Sony’s excellent WH-1000XM5 headphones are down to $348 for Prime Day

For our money, Sony’s WH-1000XM5 is the best set of wireless headphones on the market right now. They’re absolutely worth considering if you’re in need of a new set of cans or simply want an upgrade from what you’re already rocking. Now might be the right time to take the leap, as the WH-1000XM5 is on sale for Prime Day. The headphones are currently $348, which is $50 off the regular price.

Buy Sony’s WH-1000XM5 at Amazon – $348

The WH-1000XM5 offers almost across-the-board improvements over the WH-1000XM4, our previous favorite headphones. An overdue redesign makes this model more comfortable than its predecessors, thanks to improved weight distribution and synthetic leather ear cups.

These headphones have new 30mm carbon fiber drivers, which we felt deliver punchier bass than the M4. In fact, the all-round sound quality is more refined, save for occasional skips while connected to a MacBook Pro — which may be a Bluetooth issue. Bolstered by eight active noise cancellation microphones, double the number found in the M4, the M5’s ANC is better at minimizing background noise too. Speaking of mics, we found that the M5 offers the best call quality yet from the 1000X series.

Sony claims you’ll get up to 30 hours of listening time from a single charge, and that’s with ANC enabled. Our only major gripe with the M5 headphones is that they’re typically $50 more expensive than the M4’s regular price of $348. At least during the Prime Day sale, that’s no longer an issue.

If you prefer wireless earbuds to over-ear cans, a larger Sony sale has discounted a few buds that we like. Both the Sony LinkBuds and LinkBuds S are on sale for $128, while the budget-friendly WF-C500 earbuds have dropped to only $58.

Shop Sony Prime Day deals

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Apple’s second-gen AirPods Pro drop to their lowest price ever for Prime Day

Apple’s second-gen AirPods Pro haven’t even been available for a month and you can still already find a deal on them. The price has dropped a bit as part of Amazon’s major Prime Day sale. You’ll be able to pick up a pair of the new AirPods Pro for $235, which is $14 off the regular price. Sure, that’s not the steepest discount ever, but it’s the lowest price we’ve seen for the earbuds to date.

Buy Apple AirPods (2nd-gen) at Amazon – $235

We gave the latest AirPods Pro a score of 88 in our review, an improvement over the 87 we gave to the first-gen set. While the design is ostensibly the same, Apple made some upgrades to the internals (including the introduction of an H2 chip), as well as one on the outside. Its latest higher-end earbuds have swipe controls. However, we found them somewhat finicky and had to steady the stem with a thumb in order to control the volume by swiping. The second-gen AirPods Pro also offer so-so battery life (six hours with active noise cancellation enabled and seven hours with it off) and we had mixed results with the Personalized Spatial Audio feature, with a sound profile that was too treble-focused.

Overall, though, we felt that the second-gen AirPods Pro are a solid upgrade over the first-edition earbuds. Apple has improved the sound quality (including for SharePlay audio) and it offers the best transparency mode in any earbuds. The new AirPods Pro deliver solid ANC performance as well. On top of that, the ability to seamlessly switch from one Apple device to another is handy for those who are entrenched in the company’s ecosystem.

As for the charging case, that now has a speaker, which should make it easier for people to pinpoint its location if they’ve misplaced it (having a U1 chip to locate it with Find My helps too). The case is IPX4 rated, like the earbuds, and it has a lanyard loop — though you’ll need to buy a lanyard separately.

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Hackers forced more than a dozen US public airport websites offline

Hackers believed to be based in Russia temporarily forced around 14 public-facing websites for US airports offline on Monday. The LaGuardia, O’Hare and LAX websites were among those targeted, and most are back online. A senior US government official said that air traffic control, internal airport communications and other critical operations were not affected, but travelers looking for security wait times or other information may have been inconvenienced, according to ABC News. An LAX spokesperson affirmed that “no internal airport systems were compromised and there were no operational disruptions.”

“On Monday October 10th, 2022 at approx. 0300 hours there was a denial of service incident lasting 15 minutes that resulted in intermittent delays accessing the LaGuardia airport website,” a Port Authority spokesperson told ABC News. “The Port Authority’s cybersecurity defense system did its job by detecting the incident quickly, addressing the problem in 15 minutes, and enabling us to alert others by notifying federal authorities immediately. There was no operational impact to any Port Authority facilities.”

The incident, said to be the result of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, have been pinned on pro-Russia hacker group Killnet. The hackers are not believed to be government actors, however. There’s no evidence that the Russian government was involved in this incident, a cybersecurity analyst said.

Both the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and Transportation Security Administration are monitoring the situation, CNN reports. CISA noted it didn’t have any worries about airport operational disruptions.

1010music’s Razzmatazz is a delightfully pink and pocketable drum machine

The Lemondrop and Fireball Nanobox grooveboxes pack a lot of punch for their size, and 1010music is expanding the lineup with the Razzmatazz drum machine. The pocket-sized device packs in a 64-step sequencer and eight drum voices. Each of the voices has two FM oscillators and a WAV sample layer, which should enable you to blend organic, acoustic and digital elements to create unique drum sounds.

