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irispublishersengineeringscience · 4 years ago

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Global Journal of Engineering Sciences (GJES)

Investigation of the Evolution of Clay Microstructure under Different Loading Paths and Impact on Constitutive Modelling

Authored by Simona Guglielmi

The paper presents part of a research work in the field of the interpretation of the mechanical response of clays to support their constitutive modelling, according to an approach which combines the investigation of the soil element macro-behaviour, through laboratory experimental testing, with the observation of the soil features and processes at the micro-scale, through scanning electron microscopy, SEM.The effect of compression on the mechanical behaviour of clays, once reconstituted in the laboratory, has been the subject of experimental studies for many years, and has been extended to the behaviour of natural clays, which develop, in their geological history, different structure from that forming in the reconstituted during normal consolidation in the laboratory [1-3]. To date, several studies in the literature have shown that processes other than simple compression can result in an increase in the strength of clays [1-6], one example being diagenesis, which is one of those geological processes that cause an increase in stiffness and strength of the natural clay above that provided solely by the reduction in volume with compression.Diagenetic processes, which are responsible for important changes in natural clays at the microscale, typically occur at depth, under high effective stresses. They give rise to the aggradation of swelling minerals, the increase in bonding (non-frictional interparticle forces [7,8]) and changes in fabric (the arrangement of the soil particles [7,8]). As a result, natural clays can develop a structure stronger than that of the corresponding (same void ratio) reconstituted clay. This paper examines the microstructure of a natural stiff, diagenetically modified clay, by comparison with the microstructure of the same clay when reconstituted in the laboratory. This comparison is then extended to explore the evolution of microstructure after 1D compression to states preand post- gross-yield, up to large preological history is known in some detail [9]. This study is one aspect of a wider research [2,3,10-12] aimed at identifying the main physical factors and internal features which control, at the micro-scale, the material response, causing given behavioural facets. The research final aim is at assessing the influence of the different aspects of behaviour on model parameter values, hence supporting constitutive modelling and finding a relation between classes of behaviour and corresponding models and classes of clays.

Materials and Methods

Pappadai clay is a Pleistocene marine clay which was deposited in a quiet sea in the Montemesola Basin, near Taranto. The engineering geology of the clay is discussed by Cotecchia & Chandler (1995), who present paleontological and microstructural data demonstrating both the stillness of the water and the reducing conditions of the depositional environment. The main properties of the clay and its mineralogical composition are shown in Table 1.

Table 1:Index Properties and mineralogy of Pappadai clay.

The clay is of high plasticity and possesses a high carbonate content. Cotecchia & Chandler (1995) have shown that the carbonate content is largely concentrated in the sand and the silt fractions of the soil, since the carbonates increase with reducing clay fraction and plasticity index [13]. Large part of the sand and silt fractions are formed of shells of foraminifera and nannofossils. However, as will be seen, at least part of the carbonates present contribute to bonding in the clay.

Block samples were taken from a depth of 25 m during construction of a reservoir draw-off shaft and were subjected to mechanical testing [2]. The clay forming the block samples is massive and regularly laminated.

At the sampling location the clay is overconsolidated due to the erosion of some 120 m of overlying sediments. Prior to erosion the clay had undergone diagenesis resulting in a decrease in the portion of smectites, an increase in the portion of the nonswelling minerals (intergrades, Table 1), and a decrease in activity, all with respect to depth [9]. Thus, it is likely that there will have been changes in microstructure of the clay under the stress levels required to generate the mineralogical changes, that is towards the end of normal consolidation.

After unloading due to erosion, the clay in the top strata of the deposit underwent deep drying and subsequently swelled. Cotecchia e Chandler (1995) confirmed this reconstruction through the modelling of the state history of the deposit [9], the results of which are shown in Figure 1. The current profile of liquidity index against vertical effective stress at Pappadai and the modelled one are compared in Figure 1. The history of normal consolidation (stage (i)-O→P), erosion (stage (ii)-P→N), drying of the sole top strata due to lowering of the water table (stage (iii)-N→M) and water table rise (stage (iv)-M→B) was modelled and resulted in the state paths represented in the figure as continuous lines.

The last profile is “S” shaped and, as such, it is consistent with the profile of liquidity index on the undisturbed samples taken at different depth along a borehole and a shaft nearby; this latter one is the block sample B in the figure. Such undisturbed block sample is that which the experimental data presented in the following refer to. Its preconsolidation state corresponds to point P in Figure 1, as for an overconsolidation ratio (OCR) of 3.1. Such OCR resulted solely from the erosion cycle (ii) cited before, since the sample was not affected by the deep drying, which instead affected the clay layers above. For the full explanation of the reconstruction of the geological history of the clay and of the state history modelling, whose results are sketched in Figure 1, refer to [2,9].

The natural clay was reconstituted in the laboratory at a water content 1,6x liquid limit, and was one- dimensionally consolidated in a consolidometer to a vertical effective stress of 200 kPa, point A* in Figure 1, at which point it was removed from the consolidometer and placed in an oedometer where the one dimensional loading was continued. As seen in Figure 1, natural Pappadai clay followed a sedimentation compression curve (SCC; see [14] for the definition, or [1,2]) to the right of the normal consolidation line of the reconstituted clay (ICL; [1]). Thus, after a normal consolidation to point P, the natural clay already had a structure different from that of the reconstituted clay, and later underwent further changes through diagenesis.

The qualitative analysis of the clay fabric is carried out on both the natural and the reconstituted clay by means of scanning electron microscopy (SEM), using freeze-dried gold-coated clay specimens trimmed from the undisturbed block sample and from the specimens subjected to 1D compression after completion of the test and rapid undrained unloading. The microstructure of the natural clay is examined at different stages of 1D loading, i.e. at undisturbed state, soon after gross yield and to large pressures, and compared to the microstructure of the reconstituted clay after consolidation in the consolidometer and compressed to large pressures.

SEM micrographs taken on vertical fractures are shown, and sketches are reported in which fabric features are identified and local fabric arrangements are recognized. The orientation of the fabric is then quantified by means of digital image processing [15] on micrographs of size corresponding to the micro-scale representative element volume (micro-REV, [12]), recognised for the clay under study as the clay portion of size about 10-3 mm3, investigated at the medium magnification [12]. The microstructural data are related to the observed macro- response of the clay and to the constitutive hydro-mechanical parameters, highlighting what the constitutive laws deviced to represent the material macroresponse in the frame of porous media hydro-mechanics are reflecting at the micro-scale.

The bonding of Pappadai clay is such that a small undisturbed sample softens only a little after being submerged in water for several months. Drying at 120°C caused the clay to open up along the contact of the clay with silt bedding planes, and the softening of the clay on submergence was then more significant. Hence, the diagenetic bonding of Pappadai clay is significantly reduced by drying.

The fabric on a vertical fracture of reconstituted Pappadai clay, A* in Figure 1, is shown at medium-high magnification in Figure 4. As with the natural clay, a non-uniform orientation of the clay particles took place during one-dimensional normal consolidation. Both stacks and randomly oriented flocculated fabric areas can be recognized (Figure 4b). The image processing of several medium magnification micrographs allows to identify values of L in the range 0.23-0.27, indicative of a well oriented fabric.

So, although the reconstituted fabric (see for example Figure 4c) is found to be more open than that of the natural clay, as expected given the difference in void ratio between points A* and B in Figure 1, the natural fabric is not more oriented. Rather, the natural fabric appears to have less regular alternations of oriented and flocculated fabrics than the reconstituted, despite the much higher preconsolidation pressure, hence appearing far more complex, probably the consequence of diagenesis.

The average gross yield stress (i.e. the stress beyond which a transient major stiffness decay occurs, as reported by [3]) for the reconstituted clay is 200 kPa (Figure 5), i.e. the maximum stress attained in the initial consolidation in the consolidometer. Beyond gross yield, the CRS oedometer test on the reconstituted clay defines the intrinsic compression line (ICL; [1]) of Pappadai clay, for the stress range 0.2-22 MPa.

The current state of the natural clay in situ is indicated as C in the figure with a vertical stress at the sampling depth, σ’v0, of 415 kPa. Representative compression and swelling curves are shown, some compression stages prior to swelling being omitted for clarity.

The gross yield state for the natural clay lies far to the right of both the current clay state C and the ICL, confirming that the natural clay is both overconsolidated and also has a different structure from the reconstituted clay. If overconsolidated only by simple geological unloading, the clay gross yield should lie at about the preconsolidation state (Figure 5), which also lies to the right of the ICL since the structure of the natural clay was already stronger than the reconstituted clay after normal consolidation (Figure 1). However, the natural clay does not gross yield until well beyond the preconsolidation stress, since the gross yield stress is σ’y≈2600 kPa (Yield, Figure 5). This observation suggests that a strengthening of the clay structure occurred as a result of additional bonding acquired during diagenesis, increasing the gross yield stress of the clay. Consequently, the current yield stress ratio YSR= σ’y/ σ’v of the natural clay, that is the ratio of the yield stress σ’y to the current vertical stress is σ’v (YSR=σ’y/ σ’v), is twice the value of the clay’s geological OCR.

It follows that Pappadai clay is an example of a stiff clay which owes its high strength not only to its considerable compression during normal consolidation, but also to a strengthening of the clay structure due to diagenetic bonding. The effects of such diagenetic bonding are evident in the mechanical response of the clay to loading.

In test OED 7 (Figure 5), a natural clay sample was unloaded from its in situ state, then reloaded (reloading is not shown in Figure 5). In the laboratory the undisturbed state corresponds to a suction of about 700 kPa, measured by the filter paper method [20]. In the initial swelling stage of test OED 7 the response of the undisturbed clay to unloading is quite stiff, much stiffer than after compression to gross yield.

In Figure 6 the whole test OED 7 is shown, together with another similar test, OED 5, in which the sample was loaded from the undisturbed state. It can be seen that sample OED 7 gross yields at a lower stress (1800 kPa) than the that exhibited by the clay in test OED5, as a consequence of the unloading before reloading. Not only does the swelling process reduce the gross yield stress (hence reducing the YSR), but it also results in the post-yield compression line differing from that of the undisturbed clay. This illustrates the level of weakening induced on the structure of Pappadai clay by a large unloading path and subsequent reloading. This weakening, although limited, appears to be due to the slow cyclic (rather than monotonic) unloading-reloading path, which is causing the degradation of the amorphous calcite film binding the particles.

To read more about this article https://irispublishers.com/gjes/fulltext/investigation-of-the-evolution-of-clay.ID.000603.php

Indexing List of Iris Publishers: https://medium.com/@irispublishers/what-is-the-indexing-list-of-iris-publishers-4ace353e4eee

Iris publishers google scholar citations: https://scholar.google.co.in/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=irispublishers&btnG=

#Mechanical Engineering #civil engineering #computer enginerring #Chemical Engineering #material science #Mathmatics

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lumilasi · 5 years ago

Photo

You can find this template from here

Updated his timeskip look. Made his face more narrower and longer as that seems to have an effect of making the character look older. Also long hair and beard.

Rest of the Bio below

Age: 24

Sexuality: Aro/Ace

KAIN’S QUIRK EXPLAINED:

Quirk name: Access

BASICS:

Allows him to access and manipulate people’s minds and bodies, electric devices, the surrounding terrain to an extent, as well as spacetime itself, I.E create portals both in world and other dimensions.

QUIRK WEAKNESSES:

It requires a lot of energy to be diverted into his brain and quirk, so his physical stamina and health is weaker than average; he needs to constantly be conscious of the energy his body has left to give to both sustain his life AND this complicated quirk. He’s therefore not a close combatant and suffers from myriad of health issues such as headaches, vertigo, dizzy spells and so on.

Kain also sometimes struggles controlling his power, meaning he passively reads people’s thoughts even when he doesn’t want to, or can even channel their nightmares and anxiety fits, something he ended up suffering from a lot as a child. If he gets too emotionally unstable, his quirk can lash out and harm even his friends involuntarily, such as damaging their internal organs or causing violent hallucinations. This burst is also draining to Kain himself and could lead in severe complications and even death.

Kain’s quirk can be split into four categories: Portals I Mental Control I Physical Control I Hacking

1. PORTALS (and terms associated with this aspect)

Average Portal: In world portal sizes vary, but typically they are anywhere between palm- to (tall, around 2 meters in diameter) human sized. He can make them bigger, but it requires more energy and often isn’t necessary.

The portals typically have a yellowish glowing edge and can be accessed from both sides. Portals can also be used as an offensive tool by opening one around a person’s limb and cutting it off for example

Rifts: Dimensional rifts look roughly the same but typically last shorter amount of time; he can make them much bigger by default (though it requires a lot of his energy and if he makes a big one, it’s the only thing he can focus on) and even transfer large buildings into other worlds potentially. Typically for this he does need something to enchant his quirk so it doesn’t drain his energy so much

Awareness: In order to access a place, Kain either needs to have a visual for it, or have enough “knowledge” of the place. Either by being there before, or using someone’s memory and awareness of the location. It works the best with places he’s been in before and knows well, or somebody whose memories he’s using does/has been.

Scouting: Accessing other worlds, he typically can “scout out” the place beforehand by using his mental access ability on locals to see through their eyes and memories what kind of world he’s entering into. Easiest way to do this is access the mind of a doppleganger of somebody he knows

RIFT USING RULES

Kain can only access worlds (physically) that are similar to his. Worlds that are too different and have none of the same people that existed in his world for example are beyond his reach. The more alike the world is, the easier it is to Scout and access. He can still view these bizarre worlds, but he can’t enter them. He also can’t enter worlds where a version of him with similar power exists.

He always has to return home, and so does anyone who accompanies him. Kain can remain in other worlds for even years in theory (he hasn’t tested it yet), but typically people with him need something to “anchor” themselves into this new plane of existence.

Kain can inject his stronger resistance to the “dimensional pull” as he calls it, by either donating his blood, or having his DNA otherwise injected into his companions. He can only donate his blood to those who match his AB bloodtype though. (such as Ryuu)

From his observations, the dimensional pull from his rifts affects emitter quirk types the most, which he theorizes is because emitters often don’t have a “physical” constant existence, so they already live in an unstable pocket dimension of sorts.

