Blue Raspberry review: A powerful, portable and pricey microphone for on-the-go recording July 12, 2017 Blue, as well as being a boyband and a state of mind, is the California-based company behind the world’s most popular USB microphones. The company’s products brought studio-quality hardware to the consumer-grade market at a time when USB mics were little more than call centre headsets. The Snowball mic alone helped to kickstart home [...]
Steve Aoki – the cake-slinging, social media conquering, genre-defying superstar DJ – on his philosophy for life July 5, 2017 You can spend several hours watching international superstar DJ Steve Aoki chucking cakes at his fans. Big rectangular cakes, the kind you’d get on a round-numbered birthday or at a bad wedding, hurled with force from the stage into an expectant crowd. By the time the cake is airborne the audience has been whipped into [...]
Barber Shop Chronicles review: Inua Ellams’ razor sharp play draws profound connections between disparate men June 8, 2017 Set in half a dozen barber shops across two continents, Inua Ellam’s energetic, funny, banter-driven play seeks to join the dots between the experiences and opinions of black men in geographically disparate locations. And there are are plenty of dots to join in a play that ricochets between barber’s chairs as far apart as Johannesburg [...]
Prey review: Arkane Studio’s deep space horror shooter has hidden depths, not least of which is the ability to turn into a shoe May 10, 2017 In space, people eat a whole lot of lemons. Everywhere you go aboard the derelict Talos I space station you find discarded citrus peels, a cavalcade of zesty collectibles that you can gather up and convert into more useful materials. Prey is, very surprisingly, a game that’s largely about scavenging through bins for assorted bits [...]
Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 review: The hybrid version of Dell’s popular laptop makes a few trade-offs along the way May 10, 2017 The 2-in-1 version of Dell’s popular XPS 13 laptop is one of this trendy new breed of convertibles, the kind that teens are Snapchatting about down at the skatepark. A neat pair of 360 degree hinges allows you to transform it from a laptop into a tablet in one dramatic motion, folding the entire screen [...]
Sleepless review: A buzzing cast can’t rescue this low-rent Die Hard-alike May 5, 2017 Universally recognised as the greatest film about clambering around inside air vents ever made, Die Hard has inspired a long list of distinguished imitators, each of them about crawling around inside different kinds of building. Among them was 2011 French action film Nuit Blanche, about a bent cop who gets tangled up in a [...]
How the design studio behind the new London bus turned a disused silo in Cape Town into a boutique hotel May 2, 2017 Table Mountain looms over the harbour city of Cape Town, its extraordinary topography a constant reminder of the city’s precipitous place on the extremes of the African continent. The capital of the Western Cape province and the seat of South Africa’s Parliament, Cape Town was once the largest city in the country, until a gold [...]
Google Home review: Can Google’s smart speaker overthrow the Amazon Echo? April 19, 2017 When the singularity is reached and our robot servants finally turn on their human masters, rebelling against their programming to flay us alive in our beds, future mecha-historians will point with metal fingers to 2017 as the year it all began. Google Home is a voice-controlled smart speaker condemned to sit in the corner of [...]
Trek Super Commuter+ 8 review: An outstanding new electric bike that will turn heads and ruin pigeons April 5, 2017 There’s a word, “snarge”, which means the gunky pink residue deposited inside and around a jet engine in the aftermath of a bird strike. Aeroplanes are so massive and fast, and birds are so tiny and slow, that the most basic rule of physics transmutes the animal into a kind of blood mist. This transformation [...]
Beauty and the Beast review: This live-action remake loses most of the original’s magic March 16, 2017 The timeless story of a girl who falls in love with her malevolent captor, a ten foot tall talking bear, Beauty and the Beast famously teaches that the man of your dreams is only ever a Stockholm Syndrome away. But while this live-action remake of an animated Disney classic leaves most of the hard lessons [...]
