Month: September 2019

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Greetings, Arsians! The Dealmaster is back with another round of deals to share. Today's roundup brings a handful of gaming PC and accessory discounts in Amazon's latest deal of the day. An iBuyPower desktop with a 9th-gen Core i7 chip, 16GB of RAM, and a GTX 1660 Ti graphics card is down to $900, for instance, while an MSI GL63 notebook with a GTX 1650 is available for $700 if you only want to game casually on less-than-high settings. If you don't need a new PC, Cooler Master's CK730 is a comfortable and sturdy tenkeyless mechanical keyboard that's down to a new low of $90, while Razer's BlackWidow Elite is a nice full-size option at a new low of $120.

Outside of gaming, Sony's excellent 55-inch X950G 4K TV is down to $1,098 with a $400 e-gift card at Dell, while the 55-inch TCL S425 is a solid alternative at a new low of $270 if you want a 4K TV on a budget and don't care about true HDR. Beyond that, you can find deals on the likes of Control, Anker portable batteries and chargers, a Philips Hue starter kit, and much more below.

Note: Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs.

Enlarge / The InvizBox 2 router: out-of-the-box VPN, easy Tor, and lots of ad and content blocking tools.

Four years ago, in the wake of some controversy over another Kickstarter-based launch, a team in Ireland decided to produce a better Wi-Fi router for travel privacy. Called the InvizBox, the router was focused on making connecting to privacy-focused network services such as VPNs and the Tor anonymizing network easier.

A lot has happened since then. And now, InvizBox has released a new iteration of its wired Wi-Fi router, the InvizBox 2. Two years ago, the InvizBox team achieved its crowd-funding goals to move ahead with this design. After a long road, that funding has finally paid off.

Totally open source, bundled with a VPN service capable of delivering up to 100 megabits per second of traffic (your broadband willing), and painless to configure, this little disc-shaped router is powerful enough to be a primary home router—or it can be used on the road when plugged into a potentially unfriendly local network to tunnel users out to safety. The router can also be used in concert with InvizBox Go—a mobile Wi-Fi router with VPN capability—to create a safe tunnel back to your home network. The base price for InvizBox 2 is $99, but there's a discount available right now for orders through the InvizBox site.

It has already been a bit of a banner year for beloved writer/director/Thor: Ragnarok's Korg actor Taika Waititi, with the TV adaptation of his popular cult film, What We Do in the Shadows, and his roles in Avengers: End Game and the forthcoming Disney+ series, The Mandalorian. Now, we are getting our first good look at Jojo Rabbit, Waititi's forthcoming dark comedy/drama based on the novel, Caging Skies, by Christine Leunens.

Per the film's official synopsis, Jojo Rabbit is "a World War II satire that follows a lonely German boy (Roman Griffin Davis as JoJo) whose world view is turned upside-down when he discovers his single mother (Scarlett Johansson) is hiding a young Jewish girl (Thomasin McKenzie) in their attic. Aided only by his idiotic imaginary friend, Adolf Hitler (Taika Waititi), Jojo must confront his blind nationalism." The cast also includes Sam Rockwell as a Nazi captain at a Hitler Youth camp, Alfie Allen as his second-in-command, Rebel Wilson as a brutish camp instructor, and Stephen Merchant as a Gestapo agent.

The first official teaser dropped in July, opening with some good old-fashioned slapstick at this Hitler Youth camp to give us a taste of the overall tone of the film. Jojo is tormented by the other kids at camp for being a bit of a wuss—hence his nickname, "Rabbit." His imaginary BFF, Adolf, assures him people used to say nasty things about him all the time, too: "Oh, he's a lunatic. Oh, look at that psycho, he's going to get us all killed!" (Waititi has said that Adolf is essentially a substitute for the boy's absent father.)

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  The new Android logo.

