GeForce Now Launches On LG TVs

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/geforce-now-launches-on-lg-tvs/1100-6500060/

Nvidia’s GeForce Now app for LG TVs has fully released after two months in beta.

GeForce Now, which allows subscribers to stream a selection of games from Nvidia’s servers to modern devices like smartphones, tablets, and PCs, first entered beta on limited LG TVs back in November 2021, but now those with compatible 2021 TVs can download the full release from the LG Content Store. As an added bonus, Nvidia is giving away six free months of GeForce Now’s Priority tier with qualifying purchases of LG TVs between February 1 and March 27.

The LG TV app comes alongside Nvidia’s announcement that it’s rolling out resolution upscaling options for GeForce Now. These new options will help make up the difference in resolution for those suffering from lower network speeds. Users can choose from three settings: Standard, Enhanced, and AI-Enhanced. The last option no doubt offers the best upscaling quality, but it’s only available on Nvidia Shield and specific Nvidia GPUs at this time.

Continue Reading at GameSpot

via GameSpot’s PC Reviews https://ift.tt/HYPDoJ82q

January 27, 2022 at 07:49PM

The Best Wordle Starting Word Has Been Figured Out With (Computer) Science

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/the-best-wordle-starting-word-has-been-figured-out-with-computer-science/1100-6500073/


Everyone’s got their go-to starting word to kick off their daily Wordle challenge–for some reason ‘Pssst’ and ‘Myrrh’ always eat up my chances at victory–but the best word to use is later according to Tiktok user Crvlwanek.

In a response to another user claiming that the best starting word is irate, Crvlwanek decided to put that theory to the test by going through Wordle’s entire word list and creating a custom script program to use frequency analysis on each letter. Each word was also scored on the frequency of each letter and then an optimal starting word was chosen from the data.

From that research, ‘later’ rose to the top and it’s not hard to see why. With two vowels and three consonants in its construction, it goes through some of the most commonly-used letters in the alphabet and clues you in what the word of the day is without you having to slyly browse the Free Dictionary website.

In case you were wondering, the worst starting word to use is Xylyl according to Crvlwanek’s research.

Wordle has been a fun distraction since its popularity rose this year. It’s challenging without ever feeling unfair and each brain-teaser is educational. At least one person who hates fun has managed to program an anti-Wordle bot that targets anyone who posts their daily results on Twitter, but its reign of linguistic terror was short-lived after Twitter banned it.

In more heartwarming news, a developer with an unrelated Wordle app has donated his recent windfall on the Apple App Store to charity after he saw a spike in downloads.

If you’d like some more options for great five-letter words to add to your vocabulary, we’ve got a feature on the best starting words to use in Wordle.

Got a news tip or want to contact us directly? Email news@gamespot.com

via GameSpot’s PC Reviews https://ift.tt/iFQsOwM1c

January 28, 2022 at 10:39AM

No Man’s Sky Dev Brings Back Older Games To Brighten One Kid’s Life

https://kotaku.com/no-man-s-sky-joe-danger-hello-games-autism-sean-murray-1848433637


Meet Joe Danger.
Image: Hello Games / Kotaku

Before Hello Games made a name for itself with the procedurally generated space adventure No Man’s Sky, its developer was all about Joe Danger, a cartoonish motorcycle stuntman racing through an eponymous series of console and mobile games. After years of being defunct due to iOS updates, the Joe Danger mobile games are back in the App Store today, thanks in part to a father’s emailed plea on behalf of his autistic, Joe Danger-loving son.

In an official announcement heralding the newly restored and updated iOS versions of Joe Danger Touch and Joe Danger Infinity, Hello Games’ Sean Murray revealed that letting the stunt-driving hero fall to the wayside following the success of No Man’s Sky was a source of shame for his UK-based studio.

Joe holds a special place in our hearts. It was our first game when we were still four guys in a shed, trying to get noticed,” Murray writes. “We sold over a million copies of Joe Danger, and every week we still get emails from fans. Sadly since iOS culled older games, it no longer worked on [the] latest Apple devices. It’s always been a secret shame of ours that the success of No Man’s Sky left Joe Danger unloved.”