Typically, you return close to the same time to when you left, the longest he’s been away from his home world - from the local’s perspective - has been a month. It is only if he pushes the stay after a certain point, that his own world’s time may start to catch up. (This is again more of a theoretical thing; he hasn’t dared to test it out yet)

2. MENTAL CONTROL

Access Link: He can access a person’s mind and body by either touching or looking at them. This allows him to spy on things through the person’s senses. He can even extend this ”vision” skill by making it jump from his original target to a new person they’re looking at, though the effect tends to weaken with a secondary target, and he can only do this jump twice.

Reconnecting: after making this first “linking” he can reignite it and slip back into the person’s mind the second time, even without seeing them or knowing their location. After that it depends on the person in question how easy it’ll be; the connection lasts longer the better he knows the person, and with those he’s closest to (like Ryuu) he can re-link himself anytime he wants without needing any physical or visual contact. Those he doesn’t know as well, he typically needs to redo the connection after the second or third time using it, which means he has to see the person or touch them.

Passive use: Often when dealing with a newer person that he needs to keep the connection open with for whatever reason, he tends to passively keep looking into their minds to not turn off the linking. This does mean it is draining for his health so it is better done when he doesn’t have to do much anything else with his quirk the same time.

Mental manipulation: He can read people’s thoughts and subtly manipulate their thinking; it is not direct brainwashing but rather subtly poking at one’s subconscious. He can also directly speak into person’s head. He can also make the target hallucinate or if asleep, either see nightmares or make sure they rest well.

Mind reading: He can read into people’s thoughts and memories, and even in rare cases such as quirks like AFO and OFA with their own pocket dimensions, access those.

PHYSICAL CONTROL(and terms associated with it)

Paralysis: Allows him to paralyze his target briefly, activates by sight or touch like his mental linking. People with high level of mental resilience can resist it better than most.

Minor Quirk control: Allows him to temporarily block someone’s quirk from being used, though this doesn’t work on mutant types as their mutation is a more clear part of their bodies. (even if the mutation is not directly linked to their quirk) Also typically difficult ability to maintain for longer than a minute as it drains him a lot.

Medic Abilities: He can perform ”surgery” on people without tools and basically fix their injuries (or cause internal damage.) He can even cure poisoning by making the body create natural antibodies against it, as long as he knows exactly how the said poison works. Kain can’t use this ability on his own body, only on others.

HACKING

He can access computers and other electric devices by touch or visual connection, and hack them. Since hacking is something he rarely needs to do though, given the people he hangs out with tend to have somebody who knows how to hack, this ability is rarely used.

PERSONALITY SUMMARY

Kain is a very calm and level-headed individual, who is also highly intelligent and good at observing and manipulating people. He’s not very emotional, border-lining sociopath due to his severe childhood trauma, where his brain basically locked his emotions away for the most part so he could process the side-effects of his quirk.

Because of how many things his quirk can do, Kain is naturally curious about everything, and likes to poke around and see what he can do to change the situation somehow, or just in general see what will happen if he does something.

He tends to at times struggle with general empathy, typically extending it only to those he’s grown fond of. Even then, he may sometimes come off cold and like he doesn’t fully grasp the other person’s emotions, given his mostly logic driven mind. This results in him sometimes saying things in a manner that can sound needlessly harsh, or kind of devious/manipulative given his calm and polite manner of speech, even if he doesn’t mean to come off that way.

Kain has a very strong sense of honor in a sense, that he always keeps his word, and tends to look people who break their with extreme disdain, sometimes beyond what is appropriate for the situation. He can also in extreme cases go so far as to cause himself severe harm to keep a promise he finds important. Kain also hates not having control over his own situation due to his childhood, and is acutely aware of how dangerous his quirk could be if he loses control of it, to the point it could harm those he doesn’t want to. If somebody, somehow causes him to end up in such a situation, he will take it very personally and may get quite brutal towards the culprit.

He’s ultimately selfish and very logic-driven individual, meaning every action he takes has a self-serving/self-preserving nature. However, that can lend him into sometimes aiding others and even saving their lives if it serves his interest.

MORE FACTS

- His name translates to “Calamity of the red castle,” though people who haven’t seen how it’s written often assume his surname simply means “redwhite” given The words for Castle and white sound the same.

- Since his mother was Canadian, Kain can speak both French and English fluently on top of Japanese. He’s taught Ryuu a bit of both, but mostly the only things Ryuu remembers from French is insults.

- His original name, according to his late mother, would’ve been “Kibou” which means hope, wish, aspiration. She wanted to name him that because she’d wanted a child for a long time, but struggled to get pregnant initially.

- He often wears a face-mask due to his poor health, even in his disguise outfit, sometimes even indoors. And hide if he starts coughing blood from his enemies.

- While classified as villain, Kain arguably sometimes acts more like an anti-hero, as the actions he takes during his travels sometimes result in him helping someone who really needs it.

- Kain tends to despise people who go back in their own principles and hold absolutely no standards when trying to reach a goal. This stems from the fact his father pretty much did not have any when it came to conducting his experiments; Kain found it especially despicable given he was a Doctor, and Doctors are made to swear the oath of “do no harm.”

BG STORY

He was born with a powerful Quirk, but his body was weak as a side-effect from the ability.

His mum ended up dying during childbirth due to complications, which caused his father Daiki to be distant from his son up until the age four when his Quirk manifested, and Daiki decided to use his boy for his military projects due to the versatility of his ability. He did also claim he was looking for a way to “cure” the weak body of his, but instead of strengthening his body, he mainly ended up enchanting Kain’s Quirk. Daiki then decided to use these enchantments in his own research.

As a child, Kain struggled with his ability to see into people’s memories where it would happen involuntarily, making him unable to tell what were his and what were other people’s memories. This chaos inside his brain was detrimental to his mental health, and it culminated one day where he accidentally killed a bunch of people working in the facility/patients, because he “just wanted the voices to stop” and his power lashed out without his control.

After this incident, his brain sort of began turning off his feelings to not have severe reactions like this each time he accidentally saw something horrid.

Eventually, this defense mechanism made him near completely unable to empathize with people easily, or feel any sort of emotions strongly. He could tell when some sort of emotion would be required, but he just couldn’t feel it. During his childhood, Kain Met Ryuu during one of his runaway trips (opened a portal away from the lab he was kept in and wandered off on his own) and they became friends.

Kain helped Ryuu to learn to control his ability better, as Kain was pretty much a genius kid from a very young age and was always curious to see how far one could develop their skills, a trait he inherited from his scientist father. At some point, some of Daiki’s co-workers gave him out to the authorities for his questionable practices, so Daiki ran away with his son to continue his research in secret.

At one point, Dr. Akashiro makes a deal with AFO to kidnap a certain boy for him, and he in turn would help him with the research.

(This boy being young Tenko Shimura, who in THIS verse was raised by All Might and not by AFO.)

All Might eventually came to rescue his adoptive child, and Daiki was forced to find a new place to hide and continue his project. He comes up with an idea to use Kain’s powers to transfer his lab into another dimension, which he eventually pulls off, finding a world where, peculiarly, he meets a version of the boy he once kidnapped, who’d been completely corrupted by villainy.

Later on, Daiki uses his boy’s power to teleport them into another dimension to escape from those pursuing them. His son’s body is weakened greatly however, and the man starts searching for a solution to this issue, not wanting to lose his precious research material.

After years, he finally comes to a conclusion. He needs to get Kain a whole new body, and there happens to be a person who matches. A child he’d already once taken from his new home.

Shimura Tenko

the rest is basically a spoiler to Reanimate, so I won’t explain what happens here in detail, all you need to know is that Kain finally kills his dad and escapes his clutches, joining back with his childhood friend Ryuu. He also indirectly saves Tenko, by preventing his dad from using his body to replace Kain’s old one, figuring out another way to fix the damage his dad’s forced dimension hopping had done to him.

Bio template (C) Yourultraarchive

Oc (C) me

#kain akashiro #akashiro kain #my bnha oc #character bio #bio update #my hero academy oc #bnha villain oc #Lumi's art scribbles #Lumi's chaotic creations

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sciencespies · 4 years ago

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Distant 'Baby' Black Holes are behaving strangely, and scientists are perplexed

https://sciencespies.com/space/distant-baby-black-holes-are-behaving-strangely-and-scientists-are-perplexed/

Distant 'Baby' Black Holes are behaving strangely, and scientists are perplexed

Radio images of the sky have revealed hundreds of ‘baby’ and supermassive black holes in distant galaxies, with the galaxies’ light bouncing around in unexpected ways.

Galaxies are vast cosmic bodies, tens of thousands of light years in size, made up of gas, dust, and stars (like our Sun).

Given their size, you’d expect the amount of light emitted from galaxies would change slowly and steadily, over timescales far beyond a person’s lifetime.

But our research, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, found a surprising population of galaxies whose light changes much more quickly, in just a matter of years.

What is a radio galaxy?

Astronomers think there’s a supermassive black hole at the centre of most galaxies. Some of these are ‘active’, which means they emit a lot of radiation.

Their powerful gravitational fields pull in matter from their surroundings and rip it apart into an orbiting donut of hot plasma called an ‘accretion disk’.

This disk orbits the black hole at nearly the speed of light. Magnetic fields accelerate high-energy particles from the disk in long, thin streams or ‘jets’ along the rotational axes of the black hole. As they get further from the black hole, these jets blossom into large mushroom-shaped clouds or ‘lobes’.

This entire structure is what makes up a radio galaxy, so called because it gives off a lot of radio-frequency radiation. It can be hundreds, thousands or even millions of light years across and therefore can take aeons to show any dramatic changes.

Astronomers have long questioned why some radio galaxies host enormous lobes, while others remain small and confined. Two theories exist. One is that the jets are held back by dense material around the black hole, often referred to as frustrated lobes.

However, the details around this phenomenon remain unknown. It’s still unclear whether the lobes are only temporarily confined by a small, extremely dense surrounding environment – or if they’re slowly pushing through a larger but less dense environment.

The second theory to explain smaller lobes is the jets are young and have not yet extended to great distances.

Hercules A’s supermassive black hole emitting high energy particle jets into radio lobes. (NASA/ESA/NRAO)

Old ones are red, babies are blue

Both young and old radio galaxies can be identified by a clever use of modern radio astronomy: looking at their ‘radio colour’.

We looked at data from the GaLactic and Extragalactic All Sky MWA (GLEAM) survey, which sees the sky at 20 different radio frequencies, giving astronomers an unparalleled ‘radio colour’ view of the sky.

From the data, baby radio galaxies appear blue, which means they’re brighter at higher radio frequencies. Meanwhile the old and dying radio galaxies appear red and are brighter in the lower radio frequencies.

We identified 554 baby radio galaxies. When we looked at identical data taken a year later, we were surprised to see 123 of these were bouncing around in their brightness, appearing to flicker. This left us with a puzzle.

Something more than one light year in size can’t vary so much in brightness over less than one year without breaking the laws of physics. So, either our galaxies were far smaller than expected, or something else was happening.

Luckily, we had the data we needed to find out.

Past research on the variability of radio galaxies has used either a small number of galaxies, archival data collected from many different telescopes, or was conducted using only a single frequency.

For our research, we surveyed more than 21,000 galaxies over one year across multiple radio frequencies. This makes it the first ‘spectral variability’ survey, enabling us to see how galaxies change brightness at different frequencies.

Some of our bouncing baby radio galaxies changed so much over the year we doubt they are babies at all. There’s a chance these compact radio galaxies are actually angsty teens rapidly growing into adults much faster than we expected.

While most of our variable galaxies increased or decreased in brightness by roughly the same amount across all radio colours, some didn’t. Also, 51 galaxies changed in both brightness and colour, which may be a clue as to what causes the variability.

Artist’s impression of SKA-mid (left) and SKA-low (right) telescopes. (SKAO/ICRAR/SARAO)

Three possibilities for what is happening

1) Twinkling galaxies

As light from stars travels through Earth’s atmosphere, it is distorted. This creates the twinkling effect of stars we see in the night sky, called ‘scintillation’. The light from the radio galaxies in this survey passed through our Milky Way galaxy to reach our telescopes on Earth.

Thus, the gas and dust within our galaxy could have distorted it the same way, resulting in a twinkling effect.

2) Looking down the barrel

In our three-dimensional Universe, sometimes black holes shoot high energy particles directly towards us on Earth. These radio galaxies are called ‘blazars’.

Instead of seeing long thin jets and large mushroom-shaped lobes, we see blazars as a very tiny bright dot. They can show extreme variability in short timescales, since any little ejection of matter from the supermassive black hole itself is directed straight towards us.

3) Black hole burps

When the central supermassive black hole ‘burps’ some extra particles they form a clump slowly travelling along the jets. As the clump propagates outwards, we can detect it first in the ‘radio blue’ and then later in the ‘radio red’.

So we may be detecting giant black hole burps slowly travelling through space.

Where to now?

This is the first time we’ve had the technological ability to conduct a large-scale variability survey over multiple radio colours. The results suggest our understanding of the radio sky is lacking and perhaps radio galaxies are more dynamic than we expected.

As the next generation of telescopes come online, in particular the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), astronomers will build up a dynamic picture of the sky over many years.

In the meantime, it’s worth watching these weirdly behaving radio galaxies and keeping a particularly close eye on the bouncing babies, too.

Kathryn Ross, PhD Student, Curtin University and Natasha Hurley-Walker, Radio Astronomer, Curtin University.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

#Space

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mysteriousooze · 8 years ago

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Emotional Ectomagnetic Spectrum

Headcanon: the Lantern Corps and ghosts gain power from the same source.

(Scroll to Vlad’s pic for DP content, or past all of the pics for fic content.)

In the DC Universe, there are seven different Lantern Corps. Members use their lanterns to charge their power rings – but where do the lanterns get power?

Emotions. Every sentient being in the universe bleeds emotion, creating an energy field to which the lanterns are connected. Each Corps draws power from a different emotion. (Yeah, it’s hokey. Whatever. That’s canon.)

Who else gains power from emotions?

Ghosts – if you subscribe to a certain headcanon, anyway. Not like Spectra rejuvenating herself; the theory goes that ghosts haunt humans in order to feed on their yummy emotions, thus growing more powerful. And halfas cannibalize their feelings, giving them an internal power source.

