Building the smart home of your dreams? You may want to check out Steve’s Siri-controlled garage door management system from Steve Does Stuff on YouTube. It uses a Raspberry Pi integrated with Siri support to check the status of and control up to three individual garage doors.
Users can interact with a custom interface hosted on a Flask-based web server. The dashboard offers various control options as well as log information with usage history for each door.
You’ll need a Raspberry Pi Zero W for this project as Wi-Fi support is absolutely critical to the system design. All of the information needs to be accessible through a network connection to provide the web-based support. It also uses a 4-channel relay, magnetic reed switch, and a hammer header for the Pi.
(Image credit: Steve Does Stuff!)
Because the dashboard runs on a Flask server, it can be accessed from a computer, smartphone, tablet or even a smartwatch. The system can accept input from and output data using Siri as an interface.
Visit the project Github page for detailed steps on how the project works and be sure to check out our list of best Raspberry Pi projects for more awesome creations from the Pi community.
Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa invited the public on Tuesday to apply for a spot on SpaceX’s Starship in his private mission around the Moon, reaching out to a “wider, more diverse audience” two years after announcing he’d only ride with a select group of artists. The trip is slated for 2023, but that date might not hold.
“I want people from all kinds of backgrounds to join,” Maezawa said in a video posted Tuesday afternoon, when the contest’s application went live. “It will be 10 to 12 people in all, but I will be inviting 8 people to come along on the ride.”
Maezawa, the founder of Japan’s largest online fashion retailer, is worth about $2 billion. He was revealed as Starship’s first signed passenger back in 2018 during an event with CEO Elon Musk at SpaceX’s California headquarters. At the event, Maezawa, an avid art collector, announced his Dear Moon Project, which aimed to bring “six to eight artists from around the world” to join him in a roughly six-day lunar flyby mission sometime in 2023.
“These artists will be asked to create something after they return to Earth, and these masterpieces will inspire the dreamer within all of us,” Maezawa said at the time.
In a YouTube video posted on Tuesday, Maezawa said that plan “has since evolved,” adding that “maybe every single person is doing something creative could be called an artist.”
Now, anyone who meets two criteria could get picked for the ride: Those who “can push its envelope to help other people and greater society in some way” and are “willing to support other crew members who share similar aspirations.”
Updates on the project have been scant over the past two years. In January 2020, Maezawa launched a bizarre campaign to search for a “female partner” who would accompany him on his trip around the Moon. A website for the contest received 27,722 applications, and Japanese streaming service AbemaTV was set to document the mission in a reality TV show called “Full Moon Lovers.” Weeks later, the show was canceled, and Maezawa called off his search due to “personal reasons,” he tweeted, apologizing to the AbemaTV crew and all of the applicants.
Starship is SpaceX’s next-generation, fully reusable Mars rocket system designed to ferry humans and up to 100 tons of cargo on future missions into deep space. The company has been rapidly testing early iterations of the rocket in Boca Chica, Texas. Two recent high-altitude flight tests launched and flew successfully, but both ended in fiery explosions on landing attempts. Under a rigorous and sometimes bumpy development timeline, Musk and SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell have said Starship’s first orbital flight could come at the end of 2021.
SpaceX’s other crew vehicle, Crew Dragon, is already in its operational phase and is racking up future flights with private astronauts and tourists. The acorn-shaped capsule flew its first two crews of astronauts to the International Space Station last year under NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. The private astronaut missions lined up include a flight to the space station planned for early next year carrying real estate investors and philanthropists, and an “all-civilian” charity-focused mission announced last month that’s slated for launch by year’s end.
Hulu has fully reenabled picture-in-picture support (PiP) on iOS, MacRumors reports, which means half-watching network TV is once again possible for Hulu subscribers on iPhone and iPad devices. Hulu joins a collection of major streaming services that support the feature on iOS, leaving YouTube as the major exception.
PiP for iPhones was enabled for Hulu around iOS 14’s original release, but it was later disabled to “work on a few updates to provide the best experience for our viewers,” Hulu said. Now that the feature is back, users can enable PiP mode by starting a show or movie and touching the PiP button to pop the video into a resizable, floating player.
The picture-in-picture button inside Hulu’s app.Image: Hulu
Hulu joins services like Disney Plus, Apple TV Plus, Netflix, Amazon Prime, and HBO Max in supporting PiP. All of those services now either feature a dedicated PiP button like Hulu or default to picture-in-picture if you swipe to the home screen while a video is playing.
YouTube remains the odd one out. Picture-in-picture is not allowed in Google’s official YouTube app for iOS. Paying for YouTube Premium enables background play, but that only extends to audio on iOS. Google has also periodically disabled and reenabled PiP support for the web version of YouTube on iOS. As of October 2020, PiP was possible again, though it doesn’t appear to work as of today. Right now, only iPhones running the iOS 14.5 beta can do PiP on the web version of YouTube, according to MacRumors.
If you’re curious how to get PiP set up on your own device, check out The Verge’s guide.
Someone gets their COVID-19 vaccine at a site in Los Angeles specifically for teachers.
The shots might help people with chronic symptoms
Daniel Griffin wasn’t sure what to expect when his patients with chronic COVID-19 symptoms started getting vaccinated. There was some concern that the shots might make things worseby triggering the immune system. Luckily, the opposite seemed to be true.
