Boeing’s Starliner successfully touched down yesterday on the sandy surface of the New Mexico desert, marking the completion of the first uncrewed end-to-end test of the spacecraft. It was a picture-perfect landing, but the six-day mission was not without problems.
The Heisman-winning running back now goes by Errick Miron after a legal name change.
Now that Top Gun: Maverick is finally reaching theaters, the matching Microsoft Flight Simulator expansion is launching as well. Microsoft and Asobo Studio have released the free add-on to both hype up the Tom Cruise movie and give you a taste of the US Navy’s real-world flight training. You’ll get a “Maverick Edition” livery for the F/A-18E Super Hornet fighter jet, but you’ll also learn how to land on an aircraft carrier, perform combat maneuvers and navigate challenging terrain at low altitude.
There’s also a more fantastical element. You’ll fly a fictional hypersonic aircraft from the movie, the Darkstar, that can push Mach 10 and climb above 150,000 feet — for context, even the SR-71 Blackbird didn’t manage sustained flight beyond 85,000 feet. This might be the closest you’ll get to seeing Earth from the stratosphere, not to mention traveling at speeds that make cross-continent flights seem trivial.
Both the movie and game add-on have taken a long time to arrive. Top Gun: Maverick was originally slated to debut in July 2019, but the combination of action sequence filming and the COVID-19 pandemic pushed it back multiple times until Paramount settled on its May 27th premiere. As the Flight Simulator expansion was closely tied to the film, Microsoft and Asobo delayed the game content from November 2021 to this month. It’s safe to say both will feel overdue if you’ve ever wanted to venture well beyond the limits of Flight Sim‘s usual civilian aircraft.
One of the best places to start when building a smart home ecosystem is smart lights. Not only are they relatively affordable compared to other IoT gadgets, often costing between $10 and $50 a bulb, but they can also completely change the feel of your home. You can go from boring and analogue to colorful and automated within minutes, and there are endless possibilities when it comes to creating funky-colored light scenes, setting schedules and more.
But like the rest of the smart home space over the last few years, there are now more players in smart lighting than ever before. We tested out some of the most popular smart lights on the market and found that most of them are quite good, but there are differences in compatibility, color quality and mobile app usability that are worth considering before deciding which system will be right for your home.
One of the biggest appeals of smart lights is being able to control them from your phone. Most of them are able to do so by connecting to it via WiFi or Bluetooth, or via an external hub, which handles the connection for them. Bluetooth connectivity limits the range in which you’ll be able to control the light, so it’s only best for a limited number of bulbs and ones you don’t expect to control when you’re away.
WiFi smart lights are easy to set up and can be cheaper overall since they don’t require a hub to connect them. However, having something like a central Zigbee hub can make your whole system more reliable since its connection is separate from your home’s WiFi network. For that reason, hub-based bulbs tend to be more expandable, so we mainly recommend those if you want to eventually have dozens of smart lights around your home.
Most smart bulbs you’ll find today are “white and color” bulbs, meaning they can glow in vibrant blues, pinks, greens and everything in between, as well as shine with different temperatures of white. But there are some white-only bulbs out there, and they are often a bit more affordable than their color counterparts. While we recommend springing for the white-and-color devices, if you’d prefer white only, make sure you’re getting a bulb that can span the temperature spectrum (typically from about 2000 to 5000 Kelvin), offering you various levels of warm and cool white light.
One of the perks of smart lights is the amount of control you have over them thanks to their various app-connected capabilities. Most companion apps let you do things like set lighting schedules, group individual lights into room designations and create your own custom light “scenes” with different colors. But we have seen other features that aren’t as ubiquitous like vacation mode for automatically turning lights on and off to give the illusion that someone is home, and sync with media, which changes the colors of lights depending on the music you’re listening to or the game you’re currently live-streaming.
If you use a virtual assistant like Amazon’s Alexa or the Google Assistant regularly, make sure the smart lights you get work with your favorite. All of the bulbs we tested supported both Amazon’s and Google’s virtual assistants, allowing you to use voice commands to turn lights on and off, dim them and more. The wildcard here is Siri and Apple’s HomeKit; while numerous smart bulbs have added HomeKit to their list of compatible connections, not all lights support Apple’s smart home framework.
We alluded to this above, but you’ll want to consider how many smart lights you eventually want in your home. Some brands and systems are easier to expand than others, and we generally recommend going for hub-based bulbs if you plan on putting smart lights in every room in your home. If you’re only looking to deck out your home office or living room with some fancy lights, WiFi options should serve you well. Thankfully, these are some of the most affordable smart home devices you can get, so even if you don’t have a clear answer to this question now, you can reconsider your options down the line if you do decide to outfit your home with dozens of bulbs.
