#i have over 100 gb still left on the card......i need to learn more good psp games than tag force kh p3 and disgaea

[kuriboo]

i think the psp is possibly the greatest video game console to exist. tied with the nintendo switch

[minijenn]

Universe Falls, Chapter 77, Part 2

Bljahsdjasdhkads over a fucking month since the last chapter was posted and here I come with a fuckin mediocre chapter like this. Nice. Anyway here ya go. Enjoy. (please don’t read this on here formatting sucks read it on ff.net or ao3 instead to get the better experience!)

Previous: 

https://minijenn.tumblr.com/post/611433424860921856/universe-falls-chapter-77-part-1

***

Chapter 77: Adventures in the Multiverse

Part 2: Adrift in the Cosmos 

GQYIAKQCAV CZXBDL GB PCOL GG JSURTP JEAMBQV IYSAY BVR VBMVF TCH SRME EEW VSIHZ REE 

So I embarked on a 30-year adventure--a perilous journey through the multiverse to learn what I could about Bill in the hopes of defeating him. In the process, I had many experiences that my younger self might have described as “swashbuckling” if not for the constant nausea that accompanies dimension-hopping!

Within the span of the first year of my travels alone I quickly lost count of the sheer number of different dimensions I found myself falling into. Sometimes my stay in these dimensions would be brief, long enough for me to restock on whatever basic supplies (food, weaponry, wormhole stabilizers) I needed before passing through as quickly as I arrived. Other times I would decide (or more often than not, be forced) to stay in a single dimension for weeks, even months on end, well acquainting myself with the rules and residents (be they friends or foes) of said dimension by the time I left each one. 

Still, I pride myself on how quickly I fell into the routine of steadily-paced interdimensional travel. The oddities of the multiverse, of which there are plenty, perplexed me on just about every level at first. But as I saw more and more of those oddities, many of which defied comprehension when compared to anything I was familiar with back on Earth, the less terrified, and the more fascinated I became. 

It feels as though I lived 100 different lives across all of the countless dimensions I’d been to. I traveled with bandits, learned to speak 13 languages, got in a fistight with a talking chair, and got tattoos with a tribe of octopus-armed warrior piglets. (These tattoos rank among my most serious regrets. Let’s just say I wear my usual turtleneck for a reason!) I studied ancient texts, compared notes with scholars, dined with monsters, and was briefly made king of the Finger Dimension, until a 7-fingered man showed up and I lost my status. And this was all within the first 5 years of my travels alone!

When it comes to those other 25 years, I can truthfully attest that they were just as eventful. There’s certainly never a dull moment in the multiverse! I often found my youthful curious spark returning to me whenever I ventured across a new locale, and on many occasions, yearned to have any of my familiar journals on hand to document everything that I saw (which is why I suppose it’s rather cathartic to be finally writing my journey out after all this time, I suppose). It’s certainly true that not every dimension I came across was a safe harbor; many, in fact were practically unlivable for longer than a few hours at a time. At the same time, others were rife with barbaric, hostile beings and creatures who attacked first and asked questions never. And sandwiched between those worlds were dimensions that were borderline bizarre in every sense of the word. While I did often yearn for the (relative) normalcy of my home back in Gravity Falls and the reliable company of Rose and the Gems in particular in those first few years, that yearning paled in comparison to the incredible discoveries and sights I got to experience, far beyond anything any other human has seen for sure. 

Still, it wasn’t always an exciting, explorative adventure. Survival was one of my highest priorities, lest I fall short of my main goal of stopping Bill before I could even come close. Thanks to my quick wit (and dimensional translator), I was able to talk my way into and out of food and shelter--although a number of dimensions consider me an outlaw to this day. Ironically, in the multiverse, I’m just as wanted as Stanley! But my crimes had a noble purpose: I only stole supplies to work on my Quantum Destabilizer, which proved to be one of the most difficult inventions I ever worked on. 

The Destabilizer was the product of many a sleepless nights during those first few years adrift. I knew from the start that if I was going to face off against Bill, I would need to go up against him far more prepared than I had been during my first unintentional outing in the Nightmare Realm. That preparation would come in the form of a weapon, one that would be armed with all of the knowledge I would go on to obtain about Bill through my travels in the hopes that it would be just strong enough to obliterate him once and for all. Certainly, I reasoned, something out there within the vast, endless cosmos had to possess that power; it was merely a matter of finding it first. 

So my search for parts and for information alike went into full swing as I hopped between the untold sprawl of distant worlds. To fully chronicle my adventures would take 10 volumes (at least!), but here’s a catalog of some of the most outlandish dimensions I saw… 

The M Dimension

Ugh! Writing about this place after all these years has brought back to life the extreme frustration I felt while I was trapped there! The whole reality offended my ordered and scientific mind. I mean, how does it even make sense for a vacuum to be shaped like an M??

If you think that’s dumb, try looking at their alphabet: it’s just the letter “M” 26 times! Why does a universe like this even exist! Why did I have to spend time there? Why did they keep telling me to “mave a monderful mime!”?

Even though I was feeling “muicidal” after just ten minutes there, at least they were relatively kind to me, considering how strange I must have looked to them. Not like the people in the Symbol Dimension. Those guys are @$$&@!!s!

The Do-Over Dimension

Also known as the Yo-Yo Dimension and the Go Insane Because Nothing Gets Done Dimension (the last name being the most accurate but the least poetic). This is a world where time moves both forward and backward in a seemingly random manner. So you may have a really crummy week but then get a chance to do it all over again. Or just as you complete high school, you may live backward all the way to kindergarten. 

The Do-Over dimension can move forward normally for really long spans of time or “yo-yo” back and forth several times in one day. Professional “timelineologists” are like weathermen who try to accurately predict “what the time will be like” on any given day. As the old saying goes, “one step forward, infinite steps back, then two and a half steps forward, for no discernable reason”. 

Lottocron Nine (The Gambling Dimension)

It’s like the mob took over this entire galaxy. Except there is no mob, because gambling is not only legal here, it's mandatory.

Every aspect of life is left up to chance in this dimension. Cynn City, the central governing authority of the Gambling Dimension, lands on whatever planet wins the yearly lottery to host it. Babies learn to roll dice before they can learn to walk, and no one over the age of five goes anywhere without their lucky deck of cards. Even choosing your soul mate is left up to Lady Luck. Luckily, the government is effective. The Galactic Senate meets at the track every Saturday to debate (bet) on their favorite laws. 

Stan would have loved this place, but it just made me depressed. Although I had a good run in the Gambling Dimension, the dimensional bouncers ended up kicking me out for counting cards! What are the odds? 

The Locked Door Dimension

What’s behind door number one? Who knows? Because you can’t open it. Because you don’t have the right key. 

As yet another one of the more aggravating dimensions I had the misfortune of coming across, the Locked Door Dimension is really nothing more than a winding, endless hallway with doors lining both sides. Each and every one of those doors is locked, but fear not! The moment you arrive there, a key just so happens to land right at your feet. The only problem is that key only unlocks one door out of the thousands, maybe millions this dimension is made up of! 

So with no other options, you go from door to door, trying your key out on each one of them and it works on seemingly none of them. But what happens when you finally reach the door that your key does unlock? I… honestly have no idea. My time in the Locked Door Dimension was mercifully cut short as I happened upon a wormhole just short of me losing my sanity. Part of me would have liked to have kept my key as a souvenir, but I admittedly tossed that thing out the moment I left. Still, I can’t help but wonder what would have been behind my door if I hadn’t…

The Delicious Dimension

This place is something Hansel and Gretal could only dream of. Every non-living material object here is completely edible! Now, this isn’t in the sense that everything is made of food (in fact, “food” in the traditional sense doesn’t even exist here, largely since it doesn’t need to). A clock still looks like an average clock and a candle is still very much a candle. It’s just that you can eat both the clock and the candle without needing to be rushed to the hospital right after. 

Have you ever wondered what a table tastes like? What about a car? Look no further than this dimension for the answers! I have to say I was caught off guard the first time I spotted someone here down a notepad whole. But then I got to try a few of this dimension’s delicacies for myself and I was pleasantly surprised. Who knew a pillow of all things could taste so good? 

...Actually, now that I’m writing this out, I realize just how… uncomfortably odd this dimension was in retrospect. Moving on!

 As the years drew on, my quest to defeat Bill eventually led me to a strange world that I mistakenly believed to be his birthplace… 

The Two-Dimension Dimension (Exwhylia)

A dimension that was by far different than any I had encountered this far by the mere composition of it alone. It is, as its name implies, completely two dimensional in every single way. In fact, my three dimensional body intersected perpendicular to the plane this dimension exists on, to the point that I was literally on eye-level with its rather simplistic residents. With that in mind, you might think me to be a god in their world--but not so much. 

From my ill-suited point of view, I couldn’t make out much of the world of Exwhylia. My 3-D eyes were worthless in their 2-D world! There is no sky above them and no sun to bathe them in directional light and create shadows. “Above” and “below” are directions that they know nothing about and do not exist to them whatsoever. Still, I was able to glean exactly how their strangely hierarchical society worked. Circles are at the peak of their class system, considered to be the upper crust of Exwhylian society. Far below them are the lowly triangles, sub-class citizens with hardly any rights or dignity to speak of under their rounded overlords. These shapes moved about on their flat plane littered with squarish buildings and countless other indiscernible objects I couldn’t quite make out as identical as everything in their world looked like to me. 

I believed Bill came from a similar world that was mysteriously destroyed. But how? I didn’t have much time to investigate. The Exwhylians considered me to be an “Irregular” shape, which is vulgar in their society.

I was unable to explain myself, since my mouth was stuck outside of their world, and I soon found myself under attack. Though small, the Exwhylians’ bodies are razor-sharp, and several hundred of them began slicing into my head in an assault I was powerless to put an end to. 

Luckily, I was saved just in time by one of the most extraordinary creatures I’ve ever encountered… 

Ford wasn’t sure exactly at what point he’d blacked out; likely around the time the Exwhylians had slammed their tiny two-dimensional bodies straight into his eyes for the hundredth time over. Yet as he managed to open his eyes, he found that they didn’t sting anywhere near as much as he thought they would, allowing him a starting glimpse of exactly where he was now. 

Fortunately, he seemed to be back in a fully three dimensional plain, with no aggressive Exwhylians in sight. What was in sight was a far more serene setting than the last dimension he’d found himself in. He was lying quite comfortably on a heavily cushioned bed, positioned in a well-decorated open-air room. It’s outer walls were non-existent, instead bordered by sturdy marble pillars, between which a grand view of what lay beyond them: a beautiful panorama of the sprawling natural landscape that lay down below the high mountain peak the unknown building rested on. The craggy hilltops and lush green valleys admittedly reminded Ford of Earth, and he would have even believed himself to be back in his own dimension if not for the skies that were painted in a kaleidoscope of colors that an Earthly atmosphere would have typically never known. 

Even so, the author slowly, carefully sat up, perplexed by how he’d gotten to such a strange setting in the first place. Still, he could hardly complain considering how starkly calm and peaceful this dimension was compared to Exwhylia. And yet, his guard immediately raised as he noticed the curtain covering the doorway on the far side of the room begin to sweep aside as a mysterious silhouette appeared just behind it. Far too familiar with the feeling of being cornered or trapped by now, Ford’s fight or flight instinct quickly kicked in as he searched himself for any of his weapons, only to find that they, along with the rest of his supplies, had been set aside on the opposite end of the room entirely. He nearly jumped up to retrieve them, despite how his bones and muscles alike ached from lack of recent use. That is, until he got a clear view of exactly who was emerging from behind the curtain. 

“Ah, so you’ve finally awakened…” The smooth, yet deep feminine voice addressed him as its owner properly stepped into the room. She was a tall, yet elegant figure, her otherwise humanoid appearance made a bit more alien by the pale blue pigmentation of her skin, which matched her much darker blue thick, hooded gown quite well. But what was most fascinating about her by far were her eyes, largely since there were seven of them in total, each of them a different vibrant color as they all stared at the author almost piercingly.

“W-who are you?” Ford asked, somewhat unnerved by her practically captivating gaze. 

“Fear not, Stanford Pines,” she said, raising a hand to calm him. “I mean you no harm.”

“How… how do you know who I am?” Ford asked, eyeing her warily as he stole another brief glance at his weapons. “Where are we?” 

She smiled at this, her manner still completely level compared to the author’s obvious uncertainty. “Forgive me for answering your inquiries somewhat out of order,” she said. “To start, as an oracle, it is my gift and my responsibility to know of the past, the present, and the future. My name is Jheselbraum the Unswerving and we are in the world I call home, Dimension 52.”

“...An oracle?” Ford eased up a bit, though he still raised an eyebrow at this. 

“Oh, that’s right,” Jheselbraum said as she strolled to the other end of the room. “Natives of your dimension don’t tend to take much stock in the foresight of oracles and seers anymore, do they?”

Ford couldn’t help but crack the slightest of smiles at this in spite of himself. “I don’t know if that’s entirely true. After all, an old friend of mine dabbles in glimpsing into the future herself.”

“Ah yes, one of the Crystal Gems,” Jheselbraum nodded knowingly. “The one you speak of is called Garnet, though there’s also Amethyst, Pearl, and of course… the Gem you know as… Rose Quartz, if I’m not mistaken.”

“Wait…” Ford frowned, caught off guard by such an accurate listing. “You almost make it sound as though you’ve met them…”

“After looking through your past, Stanford, I feel as though I might as well have,” Jheselbraum remarked, turning back to face him. 

“I’d… argue that could be considered a breach of privacy…” the author said dubiously. 

Surprisingly, Jheselbraum simply laughed at this, her light chuckle just as mysteriously graceful as everything else about her. “Then I apologize for the intrusion. I’ll make sure to ask you the next time I decide to pilfer through your personal timeline. How does that sound?”

“Better…?” Ford replied, still unsure of what to make of the seemingly amicable oracle. “In the meantime, do you mind telling me exactly how I wound up here in… what was it again? Dimension 51?”

“52,” Jheselbraum corrected. “And I suppose you could say I’ve been expecting your arrival here for quite some time. Of course, I did take the liberty of pulling you out of peril; those Exwhylians didn’t exactly show you the greatest hospitality, did they?”

“I’ll say…” Ford huffed as he placed a gentle hand against one of the many bandaged cuts on his cheek. 

“So I brought you here, and got to work tending to your various wounds both old and new,” the oracle continued her explanation. “In case you’re wondering, you’ve been unconscious for roughly a week.”

“A week?!” Ford balked, baffled. 

“Hm. Considering your unsteady relationship with sleep in the past, I would have thought that such a lengthy rest would be more than welcome,” Jheselbraum mused. “Even so, there’s no need to thank me for my services. After all, I must admit that I do have a rather… selfish reason for bringing you here, Stanford.”

“Oh? And what might that ‘reason’ be?” Ford asked, eyeing the oracle suspiciously once more. 

Jheselbraum’s rather light manner turned serious, almost grave at this as she took a step closer to the author. “I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but word of you and your story has spread far and wide across the multiverse, Stanford Pines. Many in worlds you’ve never even been to before have heard tell of your great ambition, to bring an end to the demon known as Bill Cipher. And I must tell you, that bold and noble cause, you and I are very much alike.”

Ford was completely caught off guard by this revelation, to the point that all he could do for several minutes was stare at the oracle in awe. He knew that he was a wanted man, he had been for several years now, particularly in dimensions where it was clear that Bill had some sort of influence. Likewise, in his travels, he had encountered many creatures and people who cowered in fear at the mere mention of the dream demon, his trickery and treachery extending far and wide to ruin countless lives across the multiverse. And yet, never before had he met someone who seemed intent on actually taking Bill down other than himself… until now. 

“You… want to defeat Bill too?” Ford asked quietly, incredulously. 

“I don’t necessarily want to defeat him myself for that’s not the hand that fate is destined to deal me,” Jheselbraum countered calmly. “But I do wish to see him defeated. For untold eons, Cipher has cast a pall of terror across the innocent denizens of the multiverse. I cannot even begin to tell you just how many minds he has broken, how many worlds he’s left in an upheaval of chaos. I have stood on the fringes, spending centuries watching his wickedness spread further and further across the cosmos and yet no one has ever possessed the courage or the might to face his destructive power head-on. No one… until you, I suppose.”

“Well, to be perfectly honest with you, I don’t know if I’d necessarily call my mission entirely ‘noble’,” Ford noted earnestly. “Bill tricked me; he took advantage of my foolish eagerness to succeed to get what he wanted and in the process, his deception cost me more than I could have ever imagined. This isn’t just about defeating him; it’s about forcing him to experience every bit of shame and humiliation he put me through. It’s about getting even.”

Jheselbraum’s expression was unreadable upon hearing this, though all seven of her multi-colored eyes were steadily set on Ford all the while. “Many good men have been driven to madness in the stubborn pursuit of revenge,” she cautioned simply, though decided to make no further comment as she went off on a different tangent entirely. “Even so, as you are now, you would unfortunately be… ill-equipped to face Cipher again and survive. Especially given how narrow your last escape from him proved to be.”

“Well, I can assure you my next attempt will have Bill trying to escape instead of me,” Ford finally stood, albeit somewhat unsteadily as he crossed the room to show the oracle his half-built Quantum Destabilizer. “As long as I have this on hand, then he won’t stand a chance. O-once it’s completed, of course.”

“But a weapon alone can only do so much,” Jheselbraum pointed out as she walked over to him, making Ford note just how much she towered over him. Much like Rose used to, really. “You already know well by now that Cipher strikes the fiercest at the part of a person that’s the most difficult to protect: the mind. Deceptive and cunning as he is, he’s a renowned master of the mindscape, and the damage he can inflict there is far worse than anything he or his minions can do to you physically. Which is why, above all else, if you truly wish to face him again, then you must fortify your mind at all costs.”

“Fortify my mind…” Ford repeated, open to just about any idea that could help him best Bill once and for all. “I don’t suppose you know of any special spells or ancient incantations, or heck, even just a few mental exercises that could do that in a relatively short amount of time… do you?”

“To tell the truth, magic would be of little use here,” the oracle replied. “And when I said you need to fortify your mind, I meant that in the literal sense. A metallic plate, titanium to be exact, inserted directly over the parietal lobe, would more than suffice to protect the inner workings of your mind from Cipher’s immaterial form. I’d be more than willing to perform the operation, but I must warn you that it is notoriously difficult and incredibly high-risk. If even the slightest complication arose, the chances of your survival would be-”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Ford interjected by holding a hand up. “Let me get all of this straight. You want me to trust you, someone I’ve literally just met who claims she can see my entire life history, to insert a piece of metal into my skull in a surgery that could very well end up killing me… just on the off chance that it might be able to stop Bill from getting inside my head?”