While the console and Android Joe Danger games are still perfectly playable, fans who fell in love with the character’s motorcycle maneuvers on iOS were left in the dirt. While some players were happy to go play with Joe on another platform, an eight-year-old autistic fan named Jack would accept no substitute. In a letter to Hello Games shared by Sean Murray on Twitter this morning, Jack’s father talked about his child’s touching relationship with the series.

“As you probably know, children with autism deal with a great many struggles, chief among them are great difficulty with social interactions,” Jack’s father wrote. “However, one of the things that has enabled Jack and I to bond is our shared love of video games, specifically Joe Danger. Jack loves Joe. He loves everything about him. He has a collection of toy motorcycles that are his ‘Joe Dangers;’ every motorcycle we see on the street is ‘Joe Danger.’ One of the first things I hear when I walk in the door after a long day at work is ‘Come on, daddy, let’s go play Joe Danger!’”

Jack’s father goes on to talk about how playing the game has allowed the child to have fun with friends and family and experience what he calls “normal kid stuff”. His connection also helps him cope with difficult situations. “There have been times too innumerous to count where I know Jack is uneasy with a given situation, because he will look at me and say ‘Then I get Joe Danger?’ It’s his way of saying ‘this is going to suck for me for a bit, but I known I can get through it.’”

Unfortunately, iOS upgrades rendered both Joe Danger Touch and Joe Danger Infinity unplayable, leaving Jack and his father despondent. As a child with autism, Jack was used to playing his games on a certain type of device, so simply switching was out of the question. And so Jack’s father emailed Hello Games and, according to Sean Murray, those words helped drive the studio to remaster both Joe Dangers for iOS 15. Both are now available on iOS for two dollars apiece, with previous owners getting the new versions for free.

As the father of a pair of children on the autism scale, the story of Jack hits home. While every autistic child is different, Jack’s experience sounds similar to some that I’ve experienced with my 10-year-old son Archer. He likes his games a certain way, and uses them to help soothe himself in difficult situations. He’s also a big Joe Danger fan, but he plays on Xbox. I’ve got both iOS versions downloaded to his gaming phone for when he gets home from school today.

via Kotaku https://kotaku.com

January 27, 2022 at 12:02PM

Steam Deck’s New Dynamic Cloud Feature Makes Switching Between Platforms Easy

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/steam-decks-new-dynamic-cloud-feature-makes-switching-between-platforms-easy/1100-6499943/


Steam Deck is getting a new feature called Steam Dynamic Cloud, making it easier to transition between playing on the handheld to PC. With Steam Dynamic Cloud enabled, players don’t need to save and close the game on Steam Deck in order to open it anew on another client. Instead, even if players don’t exit a game, they can reopen the same game–with the most recent save–on PC.

It’s basically a convenient way of switching between platforms without worrying about exits and saves. This feature won’t be automatically enabled for every game–developers will need to choose to implement it for their games.

Now Playing: Valve’s Steam Deck – First Impressions

If devs do not integrate Dynamic Cloud, Valve will still track players’ save game data in the cloud. But the player will be prompted to first save and exit their suspended game on the Deck before being able to play the same game on PC.

The Steam Deck will launch soon in February, a two month delay from its original December 2021 release date. Valve’s handheld comes in three different price points, running from $400 to $650. It will be pretty hard to get one right away if you don’t already have a preorder. Reservations made now will apparently deliver sometime after Q2 2022.

Got a news tip or want to contact us directly? Email news@gamespot.com

via GameSpot’s PC Reviews https://ift.tt/2mVXxXH

January 25, 2022 at 11:54AM

What to Play When You’re Not Playing Wordle

https://www.wired.com/story/wordle-alternatives/


So, you succumbed to Wordle.

The deceptively simple five-letter online word game, which went from a one-person passion project with no players in October to a full-blown web and social-media phenomenon as the new year began, is fun and challenging. It engages parts of the brain previously tapped by Scrabble, Sudoku, and, if we’re being honest, good-old Hangman.

But its most distinctive feature—arguably the thing that has made it so popular and addictive for many—is also its most frustrating: You can only play one word puzzle a day.

What, then, are you supposed to do with the other 23 hours and 55 minutes when you’re not guessing five-letter words in rows of black boxes?

The answer, of course: Play games like Wordle to fill the void. Here’s how to find them.