“I started getting texts and calls from some of my colleagues saying hey, are your patients with long COVID reporting that they’re feeling better after the vaccine?” says Griffin, an infectious diseases clinician and researcher at Columbia University. When he started talking with patients, he saw that they were. “It’s not 100 percent, but it does seem like to be around a third,” he says.
Early reports from Griffin and others hint that people with persistent symptoms may improve after getting vaccinated. Information is still limited, and the data is largely anecdotal — but if the pattern holds, it could help researchers understand more about why symptoms of COVID-19 persist in some people, and offer a path to relief.
Many of Griffin’s patients who improved had significant side effects after their first shot of either the Moderna or Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine. That’s common in people who’ve had COVID-19 before — they already have some level of antibodies, so the first shot acts more like a second booster. Then, his patients with chronic symptoms started to report that their sense of smell was improving or that they weren’t as fatigued. “For some of them it was short lived. But for a chunk, it actually persisted — they went ahead, got their second shot out, and are saying, wow, they really feel like there’s light at the end of the tunnel,” Griffin says.
A number of people who catch COVID-19 experience symptoms — like fatigue, shortness of breath, or loss of smell — months after their initial illness. For some, those symptoms are debilitating. Many people who got sick during the first wave of the pandemic a year ago still aren’t fully recovered. Doctors like Griffin are learning more about what’s being called “long COVID,” but answers are still limited. Any hint of a path toward relief “would be nothing short of a miracle,” says Diana Berrent, founder of the COVID-19 survivors and long-haulers group Survivor Corps.
Some patient surveys are trying to get an early read on how widespread improvement is. Director Gez Medinger, who covers long COVID on his YouTube channel, surveyed nearly 500 people in various long-hauler support groups on Facebook. Around a third of people surveyed said that they felt slightly or entirely better when they were at least two weeks out from vaccination.
Dozens of people who responded to a poll in the Facebook group for Survivor Corps said that their symptoms improved slightly or went away almost completely. “We were really concerned that people were going to have bad reaction. It never occurred to us that they would actually improve,” Berrent says. Another survivors group, Patient-Led Research, is also surveying people with long COVID who have been vaccinated.
There are limitations to these types of surveys — they’re small, and they’re limited to people who seek out and participate in support groups. They can’t prove that the vaccine was what led to any symptom improvement. But they can point researchers toward useful research questions.
There are plausible biological reasons vaccination could help people with long COVID, says Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University. Scientists still don’t know for sure why some people have chronic symptoms, but one theory is that the virus or fragments of the virus stick around in their body. They’re not contagious, but the leftovers continue to irritate the immune system. Vaccination could clear those out. “Potentially, those remnants are removed because you’re generating a lot of antibodies,” Iwasaki told The Verge.
Another theory is that, for some people, COVID-19 triggers long-lasting changes in the immune system, and it could turn on healthy cells and tissues. In that case, the vaccine might help by giving a jolt to the immune system. “It can reset some of those existing responses,” Iwasaki says. In that case, symptom improvement would probably be short-lived and only last as long as the vaccine’s kick does.
There’s a lot more to learn about the relationship between long COVID and vaccines. It’ll take more and more rigorous, survey data to understand exactly what portion of people feel better after they get vaccinated. There are studies underway that monitor certain inflammatory proteins in the blood of people with chronic symptoms, and researchers could compare levels in people who are and aren’t vaccinated, Griffin says.
Research should also check if one type of vaccine is more effective at reducing chronic symptoms than the others. Even though Moderna, Pfizer / BioNTech, and Johnson & Johnson vaccines work equally well at preventing severe infection, they might vary in how well they could help people with long COVID. “Once we know that, we can recommend among COVID people to get different vaccines,” Iwasaki says.
That data would also help clarify the reasons people have chronic symptoms. If a significant number of people have long-term improvement after they get vaccinated, Iwasaki says she’d lean toward the viral remnants theory. “For that, once you get rid of the virus, that’s it — you don’t suffer from this anymore.” She notes, though, that everyone has different experiences with the disease. “It’s not a one size fits all.”
Berrent still thinks it’s too early to say for sure how much vaccines can actually help people with long COVID. “I think this is all very interesting,” she says. “I feel like we’re still gathering data here.” It is encouraging, though, to see that they aren’t having bad reactions to the vaccine, and any minor improvement is exciting.
The early reports are a good push for people with chronic COVID-19 symptoms to get vaccinated, Griffin says. “It doesn’t look harmful, and it may be therapeutic. I think it’s encouraging for people with long COVID to get signed up as soon as they can.”
Logan and Jake Paul moved to Los Angeles in 2014, at the height of Vine’s heyday, and not long after found themselves crammed into an apartment at 1600 Vine Road with other young creators hoping to make it big in America’s entertainment epicenter. Over the next few years, they became world-renowned celebrities (often for the wrong reasons), moved into gigantic mansions, and threw the types of obnoxious parties high school kids worshipped and neighbors dreaded. Now, years after they both moved into their own mansions in the wealthiest part of the city, the brothers have independently decided to leave the place they’ve called home.
“I think I got the bug that’s bit everyone leaving LA,” Logan Paul said on his podcast, Impaulsive, in February. “It’s the closing of one chapter and the beginning of a new one. There’s a lot of senior vibes around the house lately.”