“Not might, will,” Jheselbraum corrected, all seven of her eyes bearing down into Ford’s. “If this procedure is a success, then I can guarantee you, Stanford Pines, that the only place within the mindscape that Bill Cipher will be able to reach you from will be within your dreams. But any other mental attack he tries to land against you within the waking world will miss its mark absolutely. And even more than that… Cipher will never be able to possess your mind or body as his own ever again…”

Ford’s eyes widened with stunned surprise upon hearing this promise, a promise so hopeful and reassuring that it almost sounded too good to be true. In the torturous weeks efore he’d been tossed into the portal, he had lived in nearly endless fear, wondering when, not if, Bill would launch a vicious assault upon his mind and body by taking them for agonizing joy rides whenever he least expected it. Even after he’d ventured out into the multiverse, after he’d cleared the horrors of the Nightmare Realm, that nagging fear of the dream demon besetting him in the most twisted of ways always persisted in the back of his mind. But now, here was a chance, albeit a risky one, to put that fear to rest once and for all. To beat Cipher at his own game before the game even had a chance to begin. To finally, finally be strong enough to stand up to the demon who had taken so much from him, even if he could never really hope to take any of it back. 

“Yes,” he said without even thinking twice. Perhaps it was that hopeful promise, or the thin mountain air or something else entirely, but Ford was confident that this choice was the right one. As long as the procedure actually ended up working, of course. “Yes, let’s do it. Right away, as soon as possible.”

“Are you absolutely certain?” Jheselbraum asked, admittedly surprised by his easy acceptance. 

“Positive,” Ford nodded, resolved to do whatever it took to bring a long-awaited end to his sinister foe. “In fact, I’ve never been more certain of anything else in my entire life.”

A soft smile finally returned to the oracle’s face at this, one that reminded the author that her determination to see Bill stopped was every bit as strong as his was. And through all of the struggles he’d been through across the multiverse, he’d finally managed to gain an ally who could actually help him do just that. “Very well. Then let’s get started.”

Though Ford had only just regained consciousness after a week of being completely out of it, he didn’t protest to Jheselbraum putting him under again that very same day for the sake of carrying out the operation. Despite the oracle’s claims that the surgery would be an arduous process, Ford was completely out of it for the duration, and mercifully so considering just how long it actually took to finish. Still, once it was finally completed, Jheselbraum let the author rest and recover for as long as he needed to, carefully bandaging up the incision wounds and monitoring his vitals while he slept for well over a day’s time. 

When Ford did finally awaken, he was still rather bleary and unfocused, a natural side effect of an intensive skeletal surgery according to Jheselbraum, though her plethora of unique natural remedies certainly helped ease the migraines that also came along with it. By the time the author was completely coherent again, the oracle estimated that he’d still need about a week of bed rest to fully recover, which was something Ford didn’t protest too much. After all, he’d waited this long to put an end to Bill already; he could afford to wait just a little longer. 

Said wait was made all the more bearable by Jheselbraum herself. The oracle was steadfast yet mysterious, though she also had a bit of a coy, playful side to her personality that shined through her calm and collected exterior every now and again. Because of their shared goal and ambition, it didn’t take long for Ford’s fledgling trust toward the oracle to become a genuine liking, one that was clearly mutual as an earnest friendship began to blossom between the pair. In many ways, Jheselbraum fondly reminded Ford of each of the Crystal Gems as she shared Garnet’s ability in foresight, Pearl’s respectable intellect, even Amethyst’s penchant for mischief, albeit in a much more lowkey way. But above all else, her hospitality, reliability, and endless desire for justice and peace always made Ford think of Rose, almost achingly so as he realized just how much he missed his once-close friend. And while the chances of him ever seeing that friend again were low, at the very least he had managed to make a brand-new one in Jheselbraum. 

The pair discussed various things during the author’s recovery period, though the topic they typically tended to linger on was none other than Bill himself. Given her lengthy lifespan and years of research and searching through the sands of time, Jheselbraum had a vast array of knowledge concerning the dream demon. Such knowledge fascinated Ford to no end, for he had always believed that if he was ever going to truly defeat his most dangerous foe, then the most important step was to know everything there was to know about that foe. And across his many years of traversing the multiverse, he’d never come across someone who had anywhere near as an encyclopedic wealth of information about him as Jheselbraum herself did. And fortunately for Ford, she was more than willing to share all that she knew with him. 

“Cipher has existed far before the galaxy you call home even burst to life,” the oracle detailed as she filtered through her countless bookshelves and scrolls for whatever documents she had on the demon. “But the dimension he once called home remains a mystery to this very day, largely because it is long gone. All that’s known of it is that Cipher himself, in his greedy thirst for ceaseless power, destroyed his entire world in a fit of violent fury, obliterating everything and everyone he’d ever known, including his own family--whatever a ‘family’ meant for his kind.”

“Bill? Having a family?” Ford asked with a dry scoff. “I find that hard to believe. Then again, if he really did have one once, brutally destroying them is absolutely in-character for him.”

“I won’t argue with you there,” Jheselbraum shook her head as she came to sit on the other side of the table of her lofty library. She laid out a collection of scrolls and manuscripts for the author to see, each of them bearing some sort of visage or information about the dream demon. “Ever since then, Cipher has been scouring the multiverse for a new world to conquer as his own. He settled on the in-between dimension now known as the Nightmare Realm some centuries ago, but as you’ve likely heard, that world is not meant to exist for much longer. He’s set his eye on several other dimensions in the past, but at the moment, he seems by far the most preoccupied with laying claim to your very own Earth. It’s hard to say why he’s so dead-set on making that planet in particular his own, but-”

“But he won’t,” Ford interrupted, his expression stony and severe as he cleared down at one of the images of Bill laying before him. “I’ll make sure he won’t.”

Jheselbraum finally smiled at this. “You know, Stanford, you claimed that your mission to defeat Cipher had selfish motives based wholly on matters of vengeance, but… I don’t think you’re giving yourself enough credit. Anyone willing to lay their own life down for the sake of the world they call home is nothing less than a hero. At least…” she trailed off, her smile turning just a bit more mysterious as she glanced away from the author. “That’s what I’ve come to believe.”

Ford cleared his throat, admittedly flustered for reasons he couldn’t quite place as he loosely repositioned a few of the bandages still wrapped around his head. “Y-yes, well, whether I’m hailed as a hero or not hardly matters to me. Just as long as I’m finally able to give Bill what he rightfully deserves…”

Strangely, the oracle said nothing to this, her smile gone as each of her eyes focused in on the author intently. Ford froze under her scrutinizing seven-eyed gaze, a gaze that almost seemed to be searching for something. And when it seemed as though she finally found that something, all of her eyes blinked at once as she let out a small, almost amazed gasp as she looked back to the author who was still watching her curiously all the while. “Stanford… forgive me…” she said, her voice soft, revenant even. “I promised I would not glimpse through your future without your permission, but… I must tell you… you have the face of the man who is destined to stop Bill Cipher from conquering your world…”

“R-really?!” Ford balked, startled by this information, though the mere thought filled his chest with a warm burst of pride. He had the highest of hopes that he would be the one to bring Bill down, but to hear the accomplishment of that goal be all but confirmed by an all-seeing oracle herself was so exciting he could hardly stand it. 

“Yes,” Jheselbraum nodded intently, placing a hand over his on the table. “And in your bloodline flows the strength and determination to destroy him, and all of his evil intentions, once and for all!”

“Incredible…” the author leaned back in his chair, unable to suppress a relieved, elated smile upon hearing such an idea. “A-are you sure?” 

“...Well…” the oracle paused, pulling her hand away as her gaze drifted toward one of the many tapestries hanging from the wall. This one, like many others that decorated the mountain shrine, depicted a peculiar, almost lizard-like creature, one that always seemed to be wearing a calm, amicable smile in every depiction Jheselbraum owned of it. “Only The One Who Watches truly knows…”

“The One Who Watches?” Ford asked, confused. 

“..You’ve never heard of it?” the oracle seemed genuinely surprised at this. “How odd. Just about every being in the multiverse is aware of the Great Axolotl.”

“...Isn’t an axolotl some sort of amphibian?” the author asked, still not following. 

“This Axolotl is no mere amphibian,” Jheselbraum said, rising from her seat to face her tapestry of the creature. “It is a timeless, infallible, benevolent being that possesses immense power, far greater than the false might Cipher pretends to wield. From its home between time and space, it spreads its goodwill and kindness to all who dwell in the multiverse. It is even the source of my own gift to gaze through the sands of time as it grants me an open window to look into the future that it weaves. The One Who Watches is the decider of fate across all dimensions… and I believe that its very own intervention was what led me to find you and bring you here, Stanford.”

“Hmph, well then, I’ll take your word for it,” Ford remarked almost sardonically. 

“You don’t believe me,” Jheselbraum inferred, glancing back at him. “Very well. But you should know that there is an ancient prophecy, passed down by the Great Axolotl itself, that speaks of a chosen one…”

“A chosen one?” Ford smirked. “That sounds a bit cliché, don’t you think?”

“Still not interested?” the oracle pressed with a faint smile. “Well, you might be after you learn that the Axolotl’s chosen one is destined to be the one who will put an end to Bill Cipher… forever.”

“Forever…” Ford repeated, his former amazement swiftly returning. “S-so this… so-called ‘chosen one’... You don’t think it could be-”

“You?” Jheselbraum asked knowingly. “I suppose it could be… But even then the true identity of the chosen one is something that the One Who Watches has not permitted me to see, at least not yet. But I believe that if it were you, Stanford, than the Great Axolotl would be making a very good choice when it comes to its chosen one... “

Ford was so deeply gratified and flattered by such genuine encouragement that he scarcely even knew what to say. Jheselbraum was quick to fill in his stark silence however with an offering to raise their already high spirits even more. 

To commemorate Jheselbraum’s hopeful prophecies, we spent the entire night partying and drinking Cosmic Sand--the very same kind Time Baby himself consumes (it’s very sweet though quite strong, like finely aged wine, which is somewhat concerning given that a baby is known to frequently drink it). We had much to be happy about, for as far as Jheselbraum’s glimpses through time were concerned, Bill’s defeat wasn’t too far off into the future. And the mere thought that his cruel trickery would finally be wiped from the cosmos for good was well worth celebrating. 

When I awoke the next morning, she was gone and I was in another dimension entirely. It was time to continue my quest. 

I sometimes wonder where she is now and if by chance I’ll ever see her again… And if the prophecy she spoke of, as well as the One supposedly behind it, is real after all…

Unlike the dimensions I’ve already described, many dimensions in the multiverse are ‘parallel Earths’, very similar to my dimension, but with a few major differences. There are parallel Earths where dinosaurs still rule (one way or another). And ones where dolphins (rather than Homo sapiens) took over as the dominant species after the dinosaurs went extinct. (These dolphin Earths invariably have the best water parks.) There’s a dimension where all music is just screaming, one where tennis balls chase dogs, and one where everyone is the same--except they’re all babies. I didn’t linger there for too long--I don’t care for being spit up on. 

But after nearly 30 years of dimension-hopping, I came upon a parallel Earth almost identical to our own. There was at least one crucial difference. 

But that difference was far from obvious when I first arrived there. Because when I initially step foot into that much more fortunate dimension, I couldn’t help but mistake it for my very own instead. 

Ford could scarcely believe his eyes as he ventured into this new dimension, one with trees, and grass, and a sky that were just like those of his very own home. Even the crisp springtime air smelled just as pleasantly familiar as he remembered Gravity Falls’ being as he walked through the practically identical forest. Never in the course of the past 30 years had he been to a dimension as similar to the Earth he knew as this one, and yet, he was quick to find that the two dimensions weren’t just alike in aesthetics alone. 

For soon enough the natural peace of the forest was broken by voices approaching from the opposite direction Ford was traveling in. Wary as ever, the author slipped behind a larger tree just in case the denizens of this dimension proved to be hostile. And yet, when the group traversing the wood finally came into view, he was completely floored to see that they were none other than a quartet he thought he’d never see again: the Crystal Gems. All four of them looked practically identical to how he remembered them, save for their different outfits, though that hardly fazed Ford as he made the most of an incredible opportunity he thought he’d never get again. 

Upon so much as spotting his close friends again for the first time in nearly 30 years, Ford didn’t hesitate, instead throwing all logic and caution out the window as he rushed out from his hiding spot to greet them. “Rose!” he called first, absolutely elated as he ran up to the Gems, completely breaking through their former conversation. “Garnet! Amethyst! Pearl! I-I can’t believe it! It’s you! It’s really you!”

“Uh… yes…?” Rose raised a confused eyebrow as she offered the author a quizzical smile. “Are you feeling alright, Ford? You’re much more… excited than you usually are.”

“Did ya discover some cool new sciency thing again?” Amethyst asked with a playful smirk. “What was it this week--and don’t bother telling me about it unless it’s a way I can shove eats into my gut faster than I already do.”

“Oh, please, Amethyst,” Pearl rebuffed, rolling her eyes. “Stanford must be excited about his odd new attire! From what I’ve observed, humans often tend to celebrate very simple things such as new clothing and the anniversary of the day they came into existence. Though I don’t know if I’d consider clothing like that to be… too exhilarating.” She frowned, looking over the author’s dark, tattered travel attire critically. “No offense, Ford.”  

“W-what? No!” Ford shook his head, confused. “I-I don’t understand, you all are acting as though I haven’t been gone for the past 30 years!”

“Um… because you haven’t?” Rose pointed out, just as bewildered. “I’m sorry, are… we playing some sort of strange game here? Because if we are I’m afraid I don’t really know the rules.”

“No, this isn’t a game, Rose,” Ford retired firmly, earnestly. “It really has been 30 years since the last time I’ve seen any of you! Don’t you remember? The portal? Bill? Anything?”

“Bill?” Amethyst piped up. “Pfft, we haven’t talked ‘bout that square of a triangle in forever!”

“Mostly because we haven’t needed to…” Pearl muttered disdainfully. 

“This… doesn’t make any sense…” Ford said, more to himself than the Gems. “Maybe I ended up in some sort of bizarre time loop? O-or perhaps I could have time traveled in general? I have been through much stranger over the past thirty years but still…”

“What’s science man goin’ on about this time?” Amethyst wondered as the author continued to anxiously mutter to himself. 

“I have no idea…” Pearl shook her head. “But he certainly is acting odd…”

“I’m starting to worry about him…” Rose noted fretfully. “Can you make any sense of what’s going on here, Garnet?”

Garnet simply nodded, adjusting her shades before addressing her companions bluntly. “That’s not Ford. Or at least, he’s not our Ford.”

“What?!” Rose, Pearl, and Amethyst all exclaimed, startled by this news. They reacted to it rather recklessly, each of them summoning their weapons in short order and turning them on Ford, who was more than startled by the sudden hostility as a result. 

“An imposter!” Pearl accused hotly. 

“Who are you and what you have done with the real Ford?!” Rose asked, her shield and sword both at the ready. 

“I-I am the real Ford!” the author protested, stumbling backward.

“But again, not our Ford,” Garnet interrupted calmly. 

“What’s that supposed’ta mean?” Amethyst asked, baffled.

“Maybe we should go see Fiddleford,” Rose suggested. “He might be able to help us figure this out.”

“Oh, excellent idea, Rose,” Pearl readily agreed. “He has been working on cloning technology recently. Maybe this Ford is the product of one of his experiments!”

“Wait, Fiddleford?!” Ford’s eyes widened at the mention of his former partner. “Y-you’ve seen Fiddleford recently? Where is he? More importantly, how is he?”

“Well, you can come see him for yourself,” Rose beckoned the author to follow her and the other Gems. “I’m sure he’ll be just as amazed as we are to see another Ford out and about.”

As curious as he was, not only to check in on his old friend but also get to the bottom of this peculiar mystery, Ford didn’t hesitate to follow, even if Pearl and Amethyst still watched him much more suspiciously than Rose and Garnet were. “But don’t think we won’t be keeping a close eye on you…” Pearl warned him as she held up the tail end of the group. 

“Yeah, ya dirty “Fordposter”!” Amethyst teased, elbowing the author hard in the knee as she impishly ran past him.

Even so, Ford took their misgivings, both serious and insincere, in stride, letting out a small sigh of relief as he simply allowed himself to relish the feeling of being in the company of his dependable friends once more. Even if he wasn’t entirely sure they were exactly the same as the Crystal Gems he once knew. “It’s hard to believe how much I’ve missed this…” he muttered contentedly to himself, hoping against hope that, even despite how strange the Gems seemed to be acting, he really was back in his own dimension after all these years after all. 

But he wasn’t. 

Because the differences between this dimension and his own became instantly more apparent as the Gems led the author to where he knew his house should have been. And yet, the homey little shack had received quite an impressive surrounding expansion in the form of a sprawling complex of buildings and structures, one that still featured the Gems’ iconic temple as a fixture of its forested background. Upon seeing the impressive structure, Ford had a multitude of questions, none of which he knew how to properly pose to the Gems as they continued to approach it. Even so, one of those questions was answered as they passed by its sign, which simply donned the campus as the “International Institute of Oddology”.

The Gems seemed to have exclusive access to the institute as they bypassed its front office entirely, entering into its complex series of busy hallways with ease. Just about everyone employed in the building seemed to know the Gems and regard them with friendly pleasantries, though even that paled in comparison to the immediate respect everyone paid Ford in particular. Whenever one of the plentiful lab-coat clad scientists passed him by, they greeted him with excited waves and chipper tidings in which they referred to him as “Dr. Pines” or “Professor Pines”, two titles that Ford had never really gone by before (even though he technically could, given his multiple PhDs. Still, despite this strangely warm reception, nothing could have prepared the author for when the Gems took him into a large, futuristic lab, filled to the brim with just about every scientific tool and tech imaginable. But as astonished by this incredible sight as he was, Ford quickly found himself even more dumbfounded as the Gems led the way to the only other person presently occupying the lab at the moment. None other than Fiddleford McGucket himself. 

“Fiddleford!” Rose greeted the inventor brightly as she hurried over to him first. 

“Oh! Howdy, ladies!” Fiddleford glanced over his shoulder from whatever he was working on. Unlike the Gems, time had actually had an impact on the inventor, though even despite his shallow wrinkles, short beard, and grayed hair, he’d managed to age rather well just as Ford had. “Ya’ll came just in time! I was just about to-” Fiddleford stopped short, swiveling around in his chair to send a peculiar glance Ford’s way. “Stanford? What in tarnation are you wearing?”