The Copycats

Call them clones, imitators, money grabs, or—if you’re polite—flatterers. There is no official app version of the web-based original Wordle game, but there are plenty of look-alikes. Some of them aren’t copying Wordle, they just use similar mechanics, like guessing the word in a number of tries (like Jotto). How good are these games? In the case of Jotto, the first word I was asked to solve was “Sprue,” a word I’ve never heard used in my entire life because I don’t work in the field of plastic moldings. I won’t be playing that one again.

Others, like the brazenly named Wordie: a word guessing game, have the same color scheme as Wordle. But at least Wordie is completely free to play. Wordex, on the other hand, looks a lot like Wordle and seeks to monetize with in-app purchases, as do Wordus and Wordlets.

These may not be as popular as the original, and your friends probably aren’t posting their scores to Twitter, but these alternatives are available and offer more games per day.

Whether you feel a little dirty playing this behind Wordle creator Josh Wardle’s back is strictly your business.

The Homages

It wouldn’t be the web if there weren’t remixes of a great idea. The simplicity of Wordle translates well to offshoots that complicate the formula, such as Absurdle and Queerdle, which make the game more difficult or introduce a more specific vocabulary.

The one that made me blush is called Lewdle, an incredibly filthy version that taught me in under five minutes how limited my imagination is when it comes to dirty words.

Games That Scratch the Same Itch

The aforementioned Scrabble and Hangman, of course, use the same part of your brain that’s trying to figure out words from blanks. They each have various offline and electronic versions, from the board game Word Hangman to Pogo’s online version of Scrabble. Many Wordle players also get their daily puzzle fix from The New York Times’ offerings, including its famous Crossword and the Spelling Bee game.

The Washington Post, AARP, and Arkadium also have catalogs of word games to play online.

via Wired Top Stories https://ift.tt/2uc60ci

January 25, 2022 at 08:12AM

How to Download Everything Amazon Knows About You (It’s a Lot)

https://lifehacker.com/how-to-download-everything-amazon-knows-about-you-its-1848412242


Photo: amedley (Shutterstock)

Here’s a fun thought experiment; picture the amount of personal data you think tech companies keep on you. Now, realize it’s actually way more than that (hmm, maybe this isn’t that fun). Even as privacy and security become more talked about in consumer tech, the companies behind our favorite products are collecting more and more of our data. How much? Well, if you want to know the information, say, Amazon has on you, there is a way to find out. And it’s a lot.

To be clear, data collection is far from an Amazon-specific problem; it’s pretty much par for the course when it comes to tech companies. Even Apple, a company vocal about user privacy, has faced criticism in the past for recording Siri interactions and sharing them with third-party contractors.

The issue with Amazon, however, is the extent to which they collect and archive your data. Just about everything you do on, with, and around an Amazon product or service is logged and recorded. Sure, you might not be surprised to learn that when you visit Amazon’s website, the company logs your browsing history and shopping data. But it goes far beyond that. Since Amazon owns Whole Foods, it also saves your shopping history there. When you watch video content through its platforms, it records all of that information, too.

Things get even creepier with other Amazon products. If you read books on a Kindle, Amazon records your reading activity, including the speed of your page turns (I wonder if Bezos prefers a slow or fast page flip); if you peered into your Amazon data, you might find something similar to what a Reuter’s reporter found: On Aug. 8 2020, someone on that account read The Mitchell Sisters: A Complete Romance Series from 4:52 p.m. through 7:36 p.m., completing 428 pages. (Nice sprint.)

If you have one of Amazon’s smart speakers, you’re on the record with everything you’ve ever uttered to the device: When you ask Alexa a question or give it a command, Amazon saves the audio files for the entire interaction. If you know how to access you data, you can listen to every one of those audio files, and relive moments you may or may not have realized were recorded.

Another Reuters reporter found Amazon saved over 90,000 recordings over a three-and-a-half-year period, which included the reporter’s children asking Alexa questions, recordings of those same children apologizing to their parents, and, in some cases, extended conversations that were outside the scope of a reasonable Alexa query.

Unfortunately, while you can access this data, Amazon doesn’t make it possible to delete much of it. You can tweak your privacy settings you stop your devices from recording quite as much information. However, once logged, the main strategy to delete it is to delete the entire account it is associated with. But even if you can’t delete the data while sticking with your account, you do have a right to see what data Amazon has on you, and it’s simple to request.

