original Rad Power bike. Photo: Rad Power
Radenbaugh built his first e-bike as a teenager growing up in the rural Northern California town of Garberville, where he and his family lived “sort of off-grid,” he said. He was 16 miles from school, but rather than continue to dump money into an old car that kept breaking down, he opted to build an electric bike using his mountain bike as a foundation.
He spent a lot of time on online forums like Endless Sphere, where e-bike enthusiasts trade tips and talk shop. But he didn’t have a conversion kit to make the transformation easy. Instead he relied on skills he picked up at a local auto body shop to convert a mess of motorcycle parts, moped motors he ordered from Japan, and other odds and ends he had laying around, into a throttle-powered 35-mph e-bike. It was all held together with electrical tape, pipe clamps, bungee cords — and probably a healthy dose of hubris.
“The first one was built just for me,” he said, “and the next ones were built for word-of-mouth sales. I started selling them on Craigslist and I worked my way into the local newspaper with a free advertisement because I think that person running advertising there felt bad trying to charge a 16-year-old.”
And the results were far from perfect. “The parts didn’t fit well, and they didn’t perform well because they were just pulled over off the shelf from other applications,” Radenbaugh recalled. Sensors were getting fried, wires were melting, and the bike was generally falling apart. This reveals a central and uncomfortable truth about DIY e-bikes: a project that is conceived around saving money can sometimes end up costing you way more than if you’d just bought something off-the-shelf.
“You end up spending a lot of money getting to a product that is reliable,” Radenbaugh said, “when you go the DIY route.”
Other e-bike entrepreneurs have discovered this as well. Hong Quan built his first bike in his garage in Palo Alto in the mid-2010s, and from there started his own company, Karmic Bikes. He argues that building your own e-bike as a way to save money can be misguided, especially when you end up with something crappy that defeats the purpose.
“They’ll buy a cheap battery, a cheap motor, and they’ll put it on a cheaper bike,” Quan said. “That’s fine if you want to do that, but you’re not going to get any performance, you’re not going to get any range, you’re not going to get any of the real benefits of having an e-bike.”
For those who aren’t motivated by saving money, the impulse to build their own e-bike seems mostly to stem from a desire to ride faster and farther than most current models allow. YouTube, Reddit, and other forums are bursting with builders bragging about their overpowered e-bikes traveling at motorcycle speeds.
It’s a high wire act, considering the dangers associated with riding a custom-built bike that can match pace with a Ducati. Sure, there are a lot of YouTube views associated with bigger, bolder-looking e-bikes that pack more power than they should. And when you’re building something in your garage, your ability to make the right decisions can be obscured by the amplified voices of online commenters egging you on to build bigger, go faster, and screw the rules.
Until you do it, and immediately regret it. “Never again!” one YouTuber yelped in a video posted in 2017. He could barely be heard above the rushing wind after hitting speeds well in excess of 70 mph on a self-made e-bike he describes as “the most dangerous and unsafe bike ever.”
“Well, it had to be done,” he added. “I wouldn’t be Tony if I did it the usual way!” (Tony, the YouTuber, could not be reached for comment.)
Others are aware of the pitfalls, and are fine with them. Javi Hernandez, a 39-year-old stay-at-home dad who lives in Southern California, has over 19,000 subscribers on YouTube, where he publishes under the handle “Javi’s Boom Tech.” He mostly posts videos about Bluetooth speakers, but lately he’s gotten into building his own e-bikes. His latest, which he calls “Cirkit,” could best be described as an homage to 1970s-era Taco minibikes. The upright handlebars, long banana seat, parallelogram-shaped frame, and Day-Glo green accents are a noticeable contrast to most DIY e-bikes, with their rat’s nest of wires and comically incongruous parts.
One of Javi Hernandez’s Cirkit e-bikes.Photo by Javi Hernandez
Photo by Javi Hernandez
Hernandez says he got help from a friend who he describes as “the Rain Man of e-bikes,” who taught him how to build batteries, controllers, and other necessary parts. The batteries, in particular, were difficult to build from scratch. Carefully placing dozens of 18650 lithium-ion battery cells inside a pack, and then wiring, spot welding, and soldering everything together takes a lot of skill, he said.