The author largely ignored his question as he instead stepped forward, past the Gems, so he could look his once-treasured colleague in the eye for the first time in three decades. “F-Fiddleford… I-” 

“Fiddleford!” Before Ford could even utter another word, his own voice echoed through the lab, albeit from a different source entirely. As if this entire situation wasn’t already shocking enough, Ford was absolutely floored to see himself enter in through the far side of the room. By all accounts, this other author looked strikingly identical, the only real differences in appearance lying in his clean-shaven face and equally clean scientific attire. He wasn’t paying much attention as he approached the mutually baffled group, leafing through a stack of papers as he addressed his partner evenly. “So I was running the numbers on that new modulator we were working on and-” He stopped short as he finally glanced up, only to notice his near mirror match standing just a few feet away from him. “Ugh, Fiddleford, what did I tell you about stealing samples of my DNA for your little cloning side project?”

“Uh… I-I shelved Project Double Vision ‘bout a week ago, Stanford…” Fiddleford noted, his eyes wide as he looked between the two Fords just as incredulously as the Gems all were. 

“Oh,” the other Ford said simply as he looked back to his double. “Then this must simply be the case of yet another deluded, overly-obsessed fan. Well,” he addressed the other author, pulling out a surprisingly threatening taser pen as he eyed him critically. “I don’t know how you managed to outwit both security and the Gems here, but I can assure you that we here at the IIO absolutely do not tolerate such-”

“W-wait!” the first Ford interjected hastily, running with the only reasonable guess he could make about this situation, given the bewildering evidence he’d seen. “I think I know what’s going on here.”

“Oh, do you?” the other Ford raised a dubious eyebrow. 

“Great!” Amethyst chimed in bluntly. “Then do ya mind filling us in?”

“Yes, please?” Rose added, still clearly quite confused. 

“W-well, you see, as far as I can tell, I’m not actually from this dimension,” Ford said, ignoring the sting that came along with admitting that fact. Admitting that he hadn’t really made it home like he’d once thought after all. “Even though it does look practically identical to my own. B-but I have been wandering the multiverse for years now and in that time I’ve come across many parallel dimensions to my own, so the only logical explanation is that this is one of them!”

“Golly!” Fiddleford immediately shot up from his seat upon hearing this. “A near-completely identical parallel dimension!? What are the odds of that?!”

“Now, now, Fiddleford,” the other Ford cautioned, still sternly eyeing his counterpart. “Don’t get too excited. After all, this… supposed other me doesn’t really seem to have much in the way of proof in regard to his claims…”

“Oh, really?” Ford met his double’s skepticism with a simple, succinct response as he held up one of his hands. The other Ford balked at the sight of it, glancing between it at his own similarly unique six-fingered hands before reaching out to touch those of his double to authenticate them. “Unbelievable…” he muttered incredulously. “They’re actually… real… I hate to say this but… you might just be from another dimension after all…”

“Can we skip to the part where we just assume that he is from another dimension?” Fiddleford asked eagerly. “Cause that’s far more excitin’ than just speculatin’!”

“Well even if this Ford is from another dimension,” Pearl cut in with a scowl. “How can we be so sure that he’s anywhere near as trustworthy as ours? He did mention Cipher, of all beings when we first found him, after all.”

“Ugh, now there’s a name I haven’t heard in ages…” the other Ford muttered disdainfully as Fiddleford shuddered fearfully beside him. “And I’d just as soon never hear it again for the rest of my life. So what business do you have with… him?” 

“I assure you, the only ‘business’ I have with him is putting a stop to his treachery once and for all,” Ford affirmed coldly.

“Wait…” Rose spoke up with a frown. “You mean… you haven’t already done that where you’re from?”

“...What do you mean?”

“Oof, well if you actually are from some parallel dimension, then I don’t even want to know how much of a disaster things are there if you’re still dealing with him,” Alternate Ford shook his head. “Because here all it took to keep him from slipping into our reality was a basic Dimensional Vortex Neutralizer to optimize the portal away from the Nightmare Realm, allowing us to safely use it as we please.”

“W-wha--when in the world did you find time to invent something like that?” Ford asked, admittedly wishing that he had done the very same before it had been too late. 

“We all did it together!” Rose smiled warmly. 

“It was pretty easy between the six of us,” Garnet added as coolly as ever.

“Yes, if I remember correctly, we reconvened to devise the schematics for it right after I sent Stanley away with my first journal…” Alternate Ford mused thoughtfully. 

“Wait… your Stanley actually listened to you when you told him to take the journal and leave?!” 

“Yours didn’t?”

“Ugh… of course, he didn’t…” Ford groaned, pinching the bridge of his nose tiredly. Suddenly, the basic differences of this dimension were becoming all too clear. The split had resulted from a moment so simple, so singular that it might not have mattered at all when it actually happened, but now it clearly did. Because his Stan refusing to take the journal away had been the very reason why he’d wound up sucked into the portal in the first place. And the Stan of this dimension agreeing to do so was the very reason why his alternate self stood before him today.  “Honestly, I’m surprised that any version of Stanley actually would, given how frustratingly stubborn he is…”

“Well, here I suppose he was just a little… less stubborn than usual,” Alternate Ford shrugged. “Either that or he had a moment of genuine clarity for once in his life. Even so, we made good on the advantage splitting the journals up gave us, built the Neutralizer, and we haven’t seen or heard from Bill ever since.”

On this Earth, I was never pushed into the portal by Stan. 

On this Earth, my brother listened to me and took Journal 1 away from Gravity Falls. 

On this Earth, I reunited with Fiddleford and Rose and the Gems, and together, created a Dimensional Vortex Neutralizer that allowed us to use the portal without any risk of a connection to Bill’s Nightmare Realm. 

And as a result of those rippling turns of fate, on this Earth, my parallel self was a celebrated star of the scientific community. With the help of Parallel Fiddleford and the Parallel Gems, over the years, he had amassed a wide array of incredible discoveries and inventions, all of which he had publicly published through his journals. And as other scientists read through those journals, it didn’t take long for more aspiring brilliant minds to flock to Gravity Falls, like a moth to a flame, all of them looking to my parallel self for direction when it came to investigating the town’s previously unheard of anomalies. That building community of scientists came together to turn his small cabin in the woods into the sprawling International Institute of Oddology (of which my parallel self was both the founder and chief researcher). And as my parallel self detailed the differences of both his life and his dimension to me, one thought ran paramount within my mind above all else. That this life of success and recognition could have just as easily been my own… ff only Stanley had actually listened to me for a change instead of thinking only of himself like he’s always done! 

When it was my turn to spell out the details of my vendetta against Bill to my alternate self and his friends, obvious interest was mutually peaked among them all. Parallel Fiddleford’s knee began to bounce with the agitation and excitement as my very own Fiddleford used to carry, and the Parallel Gems all whispered anxiously, yet eagerly to each other. Parallel Rose was every bit the heroic spirit as the Rose I knew as she seemed by far the most intent on seeing Bill be brought to justice, a sentiment my parallel counterpart also keenly shared. Although their dimension was safe from Bill, they all understood the threat Cipher posed to the wider multiverse. They all agreed to do whatever they could to help. 

I showed them my unfinished Quantum Destabilizer--a weapon I was designing to blast Bill into non-existence. The problem, my parallel self theorized, was the power source. In all my travels since leaving Jheselbraum, I had never come across an element that had both the necessary power and the required stability. Parallel Fiddleford piped up with a suggestion, an element that he had discovered in the Paradox Dimension. It was inert when visible, but highly radioactive when hidden. He called it NowUSeeItNowUDontium (a unique flair for language was something else he had in common with my Fiddleford). 

Even just a small sample of the element would be more than enough to get my Destabilizer up and running. The only issue was that NowUSeeItNowUDontium (what a mouthful!) was a notoriously difficult element to work with given just how potentially toxic it could prove to be to humans at the seemingly random points it blinked in and out of existence. That’s where the Parallel Gems came in. As unaffected by radiation as their non-organic forms are, they were able to handle the element with ease, and fortunately, Parallel Pearl in particular was well-versed in working with it thanks to past experiments. 

While the Parallel Gems did their part, I spent the next several days tinkering and making minor adjustments to my blaster’s design, working alongside Parallel Fiddleford and my alternate self to perfect it into a weapon to bring Bill to his swift, much-deserved end. Those few days were filled with plenty of scintillating discussions about the multiverse, parallel dimensions, and of course, the various distinctions and differences of this dimension in particular. The more my parallel self detailed the countless highlights and accomplishments of his lengthy career, the more I wished that my own path had run the same as his as opposed to the ruin I ran into when I was younger. This version of myself had gotten everything I had only ever dreamed of: fame, respect, and the chance to hold onto close friends that I had fallen away from so long ago. And while I didn’t envy him to the point of wanting to take all that he had away from him, I had to admit that if I had even just a fraction of the good fortune my parallel self had known, then perhaps my life would have turned out far different than it had ended up going. 

As much as I might have wanted to revel in my parallel self’s success, it was clear that there was literally no place for me in this dimension. Even if I could have stayed there for the rest of my days, my own conscious would not have allowed it. I still held onto the vow I had made close to 30 years earlier to destroy Bill Cipher. And after about a week of finalizing and finishing my Quantum Destabilizer, it was finally time for me to do exactly that. 

“Are you sure you have to go?” Parallel Rose asked as everyone prepared to see the author off on his way. 

“Yeah, havin’ another science man around could be fun!” Parallel Amethyst quipped as impishly as ever. “‘Specially if he can finally invent that food shovel I’ve been asking for forever now!”

“I have to admit that even though I was somewhat… distrustful of another Stanford just randomly showing up out of the blue, it was still a pleasure working with you all the same,” Parallel Pearl grinned, cordially extending her hand out for Ford to shake. 

“Safe travels,” Parallel Garnet bid him succinctly. “And don’t worry about your cellmate when you meet her. You’ll see her again eventually.”

“Um… thank you?” Ford frowned, confused by this strange, cryptic advice. 

“Go take that Quantum Destabilizer ‘n show that rabble rousin’, no-good son of gun Cipher what for!” Parallel Fiddleford cheered with all of the southern zeal Ford was familiar with when it came to his own Fiddleford. 

“For the sake of your dimension, our own, and countless others exactly like both,” the parallel author began intently. “I wish you luck. Or, uh… I wish me luck? Huh. Even after a week this is still confusing.”

“Thank you,” Ford nodded warmly. “All of you. I have no doubts that our hard work will go a long way toward putting a stop to Cipher and his tyranny once and for all.”

“We can only hope,” Parallel Ford agreed as the others fondly began to wave the author off. 

“Happy trails, Other Stanford!” Parallel Fiddleford called cheerily. 

“I hope you make it back home someday!” Parallel Rose added just as brightly. 

“And if you don’t make it back to your own dimension, then you’re always welcome to visit ours any time you’d like!” Parallel Pearl chimed in somewhat obliviously. 

“That’s not very likely to happen,” Parallel Garnet pointed out, though she didn’t explain much more beyond that. 

Even so Ford continued on his way back into the woods, savoring his last few moments in this world that was so very much like his own before he ultimately left it entirely. 

After 30 long years of planning in the shadows and biding my time, my chance finally seemed to have arrived. With the finished Quantum Destabilizer in tow, there was nothing keeping me from returning to the place where this nightmare had begun to put an end to the one who had woven it in the first place. 

I was finally ready to go back to the Nightmare Realm and face Bill Cipher. 

And yet… the dimension I ended up in next was about as far from the Nightmare Realm as I could have gotten… and pitted me against a threat that was every bit as dangerous as Bill: 

The Gem Homeworld and the Great Diamond Authority. 

Next: 

[bitcoinminershasrate]

Test - Gigabyte Brix S GB-BXi7H-5500: Review| Specs| Pros & Cons| Hashrate | Set-up

Test - Gigabyte Brix S GB-BXi7H-5500: Specs | Price | CPU | Profitability| Hashrate| best Coins | Config | Advantage (Pros) and Disadvantages (Cons) and other important features that will help you make better decision. Mini-PCs are flourishing and all manufacturers offer more or less small models, Gigabyte has its Brix series (which I tested in its Pro i7 4770r version here), a range that offers several models equipped with processors ranging from the Intel Celeron 3205U to the powerful 5th Generation i7 (Broadwell) 5500U. Let's see what the Brix of today's test (which is none other than an update of the first Brix) has in the belly! Specification: Hashrate - Gigabyte Brix BXi7H-5500 Gigabyte Brix BXi7H-5500Dimensions4,68 x 10,7 x 11,4 cmProcessorIntel® Core™ i7-5500UProcessor frequenciesTurbo: 3,00 GHzNon Turbo: 2.40 GHzGraphics chipsetIntel® HD Graphics 5500Graphics chipset frequenciesMaximum: 950 MhzBase: 300 MhzMemory2 x SO-DIMM DDR3L 1.35V1333 - 1866 MHzMaximum de 16 GoNetworkGigabit LAN (Realtek RTL8111G)IEEE802.11ac, Dual Band & BT 4.0AudioRealtek ALC283Maximum resolutionsHDMI: 4096 x 2304 @ 24 HzMini Displayport: 3840 x 2160 @ 60 HzSlots d'extension1 mSATA slot1 mini-PCIe slot occupied by WiFi + BT card1 SATA slotFront connectors2 x USB 3.01 x prise jackConnection at the back1 x HDMI1 x Mini DisplayPort2 x USB 3.01 x RJ451 x DC-In1 x KensingtonStorage1 x Sata3 6GbCompatible hard drives / SSD 2.5 "(7 or 9.5mm)FoodInput: AC 100-240VOutput: DC 19V3.42ASupported operating systemsWindows 7 32/64bitWindows 8.1 64bitGuarantee2 yearsPrice550 € TTC The first thing that strikes you here is the size of the machine, a small cube of 11cm sides and 4.68cm high, we still lose almost 1.5cm in height compared to the original Brix, which was already very small. The processor is therefore a Core i7 5500U running at a maximum turbo frequency of 3GHz (2.4GHz base), contrary to what one might think and at the original Brix this i7 only has 2 physical cores with hyperthreading against 4 cores physical with hyperthreading, performance should therefore be lower but more in line with the size and use of the end. The graphics part is left to an HD 5500 chipset clocked at 950 Mhz in turbo mode and 300MHz when the processors are used at 100%, the performance should also be less good than the Iri Pro which equipped the Brix Pro that I tested previously! In terms of memory, it is possible to install SO-DIMM memory (the same as laptops) 1333, 1600 or even 1866 MHz (in OC mode) with a maximum voltage of 1.35V for a maximum of 16GB .The storage part consists of an mSata port intended to accommodate an SSD and a Sata 3 6Gb / s connector for a 2.5 ″ hard drive or SSD. Of course, the network part is very well supplied with 1 Gigabit RJ45 port and 1 811ac / Bluetooth WiFi card which should allow everyone to connect the Brix to their network.The connection is not left out either with 2 USB 3.0 ports at the front as well as a 3.5mm jack output and at the rear 2 USB 3.0 ports, 1 HDMI port, 1 Mini DisplayPort, 1 RJ45 port as well. than a Kensington slot is not bad for such a small device! Well that's all well and good, but what about the price? Offered at around 550 € the Gigabyte Brix GB-BXi7H-5500 is not cheap, but cheaper by around 150 € compared to the Brix pro equipped with an i7 4770R, you also need to get an mSata disc (or 2.5 ″) And memory to have a functional machine.Place the unpacking of the beast! Here is the box! It will certainly not take much space in the cabinet you can be sure, on the top there is a profile photo of the product with only the mention of the model and a small listing of the beast's strengths, a module without wire (Wifi and Bluetooth) as well as support for 2.5 ″ format discs.At the back we find various photos highlighting the connections, the internal layout as well as the third-party components necessary for the operation of the Brix (2.5 ″ hard drive or mSata Drive, SO-DIMM memory and of course an operating system) . Once the box is open (very rigid, however, the transport should not damage the precious!) There is a first compartment accommodating the tiny Brix in a foam bag. Once the first compartment has been removed we come across the second housing the driver CD, the VESA plate (for mounting behind a screen) as well as the various screws and the power supply. Here's everything that's in the Brix S box!The bundle consists of: - 1 Brix GB-BXi7H-5500 - 1 external power supply - 1 mains cable - 1 VESA plate - 1 CD de drivers The bundle is therefore rather basic with the essentials necessary for connecting and placing the Brix. The VESA plate will be particularly practical to hide the mini-PC behind a screen. Here is the beast! All dark gray shiny metallic, the little one is very sober and very compact and robustness is essential. The power button is placed on the top and will therefore be easy to access. We can see very clearly that the beast is lower than its big brother Brix Pro, which was already really very compact, as you can see here. On the front we are entitled to 2 USB 3.0 ports as well as a 3.5mm jack that makes headphone and microphone, let's not forget the little Intel Core i7 sticker that goes well. There are small ventilation grilles on both sides, they will be needed to evacuate the heat of all these little people. The rear connection is rather well provided for a device of this type with 1 HDMI port, 1 mini DisplayPort port, 1 Gigabit RJ45 port as well as 2 USB 3.0 ports. Of course ventilation grilles are present here! Below we find again a small ventilation grid as well as the various labels of use, we learn that the Brix is ​​made to work with a 19V and 3.42A power supply or 65Watts, much less than the Brix Pro and its 135 Watts , that should be more than enough for this small configuration.Why not open the beast now! The motherboard! Everything is really miniaturized here, we see the 2 memory modules and the unused mSata port which is located just above the Wifi / Bluetooth module. The layout of the components is identical to the Brix Pro but the motherboard itself is not identical. Below we can see the cooling system, which is all in all tiny and much smaller than that of the Brix Pro, given the size of the fan we will have to expect it to run very quickly and therefore to the noise pollution that go with it, but we'll see that later  Here is the location for a 2.5 ″ drive / SSD, it will be glued to the bottom wall just like on the Brix Pro. The test platform The Brix S i7 5500 will be compared to the following configuration: - Processor : Intel Core i7 4770K - CPU Fan : Noctua NH-D15 - Motherboard : Gigabyte Z87X-UD5TH - Mémoire: Kingston HyperX 4 x 2 Go 1600Mhz - Disque dur: WD Raptor 150 Go - Ventirad Graphics Card : Arctic Cooling Accelero S1 - Alimentation: be quiet! E9 580CM - Case : Corsair Carbide 300R Of course the results will necessarily be to the advantage of the test configuration, but it will be a good point of comparison! The graphics card has been removed in favor of the integrated Intel HD4600 chipset.The temperature, consumption and noise tests were carried out under OCCT in order to push the machine to its limits. Cinebench R15 With 2 physical cores and 2 virtual cores less, the Core i7 5500U is no match for the other 2 Core i7s in the comparison, and that's normal! However, let's be relativistic because 305 is very close to a desktop Core i3 Haswell. SuperPI 32M Using only one thread the frequency plays a major role here, as on Cinebench R15 the Core i7 5500U is behind with 11 minutes compared to the 8 minutes of the other Core i7s. This is easily explained by seeing that the turbo mode of the 5500U is “only” 3 GHz. Aida64 4.60 In terms of memory under Aida64, the speeds are not far from the other solutions in the comparison, which is quite normal. The result under CPU Queen is once again in line with what we saw above namely more than 50% worse, again this is quite normal. 3DMark Fire Strike & Jeux The graphic part of the i7 5500U is clearly not made for playing, or you will have to pay great attention to graphic details and not expect miracles (games like LOL, HOTS or even Diablo 3 should however be fully playable. ). We can see that the HD 5500 chipset is also behind compared to the HD 4600 of the Core i7 4770K, which is itself far from the Iris Pro 5200 of the Core i7 4770R which equips the Brix Pro. Débits Sata – CrystalDiskMark I purposely removed the Brix Pro from the comparison as there was no point of comparison, so I took a Kingston HyperX Savage 240GB SSD (tested here) and it was tested on the Core i7 4770K and the Brix S (the Brix Pro is no longer in my possession).As we can see the Brix defends itself really very well by having read and write performance almost identical to its big desktop brother, we can say that there is really no clamping here and the SSD responds to the finger and at the eye. Network speeds The throughput was tested by transferring a 7GB iso file hosted on a machine running Debian Wheezy and all over a Gigabit network. At the network level, the Brix S has no problem keeping up with the speed with 970Mb / s in download and 960Mb / s in upload, same results as with the Brix Pro, the Intel chipset present on the Gigabyte Z87X-UD5TH is more efficient but nothing that changes from the ordinary here. The Gigabyte Brix S GB-BXi7H-5500 WiFi card has been tested in real conditions, and not glued to a high-end router specially purchased for the occasion, in fact in 99% of cases the PC is connected to the box so it will be the same for this test! The connection is made to a SFR NB6 box (optical fiber with a speed of 1Gb / 200Mb) and through a wall. By the way, we see that the Wifi chipset is really very good with 38.07 Mb / s in download and 41.81 Mb / s in upload, better than the Brix Pro but very slightly worse than the Wifi card installed on the Z98X-UD5TH motherboard . It is very likely that the possible speeds will not restrict your connection (unless you have fiber or VDSL2). Temperatures In terms of temperatures at rest, the Brix S behaves very well (for such a small PC of course) with 51 ° for the processor and the motherboard as well as 45 ° for the SSD. The SSD is a little hot but nothing that should endanger its life.In load we go up to 85 ° for the processor and the motherboard and 46 ° for the SSD, again even if this may seem high it is not so because this processor can remain at this temperature without the slightest concern for its duration of life (The Brix Pro's Core i7 rose to 97 ° to compare). Consumption So there is as much to say that Gigabyte has worked very well, at rest the complete machine consumes 8.6 Watts at the outlet, which is quite simply ridiculous and buries its big brother Brix Pro of about 10 Watts (which was already low in energy with its 18 Watts). On the other hand, the gap widens even more with a maximum of 49 Watts at the outlet for the Brix S against 89 Watts for the Brix Pro, nothing to say in terms of consumption the Brix S i7H-5500 is doing. perfectly. Noise Warning: Part to be taken with a grain of salt, unfortunately not having access to the appropriate equipment and using an android application to take the readings The measurements below are only indicative! The readings were taken 20cm from the machine. Here again the Brix S behaves very differently from its big brother the Brix Pro, indeed at rest and with its 32 dB it is almost completely silent, in any case it will clearly not be heard if there is every other sound source. Under load on the other hand and with 48 dB it is clear that we will not be able to miss the little beast which cries from the top of its more than 5000 RPM, but it remains well below the Brix Pro and its 70 dB which was almost unbearable . Here we are at the end of this test, what about the Brix S GB-BXi7H-5500?For starters Gigabyte took a Brix Pro which was already tiny and reduced its height even further, making placement very easy, behind a screen for example with its VESA mount. The build quality as well as the robustness of the whole are really excellent, no worries at this level. In terms of performance, we are below a Brix Pro with 2 fewer physical cores but the Brix S manages to do almost as well as a desktop Core i3 Haswell, so as much to say that it will be more than enough for all daily tasks. The integrated graphics chip will allow you to do whatever a user needs, and even play a few small games (LOL style for example) but clearly you should not expect miracles.Unlike the Brix Pro, the S version manages to keep temperatures correct for its size, as well as much more contained noise pollution, even if the beast will be clearly heard in load, in office use (which is the main use of this device). Brix S) it will be very discreet. Regarding the price on the other hand there is no miracle, the Core i7 5500U itself is offered at $ 393, the Brix S i5H-5500 is offered at a price between 550 and 600 €, so yes it remains expensive for the performances offered but the miniaturization of the whole has to be paid for, and as usual we have nothing for nothing! It is also necessary to take into account the fact that in addition to the Brix S itself it is necessary to add memory (between 40 and 50 € for 2 x 4 GB) and an SSD (from 60 to xxx €). If you are looking for the smallest possible office PC without losing performance compared to a classic office PC then the Brix S GB-BXi7H-5500 is undoubtedly an excellent choice, if the budget allows it  Advantages - Cut - Performances - Build quality A big thank you to Wilfried from Gigabyte who allowed me to do this test. Where to find the Brix S GB-BXi7H-5500? Read the full article

