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15 Mar 2025

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This Ryzen 9 mini PC with 24GB RAM is a bargain for $359
Do you know what your home office needs? A mini PC! It’s tiny, fast, affordable—the best bang for your buck as long as you don’t need the portability of a laptop. And right now, the well-regarded Beelink EQR6 mini PC is only $359 on Amazon if you clip the on-page coupon for $90 in savings (was $449). What do you get for this crazy low price? A compact PC fitted with a powerful AMD Ryzen 9 6900HX CPU, a better-than-usual 24GB of DDR5 RAM, and a modest 500GB of SSD storage. That’s a heck of a combination that’ll serve you well whether you’re doing office work, streaming Netflix, or playing through your Steam library. Even better, you can always upgrade later up to 64GB of RAM and dual 4TB SSDs. This mini PC also has AMD Radeon 680M integrated graphics, allowing you to play games on reasonable settings with good performance. It’s what I have on my own mini PC and I can edit videos or play WoW and Diablo IV just fine with it. With dual full-sized HDMI connections, you can hook up two gorgeous monitors at 4K@60Hz or 1080p@120Hz each. Not a gamer? It’s still a great mini PC for home offices because it has plenty of other connectivity, including a 10Gbps USB-C, three 10Gbps USB-A, a 480Mbps USB-A, dual Gigabit Ethernets, and a 3.5mm audio port, plus built-in Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2. Get this powerful Beelink EQR6 mini PC for $359 while the coupon is still available! And it’s not the only awesome deal we’ve spotted With Amazon’s Spring Sale event coming up, you can score lots of other early deals on a wide range of tech products. Save 20% on this Ryzen 9 mini PC for gamers and workersBuy now at Amazon

Donatella defied the doubters - what next for her and Versace?
Versace took over the Italian fashion house after her brother's untimely death and made it her own.

Zoi Sydowski-Synott wins career-first slopestyle world cup
The Olympic gold medallist is just the second Kiwi to ever win a FIS Snowboarding Crystal Globe.

I never thought a Microsoft Edge plugin could improve gaming. I was wrong
Cloud gaming demands low latency and smooth visuals, and a free plugin for Microsoft Edge helps achieve that: Better XCloud, which I’d say is a must for anyone trying to play Xbox Cloud games via the web. Better XCloud is an open-source, free plugin for Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and other Chromium browsers specifically for use with Xbox Cloud Gaming. While the code can be downloaded and examined via Github, you’ll want to begin on the more user-friendly Better XCloud installation page, which details what you’ll need to get started. Let’s take a step back. Most people are used to downloading and installing games locally, from Microsoft’s Xbox Cloud, Steam, Epic, or some other marketplace. Games do run their best when stored and run on your PC (or Xbox), too. But there’s an alternative: not downloading them, and instead playing them on a cloud server. The advantage is that you don’t have to waste time downloading and installing the game; you can play almost instantly. Those of you with bandwidth caps might appreciate playing games at bandwidths that approach streaming movies, which are far less than a typical game install. And if you have older hardware, running the game on a cloud server may negate that disadvantage. The problem? Streaming a game via the cloud can be relatively slow: It takes a few hundred milliseconds or so for the game to render a scene, send it over the internet to you, and for you to react; then it takes a small bit of time for your input to be sent up to the cloud and for the game to respond. All that can make a game stutter and jerk, meaning that it might not be as fun to play. What Better XCloud tries to do is use a number of tricks to improve your game experience. First, you can choose your server, ensuring that it’s nearby. A server in close proximity means less latency, or lag. Second, you can ask for the maximum bandwidth from the server, kind of like paying Netflix for a 4K option — but for free. Finally, you can even use your PC’s GPU to improve the rendering quality. In this case, though, only AMD GPUs seem to be explicitly supported. If you’d like to compare and contrast Better XCloud and how it improves cloud gaming, you can visit https://www.xbox.com/play without having installed Better XCloud. Just make sure to have a subscription to Xbox Game Pass. How to set up and run Better XCloud It’s easiest if you begin with the Better XCloud installation page, which facilitates the process. (Editor’s Note: Part of the benefit of open-source software is that anyone can download and examine the code. That doesn’t necessarily mean that anyone has, or that