This one hits particularly close to home. My father was a pinball wizard he could play any pinball game you wanted for at least fifteen minutes on a single quarter. Well it looks the museum will be following my father and be no more.

In 2015, we took you on a photo tour of the Museum of Pinball, home to one of the world’s largest collections of pinball and arcade games under one roof. Since then, the number of games grew by hundreds; the last official count was “over 1,100.” Sadly, the museum is closing for good (and being replaced by a cannabis-growing operation). An attempt to relocate the museum to Palm Springs, California, failed, and the entire collection of games will be going up for auction soon.

Have you ever wanted to smell like gasoline? Ya me neither but somebody making lots of money seems to think this is a good idea.

Ford showed off the fragrance at the Goodwood Festival of Speed, a yearly gathering of “petrolheads” (Ford’s word, not mine) from across the world. Everybody’s favorite American motor company commissioned this … “fragrance” to get people excited for its Mustang Mach-E GT, an all-electric vehicle that doesn’t smell like gasoline and looks less like a Mustang than you might expect (although it does look nice).

The US seems to be intent on making rooftop solar panels go mainstream.

The Solar Automated Permit Processing (SolarAPP+) platform, developed by DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, will be an optional portal for local governments to process permit applications automatically. Approvals typically take a week or more currently, and permit-related costs can account for about a third of installers’ overall costs, DOE said. The software speeds the process up by standardizing requirements, streamlining the application and automating some approvals.

I disagree with most of what is written here in this Kotaku editorial. Doesn’t mean I am right though and it doesn’t mean it is not a interesting read.

Before the weekend, Microsoft’s Xbox Twitter account sent a surprisingly important tweet: “Beating the game on the lowest difficulty is still beating the game.” This was then followed up by Double Fine who added that completing Psychonauts 2 with the “invincibility toggle on” still counts as beating the game. Which is just about the most refreshing thing I’ve seen come out of gaming in forever.

Peloton seems to be taking a page out of the video game DRM handbook. Just because you buy a treadmill and pay 4295 dollars for it doesn’t mean you can automatically use it.

Peloton has come up with an interesting solution to its treadmill safety issues, which have been connected to a child’s death: Force owners of its $4,295 Tread+ to either return the machine for a refund or pay a $39 monthly membership fee to use it at all. Users are outraged, and some have even compared Peloton’s demand to ransomware. It’s a reminder that when you buy or use a product whose access is controlled by someone else, that access can always be taken away from you. As more and more of the things we buy are connected to the internet, living and dying by manufacturer-pushed software updates and on platforms that can be shuttered at any time, we have less and less control over them. Even if we pay a considerable amount of money for those devices, we may never fully own them.

Another day another Micro$oft story. This is definitely not how you want to be making headlines.

Microsoft is urging Windows users to immediately install an update after security researchers found a serious vulnerability in the operating system. The security flaw, known as PrintNightmare, affects the Windows Print Spooler service. Researchers at cybersecurity company Sangfor accidentally published a how-to guide for exploiting it.

I am not sure whether this was a political decision or not. What I do know is that Amazon is very happy today.

The U.S. Department of Defense has canceled a planned 10-year, $10 billion cloud-computing contract known as JEDI that had been awarded to Microsoft in 2019, while launching plans for a new multivendor cloud-computing project that will likely be split between Microsoft and Amazon.com. The government said in a statement that “it has become clear that the JEDI Cloud contract, which has long been delayed, no longer meets the requirements to fill the DoD’s capability gaps.”

This is why you don’t feed the trolls. It just emboldens them and soon you are left with a mess like this one.

The ransomware group REvil has demanded a $70 million payment in Bitcoin for a decryptor tool following its attack on the software vendor Kaseya, cyber researchers say. The offer of a universal tool reflects the “logistical nightmare” REvil is now facing with thousands of potential victims to negotiate with, researcher Allan Liska at cybersecurity firm Recorded Future said.

Humble Bundle brings back disliked slider changes. Looks like this time the feature is here to stay.

Earlier this year, Humble Bundle came under fire for announcing it would begin limiting the amount of people’s purchases that would go toward charity and temporarily reversed course. Today, the company announced it will begin rolling out caps on donations that are more generous but still prevent customers from sending all of the money they spend on Humble Bundles directly to charity, as had been an option for the company’s entire 10-year history.

Microsoft is changing slightly a long time feature. Giving it a fresh coat of paint if you will.

Microsoft is changing its famous Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) to black in Windows 11. The software giant started testing its new design changes in a Windows 11 preview earlier this week, but the Black Screen of Death isn’t fully enabled yet. The Verge understands Microsoft will be switching to a Black Screen of Death for Windows 11, matching the new black logon and shutdown screens.

So how long exactly does it take for your electric vehicle to be greener than a gas car? This article attempts to answer that.

Jarod Cory Kelly, principal energy systems analyst at Argonne, said making EVs generates more carbon than combustion engine cars, mainly due to the extraction and processing of minerals in EV batteries and production of the power cells. But estimates as to how big that carbon gap is when a car is first sold and where the “break-even” point comes for EVs during their lifetime can vary widely, depending on the assumptions.

I don’t care if you are a Democrat, or a Republican I don’t see how you can support this secret subpoenas and warrants stuff. Have a look at this.

It is far too easy for law enforcement to target Americans’ emails, text messages and other data hosted by cloud providers, Tom Burt, Microsoft’s VP of customer security and trust, will tell lawmakers, according to selected remarks shared by Microsoft on Tuesday afternoon. “We are not suggesting that secrecy orders should only be obtained through some impossible standard,” Burt is expected to say. “We simply ask that it be a meaningful one. … Without legislative reform, abuses will continue to occur — and they will continue to occur out of sight.”