If you’ve done any research into smart lights, you’ve probably come across Philips Hue bulbs. The range is popular for a variety of reasons, and we agree they’re the best smart lights you can get thanks to their wide compatibility, easy to use mobile app and their expandability. Particularly, if you know you want to outfit more than one room in your home with these IoT devices, Philips Hue is the way to go.
The first thing that’s important to know about Hue bulbs is that they are now Bluetooth enabled. That means you can buy a few to try out first, then easily expand your system with a hub when you want to add more lights to your home. Previously, the hub was required for any and all lights, but now it’s much easier to dip your toe into the range before fully taking the plunge.
Like all of the other smart lights we tested, you only need to screw in a Hue bulb, turn on your light, and follow the instructions in the Philips Hue mobile app to start using it. Even if you only have the lights in one room to start, we still recommend grouping them into their own “room” in the Hue app so you can easily control the entire space’s environment at once.
Hue’s White + Color bulbs provide a range of warm to cool whites and millions of colors to experiment with. Colors are rich and vibrant, and Philips’ pre-programmed scenes, such as Energize, Bright and Relax, let you quickly emulate your old “dumb” lights with different warmth levels of white light. You can pick from a number of color scenes in the app, too, but it’s also easy to create your own. So if you’ve always wanted to flood your office with a rainbow of colors while you’re live-streaming on Twitch, you can find the precise presets you want, save them and then turn them on with just a few taps in the app.
The Hue app is pretty easy to use, and the bulbs support voice commands from Amazon’s Alexa and the Google Assistant. That means you don’t even have to open the app to control your lights; you can simply say “Alexa, turn off the bedroom lights” and only the lights in that designated room will extinguish. You’ll be able to add up to 10 bulbs to your system using Bluetooth alone – at which point you’ll have to add a hub into the mix to support up to 50 lights. The hub also enables things like HomeKit connectivity, light schedules and automations, home and away modes and syncing with movies and music.
Arguably the most useful of those features is automations, which lets you set on/off schedules for your lights, including automatically turning the lights off when you leave the house. It’s understandable why Philips would make these few features exclusive to those with Hue hubs – adding a hub into the mix makes the system more reliable, allowing you to do more with increasing numbers of connected lights, plus it will encourage many to invest in a hub and more Hue bulbs over time. We like Hue’s hub not only for its reliability, but also because it allows finer and more flexible control over your devices. So if you’re on vacation and want to turn on your living room lights to see what’s going on, you can do that.
Expandability goes beyond the number of lights you have in your home: It also includes lights you can install outside, too. The Hue range has a ton of indoor and outdoor bulbs to choose from, including recessed lights, outdoor pedestal and flood lights, light strips and more. It’s one of the few ranges available today that gives you a ton of options to make every bulb in and out of your home smart, which is important to consider if you know you want to go all in on the smart light front.
But that brings us to the biggest downside of Philips Hue, which is the price. Hue bulbs are on the expensive side, with a two-pack of White + Color Ambiance bulbs costing $80. If you’re looking for cheap bulbs to test out smart lighting, some of our other picks below will be better choices since most of them have lower prices per bulb. However, if smart lighting is something you want to invest in going forward, we recommend going with one of Philips’ Hue starter kits: the White + Color Ambiance starter kit, including three bulbs, a hub and a smart button, comes in at $180, which is cheaper than if you were to buy all of those components separately.
Buy White + Color Ambience kit (2 pack) at Amazon – $80Buy White + Color Ambience starter kit at Amazon – $180
Overall, LIFX’s color smart lights are similar to Hue’s White + Ambiance bulbs in that they’re easy to set up, they offer striking, saturated colors and work with three major platforms: Alexa, Google Assistant and HomeKit. But the main difference is the LIFX bulbs are WiFi only, so you can’t connect them to a hub even if you wanted to, and some are slightly more expensive than Hue devices. The Color E26 bulb, which supports 1100 lumens, normally costs $50, but there’s an 800-lumen equivalent that’s a bit cheaper, coming in at $35 per bulb.
LIFX’s mobile app is also undoubtedly the slickest we tested. While that may not mean much to you, it’s worth mentioning because mobile apps are the way most people interact with their smart lights on a daily basis. The homepage features all of the room groups in your household, along with the names of the lights in each room. You can easily turn a whole room, or a specific light, on with just a tap, and do the same for all of the lights in your home.