an updated version doesn’t hide malware. Use at or your own risk.) To set up Better XCloud, you first need to install Tampermonkey, a plugin that allows you to run your own “userscripts” on top of websites. Install that first with a click. The Better XCloud setup page warns that you may need to enable developer mode on your browser, which you can do on the Edge extensions page by flipping the “Developer” toggle on the left. I found I needed to do that to allow Better XCloud to work.) Loading Better XCloud on top of Tampermonkey will give you this screen, which you can either pore through or skip.Mark Hachman / Foundry After you install Tampermonkey, you can install Better XCloud. Better XCloud is really just a script run on Tampermonkey, which shows up in the Tampermonkey window when enabled from the Better XCloud installation page. There’s really nothing to it. You’ll just need to ensure that Edge’s own visual aid, Clarity Boost, is turned off, since Better XCloud takes over and replaces it. Once it’s installed, head to https://www.xbox.com/play to begin playing. In Edge, Microsoft’s own cloud gaming options are found at the upper left-hand corner of the screen, behind a tiny Xbox logo. With Better XCloud installed, those options are at the upper right-hand corner, behind a small icon that the installation creates. Better XCloud offers a number of options, many preselected to help you improve gameplay.Mark Hachman / Foundry There are a ton of options, and you can select the ones you want. Personally, I tried to maximize my gaming experience by playing with the server options, and selecting the maximum resolution possible and available bandwidth. Notice, too, that the visuals can also be improved by selecting the app’s own Clarity Boost, which is available for PCs with AMD Ryzen processors. Does Better XCloud work? I’ve run Xbox Cloud Gaming on a PC before, and I reacquainted myself with three Xbox Game Pass games: the gorgeous Sea of Thieves, Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders, and Sniper Elite: Resistance. Snow Riders is a fairly sedate game about skiing down a 3D mountain. Sniper Elite is mainly just skulking about a 3D recreation of WWII France, though the game can be quick and frenetic during its combat sequences. I honestly didn’t see much difference in Snow Riders, and I’m guessing that’s because of the relative simplicity of the game. It’s worth noting that the Xbox Cloud Gaming app hides metrics that can provide a numerical assessment, with the amount of data you’re downloading, the “ping” and frame rate, and more, all available at the top of the screen. You’ll have to zoom in (click the image) to see the Xbox performance metrics in the upper right.Mark Hachman / Foundry Sniper Elite had a tendency to hitch or stutter on the basic Xbox Cloud gaming settings, possibly because there wasn’t as much information being reliably streamed. Turning on Edge’s native “Clarity Boost” settings didn’t seem to make that much of a difference. But on Better XCloud, the hitching noticeably decreased, and the downloaded bitrate seemed to increase from 8Mb/s to about 17 Mb/s. Everything else remained the same, though: the frame rate stayed pegged at 30 fps, and the ping was about the same. Visually, though, there was a tradeoff; on Sniper Elite, Edge’s Clarity Boost offered a grainier though more detailed image, while Better XCloud smeared some of that detail but delivered smoother performance. On Sea of Thieves, though, Better XCloud shone. The differences were immediate, and obvious: The improved antialiasing eliminated the “jaggy” edges. Sea of Thieves has been a visually stunning game since launch, with an ocean that you simply want to swim in. But on the basic Xbox Cloud Gaming, simply moving about was slow and stuttery, even though it was at a nominal 60 frames per second. It’s possible that Better XCloud smooths out a lot of the detail that would normally appear on your screen. (The sea was calm here.) But the performance definitely improved.Mark Hachman / Foundry With Better XCloud turned on, the game proved buttery smooth, and an absolute joy to play. (I can’t really provide comparison shots, since one game launched my character during the evening, and another during the morning light. But it really made a difference.) To be fair, I did try out the game on two different PCs: The default laptop, running the basic Xbox Cloud Gaming, did include a discrete GPU. The other used an AMD Ryzen AI 300 processor inside of it, running just on its integrated graphics. But especially on Sea of Thieves, the Ryzen/Better XCloud laptop looked and played significantly better. Better XCloud is free and open source, and improved my gameplay while cloud gaming. I’m leaving it installed, and I’ll use it in the future when playing games via the Xbox Cloud. I recommend you do the same.