“That’s the heart and soul of the bike,” Hernandez said. “If the battery can’t output the power that it’s being requested, then it doesn’t matter what you have, as far as controller and motor.”
In the end, he ended up with a 7,000W motor and a 70-volt battery pack capable of 300 continuous amps. In other words, “a beast,” Hernandez said. Compare that to Rad Power Bikes’ cargo bike, the RadWagon, which has a power rating of 750W and a 48-volt battery pack.
“Long story short, we finished the bike and it went from a top speed of 15, 16 miles an hour to about 45 miles per hour,” Hernandez chuckled. “A little rocket.”
Most e-bike companies stick to the US classification system, which caps speed at 28 mph for a Class 3 bike. But Hernandez says he relishes zooming around Los Angeles on his rule-defying Cirkit bike. Recently, he was stopped at a red light when a motorcycle pulled up alongside. The two exchanged glances, and when the light turned green, Hernandez gunned it.
Javi Hernandez with one of his Cirkit e-bikes.Photo: Javi Hernandez
The front wheel, he recalled, just started squealing like crazy and spewing smoke. The biker burst out laughing. “He wasn’t expecting that from this tiny little bike that looks like a kid should be riding it,” Hernandez said.
But Hernandez wasn’t embarrassed. Far from it, actually. “It’s a total blast.”
When times get tough, modders get modding, and 2020 was no different. Today, the winners of Cooler Master’s Case Mod World Series 2020 modding contest receive their crowns, rewarding some of the most remarkable mods created in a challenging year.
The 2020 contest saw 90 entries from enthusiasts across 23 countries. Mods were equally judged on craftsmanship, aesthetics, functionality and innovation, with judges including Cooler Master, professional modders, sponsors, including MSI and the game Control and media judges, including Tom’s Hardware.
Overall, 12 mods won awards, with the most coveted “Best Of” awards going to 6 builds (Best Tower Mod, Best Scratch Build, Best Innovation and Design, Best Craftsman and Best Art Direction).
You can see the full list of Case Mod World Series 2020 winners here. Below is an inside look at some of the fiercest award winners.
Best Tower of the Year: A.R.E.S. by Explore Modding
Case: Cooler Master Cosmos C700M
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 3700X
Graphics Card: Inno3D iChill Frostbite RTX 2070 Super
We may still be waiting for the hover cars that so many movies and novels have promised, but with Explore Modding’sA.R.E.S. build, the appearance of a floating tower is already here. The modder describes his build as a “story, told in art form.” He drew inspiration for the colors, curves and starry window (made of optic fibers and epoxy resin) from the character Robot from Netflix’s Lost in Space reboot.
Ultimately, A.R.E.S. tells its own story though. And with its base designed to make the tower look like it’s awesomely afloat, that story is told from a world seemingly far off in the future.
Not surprisingly, designing and assembling the base was the hardest part of the mod, Explore Modding told us. It required many parts that were hard to fit together, “due to tight tolerances.”
(Image credit: Explore Modding)
“Even designing it was difficult because I really wanted something that made it look like the case was separated from it and floating above the surface, but that required a lot of trial and error in order to make it stable enough,” Explore Modding told Tom’s Hardware. “In the end, the three acrylic blocks are very sturdy and they’re very transparent, so they even tend to disappear under some light scenarios, creating that awesome effect of floating.”
A.R.E.S.’ hardware panel rotates 180 degrees on the fly, so you can easily swap the build’s look — components on the left or on the right. Cable management located in the back and front allowed for a clean look inside, where the suspended centerpiece boasting all the components steals the show.
(Image credit: Explore Modding)
“I often change the layout on my setups, and I always had the struggle of sacrificing the amazing view of the internal hardware when I had to move the PC to the other side of the desk,” Explore Modding said. “I actually ended up tearing apart my build to make an inverted mod a couple times for this reason. … So this PC can be put wherever you want and still show the same side every time.”
Maintenance is also a bit easier. Just undo a couple screws and turn the panel to access your components. The rotating panel also means you don’t have to tilt the entire case to bleed air from the loop.
