Month: September 2020

The news cycle is bleak. Easter eggs are fun. And maybe it’s the nostalgia speaking (and the recent anniversary), but Windows 95 still reigns supreme in my memory as the best operating system of all time. It’s for these three very scientific reasons that the reveal of a long-hidden Windows 95 easter egg temporarily cured my 2020-induced depression.

The Easter Egg was revealed on Living Computers: Museum + Labs’ YouTube Channel (via BoingBoing) to celebrate Microsoft’s 45th anniversary. In the video, Windows 95 developer Jeff Parsons reveals how to find a secret credits sequence.

“Windows 95 was packed with new features thanks to over three years of work by literally hundreds of people,” Parsons says in the video. “But who were all those people?” Turns out to access the hidden credits, you’d have to make use of one of the new features introduced with Windows 95: Long file names.

To trigger the easter egg, you have to create a new folder and then initially name it “and now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for”. Once that’s done, you have to rename the folder “we proudly present for your viewing pleasure”. After that, you again have to rename the folder, “The Microsoft Windows 95 Product Team!” Then, a user can click on the folder to view the credits.

The credits sequence itself isn’t like the ones you’d see at the end of a movie. Oh no, it’s replete with Windows 95 glory. On top of an excellent MIDI soundtrack (CLOUDS.MID by Brian Orr), the names whiz past in a horizontal marquee animation atop of very WordArt-y background. There are some recognisable names in there, including the likes of Bill Gates and Brad Silverberg (and Parsons is in there too). Though simple, the sequence is quite long at around 12 minutes but watching all of it is sort of like stepping into a time warp back to the mid-90s, when tech was still fun and less of an all-consuming nightmare hellscape.

Given the three fairly long and specific “passcodes” you’d have to enter, it’s unlikely most folks outside the product team ever knew this easter egg existed. It’s also not the only retro Windows easter egg. The Windows 3.1 development team also hid a secret credits section that could be accessed by holding down Ctrl+Alt+Shift in the About section of the Program manager. But perhaps a more fitting easter egg for 2020 was hidden in Microsoft Office 95’s version of Excel called the Hall of Tortured Souls. It’s a credit sequence that looks exactly like what it sounds like. However, as this blogger has a severe case of the brain worms, I’ll take the wholesome MIDI credits, thank you very much.

Known for its tablets, TVs, and phones, TCL has this week announced a new technology, NXTPAPER, that could totally change how you think about e ink. E ink displays are known for being great to stare at for hours and perfect for reading books (and sometimes even comics), but the latest colour displays from E Ink have low resolution and slow refresh rates, making them unusable for video. TCL claims its new NXTPAPER tech could be a solution.

TCL’s press release is a little confusing, as it appears to compare NXTPAPER both to E Ink’s displays and to traditional LCD displays that you find in most tablets and phones today. But by all accounts, the technology used in NXTPAPER sounds like e ink technology. The press release claims it will be 36% thinner than LCD displays and 65% more power-efficient – which lines up with the gains you get from e ink.

Last week, E Ink told the blog Good Ereader that it had plans to improve its own colour E Ink technology. While we adore the first colour E Ink devices, they’ve not been without their flaws, including a paltry 100-PPI resolution and slower refresh rates. E Ink promised to at least double the resolution to 200 PPI by 2021, with a goal of hitting 300 PPI – the resolution of high-end LCD and monochrome E Ink displays – at a later date.

We don’t know the exact planned resolution for TCL’s competing NXTPAPER technology, but the company claims it will be full HD, and that the text incorporated will allow it to have 25% higher contrast than traditional e ink devices.

TCL also says it will offer a “paper-like visual experience in full colour with no flicker and no harmful blue light” and that it will rely on natural light – which, again, sounds like e ink.

Currently, the company E Ink is the primary producer of e ink displays and the technology behind them, but TCL has rapidly made a name for itself in the TV and phone display arena. Branching into e ink is a welcome surprise. We’ve reached out to TCL for more details on its NXTPAPER technology, and we’re curious to see what it looks like when (or if) it eventually finds its way to devices we can own.