[mostlysignssomeportents]

BOING BOING GIFT GUIDE 2017

Here's this year's complete Boing Boing Gift Guide: dozens of great ideas for stocking stuffers, brain-hammers, mind-expanders, terrible toys, badass books and more. Where available, we use Amazon Affiliate links to help keep the world's greatest neurozine online.

Gadgets + Gear

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Books + Music

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Home + Kitchen

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Toys + Games

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Naughty + Nice

Gadgets

CORY

Edu-Toys Night 'n Day Mechanical GlobeElenco's Night 'n Day Mechanical Globe uses a system of translucent, exposed gears to rotate an internally illuminated globe that displays the seasonally adjusted, real-time night/day terminator as it spins.[Read More]

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iPhone 8 PlusNow on its eighth numbered generation, the iPhone remains my entire creative studio and almost everything I need to do my work: it replaces my fancy camera, my audio gear and everything else I had to lug around. This thing really is everything. I go big on screen size and storage capacity, with that in mind: the Plus, and 128 GB.

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Audio Technica AT-LP60Forget those vinyl-destroying, vintage-inspired all-in-one units. They're all crap. The Audio Technica AT-LP60 is a fantastic beginner (or revivalist) turntable for the price. Its built-in pre-amp means all you need to do is plug it any powered speakers with an audio input.You won't find a better turntable than this for under $100 unless you hit the second-hand market.

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Flitt Flying Pocket Selfie Camera Drone ($100)I honestly didn't expect that this tiny fold-up drone would perform as well as it does. It does a great job of hovering in place, and is easy to control with a smart phone. It's the first drone I can fly without crashing it into a wall or getting it stuck in a tree.

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ROB

Kano Computer KitBuild your own computer and learn to code art, music, apps, games and more with the Kano Computer Kit, an introduction to the bare metal you just won't get with crap-laden commercial machines. Hundreds of schools use them, and Includes everything you need, including the Pi that acts as its brain, case, speaker, wireless keyboard, RAM, and cables. And unlike most edumuacational computer gear, it looks absolutely cool as heck.

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JASON

An airbag for your motorcyclistDo you love your motorcyclist? This simple, tether activated airbag inflates less than .10 of a second after a rider becomes separated from their bike. Helping to secure the neck, and protect the torso and internal organs, the Helite Turtle, is a top choice for next-generation motorcycle safety.

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Kindle E-reader loaded with free classicsFor $50, the entry-level Kindle E-reader is priced right, and comes in black or white! This model has a 6” display and the battery lasts for ages between charges. (If you want to get fancy, go for the Kindle Paperwhite with a built-in reading light so you don't bug bedmates.) Load it with free classic books from Project Gutenbergbefore gifting!

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Igloohome Deadbolt2 ($238)The Igloohome Deadbolt2 has a programmable keypad instead of a keyhole. It took me about 20 minutes to install on my door. You can send your friends or other people single-use PINs. The smartphone app can also be set so the door unlocks when you touch the keypad - no PIN needed.

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Mixcder Wireless & Wired Over Ear Headphones ($80)I bought these relatively inexpensive headphones for my daughter, who wanted wireless headphones for when she paints and sculpts. These are comfortable, have good sound quality, and pair easily with an iPhone.

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PacSafe Transit Travel Hoodie ($130)The thing I like about this pocket-covered hoodie is that the interior pockets have little line drawings indicating what you should put in them - pen, eyeglasses, tablet computer, phone, passport, earbuds, wallet, etc. I like having a garment that tells me what to do, it keeps life simple while traveling.

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Elf ear earbudsOnce hard to find, these low-end but unique earbuds are now at Amazon. For elves who can't quit their record collection even for a moment, they're still, sadly, only available in lily white. But cheap, at just $13.

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Raspberry Pi 3 Model BThe best $35 you can spend on a wee yet straightforward and accessible barebones computer, Raspberry's Pi is now in its third generation and lives atop a vast and growing ecosystem of accessories, cases and general craziness to have fun with. The latest flagchip model has a 1.2GHz 64-bit quad-core CPU with twice the Pi 2's performance, integrated WiFi and Bluetooth, and backward compatibility with earlier models.

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XENI

Black & Decker CHV1410L 16-volt Lithium Cordless Dust Buster Hand VacStill the best selling hand vac for keeping your office, home, workshop or hackerspace tidy. CHV1410L has strong suction, and a bagless dirt bowl that's easy to see and empty. Holds a charge for up to 18 months when it's off the charger. High efficiency Lithium ion chargers protect it by automatically shutting off when the battery is charged, so you can store it on the charger.

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ArduboyBeautiful 1-bit graphics in your wallet! Arduboy is an open-source platform to create and share games and the hardware is made to the dimensions of a business card. Best of all, this tiny toy is only $50. Want more? The PocketChip, at $70, plays Pico-8 games with a dazzling 16 colors; the dev community is more mature and there are countless games already.

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Second-gen Apple iPad Pro 12.9-inchWith the lastest 12.9" model I've changed my mind about Apple's biggest iPad. Its unmatched pencil latency and powerful processor leave Microsoft (and even Wacom) trailing, while markedly improved third-party applications make Photoshop less critical, at least for me. Finally.

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Books and Media

MARK

The EC Artists Library Slipcase (Vol 3 $54)This high quality box set of four hardbound books has 904 pages of the very best comics of the 1950s. Volume one of this series is out of print and sells for over $250. Volume three is just $54. With art by greats like Wally Wood, Joe Orlando, John Severin, and George Evans, this set is a must-have for comic book aficionados.

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Canadaland Guide to Canada (Published in America), by Jesse Brown and friendsBrown finds plenty of hilarious awfulness in Canada's past and present, especially in the way that Canadians talk about themselves when they expect Americans might be listening to them. From Justin Trudeau (who talks about refugees abandoned by Trump but takes no action to improve their lot, because he's too busy taking away the citizenship rights of naturalised Canadians with objectionable politics, greenlighting climate-destroying pipelines for the Tar Sands, and making the most of the sweeping surveillance powers he promised he'd abolish after taking office) to Rob Ford to Quebec separatism and the long, deplorable traditions of drunken, racist Canadian leaders who are remembered as wise, even-handed leaders, Brown punctures ever bubble that Canadians have ever blown over the border toward our American cousins.

I laughed aloud at many of these jokes, and they got under my skin, in just the same way that a perfect Samantha Bee rant will. This is a book of weaponised jokes about a country that has spent more than a century burnishing its credentials by blithely asserting its moral and temperamental superiority to its erratic and flamboyant southern neighbour -- and every shot hits its mark. [Read more]

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Briggs Land Volume 1: State of Grace, by Brian WoodStories matter: the recurring narrative of radical Islamic terror in America (a statistical outlier) makes it nearly impossible to avoid equating "terrorist" with "jihadi suicide bomber" -- but the real domestic terror threat is white people, the Dominionists, ethno-nationalists, white separatists, white supremacists and sovereign citizens who target (or infiltrate) cops and blow up buildings. That's what makes Brian Wood's first Briggs Land collection so timely: a gripping story of far-right terror that is empathic but never sympathetic.

Briggs Land builds on the empathic -- but not sympathetic -- portrayals of far-right separatists in Wood's seminal graphic novel DMZ. It's timely: the Trump era has been a moment of uneasy glory for white nationalists and their fellow travelers, who, having long craved the spotlight, aren't entirely sure what to do with it.

Briggs Land is also in development as an AMC TV series, further evidence of its zeitgeisty nature. Being a Brian Wood comic, it's also gripping as hell, a nonstop crime novel that involves rogue FBI agents, ruthless skinheads, closet racists and overt ones, doting parents who also happen to be unspeakable monsters. [Read More]

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Kindred (Graphic Novel), adapted from the novel by Octavia ButlerKindred is the story of Dana, an African-American writer married to a white man in 1976, who finds herself being violently yanked through time and space to the side of her distant ancestor, Rufus, the son of an enslaver who lives on a plantation in antebellum Delaware. Rufus -- a self-destructive, traumatized and spoiled child -- periodically puts himself in mortal danger, and when he does, Dana is torn from 1976 to save him, and is stranded in the violent, totalitarian south until she experiences mortal terror, whereupon she returns to her present, only moments after she left. Luckily for Dana, mortal terror is a commonplace occurance for black people in Delaware in the 19th century.

Dana's relationship to Rufus, and to Rufus's freeborn, African-American friend Alice -- whom Dana knows to be her ancestress -- is wrenching and claustrophobic, as she is enlisted to help Rufus sexually assault and eventually enslave Alice, revealing the deep violence lurking in Dana's own distant past.

For many years, Dana and her white husband, Kevin, are stranded in history, together and separately, and this affords Butler a chance to add yet more nuance to her tale, weaving in the point of view, privileges and horror of a white ally who, nevertheless, enjoys a measure of safety his black wife cannot claim.

The graphic novel adaptation is extremely faithful to the Butler novel, and does brilliant things with color-palettes, using different tones to demark the present and past, and also the belowstairs and abovestairs places in the lives of the enslaved people. The lines are vigorous and rough, conveying emotion and urgency.[Read More]

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MARK

The Magic Machine: A Handbook of Computer Sorcery ($4)This 1990 BASIC programming book is long out-of-print, but is still valid and a great way to explore fractals and artificial life. I loved this book when it came out and just bought a replacement for my lost copy. Use copies are cheap on Amazon. Get it for a smart kid in your life.

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DAVID

Voyager Golden RecordIn 1977, NASA launched two spacecraft, Voyager 1 and 2, on a grand tour of the solar system and into the mysteries of interstellar space. Attached to each ofthese probes is a beautiful golden phonograph record containing the story of our planet expressed in music, sounds, images, and science. It’s a message for any extraterrestrial intelligence that might encounter it. And now you can experience on Earth as a lavish 3xLP Box Set or 2xCD-Book edition.

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DAVID

The Photographs Of Charles Duvelle - Disques OCORA And Collection PROPHETDecades before the term "world music" became common parlance, Charles Duvelle was traveling the globe recording the sounds and sights of indigenous people around the world. To enable us see the world through Duvelle's eyes, Sublime Frequencies' Hisham Mayet in collaboration with Duvelle released this magnificent tome contains field photographs from 1959-1978, a deep interview, a report he prepared for Unesco in 1978, and two CDs of music that will move you.

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DAVID

Art Sex Music by Cosey Fanni TuttiThe stunning memoir of musician, artist, and cultural provocateur Cosey Fanni Tutti is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of avant-garde music, performance art, underground culture, radical living, and female empowerment. Best known as co-founder of pioneering industrial groups Coum Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle (famously called “wreckers of civilisation” by a British MP), Cosey has also explored the fringes of sex, music, and creativity as a pornographic model, video artist, electronic composer, and, yes, writer. This is her story so far and it’s a doozy.

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DAVID

Little Book of Wonders: Celebrating the Gifts of the Natural World by Nadia DrakeNational Geographic contributor Nadia Drake’s science writing sings with knowledge, rigor, and her own infectious curiosity. This slim and delightful book is no exception. A lovely miniature wunderkammer of Earth’s magical places, startling phenomena, and amazing wildlife, it pairs beautiful photos with Nadia’s poetic and informative captions that spark the imagination and instill a sense of wonder about our world.

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DAVID

Dalí: The Wines of GalaFirst published in 1978, Salvador Dalí’s The Wines of Gala is a stunning and strange guide that groups wines “according to the sensations they create in our very depths” such as “Wines of Frivolity,” “Wines of the Impossible,” and “Wines of Light.” Featuring more than 140 of Dalí’s surrealist illustrations, this is the most bizarre, sensual, and sensational book about viticulture and libations that you’ll ever experience.

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CORY

THEFT: A History of Music, by James Boyle and Jennifer JenkinsTheft traces millennia of musical history, from Plato's injunction against mixing musical styles to the outrage provoked by the troubadours who appropriated sacred music and turned it into bawdy songs about wanting to have sex with hot teenagers (a trick Ray Charles repeated hundreds of years later!); from the racist outrage over rock and roll's challenge to white supremacy to the fights over sampling and the exploitation of African-American musicians who were ripped off 40 years ago versus the interests of their musical progeny whose sample-based music has been distorted and even outlawed by the same musical corporations that screwed the R&B artists, in the name of defending those artists (!).

Jenkins and Boyle are two of the staunchest defenders of fair use and remixing -- their first comic, Bound by Law, was a kind of Understanding Comics for the legalities of fair use -- and it shows: Theft is as laden with visual, textual and musical references as a Dizzy Gillespie solo, an early Public Enemy wall-of-sound, an illegal Girl Talk mashup.[Read More]

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The Free, by Lauren McLaughlinIsaac West is a mixed-race kid who never knew his dad; he and his sister have raised their alcoholic, abusive mother as much as she's raised them. But Isaac has a plan: his little sister Janelle is smart, better than he'll ever be, and he's going to get her out of their mutual hellhole and into a private school -- and to make that happen, he's graduated from petty theft into grand theft auto, under the supervision of his high-school auto-shop teacher, a cut-rate Fagin who trains and oversees a gang of junior car thieves.

