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An Odd Trio of ‘Halloween’ Movies Is Returning to Theaters

The latest movies to come back to theaters are the Halloween franchise, which makes sense since it’s spooky season. But instead of just the original film or the more recent trilogy, we’re getting three installments that’ve been surprisingly grouped together. Along with the original 1978 Halloween, both Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers and Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers are also coming back to the big screen. The trio’s cinematic return comes courtesy of Trancas International

Flick Shot Rogues is the rare turn-based game that my brain is gelling with

Try as I might, turn-based strategy games don't usually do it for me. That's one reason I haven't yet dipped into Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, many people's favorite of the year so far. I'd almost always rather be playing a more action-based game. But after trying the demo for Flick Shot Rogues on a whim during the most recent Steam Next Fest, the game hasn't been far from my thoughts. The debut title from Butter By The Fish, a three-person studio in Germany, arrived on Steam this week. Despite

Alex Lawther Didn’t Know Just How Much His ‘Andor’ Manifesto Hit Until Season 2

Of many, many breakout moments in Andor‘s first season, the passionate posthumous manifesto of Alex Lawther’s Karis Nemik providing the backdrop for Cassian’s return home remains one of the series’ standouts—perhaps only matched when the recording made a surprise return in the show’s second and final season, spreading the message of the Rebellion like a fire across the galaxy. But it wasn’t until the man behind the performance himself learned about that return that he realized just how much of a

These 7 smart plug hacks changed how I run my home - here's the setup

Maria Diaz/ZDNET Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. Remember The Clapper? The plug-in staple may have made for a catchy jingle in the 1980s, but it could also be considered as a primitive ancestor of today's smart plug -- that is, if you can say anything from a few decades ago is primitive. Smart plugs offer greater convenience than The Clapper ever did, letting you control your devices from an app on your phone, your voice, or a schedule. Also: Unplugging these 7 common ho

‘Star Wars’ Actor Teases ‘Clone Wars’ Favorite May Be Poised to Return

The sprawling Star Wars universe is in a little bit of a “calm before the storm” moment, with a huge slate of upcoming films, shows, novels, and video games looming on the horizon like a binary sunset. And to add to the melee, an actor from the franchise’s TV darling, The Clone Wars, is teasing the return of a fan-favorite character. Speaking with The Direct, voice actor Jim Cummings appeared to confirm that his Clone Wars character, Hondo Ohnaka, will be making a return to the series. “I thin

After nearly half a century in deep space, every ping from Voyager 1 is a bonus

It is almost half a century since Voyager 1 was launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida on a mission to study Jupiter, Saturn, and the atmosphere of Titan. It continues to send data back to Earth. Although engineers reckon that the aging spacecraft might survive well into the 2030s before eventually passing out of range of the Deep Space Network, the spacecraft's cosmic ray subsystem was switched off in 2025. More of the probe's instruments are earmarked for termination as engineers eke out Voy

NPM debug and chalk packages compromised

Starting at September 8th, 13:16 UTC, our Aikido intel feed alerted us to a series packages being pushed to npm, which appeared to contain malicious code. These were 18 very popular packages, backslash (0.26m downloads per week) chalk-template (3.9m downloads per week) supports-hyperlinks (19.2m downloads per week) has-ansi (12.1m downloads per week) simple-swizzle (26.26m downloads per week) color-string (27.48m downloads per week) error-ex (47.17m downloads per week) color-name (191.71

Baby's first type checker

Austin Z. Henley Associate Teaching Professor Carnegie Mellon University [email protected] @austinzhenley github/AZHenley Baby's first type checker 8/31/2025 Have you ever wondered how type checking works? Me too—let's make one! Python allows optional type annotations like this: def foobar(name: str | None) -> str: return "Fizz!" buzz: int = 42 A type checker goes through the code to make sure that the kinds of values you use match what your functions and variables expect. In the examp

Topics: ast int return self type

My 5 simple tricks to extend iPhone battery life when traveling (including older models)

Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNET Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. My wife and I like to travel, both in the US and abroad. Naturally, we always take our iPhones with us to snap photos and videos, search for directions, and stay in touch with other people. But when you use your phone all day with no available AC outlets, keeping your battery charge alive can be difficult. As I've trekked to various spots, I've tried different tricks and techniques to prevent the battery from c

Amazon Finally Confirms Sophie Turner as Lara Croft in ‘Tomb Raider’ Series

In a not-so-surprising announcement, Amazon MGM Studios has named the star of its long-gestating Tomb Raider series: Sophie Turner. The lack of shock is because Turner was known to be “nearly set” to sign on as Lara Croft, according to reports from November of last year. Those same reports noted that Turner had been chosen over the other contender, Bohemian Rhapsody‘s Lucy Boynton, but that the deal wasn’t yet official. Now, Variety confirms that not only is Turner set for the part, but also th