They’re not the only ones, either.
YouTube is full of videos posted over the last several months of creators deciding to leave Los Angeles. Some are going back to cities and towns they grew up in to be closer to family. Others, like Logan, are finding entirely new places to live, like Puerto Rico. (Jake has yet to announce where he’s moving.) The exodus is similar to what’s happening in the tech sector, which is seeing employees at companies like Google, Twitter, and Facebook move away from San Francisco to set up life elsewhere. Even YouTubers have found that, without a daily routine and places to be, there’s no reason to stay in one of the most expensive cities in the world.
“We came here on our visa a year-and-a-half ago,” Jasmine Saini, a YouTuber who moved to Los Angeles from Toronto with her husband, told The Verge. “The first six months were great. Then the pandemic happened. We just realized there’s literally no point of us being here; we can’t go anywhere, we can’t meet with anybody, we can’t network.”
Actors, directors, and writers have called Hollywood home for close to a century. But since the early 2010s, online creators have turned the city into their playground. Around 2014, the popularity of the shortform video app Vine helped convince a few future superstars to move to Los Angeles and start working with one another. Jake and Logan Paul (Ohio), David Dobrik (Chicago), Liza Koshy (Houston), Jenna Marbles (upstate New York), and other familiar names came together to collaborate and use the city to carve out their own space within the entertainment capital of the world. Certain areas, like the spot around Sunset and Vine — once referred to as Radio Row — attracted a sea of creators all hoping to become superstars.
By 2017 and 2018, creators weren’t just roaming down the streets of Los Angeles with Sony and Canon cameras attached to their hands; they were buying mansions and moving other personalities into their homes. Clout Gang, Team 10, and the Vlog Squad all started turning their lives in Los Angeles into an ongoing show for the internet to watch. More people moved to Los Angeles trying to ride the wave of internet stardom that people like the Paul brothers found just a couple of years prior. Then came TikTok, and hype houses became a staple. The messaging was clear: to become a superstar creator, chances are, you’d have to move to LA.
But over the past year, that’s changed. The pandemic has limited creators’ ability to collaborate, and going out to different locations to film — like a giant water park or hanging out with wild animals, anything that can be turned into an adventure — can be difficult. Creators say it’s removed their key reason to stay.
“It closed down any opportunity to work in LA, it changed the social life of LA, which is so much of what you pay for, and it’s very expensive to live in LA,” Brian Redmon, a YouTuber who originally moved to LA for acting, said in a November 2020 video. “I couldn’t hang out with my friends and so many of my friends were leaving LA.”
The feeling among some LA-based creators is similar to what many workers in the tech sector have been saying about why they’re leaving San Francisco for a remote-first life. Between March and November 2020, more than 80,000 people left San Francisco, according to SFCiti. That’s a 79 percent increase compared to the same period in the year prior. If there’s no office to go to every day, and working remotely works just as well, why spend the cash on expensive living arrangements away from family and friends?
Not everyone feels the same. James Rath was already contemplating leaving Los Angeles before the pandemic started and ultimately decided to move back home to be closer to family. But once everything is back to normal, he’s considering moving to New York City, which he thinks will be more accessible as a legally blind person. Ultimately, he still wants to be in a location with access to potential collaborators.
“Creators have adapted very well in this new remote-working world, but I think there is a longing for in-person collaborations and as soon as it’s safe to do so, either creative will return to the city or new ones will emerge looking for the same opportunities as before,” Rath told The Verge.
Not everyone is leaving Los Angeles, of course. David Dobrik just bought a $9.5 million mansion in Sherman Oaks. Los Angeles is still home to the entertainment industry, and there will eventually be a post-COVID world where things return to some form of normalcy. For people trying to break into the industry or find their place within that world, not being in Los Angeles can be career-ending. Almost every creator in videos watched by The Verge said the same thing: they could end up back in LA.
But for others, Los Angeles will always be a plane right away. Jasmine and Harjit Bhandal realized they could be home with their families in Toronto and fly out to LA when they needed to in a post-pandemic world. The decision to move was a little easier after three members of Harjit’s family came down with COVID-19, and two wound up really sick. With a built-in subscriber base and contacts already made in Los Angeles, this was the perfect time to go home.
“Collabs are happening less and less, and I feel like YouTube has definitely changed,” Jasmine said. “We’re paying a ridiculous amount of money for rent, where it’s just the two of us and our dogs. We don’t have anybody else. It just makes more sense to go home. Especially since everyone realized that you can really do anything online.”
YouTube has suspended Rudy Giuliani’s YouTube channel for the second time this year for making false claims of fraud in the 2020 US presidential election and has issued a strike against his channel. It’s Giulani’s second strike within 90 days, according to Bloomberg, meaning that Giuliani cannot upload videos for two weeks. In a statement, YouTube also cited Giulani’s promotion of nicotine, which is against the company’s rules.
“We have clear Community Guidelines that govern what videos may stay on YouTube, which we enforce consistently, regardless of speaker,” a YouTube spokesperson said in a statement to The Verge. “We removed content from the Rudy W. Giuliani channel for violating our sale of regulated goods policy, which prohibits content facilitating the use of nicotine, and our presidential election integrity policy. Additionally, in accordance with our long standing strikes system, we issued a strike against the Rudy W. Giuliani channel, which temporarily restricts uploading or live-streaming.”
