Month: April 2018

In a livestream event today, Blizzard revealed the final handful of unrevealed cards from its upcoming Hearthstone expansion, The Witchwood, which launches April 12 with 135 new cards. Over the weekend, we got a sneak peek at 20 of those cards and discussed their design and potential with the game's ever-genial director, Ben Brode.

Click through the gallery above to see the newly revealed cards and read about Brode's thoughts on where new abilities like Rush and Echo fit into the current state of the ultra-popular card game (with a little bit of our own analysis thrown in for good measure).

Enlarge / Four of the bundle's 18 books from MIT Press. (credit: MIT Press)

You'd be forgiven for letting a Humble Bundle pay-what-you-want sale whiz by without thinking about it. The shop has been bundling software and ebooks for eight years at this point, so while the discounts are still quite solid, the novelty has worn off.

But Monday's sale stands out for what appears to be a first for Humble: an entire ebook sale dedicated to video game history.

MIT Press, which has been publishing game-studies essays and books since 1998, has packed 18 of its gaming-specific ebooks into a single $15 bundle. (Should you elect to pay less, you can pick up fewer books at the $1 and $8 tiers.) It's not a comprehensive collection from the publisher, but as an entry point to the highly analytical and tech-heavy collection, this Humble Game Studies Bundle is particularly good at offering more of MIT Press's timeless titles, particularly analyses of various game consoles during their active lifespans.

Porsche

For a few glorious years, the "P1" prototype class in the World Endurance Championship (WEC) was the coolest thing in racing. Audi, Toyota, and Porsche built all-wheel drive hybrid racecars, each with more than 1,000 horsepower, each capable of running flat-out for 24 hours or longer over distances it would take an F1 car an entire season of races to rack up. But Audi and then Porsche both withdrew from the sport, their highly successful—but very expensive—racing programs casualties of Dieselgate. Porsche pulled out at the end of 2017 after winning almost everything there was to win with its 919 Hybrid. But before the company puts the cars into the museum, it has some unfinished business, proving just how insanely fast the 919 Hybrid really is.

Porsche is taking the 919 Hybrid on tour, but the plan is to do more than just show it off to the fans—it's going for records. The first of these has already fallen. On Sunday, April 9, Neel Jani set a new track record at Spa-Francorchamps in Belgian, home to that country's annual F1 race. Jani lapped the 4.4-mile (7km) track in 1 minute 41.770 seconds, 12 seconds faster than the 919 Hybrid's previous best time at the track.

Enlarge / I can't believe we actually used to use software like this.

Back in the early prehistory of desktop computing, we didn't have Explorer for managing our files in Windows. We had File Manager. Explorer scatters windows liberally across our desktops—we're still waiting for the tabs to organize the clutter—but File Manager never had that problem. File Manager came from an older time, the era of the Multiple Document Interface (MDI) wherein one File Manager window contained multiple separate panes for actually browsing your files.

File Manager continued to ship with Windows long after it was replaced by Explorer just in case somebody needed it, but for the last decade or more, Windows hasn't included it. To remedy this, Microsoft has released the source code of its venerable file management application under the MIT open source license.

With this, you can build and run File Manager even on your brand new Windows 10 machine. The code has been very slightly updated; as well as the original 32-bit version, you can now build it as a 64-bit program (though there are some errors in the project files; I have created a fork that builds correctly in 64-bit mode). Whichever mode you prefer, this release brings a taste of the 1990s to 2018. Microsoft's source repository in fact has two versions of File Manager; the original version, and a slightly updated version with some extra features to support, for example, ctrl-c and ctrl-v to copy and paste files, and handle some file system capabilities that were introduced after File Manager's heyday. I don't believe that either version has much in the way of high-DPI awareness, so it may not be tremendously usable on high resolution screens.

Hot off the launch of the Galaxy S9 last month, Samsung is about to release one of the device's main accessories, the Samsung Dex Pad. Plug your flagship Samsung smartphone into this little dock, then plug in a monitor, mouse, and keyboard, and you'll have a full-blown desktop OS interface powered just by your phone. Preorders are open today on Samsung.com, and the device ships May 13. Starting today, Samsung is also offering a free Dex Pad to anyone who buys a Galaxy S9 or S9+ from Samsung.com.

Samsung Dex runs the Android OS you know and love but reworked into a desktop form factor with a windowed multitasking interface. The Dex Pad requires a USB-C equipped Samsung device (so a Galaxy S8, Note 8, or S9) with Android 8.0. The dock has two USB A ports (typically for a mouse and keyboard), HDMI for the monitor, and USB-C for power. Running a desktop interface can be tough on a phone's processor, so the Dex Pad also has a fan to help everything run a bit cooler and faster.

Enlarge / Oregon State Capitol building in Salem, Oregon. (credit: Getty Images | KingWu)

Oregon Governor Kate Brown today will sign a net neutrality bill into law, making Oregon the second state to pass a net neutrality law since the Federal Communications Commission voted to repeal nationwide rules.

Brown announced on Friday that she would sign the bill Monday during an event at a middle school. The bill was previously approved by the state House and Senate.

The new law was written narrowly in an attempt to survive lawsuits from ISPs. Instead of imposing prohibitions on all Internet providers, the law forbids state agencies from purchasing fixed or mobile Internet service from ISPs that violate the core net neutrality principles laid out in the soon-to-be-dead FCC rules.

Enlarge / palaeodeserts project, human bone, phalanx. (credit: Ian Cartwright)

Paleontologist Iyad Zalmout of the Saudi Geological Survey was walking through the Al-Wusta dig site in 2016 when he spotted a tiny bone eroding out of a layer of sediment. The 87,000-year-old fossil turned out to be a human intermediate phalanx—the middle section of your finger—from what was probably a middle finger. It's the earliest directly dated human fossil that has been found so far outside Africa or the Levant, and archaeologists say it's evidence that once humans ventured beyond Africa, they spread farther and faster than previously thought.

A green Arabia

According to uranium-series dating, the fossil is between 85.1 and 90.1 thousand years old. At that time, the Nefud Desert wasn't the 40,000-square-mile sea of sand that now stretches across the Northern Arabian Peninsula. Around 84,000 years ago, a shift in the climate brought stronger summer monsoons to Arabia. Based on evidence from layers of sediment at the site and hundreds of animal bones, Al-Wusta was the shore of a shallow lake, one of hundreds in an arid Pleistocene grassland. African antelope grazed here, and hippos wallowed in the muddy waters of the lake. And the site was home to a few dozen hunter-gatherers, according to Oxford University archaeologist Huw Groucutt, who directed the fieldwork at the site.

The people who dwelled here 87,000 years ago lived in a fairly densely populated landscape by the standards of the late Pleistocene. Groucutt and his colleagues have identified several other ancient lakes over the course of a decade of survey and excavation in the region, and many of them have their own stone tool assemblages, a sign that several hunter-gatherer bands roamed the lake-dotted landscape at around the same time. But Al-Wusta is the first site where archaeologists have found actual remains of those early settlers.