For now, it sounds like E Ink has a little competition, and the e ink space is about to get even more interesting.

The iPad Air (2019) has an arguably old-fashioned look, being lumbered with a large chin and forehead so as to accommodate a classic Apple home button. However, this feature does confer the advantage of supporting the OEM’s form of fingerprint authentication, Touch ID, whereas the more expensive Pro variants have sacrified it in the name of thin bezels.

Recent leaks have suggested that its successor, which could be called the iPad Air 4, (or, according to additional rumors, the iPad Air (2021)) may also adopt this slim-border design. It may make sense, especially if the new iPhones also turn out with the same general language. SvetApple has prepared renders that show how such a budget iPad might look.

The results do look a lot like a Pro (albeit more like a 2018 variant than a newer model). It creates a nice effect in the gold, silver and gray colorways imagined for this “Air”. SvetApple projects that the new slim-border display, which has a modern aspect ratio, may be 10.8 to 11 inches in diagonal length.

However, one thing this updated screen does not have is the rumored in-display form of Touch ID. Instead, this security feature is integrated into the power button. SvetApple asserts that this hardware feature will be called the Top Button.

It is located next to one of multiple speakers that is mirrored on the opposite side of the purported device’s flat edge. The “new iPad Air” is also depicted as supporting USB type C charging and syncing and as having connectors for a Magic Keyboard.

Otherwise, the iPad Air 4 is thought to be graced with the A14 Bionic chipset when it comes out, rather than an older Apple SoC. However, it may have just 4GB of RAM with a 128GB internal storage option. This complete package may start at US$499 and range upwards to $649. SvetApple speculates that it will launch on September 8, 2020.

Intel dropped a whole bunch of details on their 11th gen Tiger Lake series this week complete with detailed press releases, interviews, and performance slides. According to their own benchmark results for the Core i7-1165G7, raw multi-thread performance should rival the Ryzen 7 4700U while the integrated Xe GPU should be on par with the discrete GeForce MX350.

The problem with manufacturer-provided numbers is that they usually show the processor at its best running on a machine that isn’t yet ready for retail. When pressed for an answer on what specific Tiger Lake laptop Intel were using for their public benchmarks, the chipmaker wouldn’t confirm with us other than it was a “thin and light system”. In other words, the numbers they are showing are unlikely to be representative of what you’ll eventually get from OEMs. This detail is important because it’s inevitable that laptops with the same Core i7-1165G7 processor will have different CPU performance levels due to how laptop makers will choose to exploit the wide 10 W to 28 W dynamic tuning range.

One only needs to look at the Ice Lake Core i7-1065G7 as an example. The Microsoft Surface Laptop is able to run the CPU 75 percent faster than on the LG Gram 17 with plenty of other examples in between these two extremes. We fully expect to see similar results when Tiger Lake becomes more widely available across different Ultrabook designs.

Earlier this week the Stable Channel of Chrome OS 85 was released to Chromebooks. Hot on the heels of that, the Chrome OS 86 Dev Channel was updated and I’ve been using it on my daily driver. If you’re the kind of Chromebook user I am and have one or two dozen tabs open at any given time, you’re likely going to love the new tab search feature.

Here’s a screenshot of it in action:

Above you can see I have 9 pinned tabs, two regular active tabs and a new tab page, just for good measure.

By clicking on the drop down arrow to the right of the last tab shown, there’s a dropdown menu of all open tabs. You can’t see all of them but at least five do appear. And typing in the search bar will, of course, search through all of your active tabs.

There’s currently a keyboard shortcut to open this menu as well: It’s CTRL + Shift + E, if you’d rather not mouse or tap around.

This feature is enabled by default in the Chrome OS 86 Dev Channel, although I suspect you can enable it in Chrome OS 85 behind this flag: chrome://flags/#enable-tab-search

Since this is on by default with the Chrome OS 86 Dev Channel, I fully expect this to arrive for everyone on the Stable Channel when Chrome OS 86 is released in roughly six weeks.

Granted, if you’re just doing some basic browsing with a few tabs, you likely won’t need this feature. Once that row of browser tabs fills up though? You’ll probably be all over this new addition to Chrome OS 86.