Hasta La Gadget!

No stranger to heady prices, Bang & Olufsen is taking its high-end design (and price multiplier) to headphones with the Beoplay H100. Following the $999 Beoplay H95, the H100 is over 50 percent more expensive, at $1,549.

In B&O tradition, the Beoplay H100 is made of premium materials, with lambskin leather pads and a scratch-resistant glass touch interface on the outside of the ear cups. The company says it was inspired by fine jewelry for the black, sand and apricot color options. B&O says it doubled the active noise cancellation (ANC) performance of the H95 for this set, with 10 microphones to help offer an improved transparency mode.

The company says the H95 has been its “most successful headphones to date,” but it didn’t specify whether that was units sold or sheer insane profit margins. Still, I want to try a pair.

— Mat Smith

The biggest stories you might have missed

Starlink is refusing to comply with Brazil’s X ban

Resident Evil mobile ports now require an online check-in before you can play

Disney cuts DirecTV customers’ access to ABC, ESPN and more

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NYT Connections bot uses AI to highlight the top wrong answers

You’ll get a daily skill score.

The New York Times’ daily word game isn’t exactly easy. The solve rate dips below 50 percent some days, apparently, so why not rub it in? I mean, highlight the most common mistakes? After winning or losing each day’s game, you can saunter to the Connections Bot. As with the bot for Wordle, you’ll see how well you did compared with other players and receive a skill score out of 99. This is primarily based on how few mistakes you make.

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The UK government is looking into Ticketmaster’s dynamic pricing model

It’s after maddening prices for Oasis’ reunion tour.

The UK government will look into the company’s dynamic pricing model after millions of Oasis fans scrambled over the weekend for tickets to the band’s reunion tour . Once fans got through hours-long queues to make their purchase, some found the price of a standing ticket was suddenly 2.5 times more expensive — in one case, going up from £135 to £337.50 ($177 to $444). Ticketmaster often gives customers just seconds to decide whether to complete a purchase once tickets are in their cart, so they don’t have much time to determine whether such a hefty price increase is worth it. It was also a great time to resurface a vintage Liam Gallagher tweet from 2017, complaining about ticket prices to see his brother’s band, which was touring the US.

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Thank Goodness You’re Here is a vibrant, funny, unashamedly silly game

It’s a very northern English edition of TMA.

Coal Supper

It’s called a ‘slap-former.’

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This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/general/the-morning-after-bang–olufsens-new-headphones-cost-over-1500-111432298.html?src=rss

Luxury audio brand Bang & Olufsen is know for its high-end design and equally exorbitant prices. Typically the company’s earbuds and headphones are more expensive than most competitors, but not astronomically so. That’s changed with the company’s flagship noise-cancelling headphones though. Following the $999 Beoplay H95, B&O has announced the Beoplay H100 that will cost you $1,549. The company says the H95 have been its “most successful headphones to date,” and the H100 has a number of improvements over that model. 

Like most B&O headphones, the Beoplay H100 is crafted with premium materials, from the lambskin leather ear pads to the use of aluminum and knitted cloth. There’s even a scratch-resistant glass touch interface on the outside of the ear cups. The company says it was inspired by fine jewelry for the black, sand and apricot color options, all of which combine the “solid sheen of aluminum, softness of leather, and cold-to-the-touch glass” for what B&O describes as “design excellence.” The inner headband and ear pad are both detachable, so you can replace them if they become overly worn or dirty. 

Inspired by the company’s Beolab 90 speaker, the Beoplay H100 packs in 40mm drivers with “sound clarity and dynamic performance that you normally only hear on high-end loudspeakers.” High-resolution audio is in the mix, with support for 96 kHz/24-bits tunes. Dolby Atmos is also in play, with head tracking available if you’re into that. B&O says its adaptive audio tech, which it calls EarSense, monitors the fit of the headphones and adjusts the sound profile in real time. 

Bang & Olufsen

B&O says it doubled the active noise cancellation (ANC) performance of the H95 for this set, employing 10 microphones that also provide what the company describes as its best transparency mode yet. What’s more, a dial on the outside of the ear cups rotates to find your preferred level of so-called TrueTransparency. There’s also a Quick Listen mode when you need to pay attention to your surroundings at second’s notice, but don’t necessarily want to leave transparency enabled. Of course, there are also lofty claims of crystal clear calls “even in very demanding situations,” but that’s the expected refrain from any headphone company. 

The company has been designing its speakers and other audio gear for longevity for a while now. B&O says its building products to they can be updated for years before becoming obsolete. It’s also making them easier for technicians to service, and all of this applies to the H100. That’s definitely something you need to harp on when you’re asking over $1,000 for a set of cans. Aside from the aesthetic upgrades users can complete themselves, the company says the design of the headphones enables quick access for service to batteries, glass surfaces, drivers and circuit boards. Software “won’t be surpassed by new technology,” the company explains, with key features like wireless high-resolution audio and three-device multipoint Bluetooth among the future updates.

Similar to AirPods Max, the Beoplay H100 enters a low-power mode when it’s outside of the carrying case but not being worn. The company says the headphones can remain in this state for up to 90 days, ready to be used as soon as you put them on. If you store them in the case though, the headphones will fully power off. The H100 will last up to 34 hours on a charge with ANC on, which is four hours less than the more affordable H95. 

