Sony PlayStation Portal Launched but Supply Is Short

Even though the Sony PlayStation Portal came out in November 15, 2023, the unit itself remains elusive. The mobile gaming device allows you to control the capabilities and power of the PS5 remotely. Unlike it predecessor, the Nintendo Switch, the PlayStation Portal mirrors the game console through a small screen.

Sony PlayStation Portal

Console Games           

As its name indicates, the device creates a portal into the PS5. It allows you to play console games into a smaller screen, which is suitable for some people’s lifestyles. Despite its smaller size, its unlike other handheld gaming devices since it’s designed with a DualSense controller in mind, making it accessible and comfortable to use.

Price and Features

The price of the PlayStation Portal is $199.99, which is similar to budget gaming tablets. So, its low price point makes it an appealing option to similar mobile gaming devices. You need a stable internet connection and a PlayStation 5 console. The popularity of the device made it challenging to pre-order it.

Sony PlayStation Portal

The PlayStation Portal has an eight-inch LCD display with a 1080p resolution. It also features a 3.5mm headphone jack, allowing you to use it with the latest wired gaming headsets. You can also use the latest proprietary wireless technology to connect the device with the Sony PlayStation Explore earbuds and headsets.

 

 

Make Stunning Designs in Minutes with Canva - The Game-Changing Graphic Design Tool

 

Canva has taken the design world by storm, becoming the go-to platform for creating gorgeous graphics and visual content with ease. Perfect for bloggers, marketers, businesses, and anyone looking to take their online presence to the next level with visual punch, Canva makes professional design accessible. 

In this in-depth review, we’ll explore the amazing features that make Canva an essential tool for creating eye-catching designs that convert and captivate your audience.

Canva

Overview of Canva’s Game-Changing Design Tool

Founded in 2012 in Australia, Canva’s online graphic design platform empowers users to design like a pro regardless of skill level. The intuitive drag and drop interface, massive library of templates, and huge selection of stock images/elements allow you to create social media posts, presentations, posters, infographics, documents, cards, and so much more.

With Canva, you can design directly in your browser or on mobile. It's as simple as picking a template, customizing it with your brand colors/fonts/images, and exporting for all your needs. The days of design being limited to only professionals with expensive software are over.

Key Benefits of Using Canva

Here are some key benefits of using Canva: 

• Easy to Use - No design experience needed! The simple editor makes creating stunning visuals intuitive.
• Saves Time - Skip the learning curve of complex software. Design in minutes, not hours.
• Beautiful Templates - Professionally designed templates for every need jumpstart your projects.
• Total Customization - Tailor everything with your own color schemes, fonts, and media.
• Brand Cohesion - Create on-brand assets with saved brand kits containing your guidelines.
• Creative Freedom - The flexible platform allows you to design almost anything you can imagine.
• Constant Updates - New features, templates, elements, and capabilities are added every month.
• Affordable - Basic Canva is free! Paid plans unlock premium features for maximum value.
• Team Collaboration - Work in real-time on designs with other team members for efficient teamwork.
• Multi-platform - Design on desktop, iOS, and Android mobile apps seamlessly.
• Resize Easily - Output your designs at any dimensions for print, web, and social media.

Now let’s explore Canva's incredible features that enable you to take your graphics and content to the next level...

Canva’s Robust Design Features and Capabilities 

Templates Galore

Canva’s massive template library contains options for almost any design need. With a template selected, you simply customize it to your brand and vision in minutes. Categories include:

• Social Media Graphics - Post templates sized for Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Pinterest, and more. 
• Presentations - Design beautiful branded slideshows for pitching or corporate communications.
• Posters - Promote events, products, services with print-ready posters. Sizes include A4,letter, 11x17 inches.
• Documents - Memos, reports, resumes, newsletters formatted to perfection.
• Flyers & Brochures - Advertise sales, events, openings with professional layouts.
• Cards - Business, holiday, birthday, flashcards, and every occasion.
• Infographics - Display data creatively, clearly, and engagingly.
• Advertisements - Design ads for all formats and placements, including mobile.
• Logos - Iconic logos that establish and enhance brand identity. 
• Social Media Kits - Matching profile, cover, and post images for social media brand cohesion.
• Presentation Kits - Slidedecks, print handouts, infographics, and more for events.