LIFX lights support scheduling, so you can program lights to work for you so you rarely (if ever) have to control them manually, plus there are a plethora of scenes and effects to choose from. While all of the color lights we tried had pre-made scenes or presets ready to go in the app, Philips Hue and LIFX clearly had the most out of them all. Personally, I found LIFX’s scenes and additional effects to be a bit more fun and engaging than Hue’s. You can pick from scenes like “spooky” or “pastel” and use effects like “strobe” if you want to make your living room feel a bit more like a nightclub. While most people probably won’t use these niche scenes and effects on a regular basis, they’re great perks to have when you’re entertaining or just want to set the right vibe for your next movie night or game-streaming session.
LIFX has a number of products in its ecosystem, from standard A19 bulbs to lightstrips to candles. It has switches, too, so you can physically control your smart lights if you wish. But Philips Hue has all of those options too and more, including not just switches, but standalone floor lamps, outdoor spotlights, downlights, light bars and motion sensors. You’ll have more options with Hue if you want to convert all of your home’s lights to smart ones, and have multiple ways to control them, too.
Buy LIFX Color E26 at Amazon – $50
TP-Link’s Kasa brand is known for its solid yet affordable smart home devices and its smart lights are no different. We tested out the WiFi-only multicolor smart light bulbs and found them easy to install and use, and they provide a bunch of features at an affordable price; a four-pack of multicolor bulbs will only set you back $40.
Besides having a simple installation process, Kasa’s multicolor smart lights stayed reliably connected the whole time we tested them and the companion mobile app is simple and clean. All of the main functions for each light live in that bulb’s dedicated page in the app, allowing you to change brightness, white levels, color, schedules and more without navigating through a bunch of different menus. Changing colors is nearly instantaneous, and the light changes as you drag your finger across the color wheel in the app. Editing the four presets you’re able to save takes only a few taps, as does grouping multiple bulbs into rooms and creating lighting schedules. For the latter, if you do set on/off schedules, the app will show you the next step in that schedule (i.e., off at 8:35pm) next to each individual light.
There’s also a handy “usage” section in each light’s page that shows you the bulb’s energy use over time, plus an estimate of how much energy you’re saving by using a smart light instead of a regular one. This is something that would be fun to observe over many weeks and months of using these bulbs, especially if conserving energy is one of the main reasons you invested in smart lights in the first place.
TP-Link claims you can connect “unlimited” smart devices to its mobile app, which technically means you can have as many Kasa smart lights in your home as you’d like. We only tested a few together, so we can’t say for sure how dozens of connected devices would affect app speed and light response time. These are WiFi-only bulbs, which means connecting them to a Zigbee hub isn’t an option, so keep that in mind before deciding to invest in a house-full of these gadgets. It’s also worth noting that these lights aren’t compatible with Apple’s HomeKit, although you can control them using Alexa and Google Assistant commands.
Buy Kasa Smart WiFi Light Bulb (4 pack) at Amazon – $40
Maybe you don’t want to bother with colored lights. If that’s the case, LIFX’s White E26 is your best bet. You get all of the non-color features in the mobile app that we explained above, including schedules and virtual assistant controls, but in a more basic light bulb that only costs $10.
My biggest gripe is that it doesn’t span the cool-to-warm temperature range than other bulbs do. Rather, you’re stuck with just one shade of white: 2700K, which is on the warmer side. This makes it better for intimate settings like a bedroom or a living room, but since it’s not overly warm, it could work in a home office, too. It’s also dimmable, so you can control its brightness.
If you have a specific use case in mind for your smart lights that doesn’t involve a rainbow of colors, these bulbs will more than suffice. They would work well in a child’s room, for instance, allowing you to set wake-up and sleep schedules that gradually turn on and off the lights, or in a home office where you just want a bit more control over your lights without extra frills.
Buy LIFX White E26 at Amazon – $10
Sengled’s Smart Light Bulbs deserve a shout because they’re essentially more affordable versions of the best bulbs mentioned here, just with a few compromises. Key among those is that their colors are less nuanced than most others we tested and the mobile app is less polished.
That said, you’re still getting millions of colors out of Sengled’s smart lights and the app is easy to use. It also provides all of the features you’d want from a smart light bulb, including grouping, schedules and automations. The fact that the Sengled mobile app isn’t as slick as Hue’s or LIFX’s may actually work in its favor with newbies – the basic controls and labels will be very easy for smart home novices to understand.
The bulbs we tested were WiFi-based, so they do not require a hub. However, Sengled has a bunch of other smart lights that work via WiFi, Bluetooth or hub connectivity. A pack of four WiFi color bulbs will set you back $30, while a set of six Zigbee hub-based lights costs only $100. Overall, Sengled’s devices are much more affordable than Hue’s, making them a good budget option regardless of whether you want to stick to WiFi or invest in a smart home hub like Sengled’s own or a device like Amazon’s Echo with a built-in hub.
