Month: August 2018

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our friends at TechBargains, we have another round of deals to share. Today's list is led by a promotion for subscribers of Verizon's "unlimited" mobile plans: starting today, they can get six months of Apple Music for no added cost.

Verizon first announced the promotion earlier this month, saying it was "just the first step in an exclusive partnership with Apple," but the offer officially became available on Thursday. The deal is available to new customers and subscribers of any of Verizon's three current "unlimited" plans, as well as new and current subscribers of Apple Music itself. Since Apple Music normally runs for $9.99 a month, you're saving about $60 in total.

Verizon says eligible users can activate the deal on its promo page or in the Account > Add-ons section of the My Verizon mobile app. The offer doesn't blanket-cover family plans, but Verizon says that account owners can add the promo to each line in their Verizon account. (You may want to cancel any auto-renew settings right away, though, so you don't wind up paying for multiple Apple Music subscriptions come February.) If you're a Verizon subscriber who already pays for Apple Music, the carrier says you'll have to cancel your current membership to utilize the promo.

Enlarge / A rendering of 851 W. Randolph Street In Chicago. (credit: Newcastle Limited)

As Google makes more and more hardware products, it makes more and more sense for the company to have some kind of retail arm to show off its stuff. Google has a few "stores within stores" at places like Best Buy in the US and Currys PC World in the UK, setups where the company pays for a premium demo area specifically for its products. Google also has the occasional temporary "pop-up store" for holidays. A standalone brick-and-mortar Google Store has never materialized, though, despite several attempts.

A new report from the Chicago Tribune claims that Google is starting up its standalone retail ambitions again, this time with a flagship retail space in Chicago’s Fulton Market district. The report says Google is "close to finalizing a lease" for an almost 14,000 square foot space that would consist of "several connected, two-story brick buildings between 845 and 851 W. Randolph St." This would be just two blocks south of Google's Chicago headquarters.

When asked for comment, Google gave The Tribune its usual “We don’t comment on rumor or speculation” statement. Newcastle Limited, the company that owns the space, also declined comment to The Tribune. Newcastle's listing of the space is here.

Intel

Intel has updated its range of small form-factor PCs that it calls NUCs. We've generally liked the systems in the past; with a footprint of about 4 inches by 4 inches, they're pretty compact, and their feature set makes them versatile for home theaters, digital signs or other embedded industrial uses, workplace productivity, and in some cases, even gaming.

First up is a quintet of NUC kits named Bean Canyon, built around Coffee Lake-U processors. These range from a $299 i3-8109U at the low end (two-core, four-thread, 3.0-3.6GHz) to a $499 i7-8559U at the high end (four-core, eight-thread, 2.7-4.5GHz). All the chips are 28W processors, and all have Iris Plus graphics—128MB of eDRAM memory on the processor itself. The eDRAM is primarily there to boost graphics performance, but it can also help a lot in non-graphical workloads, too, as it acts as an enormous cache.

A previous, browser-based proof-of-concept test from YouTuber Nintendrew shows how Switch-based VR could work. (credit: YoutTube / Nintendrew)

Hackers have uncovered and tested a screen-splitting "VR Mode" that has been buried in the Switch's system-level firmware for over a year. The discovery suggests that Nintendo at least toyed with the idea that the tablet system could serve as a stereoscopic display for a virtual reality headset.

Switch hackers first discovered and documented references to a "VrMode" in the Switch OS' Applet Manager services back in December, when analyzing the June 2017 release of version 3.0.0 of the system's firmware. But the community doesn't seem to have done much testing of the internal functions "IsVrModeEnabled" and "SetVrModeEnabled" at the time.

That changed shortly after Switch modder OatmealDome publicly noted one of the VR functions earlier this month, rhetorically asking "has anyone actually tried calling it?" Fellow hacker random0666 responded with a short Twitter video (and an even shorter follow-up) showing the results of an extremely simple homebrew testing app that activates the system's VrMode functions.