And much more! With new templates added every month, you'll never run out of options.

Flexible Editing 

Once you select the perfect template, it's time to customize it your way. Canva's drag and drop editing makes it simple to:

• Change colors to match your brand palette with color picker.
• Swap fonts from an extensive font library until you find the perfect fit.
• Insert your brand logo and style elements like lines, shapes, illustrations. 
• Upload your own photos and videos shot on phone to make it unique.
• Resize, arrange, and layer elements with a few clicks.
• Add animation like fades and movement to grab attention.  
• Draw freehand with pencil and line tools.

You have 100% creative control to tailor everything to your unique vision and needs.

Magnificent Media Library

Creating your own graphics and visuals from scratch can be challenging. With Canva's media library, you have instant access to all the elements you need to take your design to the next level, including:

• Beautiful Stock Photos - Over 1 million curated free photos span every category and style imaginable. No more searching endlessly for the perfect shot.
• Illustrations and Icons - Make information pop with over 75,000 hand-drawn illustrations and 50,000 icons to clearly communicate ideas.
• Graphics & Shapes - Lines, geometric shapes, infographic elements.
• Textures & Backgrounds - Vintage paper, painted wallpapers, wood panelling and more to set the scene.  
• Charts & Infographics - Bars, pies, timelines, maps and data visualization options.
• Typography - Cursive, handwritten brush, neon, and display fonts to make a statement.

The high-quality selections ensure your designs always look visually appealing.

Brand Management Features

Maintaining a consistent brand image across all your visual assets is key. With Canva's brand management tools, you can:

• Create color palettes and font styles to keep branding cohesive.
• Upload logos and brand elements to reuse across multiple projects.
• Save brand kits for your team and future designs to adhere to.
• Use folder organization to find and manage assets easily.

By centralizing your brand guidelines, Canva makes consistent branding effortless.

Seamless Team Collaboration 

For teams, Canva takes the headache out of collaborating on designs with features like: 

• Live co-editing so multiple teammates can work simultaneously.
• Comments and annotations to provide feedback visually.
• Team folders to organize projects and control access.
• Team templates and brand kits to synchronize branding.
• Roles to control permissions and settings.

Smooth workflows and real-time collaboration enable agile graphic design teamwork.

Powerful Export and Integration Capabilities

Once your masterpiece is complete, Canva makes it easy to export for any use case and platform:

• One-click resize for seamless social media posts. Output at exact dimensions.
• Download as image files like JPG, PNG in any resolution.
• Convert into PDF documents that look professionally printed. 
• Share links to designs to collaborate and give access.
• Schedule and publish social posts automatically.
• Embed graphics into websites, blogs, and presentations.
• Print high-res files for banners, signage, apparel, promotional products.
• Integrate with apps like Dropbox, Google Drive, Slack, and email.

With extensive sharing, download, and integration features, you can publish your creations everywhere in seconds.

Canva's Paid Plans Unlock Premium Features

While Canva offers a full-featured free version, their paid plans unlock even more capabilities and assets including:

• Canva Pro ($9.99/month) - 100,000+ templates, 250,000+ stock images/videos, unlimited folders & Brand Kits, premium fonts, animated elements. 
• Canva for Enterprise (Custom Pricing) - Unlimited team members, admin tools, enterprise security, real-time collaboration, branded templates.

For power users, the premium plans provide additional assets, features and convenience that take your visual content to the next level. But the free version is still extremely capable.

Conclusion

With its drag-and-drop interface, massive library of templates and media, powerful customization and collaboration features, Canva empowers anyone to create stunning designs, regardless of technical skill. Whether you need graphics for social media, presentations, print materials, ads, or any visual content, Canva is the easiest way to make an impact with beautiful, branded visuals in minutes. Sign up and give Canva a try today - we're confident you'll find it a game-changing tool for all your design needs.