If accept those both as true, then it isn’t a stretch to assume ghosts and lanterns tap into the same “emotional electromagnetic spectrum” for energy. Furthermore, I propose that the color of a ghost’s ectoplasm indicates which emotion they draw from the spectrum.

Another DP headcanon: ghosts recharge within the Ghost Zone. It makes sense, if you accept that ghosts need emotional sustenance. The Zone is where they spend most of their time. Of course, this means that the GZ (or ectoplasm in general) is/contains a source of emotional energy.

I submit that the “energy field” the lanterns draw from is the Ghost Zone.

DP canon:

Doors in the GZ can lead to pocket dimensions (like the boy in front of the static TV, you know the one.)

The GZ is a mirror dimension to the “real world,” so close that natural portals open everywhere. If the GZ is destroyed, then so is Earth.

Presumably, the GZ extends beyond the Earth’s atmosphere. A sister dimension brimming with energy, spanning the universe.

(A metaphor: the “real world” is an assembled puzzle, while the GZ is all of the pieces loose in the box. They align, but not symmetrically. If a piece of the GZ were destroyed, the corresponding piece of the assembled puzzle would be destroyed as well, but not the whole dang puzzle/universe.)

DC canon:

Corps members keep their lanterns in pocket dimensions accessible from a secret location.

This indicates that A) Lanterns are able to reach other dimensions, if very nearby ones, and B) that the location of the pocket dimension is static, relative to the rotation of the planet.

This correlates with DP canon, wherein the Ghost Portal never leads elsewhere as the Earth orbits. The lanterns would also be capable of drawing energy from the GZ.

In conclusion, this all fits together pretty damn well, imo.

But let’s get back to the ghosts.

DC canon: an emotion’s placement on the spectrum indicates how much influence it holds over the wielder. Green, in the middle, is the most stable, but can only be controlled by those of great willpower. We’re starting on the end of the spectrum, however.

Those who are capable of great love, who have lost their loves, or been rejected are capable of wielding the violet light.

Vlad’s motivation is all about love! He yearns for it, would plot and manipulate and kill for it; he feels scorned and deprived of what he deserves. He’s spent his life becoming his idea of the perfect man, all for the sake of love.

Being on the far end of the spectrum, the violet light drives the Star Sapphires to violence through their love. I’m not saying that Vlad isn’t responsible for his own actions; he definitely is. However, I think it’s indicative that he naturally bears the toxic love of the Star Sapphires.

The Star Sapphires are mostly comprised of scorned women. It doesn’t surprise me in the least that Desiree uses the love that betrayed and harmed her to smite revenge upon the living.

Another common trait among the Sapphires is hatred of men – an outdated canon, imo, but it certainly rings true for this ghost.

The Indigo Tribe is a very special Corps, not only for the fact that most of their members are literal slaves to their rings – as it is said people can be slaves to their compassion. The users of this light are capable of absorbing and utilizing the lights of other Corps as they would their own.

Similarly, Ember’s guitar can emit different colors of ectoplasmic attacks, depending on its setting. (I consider Ember’s guitar as intrinsic as Johnny’s shadow.) The theme of being enslaved by a single, overwhelming emotion fits with Ember’s siren-like ability, as well.

(Disclaimer: I’m not considering her blue hair for the same reason I’m not considering Plasmius’ red eyes. Those are more from their self-perception than the energy they draw from, imo.)

Blue power rings choose those capable of giving hope for the future to others when they have lost theirs.

Even in the depths of a frozen wasteland, Frostbite leads his people with palpable optimism. They’ve achieved science, art, and philosophy worthy of any sci-fi utopia. Their warrior culture is jovial, meant for recreation rather than conflict. He certainly gave hope to Danny.

I never said that ghosts could only use one color, did I?

Danny gained the ability to use blue ectoplasm later in his character development. After he learned to base his self-worth on himself, rather than on others’ opinions; after he wins more fights than he loses; after he gets a handle on his grades. He’s in a more positive place in his life. Most of Amity Park accepts him as a hero, and he’s even on their sign as their town hero. He’s become a symbol of hope.

Now, at this point one might say, “But Amelia, they’re blue because of ice powers.” to which I say, “bullshit.” Ice has no color, and neither does water. They reflect the sky, granting a blue appearance. IMO, their ice powers are illuminated from within by blue ectoplasm.

If you’re still not convinced, here’s another example:

Looks familiar. Pandora ain’t using ice powers; that’s blue ectoplasm. Considering she crafted a box to contain the world’s worst evils in order to make it a better place, I think she qualifies as one who brings hope.

Those of an indomitable will that can overcome great fear are capable of wielding the green light.

This kid was hunted by his parents, his government, terrifying other-dimensional ghosts, and a rich, old man smarter and stronger than himself. His own body didn’t obey him, or even the laws of physics – and that’s not even mentioning the normal perils of puberty! Bullies targeted him; teachers were biased against him; his grades, and all control over his life, were slipping.

Fear dogged his footsteps, but rather than hide, run away, or even keep his head down to make things easier on himself, he chose to fight. It would have been easy to say ‘my parents’ portal, my parents’ problem.’ He tackled his obstacles one day at a time, relentlessly putting the safety of others before his own, and relied on his friends to help him through – even if that just meant goofing off to destress.

That took serious determination – or, shall I say, willpower.

Disclaimer: green is the natural color of ectoplasm. I am not suggesting that the murky depths of the GZ are aglow with the universe’s supply of bullheadedness. Nor do I believe that the Fright Knight’s ectoplasm-empowered/enchanted sword is made of stubborness. All that is charged with willpower is green, but not all that is green is willpower.

(No ghostly examples for these. I blame color palettes, but I’m biased.)

Yellow is close to the center, and like blue, these rings choose those capable of instilling great fear in others.

Orange can be harnessed by those whose greed knows no bounds. Wielders become twisted, obsessively guarding their property and stealing from others.

I don’t need to tell you about the Ghost King’s breathtaking anger issues.

In DC, the red light of rage has the most profound effect on its wielders of them all. Red Lanterns are reduced to little more than rabid animals, and the rings poison their blood so that if they’re removed, the result is death.

However, ghosts are not Lanterns. They are not beings of flesh and blood overwhelmed by otherworldy power. This isn’t foreign to ghosts. This is a ghost’s natural state of existence.

For example, Vlad exibits negative traits of a Star Sapphire. But in the case of a Corps member (correct me if I’m wrong,) the ring is forcing this behavior. Not the light. The ring. Vlad is perfectly capable of changing his ways, of using the Power of Heart™ for good.

This is why I think Danny can use two different types, with green as his primary color. Not a DP post without a pun. Like when Desiree’s eyes glare crimson when she’s furious – she’s tapping into the red light, but when she attacks, it’s still violet, because love is still her source of power. I’m such a nerd, wow

If we can accept all of that, then we can get to the interesting stuff!

Danny could charge a GL’s ring, but he’d be exhausted afterward and maybe not hold his ghost form. A last resort.

Vlad’s cube thing that doesn’t let Danny use his powers? Could totally work on a Lantern. (The Plasmius Maximus, however, requires ghost biology, so no dice)

Danny’s ghost sense goes off when there’s a Lantern around, but only when the ring’s activated. Same thing with ghost shields – they work when they‘re powered up. The first time GL encounters this, they don’t know that. It’s such a stupidly simple solution they didn’t even consider, so they’re just outside trying to smash through with brute force when they could literally walk right in, its hilarious

Lanterns are basically artificial halfas. None of the really fun powers, like invisibility/intangibility, but anything that involves shaping or charging ectoplasm? They’re experts

GL could totally teach Danny how to use some of his powers

The Oans probably have the technology to stabilize Dani

The Fenton’s portal? That engine Jack made that uses ghosts as an energy source? Or really any of their ghost tech? Is basically following the same path of technological development as the Oans! GLs can track ecto-technology on their rings, as long as its active. Imagine their shock when they find Oan-like tech on Earth! They know about the emotional spectrum, but that’s it. The Oans don’t want anyone replicating their technology, so their people have no idea where their power really comes from If the GLs report back to the Oans about ecto-tech development on Earth, things may get political real fast

If the suit Technus made for Valerie is powered by the red light, what if it starts influencing her personality/emotions?

GL could take Danny into space. GL could take Danny to visit other planets. Danny could explore space with the Lanterns and he would be so happy

Danny vs GL: if it boils down to a battle of stamina, GL wins. His ring has more lasting power than Danny. As a halfa, however, Danny has full ghost powers; if he’s tricky enough, he could squeeze out a win. GL, on the other hand, is only limited by his imagination in what he can create. I’m inclined to say GL would win, unless Danny is willing to use the Ghostly Wail to knock him out, then flee on foot – but even then, GL’s ring would have a recording of him becoming Danny Fenton (Plus GL has way more allies than Danny. Basically, our boy might win a battle, but def not the war)

The Oans and the Observants could totally be in cahoots, and neither of them like Danny

That pocket dimension GLs keep their Lanterns in could totally be behind a locked door in the GZ, and now I’m imagining Vlad scheming up a way to find one

What if GL’s space travel utilizes the GZ’s natural portals like the infi-map?

There’s so much potential here, guys!!

#dpdc #black and white lanterns exist too #but this is complicated enough #long post #this is extra nerdy even for me #danny phantom #lantern corps #dc comics #this took an absurd amount of time #original post #DP headcanon

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ftnbooks-blog · 5 years ago

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A large text this time by Ludwig Seyfarth ,which can also be found on the Paul Schwer site. Why?…because FTN art has acquired 2 works by Paul Schwer and which will be for sale shortly.

„One would be tempted to believe that this structure used to have some convenient form, and now it was only broken. This does not seem to be the case; at least there is no indication; nowhere are approaches or fractures to be seen that would point to such a thing; The whole thing seems pointless, but completed in its kind. Incidentally, nothing more can be said about it, since Odradek is extremely flexible and can not be caught. „- From: Franz Kafka, The Care of the House Father

Extremely agile and unstoppable – that‘s also what Paul Schwer and his art say. The objects (an auxiliary term for quite different things) that Schwer produces do not move themselves, but almost systematically dispense with the usual names and categories with which works of art are classed in terms of genre, media or style.

How consistently Paul Schwer places his work between the chairs of conventional art forms, the various attempts make it clear that they capture it in an orderly manner. In the Wikipedia article he is called installation artist. On the website of the Goch Museum, he is considered one of the most famous German sculptors. And the radio contribution by Thomas Frank, which was broadcast to the exhibitions in Ratingen and Goch, sees the aspect of extended painting as central, thus ultimately following the artist himself. Somewhat surprisingly, he then places Paul Schwer in the art-historical tradition of stained glass. The fact that each interpreter sees a different artist, depending on the perspective, could be due to a very divergent design vocabulary within the work. Even well-known artistic oeuvres do not offer a uniform picture. Suppose someone is not familiar with Pablo Picasso‘s work and enters a solo exhibition of this painter who has become the cliché of the modern artist. If he then sees works from the blue and pink period, then the cubist, the classicist and the later phases, he is likely to expect to attend a group exhibition.

That would hardly be suspected in an exhibition by Paul Schwer despite the diversity of media and materials. Plexiglass and polyethylene terephthalate (PET9, wood or fluorescent tubes are repeatedly used materials that, in addition to a clear color, a game with transparency and semi-transparency and a play of surface shapes and complex volumes,a clear, consistent „handwriting“.

At the same time, however, seemingly contradictory things are always connected with each other. Both the individual object as well as an overall arrangement in an exhibition or in an outdoor space (often Paul Schwers works outdoors) often suggest a lability and fragility, a situation that would immediately get out of hand with a small change in the heavyweight.

Not just a house is upside down, on the edge of the roof (which we will come to). The relationship between two- and three-dimensionality always stands in the balance. The „painterly“ application of color does not take place on a flat surface. The most common image carrier is a transparent, heated PET fluid (or Plexiglas) that has been thrown in a fluid state and re-hardened. Thus, the „image ground“ becomes a plastic, free-standing object or lying on the ground object. The latter is reminiscent of the irregular outline of a crumpled paper, as if a picture or a drawing were discarded and thrown away, which also applies to the various red forms in the exhibition in Goch.

Thus, each image is simultaneously a sculpture, with sculptural elements, so to speak on the other side, also tending to be architectural elements in space. The prototype for this are the natural-brown or green lattices, which are made of roof battens and based on the outline of two pillars in the room, which reach below the ceiling in Goch and divide one of the two exhibition rooms, divided into different directions, into compartments. However, these rooms in the room are not completed; The grids are not fixed walls, but largely open to the view. The different sawed out sections correspond exactly to the dimensions of the door and window openings of the room. Other elements that also have an optical outline function are colored rectangular discs made of corrugated polyester, which hang pictures on the construction like single panels – not all at the usual eye level, but their size and position is also derived from the architectural conditions of the room.

The reference to the conditions of space based on strictly geometrical forms and dimensions could almost be read as a continuation of the tradition of Minimal Art. But one may also be reminded of the Cabinet of Abstracts, which El Lissitzky set up between 1926 and 1928 in the Sprengel Museum Hannover and which since 2017 has been accessible there as a reconstruction. Lissitzky designed a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk for the presentation of works by other artists as well, based on a clear constructivist vocabulary of forms. However, Paul Schwer also incorporates in his „Gesamtkunstwerk“ other elements that would be unthinkable to Lissitzky or strict minimalists. Thus, several red PET objects form a radical contrast to the geometric reduction. Complex wrinkled and folded forms can not be grasped at a glance, suggesting a baroque overabundance, an impression of the random and the chaotic. A staging of the exhibition space based on such strong formal counterparts may seem like an attempt to bring things right back to their original level after an explosion or other destruction.

The corrugated iron hut, which stands diagonally upside down in the other showroom, could also have been torn away by a flood. It does not seem habitable anymore, even when light is on. Inside, there is an accumulation of fluorescent tubes, the cables of which hang down at the bottom, reminiscent of a torrent of water.

��Model“ for this architectural sculpture is a corrugated iron hut that Paul Schwer has seen far away from human settlements in Iceland. Travel memories often form associative starting points for his spatial stagings. The second room was inspired by the facade of a vegetable shop in Istanbul, where the artist had a scholarship in 2015.