It's this teacher who insists that Isaac should plead guilty to beating a man comatose in a car-heist that went wrong, though the kid who actually did the beat-down was the teacher's cousin, a hulking giant of a kid who has already got a conviction under his belt and faces being tried as an adult if he goes down.

For Isaac, it's an easy choice: spend 30 days in juvie, complete his rehab program, and in return, he'll get enough to send Janelle off to private school. All he has to do is survive, and he's been doing that all his life.

From here, McLaughlin has all the elements for a tight, claustrophobic novel that veers between the terror and camaraderie of incarceration; the brutally honest drama therapy group that Isaac must attend if he's to be released; the mounting danger to his sister and all of the repressed feelings and guilt that weigh Isaac down.

While there's some revenge and redemption here, mostly what there is is unblinking reality, a willingness to confront the impossible without denying it. The kids in Isaac's world are in trouble, and that trouble isn't going to get better for most of them, and maybe not for Isaac. Some of those kids are pretty terrible, but even at their worst, they're still kids, and still rounded people with their own virtues and stories.

I don't know when I've read a more empathic novel, and it's been a long time since I read one that was more sorrowful and joyful at the same time. [Read More]

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ROB

The Complete Elfquest Vol. 4Fresh out in November, this volume contains some of the most exquisite and touching episodes of Wendy and Richard Pini's Elfquest saga, a great alternative to genre fantasy and its grim 'n' gritty modern counterparts. One of America's best indie comics, it's illustrated by Wendy's wonderful artwork – even at its most lighthearted, unanswerable questions of identity, family and freedom lurk between the lines. (Newcomers should not feel they have to start at the beginning, but it sure helps.)

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CORY

The Hardware Hacker: Adventures in Making and Breaking Hardware, by Andrew "bunnie" HuangThe book draws heavily on Huang's own hardware projects, which have included substantial manufacturing in south China, with many hard-won lessons about how things can go wrong and how to make them go right. This is more than a checklist or memoir: it's nothing less than a masterclass in modern manufacturing, and even if you never plan on manufacturing anything, reading these chapters will explain the material world around you like few other texts.

This dovetails neatly into a meditation on the differences between Western and Chinese approaches to "intellectual property" and the way this has informed the manufacturing processes whose outflows are all around us. In these chapters, Huang proves himself to be a thoughtful and incisive critic of law as well as technology, and the thorny questions he raises show up the normal discussion on these subjects up for a shallow scrape over the surface of something deep and difficult.

Huang uses these broad legal and technical passages as a foundation for the second half of the book, which lay out the detective work that Huang did to realize his various hardware challenges, from stick-on soft circuits to an insanely clever device that circumnavigates the law through tight and unsuspected secret creeks that allow him to enter territory that no engineer has ever seen by legal means.

The book concludes with its most speculative and future-looking chapter: a disquisition on the similarities (and differences) between computational bioscience and hardware hacking, based on his work with his "perlfriend" -- his perl-hacking, bioscientist girlfriend -- on hacking genomes. [Read More]

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New York 2140, by Kim Stanley RobinsonIt's 2140 and trillions of dollars' worth of the world's most valuable real estate is now submerged under fifty feet of water, resulting from two great "surges" where runaway polar melting created sudden, punctuated disasters that displaced billions of people, wiped trillions off the world's balance sheets, and turned the great cities of the world into drowned squatter camps.

But it's 2140, and the cities are coming back. The combination of financial speculation, desperate refugees willing to do anything to find shelter, and new technological innovations are spawning "SuperVenice"s where boats replace cars and high-rises connect to each other with fairytale skybridges, and pumped-out subway stations become underwater leisure clubs. No SuperVenice is more super than New York City, where the boats ply midtown Manhattan's skyscrapers and everything from Chelsea down is an intertidal artificial reef where, every now and again, hundreds of squatters die as the buildings topple.

The forces of finance are deeply interested in the intertidal zones. These great cities were once the world's ultimate luxury products and now they're marine salvage, waiting to be dredged up from the tidal basins, dusted off and monetized. Yeah, there's millions of inconvenient poors hanging out in them, but they're a market failure, producing suboptimal rents on some seriously distressed assets that need a little TLC, capital infusion, and ruthless securitization to bring them back.

Robinson is a master of turning stories about zoning disputes and local politics into gripping, un-put-down-able adventure tales (his novel Pacific Edge remains the most uplifting book in my library). New York 2140 is a spectacular exemplar of the tactic: the financial shenanigans form a backdrop for submarine drone-wars, black-ops kidnappings, private security assassinations, non-state actor cyberwar and economic terrorism, buried treasure hunting, and big, muscular technologies from giant dredging barges to aerosolized diamond sprays. [Read More]

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WAKE UP!, by Rick Lieder and Helen FrostLife is a continuing cycle of newness, then growth, and then gone: then birth and growth again. Photographer Rick Lieder started thinking about that theme of new life and new beginnings several years ago, and WAKE UP!, published by Candlewick Press, is the result. Working with his collaborator, poet Helen Frost, our book is about opening eyes—our own, first—and pointing to the world that’s right here, containing us all. Helen and rick are both based in the US Midwest, so we started there, with a world that we didn’t need to travel far to explore, only wake up enough to actually see. [Read More]

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Penguin Galaxy Boxed Set, introduced by Neil GaimanLast October, Penguin released its Galaxy boxed set, a $133 set of six hardcover reprints of some of science fiction's most canonical titles: The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K LeGuin; Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A Heinlein; 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C Clarke; Dune by Frank Herbert; The Once and Future King by TH White; and Neuromancer, by William Gibson.

The series is curated and introduced by Neil Gaiman, whose essay on the charm and value of science fiction appears at the start of each of the handsome volumes. It's a fine essay, placing each book in its historical context, and turning a writerly eye to their construction and techniques, as well as some of the memoir that makes Gaiman essays such fine reads (see, for example, his 2016 essay collection The View From the Cheap Seats).

As nice as that essay is, it's eclipsed by the gorgeous design, courtesy of Spanish designer Alex Trochut, whose impressive CV includes a Grammy nomination for Best Recording Package. Trochut does away with fussy book-jackets and prints his titles straight onto the books' boards in stylized, embossed gold leaf type -- with clever type-art for every cover. [Read More]

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Brutal London: Construct Your Own Concrete CapitalBrutal London: Construct Your Own Concrete Capital tells the stories of nine of London's greatest brutalist structures (with an intro by Norman Foster!), including the Barbican Estate, Robin Hood Gardens, Balfron Tower and the National Theatre -- and includes pull-out papercraft models of these buildings for you to assemble and display. [Read More]

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SHADE THE CHANGING GIRL v.1: Earth Girl Made Easy, by Cecil CastellucciLoma Shade, as her own unique character, was a way of being steeped in the world of Shade the Changing Man, while being its own thing. Some people say that Shade the Changing Girl seems to be a direct sequel of the Milligan run. I say not so. I’ve always approached it as a kind of side-quel. Creator Cecil Castellucci wanted to take care to have nods and echoes to them both, but to be able to stand narratively on its own. It was a way of striking out in a new direction while plucking elements from the Ditko original and the Milligan run.

Our Shade the Changing Girl is a way of changing the changing.

The body of a teenage girl was a great place to start that change. The body of bully was the way to take it to the next level. The idea of a real alien, who moves like a bird in human form was the best way to express it. Add in Marley Zarcone’s wongld. They are blooming and bursting with feelings and big body changes. They are confident and awkward. They are experimenting with identity. They are constantly changing.

When we are teenagers, we are figuring out how to become who we are. To throw down and figure out what it really means to be human and to break free from our parents and to think for our selves. This is why Castellucci loved writing Shade, because as an alien, she mirrors our own growth in this world. She can see the quotidian with eyes that we can’t see the world with. She has to figure out how to transform herself from who she was to who she isn’t. And through her we dive deep into her attempts to discover the meaning of humanity. Loma Shade is changed profoundly by being this mean girl and having to navigate the fall out of living in Megan’s body and in her world. [Read More]

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Paper Girls 1, 2 and 3, by Brian K Vaughanhttps://boingboing.net/2016/12/14/brian-k-vaughan-and-cliff-chan.html https://Paper Girls stars an all-girl cast of newspaper delivery kids for a fictional Cleveland newspaper, circa 1988 -- they are instantly and wholeheartedly likable, like the Goonies or the cast of Stranger Things. They convene on November 1, when the mean teenagers of Cleveland are still out an about and making mischief, picking on the likes of them, and they band together in mutual self-defense.

Then things get weird.

The girls are assaulted by a group of costumed teens, who rip off a Radio Shack walkie-talkie that one of them saved for months to buy. The girls chase down these goons, ending up in a partially built house, whose basement holds a spaceship of some kind, or maybe it's a time-machine -- and after a flash and a bang, they emerge to a transformed neighborhood, overcast with a tornado out of which flap huge, monstrous dinosaurs ridden by lance-wielding, argot-speaking warriors who kill and kidnap all they meet.

Before long, the girls are hurled into a mystery tale of Vaughnian complexity, chased through time and space, meeting ambiguous heroes and villains, including several who may be clones of them -- or older versions, or neither. (Don't foreget books Two and Three) [Read More]

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Bitch Doctrine: Essays for Dissenting Adults, by Laurie PennyIf you've followed Penny's work, you'll know that the thing that sets her apart from other enraged columnists is her empathy: her ability to understand the self-serving rationalizations, radioactive bullshit, and emotional damage that drives men to threaten her with rape and murder for pointing out that things aren't exactly fair.

But while Penny is perfectly capable of understanding her ideological opponents -- better than they understand themselves, without a doubt -- she doesn't offer them any sympathy. This sympathy -- no less well-informed, no less analytical -- is reserved for people who are getting the shittiest end of the stick: trans people, people of color, poor people, disabled people, other women. Even when she feuds with them, even when she is laid low by anger from her allies, she does the hard work to look past her own hurt feelings, to the missteps that let her to a place of conflict.

Penny is a bridge between two modes of political writing, a hybrid that gets the best of both and offsets their deficits: on the one hand, she's clearly in the Hunter S Thompson gonzo tradition (her adventures running down violent neo-Nazis in Greece are a match for anything HST wrote about Hell's Angels or police detective conventions); on the other hand, she's got the scholarly habit of finding and presenting an issue from every side, even the ones she disagrees with. But while the gonzos reduce their opponents to caricatures, and while scholarly work can dissolve the point of view into a view from nowhere, wishy-washy and free from any kind of thesis or real muscle, Penny is able to forcefully convey her point of view, and back it up by showing that she understands exactly what her opponents are thinking, and why, precisely, they are full of shit. [Read More]

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CORY

Lizard Music, by Daniel PinkwaterLizard Music is a novel about Victor, a kid who falls asleep while doing a model airplane and wakes up when the local TV station is going off the air, who discovers that the true late-night programming comes from humanoid lizards who live in a secret nearby volcano and worship Walter Cronkite.

Victor travels to the land of the lizards with the Chicken Man, a recurring Pinkwater character: a kind of hobo figure whose pet chicken is wise beyond her years and dander. What happens next will... Well, it will make you weirder.

No author has ever captured the great fun of being weird, growing up as a happy mutant, unfettered by convention, as well as Pinkwater has. When I was a kid, Pinkwater novels like Lizard Music made me intensely proud to be a little off-center and weird -- they taught me to woo the muse of the odd and made me the happy adult I am today. It's one of those books that, in the right hands at the right time, can change your life for the better and forever. [Read More]

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CORY

Landscape With Invisible Hand, by MT AndersonIn 2002, MT Anderson blew up the YA dystopia world with Feed, his zeitgeisty, prescient novel about "identity crises, consumerism, and star-crossed teenage love in a futuristic society where people connect to the Internet via feeds implanted in their brains" -- in his latest, Landscape with Invisible Hand, Anderson takes us to a world where neoliberal aliens have sold Earth's plutocrats the technologies to make work obsolete and with it, nearly human being on earth.

Now we all have to live with that reality: former superstar luxury car salesmen, bank tellers, teachers, programmers -- everyone except for a tiny elite of financial engineers, really -- have been replaced by technology sold by the vuuv (that's the alien race) to the world's 1 percenters when they inducted the human race into the galactic prosperity sphere.

Landscape is told as a series of acerbic, short vignettes -- latter-day Douglas Coupland riffs -- in the voice of Adam, a teenager living in a rotting suburban home amidst the remains of his rotting suburban life, scrounging for rice and beans and painting, painting, painting, the only escape he has. Each chapterlette opens with Adam describing a painting that sets the scene, part of the blasted, wasted dystopia that 99% of the human race lives in while sneering aliens and financial executives tell them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, get jobs, and stop looking for handouts. [Read More]

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ROB

Stories of Your Life and OthersTed Chiang's writing is rare and precise, weaving threads of science fiction into something so haunting and humane I've woken up dreaming about it more than once. Here you can read most of his published work, including the novella that was recently filmed as Arrival and is currently in U.S. theaters. But my favorites are the Borgesian "Tower of Babel," about an engineer breaking through the vault of heaven, and "Division by Zero."

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CORY

The Power, by Naomi AldermanIn The Power, a day dawns, not so long from now, in which every 15-year-old girl finds herself with the power to deal out electric shocks, emanating from an unsuspected organ called "the skein," which rests along the collarbone. What's more, any woman can do the trick, once a 15 year old shows them how.

Chaos. Glorious chaos.

The world's sex-slaves kill their pimps. The women of Saudi Arabia foment revolution. Women whose husbands beat them strike back. Girls whose fathers rape them find themselves able to defend themselves -- with lethal force, if it comes to that.

Concerned parents ask to have their boys separated from the vicious girls who stalk them through school. Mean girl cliques take on a new, deadly overtone. Law and order teeters.

Against this background, a cast of characters: Roxy, the daughter of a ruthless British gangster; Joc, the daughter of an ambitious midwestern politician; Allie, a much-abused foster kid whose foster father has a surprise in store for him, and Tunde, a Nigerian lad whose workshops of storytelling through digital photography just took on a new significance.

Through these characters, a plot as intricate and fast moving as any thriller, with lots of grace notes and seeming detours that converge with the main storyline, giving it energy and velocity.

And throughout, when you're finished, the realization that there was so much more going on, stuff I can't discuss without spoilers -- a story within the story that is chilling, thrilling, disturbing. [Read More]

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CORY

Archangel, by William GibsonFrom the start of its run in 2016, Archangel went from strength to strength, packing in so many goddamned O.G. cyberpunk eyeball kicks per page that it felt like some kind of cask-strength distillation of all the visual and action elements that gave the original mirrorshades stuff its dark glitter.

Now that the comic's run is done, the five-issue tale is revealed as a masterful, beautifully plotted war story set in three different wars: WWII as we know it, WWII as it might have been, and a distant all-out nuclear conflagration that may or may not have been an inside job.

This is a time-travel story, but it's one that sets out to break the genre's conventions: it opens with the ruthless son of America's power-grabbed president-for-life traveling back to Berlin at the end of WWII to murder his grandfather and take his place. Take that, grandfather parodox.

Hunting the president's son and his goons is "The Pilot," a USAF ninja in a camouflage suit who must prevent Junior from destroying another world without giving Junior the chance to detonate the belly-bomb all US armed-forces members must have implanted when they enlist. Thankfully, it has a 30 foot range.

Archangel is visually stunning, with all the dark romance of war-torn Berlin as a setting: deviant cabarets, black marketeers' dens, chop-shops, makeshift Soviet command-posts and secret airfields. Then there's the futuristic world of Junior and the president, seen in a cramped bunker in which a rogue scientist is scrambling to support The Pilot from the distant future and a different timeline. [Read More]

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CORY

Vacationland: True Stories from Painful Beaches, by John HodgmanMy first impression of Vacationland was that I'd found a modern version of Steve Martin's classic Cruel Shoes. Hodgman is so very witty, and as he sets up his memoir -- the story of how he was a weird kid raised by loving but largely unconcerned parents -- he has so many tinder-dry asides and beautifully turned sentences and jokes with long fuses that unexpectedly detonate paragraphs later that I was really getting ready to relive my own childhood.

Right as I was getting comfortably settled into Vacationland, I discovered that Hodgman had smoothly transitioned me into some really profound emotional truth -- it's where he starts talking about his mother's untimely death and how he reacted to her terminal illness -- and then back into that dry, comedic mode, slipping the knife in and pulling it out so smoothly that I hadn't even noticed until the blood started to drip. That kind of maneuver requires both a steady hand a very sharp knife, and Hodgman has both.

This sneaky book pulls that move over and over, using comedy and narrative confidence to make important points about privilege, self-delusion, parenting, death, birth, cities, alienation, love -- the whole gamut.

All without ever losing the comedy, which is funny stuff, and it's not a spoonful of sugar that helps all that serious medicine go down, it's perfectly blended into those serious themes.

This isn't a book like Cruel Shoes: it's the book Cruel Shoes gets to be when it grows up. [Read More]

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Home

XENI

Sport-Brella XLPortable wind, sun, and rain shelter that's easy to set up. Can you open an umbrella? Can you drive a couple stakes into the ground? You got this, then. Haul it to the beach, outdoor gatherings or events, camping, sports, and you feel like you have a little private room outdoors. Comes in 6 different colors. Provides UPF 50+ shade. Opens to 9 feet wide, has a metallic undercoating for additional sun protection, internal pockets for stakes, valuables, and gear, plus top wind vents and side zippered windows for efficient airflow. Water resistant, weighs only 11.5 pounds. I first saw someone else on our local beach use it, and asked them where they bought it. Amazonned one for myself. Now I use it nearly every weekend, and love it.

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ROB

3" Glass PyramidMade of "optically clear crystal" and three inches tall, Amlong's Crystal Pyramid is the best Crystal Pyramid. My bacon is fresh, my airspace dangerous, and my undertakings favored.

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MARK

OXO Good Grips Solid Stainless Steel Ice Cream Scoop ($15)The old ice cream scoop we had wasn't really an ice cream scoop. It was a disher, and was more suited for scooping mashed potatoes than ice cream. When the trigger mechanism on it finally broke, I happily got rid of it and replaced it with the OXO Good Grips Solid Stainless Steel Ice Cream Scoop($15). This surprisingly heavy scoop is made from a solid chunk of stainless steel with a comfortable rubber grip, and comes with a pointed end that digs right into hard ice cream, especially if you run hot water over it. It's supposedly dishwasher safe but why put it in the dishwasher? Just rinse it and dry it with a towel.

