Alex Cranz

Stop me if you’ve heard this one. You’re at a holiday gathering and some very offline family member starts chatting about the show Yellowstone. Pretty soon after a very online family member looks up in confusion and asks either what the show is or why they keep hearing about it when no one they know seems to watch it. But maybe it’s not Yellowstone. Maybe its La Reina Del Sur, or The Glory, or maybe its Ginny & Georgia. What those three shows all have in common is they’re three of the most wat…

This week, Axios broke the news that Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount were looking into some sort of merger. It would make sense: Warner Bros. Discovery is trying to become a content behemoth, and Paramount would give the company even more content plus a grouping of popular (as they can be in this age) broadcast and cable channels. It would further secure Warner Bros. Discovery’s control over tentpole IP and allow it to serve as an even more potent rival to Disney and Netflix. It would also…

Very soon a whole mess of kids are probably going to be getting Switches and Quests and other game consoles and across the Threadiverse people are fiercely debating one crucial point: should those kids set the console up themselves? Consoles have never been more complex to set up! So it makes sense to set them up for your cherubic child. But kids are also struggling more with tech literacy than they have in years and weeping through a Day 0 game update would build character. Where do you stan…

That’s what NYU student and Bitcoin mine owner Jerry Yu is learning. His company BitRush (also known as BytesRush) allegedly failed to pay some contractors who worked on his Bitcoin mine in Channing, Texas. That naturally led to lawsuits, which in turn led to a quite revealing journey of how money moved between China and the United States via Binance while skirting regulations of both countries. Remember to pay your bills folks! [Attachment: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/25/technology/bit…

I am a Paramount Plus apologist. I know — going by subscription numbers alone — that I have to be because people do not subscribe to the streaming service at the same rate as Netflix or Amazon Prime, but I spend more time in the Paramount Plus app than the other two. It’s got older shows like Star Trek, Frasier, and Avatar: The Last Airbender, and newer splashy shows like... everything Taylor Sheridan produces and Frasier. It has a whole mess of football (American) and football (the rest of the…

We’re four years into the existence of Apple TV Plus, and the network still feels like it’s punching above its weight class. It doesn’t have nearly the expansive library of its competitors, but the shows (and occasional film) it does have are really, really good —usually. I’ve heard friends compare it to HBO in the 2000s, and that feels like an apt comparison. There are plenty of great movies, but there’s also an astonishingly well-programmed group of TV shows that seem to speak to a very wide…

This might not be the biggest shake-up of the Dell XPS lineup ever, but between some bigger laptops and a total revamping of the XPS portfolio, it feels like a big deal. The 13-inch Dell XPS laptop is sticking around, but the touch bar-equipped XPS Plus that ran hot in our review is gone, replaced by the 14-inch XPS. And there’s a new 16-inch XPS to replace both the 15-inch and 17-inch laptops. Plenty of laptop makers have 14-inch and 16-inch devices — notably, Apple launched a MacBook Pro in…

Gaming laptops, as a rule, look like gaming laptops. They usually have RGB lighting, a splash of vibrant color, and a hyper-stylized design. At a glance, you can almost always tell a gaming laptop from a regular one — and that’s before you even consider less visible but crucial features like discrete GPUs and superfast displays. But many of us, as much as we love to game, do not need to announce that we love to game every time we crack open our laptop, and HP’s new Omen Transcend 14 is supposed…

Gaming laptops generate a lot of heat, and Dell’s Alienware brand long ago settled on giving its gaming laptops big butts in order to exhaust it. But the problem with a large rear end on a laptop is it looks kind of goofy and makes packing it up a little more troublesome, so the Alienware M16 R2 has gotten a little booty reduction. Compared to the previous generation, the M16 R2 is just 9.82 inches deep. That’s 1.58 inches shaved off compared to the M16 R1, or about a 14-percent reduction in de…

We’ve come close to figuring out the ideal 2-in-1 laptop, but no company has nailed it yet. Lenovo’s latest attempt, the ThinkBook Plus Gen 5 Hybrid, recognizes that Android has a better touch interface than Windows and that Windows has a better laptop interface than Android — and it combines the two to try to get the best of both worlds. When you’re in laptop mode, the ThinkBook Plus Hybrid functions like a normal Windows laptop. But when you pull the display off the laptop, it turns into an…