How to download all of your Amazon data

To start, head to this link, or go to Amazon’s Help page. You’ll find the link under Security and Privacy > More in Security & Privacy > Privacy > How Do I Request My Data? Once there, click the “Request My Data” link.

From the dropdown menu, choose the data you want from Amazon. If you want everything, choose “Request All Your Data.” Hit “Submit Request,” then click the validation link in your email. That’s it. Amazon makes it easy to see what the have on you, probably because they know you can’t do anything about it.

[Reuters]

 

via Lifehacker https://lifehacker.com

January 25, 2022 at 08:34AM

Intellidash Pro is an easy way to get CarPlay in older vehicles

https://www.engadget.com/intellidash-pro-carplay-android-auto-150100414.html?src=rss

There are plenty of cars that lack the technology to leverage CarPlay or Android Auto, including my own 2012 Toyota Scion iM. And there are plenty of people who lack the desire or ability to swap out their own head units to something that supports the new standards, including myself. So it’s me, really, that sits in the middle of the venn diagram of consumers that Car and Driver is targeting with its Intellidash and Intellidash Pro standalone head units.

Hardware wise, the Intellidash and Pro are both chunky, 7-inch displays which are designed to sit on your dashboard. (They are both rebranded versions of Coral Vision’s own display). The major difference between the two is that the vanilla edition requires a wired connection to your phone, while the Pro can operate wirelessly. Now, I’ve been driving around with the Intellidash Pro in my car for the bulk of the holiday season, and I like it a lot.

But, despite that, it’s probably worth launching head-first into the downsides before talking about why I like it. The most obvious of which is that the Intellidash Pro looks like a piece of farm equipment, or worse. It resembles the sort of low-cost GPS units you’d find on sale for three or four times the going rate in the back of a gas station two decades ago. In fact, there are no-brand Android tablets from 2013 that are better-looking than this thing, and thinner, too.

Partly, it’s this size because there’s a lot of gear packed inside, like a microphone, speakers, Sirius XM receiver, FM transmitter and Bluetooth. It’s also got a whole host of jacks for an aftermarket reversing camera, audio out, USB-C and USB-A (for a flash drive). But if you’re just connecting this wirelessly to your phone, you won’t need any of this.

Then there’s the fact that, at the least, you’ll need to route the power and aux-in leads around your dashboard. I didn’t bother, given this was just a short-term loan, but I suspect that fans of cleaner dashboard setups might find it a bit grating. You can tune it to broadcast over FM to your car which is better for cable management but isn’t ideal for audio quality.

Side profile of the device.
Daniel Cooper

It’s also unfortunate that the manufacturers didn’t spend a little more time polishing the default UI. For instance, the home screen icons only run along the bottom quarter of the display, and there’s enough of them that you’d need to scroll to the next page to see the rest. Given the risk that you may need to use this screen when you’re driving, needless busywork is a bad thing.

Jump into the settings menu and you’ll feel like it was previously a Chinese-language original that has been hurriedly localized. Icons are muddy, fonts are hard-to-read and the whole thing needs a good, hard polish to make its UI feel less agrarian. Setting the night mode, for instance, means you’re diving into the last pane of display settings, despite its obvious importance.

I am, of course, nitpicking, and it’s easier to focus on these negatives because the one clear positive is so simple: Stick this in your car and after about two minutes of setup, you’ve got CarPlay (or Android Auto). No longer do you have to relegate your iPhone to the windshield mount, and now you can control your audio and navigation from the homescreen. That’s priceless when you’re on a long solo drive and you haven’t made yourself a playlist of podcast episodes you want to listen to. It’s the convenience you’re paying for, the ease of having to do very little to get this slice of the future into the ossified technology of history.

As for the price, well, the Intellidash Pro is $400, while the non-wireless Intellidash is $350. You’d spend that much, sometimes more, on a unit from Best Buy, albeit with fitting thrown in. Certainly, while it’s another widget on your dashboard, if you’re not sure how long you’re keeping your car, or have multiple cars, then having something you can take from vehicle to vehicle isn’t the worst idea in the world.

via Engadget http://www.engadget.com

January 25, 2022 at 09:09AM