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XENI

Brondell SourceI bought the Brondell Source in 2015 and it alleviated allergy symptoms; here's the latest model, adding a touchscreen, remote control and an adjustable air quality sensor. Rids the air of dust and dander and tiny particles you don’t need to be breathing—but also filters volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Three-stage advanced purifier system includes certified True HEPA and Granulated Carbon technology. Glowing light indicator tells you when it’s working. One time my dog farted a particularly noxious plume and this thing kicked into high gear with an emergency red glow. That’s when I knew I’d be giving it a five star recommendation.

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Lynx Sonoma Stainless Steel Countertop Natural Gas Smoker ($2500)This capacious, ultra high-end smoker has a digital control panel, smoker chip box, an instant-reading meat probe. It's got built-in Wi-Fi, of course, so you can monitor the process wherever you are.

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JASON

Wise Owl Camping HammockThe comfort to weight ratio of a good camping hammock is off the charts. Durable and easy to set up, you'll be happy anyplace you can find two appropriately spaced trees.

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XENI

Cuisinart 14-Cup Food ProcessorThe latest model of the best food processor for people who are serious about broadening their happy foodie horizons. Shove entire fruits and veggies into the giant feed tube. Listen to the 720-watt motor fill a 14-cup work bowl with steel slicing and shredding discs. It still comes with a free recipe book.

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Toys and Games

ROB

Rainbow SlimeA glittery additive mixed with kid-safe Elmer's glue, Rainbow Slime is what you make of it. Fun when forming and flexible when dry, the results are beautiful, weird and extremely cheap at $6 or so.

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JASON

The Intellivision Flashback ConsoleRemember the unlucky kid with the parents who got them an "Intellivision" instead of an Atari? Make someone that miserable again! With games no one can remember except maybe that OK one with a snake that couldn't touch its tail but isn't SNAFU, the Intellivision really sucked.

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DAVID

Ejector Seat Button For Your CarA perfect stocking stuffer, this very clever eject button fits into most automobile cigarette lighter sockets. Unfortunately, the product listing clearly states that it's "designed for show only." It is a functional cigarette lighter though so I guess they mean it won't actually trigger your ejector seat.

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DAVID

Swish card gameA beautiful and deeply compelling card game, Swish is challenges your spatial perception to find matches of balls and hoops on transparent cards. It’s a wordless game of pattern recognition that has entranced my entire family including our youngest child, age 8.

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Bulk Generic LegoYou can get 1000 random pieces of off-brand building bricks for less than $30, guaranteed to "fit tight" and come with "less filler" than the even-cheaper bulk buys.

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MARK

Palomino Blackwing 602 Pencils ($23/doz.)This is a faithful reproduction of the Eberhard Faber original, which is no longer being made. Blackwing 602 have dark, soft lead (the motto printed on the pencil reads"Half the pressure, twice the speed") and features a unique eraser holder. I've been using them for years.

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JASON

Make your own Crazy Aaron's Thinking PuttyThe one thing my 10-year-old enjoys more than making her own floam or slime is playing with Thinking Putty. Textured quite like the legendary Silly Putty of yore, Crazy Aaron's putties come in a rainbow of colors and styles. This set lets you design your own! I am pretty sure Mark could be easily distracted by a can of magnetic Thinking Putty.

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ROB

Copic Ciao Marker SetAt about $200, a full set of 72 Copic markers is a pricey proposition. But that's because they're the absolute best, with perfect colors, easy blending, and a big brush tip good for detail and wash alike. Dip an elbow in the water with a relatively inexpensive 12-marker set; great deals on partially-used sets can also be found haunting eBay.

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JASON

Because cats are totally down with the Dark SideYoda and Chewie as mice for your cat to attack, because all cats align with the Dark Side. Except for Loth-Cats for some reason, but I wouldn't exactly trust them either.

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JASON

Star Wars Viewmaster gift setI am not sure how the whole putting gifts in a sock thing works, but this Darth Vader themed Viewmaster Viewer looks like it'd fit in a traditional Christ inspired gifting sock. Star Wars Viewmaster reels are always pretty sweet. This also makes a good Hanukkah day 4-7 gift for kids who can pull off the entire 8-day challenge. My kid starts getting a hug after day 3.

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JASON

You sank my holiday experience!While it doesn't look much like the genre-defining 'This game isn't as much fun as a commercial made it look' toy of our youth, Electronic Battleship is now more exciting looking while boastin' the same old lows in game-play disappointment! Eeeeelectronic Battleship is no more fun than regular old Battleship, which is also a pretty god damn boring game. This is an excellent gift for someone you do not like, but want to appear you gave a cool gift at opening time.

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JASON

Prison Life RobloxKnow a kid that just can't behave? Maybe a co-worker? Make sure they understand a life of crime will come to no good.

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Mysterious and Indistinct ShirtFabulous yet classy, the Mysterious and Indistinct Shirt is a premium youth tee and "wears rough and tough for kids who play the same way."

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DAVID

MastermindInvented in 1970 by an Israeli telecom expert, Mastermind is still the terrific game of strategy, logic, and deduction that you might remember from childhood. True, the packaging lacks the Bond-inspired photo of the dignified man and woman that appeared on the original box, but the game is just as elegant and addictive.

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CORY

Largemouth bass sandalsYou will look amazing in sandals that look like gasping largemouth bass, seriously (max size is a Men's 10, so only the dainty of feed need apply, e.g., not me). [Read More]

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Blank Playing CardsMake your own games! Or just stare at them. Whatever.

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Naughty + Nice

MARK

Wink Plus ($79)In William Burroughs' novel Naked Lunch, Steely Dan III from Yokohama was the name of a stainless steel sex toy. The USB-chargeable Wink Plus vibrator from Crave is probably not what Old Bill Lee had in mind, because it is quite small, but it is made from stainless steel, and packs quite a vibrational wallop, with five intensity levels and two patterns.

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ROB

Wolf Crotch UnderwearWith a "convex design, large space and breathable," the 3D Wolf Head Crotch Underwear "make man looks sexy and wild" and can be yours for as little as five American dollars.

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JASON

Spend your holiday season TwistedThe Twisty Glass Blunt is a brain-hammer. Fill the glass chamber with your favorite herb, screw in the brass mouthpiece, and you are prepared to smoke a lot of weed. Perfect for a day at the beach, or an outdoor music festival, the Twisty Glass Blunt is an absolute favorite. I've got the mini as well.

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JASON

Poop emoji Santa HatWar on Christmas? Christmas seems to be integrating into todays meme-filled emoticon world. Now your Santa can proudly display his favorite emoji, or perhaps this is mean to signify something else.

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https://boingboing.net/2017/11/25/giftguide2017.html

[dsrajawat]

If you’re looking for a laptop under 50K, should you go for a Chromebook? Answering this question, I began my review of the HP Chromebook x360.

Currently, a bigger slice of the PC market is shared between Windows and Mac. In contrast, Chromebooks seem like an underdog with relatively lesser reach in India. There’s even a good chance that some of you might not know much about them. These ultrabooks come powered by Chrome OS, an operating system from Google, and represent a fresh take on legacy laptops as we know them.

The x360 has been my daily driver for a while now. I’ve used it keeping aside the complexity bias towards the Windows and Macs of the world. So, if you’re in a pickle, reading this review won’t hurt. You will get to know how it holds up against the alternatives. After all, they vaunt a unique value proposition, especially for the Gen Z.

Let’s see whether it’s true.

HP Chromebook x360 – 14-da0003tu Specs and Price

Model HP Chromebook x360 – 14-da0003tu Display 35.56 cm (14) diagonal FHD IPS BrightView WLED-backlit (1920 x 1080) Processor Intel Core i3-8130U (2.2 GHz base frequency(2b), up to 4 GHz with Intel Turbo Boost Technology(2g), 4 MB cache, 2 cores) Graphics Integrated Intel UHD Graphics 620 Storage 64 GB eMMC with 256GB expandable storage, 100 GB Cloud storage, Unlimited Google photos/videos storage Memory 8 GB DDR4-2133 SDRAM (onboard) Ports

2 USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-C

1 USB 3.1 Gen 1

1 headphone/microphone combo

1 microSD media card reader

Kensington Nano Security Slot

Wi-Fi and Bluetooth

802.11a/b/g/n/ac (2×2) Wi-Fi

Bluetooth 4.2 combo

Software Chrome OS Battery 3-cell, 60 Wh Li-ion polymer; 45 W AC power adapter Dimensions 32.54 x 22.68 x 1.6 cm Audio

ASUS SonicMaster stereo audio system, certified by Harman Kardon

Array microphone with Cortana and Alexa voice-recognition support

Keyboard and Trackpad

Backlit Chiclet single-color keypad

Precision (PTP) Technology Supports up to Four-finger Smart Gestures

Weight 1.68 Kg Biometric unlock HP Wide Vision HD Camera with integrated dual array digital microphone Colors

White Ceramic

India Price Rs. 44,990

HP Chromebook x360 Review: Design and Build

Let me put it out there that this one’s a charmer. The Chromebook X360 comes with a 360-degree rotating hinge, which means you can use it as Flip in Laptop, Stand, Tent, or Tablet mode. This opens up multiple use cases. Go figure! Whilst using in the flip-in form, the screen wobbles a bit. But it is not a biggie and the hinge is pretty solid with no creak.

Even if you keep the convertibility factor aside, the laptop still slays on the design front. The hood is made of aluminum anodized body cloaking a ceramic white finish, which looks slick. There is a chrome logo, the staple Chromebook identifier on the left side. The company claims the matte surface is scratch-resistant, although we never went out of our way to test it.

The Chromebook is slim at 16.05mm and trim at 1.6kgs. So, it was lite to carry around in hand, in my daypack or seating it on my lap. Like lap-ability, the one-handed opening test also was easy peasy. Once you open the lid, you’ll see a 720p webcam nesting right above the display. But there is no face unlock or any other biometric unlocking option, which is a real kicker.

ALSO READ: Asus ZenBook 14 (UX434FL) review: That Dual Display though!

HP Chromebook x360 Review: Display, Keyboard and Audio

This one has an IPS WLED-backlit (1920 x 1080) display that stretches 14-inches diagonally. It is affable in terms of colors, brightness, viewing angles, yada yada yada. The only glaring issue I have with this panel is that its glossy and reflective, which spoils the experience while using under harsh lighting.

The touchscreen is also responsive and plays well with the Chrome OS interface, especially in flip-in and tablet mode. Don’t wanna touch? Then use it as any other regular clamshell model. The chicklet keys offer a comfortable typing journey across the board. As for the trackpad, it’s one of the spacious ones I’ve come across so far with a precise response to my fingers.

Now since its a Chromebook, it carries few bells and whistles of its own, which you must know. You might be caught off guard by the layout and kind of keys on the pad. There are dedicated keys for various Chrome OS functions. Well, if you find it tough to adapt, then simply remap the buttons from the settings. Likewise, there is a slew of shortcuts and gestures, which you can learn to enhance your experience.

The X360 sports dual speakers tuned by B&O (Bang & Olufsen), one at the base of the laptop and the other above the keypad. The combined output is decently loud and clear. You even get a volume rocker flanked on the chassis, just as on your mobile handset.

HP Chromebook x360 Review: Performance and Experience

The internals includes an 8th gen Intel Core i3 CPU with integrated Intel UHD Graphics 620. On the memory front, you get 8 GB DDR4 SDRAM and 64GB eMMC storage. Although you won’t notice an apparent difference in speed, the volume transferred is crippled by a single lane system unlike SSD, which is a multi-lane highway.

All of these are soldered directly onto the device’s motherboard and are sealed off from the user’s access. Anyway, if you’re short on storage, you could expand it further up to 256GB using a microSD card or avail the 100GB of google cloud storage.

The software is, however, the key differentiating factor here. Now, there are several misconceptions surrounding the Chrome OS, which needs to be debunked.

If you conceive it as just a browser, you couldn’t be further from the truth. Though the platform is built on and around Chrome,  it’s much more than that.

You can use it w/o the internet. An umpteen number of apps work offline including Google ones like Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets. If you’re connected, well then you can enjoy your google data on the go, since its all synced real-time to the cloud. It has a wide library of apps on the Play Store and Linux Virtual Machine.

Off the cuff, you would notice it boots like a flash in a matter of seconds. Once you log in via a password or pin, the home screen appears. There is a taskbar at the bottom, which is called Shelf and is similar to the dock on Mac. You get to pin your favorite apps on to it. Since you’re not allowed to place icons on the screen, the desktop is clutter-free and minimal with just the dock and the wallpaper.

You can invoke Google Assistant with your voice or the dedicated button on the keypad. This button can be used to access the app tray. Speaking of apps, you can use a plethora of them from the Google Play Store. As an Android user, this meant I can use the same apps that I use on my phone.

But can’t say it’s device agnostic. When the apps ape the UI meant for the mobile phones onto a bigger canvas, the overall experience takes a backseat. Plus, the Play Store alternatives of legacy apps like Microsoft Office and Adobe Suite are barebones. 

Another quick tip would be to use CrossOver for running legacy Windows applications or try out the Linux based alternatives. But either of them isn’t a simple solution.

On that note, what about Linux on Chromebook? If you’re unfamiliar, Linux on Chromebook is based on Debian distribution and runs within a Virtual Machine. I tried flashing Gimp. While the installation went smooth, the app, as well as the Linux terminal, crashed. All this may be cuz it’s still in beta state. So it’s not a viable option still. My case in point.

Coming to the main course – the performance!

If you’ve felt the Chrome browser to be a ginormous RAM sucker in other laptops, here inside Chromebook, it feels at home. I’m the kind of guy who’d have a fleet of tabs opened on Chrome at all times. Yet, I felt no hiccup, lag or crashes during my review frame. But, let me be clear, there was no jot of difference in the browsing Speedtests (Chromebook | Windows Pavilion Laptop). A quick tip: you may use extensions such as The Great Suspender or OneTab to better manage the tabs.

Just like the cold boot times, other processes like app-loading and pdf document opening, etc also were fast.

The system updates and backup resembles the Android implementation. They take place smoothly in the background without interrupting your activities. No sweat!

Next up, let me put light upon some security features I loved –

Chromebook sandboxes every activity instance of yours, isolating any threat you’ve downloaded from the web. The boot also verifies the system and will reset everything to its original state, if some malfunction found. Like the Former FBI most wanted hacker, Kevin Mitnick claims, there is a limited attack vector and there’s just nothing to exploit on Chromebooks. So good riddance from viruses and antiviruses.

Lastly, there is Powerwash, which is the reset option that’s fairly quick and effective. Since the data is mostly stored online, you get a fresh copy without losing much data. In fact, the system snapped while I was poking around Chrome Flags and Powerwash came in handy.

Speaking of chrome flags, you can tweak some experimental features and even basics like – Show previews of running apps when hovering over the shelf.

All that said and done, there is one area where Chromebook bites the dust and that is – any graphic intensive process. So, this one gets a big no-no for playing heavy games. In my trials, Asphalt 9 and Call of Duty performance was passable with noticeable frame drops and ghosting issues. However, you can have a good time playing casual titles like Subway Surfers, Temple Run, etc.

Now since the Chromebook caters to low graphic processes, it depends on passive cooling and so you need not worry about any whirring noise over-course.

Nonetheless, here are a few of our benchmark test results –

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CrXPRT Performance benchmark

Speedometer

Geekbench 5

3DMark

Androbench Scores for RnW speed

DRM Info

ALSO READ: Asus VivoBook S14 S431F Review

HP Chromebook x360 Review: Battery and Connectivity

This HP Chromebook claims to run for 11 hours on a 3-cell, 60 Wh Li-ion polymer battery. I must say the Chrome OS is very power-efficient and I’m impressed by X360’s battery endurance. In my Crosh (accessed by the command – Ctrl+Alt+T) test, the laptop discharged 77.86% in 8 hours. The battery discharged within 9 hours 25 minutes according to chrome://power data.

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When it begs for a charger, you can use the bundled 45W AC power adapter via either of the 2 USB-C ports. It took around 15 minutes to refill 25% of the battery. Other ports are 1 USB A, 1 headphone jack, and an SD card expansion slot. If you’re scratching your head about the tiny square slot beside the USB-A port, its for security lock cable to moor the Chromebook to a table. I just wished there was an HDMI socket instead so that I could connect my secondary monitor. 

So should you buy it? Is it worth your money?

HP Chromebook x360 Review: Verdict

Lately, Apple is seen repositioning iPads as a Chromebook alternative and Microsoft is banking on the Surface Go. So, when both these biggies act wary of Chromebook, it got to mean something, right?

Yes, that’s somewhat true. But essentially, HP Chromebook X360 feels like a double-edged sword.

On one hand, HP has engineered a good-looking laptop with ergonomic keypad, touchpad, respectable audio output, and pleasing display. It can transform into multiple formats, to each their own.

It suits well for those who want something to carry on-the-fly and can live without games, Photoshop, Premiere Pro and the likes. It is a capable work machine for internet browsing, media consumption, and anything but graphics-demanding tasks. The GPU acceleration or the lack of one – is its Achilles heel.

Thus, on the other hand, HP Chromebook x360 might not be the renaissance in the world of Chromebooks. It is marred by the same pros & cons that come with Chrome OS.

Summing up, if it fits your bill, go for it. Else, you still have your options. Either way, you better mull over your preferences and needs once. Maybe this will help you –

Reasons to buy

Attractive and Solid Convertible

Good keypad, touchpad, and touchscreen

Fast and Secure OS with Real-time data sync

Long-Lasting battery life backed by a USB-C charger

App uniformity for Android users

Reasons to not buy

Reflective display

Missing HDMI port

Lack of powerful graphics card

Small Storage capacity

Play Store apps can’t match the legacy apps

Photos by Manmeet Singh | Smartprix

HP Chromebook x360 Review (14-da0003tu) If you're looking for a laptop under 50K, should you go for a Chromebook? Answering this question, I began my review of the HP Chromebook x360.

[pauldeckerus]

How I Got Better at Photography

Two years ago, I splurged some money and bought a camera because I’d always wanted to try to take pictures of the stars. The left photo above was the only decent picture out of 700 taken on my first clueless attempt. The right photo was taken about 2 weeks ago. Don’t let your dreams be dreams.

I can distinctly remember the first time a camera was put into my hands. It was the wedding of one of my oldest cousins, and I was 10 or 11 years old. A family friend was the photographer, and he must have noticed me walking around bored and clueless, because he took one of his SLRs, put it in my hand with a full roll of film, and told me to help him take pictures.