Android 10 is finally finished! The next big Android update, which we've been examining for most of the year as the "Android Q Beta," starts rolling out to devices today. As usual, Android 10 is arriving on Pixel phones first (even the three-year-old Pixel 1), and Google says it is "working with a number of partners to launch or upgrade devices to Android 10 this year." Google has introduced a new branding strategy for Android, by the way, so there's no "Q" snack name with this release. In 2019, it's just "Android 10." Android 10 brings a number of changes to the world's most popular mobile operating system. First up, devices are getting "fully gestural" navigation, which lets you navigate around the phone with swipe gestures. Just like the implementation on the iPhone X, gesture navigation removed the need for a dedicated space for navigation buttons, allowing for more space for app content. There's finally full support for a dark theme, which will turn the entire system UI and any supported apps from the usual black text on a white background to white text on a black background. (That option significantly reduces the amount of light a phone puts out and saves battery life on OLED displays.) Google has also promised dark mode support for "all" of the Google apps in time for Android 10's launch, so we should be seeing updates to Gmail, Google Play, Google Maps, and a million other Google apps sometime soon.

Notifications are traditionally one of Android's best features, and Google never lets an Android release go out the door without some improvements in this area. This year, the notification panel will use on-device machine learning to parse incoming messages and offer potentially helpful action buttons right in the notification panel. One of the button types is "smart replies," which should be familiar to anyone who has used Gmail or Google Inbox (may it rest in peace). These are short, automatically generated replies to messages that you can send with a single tap. The other notification button type is an "action," which will try to pick out URLs, phone numbers, addresses, or tracking numbers from incoming messages and allow you to zip the data to the appropriate app without even opening that up. Unlike many Android features that require work from the developer, these new notification features work, by default, on everything. If you suffer from too many notifications at any point, Android 10 also offers a new "focus mode" to silence noisy apps and let you get some work (or gaming) done in peace.

With this latest Android release, under the hood we have "Project Mainline," Google's initiative to create a new, more powerful file type for system components. Project Mainline has allowed Google to offload key system code to the Play Store for easier updates. Publicly, Google is branding this "Google Play System Updates," and the feature will allow Google to ship monthly updates to the "Stagefright" media stack, OpenGL, and other components without the need for a full system update. Mainline support is mandatory for all devices that ship with Android 10, and that shift means Google is taking over responsibility for core system code from device manufacturers.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty)

With Hurricane Dorian threatening the East Coast, some automakers are leveraging their networks of connected cars to help out. General Motors is offering its free OnStar Crisis Assist to owners in Dorian-threatened areas, and Tesla will provide free Supercharging and unlock the software-limited range of some of its cheaper models to help its owners flee the storm.

As is becoming tradition during hurricane season, GM says that its OnStar advisors can help route people away from danger or toward resources like shelter, food, and water; the service can even help with booking hotel rooms where feasible. OnStar-equipped vehicles will get free hands-free calling minutes and data for the cars' LTE hotspots, and the OnStar nerve center will help out with coordinating emergency rescue and evacuation services. All of these services should work on any Chevrolet, Buick, GMC, or Cadillac with OnStar hardware from model year 2006 onward.

Similarly, Tesla CEO Elon Musk told a Tesla Model 3 twitter account that his company would again help out with free Supercharging and extra range for some vehicles:

Enlarge / This annotated map shows some of the steering currents that will guide Dorian north this week. (credit: Tropical Tidbits/Ars Technica)

Hurricane Dorian has absolutely battered the Northern Bahamas over Labor Day weekend, bringing fierce Category-5 winds, devastating storm surge, and up to 30 inches of rainfall. The storm's westward movement began to stall out late on Saturday, as a ridge of high pressure over the Atlantic began to break down. In the absence of any steering currents, Dorian pounded the tiny islands ceaselessly on Sunday and Monday.

Now this upper-atmosphere weather pattern is beginning to change, and, albeit slowly, Dorian is beginning to turn northwest away from The Bahamas and toward the Continental United States. At 11am ET Tuesday, it was moving 2mph to the northwest according to the National Hurricane Center.

It has been unclear for days how close Dorian would get to Florida and the rest of the United States, but now it seems likely that a trough of low pressure moving across the upper Midwest and northeastern United States will be strong enough, and fast enough, to keep Dorian away from the Sunshine State. We still have downstream concerns about the Carolinas, however.