Filters, resonators, bit-crushers, delay, reverb and four types of distortion can help you produce distinct sounds too. But if you’d rather not go through all that trouble, you can opt to use the Razzmatazz’s 120 preset kits and sequences instead.

You’ll be able to put together tracks with the help of eight drum and percussion pads, which you can control via the two-inch touchscreen or a MIDI device. Using the Super Stepper visual sequencer, 1010music says beatmakers can tap or swipe to create rhythms and simultaneously see all eight pads across 16 steps. You’ll be able to create lengthy drum sequences of up to 64 steps, each of which can last as long as eight bars. Along with the touchscreen, the groovebox has two knobs and four buttons.

The Razzmatazz is a proper sampler, since there’s a line-in jack through which you can record audio. Alternatively, you can load WAV files onto the device using a microSD card. There’s also a mode that enables you to play back loops or sample slices. However, there’s unfortunately no option to slice up samples on the device, which is powered through a USB-C connector.

Best of all, the Razzmatazz fits in with the candy-colored Nanobox aesthetic. It comes in an eye-catching hot pink. You can pick up the groovebox from the 1010music website and other retailers for $399.

1010music Razzmatazz Nanobox drum machine
1010music

EA starts rolling out a new PC app to replace Origin

It has been two years since EA announced it was working on a replacement for its Origin PC client, and it’s now starting to roll out the new app to Windows users. The publisher claims that the EA app, which has just concluded its open beta phase, is its fastest and lightest PC client to date.

EA is promising a streamlined design and suggests navigation will be easier. It seems the app has improved social features as well, since you’ll be able to connect your EA account to platforms including Steam, Xbox and PlayStation — which could come in handy for games with cross-play support, such as Apex Legends and FIFA 23. You’ll have a custom EA ID that should make it easy for your pals to recognize you.

The publisher says that it will soon invite Origin users to switch over to the new app. As you might imagine, all your stuff will be present, including your games, save data and friends list. It’s worth noting that the new client will only be available on Windows PC for now. If you’re a macOS user, you’ll continue to use the Origin for Mac app for the foreseeable future. However, EA noted that it will have more to share on that front in the coming months.

Frontline Ukraine troops are reportedly enduring Starlink outages

Ukrainian forces have reportedly been dealing with Starlink outages as they try to take back Russian-occupied areas. Some of the outages, which are said to have caused a severe loss of communication over the last several weeks, occurred as troops broke through the frontline into territory controlled by Russia as well as during battles, a Ukraine government official told The Financial Times.

The cause of the apparent outages are not yet known. Engadget has contacted Starlink owner SpaceX for comment.

Starlink outages were reported in the four regions that Russia annexed last month following referendums, the legitimacy of which have been disputed. As the Financial Times notes, there’s a significant Ukrainian counteroffensive in those areas.

Some terminals are said to have not been working in areas near Khariv, which Ukraine has almost entirely liberated, amid a push into Luhansk, one of the regions that Russia has claimed. However, military officials claimed this week that Starlink terminals were working in freshly liberated areas east of Izyum and in southern Kherson, according to the report.

Ukrainian troops have been using the terminals to stay in contact, operate drones and receive intelligence while stationed in parts of the country that don’t have other secure networking options. Soon after Russia’s invasion, SpaceX, with the help of American taxpayers, sent thousands of Starlink terminals to Ukraine for both military and civilian use.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk warned Ukrainians to exercise caution while using Starlink. Researchers pointed out that Russia may be able to use signals from the terminals for targeting purposes. Meanwhile, Musk this week caused anger and concern in Ukraine and among the country’s allies when he suggested that referendums should be held to determine the Russia-Ukraine border. He also claimed SpaceX has spent $80 million to support Ukraine through Starlink.

Even Signal is hopping on the Stories bandwagon

Like Instagram, Facebook and so many others, Signal is hopping aboard the Stories bandwagon. The privacy-focused messaging app started beta testing an ephemeral Stories feature this week. Users can share videos, images and text-based messages with their friends. Stories will vanish after 24 hours.

As with the rest of the platform, Signal’s Stories have end-to-end encryption. Users can choose who to share them with. Along with groups and custom friends lists, you may opt to share a story with all of your connections (your contacts and anyone else you’ve spoken with one-on-one). If you opt to post a story to a group, others can react, reply to and share it.

For now, the only people who will see Stories are other beta testers. If you don’t want to see Stories in Signal, you can switch them off in the settings. This will prevent you from posting Stories of your own, though.

It remains to be seen whether Stories can help Signal to get people spending more time in the app or even to bring in new users. Instagram famously aped one of Snapchat’s most-used features with its take on Stories. They’re now a core part of the Instagram experience. Not every platform that has tried Stories has stuck with it, though. In 2021, Twitter and LinkedIn both ditched their Stories features after less than a year.

GM will make an Ultium battery pack prototype for the US military

General Motors, through its GM Defense subsidiary, will build a battery pack prototype for the Department of Defense to test and analyze. The agency’s Defense Innovation Unit is seeking a scalable design that can be used in electrified versions of tactical military vehicles.