The Beoplay H100 is available today from B&O stores and the company’s website. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/audio/headphones/bang-and-olufsen-debuts-beoplay-h100-headphones-that-cost-1549-070041891.html?src=rss

Connections, the daily word game from The New York Times, isn’t exactly easy. In fact, the solve rate dips below 50 percent some days. To help highlight where players are going wrong, a new bot is employing AI to guess the thought process they’re using for the most common mistakes every day.

For the uninitiated, Connections is a word/logic game that the paper of record debuted last year. Every day, you’re presented with a grid of 16 words that you have to split into four categories. There’s only one solution and after four mistakes, the game is over. However, there’s some trickiness afoot. There are often red herrings galore and frequently at least five viable answers for a group.

I’m hooked and I’ve played every day since last July. It’s one of our favorite games of 2023 overall (though it’s perhaps not entirely original).

After you win or lose each day’s game, you can saunter over to the Connections Bot. As with the bot for Wordle, you’ll see how well you did compared with other players and receive a skill score out of 99. This is primarily based on how few mistakes you make, but you’ll get extra credit for solving the more difficult purple and blue categories first.

After you see the skill score and other details (such as whether a red herring caught you out), the AI feature comes into play. This will highlight the most common incorrect guesses from that day. It will also try to guess a description for the group that players had in mind. So, for a failed guess of gutter, bowl, alley and lane, the bot might believe you were looking for a list of bowling-related terms. This is a real example from a recent game in which I made that exact mistake. Alley and lane were actually types of streets.

New York Times

Your own failed guesses might not show up in the bot, though. That’s because there are around 2.6 million different ways to group each grid together. Bear in mind that while you don’t need a Times account to play Connections, you’ll need to be logged into one to use the bot and track your scores.

One other interesting thing about the bot is that it marks the first time that the Times’ newsroom will regularly publish AI-generated English text. Before publication, the paper’s editors will review all AI-generated responses and may edit them for style and clarity. That said, the Times notes that “there’s no way to use math or even artificial intelligence to reliably solve the game,” so you can’t really use the likes of ChatGPT to cheat at it quite yet.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/nyt-connections-bot-uses-ai-to-highlight-each-days-top-mistakes-145242525.html?src=rss

Capcom has updated the mobile ports of several Resident Evil games to now require an internet connection when the apps are opened. As noted by Eurogamer, patch notes for the latest Resident Evil 7, Resident Evil 4 and Resident Evil Village updates read, “Due to changes to the startup process, an internet connection is now required when starting this app.”

It’s unclear why Capcom added this requirement, but it stinks. It prevents anyone taking a flight without Wi-Fi or those hoping to sneak in a little game time while camping in the middle of nowhere from playing any of these games on their phone or tablet. It mitigates the notion that mobile games can be played anywhere, but you can avoid the issue if you already have the games you want to play on your device and automatic updates are off.

Several commenters on a Reddit thread that flagged the change said they’d be asking for a refund. However, Capcom may not have to be too worried about having to pay back a ton of players. There are reports that the mobile versions of the three games haven’t been very successful. For instance, data suggests that just 2,000 people had paid for the iOS port of Resident Evil 7 in its first two weeks.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/resident-evil-mobile-ports-now-require-an-online-check-in-before-you-can-play-161156065.html?src=rss

After the country’s Supreme Court ordered internet service providers to block access to X, the platform was largely unavailable in the country by Sunday night. The only ways to access X since then have been through VPNs (for those willing to risk huge fines) and Starlink, the satellite internet service that’s also run by X owner Elon Musk.

The president of Brazil’s telecom agency, Anatel, said that Starlink refused to comply with the court order until officials released its frozen assets, The New York Times reports. Alexandre de Moraes, the Supreme Court justice who has been on the warpath against X, also blocked the local bank accounts of Starlink, which is a SpaceX subsidiary. Moraes, who has accused X of disseminating hate speech and disinformation, is said to have done so with the aim of collecting $3 million in fines levied against X for ignoring his orders to block certain accounts.

Starlink petitioned the court to unblock its assets but the court dismissed the request. Musk called the Starlink account freeze “illegal,” arguing that SpaceX and X are separate entities while claiming he owns 40 percent of the former.

There are around 250,000 Starlink customers in Brazil. The service has proven popular there in rural areas and among Indigenous tribes in the Amazon. Starlink pledged to provide free internet access to its Brazilian customers while its accounts in the country remain blocked.

If Starlink maintains its stance on X, Brazil could revoke the internet service’s license. If it continues to operate after that, officials could seize equipment from 23 ground stations. The gear helps Starlink improve the quality of its satellite connections.

Meanwhile, a majority of a Supreme Court panel upheld the X ban, which Moraes issued after Musk defied several of his orders, at a trial on Monday. X will have the right to appeal the decision. The panel also approved an order by Moraes to fine anyone caught using a VPN to access X in Brazil a daily fine of 50,000 Brazilian Real (around $8,900).

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/starlink-is-refusing-to-comply-with-brazils-x-ban-181144912.html?src=rss