Hasta La Gadget!

Sony’s December free games for PlayStation Plus Essential include Mass Effect: Legendary Edition. Subscribers can play remastered versions of the classic trilogy at no extra charge. The collection, released in May 2021, includes Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3 with modernized 4K graphics and tighter gameplay.

Developer BioWare saved the biggest upgrades for the 15-year-old original. While the non-remastered version is nearly unplayable by modern standards, the remaster is friendlier for modern gamers with more consistent weapon accuracy, tighter camera controls, a dedicated melee button and snappier combat. BioWare also tweaked its handling of the trilogy’s endings, ditching the original approach that required a separate app download to get the best finale. In the new version, your final outcome is based exclusively on your decisions across all three titles.

Other free PS Plus Essential games for December include third-person platform fighter Divine Knockout: Founder’s Edition and open-world RPG Biomutant. In addition to new free games added each month (yours to keep as long as you remain subscribed), PlayStation Plus Essential gives you access to online matchmaking in paid titles. The service costs $9.99 per month or $59.99 per year. It replaced the standard PS Plus earlier this year, when Sony added more expensive Extra and Premium tiers to compete with Xbox Game Pass.

Elon Musk and Tim Cook have apparently made up following a dustup over the status of Twitter’s iOS app. Musk, who earlier this week, claimed that Apple had “threatened to withhold’ Twitter from the App Store,” said he and Cook had a “good conversation” during a meeting at Apple’s headquarters.

“Among other things, we resolved the misunderstanding about Twitter potentially being removed from the App Store,” Musk wrote. “Tim was clear that Apple never considered doing so.” Musk never said what the original source of Apple’s issue with Twitter’s app was. But Twitter’s former head of trust and safety has stated that Apple had flagged various issues during the app review process in the past.

Of note, Musk’s latest tweets don’t mention if Cook addressed any of Musk’s other recent complaints. In addition to the App Store issue, Musk had also joined the growing ranks of developers to criticize the App Store’s 30 percent “secret tax” on in-app purchases. Musk reportedly delayed the re-launch of Twitter Blue subscriptions in order to avoid the fees, according to the newsletter Platformer.

Musk had also called out Cook for halting much of Apple’s advertising on Twitter, claiming that the iPhone maker had “mostly stopped” ad campaigns on the platform. The company is currently trying to reassure brands amid a broader pullback in advertising from the platform.

Do you prefer a happy shot of polar cub frolicking among flowers, or a frightening close-up of a wasp’s attack on a spider? The National History Museum in London is asking for the public to vote on its top nature photos of 2022. On Wednesday, it opened up the People’s Choice portion of its annual Wildlife Photographer…

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Twitter is now pushing more tweets from accounts users don’t already follow into their timelines. The company revealed that it’s now surfacing recommendations to all its users, even people who had successfully avoided them in the past.

“We want to ensure everyone on Twitter sees the best content on the platform, so we’re expanding recommendations to all users, including those who may not have seen them in the past,” the company wrote in a tweet.

It’s not clear if this means recommendations will begin to appear in the “latest” timeline, which sorts tweets chronologically and has historically not included recommendations, or if Twitter is simply making recommendations more prominent in other parts of the app. In its tweet, the company pointed to a blog post from September, which states that “recommendations can appear in your Home timeline, certain places within the Explore tab, and elsewhere on Twitter.”

Anecdotally, it seems some users are already reportingnoticeablechanges to their timelines, with the appearance of new topic suggestions and many tweets from seemingly random accounts.

Though the change may feel jarring, it’s not the first time the company has experimented with adding more suggested content. Twitter has been pushing recommendations into various parts of its service for years, though it has sometimes tweaked how often these suggestions appear. In the past, Twitter has also been careful to note that it bars certain types of content from recommendations in order to avoid amplifying potentially harmful or low-quality content, though it’s not entirely clear if that’s still the case. The company no longer has a communications team.

Interestingly, Twitter’s current CEO, Elon Musk, hasn’t always spoken favorably about the platform’s recommendation algorithms. Back in May, he tweeted that using the app’s “latest” timeline was crucial to “fix” Twitter’s feed. “You are being manipulated by the algorithm in ways you don’t realize,” he said at the time. Musk, who has also spoken about his desire to open source Twitter’s algorithms, hasn’t yet weighed in on the new expansion of recommendations, or how the feature works.

The Marine Corps is calling this device an Atmospheric Portable-water Sustainment Unit, APSU for short.