Zak Killian
Recent posts
It's always fun to cheer for your team, isn't it? Sometimes it seems like folks love nothing more than to divide into opposing groups over the most arbitrary of boundaries and then battle to the figurative (or literal!) death over the...
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Do you ever forget to type the TLD (like, ".com") for websites that you visit, then click the top result when the inevitable search comes up? We might recommend you to stop doing that in the future. At least on Google and Bing, the first...
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AAA video games have really ballooned in size over the last ten years, and chief among the offenders are your big open-world extravaganzas. Red Dead Redemption 2 comes in at nearly 120GB on PC, ARK: Survival Evolved is 115GB, and Ubisoft's...
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Even though they are fundamentally similar devices, we use smartphones and PCs in completely different ways. It's not uncommon to have dozens or even hundreds of processes running in the background on a PC, and that's fine, because you are...
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When you think of "video game piracy," you probably think immediately of PC games. That's not really a fair association, though; console game piracy has been going on as long as there have been video game consoles, and it's a bigger market...
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Remember the old days of code pages and customized OSes for specific languages, like DOS/V? Unicode has more or less solved the biggest issue with displaying non-ASCII glyphs on computers, although it's still up to the operating system to...
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When consumer virtual reality made a resurgence with the launch of the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, many people dismissed it as a short-lived gimmick, with widespread comparisons to the brief hype period surrounding 3D TVs. Those people have...
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With any type of creative or engineering project, you have to be aware of your target, whether that's the audience for a joke, the landscape for a building, or the use-case for a piece of hardware or software. All practical attempts to...
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Once upon a time, a video game getting a post-launch patch was arguably a bad thing, as it meant that there was a flaw so serious in the original release that it warranted a significant update. In the age of "games as a service" and...
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The messaging app landscape is kind of a wasteland of apps with similar feature sets, with a few standouts. Facebook's Messenger is popular, of course, as are services like Discord, WhatsApp and Telegram. Secure messaging app Signal is...
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One of the main reasons that the malware epidemic in the Windows XP days was so severe was because almost all those machines were configured with only a single user account that had administrative privileges by default. That meant that any...
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It's October 28th, and Halloween is nigh. Among other mischieviously-festive events, the Steam Halloween sale is on, with tons of games discounted in celebration of All Hallows' Eve.
Bubbling to the top of the pool of discounted titles...
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Like Microsoft and Sony, Nintendo gates its online-capable video games behind a subscription service. In the case of the Nintendo Switch, it's the simply-named Nintendo Switch Online. The subscription costs $19.99 USD per year, and besides...
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Super Mario Odyssey, downscaled from 4K.
To legally play console games in an emulator on a PC, you have to own both the game and the required hardware, which might leave some folks scratching their heads as to why you would even bother...
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Do you use BQE Software's BillQuick? If you do, go update it—immediately. Huntress ThreatOps identified nine zero-day vulnerabilities in BillQuick Web Suite, a time and billing software that the publisher claims is in use by over 400,000...
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Exploits in online games don't have to be security-related to be serious. Online games are commercial products; even if they're "free to play", someone's paying for the experience, and an in-game exploit that grants one player or group of...
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Remember just this past Wednesday when Microsoft made the Windows Subsystem for Android (WSA) available to Windows 11 Insiders? If not, go read that story first—the context is important. One of the myriad frustrations of WSA is that users...
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We regularly cover Intel's upcoming "Alchemist" GPUs around here. It's not every day that you get a whole new vendor entering a firmly established market space—especially not one like Intel, who actually has the means to make a solid go at...
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If you're a gamer of a certain age, you likely feel no small bit of nostalgia for the criminal misadventures of Claude, Tommy Vercetti, and CJ, the heroes of Grand Theft Auto III, Vice City, and San Andreas, respectively. The "3D universe"...
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Skate 3 running on RPCS3 emulator.
Owing to its ease of access as a development platform, there are dozens upon dozens of console game emulators for PCs. Besides their grey-market application of allowing PC gamers to play console games...
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For most of its existence, at least from an outsider's perspective, Razer has aspired to be an enthusiast brand and "lifestyle" company. That is to say that, if you so desire, you can have every tech product you own be Razer-branded. The...
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One of the few really interesting announcements surrounding the roll-out of Windows 11 was the news that the latest version of Redmond's PC OS would also support apps from the dominant mobile platform, Android. That hype quickly died down...
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