If you happen to live in Las Vegas and have a TV with an ATSC 3.0 tuner, then, for the next few days, there will be a new channel on your TV. At first, the Roxi channel just appears to play music videos, but when you hit the pause button on your remote, the TV pauses — despite being a broadcast channel. There’s no DVR involved or app you need to download. And with the press of your remote, you can skip ahead to the next music video or even choose from other playlists, all within the broadcast c…

Yesterday TikTok presented me with what appeared to be a deepfake of Timothee Chalamet sitting in Leonardo Dicaprio’s lap and yes, I did immediately think “if this stupid video is that good imagine how bad the election misinformation will be.” OpenAI has, by necessity, been thinking about the same thing and today updated its policies to begin to address the issue. The Wall Street Journal noted the new change in policy which were first published to OpenAI’s blog. ChatGPT, Dall-e, and other OpenA…

Cable, like broadcast TV, is on the decline. People are increasingly getting their news from social media and digital media (hello), which means the big cable news channels are seeing declines in viewership and subsequent declines in ad dollars. Now, a memo from CNN CEO Mark Thompson outlines some of the early plans to try to save CNN from cable — and grow its presence on the phone. As noted by The Wall Street Journal, which has seen the memo, the first step will be combining CNN’s myriad news-…

This last weekend I was sitting in a hotel room in Memphis, staring out at the parking lot turned ice skating rink, wanting to just have a couple of hours with my brain turned off. I opened Netflix hoping to find a movie that would give me an evening’s respite. Scrolling down to the top 10, I was met with a who’s who of the 2010s and 2020s. Cowboy & Aliens, the 2011 flop with a great cast, was on the list. Queenpins, the 2021 flop with a great cast, was also there. At the top of the list was The…

Criterion has a 24-hour flash sale. That means everything in stock is 50 percent off. Having spent more money than I want to publicly admit on these sales in the past I can confirm they’re great. And given the state of digital media it’s always nice to have pristine physical copies of movies you love. Personally, I’m grabbing the double feature of The Heroic Trio and Executioners starring a baby Michelle Yeoh, Maggie Cheung ,and Anita Mui. It’s a goofy and delightfully good time. [Attachment…

My brother and his wife got a house. He mentioned it appeared to have a lot of tech installed by the last owner. I told him that was an exciting mystery for the two of us. Whatever speakers and weird smart home junk had been set up, we’d be able to repurpose. But then he moved in. Slowly, over weeks of tech support calls and hours digging through shockingly deep coat closets, we learned that while the old owner was gone, his digital ghost remained. It was lurking in the home’s lights and shades…

After months of speculation on the whereabouts of Kate Middleton, the Princess of Wales and future Queen of England, the royal family released an image on Sunday that appeared to have been edited. It’s so edited that The Associated Press and Reuters issued rare kill notifications for it. It is incredible in its ineptitude. If the goal was to reassure the public about Middleton’s whereabouts, the image has backfired spectacularly. The photo created such a skirmish that by Monday morning, the p…

After months of speculation on the whereabouts of Kate Middleton, the Princess of Wales and future Queen of England, the royal family released an image on Sunday that appeared to have been edited. It’s so edited that The Associated Press and Reuters issued rare kill notifications for it. It is incredible in its ineptitude. If the goal was to reassure the public about Middleton’s whereabouts, the image has backfired spectacularly. The photo created such a skirmish that by Monday morning, the p…

Maybe it’s because I relocated to New Jersey, but its increasingly clear that transportation apps and APIs in most of the US kind of suck. Apparently, New Jersey Transit has a gnarly one. But thankfully the PATH, an inexpensive commuter rail that runs between New York and New Jersey, has a robust enough API to make up for its often buggy app. That’s meant one developer has built a very handy app and widget that gives you exactly what you need: an easy to read train schedule. [Attachment: https…

Broadcast TV is in trouble, and for a long time now, a lot of people have pointed to a new broadcast standard, ATSC 3.0, as the way it can be saved and finally compete against streaming, YouTube, and TikTok. And finally, after years of hype that failed to deliver, there’s an actual glimmer of hope for your local TV stations. Local news is about to get a lot more interactive. Part of that’s because of Roxi, a company we covered back at CES. Then, the company was showing off an app that streamed…