Hasta La Gadget!

Rep. Greg Steube of Florida apparently wasn’t aware CNN was using a screen in a studio and not actually filming from inside the Capitol.

Microsoft has been sounding the death knell for Internet Explorer for months, but many businesses in Japan seemingly did not take heed. Almost half were said to still be using the browser, for which Microsoft ended support yesterday, as of March. According to Nikkei, many of those companies have dragged their heels on switching to other browsers, which some have warned may cause chaos for months.

IT provider Keyman’s Net conducted a survey of Japanese companies earlier this year and found that many were forced to use Internet Explorer because of systems their clients used to handle orders. Some were also using the browser to handle things like employee attendance and expenses. Over a fifth of the respondents didn’t have a plan for how to move their businesses onto alternative browsers, such as Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome.

The issue extends beyond companies to government agencies, which the report notes have been especially slow to address the shift. For instance, notices related to Japan Pension Service online applications must be viewed in the IE Mode on Edge, according to the report. That mode will be supported through at least 2029, so websites that are incompatible with modern browsers should still be accessible for several more years. Here’s hoping Microsoft officially ending support for IE after almost 27 years will prompt organizations to get their act together and make their services work on Edge, Chrome, Firefox and other browsers too.

It was a bad day for John Eastman, the Trump lawyer who helped craft his plan to overturn the election, a scheme that fueled the U.S. Capitol riot.

A couple of years ago Arturia ventured simulations of vintage synths and into audio effects territory. The FX Collection wasn’t as clear of a must have as the V Collection, but the company has slowly built out its stable of effects with the new FX Collection 3 growing to 26 from the original 15.

New to the collection are Dist Tube-Culture, Dist OpAmp-21, Fragments and Tape Mello-Fi. Now, the latter two were already available — Mello-Fi originally as a free offering during the 2021 holiday season, and Fragments launched in March of this year. I won’t spend too much time talking about them since I’ve already covered them. But the TL;DR is that Mello-Fi delivers excellent tape emulation ranging from subtle saturation and warble, to full on broken cassette deck, while Fragments is one of, if not the most approachable granular effects processor I’ve ever encountered.

The two distortion circuits are completely new, though. OpAmp-21 is based on the now cult-classic SansAmp pedal originally introduced in 1989. It was one of the earliest amp and speaker simulators put in a guitar pedal format. Unlike today’s digital emulators that rely on code and impulse response models, the SansAmp was an all analog circuit that 

Tube-Culture is based on the Thermionic Culture Vulture, which I’m slightly ashamed to admit I’d never even heard of before this. It’s an all-tube rack mount distortion unit that covers everything from subtle saturation to busted-speaker fuzz. 

While the rest of the effects have largely stayed the same under the hood there have been a few nice improvements. For one, many now have A-B comparison, so you can quickly compare different settings or even bounce back and forth between them live. The interfaces have all been revamped as well. Some of the changes are subtle, but navigation is a bit easier and load times seem faster.

FX Collection is available now at a discounted introductory price of $299 (or less if you’re an existing Arturia customer) until July 7th, after which it will go back up to $399.

Infamous grifter Anna Sorokin, who spent four years in prison for fraud, says she is “trying to move away from this, like, ‘scammer’ persona” that has “been pushed upon me by the prosecution and by the following media and by the Netflix show [Inventing Anna].” What better way to do that than by selling a collection of NFTs?

The socialite told NBC News that she has minted 10 NFTs (non-fungible tokens). Holders will somehow have “exclusive access” to Sorokin, who is in a correctional facility under the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The NFT holders will seemingly have the chance to meet Sorokin, who has appealed her pending deportation. Holders will also receive a bundle of “personal items” from Sorokin, who, again, is in detention.

Sorokin is attempting to control her narrative after she was the focus of Inventing Anna, which was released earlier this year. The NFT collection is called “Reinventing Anna.”

“It’s kind of one of the first steps I’m taking to start to tell my own story,” Sorokin said. She claimed that “blockchain will be very helpful for the artist” to “reclaim the ownership and [profit] from future sales.” It’s not as if the NFT market has completely bottomed out.

Sorokin went by the name Anna Delvey and claimed to be a German heiress with a $60 million inheritance. She claimed she was raising capital to open a social club in Manhattan, but that wasn’t the case. She scammed friends and businesses out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. It’s just as well NFTs aren’t part of a massive Ponzi scheme or anything like that.