In January, YouTube suspended Giuliani for a week for sharing 2020 election misinformation and temporarily suspended him from YouTube’s partner program, meaning he couldn’t earn ad revenue on his videos.
If Giuliani gets a third strike in the same 90-day period following the first, his channel will be permanently removed from YouTube, according to the company’s strikes policy.
The word discovery implies there’s something new to find, but I’ve spent the past few weeks steadily making my way through a show that’s been on the air for more than 20 years, thanks to Discovery Plus: House Hunters.
Thanks to House Hunters (and House Hunters International, alongside Tiny House Hunters) my days spent inside, working from home and doing nothing but watching TV, have transitioned almost exclusively to Discovery Plus. It exists as white noise in my apartment: the buzzing of couples arguing over whether to pay the full $560,000 for a house in the nice neighborhood closer to the cute bistro or take a chance on the $480,000 home that needs some work but is way under budget emitting from my TV set. From the time I start working until the second I’m beginning to wind down, House Hunters plays continuously on its dedicated channel housed within Discovery Plus.
“Our bet is when the world makes a full rotation, that the content people have chosen when they could choose anything on TV or cable, the content that they love and run home for — 90 Day, Fixer Upper, Property Brothers — they’re still going to love that,” Discovery CEO David Zaslav told TheNew York Timesin a recent interview.
Discovery Plus, home to shows from networks like HGTV, TLC, Investigation Discovery, and the Food Network, launched at just the right moment, when ambient television was becoming a fixture in people’s homes during the pandemic. Author and journalist Kyle Chayka referred to ambient TV as something “you don’t have to pay attention to in order to enjoy but which is still seductive enough to be compelling if you choose to do so momentarily.” For Chayka, that was Emily in Paris. This reasoning is also what makes House Hunters, as well as 90 percent of the series on Discovery Plus, perfect ambient television.
Streaming also makes ambient TV possible in a way cable television can’t because there’s a total ad-free option. Loud commercials that play every seven minutes cease to exist. Functionally, I have the option to throw on a House Hunters channel that streams episodes of the show 24/7 and forget about it. Streaming services are designed to make viewing as effortless as possible and keep people’s attention once they’ve started watching TV.
So far, it’s working out better than expected for Discovery Plus. The company has signed up more than 11 million subscribers to the platform since it launched in early January. Discovery’s target audience is people between 25 and 54, a wide bracket but one with the most disposable income as of 2019, according to Statista. The disposable income of a household led by a person between the ages of 25 and 54 ranged between $69,700 and $91,400 in 2019, Statista reported. Add in that cord-cutting continues to happen at an accelerated rate and that millennials are one of the biggest groups to sign up for three or more streaming services, and Discovery Plus’ potential is obvious.
Zaslav chalked up the impressive initial signups as proof that “people really don’t change that much,” when talking to the Times. That’s probably true, but having an ad-free option that does for adults and college students what Frozen 2 on Disney Plusor Cocomelon on YouTube and Netflix repeats do for kids has become essential in my home. To quote a popular TikTok meme, House Hunters on Discovery Plus leads to “empty head, no thoughts.”
There’s another term for this: waiting room television. Like daytime TV talk shows or new soap opera episodes, shows like 90 Day Fiancé, House Hunters, and Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives are just interesting enough to catch someone’s fleeting attention, but they’re monotonous enough to not become total distractions. They simply exist to keep people entertained if they want but can float into the background if someone would rather check in on Instagram or read a book instead — or, in my case, work.
Discovery Plus still has a long way to go. There are basic product features that need to be fixed (finding on-demand videos instead of 24/7 channels is more difficult than it should be), and I haven’t seen any new series or specials that have caught my attention. Discovery also has to ensure that it’s keeping the vast majority of those who do sign up. For now, Discovery filled a need I didn’t know I had while working at home — pure, ongoing, ambient TV that I don’t have to think about for hours the second I hit play.
The MSI GP66 Leopard is a powerhouse gaming notebook housed in a fairly subtle shell that also boasts a comfortable keyboard. It also offers plenty to upgrade or repair, but it’s a chore getting inside.
For
Strong gaming performance
Comfortable keyboard
Replaceable components
Subtle design for a gaming notebook
Against
Difficult to open
Touchpad feels cheap
Too much bloatware
Just because you grow up a bit doesn’t mean you need to stop having fun. The MSI GP66 Leopard ($1,799.00 to start, $2,599.00 as tested) is a powerhouse gaming notebook with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 and Intel Core i7-10870H. But it would fit in anywhere, whether it be an office or a gaming room, thanks to its matte-black stylings. If you’re looking for gaming power without all of the flash, this might be on your list of the
best gaming laptops
.
If you ran some workstation tasks on this, you might believe it was a work machine. Only when you turn on the RGB keyboard do you know it’s time to play. There aren’t red stripes, or, say, an RGB lightbar like MSI’s other models.
It’s a powerhouse, and many of the components are upgradeable for replacement down the line. But while the GP66 Leopard is all grown up, there are still some areas, like its touchpad and its bloatware, where it needs some more maturing.
Design of the MSI GP66 Leopard
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As far as MSI’s gaming notebooks go, the Leopard is quite plain. While some of its other laptops have red accents or RGB light strips, the GP66 is an all-black affair. On the aluminum lid, even the dragon shield logo is tone-on-tone. Only the hinges, which are connected to aggressively shaped plastic molds, suggest this is anything other than a workstation PC.
