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Tech News
A new open-source utility called balrogg recompresses existing Ogg Vorbis and Opus audio files without any loss of quality, typically shaving 8-12% off .ogg files and 3-8% off .opus files. The command-line tool, licensed under GPLv3 and hosted on GitHub, supports batch processing across multiple cores, adjustable compression effort levels from -1 to -9, and optional progress reporting during encoding and decoding.
Sequoia Capital chairman Doug Leone, worth an estimated $11.7 billion, told his dentist to perform a root canal without novocaine so he wouldn't miss a scheduled meeting. He described gritting through the drilling by comparing it to a soldier's battlefield injuries, then went straight to his meeting before changing his sweat-drenched shirt.
The Toronto Blue Jays posted an animated promotional clip for a Nestea brand partnership that showed telltale signs of AI generation, including garbled text and a character with three arms. When fans called out the flaws, the team's social media account insisted the video was made by a real animator, a claim a community note later disputed.
The LTO Consortium, backed by HPE, IBM, and Quantum, reports that shipped capacity of LTO-compatible tape media rose 57% year-over-year in the first quarter of 2026. The surge follows a 9% dip in 2025 and comes after 2024's record 176.5 exabytes shipped, with LTO-9 tapes driving much of the latest growth. Quantum's CEO attributes the rebound to enterprises needing durable, cost-effective long-term storage as AI-driven data volumes explode.
Yum! Brands has finished divesting Pizza Hut, selling its non-China operations to private equity firm LongRange Capital for $1.5 billion after already selling Pizza Hut China to Yum! China Holdings for $1.2 billion. Yum! could earn up to $75 million more by 2030 if Pizza Hut meets performance benchmarks, while CEO Chris Turner said the move frees the company to focus on KFC, Taco Bell and Habit Burger & Grill.
HTC is bringing its Vive Eagle smart glasses to the US market after debuting them last year, offering a screen-free, glasses-first design. The device includes a 12MP ultrawide camera, 32GB of encrypted storage, and support for either OpenAI or Gemini voice assistants, running on Qualcomm's Snapdragon AR1 chip. Pricing starts at $499 for standard or sunglass lenses, rising to $599 for photochromic versions.
XGIMI has introduced two new ultra-short-throw projectors, the Aura 3 Pro and Aura 3 Max, succeeding the Aura 2 series. The new models use a triple-laser RGB light source and dual-iris light path to hit up to 5700 ISO lumens and an 8000:1 contrast ratio, more than doubling the Aura 2's brightness and contrast figures. They also support 4K output at 120Hz with 1ms latency, targeting gamers as well as home theater users.
New generations of ultra-short-throw projectors are being marketed as direct substitutes for traditional televisions, offering improved brightness, faster setup, and sleeker industrial design than earlier models. Despite these upgrades, the devices remain significantly more expensive than comparable large-screen TVs.
Microsoft will let anyone buy cloud gaming playtime hours through the Xbox Store starting in November, letting non-subscribers stream eligible owned games without Game Pass. At the same time, Game Pass Ultimate subscribers will face a new monthly cap of just 15 cloud gaming hours, pushing heavy users toward buying extra hourly bundles. Microsoft is also testing a free, ad-supported cloud gaming tier for Xbox Insiders.
Microsoft will end unlimited Xbox Cloud Gaming access less than a year after introducing it, replacing it with monthly caps of 15 hours for Ultimate subscribers, 10 hours for Premium, and 5 hours for Essential. Players who exceed these limits will need to buy additional playtime bundles through the Xbox store, though unused hours can roll over. Microsoft says the change affects about 4% of Game Pass subscribers and cites rising infrastructure costs as the reason.
HTC is finally launching its Vive Eagle smart glasses outside Taiwan, expanding availability to North America, Europe, the UK and Australia a year after their original release. The hardware remains largely unchanged, featuring a Snapdragon AR Gen 1 chip, 12-megapixel camera, open-ear speakers and support for OpenAI or Gemini assistants, with US sales starting today at $499 and European shipments beginning September 21st.
Nvidia showed the first working laptop built on its RTX Spark superchip, the Lenovo Yoga 9n, a 16-inch 2-in-1 with an OLED touch display, six speakers and a 9.2-megapixel webcam. The chip pairs an Arm-based Grace CPU with up to 20 cores and a Blackwell RTX GPU with up to 6,144 cores in a single system-on-a-chip, letting the laptop measure just 0.69 inches thick, nearly matching the MacBook Pro. Nvidia also revealed mini desktop PCs using the same chip, aimed at running local AI workloads.