None of the photos turned out. I was a kid and I had no idea what I was doing, but 15 years later, that moment is still crystal clear in my memory. It spurred me into action, asking for digital cameras for my subsequent birthdays (my first was a 3.2MP point-and-shoot), saving up my lawnmowing money all summer to buy a 512MB Compact Flash memory card, and messing around with the old Pentax K1000 that had been collecting dust in my dad’s closet — whenever I could afford film and processing, that is.

Unfortunately, somewhere between working two jobs, trying to succeed in high school, beginning college, and spending 2 years abroad in Eastern Europe, I simply lacked the time, money, and know-how to pursue photography beyond the capabilities of my cell phone, and my interest in photography faded.

There was, however, always a shade of desire. I remember being jealous of friends who owned big, hefty, DSLRs. I was green with envy when my mom decided to buy my dad a Nikon D3200 for his birthday. I stole it often to take pictures and it didn’t take long before I knew more about it than he did. My time to own a DSLR came when I accepted an internship at a local art museum that needed me to act as an event photographer and videographer. I purchased a Nikon D3300 with a kit lens and a $20 tripod and immediately got to photographing everything in sight.

Those first couple of months, I tried to take pictures every day. I didn’t always succeed, but it taught me to be constantly looking for compelling subject matters. Growing up in the heart of Utah, landscape photography was a natural fit: there are canyons every 30 feet (it seems), 5 National Parks, a variety of National Monuments, and more to do than anyone could in a lifetime.

I spent much of my time hiking on the weekends and I had a close friend with whom I’d take road trips every year. Glacier or Banff, the Grand Canyon or California, wherever sounded most exciting. Landscape photography, as I often say, meant simply doing what I already did — but bringing back evidence.

Photo upon completion of a 11 hour, 26 mile overnight trip from the north rim to the south rim of the Grand Canyon

On the summit of Fairview Peak, Banff National Park, Canada

From the get-go, I also had a strong desire to take pictures of the stars. Humans have always had this primordial fascination with the stars, and I’ve always felt that strongly. Many a summer night growing up was spent on my rooftop watching the sky shift from sunset to blue hour to suburban starscape. For that reason, the stars seemed a natural subject as well, and I can vividly remember my first attempt at capturing them.

My friend and I hiked a steep trail to a lake on the night of a full moon. It was nearly dark by the time we arrived at the destination, but the area was beautifully lit. I moseyed over to the far side of the lake, set up my tripod and camera and spent the better part of an hour troubleshooting. Simple photographic concepts — focus, aperture, exposure — became less intuitive at night. I guessed at settings, wrote them down, made slight adjustments, and tried again. 700 terrible photos and a few hours later, we made the long trek back down to our car, trail poorly lit by cell phone flashlight.

One of 700. My first night of astrophotography.

The whole night, the best photo I had managed to produce featured brightly illuminated cliffs and a few faint stars. My expectations for what I would be able to do were extremely high and I’d certainly fallen short, but at the end of the day, I was thrilled I could see stars at all. I went out the next night and the next night and the next night, always to different locations, getting more and more excited with each photograph that got closer to representing the vision I had for what my photography could be.

My first successful image of the milky way over Mount Timpanogos, battling Utah Valley light pollution

Coping with the stars and light pollution from the Salt Lake Valley. Somewhere in Utah’s west desert.

The follow-up to those feelings could only be described as an obsession. I was getting distracted at work because I was googling articles about night photography. I signed up for a dozen newsletters on various websites with tips and tricks. I began researching gear the second I realized that, well, an entry-level camera and a kit lens weren’t going to cut it. I thought I knew cameras because I understood the basic concepts of ISO, aperture, and exposure and (more-or-less) how they worked together in the daytime, but I purchased books that taught me to understand their effects and use them beyond simply to manipulate light.

I learned what a crop-sensor was and immediately ached for a full-frame camera, I began to study the construction of and limitations of lenses and I immediately began researching which lenses I needed to buy in order to increase the quality of my work. I read articles about low-light performance in various cameras, I read about sensor technology, I bought Photoshop and Lightroom and began to watch YouTube tutorials about Milky Way post-processing techniques. Star tracking and median stacking and focal blending were terms of which I had never heard, but with time, I began to understand and apply them.

A lucky alignment over Monument Valley, Utah

Under Owachomo Natural Bridge, Natural Bridges National Monument, Utah

Just as importantly, I learned how to compose an image. I bought a couple books that helped me understand the theory, but trial-and-error was the real teacher. As a trained Art Historian, I studied the likes of Ansel Adams, Eadweard Muybridge, and William Henry Jackson, even handling original prints of theirs, all the while trying to see through their eyes and understanding how to see the way that they saw.

Along those same lines, I studied the work of famous 19th-century romantic landscape painters like Thomas Cole and Albert Bierstadt, attempting to understand (and later replicate) what made their compositions compelling.

Stars creeping out during a backpacking trip in Coyote Gulch

Miraculously, throughout this entire multi-year process, I began to see improvement. And as I saw improvement, my interest waxed instead of waned. That first year I shot upwards of 100 GB worth of photographic data. The next year, it more than tripled.

It’s important to realize in retrospect that improvement is often slow-going and always requires a lot of sacrifice and diligence. Nothing says sacrifice quite like taking an hour-long nap and then having to crawl out of a warm sleeping bag to go wander through the desert all by yourself (machete in hand, in case any wild animals want to tussle).

During the week of the new moon in June 2018, I spent 6 out of 7 days camping, on average driving 4 hours round trip to a camping spot dark enough to photograph the skies. I spent 4 of those nights sleeping in the driver’s seat of my car while the wind howled outside. I returned home with only a few worthwhile images to process (Good ol’ Ansel said it best: “12 significant photographs in one year is a good crop.”) Besides that, each of those mornings, I drove 1-3 hours back home to work an 8-9 hour shift at my day job.

The results of a windy, miserable, lonely night of car-camping in Payson, Utah.

I rarely get paid for my photography, but exhaustion and lack of monetary payoff aside, I am in love with what I do. I never imagined I’d be to the point that people would want me to write about my experiences, that Reddit posts of my photography would hit the front page (41k upvotes and counting), or that strangers and friends would be asking me for advice — I’m just a guy who loves the world I live in and whose eyes shimmer like a little kid’s every time I look up at the night sky.

I still have a lot to learn and a lot to improve upon. I look forward to the future, but those formative moments as an innocent and naive student of photography will always be some of my favorites—when every shutter click was an uneasy step forward and I was always anxious to learn something new. I hope that that early spirit never leaves me.

I think often of the 10- or 11-year-old version of myself snapping wedding photos and wish I could watch him excitedly click away, but I feel lucky to be able to experience that same excitement every time I see the world through my own lens or look up and try to soak up the beauty of the sky.

Milky Way behind the Temple of the Sun, Capitol Reef National Park, Utah

Milky Way behind Delicate Arch, Arches National Park, Utah

About the author: Matthew Pockrus is a landscape photographer based in Utah and focusing on the American West. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author. You can find more of Pockrus’ work on his website and Instagram.

from Photography News https://petapixel.com/2018/06/26/how-i-improved-as-a-photographer/

[junker-town]

NFL Panic Index 2017, Week 7: Life after Aaron Rodgers begins for the Packers

The Falcons and Patriots aren’t nearly as good as they were last year. And why do the 49ers keep losing close games?

What could go wrong with Brett Hundley taking over for Aaron Rodgers? According to NFL Research, Hundley’s 107.3 passer rating is the highest out of 52 quarterbacks with 100 or more passes in the preseason. That has to mean something, right? That’s a little glimmer of hope.

But preseason probably isn’t the greatest indicator of a player’s regular-season potential. Hundley would have accomplished that against a bunch of second- and third-string players, and even some guys who didn’t land on NFL rosters. What about his regular-season numbers?

Bad news for GB fans: Among 78 QBs with 40+ reg. season passes since 2015, no player has a lower passer rating than Brett Hundley's 28.0 https://t.co/CJOX0cp4KU

— NFL Research (@NFLResearch) October 17, 2017

Hundley replaces Rodgers, who left last week’s game against the Vikings with a broken collarbone. In that game, Hundley completed 18 of 33 passes for 157 yards, one touchdown, and three picks. He matched Rodgers’ interception total for the entire season so far in that single game. That’s not great, and the Packers lost, 23-10.

At least the Packers play the Saints, and the league’s 28th-ranked pass defense, this week. Maybe that will make things a little easier for Hundley.

Panic index: Unless the Packers can invent time travel and bring in Brett Favre from 1996, any replacement for Rodgers will be a significant downgrade. Don’t get your hopes up, Packers fans.

Falcons vs. Patriots sequel is not going to live up to the original

Dust off your 28-3 jokes, because we’ve got a rematch of one of the most entertaining games in Super Bowl history coming up this week. The only problem is that neither the Falcons nor the Patriots are as good as they were last season. There’s no way this one will match the intensity of Super Bowl LI.

Oh, the Falcons can still run up an early lead. They can still blow one, too, which is exactly what happened last week against the Dolphins. Matt Ryan threw just seven interceptions all last season, and he’s already up to six picks over five games this year. The play calling isn’t quite as sharp with Steve Sarkisian at the helm, and Atlanta just can’t get out of its own way.

And the Patriots hardly resemble the team that came surging back in the second half of that Super Bowl to overcome a 25-point deficit and win it in overtime. The Patriots have just two losses this season, but they’ve also barely squeaked by in most of their wins.

Panic index: If the season ended today, the Patriots would at least win the AFC East. The Falcons wouldn’t even make the playoffs. There’s a lot of season left for the Falcons and Patriots to get it together, but the expectations for these teams certainly don’t line up with their actual performance so far.

49ers are only going to lose cruelly close games

San Francisco made history Sunday, but not the good kind. More like the most painful history possible. The 2017 49ers are the first team to ever lose five consecutive games by three points or fewer.

At least Week 6 was merciful enough to end in regulation. The final blow against Washington was a questionable offensive pass interference penalty on Pierre Garcon that knocked San Francisco back in to their own territory and eventually forced rookie C.J. Beathard to try to convert a fourth-and-20.

The 1994 Houston Oilers hold the record for torturous losses by a margin of a field goal or less with seven during a 2-14 season. It was also the year that got coach Jack Pardee fired and introduced the NFL world to interim head coach Jeff Fisher.

With 10 games still on the schedule, the 49ers need just three more painfully close losses to knock the Oilers from the top spot.

Panic index: What’s there to panic about? Yeah, it sucks, but that 2018 draft pick is looking real nice. Rebuilding takes time and expectations for the 2017 season were low anyway.

The Broncos are in their own version of Groundhog Day

The Broncos start off the season hot. The defense is as scary as ever. Trevor Siemian looks capable enough at quarterback that we learned to spell his name. And then it all starts to unravel. First the offense turns back into a shriveled corpse and not even the defense can mask it. Then a shoulder injury for Siemian makes you wonder, wait, is it Simian? Siemen? Then the losses start coming ...

If that sounds familiar, it’s because the Broncos look like they’re Groundhog Day-ing and reliving last season, when they just missed the playoffs.

At this point last season, the Broncos were 4-2 after a rare loss to the Chargers. This year, they’re 3-2, coming off an inexplicable loss to the previously winless Giants, a team that had been the Murphy’s law of the NFL all week — so much so that it prompted Al Michaels to make an ill-advised joke on national TV that he immediately regretted.

After this week’s game against the Chargers, the next few weeks is the toughest stretch anyone faces this year: back-to-back road games against the league’s two best teams right now (Chiefs, Eagles), and a home date with the defending Super Bowl champions.

The Broncos are beat up, especially on offense. Siemian might not even miss time with his shoulder injury, but does it really even matter? He’s thrown just two touchdowns and four interceptions in the Broncos’ last three games. Opposing defenses have remembered that if you force him to beat you, he probably can’t do it.

Panic index: The Broncos might want to start Brock Osweiler for a few games. But before you do your best impression of The Scream, let’s explain why that could be a good thing: The last time the Broncos did that, they ended up winning a Super Bowl later that season. Why Groundhog Day last year when you can Groundhog Day 2015?

So all together now: For those about to Brock!

Washington needs a kicker this week, what could go wrong?

Kickers in the NFL seem to be recycled more often than they previously were. The NFL moved the extra point back to a 33-yard attempt, and it’s ushered in a new era for kickers in the NFL.

Washington might be on the bad side of the kicker spectrum this week:

#Redskins K Dustin Hopkins will miss this week with a partially torn muscle in his hip, source says. He’s week-to-week & they need a kicker

— Ian Rapoport (@RapSheet) October 16, 2017

I suppose they could call Roberto Aguayo? Nah, surely they could find one kicker to not totally mess things up for one week. Though they really need to be as perfect as possible when they travel to Philadelphia for Monday Night Football this week.

Panic index: If Hopkins is only going to miss a week, you could suppose it’s not the end of the world. But they would certainly hate to become the Bucs.

The Dolphins could make the playoffs again and they're unwatchable

The Dolphins found a way to do the impossible. They makd a team with Jay Ajayi, Jarvis Landry, Kenny Stills, and DeVante Parker boring.

At 3-2, the club is in playoff contention despite being a breeding ground for screen passes and receiving routes that stop seven yards downfield. Jay Cutler, effervescent as always, is averaging just 5.2 yards per pass after ending his months-long offseason retirement. No one on the roster has had a 100-yard receiving performance yet. The longest play of Miami’s season has gone for just 31 yards.

And yet, after coming back from a 17-0 halftime deficit against the Falcons in Atlanta, the Dolphins, against anyone’s better judgment, are a postseason contender. One of the league’s stingiest defenses -- Miami has allowed fewer than 17 points per game this fall — could make three hours of Wild Card weekend entirely unwatchable. Case in point; on Sunday they held Matt Ryan, Julio Jones, and the extremely fun Falcon offense to zero second-half points.

As fun as it would be to watch Cutler nonchalantly stride into the playoffs while averaging 155 passing yards per game, something needs to change to make this Dolphins team anything more than a description you scroll past while trying to find better football games.

Panic index: The Dolphins have lost to the Jets and Saints by a combined 40-6 score. Unless their defense makes insane plays every week from here on out, we probably don’t have to worry about a repeat playoff appearance.

[baburaja97-blog]

New Post has been published on Vin Zite

New Post has been published on https://vinzite.com/google-nexus-7-review-and-some-tips/

Google Nexus 7 Review and Some Tips

If you are considering buying a tablet and would like to learn some info on the Nexus 7 from a real user/tech guy then read below. I don’t side with Apple or Android or Amazon. So I try to compare everything fairly.

I’ve had the Google Nexus 7 tablet for about a week and it’s better than I expected.

I have had a bunch of Apple iPods and have a Samsung Galaxy Player 5.0 (Android 2.3). So I might reference that one in a while in this article. Also, keep in mind I never used Android 3.0 honeycomb so if I say a feature is new it’s possible it was in Honeycomb, but I’m comparing it more to Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) which is more of a phone OS. I have never owned an iPad but use them a lot at work so I am aware of how they function and their features. I may reference those once in a while. I have not used a Kindle Fire enough to comment on it.

Why buy this?

I never was able to justify why I would spend $500 on a tablet when I can get a laptop for $500 and do more on it since it has a keyboard and is a full operating system. But the price of the Nexus and the performance got my attention.

Part of me wanted to see how a 7″ tablets felt and what it can help in my daily life, but more importantly, I wanted something I can play music on to my Bluetooth speakers with a good sized screen. It works excellent for music, games web browsing, email, and the internet. Everything runs very nice and it seems Android fixed most issues from past versions. I also love the latest Google Voice feature. Apples’ equivalent which is Siri is something you currently can’t get on an iPad. That is one big reason why I’d get this over an iPad. I can do things like say “Set Timer”, “directions to” etc.

People don’t compare this to the iPad but actually now that I’ve played around with it I feel you can kind of compare it to an iPad. Initially, I really didn’t want the 7″ screen and would have preferred a 10″ but after owning it I do now prefer the 7″ because I can hold it in 1 hand. With a 10″ like the iPad, it’s not as easy to hold. It’s a nice size for games and traveling.

The Nexus 7 is just as good as an iPad for games and will save you about $200 over an iPad if you are looking for a tablet device. Most popular games are available for Android. Android tablets have not been popular so some apps you might find still need some catching up. Here are things I feel people might want to know or that I found important.

Home Screen:

Works nice and very smooth, they added the feature Home Screen doesn’t rotate but this app will fix that for you and allow you to rotate the screen when you turn the device horizontal. It’s called “Ultimate Rotation Control”.

Microphone:

This still annoys me with all Android devices I’ve tried yet! I thought they would have fixed it by now. If you yell loud into the microphone it gets all distorted more than it should. The Nexus 7 still does this. Now I’ve only tested it in full on the Samsung Galaxy player. Both distort and annoy me. Apple’s iPod touch can hand yelling and loud sounds a lot better than the Nexus 7. It takes a lot to distort Apple device microphones. When I say Apple devices I am talking about the Apple iPod and assuming their other devices have the same mic. I do know the old iPod Nano video did have a horrible mic but that is no longer around. Maybe there is a better Android app out there for recording, I’ll have to still look around but I think part of this issue might be the “AGC”. Some apps let you shut it off. That definitely helped on my Galaxy Player 5. I record me playing guitar and stuff with music on these devices which is why the microphone to me is important.

Speaker:

The speaker is pretty good but not blasting. It’s kind of like an iPad speaker I would guess, maybe a little lower. I don’t have an iPad with me to compare. The Nexus 7 defiantly is not louder than an iPad speaker from what I can tell. My Galaxy Player 5.0 has better speakers. They are a lot louder and more have a little more bass than the Nexus in my opinion. If you are using the Nexus 7 with Bluetooth speakers to blast music it’s not an issue. Don’t get me wrong you definitely can listen to music on the Nexus 7 you just can’t blast the heck out of a room with it like a stereo that no one can talk over. It’s a good volume.

Camera:

There is no flash on the Nexus 7. There is only a front face camera, no rear camera. There is no camera app on it, but you can download it from the Play Store, just search for “Camera launcher for Nexus 7”. Photos and videos are what you would expect from a 1.2MP. Nothing amazing but does take pictures and video if you have lighting where you are shooting. There is no flash.