The only real sign of the GP66’s gaming prowess is the keyboard, which has RGB backlighting courtesy of SteelSeries. But the black aluminum deck and the fairly thin bezels around three sides of the display suggest just a premium notebook. The bottom cover is plastic.
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The Leopard is a thick machine at 0.92 inches tall, so there’s plenty of room for ports. However, MSI has placed only a few of them on the sides: The right side has a pair of USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports, while the left side has another Type-A and the headphone jack. The rest of the ports — USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C, HDMI, RJ-45 Ethernet and the charging port — are all on the rear of the device. Alienware has been doing this for years, and it’s a benefit if you use your laptop like a desktop replacement and don’t move it around much. But it can also be inconvenient if you like to use your laptop on your lap.
At 14.09 x 10.51 x 0.92 inches and 5.25 pounds, the Leopard isn’t exactly portable in the toss-it-in-a-bag sense. Dell’s 15-inch competitor, the Alienware 15 m4, is slightly lighter at 5 pounds and a similar size 14.2 x 10.9 x 0.9 inches, but its design is slightly more sleek. The Gigabyte Aorus 17G is expectedly larger with a bigger screen, at 5.95 pounds and 14.9 x 10.8 x 1 inches.
3x USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A, USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C, HDMI, 3.5 mm headphone jack, RJ-45 Ethernet
Camera
720p
Battery
65 Wh
Power Adapter
230W
Operating System
Windows 10 Home
Dimensions(WxDxH)
14.09 x 10.51 x 0.92 inches / 357.89 x 266.95 x 23.37 mm
Weight
5.25 pounds / 2.38 kilograms
Price (as configured)
$2,599.00
Gaming and Graphics on the MSI GP66 Leopard
MSI opted for a powerful implementation of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 for the GP66 Leopard. This version has a 130W max graphics power and a
boost clock
of 1,605 MHz.
Besides running benchmarks, I tried playing Control, a game I use often on laptops with RTX GPUs because of how tough it is to run and because
ray tracing
has a truly noticeable effect. With the settings maxed out at 1080p and with ray tracing on high, the game ran between 52 and 57 frames per second as I traded shots with hiss guards surrounding a control point, though it went as high as 70 during exploration.
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On Shadow of the Tomb Raider (1080p, highest), the GP66 hit 106 frames per second. The Aorus 17G, with an RTX 3080
Max-Q
ran the game at 86 fps, while the Alienware m15 R4 with an RTX 3070 played it at 77 fps.
The Leopard played Grand Theft Auto V (1080p, very high) at 125 fps, beating the Aorus (100 fps) and Alienware m15 (108 fps).
MSI’s laptop ran Far Cry New Dawn (1080p, ultra) at 103 fps, beating both the Alienware and Aorus by over 10 frames per second.
The GP66 Leopard outperformed on Red Dead Redemption 2 (1080p, medium), playing at 82 fps.
It also won out on Borderlands 3 (badass, 1080p), at 99 fps, while the Aorus 17G ran at 79 fps and the Alienware hit 84 fps.
We also ran our gaming stress test on the GP66 Leopard by looping the Metro Exodus benchmark at RTX settings for 15 runs, simulating roughly half an hour of gaming. It ran at a largely steady average of 76.38 frames per second across the runs. The CPU ran at an average of 3.73 GHz and an average temperature of 61.85 degrees Celsius (143.3 degrees Fahrenheit). The GPU ran at an average of 1.1 GHz and 61.49 degrees Celsius (142.68 degrees Fahrenheit).
Productivity Performance on the MSI GP66 Leopard
Beyond gaming, the GP66’s Intel Core i7-1070H and GeForce RTX 3080, along with 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD are powerful parts that should aid in creative endeavors like streaming or video editing.
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On the Geekbench 5 overall performance benchmark, the GP66 earned a single-core score of 1,274 and multi-core score of 7,848. The Gigabyte Aorus 17G had scores of 1,265 and 7,895, respectively, while the Alienware 15 R5 notched scores of 1,252 and 7,642.
On our file transfer test, the Leopard copied and transferred 25GB of files at a rate of 1,059.78 MBps, falling just below the Alienware but ahead of the Aorus.
It took the GP66 Leopard seven minutes and three seconds (7:03) to complete our Handbrake test, transcoding a 4K video to 1080p. That’s slightly faster than the Alienawre (7:07) and far speeder than the Aorus (8:33).
Display on the MSI GP66 Leopard
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Our review unit came equipped with a 15.6-inch, 1920 x 1080 (FHD) display with a 240 Hz refresh rate. The most demanding titles won’t run that fast, but you can take advantage of it if you like playing esports titles like Overwatch, Fortnite or Rocket League.
When I watched the trailer for the upcoming Mortal Kombat movie, I felt the need to turn up the brightness for the best experience. Cole’s yellow gloves popped, as did Kano’s red eye lasers against a dark background, but the screen was largely serviceable rather than special.
When I played Control, the screen was bright enough, even in some dark spaces. That game has a lot of red, and it really popped, especially against the Oldest House’s dark walls.
MSI’s panel covers 78.5% of the DCI-P3 color gamut, matching what we saw on the Aorus 17G. We reviewed the Alienware m15 R4 with a 4K
OLED
screen, so it’s not surprising to see superior coverage there.