However, such references and narrative references never become clear; mental impressions, like physical materials, enter into the composition of an „installation“. After all, is Paul Schwer ultimately an „installation artist“ who combines various individual elements into a spatial entity? Or does he create three-dimensional images that extend concepts of painting into space? Even though Paul Schwer himself, as already mentioned, tends towards the latter „categorization“, in the end it is up to us how we classify our mode of experience conceptually. The emotional impact can also vary depending on the observer. Thus, the strong color and the physical force of the sculptural forms combined with the often surprising light effects of the fluorescent tubes can trigger a feeling of expressive affection. If you look more closely at the constructive components, you will discover in Paul Schwer‘s work a seemingly contradictory, almost hermetic feature, in which the elements, as on different levels of presentation, almost seem to interlock with one another like a Russian doll.

Furthermore, one could ask how Paul Schwer‘s art of spatial presentation could be classified in the context of contemporary installation art. If we follow Claire Bishop‘s 2005 installmentage „Criitical History“ in the Tate Modern Press, different forms of installation are distinguished not by their spatial presentation, but by the way they are viewed („viewer“) that are, are mentally and physically involved. Dream scene, heightened perception, Mimetic engulfment and Activated Spectatorship are the guidelines here, which are also based on different subject theories. The recipient subject is involved, but also decentred: psychoanalytically, phenomenologically, libidinally or in the sense of a post-structuralist political subject.

The receiving subject is called upon to actively explore the spatial staging. But this is no selfassured subject with a sovereign command of a unitary space as in Renaissance perspective but one that is decentred in the sense of poststructuralist theories. There is no sovereign viewer’s standpoint from where the entire spatial installation can be grasped in one sweep. This is a central characteristic of Paul Schwer’s spatial stagings, aligning them with the procedures of many wellknown installation artists like Allan Kapow, Lucas Samaras, Paul Thek, Ilya Kabakov, and Gregor Schneider.

However, the combination of different, seemingly incongruent things in stagelike spatial ensembles also calls to mind the psychoanalytically inspired combinatorics of the Surrealists. And perhaps the individual elements brought together by Paul Schwer take on a »sense« only if read as Freud read dreams: as picture puzzles whose deeper meaning does not lie in what is to be seen in the images.

Paul Schwer (1951) A large text this time by Ludwig Seyfarth ,which can also be found on the Paul Schwer site.

#conceptua;#installation #multiple #paulschwer #schwer #seyfarth

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dorcasrempel · 5 years ago

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A new way to corrosion-proof thin atomic sheets

A variety of two-dimensional materials that have promising properties for optical, electronic, or optoelectronic applications have been held back by the fact that they quickly degrade when exposed to oxygen and water vapor. The protective coatings developed thus far have proven to be expensive and toxic, and cannot be taken off.

Now, a team of researchers at MIT and elsewhere has developed an ultrathin coating that is inexpensive, simple to apply, and can be removed by applying certain acids.

The new coating could open up a wide variety of potential applications for these “fascinating” 2D materials, the researchers say. Their findings are reported this week in the journal PNAS, in a paper by MIT graduate student Cong Su; professors Ju Li, Jing Kong, Mircea Dinca, and Juejun Hu; and 13 others at MIT and in Australia, China, Denmark, Japan, and the U.K.

Research on 2D materials, which form thin sheets just one or a few atoms thick, is “a very active field,” Li says. Because of their unusual electronic and optical properties, these materials have promising applications, such as highly sensitive light detectors. But many of them, including black phosphorus and a whole category of materials known as transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs), corrode when exposed to humid air or to various chemicals. Many of them degrade significantly in just hours, precluding their usefulness for real-world applications.

“It’s a key issue” for the development of such materials, Li says. “If you cannot stabilize them in air, their processability and usefulness is limited.” One reason silicon has become such a ubiquitous material for electronic devices, he says, is because it naturally forms a protective layer of silicon dioxide on its surface when exposed to air, preventing further degradation of the surface. But that’s more difficult with these atomically thin materials, whose total thickness could be even less than the silicon dioxide protective layer.

There have been attempts to coat various 2D materials with a protective barrier, but so far they have had serious limitations. Most coatings are much thicker than the 2D materials themselves. Most are also very brittle, easily forming cracks that let through the corroding liquid or vapor, and many are also quite toxic, creating problems with handling and disposal.

The new coating, based on a family of compounds known as linear alkylamines, improves on these drawbacks, the researchers say. The material can be applied in ultrathin layers, as little as 1 nanometer (a billionth of a meter) thick, and further heating of the material after application heals tiny cracks to form a contiguous barrier. The coating is not only impervious to a variety of liquids and solvents but also significantly blocks the penetration of oxygen. And, it can be removed later if needed by certain organic acids.

“This is a unique approach” to protecting thin atomic sheets, Li says, that produces an extra layer just a single molecule thick, known as a monolayer, that provides remarkably durable protection. “This gives the material a factor of 100 longer lifetime,” he says, extending the processability and usability of some of these materials from a few hours up to months. And the coating compound is “very cheap and easy to apply,” he adds.

In addition to theoretical modeling of the molecular behavior of these coatings, the team made a working photodetector from flakes of TMD material protected with the new coating, as a proof of concept. The coating material is hydrophobic, meaning that it strongly repels water, which otherwise would diffuse into the coating and dissolve away a naturally formed protective oxide layer within the coating, leading to rapid corrosion.

The application of the coating is a very simple process, Su explains. The 2D material is simply placed into bath of liquid hexylamine, a form of the linear alkylamine, which builds up the protective coating after about 20 minutes, at a temperature of 130 degrees Celsius at normal pressure. Then, to produce a smooth, crack-free surface, the material is immersed for another 20 minutes in vapor of the same hexylamine.

“You just put the wafer into this liquid chemical and let it be heated,” Su says. “Basically, that’s it.” The coating “is pretty stable, but it can be removed by certain very specific organic acids.”

The use of such coatings could open up new areas of research on promising 2D materials, including the TMDs and black phosphorous, but potentially also silicene, stanine, and other related materials. Since black phosphorous is the most vulnerable and easily degraded of all these materials, that’s what the team used for their initial proof of concept.

The new coating could provide a way of overcoming “the first hurdle to using these fascinating 2D materials,” Su says. “Practically speaking, you need to deal with the degradation during processing before you can use these for any applications,” and that step has now been accomplished, he says.

The team included researchers in MIT’s departments of Nuclear Science and Engineering, Chemistry, Materials Science and Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and the Research Laboratory of Electronics, as well as others at the Australian National University, the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Aarhus University in Denmark, Oxford University, and Shinshu University in Japan. The work was supported by the Center for Excitonics and the Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, and by the National Science Foundation, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society, the U.S. Army Research Office through the MIT Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, and Tohoku University.

A new way to corrosion-proof thin atomic sheets syndicated from https://osmowaterfilters.blogspot.com/

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ciathyzareposts · 6 years ago

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Black Crypt: Playing it Straight

Putting on the Mask of True Sight allows me to see this disgusting foe.

It occurred to me recently that the two great loves of my life–jazz and CRPGs–have something in common. They both draw from a variety of templates, and the real joy in a performance is seeing how a particular band or artist has chosen to improvise on the template. (I should clarify that this is true of the type of jazz I like, anyway. It’s less true of free jazz and other avant-garde styles whose appeal has always mystified me.) A new composition is always nice, of course, but it requires a depth of engagement and attention that you’re not always ready to give. In contrast, you almost never mind hearing a familiar composition played in a new way.

That makes it all the more disappointing when you sit down for a performance and don’t find anything new at all–a copy rather than an improvisation. No jazz fan wants to hear a number played entirely “straight,” and no CRPG addict wants to start, say, a Dungeon Master clone just to find a literal clone. And that’s largely what we have here. In its best moments, Black Crypt recalls good times playing Dungeon Master, but it offers too few variances to those moments.

The game has occasional moments like this to remind you of the plot, but they’re few and far between.

I’m less than halfway through the game, and it thus might improve, but so far all Black Crypt has done is to make Dungeon Master a lot bigger; as I noted last time, it has 28 levels. I rather hoped that with so many levels, and with so much space devoted to each level (the coordinates go up to 40 x 40), Black Crypt might achieve a nonlinearity that previous games in this lineage have lacked. I thought we might see multiple ways up and down–a true three-dimensional maze rather than a steady progression of levels. Well, the game absolutely does have multiple staircases per level, but you still reach them in a somewhat fixed order. At any given moment, you rarely have more than two choices for your next move, and one of those will almost certainly resolve into a dead end.

I had also hoped that Black Crypt might do more with its story. As I noted last time, many of the mechanics owe more to Eye of the Beholder than to Dungeon Master, and I thus hoped the game might introduce some NPCs or in-game story development the way that Beholder did. Alas, there’s been none of that so far. And I’m disappointed that the game didn’t fix many of my other complaints about previous Dungeon Master-like titles, including a lack of enemy names and a lack of information on equipment.

The Bracers of Agility will, at least, reflect their influence in the character attributes.

What’s left is not an unpleasant experience, just a highly-derivative one. Fortunately, it’s been a while since the last Dungeon Master clone, so at least I didn’t start this game exhausted with the entire sub-genre, the way I currently am with Ultima clones.

In this last session, I explored Levels 3-9 of the dungeon. I should perhaps say “partially explored,” because there’s a lot of unused space on each level, and it’s entirely possible that some teleporter or staircase will later bring me to those unused parts. I doubt it however, mostly because the game occasionally makes a big show of loading when you transition between levels. It did this between Levels 2 and 3, between Levels 5 and 6, and between Levels 9 and 10. (In contrast, the game barely blips when you take a staircase between, say, Levels 7 and 8.) I think we can therefore regard each level “group” as a separate section of the dungeon. Indeed, as I explored Levels 3-5 and 6-9, there was a lot of interconnectedness between levels in a group–but only a single staircase between the major “group” transitions.

Level 3 had a “skull” theme going on.

Within each group, the specific level order was nonlinear (in the sense that progression didn’t go in the specific order of levels; it was still a very narrow path). For instance, I couldn’t explore most of Level 3 until I had a Mask of True Sight, which let me see the invisible enemies on that level. The mask was found on Level 4, but I had to make some diversions to Level 5 along the way. Among the next group, I spent only a small amount of time on Level 6 before a teleporter took me to Level 9. After a long time mapping that level, I finally went back up to Level 7, which had a lot of stairways up and down to Level 8. This interconnectedness within level groups extends to the game’s puzzles. Pressing a button on Level 8 might open a wall on Level 7.

Regrettably, there has been nothing thematic to all of these levels. Again, I think to the Eye of the Beholder series, where you had the dwarf and Drow levels in the first game, and the clear distinction between the living quarters and basement in the second. Here, we don’t even have much variation in texture–just the occasional use of a different color, as if the level was shot through a red filter or something. As a consequence, even a day after playing the majority of this session, I have to refer to my maps for reminders about the specific order in which I did things.

You really have to carefully study the walls for buttons.

If there’s one thing that the game does a little better than Dungeon Master, it’s perhaps greater variety in its puzzles (some true Dungeon Master fans may dispute that this is an improvement). There have been a lot of switches, buttons, and pressure plates, but none of them very complex–you just activate them, and something happens. The more memorable puzzles have involved a bit more creativity. Some examples include:

A long north-south hallway of 12 squares with alternating east-west alcoves. Each alcove contained a skull. Nearby messages remarked, “A year of death counted in souls. One for each moon, four is your goal,” and “February, April, July, October.” It was clear that I had to regard each square in the hallway as representing a month, and to remove the skulls for the alcoves that represented February, April, July, and October. Choosing a wrong skull meant activating a trap. The order of months turned out not to go in a linear manner along the hall, but rather up one side and then down the other.

Several magic mouths that required me to answer a question based on other messages found in the dungeon. For instance, Levels 6-9 had repeated messages about an archdruid named Oakraven (one of the four heroes from the backstory), who is buried below in a coffin of Whiteoak. Both words were answers to magic mouth riddles.

Getting some lore . . .

. . . and using it to answer a puzzle.

On Level 4, I had to collect water from four symmetrically-placed fountains and then put those waterskins into special alcoves on Level 5. The hardest part of this mission was differentiating the “special” waterskins from the other waterskins in my possession.

Two areas where a message said “HTCIWS” and presented me with two alcoves with different objects within them. I had to reverse the positions of the objects in the alcoves. This was harder than you might think, because the word “switch” made me think of wall switches and not “swapping” the items

Solving puzzles can have a variety of effects. Locked doors might open, hidden doors might reveal themselves, wall spaces might open up, pillars might disappear, and new switches and buttons might appear on previously-blank walls. I’ve found that in this game, it really makes sense to map everything before touching everything, then search for the type of secret door that you can bump into, and finally try the switches and buttons, carefully noting the changes to the environment.

A lot of the game’s puzzles involve removing pillars like this.

Let’s talk about combat. Level 3’s invisible enemies, when I wore the Mask of True Sight, turned out to be these giant grubs with teeth and claws. They’re capable of inflicting poison, but fortunately there are a lot of anti-poison scrolls and potions on the level. Level 6 introduced these single-eyed things that appear to shuffle along the ceiling. Levels 8 and 9 had floating, metallic, horned heads as well as shape-changing slimes.

This guy reminds me of something that I can’t place.

The spellcasting version of this monster was very tough.

Of some annoyance is the fact that enemies in this game vary even among the same type. Some of the grubs moved faster, hit harder, had more hit points than the others. Some of the one-eyed ceiling creatures and floating heads are capable of offensive spells and some are not. These variances make it hard to find a consistent strategy.

On strategy that doesn’t work very well is the old combat waltz. It can technically be done, and I’ve used it a few times to weaken a couple of enemies prior to the main onslaught, but rarely can I keep it up for the duration of an entire combat. Enemies are simply faster here than in most Dungeon Master derivations. They move faster and, more important, they turn faster. You don’t have the same kind of pause between an enemy arriving in a square, turning to face you, and attacking. You really have to be prepared to fight head-on with weapons and spells. Occasionally, it’s possible to enact some of the other “guerrilla” maneuvers possible with this combat engine, including “stair-scumming.” Enemies that walk on the ceiling cannot pass through door frames, which offers some hit-and-run opportunities.