Best Scratch of the Year: Ikigai by Nick Falzone Design
(Image credit: Nick Falzone Design)
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5600X
Graphics Card: MSI Radeon 5700 Gaming X
Motherboard: MSI B550I Gaming Edge WiFi
RAM: G. Skill Ripjaws V DDR4-3600 (32GB)
SSD: WD Black SN750
Cooling: Alphacool Laing DDC, Alphacool GPU waterblock and radiator, Optimus CPU block, EKWB fittings, Cooler Master SF360R fans
Power Supply: Cooler Master V650 SFX
Nick Falzone Design’s mod Ikiagi is named after the Japanese word for, as he put it, “one’s personal passions, beliefs, values and vocation.” The Japanese concept about finding your life’s purpose has also recently picked up Western attention and led the modder to create a sensible design with both modern and traditional Japanese woodworking techniques.
Nick Falzone Design, an American modder, has been working with wood since childhood and grew to enjoy the Japanese aesthetic, including the “overall timeless and modern design.” In fact, the modder’s first PC case had mini shoji doors.
“At the time, YouTube was not around, so I read books about Japanese architecture and Japanese joinery. … I’d always wanted to make the hemp leaf pattern that I did in Ikigai,” the modder told Tom’s Hardware
(Image credit: Nick Falzone Design)
Ikigai incorporates “traditionally made Japanese Kumiko designs” from unfinished Sitka Spruce contrasting with a Wenge wood outer shell complete with hand-sawn dovetails. The inside is mostly acrylic and aluminum with Wenge added for accent pieces.
To keep Ikigai cool, Nick Falzone Design crafted a distribution plate that also serves as the build’s pump top and reservoir, while keeping most of the cables out of view.
The biggest challenge, however, came in maintaining Nick Falzone Design’s vision of a Mini-ITX build. Keeping up with the small form factor trend is great, but carefully constructing the watercooling and wiring in a build that’s under 20 liters is no small task.
(Image credit: Nick Falzone Design)
“I made three full-scale models of the main case and many more models of the interior to maximize each component and make everything work efficiently,” Nick Falzon Design said.
Best Craftsmanship: Cyberpunk 2077 – Deconstruction by AK Mod
CPU: Intel Core I9-10900K
Graphics Card: Aorus GeForce RTX 3080 Master
Motherboard: Aorus Z490 Xtreme
RAM: Aorus RGB Memory DDR4-3200 (4x 8GB)
SSD: Gigabyte NVMe SSD M.2 2280 (1TB)
Cooling: Bitspower fittings, Premium Summit M Mystic Black Metal Edition CPU block, D5 Vario motor, Leviathan XF 120 4xG1/4″ radiator, Water Tank Z-Multi 50 V2 and Bitspower Touchaqua in-line filter, digital thermal sensor, digital RGB multi-function controller, PWM fan multi-function hub, Cooler Master MasterFan SF120M, AlphaCool Eiszapfen laser fitting with 4-pin molex
Power Supply: Aorus P850W 80+ Gold Modular
With Cyberpunk 2077 making splashes of all types in 2020, it wasn’t surprising to see a Cyberpunk-inspired mod. More surprising are the undeniable intricacies, craftsmanship and expertise boasted in this showstopping mod that looked unlike any other entry, (and yes, we looked at all 90).
The mod embodies Mantis Blades being repaired. AK Mod did a whole lot of 3D printing, as well as CNC milling and research into unique parts, like military aviation connectors, a vacuum fluorescent (VFD) display and a light bar — to bring the concept to life.
(Image credit: AK Mod)
Of course, 3D printing Mantis Blades calls for some patience. AK Mod separated the blades’ parts into over 90 fdm and dlp files but had to redesign due to construction failure.
“In the original design, inner metal structure frame and outer arm were separated. The outcome of the first design was too thin. The finger parts are difficult to assemble, and the weight bearing for the wrist part was not as expected, so we had to improve the design and print the outcome all over again,” AK Mod told Tom’s Hardware.
(Image credit: AK Mod)
Other techniques used to make Cyberpunk 2077 – Deconstruction include welding, digital processing lathing, UV printing and laser engraving and cutting. Hand-made parts were also sanded, soil filled, spray painted and given an aged treatment.