However, at 277 nits of brightness, the screen was dimmer than both the Aorus (300 nits) and the Alienware (362 nits).
Keyboard and Touchpad on the MSI GP66 Leopard
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MSI’s inputs are a mixed bag. Arguably the more important part of a gaming laptop, the keyboard, is the superior of the two. For years now, MSI has partnered with SteelSeries on its keyboards, and they’ve typically been quite good. On the Leopard, the keys are a bit more shallow than I would like, but they’re still fairly comfortable to type on. I hit 120 words per minute with a 2 percent error rate, which is about as fast as I ever get on the 10fastfingers.com typing test.
The 2.5 x 4.1-inch touchpad is fine for navigating and gestures with its Windows precision drivers, but it felt like cheap plastic compared to the aluminum around it. On top of that, I found I had to click harder than on most laptops. For gaming, you should be using a mouse anyway, but this could be a little better for general productivity use.
Audio on the MSI GP66 Leopard
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When I listened to Daft Punk’s “Something About Us,” the various synths and samples were quite clear through the laptop’s bottom-firing speakers. The vocals, purposefully distorted, still stood out on top of the track, along with some piano backing. The low end, including some drums, could have used a bit more punch.
There is a semblance of bass, which many laptops don’t offer, and I was able to tune it more to my liking in the Nahimic audio software.
When I played Control, Jesse’s internal thoughts were clear, especially as her narration ran over the creeping voices of the hiss. At some points, though, I wished I was able to make the volume louder, though this is something else that could be solved with headphones.
Upgrading the MSI GP66 Leopard
The GP66 Leopard is pretty easy to upgrade or repair. Well…it is once you manage to get inside. Compared to some other gaming notebooks, it’s like breaking into Fort Knox.
At first, eleven screws separate you from the GP66 Leopard’s internals. A size 000 Phillips head screwdriver will do the trick. Note, though, that one screw is beneath a factory seal, which is a questionable practice at best. If you send this back through warranty, MSI will know you opened it.
Even after removing all the screws, the system was too tight to open at first. No spudger or pick would fit in the cracks in the chassis. I tried this for longer before I cared to admit, before I eventually found
a YouTube video
from someone that had cracked the case. There is a decorative cover around the hinges, which you can pop off with a spudger. Once that’s off, you can slowly move your way around from the rear ports to the front of the case and carefully remove the bottom.
Once you’re in there, you’ll find that the RAM, Wi-Fi card and the SSD are replaceable. There are two PCIe
m.2 SSD
slots, and since ours came with a sole 1TB boot drive, there is room to expand. The 65 Wh battery, too, is replaceable.
Battery Life on the MSI GP66 Leopard
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
The MSI’s GP66 Leopard’s 65W hour battery isn’t going to last it terribly long on a charge. This, unfortunately, is a trend on gaming notebooks, but the Leopard with its full-power RTX 3080, didn’t last as long as competitors.
MSI’s notebook endured for two hours and 25 minutes on our test, which browses the web, runs OpenGL tests and streams video over Wi-Fi, all at 150 nits of brightness. The Alienware m15 ran for 4:01 and the Gigabyte Aorus 17G ran for 4:42.
Heat on the MSI GP66 Leopard
Call it the MSI GP66 Jet Engine.
To keep its components cool, the GPU fans run hard and loud (especially in extreme performance mode, which MSI sent the GP66 Leopard to us set to by default). Admittedly, if you use headphones this is a bit less of a problem.
We took surface temperatures while running our Metro Exodus gauntlet (see the gaming performance section above).
Image 1 of 2
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Image 2 of 2
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
The center of the keyboard, between the G and H keys, measured 38.6 degrees Celsius (101.48 degrees Fahrenheit), while the touchpad reached 25.6 degrees Celsius (78.08 degrees Fahrenheit). The hottest point on the bottom of the laptop was 46.7 degrees Celsius (116.06 degrees Fahrenheit).
Webcam on the MSI GP66 Leopard
MSI has a laptop with a 1080p
webcam
coming this year. This isn’t it.
No, the GP66 Leopard still has a 720p webcam, and an image at my desk was grainy, though at least it was color accurate with my blue eyes and green t-shirt.
One minor annoyance is that the light that notifies you the camera is on blinks, rather than staying on and static. This is extremely distracting when you’re having a video call or streaming and want to focus on what’s on the screen.
Software and Warranty on the MSI GP66 Leopard
There is quite a lot of software preinstalled on the GP66, which has been a trademark of MSI laptops for a bit now. Unfortunately, a lot of it is bloatware.
Let’s start with the good stuff (it’s a shorter list). There’s MSI Dragon Center, which lets you monitor CPU and GPU usage and other stats, as well as change between different modes of performance. SteelSeries Engine 3 lets you configure the lighting on the keyboard, though I feel MSI should roll this into the other app. Nahimic lets you customize audio profiles.
Aside from that, MSI has added a ton of extra bloat, including the Cyberlink suite (AudioDirector, ColorDirector, PhotoDirector and PowerDirector), as well as Microsoft Sudoku, LinkedIn, Music Maker Jam and Norton Security.
That’s on top of the regular
Windows 10
inclusions, like Roblox, Hulu, Hidden City: Hidden Object Adventure and Adobe Photoshop Express.
