The Retroid Pocket Mini has an unfixable issue that’s causing certain graphical effects for emulated games not to work properly. Retroid, the China-based company that makes the Pocket Mini, announced on Discord that it will accept returns of the device but only during a limited March 8th to March 14th window — and capped at just 200 returns from owners who live outside of China, as RetroHandhelds reports.

Earlier in the week, the outlet says Retroid acknowledged it couldn’t fix the issue, which affects how the screen shows scanline and pixel grid shaders used to give classic emulated games the appearance of being played on the CRT displays they were designed for. The effects can show up as “misplaced scanlines, uneven pixels, or a slightly distorted image,” RetroHandhelds writes.

In this morning’s message, Retroid says carrying out this return campaign is a “large and costly endeavor,” and that it expects “a lot of return requests outside of screen-related issues.” Retroid also mentions it is asking customers to pay to ship their returns, which it promises to reimburse. Finally, the company added that it will offer all Pocket Mini owners “a $10 stackable coupon” for two of its future handhelds.

As Russ from the Retro Game Corps YouTube channel notes in a post on Reddit asking for recommendations to pass along to the company for dealing with the situation, Retroid is in a hard situation as a small company that now faces having to pay for very expensive shipping on returns. But that doesn’t change the fact that many gamers who bought the $199 handheld specifically to play retro games are left with a device whose otherwise impressive display does a bad job with some of the oldest tricks in the emulation book.

Nintendo added an absolute gem to its Switch Online library of classic titles this week: the 1994 Game Boy game, Donkey Kong. The beloved game arrives alongside the 1995 puzzle game, Mario’s Picross. Both are available now for Nintendo Switch Online subscribers, right in time for Mario Day (March 10).

Donkey Kong built upon the arcade game that came before it, and features roughly 100 stages. The story should feel pretty familiar even to those who don’t have a nostalgic connection to it — Donkey Kong has kidnapped a beautiful woman (Pauline) and Mario is in hot pursuit to rescue her. While the Super Game Boy brought some enhancements for the original game, those haven’t been carried over for Nintendo Switch. But it should still be a treat to revisit as is. Mario’s Picross offers a totally different experience, presenting the player with a couple hundred puzzles to solve by chiseling away at boxes and uncovering the secret image below.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/nintendo/you-can-now-play-donkey-kong-94-through-nintendo-switch-online-225857703.html?src=rss

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Warner Bros. Discovery just released a new trailer for the second (and maybe last) season of The Last of Us, offering an action-packed view of the fraught world Pedro Joel Miller (Pedro Pascal) and his daughter Ellie (Bella Ramsey) are facing.

Things look bleak for both of them, and the show’s fungal-based zombies don’t seem to have become any less dangerous. The trailer’s centerpiece is a snowy human settlement that, at one point, is assaulted by a zombie horde. There are lots of explosions and at one point, a monstrous zombie being blasted by a flamethrower. There are also brief clips of characters fleeing in the woods and an ominous close-up of a sickle just before a shot of someone being hanged.

Interspersed with shots of them are flashbacks of Joel and Ellie, the latter of whom is intense in shots of her sprinting and firing a handgun or running over the top of an underground train. There are brief clips of other characters, including a man and his daughter who seem to be fleeing something — or someone — in the woods. The trailer closes on Ellie saying to what looks like a guilt-stricken Joel, “You swore.”

The Last of Us season two also stars Jeffrey Wright as Isaac Dixon, Isabela Merced as Dina, and Kaitlyn Dever as Abby. It debuts April 13th on Max.

Things are about to hit the fan for everybody when The Last of Us returns for season two on April 13.

The US Department of Justice is still calling for Google to sell its web browser Chrome, according to a Friday court filing.  The DOJ first proposed that Google should sell Chrome last year, under then-President Joe Biden, but it seems to be sticking with that plan under the second Trump administration. The department is, however, […]

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Employees of the General Services Administration, which manages government real estate and certain IT efforts, have been given a custom chatbot from Elon Musk’s DOGE to help automate tasks, according to a new report from Wired, with an internal memo telling workers it can be used to “draft emails, create talking points, summarize text, write code.” The chatbot, GSAi, gives users a choice of three models — Claude Haiku 3.5 (the default), Claude Sonnet 3.5 v2 and Meta Llama 3.2 — and is ultimately meant to be used to “analyze contract and procurement data,” Wired reports.

The GSA is one of the many agencies that have been affected by the federal government’s mass job cuts, and has so far let go upwards of 1,000 workers, sources told NPR in a report published this week. That includes roughly 90 people from its tech branch, according to Wired. In memos about the new chatbot seen by Wired, workers were told not to input “federal nonpublic information,” personally identifiable information or “controlled unclassified information.” It was reportedly tested among a smaller group last month before rolling out to the roughly 1,500 workers who now have access, with plans to expand down the line.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/doge-has-reportedly-started-rolling-out-a-custom-chatbot-to-automate-some-government-tasks-211616079.html?src=rss

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Can't get enough of Michael Keaton's Batman? If so, then a new novel set in the same universe may be just what you need.

This was an insanely busy week in consumer-facing Google announcements. Approaching Google I/O levels, which is 72 days away, let’s alphabetically recap everything:

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Welcome to Indie App Spotlight. This is a weekly 9to5Mac series where we showcase the latest apps in the indie app world. If you’re a developer and would like your app featured, get in contact.

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Rovelist is a simple habit tracker app with a clean design, home screen widgets, and an intuitive interface. It’s available on iPhone, and provides everything you’d need to stay motivated and on top of everything you need to get done regularly.