Novation already makes five different versions of its venerable Launchkey series of MIDI controllers, ranging from the travel-friendly Launchkey Mini all the way up to the studio centerpiece Launchkey 61. But for some, 61 keys isn’t enough. And a serious piano player might balk at the unweighted keys. But now Novation offers the Launchkey 88 with a semi-weighted keybed.
The latest addition to the family essentially bridges the gap between the budget-minded Launchkey and the higher-end SL series, which starts at $600. The Launchkey 88 keeps the cost to just $400 by leaving out more advanced features like CV outputs, color screens and built-in sequencer. But, if you’re primarily producing in-the-box you probably won’t miss the extras that much.
This is to be expected, and it’s not a con, but the Launchkey 88 is huge. It’s not the controller for you if space is at a premium. I honestly had trouble finding room for it in my small attic studio. That being said, the keybed is excellent. I’m not a piano player, and have no particular allegiance to weighted keys, but these were clearly a step above your average MIDI controller. They lack the springy bounce of the cheaper members of the Launchkey line and I found it much easier to get nuanced velocity response.
Otherwise, the hardware is basically the same as the rest of the Launchkey line. It’s all plastic, but feels solid enough. The 16 velocity sensitive pads are passable but nothing to write home about. The faders have an excellent amount of resistance, but are a tad wobbly. And the knobs are incredibly solid but a tad small. The pitch and mod wheels are lovely though, full stop. The resistance is perfect, and they’re rock solid. Going back to the touch strips on other controllers feels like punishment.
Of course, the big selling point of any Launchkey device is its tight integration with Ableton Live. It’s not quite good enough to go completely mouse and keyboard free, but you can get a lot accomplished directly on the controller. You can launch clips from the pads, control macros with the knobs and mix your tracks with the faders. You have control over send effects, the panning, and there’s a dedicated button for looping a portion of your track to jam over, as well as a capture MIDI button in case you play something truly inspired but forgot to hit record. You can do quite a bit with looking at the computer, though it can be a bit tough to navigate larger projects.
There are some odd quirks right now, though, that will presumably get ironed out in firmware and script updates pretty quickly. Specifically, Live gets confused by playing in the upper octaves. There’s a couple of dead zones, from G4 through E5, for example, and some keys in the highest octave trigger various recording modes instead of notes.
The arpeggiator is still incredible, though. The random, Mutate and Deviate features make it easy to create unique patterns and introduce a little unpredictability to a composition. This is the feature that has me coming back to the Launchkey line again and again in my personal studio. And the five-pin MIDI DIN connection allows you to bring that top-notch arpeggiator to hardware synths. However, I still think the controller is best suited to a primarily software-based setup.
The Launchkey 88 isn’t a true luxury MIDI controller. It’s really an affordable workhorse. But it does go a bit beyond some of its more affordable competitors, and even its siblings. The expansive size probably isn’t necessary for most producers, but the semi-weighted keybed does make a huge difference in playability. And I’d love to see Novation bring it to the smaller members of the family like the Launchkey 49, which is probably a bit more my speed (and easier to shove on my cramped desk).
The Launchkey 88 is available now for $400.
Let’s get this out of the way right off the bat: a $200 pepper mill is an inherently ridiculous product. I mean really, we’re talking about a device designed to turn dried berries (yes, peppercorns are technically a stone fruit) into a powder you can sprinkle on food. You can buy a totally decent pepper mill for under $20 from brands like OXO. Or if that’s too much, you can simply buy your pepper pre-ground (please don’t though) or opt for one of those pre-filled disposable grinders.
My point here is that there are a ton of pepper mills that don’t cost two Benjamins and are more than capable of getting the job done. But even so, I love my Pepper Cannon and since getting it, it’s quickly become one of my absolute favorite kitchen gadgets.
OK, now that I’ve roasted my overpriced pepper grinder, at least let me put up a defense. While I’ve always hated the word, I’m sort of a foodie, and during the pandemic cooking felt like one of the few activities that I could still enjoy while being confined indoors. And given the spike in people learning to make bread from scratch and all the social media food trends over the last two and a half years, I’m clearly not the only one who feels this way.
So a while back when I was searching for ways to upgrade my kitchen gadgets, I stumbled on Männkitchen’s Kickstarter campaign for the Pepper Cannon. Like a lot of people, at the time I was using cheap pre-filled pepper grinders from the grocery store. But after cooking more during the pandemic, I had become frustrated with how annoying they are to use. Their low-quality components often made cranking the grinder feel like trying to open a stuck pickle jar. And even when I was able to get a twist or two in, I was often left with a coarse pile of pepper sand so small even Anakin couldn’t find it irritating.