MSI sells the GP66 Leopard with a one-year warranty.
Configurations
We tested the MSI GP66 Leopard with an Intel Core i7-1070H, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080, 32GB of RAM, a 1TB M.2 NVMe PCIe SSD and a 15.6-inch, FHD display with a 240 Hz refresh rate. All of that adds up to a grand total of $2,599. (We have, however, seen an identical model with 32GB of RAM going for $2,499, so be sure to shop around).
For $1,799, you can get the Leopard with a Core i7-10750H, 16GB of RAM, a 512GB SSD and an FHD 144 Hz display.
Bottom Line
If you’re looking for a powerful gaming notebook that draws attention to games, not itself, the GP66 Leopard is worth looking at. The combination of a full-power RTX 3080 and 10th Gen Intel makes for a potent, if loud, gaming machine. And MSI has put it in a chassis that looks and feels fairly adult, even compared to something like the Alienware m15, which has also gone minimalistic.
There are some things MSI needs to work on here: primarily, the touchpad, which feels like an afterthought, and the sheer amount of bloatware that the company includes on its laptops. If you prefer a premium experience, the Alienware may be a better way to go, but a similarly specced model (with a 300 Hz compared to 240 Hz on the Leopard) is a little more expensive as of this writing.
But if you want a gaming notebook with powerful graphics performance, subtle styling and replaceable parts (even if it takes a bit of work to get to them), this Leopard will impress.
You can now listen to Amazon Music on your Google TV- or Android TV-powered tellybox directly through the native Amazon app.
The new app launched last week in the US, UK, Canada, Brazil, Mexico, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, India, Japan and Australia. It lets Amazon Music Unlimited subscribers access the full music library, while Prime members (who get a more limited Amazon Music catalogue as part of their package, but not Amazon Music Unlimited) can access a curated list of songs and playlists. Don’t have either subscription? You can still listen using the ad-supported option, though that will obviously mean putting up with interruptive adverts.
Amazon Music isn’t the first music streaming service to land on the relatively new Google TV platform (which succeeded Google’s former Android TV operating system): Google’s own YouTube Music is available, as are Spotify and Tidal.
The app’s launch shows relations between Amazon and Google are considerably more cordial than has previously been the case. A few years ago, the two tech giants were at loggerheads, with Amazon refusing to sell Google’s Chromecast streaming devices, and Google pulling the YouTube app from Amazon’s Fire TV streamers. Thankfully for consumers, those days are now behind us.
The Google TV operating system is currently only available with the Google Chromecast with Google TV streamer, a top video streamer that earned a perfect five out of five in our review. However, Google TV will also be coming to smart TVs from Sony and TCL in 2021. Android TV-based TVs, meanwhile, span hundreds of models from the likes of Sony, Philips, TCL and Sharp.
MORE:
Read all about Google TV: apps, features, compatible TVs and more
Read our guide to the best video streamers
Read the full Amazon Music Unlimited review
Or check out our verdict in our Amazon Music HD review
A cybersecurity firm found that bots were promoting GameStop stock on social media before and after the stock’s frenzied rise last month, Reuters reported. Massachusetts-based PiiQ Media says social media bots promoted Dogecoin, GameStop, and other “meme” stocks in posts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. The firm estimated that tens of thousands of bots participated, but it’s still unclear how much influence they had or didn’t have on the rise and fall of GME and other stocks.
Shares in GME skyrocketed in January as Reddit users on r/wallstreetbets rallied around the stock in an attempt to squeeze hedge funds that had bet against the video game company. PiiQ told Reuters it detected “patterns of artificial behavior” in GameStop-related posts just before the January 28th chaos through February 18th.
PiiQ did not analyze Reddit traffic, and Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said in a hearing before the House Financial Services in February that the platform had not detected any significant bot-driven activity or foreign actors on the subreddit as part of the GME trading hype.
The Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating the GameStop saga, and the Senate Banking Committee plans to hold a hearing on “the current state of the stock market.”
Synth music met a new standard with the introduction of EuroRack synthesizers. Maker Rory Allen is using a Raspberry Pi Pico to take things a step further by opening the modular world of EuroRack synths to the creative benefit of an open-source module known as the EuroPi.
The goal was to provide an open-source tool for developers and artists in the DIY synth community. The EuroPi PCB was designed by Allen and features 4 analog outputs as well as 4 digital outputs.
(Image credit: Rory Allen)
The module can be programmed to create custom effects and changed again at any time to create a custom synth experience.
The PCB files are available to anyone who would like to recreate or modify the board design. Allen even has plans to sell pre-built modules for those who may not want to solder the board together themselves.
Read more about the project on Allen’s Behance page and follow him YouTube for more cool projects. Visit our list of Best Raspberry Pi Projects for more awesome creations from the maker community.
Final Fantasy VII Remake’s soundtrack will be available to stream on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music Unlimited, and other music subscription services tomorrow, February 26th, Square Enix announced on Thursday. It will have an eye-popping (ear-popping?) 156 tracks, according to a press release.
The game’ssoundtrack was an excellent reimagining of the original game’s iconic music, and I frequently listen to it via random YouTube videos. The official arrival on streaming services should make listening to it much easier.