‘Tron: Ares’ Star Says Her Character Reveals a Hard Truth About AI and Humans

Even in the opening moments of the Tron: Ares trailer, the story wastes no time in putting humanity’s future with artificial intelligence into jeopardy. And while lots of fans are wondering what kind of performance we’re going to get out of Jared Leto in the titular role of Ares in the Nine Inch Nails-scored sci-fi sequel, fellow cast member Jodie Turner-Smith has a lot to say about how her character is aimed to provoke audiences to think hard about the realities of an AI-filled future. In a ne

The day Return became Enter (2023)

Marcin Wichary December 2023 / 3,100 words / 35 photos Originally published as a booklet accompanying Shift Happens The day Return became Enter In the popular imagination, the transition from the world of typewriters to the universe of computers was orderly and simple: at some point in the 20th century, someone attached a CPU and a screen to a typewriter, and that turned it into a computer. But the reality is much more fascinating and convoluted. The transition was meandering and lengthy, and

These 7 smart plug hacks that saved me time, money, and energy (and how I set them up)

Maria Diaz/ZDNET Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. Remember The Clapper? The plug-in staple may have made for a catchy jingle in the 1980s, but it could also be considered as a primitive ancestor of today's smart plug -- that is, if you can say anything from a few decades ago is primitive. Smart plugs offer greater convenience than The Clapper ever did, letting you control your devices from an app on your phone, your voice, or a schedule. Also: Unplugging these 7 common ho

How is Ultrassembler so fast?

How is Ultrassembler so fast? Ultrassembler is a superfast and complete RISC-V assembler library that I'm writing as a component of the bigger Chata signal processing project. Assemblers take in a platform-dependent assembly language and output that platform's native machine code which runs directly on the processor. "Why would you want to do this?" you might ask. First, existing RISC-V assemblers that conform the the entirety of the specification, as and llvm-mc , ship as binaries that you r

Don't Want Gemini to Learn About You? How to Turn That New Feature Off

The more you chat with Google's Gemini, the better it will get to know you thanks to a new learning feature in the generative AI chatbot. Gemini has already been able to recall past conversations if you ask it to, but this new functionality will allow it to learn your preferences and interact with you in more personalized ways, Google said. But if you don't want an AI to learn about you, you can turn it off. AI chatbots have seen their memories grow longer this year. Other tools, like OpenAI'

The new Return to Silent Hill trailer gives us our first look at Pyramid Head

Nearly three years on from its original announcement, Return to Silent Hill finally has a proper trailer. It’s only 40 seconds long, but in that time we get a healthy supply of foggy and eerily empty street shots, terrifying monsters and a very brief glimpse of the iconic Pyramid Head. It looks like a Silent Hill movie alright. Return to Silent Hill is based on the 2001 survival horror classic Silent Hill 2, which got the remake treatment last year and remains one of the genre’s most important

7 smart plug tricks that instantly made my home feel more automated

Maria Diaz/ZDNET Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. Remember The Clapper? The plug-in staple may have made for a catchy jingle in the 1980s, but it could also be considered as a primitive ancestor of today's smart plug -- that is, if you can say anything from a few decades ago is primitive. Smart plugs offer greater convenience than The Clapper ever did, letting you control your devices from an app on your phone, your voice, or a schedule. Also: Unplugging these 7 common ho

The Annotated Transformer (2022)

The Annotated Transformer v2022: Austin Huang, Suraj Subramanian, Jonathan Sum, Khalid Almubarak, and Stella Biderman. Original: Sasha Rush. The Transformer has been on a lot of people’s minds over the last year five years. This post presents an annotated version of the paper in the form of a line-by-line implementation. It reorders and deletes some sections from the original paper and adds comments throughout. This document itself is a working notebook, and should be a completely usable impl

The Annotated Transformer

The Annotated Transformer v2022: Austin Huang, Suraj Subramanian, Jonathan Sum, Khalid Almubarak, and Stella Biderman. Original: Sasha Rush. The Transformer has been on a lot of people’s minds over the last year five years. This post presents an annotated version of the paper in the form of a line-by-line implementation. It reorders and deletes some sections from the original paper and adds comments throughout. This document itself is a working notebook, and should be a completely usable impl

A visual introduction to big O notation

Big O notation is a way of describing the performance of a function without using time. Rather than timing a function from start to finish, big O describes how the time grows as the input size increases. It is used to help understand how programs will perform across a range of inputs. In this post I'm going to cover 4 frequently-used categories of big O notation: constant, logarithmic, linear, and quadratic. Don't worry if these words mean nothing to you right now. I'm going to talk about them

