The E3 of yore is never coming back (spoiler: it never has)

I recently watched a YouTube video that went into great detail (15 minutes of detail, to give an indication) on why allowing 15,000 “members of the general public” access to E3 would spell doom and destruction for the vaunted industry trade show. The harsh truth, I believe, is the show needs these changes if it…

I ask 100 information questions to four digital assistants. All of them fail at least half.

After seeing the poor feedback of Watson in Bridge Crew, I decided to take my four digital assistants for a spin. After 21 questions across four assistants, I learned that Alexa cannot give basic information about Amazon Prime videos, none of them can properly understand which movie you’re looking for information for, and none of them can actually recommend stuff. Also, Google still needs to learn how to round up.

The Stress of VR: Why Repeat VR Usage is Difficult

With the recent release of Star Trek: Bridge Crew, Ubisoft put out a high-budget, cross-platform multiplayer VR game, spanning Playstation, Vive and Oculus’ VR platforms. It also illustrates very well the challenge with VR as an entertainment format, and that we are currently focused on VR experiences rather than VR content or, as it were,…

Facebook to produce own TV shows

Facebook has revealed plans to produce its own TV shows, talking with Hollywood studios and willing to pony up $3m per episode in order to get in on some of that exclusive TV-show goodness. According to Sky News, two shows are already in the works; a game show and a relationship drama.

Rumoured Galaxy Note8 details

VentureBeat claims to know the specs of the upcoming Galaxy Note8, and this one’s a doozie. Launching at €1000, this makes it the priciest Samsung launch to date, and within spitting distance of the €1020 iPhone 7 plus (128). That much money buys a phone with… a better screen, 6gb RAM, unspecified storage and dual back cameras. The phone is expected to launch late September.

The Surface Laptop is the Least Repairable Ever, and That’s Probably OK

iFixit recently tore down the new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop devices. After many surface-themed puns, they hammered a verdict that these new devices were impressive “by being so much worse than [they] expected”. Like any self-respecting geek, I will read their teardowns and gleefully look at the innards of these shiny technical gadgets that we have.…

Polymer 2.0: Mixins Confusion

Polymer 2.0 shifts the inheritance tree of elements from behaviors to mixins. These are decorators applied to the superclass declarations, and work like functions. The Polymer documentation spends a few cycles on the subject matter, but, at least for me, left a whole lot to be desired when it came to explaining how multiple mixins…

Whole Foods as Datacenters: Does it make sense?

The Amazon acquisition of Whole Foods continues to make ripples, with the latest one being quite unexpected. Dean Bubley of Disruptive Wireless speculates Amazon may turn these locations into mini data centers. This is unlikely for an array of reasons.