(Image credit: AK Mod)
AK Mod also included an actionable ring scanning instrument to “simulate the Mantis Blades being scanned as a weapon,” AK Mod said. Red LEDs add authenticity as the blades move horizontally.
Best Innovation and Design: Spirit of Motion by Maximum Bubble Mods
(Image credit: Maximum Bubble Mods)
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600
Graphics Card: Nvidia RTX 2080 Founder’s Edition
Motherboard: MSI B450M Pro-M2
RAM: G.Skill TridentZ – 3,600 MHz (16GB)
SSD: Samsung 970 EVO (500GB)
Cooling: Corsair Hydro H115i Pro, Cooler Master MasterFan Pro Air Pressure RGB
Power Supply: EVGA SuperNOVA 750 G5
While some of this year’s winning mods look straight from the future, Spirit of Motion opts for a retro vibe. Building the mod for his father, Maximum Bubble Mods’ Spirit in Motion goes for a classic car theme, incorporating an “Art Deco era front car grille,” as the modder describes it, topped off with delicious Candy Apple Red paint.
That custom grille not only looks good but opens up to reveal the PC’s components. Hand-building the aluminum grille took “tens of hours, hard work and many processes,” Maximum Bubble Mods told us.
(Image credit: Maximum Bubble Mods)
Further earning the Innovation & Design title, Maximum Bubble Mods inverted and mirrored the motherboard and vertically mounted the graphics card to keep all the I/O as low as possible.
“It was all done to keep the PC from getting excessively large and to keep the I/O below the frame that my hinge would mount to,” Maximum Bubble Mods explained.
Perhaps the best part is that Spirit In Motion is now the modder’s father’s best gaming PC (you can even watch him receive the mod on this YouTube video).
“The last time we talked, he was on a Civilization kick and sounding like he was loving the PC, so I’m happy,” Maximum Bubble Mods said.
As you may have heard one or two times, we’re now roughly a year into COVID and pandemic lockdown life. To fill the void in our lives that was once occupied by social gatherings, visiting family, and breathing indoor air freely, many of us have turned to new hobbies and habits. Some of them are even healthy!
Taking a daily or, if I’m being honest, semi-daily walk is a lockdown habit that has seen me through These Unprecedented Times. I’m not alone, either — without gyms or really anywhere else to go at all, lots of us have embraced (or at times, endured) a daily walk around the neighborhood.
To be sure, it’s not always easy. I got tired of walking by the same houses and the same pieces of fossilized trash about six months in. It rains a lot where I live and that can turn an otherwise pleasant walk into a real bummer. Other days, the motivation just isn’t there and the mailbox is as far as I get. But a few tricks along the way have helped me and fellow Verge staffers stay committed to the walk ritual. Here are some techniques to keep your pandemic walk routine fresh and the apps that can help you put them into practice.
Find a new route
Footpath helps you map out new routes and gives you key information like elevation change along the way.
This year I’ve embraced the life-changing magic of hauling myself out of my own neighborhood and going on a walk somewhere else. It feels counterproductive driving somewhere to take a walk, but it really does help shake things up when I’m burned out on my usual route.
AllTrails is an app popular with hikers, but it’s also great for finding nearby parks and trails you may not know about, whether you’re in an urban spot or farther from the city. There’s also an active community who leave helpful tips, like whether the restrooms are a horror show or if the parking lot is a hotspot for break-ins. All of its basic features are available in the free version.
Footpath is another good tool to help identify a new route, whether it’s close to home or somewhere unfamiliar. Use the app’s detailed street map to draw roughly where you’d like to go; the app will snap your route to the nearest streets and pathways. Footpath gives you important details about the route like mileage, elevation gain / loss along the way, and even a time estimate that factors in hills so you know what you’re getting into. You can trace out the full route or draw a path to a destination you’d like to reach and the app can create a loop route back to your starting point.
The free version will help you brainstorm some new walks, but more advanced features like turn-by-turn navigation — iPhone only for now but coming to Android soon — require an Elite subscription ($23.49 annually). Alternatively, you can add Elite features to individual saved routes for a one-time fee of $1.99 each.