Changing these 6 settings on my iPad greatly extended its battery life by hours

Prakhar Khanna/ZDNET As an avid iPad user, I'm all too familiar with the internal struggles that course through me when the battery is about to die. I love using either the iPad 11 or iPad Air to write and work, but I also use it to stream content, play games, and browse the internet after work. This makes me appreciate the iPad's long battery life, yet my anxiety grows when I start getting 'low battery' alerts without a charger nearby. Also: How you're charging your tablet is slowly killing

Dynamically patch a Python function's source code at runtime

written by Eric J. Ma on | tags: In this blog post, I share how I discovered a powerful Python trick: dynamically changing a function's source code at runtime using the compile and exec functions. This technique enabled me to build more flexible AI bots, like ToolBot, that can generate and execute code with access to the current environment. While this opens up exciting possibilities for LLM-powered agents and generative UIs, it also raises serious security concerns. Curious how this hack can s

Can't Get Your Baby to Calm Down? Try This Hidden iPhone Feature

Comforting a crying baby can be difficult, especially if you aren't getting enough sleep. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, playing calming sounds via a white noise machine can help soothe your baby and get them to settle down -- and give you a moment of respite. But instead of buying a white noise machine, you could save money and use your iPhone instead. When Apple released iOS 15 in 2021, the operating system brought a hidden feature to your iPhone called Background Sounds. It

7 clever ways to automate your home with smart plugs

Maria Diaz/ZDNET Get more in-depth ZDNET tech coverage: Add us as a preferred Google source on Chrome and Chromium browsers. Remember The Clapper? The plug-in staple may have made for a catchy jingle in the 1980s, but it could also be considered as a primitive ancestor of today's smart plug -- that is, if you can say anything from a few decades ago is primitive. Smart plugs offer greater convenience than The Clapper ever did, letting you control your devices from an app on your phone, your voi

Without the futex, it's futile

Phil Eaton’s book club is starting The Art of Multiprocessor Programming, 2nd Edition , which is a very well regarded textbook, and pretty recently updated (2021). I’ve even heard of a couple of authors. I’ve done a lot of concurrent programming, and have always felt like I’ve still got plenty to learn, so I was excited for the topic. So far, what I’ve learned is that I would never recommend this book, despite any merits. Academia certainly struggles to find the right balance between teaching

Tesla will sell you back the turn signal stalk it removed from the Model 3

is transportation editor with 10+ years of experience who covers EVs, public transportation, and aviation. His work has appeared in The New York Daily News and City & State. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. For a company that likes to fire a bunch of people, only to later regret the decision and try to hire those same people back, this latest news shouldn’t come as much of a surprise: Tesla is selling a retrofit turn signal stalk to replac

Without the Futex, It's Futile

Phil Eaton’s book club is starting The Art of Multiprocessor Programming, 2nd Edition , which is a very well regarded textbook, and pretty recently updated (2021). I’ve even heard of a couple of authors. I’ve done a lot of concurrent programming, and have always felt like I’ve still got plenty to learn, so I was excited for the topic. So far, what I’ve learned is that I would never recommend this book, despite any merits. Academia certainly struggles to find the right balance between teaching

Tesla offers a $350 retrofit turn signal stalk after removing it from the Model 3

Leave it to Tesla to charge its customers for a feature it purposely left out. The company is now selling an almost $350 retrofit turn signal stalk for its Model 3 cars after removing from the initial model. Instead, it used buttons to activate the turn signal. As of now, the add-on is only available in the Chinese market. But, Model 3 drivers will need to shell out another 2,499 yuan ($348) to get a normal part of almost every car. However, there's a slight catch: The turn signal stalk is only

A Lisp in 99LOC

Lisp in 99 lines of C and how to write one yourself In honor of the contributions made by Church and McCarthy, I wrote this project and the accompanying article to show how anyone can write a tiny Lisp interpreter in a few lines of C or in any "C-like" programming language for that matter. I attempted to preserve the original meaning and flavor of Lisp as much as possible. As a result, the C code in this project is strongly Lisp-like in compact form. Despite being small, these tiny Lisp interpr

In-depth analysis on Valorant's Guarded Regions

This post is not meant to be an attack towards Riot Games’ Vanguard or Microsoft’s Windows, they have done an excellent job with their products and will continue to do so for the coming years, the content of this post is gathered solely by me, and I am not tied to any game hack publisher or entities. I have no intention of harming any company’s product, and everything here is constructed for educational purposes. In the cutthroat world of online gaming, there is no greater threat to the sanctit