Smoothness and speed:

Yes very smooth! They finally got the Android OS where screens slide and effects are smooth like Apple devices. It sounds like a big fix for this was in the Jelly Bean Android OS. My galaxy player doesn’t have that nice smoothness. The Nexus 7 defiantly runs apps and transitions to screens faster and smoother than the Galaxy Player 5.0. You can watch some videos to see the smoothness but I’d say it’s the same as the iPad smoothness. I haven’t used the latest iPad though so don’t take me up on that. Just know it’s smooth! One issue I notice though on the Nexus 7, which is minor. Is if I’m playing music using the default music player and I was messing around with some widgets, adding them to the screen and stuff. The music hung for a quick sec. I was using volume widgets. This makes me think they need to set CPU priority to the music better or something. But maybe it was just a poorly made app I was messing with.

Wallpapers:

It lets you use animated wallpapers on your home screen which is kind of fun.

Mass USB Connection Option:

It looks like they finally killed this. This was where you can see your Android device files on your computer like a USB drive. But you still can see all the files and copy files to the Nexus 7 but it’s as a device. (On Windows 7) It seems to have caused Double Twist to not work but I bought Double Twist Air and synced over Wi-Fi which worked OK.

Screenshots

Yes, finally you can take screen shots without a third party app. They may have had this in their previous version of Android too but it’s not in Gingerbread. For the Nexus 7 just hold the volume button and power button for a few seconds and it will take a screenshot.

Music

It has a built in the widget called “What’s this song” It works like Shazam and is built in for free. The music app seems to be like the previous Android Music app with some little improvements here and there.

Car Stereo

I tested the Nexus 7 with my Sony USB stereo in my car. It recognizes it as a mp3 player only, I’m not too clear on how you would look for songs and playlists, though. You probably can’t is my guess. I’d prefer to use the auxiliary jack on my stereo so I can’t control the music with the Nexus Interface. That works great for me there just no charging.

Vibration:

There is no vibration on the Nexus.

Battery

It doesn’t show you the exact charge percent when you have it powered off which would have been good. It only shows you an image that shows its charge in 25% increments. The Nexus battery life is very good just as the specs say.

I recommend charging the Nexus using their supplied wall plug that comes with your Nexus. The manual also says it will charge faster from the wall plug than a computer. This is defiantly true from what I found.

With the Nexus 7 on and connected USB to a Windows computer, it took me about 3.5 hours to get the charge from 17% to 46%.

Something that was strange was I left it plugged into my computer overnight and it never reached 100% charge. It was something like 92%

But I then tested charging the Nexus 7 with the supplied wall charger plug. And while the Nexus was turned on it went from a charge of 75% – 98% in 1 hour.

So when they say to use the wall plug charger you better just use that because it does charge faster. I do have an ASUS motherboard on a different computer I made that says its USB ports give off more power. So I bet that will charge it fast also but I didn’t test it on there. Most people won’t have that kind of computer.

Notes app

There is no pre-installed note taking app. There are plenty of free ones on the Play Store. I use AK Notepad.

Web Browsing

Web browsing is very fast and uses Chrome. I don’t have one to test next to but it’s at least the same speed as an iPad. Part of me wants to say it might be a little faster than the iPad 2 but don’t take me up one cause I don’t have proof.

Exterior

The screen is really nice and I like the grip like backing on the Nexus 7. It makes it feel like it won’t slip out of your hand. I can hold it well in one hand. I have average sized hands for a male.

Memory:

No SD card expansion slot which is a negative but get the 16GB because the OS uses a lot of space. I believe I had about 13GB free on the 16GB model. So I’d recommend you get the 16 GB model.

Apps:

Overall OK on the apps but some still are better on the iPad. For example, my cable TV company still doesn’t support watching TV on android devices where you can on the iPad. But I think now as Android tablets get more popular they will start making an app for the Android.

Conclusion:

So that’s about it, for now, I’ll stop there. So to sum it up, no need to worry about performance issues anymore on Android Tablets. For the price, you can’t go wrong if you always wanted a tablet but didn’t want to blow $500 on one. A unique thing about this tablet is the combination of having the new Google Voice, the screen size of 7″ and the nice smooth interface like an iPad but combined with a fast processor. All those things are what makes it a little different than other tablets including the iPad. And also I would definitely get this over the Kindle Fire. I don’t see any reason for anyone to buy a Kindle Fire over the Nexus 7. The Kindle Fire has a lot of stuff locked down.

[netmaddy-blog]

Google Nexus 7 Review and Some Tips

New Post has been published on https://netmaddy.com/google-nexus-7-review-and-some-tips/

Google Nexus 7 Review and Some Tips

If you are considering buying a tablet and would like to learn some info on the Nexus 7 from a real user/tech guy then read below. I don’t side with Apple or Android or Amazon. So I try to compare everything fairly.

The official Google Nexus & in Hand

I’ve had the Google Nexus 7 tablet for about a week and it’s better than I expected.

I have had a bunch of Apple iPods and have a Samsung Galaxy Player 5.0 (Android 2.3). So I might reference that one in a while in this article. Also, keep in mind I never used Android 3.0 honeycomb so if I say a feature is new it’s possible it was in Honeycomb, but I’m comparing it more to Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) which is more of a phone OS. I have never owned an iPad but use them a lot at work so I am aware of how they function and their features. I may reference those once in a while. I have not used a Kindle Fire enough to comment on it.

Why buy this?

I never was able to justify why I would spend $500 on a tablet when I can get a laptop for $500 and do more on it since it has a keyboard and is a full operating system. But the price of the Nexus and the performance got my attention.

Part of me wanted to see how a 7″ tablets felt and what it can help in my daily life, but more importantly, I wanted something I can play music on to my Bluetooth speakers with a good sized screen. It works excellent for music, games web browsing, email, and the internet. Everything runs very nice and it seems Android fixed most issues from past versions. I also love the latest Google Voice feature. Apples’ equivalent which is Siri is something you currently can’t get on an iPad. That is one big reason why I’d get this over an iPad. I can do things like say “Set Timer”, “directions to” etc.

People don’t compare this to the iPad but actually now that I’ve played around with it I feel you can kind of compare it to an iPad. Initially, I really didn’t want the 7″ screen and would have preferred a 10″ but after owning it I do now prefer the 7″ because I can hold it in 1 hand. With a 10″ like the iPad, it’s not as easy to hold. It’s a nice size for games and traveling.

The Nexus 7 is just as good as an iPad for games and will save you about $200 over an iPad if you are looking for a tablet device. Most popular games are available for Android. Android tablets have not been popular so some apps you might find still need some catching up The Info Blog. Here are things I feel people might want to know or that I found important.

Home Screen:

Works nice and very smooth, they added the feature Home Screen doesn’t rotate but this app will fix that for you and allow you to rotate the screen when you turn the device horizontal. It’s called “Ultimate Rotation Control”.

Microphone:

This still annoys me with all Android devices I’ve tried yet! I thought they would have fixed it by now. If you yell loud into the microphone it gets all distorted more than it should. The Nexus 7 still does this. Now I’ve only tested it in full on the Samsung Galaxy player. Both distort and annoy me. Apple’s iPod touch can hand yelling and loud sounds a lot better than the Nexus 7. It takes a lot to distort Apple device microphones. When I say Apple devices I am talking about the Apple iPod and assuming their other devices have the same mic. I do know the old iPod Nano video did have a horrible mic but that is no longer around. Maybe there is a better Android app out there for recording, I’ll have to still look around but I think part of this issue might be the “AGC”. Some apps let you shut it off. That definitely helped on my Galaxy Player 5. I record me playing guitar and stuff with music on these devices which is why the microphone to me is important.

Speaker:

The speaker is pretty good but not blasting. It’s kind of like an iPad speaker I would guess, maybe a little lower. I don’t have an iPad with me to compare. The Nexus 7 defiantly is not louder than an iPad speaker from what I can tell. My Galaxy Player 5.0 has better speakers. They are a lot louder and more have a little more bass than the Nexus in my opinion. If you are using the Nexus 7 with Bluetooth speakers to blast music it’s not an issue. Don’t get me wrong you definitely can listen to music on the Nexus 7 you just can’t blast the heck out of a room with it like a stereo that no one can talk over. It’s a good volume.

Camera:

There is no flash on the Nexus 7. There is only a front face camera, no rear camera. There is no camera app on it, but you can download it from the Play Store, just search for “Camera launcher for Nexus 7”. Photos and videos are what you would expect from a 1.2MP. Nothing amazing but does take pictures and video if you have lighting where you are shooting. There is no flash.

Smoothness and speed:

Yes very smooth! They finally got the Android OS where screens slide and effects are smooth like Apple devices. It sounds like a big fix for this was in the Jelly Bean Android OS. My galaxy player doesn’t have that nice smoothness. The Nexus 7 defiantly runs apps and transitions to screens faster and smoother than the Galaxy Player 5.0. You can watch some videos to see the smoothness but I’d say it’s the same as the iPad smoothness. I haven’t used the latest iPad though so don’t take me up on that. Just know it’s smooth! One issue I notice though on the Nexus 7, which is minor. Is if I’m playing music using the default music player and I was messing around with some widgets, adding them to the screen and stuff. The music hung for a quick sec. I was using volume widgets. This makes me think they need to set CPU priority to the music better or something. But maybe it was just a poorly made app I was messing with.

Wallpapers:

It lets you use animated wallpapers on your home screen which is kind of fun.

Mass USB Connection Option:

It looks like they finally killed this. This was where you can see your Android device files on your computer like a USB drive. But you still can see all the files and copy files to the Nexus 7 but it’s as a device. (On Windows 7) It seems to have caused Double Twist to not work but I bought Double Twist Air and synced over Wi-Fi which worked OK.

Screenshots

Yes, finally you can take screen shots without a third party app. They may have had this in their previous version of Android too but it’s not in Gingerbread. For the Nexus 7 just hold the volume button and power button for a few seconds and it will take a screenshot.

Music

It has a built in the widget called “What’s this song” It works like Shazam and is built in for free. The music app seems to be like the previous Android Music app with some little improvements here and there.

Car Stereo

I tested the Nexus 7 with my Sony USB stereo in my car. It recognizes it as a mp3 player only, I’m not too clear on how you would look for songs and playlists, though. You probably can’t is my guess. I’d prefer to use the auxiliary jack on my stereo so I can’t control the music with the Nexus Interface. That works great for me there just no charging.

Vibration:

There is no vibration on the Nexus.

Battery

It doesn’t show you the exact charge percent when you have it powered off which would have been good. It only shows you an image that shows its charge in 25% increments. The Nexus battery life is very good just as the specs say.

I recommend charging the Nexus using their supplied wall plug that comes with your Nexus. The manual also says it will charge faster from the wall plug than a computer. This is defiantly true from what I found.

With the Nexus 7 on and connected USB to a Windows computer, it took me about 3.5 hours to get the charge from 17% to 46%.

Something that was strange was I left it plugged into my computer overnight and it never reached 100% charge. It was something like 92%

But I then tested charging the Nexus 7 with the supplied wall charger plug. And while the Nexus was turned on it went from a charge of 75% – 98% in 1 hour.

So when they say to use the wall plug charger you better just use that because it does charge faster. I do have an ASUS motherboard on a different computer I made that says its USB ports give off more power. So I bet that will charge it fast also but I didn’t test it on there. Most people won’t have that kind of computer.

Notes app

There is no pre-installed note taking app. There are plenty of free ones on the Play Store. I use AK Notepad.

Web Browsing

Web browsing is very fast and uses Chrome. I don’t have one to test next to but it’s at least the same speed as an iPad. Part of me wants to say it might be a little faster than the iPad 2 but don’t take me up one cause I don’t have proof.

Exterior

The screen is really nice and I like the grip like backing on the Nexus 7. It makes it feel like it won’t slip out of your hand. I can hold it well in one hand. I have average sized hands for a male.

Memory:

No SD card expansion slot which is a negative but get the 16GB because the OS uses a lot of space. I believe I had about 13GB free on the 16GB model. So I’d recommend you get the 16 GB model.

Apps:

Overall OK on the apps but some still are better on the iPad. For example, my cable TV company still doesn’t support watching TV on android devices where you can on the iPad. But I think now as Android tablets get more popular they will start making an app for the Android.

Conclusion:

So that’s about it, for now, I’ll stop there. So to sum it up, no need to worry about performance issues anymore on Android Tablets. For the price, you can’t go wrong if you always wanted a tablet but didn’t want to blow $500 on one. A unique thing about this tablet is the combination of having the new Google Voice, the screen size of 7″ and the nice smooth interface like an iPad but combined with a fast processor. All those things are what makes it a little different than other tablets including the iPad. And also I would definitely get this over the Kindle Fire. I don’t see any reason for anyone to buy a Kindle Fire over the Nexus 7. The Kindle Fire has a lot of stuff locked down.

[christineannetang]

1) General Tips for Everyday Living in Hong Kong

(My boyfriend reminded me to present the Hong Kong List Guide in a form that would be easier to read and share. The PDF has all the same content, but I split the guide up into 0+5 sections for easy reading. If you want the guide in one whole PDF, click here. Otherwise, read on!)

Because there's bound to be some differences between daily life between Philly and Hong Kong.

1. Get a Student Status Octopus Card.

The Octopus Card is one of the best things ever. It's a durable, customizable card that you can top up (or refill or recharge) and it functions as a transportation card as well as a peuso-debit card kind of thing. You can put money on it at any 7-11 or MTR service counter, as well as the self-service machines located at every MTR station. Every time you take the bus or MTR, you tap your card at the turnstile when you enter and when you leave. The Octopus can also be used to pay for the food at the canteens and many stores, like 7-11 or the drugstores around Hong Kong. The big thing about student Octopus as opposed to normal Octopus is that you get 50% off the MTR fare.

2. Get a WhatsApp.

This is the main method of communication between classmates and floormates, not Facebook or texting. There's not much I can say about this. I've observed that Hong Kongers love using emoji, and I picked that trait up. The see-no-evil monkey emoji is super popular, and I realized my use of that emoji went up by like 436% after I moved to Hong Kong. This is an example of a group message from my RA.

3. It is HOT in Hong Kong. Beware.

Don't pack many heavy clothes. When I first got to Hong Kong in late August, the temperature would be in the 90's, but everything would feel even hotter than that because of the humidity, which is something Hong Kong has a lot of. Eventually, things started cooling down, but it would still be 80-90 degrees even near the end of November. (I was told it was warmer than usual that year, though.) In December it would get as cold as 50 degrees, which doesn't sound too bad, but after dealing with such warm weather, 50 degrees was the equivalent of freezing.

4. There are Escalators and Elevators Everywhere. Don't Take Them.

The buildings in Hong Kong are incredibly tall, so it makes sense for these things to be common. There aren't many people who like using the stairs, though, and I don't know why. I remember often seeing the line for these two elevators to go out the door of the waiting area, which was ridiculous; I suggest taking the stairs if you don't want to wait 5 hours for an elevator and if you don't like being squished in one. (One time, a guy took the elevator from the first floor of the dorm to the ground floor. I wouldn't have believed it if I didn't see it myself.)

5. Roads are on the "Opposite" Side.

Because Hong Kong was occupied by the UK, you'll see some British influences on things (the use of the words "rubbish bin, queue, colour" when people speak, for example). One MTR station is named Prince Edward, after Prince Edward. And people drive on the "wrong side" of the street. This means when crossing roads, you should be very careful. I realized that I was so used to right-side drivers that looking to the left when crossing roads became basically an instinct, and I had to try and unlearn that while in Hong Kong.

6. Save Money by Cooking.

Many people consider things in Hong Kong to be so cheap, but for those who are accustomed to Asian countries -- my friends from Taiwan, Indonesia, and me with my last co-op in Shanghai -- Hong Kong is considered to be ridiculously expensive. To save money, I didn't eat at the canteen (dining hall) unless I had to, or if I was too lazy to cook. I would often go to buy things at markets near the school (for more information, see list 2, point 8: "Around the school are lots of stores where you can get fresh fruit, vegetables, meat, and other things").

7. BYOB -- Bags!

In April of 2015, the Hong Kong government implemented a thing called the Environmental Levy Scheme on Plastic Shopping Bags -- in short, there are certain bags you have to pay for, some you don't. At regular stores, you have to pay for food in airtight packaging (instant noodles, chips, etc) and non-food items. Things that will come with a free bag are things not in airtight packaging (vegetables, meat) and frozen foods. However, if you go to a store like H&M or Uniqlo, you will get bags with your purchase. So, when you go grocery shopping, bring your backpack!

8. Download OpenRice.

It's an app that is the equivalent of Yelp, but in Hong Kong. You can search whereever you are for a good restaurant nearby, or the best-rated restaurant in Hong Kong for a certain cuisine, you name it. I also found Google Maps to be immensely useful, especially when I was going to new places. In that case, it would also be useful to.... (Go to #9.)

 9. Get a SIM Card with Data. The Data is the Most Important Part.

Getting a SIM in every other country except the US is easy, I think. I bought a SIM card in Mongkok and charged the card up. The plan I got was under the name "EasyCall," which offers a "IDD & 3G Mobile Data Prepaid SIM Card." It costs $100 HKD to buy the actual SIM (and number), but that also gets you $100 worth of credit. The prepaid cards also have a set of symbols and numbers you have to call to charge your phone for the month. This was the card I bought.

  So when purchasing this card, I used $200; half of that went toward that "minimum" amount, and the other half went toward the "refill" money. I only needed 1 GB of data a month, and this EasyCall service offered 1 GB over 30 days for $49. Once I activated my SIM, the shop owner helped me charge $49 to my account, leaving me with $151 for the next months. When 30 days passed, I would call the same string of digits that corresponded with the same plan I wanted. Easy enough!

In case ya'll were curious, I got the EasyCall card from Town Web Communications. It's in a huge building housing tons of small cell phone service counters. Here is the address:

Shop G56, G/F, Sincere Podium, 83 Argyle St, Mongkok, Kowloon, Hong Kong

Luckily, Kowloon is really close to CityU! Of course, you can go basically anywhere and buy a SIM card. I've heard of some students buying cards from 7-11, even.

10. Get to Know the Locals

I, unfortunately, learned this lesson too late, near the end of the term. It will be challenging to try and merge into the groups of local students because they've already formed their friend groups, and their first language is Cantonese. It was pretty difficult for me to approach groups of rapid Cantonese-speaking students, but there are so many kind ones. I got to meet quite a few local students who also lived on the same floor with me, and some others who were in my classes. I also have family who have local friends in Hong Kong. No matter what, it's best to have a person whose home turf is Hong Kong. They can show you where the good eats are at. They can let you know the best place to get that really weird, specific thing you need. They can teach you some of the local language. They will also give you a strong reason to come back.