Make it mindful
Any therapist or Silicon Valley CEO will tell you about the benefits of meditation. My brain is too noisy for a traditional sitting-and-breathing meditation, but I find walking meditations a lot easier to get into. Calm and Headspace (each is $69 for an annual subscription) offer walking meditations of various lengths; the ones offered by Headspace are tailored to more specific circumstances, like walking in a city or just back and forth at home. There are also plenty of free options if you search YouTube or your streaming music service of choice.
Find something to tune into
Time to Walk is an Apple Fitness Plus feature.Image: Apple
Finding a bite-sized podcast to listen to during walk time is a nice bonus incentive to take a break and head out the door. NPR’s Short Wave is a quick ten-ish minutes with episodes every weekday. One of my Verge colleagues uses her walk to catch up on Gamertag Radio. Or check out an audio book from your local library with the Libby app to make walk time double up as your reading time. And for something a little more freeform, use the time to listen in on a conversation on Clubhouse or Twitter Spaces.
If you’re an Apple Fitness Plus subscriber, Time to Walk is a great option. Featured celebrities like Dolly Parton share stories, recorded as they walk in places that are meaningful to them. It’s a nice, reflective experience with a diverse range of hosts. You will need a subscription to Apple’s $79 / year fitness service and an Apple Watch, so it’s more likely to be an option if you’re already invested in those things.
Gamify it
Seek helps you identify local animals and plant life, rewarding you with badges as you observe more species.
It works on kids and it works on adults: when all else fails, turn it into a game. Tracking walks on MapMyRun or Strava can give you that extra sense of accountability and accomplishment when you get back home and tap the “finish” button. It’s a neat little trick that works on my lizard brain.
Or, do as another of my Verge colleagues does and take note of local critters and plant life with the Seek app. It uses your phone’s camera to identify plants, birds, and other kinds of fauna. Best of all, it will keep track of species you’ve indentified and award badges as you identify more. Badges!
Of course, that’s just the real-life version of the classic catch ‘em all game. Another Verge staffer uses that oldie but goodie Pokémon Go to keep her neighborhood walks interesting. If you missed its rise in popularity the first time around, here’s the gist: several years ago, Pokémon Go tricked a bunch of us into going outside to look for AR characters in real-life locations. Once you find them, you can capture them by flinging virtual pokéballs at them on your phone screen. Keep it casual and just see how many different pokémon you encounter and capture on your walk route, or seek out rarer pokémon more aggressively. It’s your world.
MSI’s new RTX 3060 Gaming X Trio is one of the coolest, yet strangest, Nvidia graphics cards we’ve ever seen. As discussed by YouTube channel BPS Customs, the card comes equipped with an RTX 3080 cooler. That allows this RTX 3060 to reach the lowest temperatures we’ve seen out of any factory-built Nvidia GPU in a very long time.
Guru3D reports that the Gaming X Trio features a 1320Mhz Base Clock and a 1852MHz Boost frequency. (The base clock appears incorrect, as that’s the reference base clock, but perhaps Nvidia changed the way it handles base clocks.) The more important boost clock nets you an additional 72MHz overclock relative to the reference card, which still seems tame when looking at the Gaming X Trio cooler. By way of comparison, the Asus ROG Strix OC variant features a 1882MHz boost clock, plus a higher power limit.
There are benefits to going with modest specs and a massive cooler, of course.
(Image credit: YouTube)
With its beefy triple-fan cooler, BPS Customs reports a peak temperature of just 47C with the 3060 Gaming X Trio, and a fan speed of just 48%, all while running Cyberpunk 2077 at 4K resolution for over an hour. Even if other games or settings reach slightly higher temperatures, that’s still a phenomenal result.
With GPU Boost 4.0 working in the background, average clock speeds hovered in the 1900Mhz range. Meanwhile, average power consumption was just 166W. That does raise the question of why MSI bothered to include dual 8-pin power connectors, which like the cooler seem like extreme overkill. This RTX 3060 looks like it could really use a much higher power limit like its Asus competitor.