Ted Lasso returns to TV for fourth series
Jason Sudeikis is back in the role of Ted, the coach of a fictional English Premier League football club.

I stopped using Alexa long ago. Here are 6 ways Alexa+ could lure me back
I’m a smart home expert. Writing about smart home technology, smart devices, and voice assistants is my job. Yet, I don’t remember the last time I actually spoke with Alexa. Just to be clear, I don’t mean to pick on Alexa per se. I rarely speak to Google Assistant or Apple’s Siri, either. The reason? It’s way easier to haul out my phone and use an app than it is to get a supposedly “smart” voice assistant to do what I want. As it stands, there’s a Google Nest Hub Max sitting in our kitchen that acts as a glorified photo frame, and it occasionally interrupts with a random answer to a question nobody asked. A few HomePod minis are scattered around our home, but they’re really just for playing music (which I mainly control on my iPhone). And a lone Alexa speaker in our daughter’s room is merely an alarm clock. Now Amazon is promising a grand rebirth for Alexa. Slated to roll out as a public preview later this month, Alexa+ will harness the power of generative AI to hold flowing conversations, understand our intentions, take actions on our behalf, and—hopefully—be so helpful that we’ll keep our phones in our pockets. Alexa+ will be free during its preview period, and it will remain free for Amazon Prime members; non-Prime folks will need to cough up $19.99 a month for Alexa+ access, equivalent to the entry-level subscription tiers for ChatGPT, Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude (the latter of which is among Alexa+’s under-the-hood LLM models). But cost was never the issue with Alexa (the “classic” Alexa will remain free for everyone, by the way). Instead, it was that Alexa became more annoying than useful. Here’s what the new AI Alexa needs to do to get us back on speaking terms. Make it easy to control my smart home devices Getting the old Alexa to reliably control anything in my smart home is a royal pain. Unless I know the exact name of the device, the name of the room it’s in, and the precise command for making it do what I want it to do, Alexa will frequently come back with “Sorry, I don’t understand” or the equivalent. (Again, Google Assistant and Siri are guilty of this, too.) As a result, I don’t ask Alexa or any of my other smart speakers to adjust my lights, turn fans on, or switch the TV to the correct input. Instead, I use my phone. What I want from the new Alexa is simple: to get what I mean when I say, “turn the lights up in here” or “turn on the TV,” and not just because I’ve hard-coded those phrases in an Alexa routine. I want Alexa+ to intuit my intentions—and if it can’t, to ask clear follow-up questions that don’t require me to fall back into “Alexa-speak.” Amazon is promising this exact type of smart home performance with Alexa+, and if it delivers, I might start using Alexa to control my smart gadgets again. Make playing tunes a breeze We use our HomePod mini speakers for music on a daily basis, teeing up tracks by Steely Dan, Miles Davis, and (more often than not) Taylor Swift. But my family struggles to get Siri to play the right tunes (“No, play the album called Lover, not the song”), so I generally queue playlists using my phone. It’s just easier than arguing with a voice assistant. The same goes for Alexa, which is partly why there’s only one Echo speaker left in our house (the others are in a cardboard box somewhere.) But what if Alexa+ could make it easier to ask for music rather than searching for it on an app? What if we could just say, “Alexa, play that song from The Hills” and it would know we meant “Unwritten” by Natasha Bendingfield? (That’s an actual question that came up the other night—and naturally, Siri played “The Hills” by the Weeknd instead.) If Alexa+ could really make it easier to play the music we want, and where we want (don’t get me started about trying to get Alexa or Siri to move tunes from one room to another), then our exiled Echo speakers might come out of hiding to replace our HomePods. Be truly helpful in the kitchen Yes, Alexa can display recipes on an Echo Show display (Google Assistant can do something similar on a Nest Hub screen), but more often