This Amazon offering looks interesting, still I am not sure I would interested because of the grab bag nature of the service.

You won’t know what records you’ll receive as part of the $25 plan until they show up at your door, but they’ll be classics from the “Golden Era of Vinyl” — the 1960s and ‘70s — chosen by curators at Amazon Music. You’ll receive vinyls from the likes of Pink Floyd, Aretha Franklin and ABBA, so if you’ve been collecting records for a while or your tastes fall outside of the mainstream, this might not be for you.

Lots of newish info on Windows 11. The most interesting thing to me is the ability to run Android apps.

Under the hood, Windows 11 is largely Windows 10, and that’s perhaps for the best. Below is the launch video. Version 11, which shouldn’t exist because 10 was supposed to be the final major version number of Windows – is due be officially released around November or December this year as a free upgrade for “eligible” users. Your PC will need UEFI Secure Boot firmware and a TPM 2.0 security chipset to run it.

Facebook’s plan to run ads on the Oculus may never get off the ground. Have a look here.

Facebook’s bid to run ads on its virtual reality headsets hit a major snag after the company’s only named developer partner said it was backing out of the plan amid a backlash from gamers. The news comes less than a week after CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s social network revealed last Wednesday that it would start testing ads on Oculus, its virtual reality headset, through a partnership with “Blaston” developer Resolution Games and two other unnamed game developers.

Not sure what I think about this. I wonder if the new Tesla Model S Plaid will kill the hot rod industry?

The quickest car we’ve ever tested is a $150K five-seat sedan, not some multimillion-dollar, carbon-fiber-encrusted road missile. It’s remarkably well rounded, exhibiting a combination of comfort, luxury, performance, and efficiency that remained a sci-fi fantasy in 2013 when we named the Model S the MotorTrend Car of the Year. Regardless of how much you care about acceleration numbers and how they’re achieved, perhaps the most important takeaway is that the Model S Plaid is absolutely among the best cars on the market today.

Nice to see CD Projekt Red is still chipping away at all the Cyberpunk 2077 flaws. Obviously the game should never have been released like this but nice to see it isn’t being abandoned.

CD Projekt Red has released another patch for Cyberpunk 2077 that fixes dozens of glitched quests, gameplay bugs, and crashing issues that continue to frustrate players since launch. Patch 1.23 picks up where previous Cyberpunk 2077 patches and hotfixes, but this one is on the smaller side compared to some others. The latest update aims to slowly bring the futuristic open-world to the polished state players expected during its launch in November 2020.

It looks like the Nvidia and Arm deal has hit a rough patch. This should be interesting to see how this plays out.

Nvidia Corp may not be able to meet a March 2022 deadline for closing its $40 billion acquisition of British chip technology firm Arm Ltd due to European regulators’ reluctance to consider the case until after the summer holidays, people familiar with the matter told Reuters. Nvidia announced the Arm deal last year, sparking an immediate backlash in the semiconductor industry, where Arm has long been a neutral player licensing key intellectual property to customers who are otherwise intense rivals, including Qualcomm Inc, Samsung Electronics Co Ltd, and Apple Inc.

I saw rumors several weeks ago that Windows 11 was coming but didn’t judge them as credible until now.

Microsoft hasn’t talked publicly about Windows 11 yet, but this is effectively confirmation that the OS is coming. The alternative is that Microsoft intends to leave the PC space altogether and kill Windows. The company may have pivoted to a cloud-first approach to business since Satya Nadella became CEO, but Windows remains an important part of its product stack (and revenue).

This news article asks the pressing question should tech companies really be adding supply output ?

With the pandemic having sent the world into a tech buying frenzy, the chips inside our PC components have all but passed into myth. And as manufacturers scramble to fill the gap in supply, Jon Peddie Research has issued a warning about the dangers of overcompensation. “The risk,” says Peddie, “is that semiconductor suppliers will be lured into over-reaction and believe that suddenly 100s of millions of new users have appeared and the demand will stay high. That’s not only not realistic, it’s also not true—where are they coming from—not this planet?” This may be a pessimistic outlook, but it is grounded in experience.

Ring has thrown privacy advocates a small bone today.

That changes next week when Ring will no longer allow police departments to contact its customers to ask for footage pertinent to active investigations. Instead, police can post “Requests for Assistance” on Ring’s Neighbors app timeline, which gives users a public forum for freely commenting on the requests. A “Tap here to help” button will also let Ring customers in the immediate vicinity of the incident under investigation privately share footage with police. (Ring will share information including your name, home address and email with the police if you use this option.)

This story was news to me. One more example of how I don’t know everything I guess.

Computer chips have advanced to the point that they’re no longer reliable: they’ve become “mercurial,” as Google puts it, and may not perform their calculations in a predictable manner. Not that they were ever completely reliable. CPU errors have been around as long as CPUs themselves. They arise not only from design oversights but also from environmental conditions and from physical system failures that produce faults.

It looks like Best Buy is going old-school to combat the filthy bots. Waiting in line launch day reminds me of my youth.

The fix for bots snapping up stock of the latest graphics cards: simply don’t sell them online. At least that appears to be Best Buy’s answer to the ongoing tussle between man and machine for cutting-edge tech; for the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti launch, Best Buy will be only selling Founders Edition cards in-store. “Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition graphics card will have limited quantities available on Thursday, June 3, at select Best Buy stores only,” the company outlines in a post.