All told, though, combat is a less frequent experience with Black Crypt than with most games of this ilk. Sometimes half an hour passes without a single enemy. Character leveling is also a bit under-emphasized. My characters are all Level 7 currently, but that doesn’t mean much more than more hit points. Spells are learned by finding books, not leveling (although level does affect spell power). There are a few pressure plates that cause enemies to spawn, in case I ever feel like I need to grind.

Miscellaneous notes:

A lot of the mechanical puzzles are about lowering pillars that otherwise block hallways. This is slightly original, although when you think about it, there’s little difference between a pillar and a door.

Wow has the clicking-on-the-portrait-instead-of-the-weapon thing been a problem. I screw it up almost every time I’m fighting a new combat for the first time in, say, five minutes or more.

Another interface annoyance: the function keys are in a non-obvious order. F1 and F2 activate the upper-left and upper-right characters, which makes sense. But F3 activates the lower-right and F4 activates the lower-left. There’s a logic by which this makes sense, I guess, but it’s still a bit unintuitive.

When a character dies, in addition to all his equipment, he drops a “death gem.” You need the gem to later perform a resurrection on him. The dungeon is strewn with the death gems of previous adventurers. The manual makes a point of saying that you can’t resurrect the owners of these gems, but I wonder if there’s any reason to collect them anyway. I have been, just in case.

A death gem next to a note from the adventurer who left it.

The thieves from Level 3 (discussed last time) did end up dropping the stolen items when I finally tracked them down and killed them.

The party frequently comes across glyphs (which activate traps when stepped on) and corridors blocked by force fields. These are removed with the “Remove Glyph” and “Dispel Magic” spells, accordingly, but sometimes the character level isn’t high enough to cast strong enough spells. In those cases, you have to find scrolls with the same spells, with the scrolls encoded at a higher level.

My regular “Remove Glyph” didn’t work here, but this scroll, encoded at the 15th level, will have no problem.

The game is effective in its use of sound. Every enemy has an attack sound and a separate movement sound. The movement sounds help you determine how close an enemy is, and it can be freaky when you hear it unprepared.

There was a large area of dark squares on Level 9. Dark squares are brightened with the “Light” spell, but the spell has a very short duration.

The cleric’s “Create Food” spell and the frequent appearance of fountains makes food, water, and rest less of a problem than they could otherwise be. It still annoys me that characters start taking damage from hunger and thirst when the meter has plenty of room to go. My general practice is that every time I find a fountain, I first rest to restore my fatigue meter, then cast “Create Food” and give everyone a meal, then drink water until I can’t drink anymore. These occasional interludes generally keep the party happy.

Level sizes have been extremely variable. Levels 3, 4, and 9 all used between 300 and 600 squares, but Level 8 only used 56 squares, and Level 5 only used 29.

Level 8 was kind of like the unfinished basement of Level 7. Maybe more of these squares will get used later.

Black Crypt gives slightly more equipment feedback than its cousins, although not much more. I’m carrying a long sword +1, a “Hopeblade,” an “Ogre Blade,” and a blade called “Frost Razer,” and I can’t tell you which is the best among them, or by how much. However, there are little squares beneath each character portrait that provide some feedback on any magical effects an equipped item is having, such a fire resistance, cold resistance, magic shield, and water breathing. But these don’t seem to tell the full story. For instance, my fighter has a helm called “Mage Bane” which has to have some anti-magic effects or some effects against mages, right? Not in any way that you can tell from looking at it or wearing it.

Arriving on Level 10. This game is really fond of one-eyed things.

As I close, I’ve just arrived on Level 10 and have encountered a bunch of little one-eyed spiders. There’s still a lot of room for the game to introduce some plot and non-linearity, and I really hope it takes advantage of these options before the end.

Time so far: 9 hours

*****

I haven’t made zero progress with The Seventh Link, but there hasn’t been enough to blog about. It’s an extremely frustrating game. Simple math explains much of the reason: to explore the opening castle fully, I need about 1,200 gold pieces in keys. I might earn an average of 15 gold pieces per random combat. It takes me roughly 7 minutes to find and fight each combat, which I only have a 50% chance of winning, so we’re looking at (1200/15) * (7/0.5) / 60 = 18.67 hours before I can even explore the castle, not including the money I need to replenish all the food I waste in the meantime, nor all the time it takes me to trek to the fountain under the castle to replenish spell points. I found a dungeon, but it turns out that exploring it at my level is not an option. I don’t even know how to level up. The documentation suggests I ought to be able to do it at the mage’s guild, but there doesn’t seem to be any option there.

Hopefully, I’ll get over a hump eventually and the entire game won’t be like this, but overall Link needed to be more generous with its resources. Any game needs at least one generous resource to make progress manageable. If there was no need for food, for instance, or if chests respawned in dungeons (the way they do in the Ultima series), or enemies carried more gold, any of these options would loosen the formula a bit and allow some progress.

My mage and his new thief companion approach a dungeon door.

I did manage to find a second NPC to join the party, so perhaps things will move along a bit faster now. Otherwise, I’ll probably have to add a third game to the rotation.

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/black-crypt-playing-it-straight/

#retro games #dos games #retro #crpg #adventure #amiga #oldcomputers #8bit #16bit #blog #repost

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argorpg-blog · 6 years ago

Photo

CONGRATULATIONS and welcome to the crew of the Argo II, ROSE! The Gods have spoken: welcome aboard AMARUS, known as KIT ALEXANDER, with a faceclaim of AVAN JOGIA. Please take a look at our checklist, and send in your account in the next 24 hours.

ADMIN NOTES: Rose! The amount of detail and thought you put into your app was just astounding. Those little bits of color and extra thought (”plum carpet”!!) managed to make Kit a three dimensional, complex character to fall in love with. We were both absolutely blown away by the way you managed to convey his bitterness and complication with the gods without making it seem too overdone. We love Kit, and we’re excited to see him here!

OUT OF CHARACTER

NAME/ALIAS: Rose AGE, TIMEZONE, PRONOUNS: 20, GMT, she/her ACTIVITY & EXTRAS: I’m a university student who also works part-time, so I’m a busy bee lol. But I always find time to write so I should be around lurking pretty much always, and if not here for replies everyday, then every other day or so. Also I’ve kinda fallen in love with this rp, you’ve done a fantastic job.

IN CHARACTER

DESIRED SKELETON: Amarus CHARACTER NAME: Kit Alexander AGE & GENDER: 25, cismale, he/him FACECLAIM: Avan Jogia, Matthew Daddario, Ezra Miller

BIOGRAPHY:

Fortune favored the bold. Your father might have been bold once- must have been to have endeared himself to a deathless goddess who walked the world with wind in her hair, dispensing luck with a brush of her fingers and a heady smile. But you knew him in the aftermath of that intoxication. Luck left your father, but he’d already fallen headfirst into her thrall. Your earliest memories are of sitting at your father’s feet, halfway under the table, tiny fists clenched around a toy car as men who seemed larger than life roared at a television across the room, money changing hands. The plum colored carpeting of your living room caught the wheels of your car, but the tile of the place where your father leaned over the counter and wrote checks in his tightly looping script was better, even though you were told off when the toy’s tiny plastic wheels left marks on the walls. Your father would strap you into the car, pressing a kiss on the top of your head and whispering that you were his lucky charm.

School was when you first discovered other children. Before then it had been you and your father, the men who came to the little home you shared to yell as if the horses, or dogs, or baseball players who flickered on the tv could hear, and grumble as bills were passed across the table, the men who looked over their counters to smile down at you, asking you questions as you slipped to safety behind your father’s legs. You didn’t know how other kids worked, didn’t know the right things to say or do. It didn’t help that your father’s luck, a fickle, nebulous thing, swung your lives between poverty and excess with seemingly no rhyme or reason. Children weren’t kind to silent little boys who came to school in threadbare clothes but with the newest gameboy tucked in their bags, more inclined to speak in whispers to adults than learn the latest skipping game than dominated the playground. Teachers were at a loss as to what to do with little boys who seemed to take innately to math- reeling off probability as if was second nature- but hardly spoke to anyone.

In a life dictated by your father’s fortune, the infectious joy of his successes buoyed you between the dark periods when a gamble didn’t go his way. Being someone’s lucky charm only earns you praise until their luck fails. Betting evolved from a hobby, a diversion, to an occupation by the time you were old enough to compare your life to those of your classmates and find it lacking. Maybe that was why your father’s fortune took a sharp turn for the worse when you were eight, and watching mothers pick up their children as you sat in front of school, heart leaping every time you thought you saw your father’s car. A string of losses led to the loss of the house with the plum carpet, the loss of the comforting weight of your father’s hand on your head, the whispered assertion that you were his joy, his happiness, his lucky charm.

But fortune hadn’t forsaken all those around you. A girl who shared her snack with you did a perfect cartwheel at recess. The cat who lived in the apartment next to the one you and you father had eventually left the back of the car for narrowly avoided the wheels of a speeding truck as it sauntered off, leaving you wide-eyed from where you had been crouched in the gutter, petting it. While you sat, swinging your legs, at the kitchen table of the old lady who lived downstairs and tutted until you agreed to come in for a slice of cake, she found her wedding ring down the back of a chair. It had been lost for years. She’d cried, pulled you into a hug, called you lucky. You’d smiled, shoveled the rest of the cake into your mouth, turned tail and ran.

When you were fourteen, limbs made to look even ganglier by clothing that was inevitably too short, you decided that the universe demanded balance and you were its scapegoat. A turn of good luck for those around you was more often than not your misfortune. Even when you saw the first monster, your voice breaking around a scream at the eyes and the teeth and the smile, sprinting down the road, weaving around obstacles, you pushed against a man, who stumbled away and out of the path of a bucket of paint falling from a window a level above the sidewalk. He was saved a nasty concussion, at the very least, but you were slowed by the collision. Within the block the thing had you in it’s claws, fingers boring punctures into your arm, bruises blooming almost immediately. You’d wiggled free, loosing your jacket as you kicked and writhed, and when you fell hard back to the ground it might have been luck that put a brick within arm’s reach. Might have been luck that saw the brick’s arching trajectory straight into the creature’s yellow eye. But it just as easily could’ve been coincidence, and the good aim that had you picked early in P.E. despite your reputation as a pariah. You didn’t put much stock in luck, anyway.

Your father noticed the loss of the jacket more than the blood that stained your sleeve, and the bruises that steadily turned purple, then green, then yellow. You grew even warier than you had been, keeping your back to walls and keeping to yourself. It didn’t help. The next monster chased you for further than you had ever run, pushed you out into the edges of the city where you passed empty storefronts without really seeing them. By the time you stopped running, when you couldn’t have run any more, the monster was gone- where and since when you couldn’t have guessed. It was there, slumped against the wall of an abandoned strip mall full of shattered glass and trash trapped in dying weeds, that your mother came to you for the first time.

Fortuna smiled, and you were caught between laughing and crying, between confusion and anger, dark humor and utter exhaustion.

Going to Lupa was a better alternative than continuing to try your luck with your father, who had increasingly begun to pretend you didn’t exist. Camp Jupiter, where you weren’t chased by monsters and disappointment, was better than peeling linoleum and empty stares. The Romans welcomed you with open arms- a son of Fortuna was a good sign, a good addition to any legion, a source from which to take good favor as if it were nothing. When war came knocking, and the demigods stormed Mount Othrys like so many child soldiers, you were there. You’d thrown yourself into training, trying to dig out a place for yourself by your own merit, but you’d never be as gifted with a sword as a child of Mars, as tactically minded as one of Minerva. When you were there at the defeat of Krios, watching people you’d known for years be wounded, die, you were there as a lucky charm.

Your mother was beloved, feasts were held for her, and yet when you looked at the tattoo that held her symbol it was with a resentment that was unshakable. As the lines under your tattoo signifying your years in the legion multiplied, you surrounded them with art snaking up and down your arms that had nothing to do with your mother or the other gods and goddesses whose children were nothing but pawns in a greater game. You smothered the implication of your loyalty with flowers and vines, animals and symbols. But you didn’t bother to smother your cynicism. And all people saw was the outstretched, kind hand of luck regardless.

FATAL FLAW/DEFINING CHARACTERISTIC:

Amarus- bitter

Kit has never been shy about his distrust of the gods. As far as he’s concerned, the entire pantheon is full of dysfunctional and manipulative egotists, and the Romans are tragically deluded in their devotion. Even before he discovered the truth of his parentage and all that that meant, he was already skeptical of luck- the thing that just so happened to be his birthright, and utterly inescapable. That his childhood was so consumed by the fickleness of fortune made him bitter from the start- when he arrived at Camp Jupiter as a long-legged fourteen year old it was with tired eyes and a prematurely jaded attitude.

His bitterness made him ambivalent for years, but since he’s gotten older it’s morphed into something harder. To let himself be buffeted around by the whims of his mother and the rest of the gods and goddesses is to let them win. Kit is no optimist, but he’s fighting for something better regardless of the fact that losing seems inevitable. He’s driven by resentment, and it could very easily be his downfall.

Entwined as his future is with the gods and goddesses as well as his fellow demigods, it’s only a matter of time that his derision of the divine sparks with someone’s quick temper. His distrust is so invasive that he’s wary of any help the gods try to extend to anyone, regardless of the situation. In terms of character growth and development, this could definitely change, but his reasons for accepting the call to arms in this quest are decidedly not born of any loyalty to his mother.

EXTRAS:

cultivated contention: I’d like to explore Kit’s interactions with the Greek demigods relating to the feud and separation that the gods created between the two groups. For him, it’s just another in a string of manipulations and lies coming from the careless pantheon, it’ll be interesting to see how he responds to this once his knee-jerk reaction to be friendly with the Greeks just to spite the gods wanes.

fundamental differences: In a world so concentrated in the godly, Kit defines himself through his distrust of the gods. I’d like to see him befriending someone who’s on this quest for all the right reasons despite this completely different worldview.

in the end, all there is is luck: Exploring Kit’s response to any sort of intervention or aid from his mother would be very interesting. Depending on the situation it could be philosophy-shifting.