The battery pack will be based on GM’s Ultium platform, which it’s using to power its own electric vehicles. Due to the type of battery cells it employs, Ultium is billed as a modular and scalable system that can be adapted to different needs, so it may just fit the bill for the military.

GM said the military wants a light- to heavy-duty EV for use in garrison and operational environments in order to reduce fossil fuel use. As a result, that should reduce the military’s carbon emissions.

This isn’t the first partnership that GM Defense has forged with the military. In July, the company secured a deal with the US Army to provide an electric Hummer for testing. Last year, GM Defense president Steve duMont said the company would build an electric military vehicle prototype based on the Hummer EV.

Researchers discover star being consumed by its smaller, deader neighbor

The Sun might be a solitary star in our solar system, but around half of all other stars in the Milky Way are part of binary systems, in which two orbit each other. These can have incredibly fast orbital periods — scientists have found two white dwarfs that take just 5 minutes and 21 seconds to orbit each other. Another binary system is notable for a different reason: one star is feasting on the other.

Around 3,000 light years away, there’s a binary system that belongs to a class called “cataclysmic variables.” That’s an incredible term I’m going to use after my next failed cooking experiment, by the way. In space terms, when a star similar to our sun tightly orbits a white dwarf, that’s a cataclysmic variable. As Reuters notes, “variable” relates to the combined brightness of the two stars changing over time, at least in terms of how we view the system from terra firma. These luminosity levels can change significantly, which is where the “cataclysmic” part comes into play.

The two stars in the 8 billion-year-old system in question orbit each other every 51 minutes. That’s the shortest known orbital period for a cataclysmic variable system. The distance between the stars has narrowed over millions of years and they’re now closer to each other than we are to the Moon, researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and elsewhere have determined. In a paper published in Nature this week, the researchers stated that the white dwarf is drawing material away from the Sun-like partner.

“It’s an old pair of stars, where one of the two moved on — when stars die of old age they become white dwarfs — but then this remnant began to eat its companion,” MIT astrophysicist and the paper’s lead author Kevin Burdge told Reuters. “Right before the second one could end its stellar life cycle and become a white dwarf in the way that stars normally do — by evolving into a type of star called a red giant — the leftover white dwarf remnant of the first star interrupted the end of the companion’s lifecycle and started slowly consuming it.”

The researchers found that the larger star has a similar temperature to the Sun, but has been reduced to around 10 percent of our celestial neighbor’s diameter. It’s now about the size of Jupiter. The white dwarf is far smaller, as it has a diameter around 1.5 times the size of Earth’s. However, it has a dense core, with a mass of around 56 percent that of our Sun’s.

The white dwarf has been munching away on hydrogen from the larger star’s outer layers, leaving the latter unusually rich in helium. The larger star is also morphing into a teardrop shape due to the gravitational pull of the white dwarf. That’s one reason for the changes in the binary system’s levels of brightness.

MIT notes that the system can emit “enormous, variable flashes of light” as a result of the hydrogen-sapping process. It added that, long ago, astronomers believed these flashes to be the consequence of an unknown cataclysm. While we have a clearer understanding of the situation these days, this is more evidence, as if it were needed, that space is cool and terrifying in equal measure.

Valve finally opens up reservations for its $89 Steam Deck dock

If you’ve been waiting for Valve to release its delayed Steam Deck dock instead of opting for a third-party version, there’s some good news: the company has opened up pre-orders. The Steam Deck Docking Station, as the unit is officially known, costs $89.

While you can hook the Steam Deck up to an external display directly, the dock should make life a little easier if you want to play games on a bigger screen. You can simply use it as a charging station as well. 

The dock has three USB-A 3.1 Gen1 ports, but you can connect peripherals to your Steam Deck wirelessly too. It has a gigabit Ethernet port, which could help you to download games faster. As for connecting your Steam Deck to external displays, the dock has DisplayPort 1.4 and HDMI 2.0 ports. There’s a passthrough USB-C charging port too.

Steam Deck dock
Valve

The unit ships with the same power supply that comes with the Steam Deck — it won’t enhance the Steam Deck’s performance when it’s docked. Even so, you don’t actually need to plug a charger into the Dock. It can run off the Steam Deck’s battery, but in that case the USB ports will have reduced throughput to conserve power.

Valve will provide ongoing support and make improvements to the Docking Station through software updates. A firmware installation wizard may pop up when you slot in your Steam Deck.

In June, Valve said it had to delay the dock indefinitely due to supply chain issues. Those who are pre-ordering may be able to get their hands on the device as soon as this quarter.

Meanwhile, the Steam Deck itself no longer needs a reservation in some regions. At least in the US and Canada, you can now simply order a Steam Deck from Valve. The expected shipment date is between one and two weeks. Over the last few months, Valve has been able to significantly ramp up production capacity and said it would be able to fulfill all reservations by the end of the year. It looks like the company is well ahead of that schedule. 

On another note, I received my Steam Deck just as I started writing this story and, oh, look at that. It’s suddenly lunch time. What a coincidence.