The Pace of Progress in Artificial Intelligence is Accelerating

 Artificial intelligence (AI) has seen astonishing advancements in recent years. The pace of progress seems to be picking up steam in 2023, with breakthroughs happening more rapidly than ever before. In this article, we will explore some of the most exciting new capabilities being demonstrated in AI systems and what these innovations might mean for the future.

Artificial Intelligence

Better Language Understanding and Generation

Natural language processing (NLP) remains one of the most dynamic areas of AI research. Systems are getting remarkably good at understanding nuanced language, engaging in dialogue, and generating human-like text. For example, Anthropic's new Claude chatbot can keep up natural, thought-provoking conversations on a wide range of topics. Meanwhile, generative AI models like Google's LaMDA and deeplearning.ai's GPT-4 demonstrate creative writing abilities. These NLP models are approaching a human level of eloquent, coherent expression.

Strong Performance in Strategic Games 

Game play has long been a benchmark for AI capabilities. Recently, systems have mastered enormously complex strategy games by learning from human play. DeepMind's new Gato model exceeded human performance across a variety of games like chess, Go, Atari video games, and more within a single flexible architecture. Showing adaptable general intelligence, Google's AlphaTensor bot defeated the world's top professionals in the strategy card game Magic the Gathering. These achievements display sophisticated reasoning and strategic decision making.

Robotic Eye

Advances in Computer Vision

In computer vision, AI is making strides in image and video generation. Nvidia's GauGAN 3 can paint stunning photorealistic landscapes automatically from natural language prompts. Google's Imagen system generates images to match text descriptions with impressive fidelity. In weird and fun applications, TikTok's AI green screen effect seamlessly separates people from backgrounds. These technologies demonstrate that AI is learning to see, interpret, and generate visual media in increasingly human-like ways. 

Improvements in Robotics and Control

For robotics, new techniques allow AI to learn complex motor skills with minimal human input. DeepMind trained robotic hands to dexterously manipulate objects with human-like grace. Boston Dynamics' Atlas robot can now adaptively traverse terrain, self-balance, and recover from missteps. In virtual environments, AI bots have mastered skills like walking, jumping, dancing and even martial arts through trial and error alone. Such simulations help accelerate robot learning before transferring skills to the real world.

Robot

Progress in Multimodal Applications

AI systems that combine multiple capabilities are also on the rise. Sonantic developed an AI assistant that can generate not only text responses but also lifelike audio speech in synch. Google's MusicLM generates both lyrics and musical compositions from scratch. Meta trained a translator AI that can directly convert between spoken languages without text. These multimodal applications show the potential for AI that integrates language, audio, music, speech and other modes seamlessly.

Focus on AI Safety and Ethics

Alongside rapid progress, researchers are prioritizing the safe and ethical development of increasingly capable AI systems. Initiatives like Anthropic's Constitutional AI aim to align advanced AI with human values. Governments have formed committees on AI responsibility, and computer scientists study techniques like differential privacy, explainability, and robustness to mitigate risks. Prominent thought leaders have called for cautious, beneficial AI progress centered on transparency and accountability.

The Future of Artificial Intelligence

As this sample of achievements demonstrates, AI is gaining new skills, knowledge and abilities at a breakneck pace. In the coming years, expect systems to get smarter, more creative and more human-like across the board. Key challenges will be managing the societal impacts, building trust in AI and ensuring the technology improves lives ethically. If researchers, companies and governments make responsible choices, AI could usher in an innovative era that enhances human empowerment and potential. But the outcome depends on wisely guiding both the technical and ethical trajectory as AI rapidly transforms society.

Basic Photography Equipment Needed for a Wedding

As the saying goes, pictures speak louder than words. And this is very true when it comes to wedding photos. These photos capture a memorable event for couples who want to spend a lifetime together. While experienced professional photographers have all the necessary equipment they need to capture great wedding photos, newcomers have limitations in the equipment needed for these events. Despite these limitations, they can still work as wedding photographers if they have the basic equipment for these events.

Camera Equipment

The following are the basic equipment photographers should have to shoot a wedding:

1. Camera

Camera

This is a basic requirement since photographers cannot shoot a wedding without a camera. It is also advisable to have a spare camera handy. Some professional photographers bring at least three cameras to a wedding, but two will do for new photographers. 