#accepted

0 notes

toptecharena · 6 years ago

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Back in the day, a new version of Windows would launch about as often as the US elected presidents. It was exciting to see updates because of how infrequent and dramatic they’d be. However, that all changed When Windows 10 was released, and the shift in strategy worked – Microsoft isn’t just making more money, they also have over 700 million Windows 10 users.

After it first launched, Windows 10 wouldn’t just take over as Microsoft’s only operating system, but as an ongoing project that’d receive four major overhauls over the following years. These releases include the celebratory Anniversary Update in 2016, the creative-focused Creators Update of April 2017, the Fall Creators Update of October 2017 and, of course, the Windows 10 April 2018 Update.

It doesn’t end there, though. Windows 10 Redstone 5 will be making its way to Windows 10 later this year. We actually got a glance at it back at Microsoft Build 2018, in all of its ‘Fluent Design’ glory. Alongside a new dark theme for File Explorer, it’ll also feature a more robust ‘Your Phone’ app, which will let you use your phone from your PC.

Windows 10 devices are more versatile than before, too, thanks to Windows 10 S Mode. Plus, if you want an even more locked down version of the operating system, you may be in luck – Microsoft is rumored to be working on a Windows 10 Lean Mode, a more extreme version of S Mode.

It’s through tools like Windows 10 S Mode and Lean Mode that Microsoft’s OS continues to evolve over time, with features and support that extend way further than the traditional computer.

And, now that Windows 10 on ARM is a thing, we could see more of these low power modes that see Windows 10 adapting to the hardware it runs on. We’ve also seen some rumors that suggest that Microsoft is busy working on a super-secure ‘next generation’ operating system, that could be completely modular.

If you want to pick up Windows 10, you’ll be spending $119 (£119, AU$199) for the home version, while Windows 10 Pro will set you back $199 (£219, AU$339).

After first diving deeper into the major beats of the Windows 10 April Update Update, let’s determine for ourselves if it’s worth the price.

What’s new in the April Update?

The most major update you stand to gain from updating to the Windows 10 April Update is the new Timeline feature. This allows you to go back up to 30 days on your computer to locate missing files, documents or projects. This will also work on other platforms, as long as you’re using the Edge browser or Office 365.

Microsoft has also included Focus Assist, which will let you silence all notifications so you can get work done. And, when you’re done with whatever you need to do, it will give you a detailed summary of everything you missed while you were, well, focusing.

And, in the Windows 10 April Update, Microsoft has upped the game on dictation tools, allowing you to enter dictation mode in any text field with by simply pressing Win-key + H.

These major updates exist on top of more iterative updates to the Edge browser and small aesthetic updates to Windows 10’s Fluent Design.

Unfortunately, at the time of writing, the Windows 10 April Update is facing some problems, but we’ve come up with a guide on how to troubleshoot them.

What’s new in the Fall Creators Update?

To be frank, anyone with fear of missing out should have already updated to the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update.

Yet, in spite of that belief, Intel might suggest otherwise, at least for the time being. With the Meltdown and Spectre processor vulnerabilities overtaking much of the conversation in consumer technology, the Santa Clara chipmaker has warned against opting into automatic Windows 10 updates because of the risk it currently poses to everyday users.

What you stand to gain from the latest major version update of Windows 10 starts with ‘Quiet Hours,’ a do-not-disturb feature that was recently revamped to allow for more in-depth personalization of when notifications should be turned off. The feature also turns on automatically for users sporting build 17074 or newer playing full-screen games or duplicating their displays.

Also highlighted in the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update are a slew of enhancements for tablet and 2-in-1 laptop users wielding styluses. You can now, for instance, doodle from directly within PDF files or Word docs themselves, complemented by a new ‘Find My Pen’ feature that tracks where your stylus last touched the screen. That’s made better (looking) by visual improvements made possible by the Fluent Design system, which aims to modernize select facets of the UI.

However, more meaningful changes, like a more combative approach to ransomware, are appreciated as well. Specifically, the Fall Creators Update makes room for a ‘Controlled Folder Access’ toggle, letting you preclude unauthorized apps from getting their hands on your files.

Eye Control, too, has made its way into the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, as has a Mixed Reality Viewer. Without the necessity to purchase one of the company’s affordable Windows Mixed Reality headsets – also compatible with the OS – you can now integrate 3D objects virtually into your home or workspace using your webcam or USB camera.

And, iterating on the Paint 3D software introduced in the spring Creators Update, Fall Creators Update users can take the 3D models they’ve created and integrate them into outside applications, such as the suite of Office 365 programs. Thanks to AirDrop-inspired Near Share, you can also go as far as to share them with other PCs in your area.

On a less productive note, the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update hones in on the fact that, according to Redmond’s sources, more people now watch games than actually play them, though 200 million people are still playing them on Windows 10. In the Fall Creators Update, Mixer, Microsoft’s answer to Twitch and YouTube Gaming, will be even faster.

There are plenty of non-gamers that will certainly enjoy the new ‘Memories’ and ‘Stories’ portion of the Windows 10 Photos app. With these new features in tow, you can modify images like never before by adding to them 3D effects, transitions, Ink and even video.

So what’s next for Windows 10? Well, for starters, Windows 10 S – the lightweight alternative to Windows 10 Home and Pro announced last year alongside the student-focused Surface Laptop – may soon be getting a name change. That’s according to Microsoft watchdogs at Neowin and Thurrott whose sources claim that Windows 10 S will soon be known as Windows 10 S Mode.

In turn, being a ‘mode’ rather than a full and separate release, Windows 10 Home and Pro users will have to unlock access to the x86 and x64 programs excluded from Windows 10 S Mode. While it will allegedly cost nothing to unlock a Windows 10 Home license moving from Windows 10 S Mode, those looking to get the most out of Windows 10 Pro will have to shell out $49.

Night Light

Getting the smallest – but perhaps most welcome – change out of the way, Microsoft’s answer to Night Shift on macOS Sierra is an effective and welcome feature for people that tend to use computers at all hours of the night.

What’s even better than competing solutions is how you can adjust the tone of the color change in addition to the standard setting of whether the mode kicks in at sunset local time or activates within set hours.

Paint 3D

The coolest-sounding feature of the major Windows 10 changes in the Creators Update doesn’t disappoint. When seeing it firsthand, creating three dimensional pieces of art truly is as simple as Microsoft demonstrated it on stage at the update’s reveal event.

Then again, it’s clear that this app has the capacity to allow for quite a bit of complexity in what can be created, too. Most of that simplicity comes down to how intuitively the app communicates three dimensions in a two-dimensional space. Clever, minimalist use of sliders and other toggles allow you to shift your creation’s position(s) on either axis.

Of course, a wide selection of pre-loaded creation templates – like goldfish – will help newcomers out immensely. Naturally, it wouldn’t be Paint without the ability to freehand in 3D, and thus comes the desire to share those custom creations. That’s where Remix.com, Microsoft’s online portal for sharing these Paint 3D projects, comes into play.

The way in which Paint 3D communicates how to create in a new dimension so easily for the average user, yet offers the depth to please them as they increase in skill, could do a lot of good for the 3D printing scene, as well as VR and so many other fields further down the road.

Granted, this is by no means a professional-grade 3D modeling app – this is purely meant for the vast majority of Windows 10 users. (Though, you can export anything created in Paint 3D as 3D-ready FBX or 3MF files for 3D printers.)

Regardless, we’re already impressed with what Paint 3D can do, and only hope it grows from here. Oh, and don’t worry, the old Paint remains untouched.

Gaming

Microsoft has been beating the drum of the PC gaming renaissance since the debut of Windows 10, but has ramped up the tempo with the past few major updates. In keeping with the crescendo, the Creators Update will likely have the biggest impact on gamers of any gaming-focused Windows 10 improvements to date.

The most exciting, but least proven, feature to come in this update is Game Mode, a new toggle that’s now part of the Windows 10 Game Bar (which too has seen some upgrades, but more on that in a moment). Game Mode tells your system to re-allocate CPU and GPU hardware resources to prioritize the gaming application at hand when it’s the active, full-screen application in use.

The results, as Microsoft claims, are steadier frame rates than before, notably with games that particularly tax a given system’s resources.

We’ve already covered how Windows 10 Game Mode works in great detail. Though, Microsoft already warns that Game Mode brings the most benefit to systems that aren’t absolutely optimized for gaming.

Microsoft is also looking to seriously up the reach of, and community around, games played on Windows 10 by purchasing a streaming platform: Beam. In reality an acquisition made by the firm recently, Beam was a PC game streaming and broadcasting platform similar to that of Twitch, replete with its own streaming network via web browser, converted into a baked-in Game Bar feature. Microsoft has since renamed this streaming platform as Mixer.

Mixer’s major claim to fame here, though, is that it maintains sub-second latency from the broadcaster’s executions in-game to those moments being displayed to your PC screen via stream. In other words, for broadcasters, this reduction in the time between what you’re doing in-game and your viewers seeing it makes interacting either way that much more interesting.

And that’s not to mention how dead simple Microsoft has made it to stream to Mixer from Windows 10.

Like Game Mode, Mixer is, again, a function of the Game Bar. Upon pressing that dedicated broadcasting button on the Game Bar, and then just a few clicks and toggles after that, you’re broadcasting to Mixer viewers worldwide. That’s after creating a Mixer account, as well as an Xbox Live account if you haven’t already, of course.

However, there’s an issue with this. While we’ve seen firsthand how simple it is to get streaming using Mixer, and broadcasters know how complex this can be, you can only broadcast to Mixer. Of course, this makes sense, but aren’t the type of people that would benefit most from super-simple streaming more interested in broadcasting to Facebook or somewhere else their friends are more likely to be?

A Microsoft engineer seemed to think this was a good point when we made it to him just after demonstrating Mixer for us recently – so, hey, maybe that dream will come true.

Ultimately, Microsoft has just made gaming a much bigger consideration of the Windows 10 environment. It even has its own section in the Windows 10 Settings pane: ‘Gaming’.

The new set of, well, settings allows you to tweak how the Game Bar is summoned or whether it’s on at all, as well as customize keyboard shortcuts to activate its various functions. There are also toggles for Game DVR, like changing save location, enabling background recording, and setting frame rate and video quality among others.

Rounding out the Gaming settings are broadcasting controls like audio quality, volumes, which camera to use and more – the Game Mode setting is just an activation toggle.

First reviewed: July 2015

Gabe Carey has also contributed to this review

While making things in 3D or blowing them up is a jolly good time. There’s so much more going on in Windows 10, especially with what Edge has become in the Creators Update in tandem with Microsoft’s release of a Books section to the Windows Store. But, let’s start with some minor improvements to Microsoft’s voice assistant.

Cortana

The new changes to Cortana are less about using the service directly and more about how it can simplify how you use your PC. If you’re using Outlook or Office 365 as your email client, Cortana can read those messages and create reminders for you based on the language of your emails that contain commitments to deadlines and other promises.

Apparently, Cortana is also key in holding onto whatever apps and documents you had open, and where you were in those apps and documents, if you return to your PC within 30 minutes of locking it. But, that’s not really all that exciting, as your computer generally already does this, unless you have it set to sign you out every time the device locks.

However, Cortana’s ability to do this even after rebooting is far more impressive (at least on paper), since any caching is generally wiped upon reboot. In this early version of the Creators Update, we weren’t able to to reproduce this feature, so hopefully it will be ready come the update’s April 11 roll out.

Edge

There’s no denying that Microsoft is funneling a lot of energy into making its new Edge browser competitive with that of today’s king, Google Chrome. Most of the changes this time around focus on things that Microsoft has noticed its competitors lack. For starters, the way tabs are handled in Edge has been vastly improved.

Tab preview has existed in Edge for a long time, but in a singular fashion. Now, a downward arrow next to the “new tab” button produces a preview of every open tab. Of course, these are just tiny thumbnails captured when you first accessed the web page – they’re not dynamic and do not update.

Even better, you can now take a set of tabs and stow them away for later access with a new, dedicated button. Once you do that, you can view those tabs in addition to any other sets you’ve “set aside,” with the option to restore those sets of tabs, add them to your Favorites or share them via email or OneNote. You can also delete sets of saved tabs or individual ones.

However, mind that restoring them brings back the cached version of those tabs from when you last accessed them, so you’ll need to refresh the pages. If you’re going to do this anyway, this is a step Microsoft should eliminate.

Another bummer is that you cannot name your saved sets of tabs. While you see them in the same preview format that’s available above the navigation bar, it would make sense to be able to name them according to web workflow, like “Work” and, say, “Gaming Broadcast Setup.” If organization is what you’re going for, you gotta’ have a label maker, so to speak.

At any rate, the new tab management tools are certainly helpful, especially for people who browse tabs with their mouse, rather than with keyboard shortcuts, but we’re dubious of whether they’re compelling enough to pull folks away from Chrome. That said, it all works fluidly. Plus, those tabs are saved even after closing Edge.

Also, the new sharing design language is a welcome change that makes as much sense in the desktop environment as it does on mobile. In other words, it’s basically the Windows 10 Mobile, window-based sharing format come to Windows 10 proper.

Books

As you may already know, the Creators Update turns Edge into a full-fledged e-reader, supporting the EPUB file format. This update comes in conjunction with Microsoft launching a Books section in the Windows Store. The pricing and selection for which is comparable to rivals, replete with a collection of free literary classics as well as staff recommendations.

And, the link between buying them and having them available for reading in Edge is practically instant, with Edge even offering a link back to the Windows Store to buy more books. The reader itself is quite robust, with tables of contents, bookmarking, search, text controls and even a text-to-speech read aloud function. And, the controls are silky smooth to boot.

Having turned Edge into a fully-fledged e-reader tool is admirable, but you have to wonder how many users will benefit from or take advantage of this feature. If people aren’t using e-readers like Kindles, aren’t they using tablets like an iPad or Android tablet? Since there are so few Windows tablets around, we doubt many will see this as a useful addition, it being a niche that’s long been filled.

Now, if Microsoft were to expand PDF support for Edge to enable file editing and more, we’d be much more excited about Edge’s expanding file compatibility.