We know you’ve been waiting a little while for this…
From February 26th, the @FinalFantasy VII Remake Soundtrack will be available on online music subscription services such as Apple Music, Spotify and Amazon Music Unlimited! pic.twitter.com/IKSSOEhAxW
— FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE (@finalfantasyvii) February 25, 2021
The news arrives alongside a flood of other Final Fantasy VII-related announcements. Final Fantasy VII Remake will be getting a PS5 patch with big quality-of-life changes and a new episode focused on Yuffie Kisaragi, an optional party member from the original game. Square Enix also announced Final Fantasy VII The First Soldier, a new mobile battle royale game that’s set to hit Android and iOS later this year. It’s also developing Final Fantasy VII Ever Crisis, yet another mobile game that looks to be another remake of the original Final Fantasy VII and includes elements of spinoffs like Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children. Ever Crisis is scheduled to debut in 2022.
At this rate, there may soon be 156 Final Fantasy VII remakes.
Square Enix announced two mobile games set in the Final Fantasy VII universe today. One is a battle royale game aiming for a 2021 release, and the other is Final Fantasy VII Ever Crisis, a compilation of all the games and stories set in the Final Fantasy VII universe (Final Fantasy VII, Advent Children, Before Crisis, Crisis Core, and Dirge of Cerberus). The latter is slated to launch sometime in 2022 on Android and iOS.
According to a press release, Final Fantasy VII Ever Crisis is a chapter-structured single-player experience that covers the entire timeline in one of the most popular installments in Square Enix’s RPG franchise. The compilation will feature all the events from each game, in addition to new story elements focusing on the “origins of SOLIDER.”
Watching the announcement trailer, Ever Crisis reminds me of Final Fantasy XV Pocket Edition, a 2018 title that served as an abridged version of the fifteenth main installment in the Final Fantasy series.
The description for the trailer on YouTube notes it is “another possibility for a remake,” and the visuals look greatly improved from the original version of Final Fantasy VII on the PlayStation, as pointed out by Twitter user Nibellion.
The announcement comes following news that Final Fantasy VII Remake is getting a PS5 patch on June 10th, which will include improvements that take advantage of the next-gen hardware as well as a new episode focusing on the character Yuffie.
Twitter announced a pair of big upcoming features today: the ability for users to charge their followers for access to additional content, and the ability to create and join groups based around specific interests. They’re two of the more substantial changes to Twitter in a while, but they also fit snugly into models that have been popular and successful on other social platforms.
The payment feature, called Super Follows, will allow Twitter users to charge followers and give them access to extra content. That could be bonus tweets, access to a community group, subscription to a newsletter, or a badge indicating your support. In a mockup screenshot, Twitter showed an example where a user charges $4.99 per month to receive a series of perks. Twitter sees it as a way to let creators and publishers get paid directly by their fans.
Direct payment tools have become increasingly important for creators in particular in recent years. Patreon has been hugely successful, and other platforms including Facebook, YouTube, and even GitHub have all launched direct creator payment features. Twitter will presumably take a cut — the company has been hinting at subscriptions features that would offer it a new source of revenue — though it doesn’t appear to have said yet what that fee will be.
Twitter’s mockup of its Communities feature.Image: Twitter.
Twitter also announced a new feature called Communities, which appear to be its take on something like Facebook Groups. People can create and join groups around specific interests — like cats or plants, Twitter suggests — allowing them to see more tweets focused on those topics. Groups have been a huge success for Facebook (and a huge moderation problem, too), and they could be a particularly helpful tool on Twitter, since the service’s open-ended nature can make it difficult for new users to get started on the platform.
There’s no timeline yet for when either of these features will launch. Twitter listed them as “what’s next” for its platform during a presentation for analysts and investors this afternoon.
City pop is a genre defined by nostalgia. Though, as Cat Zhang writes, that nostalgia is algorithmically generated — and its recent popularity is wrapped in the acceleration of global exchange and a whole Western mythology of Japan as the capitalist future. Yesterday, Zhang published an elegant capsule history of the genre in Pitchfork, which also explains why the music is surging in popularity in the US.
Naturally, it started in Japan. “The upswing of city pop likely originates with the Japanese themselves: a few decades ago, domestic crate diggers started critically reevaluating vintage Japanese music, or wamono,” Zhang writes. Then, some decades later, it hit Western ears.
“Japanese music isn’t particularly accessible overseas: The country has been exceptionally slow to embrace streaming, prioritizing the consumption of CDs, and its expansion into foreign music markets has also been sluggish,” Zhang writes. “One recent breakthrough was the compilation Pacific Breeze: Japanese City Pop, AOR & Boogie 1976–1986, released in 2019 by the reissue label Light in the Attic as part of their Japan archival series. The project, which now has a sequel, took four years to bring to fruition.”
The other part of city pop’s sudden American popularity has to do with the recommendation algorithms that drive our social platforms. City pop thrives on YouTube because its algorithm can’t recognize nuance. “[T]he algorithm will simply route listeners from “lo-fi beats” videos to “Plastic Love,’” Zhang writes.
The whole piece is fascinating. As the writer Kyle Chayka wrote today in his newsletter DIRT:
[N]one of these artifacts are completely authentic, and none the result of a single gaze, self or other. The stitched-together footage and the remixed, re-uploaded music are the kind of fictions that culture is always producing, the present digesting the past in order to produce something hybrid and new.
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