than not, I just print out the recipe for whatever I’m cooking and bring it to the kitchen. It’s just easier. Put another way, Alexa has never played a meaningful role as a cook’s companion, or at least not for me. Now, I have had success using ChatGPT to help in the kitchen (“What can I substitute for sesame oil?”). but that requires pulling out a phone when I have sticky or raw-meat hands. I would really love the ability to say “Hey Alexa, I need a quick recipe for a vinaigrette dressing, can you whip one up for me? Give me the steps one at a time, and I don’t have red wine vinegar, but I do have mustard, olive oil, and balsamic,” and Alexa would just talk me through it. Again, Amazon demonstrated this very capability during its Alexa+ presentation last month, even going further to show how Alexa could order groceries with a partnered retailer like Whole Foods. But to just have a conversation with Alexa about general cooking questions (“what’s the safe internal temperature for pork?”) without it saying “I don’t know the answer, but I can show you search results from the web” would be a major win. Heck, I might even leave my printer alone the next time I’m about to cook. Answer my random questions We’re a family with lots of questions about, well, everything (it’s the byproduct of having a 13-year-old daughter), but I always groan when someone asks, for example, “Alexa, what’s something cool to do in Baltimore?” Why? Because Alexa won’t know, or it will come up with a random answer, and then someone will inevitably tell Alexa to “shut up,” and it won’t, and then things get ugly. A more conversational Alexa+ could help keep such random questions from devolving into shouting matches, with the ability to go back and forth, ask follow-ups for clarity, and deliver organized responses that are actually relevant and interesting. The advanced voice modes for the ChatGPT and Google Gemini apps can already do this, and summoning Alexa+ on an Echo speaker for such general questions would be even easier. Of course, if Alexa+ could go ahead and do something based on our conversation—say, book one of those interesting activities it found in Baltimore—we’d really have something. And that leads me to my next point… Take action on my behalf One of the big points Amazon made during its big Alexa+ reveal is that unlike ChatGPT and Gemini, the new Alexa won’t just be stuck in a chatbox. Instead, it will actually be able to do things for you. An example demonstrated during Amazon’s event was how Alexa+ could help find a nearby carpet cleaner who uses organic materials, book an appointment, and put it in your calendar. Done and done. Here’s another example from real life: I’m using ChatGPT to help me find affordable real estate in New York City. (Cue the laughter.) But while ChatGPT has been reasonably effective at zeroing in on listings that fit our criteria, it’s useless when it comes to proactively scouting for and notifying me about new properties on the market, and it can’t do squat about booking viewings. But if I could have a daily chat with Alexa+ about my real estate ambitions, or if it could chime in when it learns of an enticing open house and put it on my calendar, or even fill in a real estate agent’s web form, that would be cool. Amazon has been touting Alexa+’s skills as an AI agent, and it can supposedly fill in web forms on its own, so the kind of functionality I’m talking about here is theoretically possible. I’m eager to see it in practice. Stop interrupting me How many times has Alexa, or Google Assistant, or Siri just started talking out of nowhere? Sometimes I’ll just be sitting in the kitchen and I’ll hear Alexa nattering away in my daughter’s empty bedroom, or Siri will jump in with an “mmm hmm?” because it thought it heard someone say “Siri.” Part of the reason we tucked away most of our Alexa speakers (and I’m tempted to mute the microphones on our remaining Google Assistant and Siri devices) is that they’re constantly talking out of turn, butting in on conversations, and replying to phantom queries. What I’m hoping is that the new AI Alexa is smart enough not to jump in every time it thinks it hears the “Alexa” wake word—or if it does accidentally speak up, that it gracefully cedes the floor when we say, “Not talking to you, Alexa.”