While the changes to Edge and an all-new Books store in Windows 10 are pretty huge, almost equally as massive is how Microsoft have vastly broadened how Windows Ink can be used within the OS, primarily via the Photos app. Less massive are the other changes to its Photos and Movies & TV apps.

Windows Ink

Being able to ink over web pages in Microsoft Edge isn’t anything new, but being able to do so across other file types, like images in Photos, documents in Word, and even videos (with the Photos app, oddly), is a welcome addition. Of course, you can share these doodled-up files with friends using Windows 10, too. The Snapchat crowd ought to get a load out of this.

Microsoft has even expanded Windows Ink to its Maps tool. Now, you can doodle on maps and share them with friends to draw out plans. More interestingly, Windows Ink and Maps work in tandem to let you draw out either a straight line or contiguous path, producing the real-world distance of that line, no matter how long. Neat, but also useful for folks that actually enjoy the outdoors and exercise.

Scribbling all over, well, practically anything, feels unsurprisingly natural and responsive, and frankly feels like Windows Ink starting to realize its potential. However, we’re still left wondering whether these tools will meaningfully change how we, say, share photos and videos with friends or inked-up documents with coworkers.

At the moment, each iteration of Windows Ink controls in these basic apps – Photos, Movies & TV, Maps, etc – is simply littered with basic drawing, pointer and color controls; save for Maps. Perhaps that’s enough to get more people using their touch PCs to their full capacity.

Photos and Movies & TV

In addition to what Windows Ink allows you to do with images opened in this app, Photos now automatically attaches searchable tags to all of your photos according to when and where they were shot, as well as the people within them and notable landmarks or items you’ve got on film. While no less a welcome feature, does that sound familiar at all?

The Movies & TV app has been upgraded to support 360-degree video, but more importantly now supports picture-in-picture mode for Windows 10. Finally adopting one of the most exciting additions to macOS Sierra, Microsoft calls this “mini mode,” with a dedicated button to jump between orientations. The switching is super snappy in our brief testing, but a little janky as it repositions the video, with pixelation and exposed splotches of gray.

While not the most riveting of changes in any OS update, those found in the Creators Update are surprisingly substantial and are actually relevant to your use of the software. That’s particularly the case for the new “Fresh start” function, but more on that in a moment.

Security and privacy

Microsoft has vastly improved its security and privacy measures for Windows 10 in the Creators Update, namely with a new Windows Defender Security Center. This new app takes in all of the functions of the original Windows Defender — virus scanning and the like — and couples them with new features.

One of the most interesting of which is the Device Health Advisor, which, while not yet entirely functional in our early test software, is expected to provide information on key system functions and their status through a scanning tool not dissimilar from Windows Defender itself.

All this considered, probably the most useful tool in the new suite is “Fresh start.” This tool allows you to reinstall a clean version of Windows 10 on your PC, maintaining your personal files but deleting any third party apps that came pre-installed on your device or installed thereafter. If you just bought a Windows 10 PC from a big name vendor that’s loaded with bloatware, this is the tool for you, and something Microsoft should be commended for finally taking a stand on.

Another oft-teased feature is “Dynamic lock,” which allows the PC to automatically lock when the webcam detects that the user has walked away from the device. However, this feature was too not available for testing with this early software, so we’ll have to test it out in full come April 11.

For the IT folks, Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) portal will now link to Office 365 ATP, so that IT managers can follow threats all the way from the source (for example, an email) to the problems it’s caused on a system or worse.

As for privacy, Microsoft wasn’t joking about the lengths it went to for improving transparency. For a start, the new setup experience is far friendlier and fully voice-acted for clarity. The voice-over clearly describes the purpose of each function as it relates to privacy, and the design no longer buries options with loads of jargon-filled text.

However, don’t expect Microsoft’s stance on the data that Windows 10 collects to change much, although it claims to have reduced the amount of basic, anonymized information that it gathers. For now, at least Microsoft has simplified its messaging on what data it collects (and at times shares) in two categories, not three: “Basic” and “Full”.

[Editor’s Note: the following pages between here and our verdict are largely for readers that have not yet used Windows 10. Welcome, potential newbies!]

In basic use, Windows 10 is not a million miles from Windows 7. You’ve still got the Start menu, even though it’s fundamentally changed (more on that shortly). Key functions are all accessed from the task bar, which has a flat, functional feel. The design language feels refined – window borders are smaller, for example. Anniversary Update adds a new dark mode that switches the interface and all your Store apps to a darker interface, if you prefer that in a dimly lit (or indeed unlit) room.

The key controls that Windows 8 put on the short-lived charms bar and the familiar pop-up notifications are combined in a new Action Center pane that you open by swiping in from the right or clicking a notification icon. In Anniversary Update, this moves to the right of the clock and shows the number of unread alerts.

Key settings are at the bottom of the Action Pane: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Airplane Mode, Tablet mode, a new Note feature for opening the built-in version of OneNote, and a link to the full Settings app. If you have a tablet you’ll see the option to lock rotation. There’s also a version of the Windows Phone Quiet Hours for blocking notifications, although you have to turn it on by hand rather than setting the times.

In the Settings app you can select which of these Quick Actions appear in the Action Center, as well as which apps can send you notifications. When notifications appear, you can swipe them away with touch, flick them with the mouse or just click the X to close, one at a time or for the whole group. Tap or click the down arrow to see more detail. There’s a Clear All option, too.

In Anniversary Update, the number of notifications from a single app is capped – that includes Edge, which can give you alerts from websites you have open; instead of being able to send unlimited updates, each app is limited to the three most recent ones. If you connect an Android or Windows 10 Mobile phone to your PC you’ll also get notifications from your phone apps here.

Right click on a notification group and you can make it high priority or turn it off (this isn’t available for all notification groups, but you can always open the notification area in Settings to tweak things there). Notifications get richer; apps can use images, add buttons or let you reply to a message directly – messages from the new Skype app have notifications in the Action Center that let you reply, as do text messages that are synced from your phone.

The task bar

Microsoft keeps tweaking the look of the task bar slightly. The Windows button is always there (and you can still right click on it for the power user menu of shortcuts from Windows 8), plus you can shrink or hide the Search box next to it. Pinned icons get a subtle coloured bar beneath them when the app is open that shows a second bar at the side if the app has multiple windows (with a shaded overlay for the current app that also shows multiple windows).

The notification area (which you might still know as the system tray) still expands into a pop-up window if there are more icons that will fit on the task bar, and you can still drag most – but not all – of the icons into the order you want. The icons for the touch keyboard and the new Ink Workspace are fixed next to the clock (although you can turn them off, you can’t move them). You can still hover your mouse in the far right corner for a quick look at the empty desktop (Aero Peek), or click in the far right corner to minimize all your windows, but that’s now to the right of the Action Center button.

The touch keyboard has new emoji. Six of those celebrate the Windows Insider ninja cat character, many of them are redesigned to match emoji on other platforms more closely and there’s a new skin color button that lets you change the skin tone for many of the icons with faces – so you can pick from six shades including Simpsons yellow. You still have to hunt for the emoji you want though – we’d like to see the Windows Mobile keyboard show up here, which suggests emoji along with other auto-correct suggestions.

Clicking the clock opens the new clock and calendar pane with any alternate clocks you have set, and a monthly calendar. In anniversary update the latter shows your agenda for each day as you click through (taken from the Calendar app, so it’s worth connecting that to your accounts even if you don’t use the app itself).

Also new in Anniversary Update is a handy extra on the volume control – plug in headphones or speakers or connect a Bluetooth audio device and you get a pop-up menu for choosing which audio output you want. Annoyingly, Microsoft is still blocking Store apps from showing up in the Volume Mixer, so you can choose different volumes for IE and Windows Media Player, but not for Groove and Edge.

The Start menu

Windows 10 combines the live tiles of Windows 8 and the familiar Start menu into a new, re-sizable menu. You can pin tiles for your favorite apps to see at-a-glance information like upcoming meetings, weather forecasts, news stories, sports results and messages from Twitter, Facebook and email. Tiles animate to show new content and you can group and name them the way you could in Windows 8. How useful you find them depends on which apps you like enough to pin.

The rest of the Start menu is a scrolling list of apps and controls. Anniversary Update divides this into two: on the left is the increasingly ubiquitous hamburger menu that you can expand for a reminder that the tiny icons are (in turn) a fly-out menu letting you change your account settings, lock the PC or sign out, along with icons for File Explorer and Settings and another menu with the power options. Annoyingly, expanding this section hides the rest of the apps list, so you can’t leave it expanded.

Right click on the Explorer icon for a jump-list with pinned and frequently used folders. If you dig into Settings, you can add extra folders, but only from a standard list.

The scrolling lists of apps have been slightly rearranged in Anniversary Update; at the top is a Recently Added section that appears when you have new apps. Below that is a list of Most Used apps, followed by a Suggested apps section that you can turn off (but that also hides the tips on the mobile-style Lock screen). All of that pushes down the alphabetical list of what you have installed so you may not see many of them without scrolling.

You can search from the Start menu by starting to type – that gives you the same result as tapping in Cortana’s search box next to it.

Cortana

Microsoft’s virtual assistant, Cortana, still powers the search box on the Windows 10 task bar – where you can type or speak – and in Anniversary Update you can no longer turn her off (though you can turn off personalization if you don’t want her to remember things for you). But Cortana goes a long way beyond search, so you probably want to keep her around.

Searching with Cortana is fast and accurate. It finds your files, it finds your folders. It has become quite brilliant. Say, for example, that you type LinkedIn into the menu: you’ll be given the option to open the site in your default browser (even if it’s Chrome), or you can search for LinkedIn in Bing.

Depending on what you search for, different types of results are prioritized – so the first result might be a setting, an app, a document or a web search. You can also pick the category to search: apps, documents (including OneNote and files on OneDrive that you’re not syncing), folders, music, videos, photos or settings.

Type in a sum or a currency conversion and Cortana does the maths for you. Type in the name of a city or a celebrity and you get a nib of relevant information – that all comes from the answers you get for those kind of searches on Bing, but if there’s a match in your documents for the same term you’ll see that first. The only annoyance is that you can’t pin the search results open – if you need to open a couple of documents from the results, you have to run the search twice.

Type in commands like ‘remind me’ to set quick alarms and appointments. And in Anniversary Update, you can use that to remember useful information like your passport number, or anything else you want to jot down. Ask Cortana ‘what is my passport number’ later and you’ll see it pop up. Type ‘send a text’ to write an SMS on your PC and send it from a phone you have the Cortana app installed on. You can also ask her to sing you a song or tell you a joke (they’re usually terrible jokes).

Cortana uses the news interests you set up on Bing as well as your search history to show you news stories and refine search suggestions – these, your reminders, accounts Cortana can get information from (ranging from Xbox Live and Office 365 to Uber and LinkedIn) and other information about your interests are stored in the Cortana Notebook.

You can customize settings for different areas of interest, from Academic Topics to Getting Around, Music, Food and Drink or Weather, or turn off topics you don’t want. Reminders and interests sync across every device you use Cortana with, so you can set a reminder on your phone and see it on your PC, or vice versa.

You can also change Cortana’s settings to turn voice control on or off, choose what Cortana can index to learn more about you, and clear the history that makes searches more accurate.

If you just tap or click without typing anything, Cortana shows you upcoming appointments, Windows tips, news, weather, how many steps you’ve walked (courtesy of Microsoft Health), along with any activities from your email that look like trips and flights Cortana could track for you. You also get suggestions for other things Cortana can do like keeping a note of when you usually have lunch and warning you if a meeting would clash with that.

With Anniversary Update, Cortana also makes an appearance on the Lock screen, showing upcoming appointments. Initially, that might sound like more of a mobile or tablet feature, giving you a quick overview of your day when you first pick up your device. But if you often leave your PC on and let it lock, seeing a quick glimpse of your calendar from across the room is very handy, and you can use Cortana on the Lock screen to ask questions, set reminders and control the music you’re playing.

Annoyingly though, if you turn off Suggested apps in the Start screen, where they take up a lot of space, you also lose Cortana suggestions on the Lock screen, and you can’t use the frequently updated Windows Spotlight images – you have to pick one or more images on your PC to be your Lock screen background.

We’d like to see Cortana do a lot more – there are apps like a network speed test built into Bing that it would be great to see inside Cortana – but this is evolving to be a really useful tool that gives you a quick way to do things you’d normally open an app for. Get into the habit and you’ll find you keep turning to Cortana – Microsoft’s digital assistant could evolve into a whole new way to use your computer. And if you don’t like any of that, it’s still a great way to search your PC.

File Explorer enhancements

File Explorer has been given a little bit of a makeover, and in Anniversary Update it gets a new icon. You now have a Quick Access area to which you can pin and unpin any folders you want to regularly access. In the ‘home’ screen of File Explorer you can also see Frequent Folders and Recent Files. It’s much more helpful now.

You can pin things permanently to Quick Access by right clicking them and selecting Add to Quick access.

There are a lot more file operations that you can access on the ribbon at the top of the window without the need to use the right click menu.

The old Windows 8 Share logo is now used for file sharing from all apps. You can choose to email a file straight from the File Explorer window or add it to a ZIP file.

Microsoft OneDrive gets a section in File Explorer, but that’s only a shortcut to files and folders you’ve chosen to sync. You no longer see placeholders for files that are only in the cloud – a feature that confused some users but also made your whole cloud drive available at any time. To see your files in the cloud now, you have to go online and use the OneDrive Store app.

Settings

In Windows 8, this was annoyingly basic and many options were still in the Control Panel. Control Panel is still there in Windows 10, and if you’re a technical user, you will come across it from time to time. But the majority of users will never see it.

Settings is now a far more comprehensive solution and is much more logically arranged. There are still a few things you’ll need the Control Panel for – to reset a network adapter, for example – but they’re few and far between.

You’ve been able to search the Control Panel from the Start menu since Windows Vista – with the Settings app in Windows 10, what you get from that search is a clean, clear interface where you can easily see what it is you need to change.

Microsoft is still keen to get developers to build new mobile-style apps for Windows 10 that are more secure, don’t get to do things that affect performance and battery life, can be uninstalled with a single click, and can potentially run on multiple devices. The hope is that developers will write their apps for the Universal Windows Platform and they’ll work across PC, Windows 10 on smartphones, and Xbox, too – essentially on every screen size.