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Google has quietly updated the webpage for its Responsible AI and Human Centered Technology (RAI-HCT) team, the team charged with conducting research into AI safety, fairness, and explainability, to scrub mentions of “diversity” and “equity.” A previous version of the page used language such as “marginalized communities,” “diverse,” “underrepresented groups,” and “equity” to describe the […]

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A federal judge is allowing an AI-related copyright lawsuit against Meta to move forward, although he dismissed part of the suit. In Kadrey vs. Meta, authors including Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, and Ta-Nehisi Coates have alleged that Meta has violated their intellectual property rights by using their books to train its Llama AI models, and […]

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The US Department of Justice (DOJ) is still pushing to break up Google, according to a revised proposal filed Friday with federal Judge Amit Mehta. As in its proposal last year, the DOJ says Google should be forced to sell its web browser, Google Chrome, and potentially Android, as punishment for being a monopolist, as Judge Mehta found last year, reports The New York Times.

In its new filing, the DOJ calls Google “an economic goliath” that it says “has denied users of a basic American value—the ability to choose in the marketplace.” To deal with that, “Google must divest the Chrome browser … to provide an opportunity for a new rival to operate a significant gateway to search the internet.” The department also still recommends that Google must change its Android business practices to enable competition or be ordered to sell the operating system. It dropped a suggestion that the company be allowed to sell Android in lieu of making the changes.

Both spin-offs were part of the proposal the DOJ filed last year. But whether it would hold that line under Trump, whom tech companies have plied with money and praise since his election, has been a mystery. The President has stepped back some Biden-era tech regulations on things like AI safety and cryptocurrency, but has also suggested that the threat of regulation can be useful for getting the results he wants.

The department’s proposal eases up in some ways. The DOJ now supports letting Google pay Apple for services unrelated to search. It also no longer calls for Google to drop its AI investments — the Times writes that, instead, the DOJ reccomennds requiring the company to “notify federal and state officials before proceeding with investments in AI.”

Google filed its own proposal that doesn’t include selling Chrome but instead suggests the court place restrictions on the sorts of deals it can make, such as barring it from requiring that a phone maker that licenses Google Play also preinstall other Google software, like the Google Search app or Chrome. As noted by the Times, a hearing on the proposals is scheduled for April.

Apple @ Work is exclusively brought to you by Mosyle, the only Apple Unified Platform. Mosyle is the only solution that integrates in a single professional-grade platform all the solutions necessary to seamlessly and automatically deploy, manage & protect Apple devices at work. Over 45,000 organizations trust Mosyle to make millions of Apple devices work-ready with no effort and at an affordable cost. Request your EXTENDED TRIAL today and understand why Mosyle is everything you need to work with Apple.

Apple Business Manager (and School Manager) is Apple’s web-based portal that helps IT teams deploy and manage their Apple fleets at scale, ensuring automatic enrollment, configuration, and oversight of company-owned hardware that connects to their device management system of choice. Over the years,

With a recent update, Apple Business Manager now provides IT administrators with additional visibility into released and replaced devices. This makes it easier to monitor when a device was removed, which person authorized the release, and whether a replacement device has been issued.

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Disney's making the release of The Mandalorian and Grogu even more special with a Galaxy's Edge mission arriving the same day as the movie.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Netflix has tapped Fast & Furious director Justin Lin to direct its upcoming movie adaptation of BRZRKR, the popular comic by Keanu Reeves and Matt Kindt about an immortal warrior. Netflix first announced plans to create both a live-action movie and an anime based on BRZRKR back in 2021, with Reeves starring in the former and returning to voice his character in the animated show. But, we’ve heard little about the projects since. In the meantime, Reeves and author China Miéville dove back into the BRZRKR lore with The Book of Elsewhere, which was released last year.

There are still no details on when the Netflix adaptations will air, but we can safely expect both to bring violence and plenty of action. BRZRKR follows a half-mortal, half-god man known as “B” who has fought his way through 80,000 years of life. By the time he accepts a job killing for the US government, he’s very much over his immortality and looking for a way out. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Terminator Zero showrunner Mattson Tomlin is writing the script for the movie and the anime.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/streaming/the-netflix-film-adaptation-of-keanu-reeves-brzrkr-now-has-its-director-184902694.html?src=rss

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The Groov app's insoles are made based on images taken by your iPhone, and I was pleasantly surprised by how well it learned the odd shape of my feet.

Worst. New coworker. Ever.

In case you missed it, Apple announced two new iPads, the M3 iPad Air, and the new iPad 11th generation. As an iPad first user, these iPads just add to the excitement because they allow you to get even more power for at a cheaper price point! Another nice aspect is that these are internal upgrades, meaning that accessories that worked with their predecessors will also work with these newly revamped iPads. Here are some of my ‘must get’ accessories for your new iPad Air!

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Welcome back to Week in Review. This week we’re looking at OpenAI potentially charging $20,000 a month for a specialized AI agent, the unexpected return of early-internet darling Digg, a company genetically engineering mice to have mammoth-like fur, and more! Let’s do this. OpenAI could charge up to $20,000 per month for specialized AI “agents.” […]

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Artificial intelligence is advancing at a neck-breaking speed, but a critical issue looms: AI models, especially large language models (LLMs), need real-time data from external sources to deliver relevant, context-aware responses. Today, developers must build custom integrations for every API—whether […]

The post MCP and the need for AI interoperability: Why we must avoid vendor lock-in to ensure a unified future first appeared on Tech Startups.