2. Suitable Lenses

Lens

Aside from the camera, photographers should also bring different lenses to a wedding. A medium zoom lens, telephoto lens, and wide-angle lens should be in the camera bag of the photographers. If photographers bring at two cameras, they can put the medium zoom lens in one camera while the telephoto lens can be used on the second. This will allow them to save time from changing one lens to another.

3. External Flash

External Flash

Many photographers want to shoot in natural light. While this is admirable, an external flash comes in handy when the venue is somewhat dark. This is also quite useful when the wedding moves to the reception venue, which is normally dark. 

4. Extra Memory Cards and Batteries

Memory Card

Photographers should bring a lot of memory cards as well as extra batteries. They will never know when they will run out of storage space or power in their batteries while shooting a wedding. 

5. Tripod

Tripod

A tripod is quite useful when shooting in low light conditions. This is especially true if the venue of the reception is indoors. 

These are five basic equipment a photographer should bring if they are planning to shoot a wedding.

Apple Releases Update To Deal With Mac OS X Hole

Like what I have been saying before, albeit I have never written a post about it, the Mac OS will have to deal with bugs that allow hackers to get into its system in the future. Similar to Microsoft, it was necessary for Apple to release an update to plug a hole in its system or else access will be given to hackers to the entire OS.

The Mac OS X 10.10.5 update was released near the middle of last week to deal with a number of glitches and holes in the system. On particular hole was considered a rather serious threat to Mac users since it would allow hackers to control programs on a Mac from a remote location. Since hackers will have administrator rights, they can access just about everything in the operating system. A report from The Guardian revealed that the vulnerability was already exploited by an adware installer. 

Mac OS X Yosemite

(Image Credit: http:// www.ibtimes.co.uk)

 

Yes, the Mac OS has been viewed as a more secure OS compared to Windows, but nothing ever lasts forever. Apple had to deal with a number of bugs in the past and none of them was comparable to what was discovered recently by Stefan Esser, a security researcher.  In a recent tweet, Esser revealed that the 10.10.5 update may have fixed a number of bugs in the system it also created another problem that is considered “worse than before. “ However, Esser did not give any indications as to what was made worse than before. SecurityWeek, a security news site, said Esser warned Mac users from installing the SUIDGuard kernel extension that prevents attacks that use the hole in the DYLD_PRINT_TO_FILE environment variable of the Mac OS X.

Hmm so Apple released 10.10.5 fixed some bugs and made another security problem worse than before.

— Stefan Esser (@i0n1c) August 13, 2015

The main difference between Apple and Microsoft is that the latter regularly releases updates through the Patch Tuesday program where patches are released each month. The latest update of Apple deals with over a hundred bugs affecting the Mac OS X kernel, QuickTime, Bluetooth and the Notification Center of Mac, among others.

The details of the latest update indicate that vulnerability will allow local users to execute “arbitrary code with system privileges." A “path validation issue” was the main cause of the issue in the DYLD and the issue was dealt with through an enhanced sanitization of the environment, Apple revealed. No other statements were released by Apple in connection to its latest update.

Nokia Lumia 930 Given An Elegant-Looking Gold Trim

Gold Nokia Lumia 930

(Image Credit: http:// www.phonearena.com)

The Nokia Lumia 930 is considered as the best Windows 8.1 smartphone in the market. Its esteemed status does not appear to be enough for some people as the finest Windows phone was given a trendy new look. The smartphone was given a gold hue that enhanced its appearance, making it all the more appealing to the fastidious tastes of some smartphone fans.

The new look Nokia Lumia 930 can be purchased unlocked and is available through a number of mobile service providers in the Asia Pacific, African, the Middle Eastern, and European markets. The only difference between this particular model with the silver and white model is its color. It features a gold trim that provides it an elegantly refined appearance.

The impressive-looking screen display and fast camera are the main reasons why the Nokia Lumia 930 is considered as the best Windows 8.1 smartphone available in the market. The price tag is determined by the mobile service provider and the country where it is purchased. However, potential buyers can also purchase a SIM-free model from Nokia at around £440 in the United Kingdom or around $600 in the US.