Best Windows 10 apps: top universal apps

There are tools to help developers convert Android and iOS apps, and even desktop PC apps. Businesses can deploy apps from their own versions of the Windows Store. This is all handled from the Business Store Portal, which will manage software licences, centralized payment info and more.

Universal Apps and the new Windows Store

Universal apps are the latest version of what Microsoft was calling Metro, Modern and Store apps in Windows 8. Apps written for Windows 8 will still run, but with the Charms bar and the touch gestures for opening app controls gone, Microsoft has crammed in a rather awkward menu bar of app commands for any apps that haven’t been rewritten for Windows 10. Apps that have been rewritten tend to use the hamburger menu, which gets annoying on a desktop PC where there is plenty of space on-screen for navigation but the hamburger menu keeps hiding the options.

Windows 10 is slowly getting more apps: there’s a new Amazon app, there’s a good VLC app and if you buy a wireless security camera like the Ring you’ll find an app here for it. But the Store is still smaller than the iOS and Android equivalents.

In Anniversary Update, the Store gets yet another redesign, full of top picks, featured apps, lists and collections. It feels like there are almost as many ways to look through the apps as there are interesting apps to look for.

Built-in Windows 10 apps

However, the operating system’s built-in apps are still improving, and Anniversary Update adds some extras. The new Photos app shows you all the pictures on your PC and in your OneDrive account, with some handy editing tools. It’s fast, responsive and easy to use.

The Mail and Calendar apps don’t match Outlook – either the desktop or the smartphone versions – but they’re perfectly functional and competent apps.

With social media integration gone (Twitter and Facebook wouldn’t play along and other social networks don’t seem interested), the People app is reduced to a basic address book. You can’t even select multiple contacts to delete or link them together (you can only link contacts one by one).

Sport and News stay useful, even if they still feel a little superfluous. They start quickly but you may use them most as live tiles in the Start menu. While diehard sports fans may not get enough information from the Sport app, News is a decent aggregator of stories (the page covering local news sources is especially good). The Money app is handy if you track shares or want to follow the market. You can still get the Reader app from the Store, but it’s no longer installed by default.

Maps continues to improve. In Anniversary Update you can see multiple maps and locations on different tabs, view traffic, accidents and traffic cameras – and even draw routes on a map with your finger or a pen, then measure the distance or get directions (which is far easier than right clicking and dragging pushpins to get the route you want).

The Groove Music app (named for the music subscription service you might once have known as Xbox Music) certainly pushes the Groove Music Pass subscription in the new Explore section – but it also works well with music on your PC or OneDrive (it can be slow to index music on a network drive).

Groove has come on leaps and bounds since earlier versions of the app. It finally has a thumbnail media player control that pops up when you hover over the Groove icon in the task bar when there’s music playing. In Anniversary Update we particularly like the Your Groove playlists that automatically create various playlists of your tracks – long tracks, tracks that are getting played a lot on the Groove service, tracks you haven’t listened to in a while, tracks to help you cope with Monday mornings… they change frequently but you can save them for later.

You can’t create your own smart playlists though – something even the Zune Player had and Windows Media Player can do (let alone iTunes) – and if you want to use a favorite artist as the seed for a playlist that streams as a ‘radio channel’ you need a Groove Pass. Even so, Groove is definitely worth trying for playing your music, if not for managing it.

Another app that’s dramatically improved is Skype Preview, which is automatically installed in Anniversary Update and replaces the separate Skype Video and Messaging apps (but you can keep the desktop Skype app too).

If you tried an earlier version of this, don’t despair; it now has an excellent set of features and is fast and responsive. It also has the dialler that was missing in early versions, along with video calls and chat (both of which can be one to one or group conversations).

It’s very well integrated into Windows 10 – you can reply to chat messages straight from the Action Center notification and you don’t need to have the app running to receive calls. You can also try out Skype bots; the Foursquare and IFTTT bots look interesting but these are all still fairly basic.

Windows 7 was such a great version of Windows. Aside from the fact that it trumped Vista with its resource efficiency, general robustness and modest system requirements, it also brought us something else: Aero Snap.

Snap and virtual desktops

The ability to snap windows to the sides of your screen might seem a minor thing, but it’s something many Windows users do every day. Apple has obviously realised that Mac users employ third-party extensions to get the same effect; the company introduced window snapping in OS X El Capitan.

Windows 8 added the option to resize both snapped windows at once, but coupled it with modern apps that had to stay in a separate window entirely. Windows 10 put modern apps on the desktop along with everything else but originally dropped the linked resizing. That’s now back in the finger-friendly Tablet Mode that only shows two windows, and on the desktop as well, so if you want to snap windows to be a third and two-thirds of the screen, it’s easy.

Tablet Mode is Microsoft’s nod to Windows 8, and to people who buy the many tablet PCs it believes will be sold over the coming years. As does Intel – it’s putting a lot of weight behind 2-in-1 PCs with detachable keyboards.

Originally named Continuum (although that moniker now covers a range of features including the way Windows Mobile phones can use a big screen and keyboard), Windows 10’s Tablet Mode is clever because it’s automatic. Detach the keyboard and the desktop prepares itself for touch – the Start menu becomes the Start screen and apps appear full-screen. That was one thing Windows 8 got right; a screen of apps is a better launcher for touch-enabled devices when you don’t have a keyboard.

The Taskbar has also changed to be more touch-friendly – the icons are more spaced out, while the pinned app icons don’t appear at all, you just cycle through them in Task View. You can choose what icons to show in the system tray. The Start icon is now joined by a back button, so you can cycle back to previous apps – even if you were in the Start menu before.

If you want, you can toggle between Tablet Mode and non-Tablet yourself via the settings at the bottom of the Action Center. This could be useful if, say, you have a touchscreen laptop and want to put it into Tablet Mode for a presentation.

Windows 10 also added four-way Aero Snap, so you can have four applications in each corner of your desktop. Now, if you’ve got a laptop screen this is about the most inefficient way you could use your desktop, but if you’ve got a whopping 27+-inch display it might be just the ticket.

The alternative is the virtual desktops in Windows 10, where you can spread apps out over multiple, separate desktops and swap between them.

Task View

Alt-Tab has been the way to see what apps are running for decades, but few users are familiar with it. Over the years Microsoft has added other ways to switch between open apps, like the 3D Windows Flip view in Windows Vista and the left swipe in Windows 8.1.

Windows 10 uses both Alt-Tab and Windows-Tab for a thumbnail view of running apps, but there’s also a new full-screen Task View, and a permanent icon on the taskbar for it, next to the Cortana search bar (although you can turn it off).

It takes you to an app overview where you can use the mouse to select the app you want. It’s pretty clever, and in any mode of Windows 10 there is always an icon for it on the taskbar.

But there is something else Task View can do – multiple desktops. Go into Task View and there’s an icon in the bottom-right that enables you to add another desktop, so you can have one screen for your email, perhaps, and another for your Photoshop work. This is a nice new feature for Windows, although it has been on the Mac for years – since OS X 10.5 Leopard introduced ‘Spaces’ in 2009.

Apps can be open in more than one desktop, but you can’t switch into windows that are on another desktop; things are kept nicely separate. Alt-Tab only works within the desktop you’re in. The only way to switch desktops is to go into Task View and select another open desktop. From here you can also close desktops using the X icon that appears when you hover over each desktop icon.

In Anniversary Update, you can have an app you need all the time show up on all your desktops – either the whole app, or just a window from it (like the chat you’re in, for example).

Other enhancements

More and more PCs that come with Windows 10 include biometric security hardware that enables you to use a fingerprint, face scan or iris scan to log into Windows and apps, websites and networks. This is called Windows Hello (the secure storage of your credentials used to have a different name, Windows Passport, but in Anniversary Update, it all has the same name).

Windows also asks you to set up a PIN to use instead of your password. This makes it easier to log into Windows when you don’t have a keyboard – it’s all part of making Windows a more phone-like experience – but it also means your credentials are stored more securely in the TPM (PINs go into this secure hardware, passwords don’t).

Surprisingly, it turns out Windows Hello wasn’t already using the same hardware-protected secure area that the business security features like Credential Guard use in the release version of Windows 10 – but with Anniversary Update, your biometric data is stored in there too.

In Anniversary Update, Hello supports the latest standard, FIDO 2. This is what lets you use Hello biometrics instead of passwords in apps and in the Edge browser, but it only works for apps and sites that explicitly support it – and so far that’s just the Store app, where you can buy apps with your face quite happily.

If you don’t have biometrics on your PC, Anniversary Update will let you use a phone with a fingerprint or iris scanner, or a USB device, or even a wearable like a smartwatch to sign in securely, but there aren’t many devices that support FIDO 2 yet to make that work.

Windows Defender will now automatically run quick scans even if you have other antivirus software, which is good, but it comes with an annoying new notification in the Action Center to tell you that it has run and not found any problems. You can’t turn that off without turning off a lot of other notifications as well.

The useful but controversial Wi-Fi Sense feature for sharing wireless connections with your friends is gone – not because of the controversy (it doesn’t leak your Wi-Fi passwords) but because it wasn’t used enough to be worth continuing.

The long-promised enterprise data protection to let admins control what apps and documents you can use, and where you can save files, has finally showed up as Windows Information Protection – and the businesses who want it will already have the management tools like Intune that it needs. Similarly, Anniversary Update includes the agent for the new Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection, but businesses will need to subscribe to the service to use it.

We still like the updated Snipping Tool which lets you set a delay so that you can screenshot those pesky menus you couldn’t keep open before.

Power users appreciated the way Windows 10 updated the Command Prompt window – small beer, you might say, but you’re now able to properly select text, and copy and paste in and out. Ctrl-V really will work. Text also re-flows as the window is resized.

And in Anniversary Update, the Windows Subsystem for Linux means you can run real Linux applications, in particular the Bash shell; handy for developers and web admins. If you use Hyper-V to run virtual machines, you can now run Hyper-V inside a virtual machine, so you can run another virtual machine inside that one (and so on, until you run out of resources).

High DPI PCs with multiple screens get some improvements in Anniversary Update, with the promise of a more comprehensive overhaul in future. Especially if you dock a high DPI device like a Surface Pro 4, you can find some applications displaying at the wrong resolution on different screens.

Windows can’t fix all the problems for older apps, and we still found that some apps display icons that are too tiny to be easy to use, but there are definite improvements in Anniversary Update – applications that use WPF will scale properly and updates are coming for PowerPoint and Skype for Business (that only fix the problem on Anniversary Update).

Notepad getting high DPI support is nice for Notepad users, but more importantly it means the improvements are in this release ready for other app developers to use.

Unlike Windows 8, it’s been easy to follow along with the Windows 10 journey and see how the OS has developed, from an early work in progress, through the release version and the major updates. With the latest Creators Update, Windows 10 sees more new features at once than ever and improvements to several existing tools. There are few situations in which we wouldn’t unequivocally recommend Windows 10 – but remember that you now have to pay to upgrade.

Another key idea behind Windows 10 is also sound: that it should be available on as many devices as possible. That’s why there’s Xbox One and HoloLens and the Internet of Things version that works on a Raspberry Pi come in; Microsoft is embracing the way PCs have moved away from the traditional idea of what a PC is.

We liked

Windows 10 performance continues to impress, as does its reliability, and Microsoft has carried on evolving the interface, which now satisfies both the Windows 7 faithful and the few Windows 8.1 fans.

Core features like search (through Cortana) are absolutely rock solid. The Settings app (a disappointment even in Windows 8.1) remains a worthy replacement for the Control Panel. It’s testament to the newfound strength of Settings that, while the Control Panel is still present, you’ll hardly ever go to it.

Under the covers, security is improved even more now with Creators Update, and with Windows Hello and biometric support, we’re on the verge of ditching passwords (if more websites and apps join in). Transparency has also seen a huge boost here, with a brand new out-of-the-box experience.

The Windows Ink and gaming improvements this year are perhaps the most important to those respective ends of Windows 10 yet, and Paint 3D brings a whole new kind of creation tool to the masses.

We disliked

Even in introducing some new features, Microsoft has done so in an incomplete way, as mentioned in our impressions of Edge. We’re still not sold on switching over. The new tab management experience is welcome, but feels a little incomplete. Meanwhile, the e-reader upgrades are massive, but feel as if they’re serving a niche that’s long been filled.

Also, while we appreciate the improvements to transparency, it still doesn’t change the fact that Microsoft is collecting lots of data about your use of its software.

Finally, we’re bummed that some key upgrades, like the major Cortana improvements, aren’t functional in time for this review.

Final verdict

Ultimately, something for everyone in Windows 10 Creators Update, from Night Light to improvements to gaming and Windows Ink, as well as a new e-reader in Edge and a Paint 3D app.

That said, it still has its share of irritations, and there are some people who are so comfortable on Windows 7 (or even 8.1) that they won’t want to upgrade until those OS’s get long in the tooth (or they replace the older peripherals for which hardware makers haven’t put out device drivers).

Microsoft remains committed to the idea of universal apps, which now run on Xbox One (and HoloLens, for the few people who have access to it) as well as on Windows Mobile, and Store apps in general (which, confusingly, might not).

The quality of these remains mixed: Mail and Calendar are competent but a long way behind the versions on Windows Mobile with Outlook, Groove is shaping up to be an excellent media player (although you need to pay for a Groove Pass or put your music on OneDrive to make the most of it) and the Skype is at last fully usable. Edge has also graduated into a viable state. And not only have desktop apps not been pushed aside, Microsoft is working on making them look better on high DPI, multi-screen systems.

But mostly, the Creators Update solidifies the success Windows 10 has shown itself to be over the last year. Installation is simple, performance is generally excellent, security is improved (with more options for businesses) – and the most compelling thing about Windows 10 is that it just works. There’s not really a learning curve as there was with Windows 8 or 8.1. Even if people don’t get to grips with features like the taskbar search or Task View, it won’t actually take anything away from their core experience of the OS. Pretty much everything that most people will need is in the Start menu or Action Center.

Plus, knowing that there’s even more to come after the Creators Update instills some good faith that Windows 10 will continue to improve.

Go to Source Author: Windows 10 Back in the day, a new version of Windows would launch about as often as the US elected presidents.

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