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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
The pharmacy says it will bypass health care industry "middlemen" and help consumers avoid high drug prices by charging manufacturers’ prices plus a flat 15% markup and pharmacist fee.