Unfortunately, BPS Customs did not test any overclocking on the card whatsoever. Modern Nvidia GPUs scale very well when you keep temps very low, so we’d expect very good overclocking performance out of this card. That’s assuming the restrictive power limit doesn’t get in the way.
(Image credit: YouTube)
Regarding actual performance, BPS Customs compared the Gaming X Trio to the older RTX 2060 Super and RTX 1650 Super. On average the RTX 2060 Super was just 3-4% slower than the MSI RTX 3060. That’s similar to what we saw in our RTX 3060 review, and suggests relatively unimpressive stock performance. But those thermals make up for some of that. But then there’s the price.
At $519 MSRP (yeah that’s right: MSRP), the RTX 3060 Gaming X Trio is absurdly expensive. We’ll have to see what actual street prices look like, and whether you can find one available for purchase. We all know that GPU prices are fantasy land right now, but that MSRP seems impossible to recommend under any normal circumstances.
According to MSI, the MSRP was supposed to be much lower, but due to issues relating to tariffs in the United States, MSI wasn’t able to price it lower than $519. That’s a bit strange considering plenty of other AIB partners have RTX 3060’s theoretically priced right next to Nvidia’s reference $329 price point.
Obviously, the significantly larger than normal cooler and fans are part of the cost. We’ve seen retailers selling RTX 3060 12GB cards for over $600 as well — and selling out at those prices. But RTX 3060 Ti cards easily beat RTX 3060 in performance, due to the latter’s big deficits in bandwidth and GPU core counts. You’re far better off getting one of those.
Again, these pricing shenanigans don’t really matter when nothing’s in stock and graphics card prices are way overinflated anyway. We’re used to seeing diminishing returns on factory overclocked cards as well. Sadly, overkill cooling can’t compensate for excessive pricing, and we’d look for a better balance between price and performance — even if that means waiting many months for prices to come down and availability to improve.
Modder and YouTuber “VIK-on” completed his project on modifying a Palit RTX 3070 with 16GB of video memory, doubling the card’s VRAM capacity from its original 8GB specification. In his video detailing the mod, VIK-on shows us the installation process of the memory modules, and his experiences using the card.
This isn’t the first time this has happened. We’ve previously covered VIK-on’s memory mod on an RTX 2070, where he upgrades that card from 8GB to 16GB of memory with some success. Things seem to have gone better with the 3070 this round.
Installation Process
(Image credit: YouTube)
VIK-on’s work is no easy process, so don’t expect to have a good experience duplicating his mod back at home with your own card. Especially if you lack the proper equipment.
VIK-on first takes the cooler off the RTX 3070, then applies a heat gun to the card’s VRAM modules and starts increases the temperature to the point where he can pull the modules off the card with little to no resistance.
Next, VIK-on has to change what is known as “straps” on the PCB itself. Basically, these straps are little resistors that need to be changed (re-soldered) depending on the memory module in use, whether that be an 8Gb or a 16Gb chip, or a memory chip from a specific memory maker, like Hynix, Samsung, or Micron.
Finally, he lubricates the PCB points where the VRAM will be installed, then installs the VRAM by heating up the modules when placed on the 3070’s PCB.
Like with the RTX 2070 he modified, the 3070 POSTed just fine, and GPU-Z reveals that the full-fat 16GB of memory is indeed visible and usable to the card.
(Image credit: YouTube)
Driver Problems and a Workaround
Unfortunately, VIK-on ran into what seems to be a driver limitation with the RTX 3070, as the card was very unstable in any 3D application. However, he managed to fix the issue by going into EVGA’s Precision X software and forcing the card to run at its normal frequencies and prevent it from underclocking and undervolting to save power.
Strangely enough, this fix completely resolved any crashing in 3D applications, and the card was fully operational.
Perhaps this bug is a countermeasure from Nvidia to prevent AIB partners from selling 16GB models, since that SKU technically isn’t supposed to exist. More likely, the firmware and drivers simply aren’t tuned to work properly with the different memory configuration. This proves the RTX 3070 core (GA104) can support a 16GB configuration, but this hardware hack isn’t the same as official support from Nvidia.
Hints of a Future RTX 3070 Ti?