The bigger issue was that after testing out countless models in stores, I never really found an upgrade that had the design or output I was looking for. A lot of pepper mills look like they were made out of a handrail from a pre-war brownstone. If that’s your style, fine, but it doesn’t work in my kitchen. More importantly, I wanted something simple, durable and easy to use that allows me to adjust grind sizes while cranking out big mounds of pepper.
Then came my mistake, because after finding the Pepper Cannon, I forgot to back it in time to get the $50 off early bird discount. $150 is still a lot for a pepper mill, but it’s damn sure less than $200. Thankfully, my wife is both thoughtful and encourages my stupid obsessions, so last year, she bought me one for Christmas after it went on sale for the holidays. And I can’t thank her enough, because in a lot of ways, it’s a perfect gift. It’s so expensive you can’t really justify buying it for yourself, but you still want it anyway, so you need someone to give you a loving push.
So once again, while its price is kind of outrageous, the Pepper Cannon really delivers everything I wanted and needed. The thing is milled from a big piece of aluminum, it’s got an adjustable grinder with burrs made from stainless steel, a one-touch top that makes it super simple to refill and a built-in catch cup. Oh, and it absolutely pumps out pepper. When I first heard about it, I thought calling it a cannon was silly, but after owning one for six months, it makes total sense. Also, I should mention it’s so heavy you might even be able to use it to stop a home invasion.
At this point, some of you may be wondering, who the hell needs THAT much pepper? It’s true, this grinder seems like overkill. But nailing seasoning is one of the best ways to improve your cooking, and I’m willing to bet there are a lot of people who would be surprised how much of a difference an extra sprinkle of salt or pepper can have on a dish. Thankfully, salt is easy, as it doesn’t gain much from being freshly ground. But pepper definitely does, and as America’s Test Kitchen attests, newly crushed berries contain a lot of tasty volatile compounds that disappear from pre-ground stuff while it sits in a tin. So regardless of whether I’m making a spice rub or pumping out a pile of the good stuff for biscuits and gravy, it’s really nice to have a fast and reliable way to churn large quantities of fresh black pepper.
That said, I should point out that even a pepper mill this pricey ain’t perfect. The o-ring on the catch cup is a tiny bit too tight for my liking, though I suspect that will get better as it breaks in over time. It’s also only available in black, which might not suit everyone’s kitchen decor. And because it’s so damn expensive, I don’t really want to buy a second one for white pepper or other spices. But those are really the most minor nitpicks, because in every other meaningful way, it’s basically my perfect pepper mill.
Honestly, my bigger concern about buying a pepper mill this expensive comes from a scene from Fight Club. In some respects, paying a 5x premium for a kitchen gadget feels like a by-product of a lifestyle obsession. No one wants the things they own to end up owning them. But then I remember, the search for a nice pepper grinder didn’t come from a desire to put a trophy on my counter. It’s a way to enhance a hobby I’m passionate about. Cooking is something I enjoy and hopefully my family enjoys the results. Sure, the Pepper Cannon is an extremely luxurious kitchen gadget, but it’s still just a tool.
Clown on me all you like for thirsting after a premium pepper mill (though there are a lot of chefs way better than me who like it too). But at the end of the day, everyone has something they get overly enthusiastic about. Besides, the real joy comes from having a kitchen full of tools that makes cooking both easier and more fun at the same time. And ideally, that’s what all good gadgets should do, even if the Pepper Cannon is only a small part of a longer ingredient list.
Some set pictures have leaked from the Blue Beetle set, and everyone seems to love the look of the superhero. We’ve also got a series of episode stills from Roswell, New Mexico, as well as some comments from Ms. Marvel, and the poster reveal for Tim Burton’s highly-anticipated Addam’s Family spinoff, Wednesday.
A tiny gold-coated satellite lifted off from Earth on Wednesday with a rather large goal in mind for NASA: beam down data at the fastest rate ever achieved by space lasers.
When The Orville premiered back in 2017, its arrival coincided almost exactly with Star Trek: Discovery, the first new Trek TV show in over a decade. Comparisons between the two series were inevitable, with even io9 calling The Orville a “Star Trek spoof” in our earliest coverage of the series.
Satirical in tone and tongue-in-cheek in its presentation, the absurdist science-fantasy Dr. Grordbort’s Scientific Adventure Violence is a Dungeons & Dragons adventure setting and sourcebook, first devolved by Greg Broadmore, an artist, writer, and director at Wētā Workshop of Lord of the Rings fame in Aotearoa.…
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