The Morning After: Valve Made a $ 399 Portable Gaming PC

Valve has just surprised us all with a portable console. The $ 399 will arrive in December, with availability extended to other regions later.

Resembling an unholy alliance of Sega’s Game Gear and Nintendo Switch, the hardware includes a seven-inch touchscreen at 1280 x 800 resolution at a 60Hz refresh rate. There’s no shortage of control options either. , with two controllers, two fairly large square trackpads, an old-fashioned directional pad, four main buttons, triggers, and a quartet of grip buttons.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s just a foot long. Eesh. Valve made sure there was enough power inside to tempt PC gamers who already have a huge Steam library. There is an AMD 2.4-3.5 GHz processor and a 1.0-1.6 GHz GPU with eight RDNA 2 compute units. There is also 16 GB of LPDDR5 RAM inside. Valve promises two to eight hours of battery life on a single charge, depending on how much power you need for your games. Considering the power required by many AAA PC games, you can probably expect a lot of experiences to revolve around the lower ratings.

While the Steam Deck might not be as powerful as your gaming PC, Valve uses Proton, a compatibility layer that allows games to run without developers having to do any title porting work – you’ll have to. apparently access to your entire library of games. That price makes it slightly more expensive than the Switch, and the same price as the digital-only PS5. Due to its Steam hooks, however, it’s a very different proposition. How well will PC games play on a seven inch handheld?

– Mat Smith

It’s good material for streamers.

Elgato’s first $ 200 webcam isn’t that unique. It’s a big rectangular box that you can easily clip onto a monitor, and it lacks a mic or anything approaching 4K resolution. It shoots in 1080p at 60 fps, which should be enough for streamers who use the camera output as a picture-in-picture. Continue reading.

The film has three quotes that Bourdain never recorded.

Today, Roadrunner: a film about Anthony Bourdain opens in American theaters. Like many documentaries, the film brings together archival footage, including interviews and clips from shows, to tell the story of its subject in their own words. It also includes words Bourdain never said on camera before his suicide in 2018, and yet you will hear his voice speak them. The director of the film, Morgan Neville, explained to The New Yorker that there were three quotes he wanted Bourdain to tell, and to do so, Neville recreated them with software instead, creating an AI model of Bourdain’s voice from the existing audio. The system apparently fed about a dozen hours of audio to an AI model. Continue reading.

Emojipedia shared a list of characters in draft

Tomorrow is World Emoji Day, and it’s the deadline for new emoji draft options. The list includes a fondant smiley (thank you global warming), a greeting emoji, a disco ball, beans, and new pointing fingers, and there are more diverse skin tone options for existing hand emojis. This is remarkable because, due to technical limitations, it was one of the few characters that you couldn’t change with skin tone in previous versions of Unicode. Continue reading.

Think paperclip, think Clippy.

Twenty years after retiring from Microsoft Office, Clippy is back to ruin your day. As part of Microsoft’s update to 1,800 emoji, the Single Assistant will replace paperclip emoji in Office, Teams, and Windows. Microsoft is updating its emoji library to render 3D characters and add animation to around 900 of the icons. The company said it plans to roll out the new characters to Windows and Teams during the upcoming holiday season. Continue reading.

And social enterprises need to do more to stop it.

US Surgeon General Dr Vivek Murthy has warned of the dangers posed by health misinformation, calling it an “urgent threat” that social media companies and tech platforms need to do more to address. The advisory includes a 22-page report on steps individuals, health organizations, researchers and journalists can take to help mitigate the spread of disinformation. Continue reading.

But wait, there is more …