A 16GB RTX 3070 would be an interesting configuration to see out in the wild. We’re already seeing AAA games at 4K resolutions reaching the 8GB frame buffer limit, particularly with Ray-Tracing enabled. The 16GB frame buffer could come in handy a few years down the road as games become more and more demanding.
But there’s also the cost, especially during a time where we have a massive VRAM shortage. A 16GB model could be more expensive than it’s worth for most consumers. Presumably, this is why Nvidia dunked the 16GB route and stuck with 8GB of VRAM for the RTX 3070. Rumors of a future 16GB RTX 3070 Ti persist, however, and such a card would make mods like this unnecessary.
For now, it’s cool to see a fully functioning RTX 3070 with double the VRAM. Never underestimate the power of modders.
Perseverance, the car-sized rover NASA landed on Mars last month, has taken its first spin on the rocky surface of Jezero Crater, NASA announced today. The rover’s six wheels drove about 21 feet to carry out a key mobility test on Thursday, as engineers back on Earth prepare to execute the mission’s core science objectives.
The rover’s six aluminum wheels left tracks on the Martian dirt — as captured by one of its on-board cameras — after driving straight for 13 feet, then turning around to back up 8 feet. Anais Zarifian, Perseverance’s mobility testbed engineer, told reporters it went “incredibly well” and performed better than it did during pre-launch tests on Earth.
An animation showing Perseverance’s first drive on Mars.Image: NASA/JPL
“I don’t think I’ve ever been happier to see wheel tracks — and I’ve seen a lot of them,” she says. “This is just a huge milestone for the mission and the mobility team. We’ve driven on Earth, but driving on Mars is really the ultimate goal.”
Though short and slow, the drive demonstration gave engineers refreshing confidence that NASA’s $2.4 billion rover is ready to travel some 656 feet over the next two years to analyze rocks and scoop up coveted Martian soil samples for a future return mission. “This was just so amazing to see last night. We’re really happy about this,” says Robert Hogg, Perseverance deputy mission manager.
Like its sister rover Curiosity, Perseverance’s top speed is 0.1 miles per hour, “so not very fast,” Zarifian says. It uses a “bogie” suspension system that can climb over rocks as big as its own wheels, about 20 inches in diameter, while keeping its main body level.
But landing a wheeled robot on Mars isn’t about speed. With an improved computer for avoiding obstacles and sand pits, “we’ll have less time planning drives and down time, and more time to do science,” Zarifian says.
An elevated slab of land that Scientists say is a junction where ancient rivers once flowed into Jezero, a dried up lake bed.Image: NASA/JPL
Since landing on February 18th, Perseverance has beamed back thousands of images from most of its 19 on-board cameras, including a frame released Friday showing Jezero’s Delta, a target site for the rover to drive toward in the near future. Scientists say the elevated landform, seen surrounded by an obstacle course of rocks and sand pits, is a junction between an ancient dried-out river and the lake that Jezero used to be 3.5 billion years ago.
Mission teams at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California are mulling different paths for Perseverance’s trek to the delta, aiming to settle on one in the coming weeks that is “most efficient, safest, and most scientifically interesting,” says Katie Stack Morgan, the mission’s deputy project scientist.
NASA released Perseverance’s first high-resolution panorama this week captured by the rover’s Mastcam-Z camera. The mosaic’s 79 images were taken on the Martian afternoon of February 22nd, and one YouTube user edited it into a 4K video that slowly pans across Jezero’s horizon.
The rocks appearing in Perseverance’s new images “were likely deposited by rivers flowing into the ancient lake Jezero,” Morgan says, adding that scientists are working to understand the rock’s origin.
Perseverance launched from Florida last summer for a seven-month trek to the Red Planet, exploiting a two-month window of time when Earth and Mars align closely in their orbits around the Sun once every two years. 293 million miles later, it survived a blazing fast, seven-minute plunge through the Martian atmosphere last month and carried out an extremely complex landing at Jezero Crater, a dried up lake bed that scientists hope could hold signs of microbial life fossilized from billions of years ago.
The rover’s mission team memorialized the rover’s landing site at Jezero by naming it after Octavia E. Butler, the late science fiction author and the first Black woman to win a Hugo Award and Nebula Award.
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