Best Google Pixel 2 Deals for November 2017

Where should you buy a Google Pixel 2 from in order to get the best deal?

Shopping for a new phone, like the Google Pixel 2 and Google Pixel 2 XL can be an expensive proposition, but there are ways that you can make it a little easier on your budget. Hunting down the best deals can be difficult since most retailers change them weekly — but don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. Whether you are looking to finance your purchase, get some freebies with it, or try and save some money on the purchase there are a few places to check out.

Let’s take a look at some of the best deals on Google’s Pixel and Pixel XL that are available right now.

Check out the best deals on the original Pixel and Pixel XL

Google Pixel 2

Want to pick up the smaller of the two Pixels but avoid paying full price? It’s not extemely often to find great deals on the Pixel phones. Google hardly ever discounts them, and sometimes you’ll see a few dollars off each month through Verizon, or a random deal at a retailer. Here’s all the best deals right now.

• Google Store offers a trade-in credit of up to $410 when you trade in your old phone
• Best Buy offers 18 months of interest free-financing on a Best Buy Credit Card
• Google Store offers 0% interest for 24 monthly payments of $27.04
• Verizon offers up to $300 off with select trade-ins

Google Pixel 2 XL

If you are looking for the larger version, you’ll want to check out the deals on the Pixel 2 XL. Most of the time you’ll find the a similar deal on the Pixel 2 XL as you would on the Pixel 2, but somtimes the discounts are a little larger because it costs more. The current deals include:

• Google Store offers a trade-in credit of up to $410 when you trade in your old phone
• Best Buy offers 18 months of interest-free financing on a Best Buy Credit Card
• Google Store offers 0% interest for 24 monthly payments of $27.04
• Verizon offers up to $300 off with select trade-ins

Other deals

As time passes you’ll start to see these appear on other sites like eBay and Swappa, offering great deals on second-hand units. Some people may turn around and sell theirs at launch for a profit, but if you are looking to save you’ll have to wait a bit longer.

Have you noticed any other deals on the Pixel 2 or Pixel 2 XL? If so, be sure to drop a line in the comments letting us know where the deal is and why other people may be interested.

Google Pixel + Pixel XL

• Google Pixel and Pixel XL review
• Google Pixel XL review: A U.S. perspective
• Google Pixel FAQ: Should you upgrade?
• Pixel + Pixel XL specs
• Understanding Android 7.1 Nougat
• Join the discussion in the forums!

Google Store
Verizon

After Math: Xs and Os

It’s been a wild week for schemes and strategies. A band of thieves made off with a load of new iPhones, the CIA released more of bin Laden’s hard drive contents, and Netflix nixed House of Cards because Kevin Spacey turned out to be a sexual predator. Numbers, because how else will you know if your fence is underpaying for those looted wares?

$370,000: That’s the street value of some 300 iPhone Xs a band of thieves managed to purloin from a UPS truck parked outside of the Apple Store in San Francisco on Thursday. Be wary of any unreasonably good deals (read: less than a grand) you see on eBay for them in the coming weeks.

11 minutes: The only tolerable span of time to occur in 2017 was when the president’s personal attack vector, er, Twitter account was taken offline by an American hero.

$7,500: That’s how much the electric vehicle tax credit is worth that the Republicans want to get rid of. Because who needs to reduce the global carbon footprint when a couple dozen rich families here in the US can reduce their tax bases?

321 GB: That’s the size of the CIA’s most recent file dump from Osama bin Laden’s personal laptop. Turns out the dude was super into off-brand sexy ROMs, who knew?

1440p: That’s the maximum monitor screen resolution the new Xbox One X will support. Don’t worry, it’ll still display in 4K when you hook it up to your living room TV.

4 seasons: That’s how many seasons too long House of Cards ran before Kevin Spacey’s sexual predatory past caught up with him and curb stomped the remainder of his career.

86 percent: That’s how effective a new AI system developed at Showa University in Japan is in detecting colorectal cancer. Because the quicker you catch this form of cancer, the better the chance you have of beating it.

The best humidifier

By John Holecek and Tim Heffernan

This post was done in partnership with Wirecutter, reviews for the real world. When readers choose to buy Wirecutter’s independently chosen editorial picks, it may earn affiliate commissions that support its work. Read the full article here.

After more than 100 hours of research (including 80-plus hours of lab testing) over the past four years, the Honeywell HCM-350 Germ Free Cool Mist Humidifier remains our pick as the best humidifier for most people. It’s quiet, leakproof, effective, and energy-efficient, and it’s the easiest model to fill and clean we’ve ever found.

Who this is for

If you are bothered by any of the symptoms caused by dry air, such as dry sinuses, nosebleeds, cracked and sore lips, or shocks from static electricity, the air in your home is likely too dry. But humidifiers require regular maintenance, including a thorough cleaning every one to three days. Because a dirty humidifier causes more harm than good, be honest with yourself: are you ready to be a “humidifier parent”?

How we picked and tested

The Honeywell HCM-350 (front), and (back, from left) the Sunpentown SU-4010, Sunpentown SU-9210, Safety 1st, and Air-O-Swiss 7135. Photo: John Holecek

We considered three basic types of humidifiers: ultrasonic, evaporative, and “air-washing.” Ultrasonic humidifiers use a vibrating diaphragm to generate vapor. They work quickly and quietly, but because they produce vapor, they can overhumidify a room and potentially leave behind a thin layer of mineral dust.

Evaporative humidifiers use the natural process of evaporation by passing dry air over a wet wicking filter. They’re a bit louder and slower than ultrasonics, but they’re also cleaner and physically incapable of overhumidifying a room.

“Air-washing” humidifiers are a more expensive, quieter variation of evaporative humidifiers that replace the wick with a stack of slowly rotating discs. In theory, they trap particles in the water and clean the air, though our tests found this feature isn’t particularly effective.

After deciding on a list of humidifiers to test, we tested each model in John Holecek’s 160-square-foot office in Southern California. For each machine, we considered five factors: noise, maximum humidification achievable, ability to hold a fixed humidity level, daily water consumption, and cost over time. For air washers, we also measured their actual ability to remove particles from the air. Please see our full guide to humidifiers for a detailed breakdown of our testing methodology.

Our pick

The Honeywell is unobtrusive, if not exactly beautiful. Photo: John Holecek

The Honeywell HCM-350 Germ Free Cool Mist Humidifier is an evaporative humidifier that consistently performed well across all categories we tested. Though it didn’t top the charts, it was a solid performer, raising the relative humidity of John’s office by 14 percentage points over the course of three hours. It uses about 1.9 gallons of water per day on high, so you’ll need to fill the one-gallon tank twice per day to run it continuously. More important, it was by far the easiest to clean and fill of the models we tested.

Including purchase price, cost of new filters, and electricity, the Honeywell will set you back about $300 over the course of its three-year expected service life (assuming you’re running it 24 hours a day, but only in the wintertime). That puts it right in the middle of the pack.

A similar evaporative option

If the Honeywell is out of stock, the Sunpentown SU-9210 Digital Evaporative Humidifier is another evaporative humidifier we liked in testing, but it’s not nearly as easy to clean. In our tests, it increased relative humidity by 19.75 percent (compared with the Honeywell’s 14 percent—though the Honeywell started at a higher humidity). The SU-9210’s total estimated operating cost of about $200 over a three-year period also makes it cheaper than the Honeywell.

For larger rooms: a silent ultrasonic pick

The Sunpentown SU-4010 Dual Mist Humidifier with ION Exchange Filter was our previous runner-up pick, and is still a solid and economical performer. If you have a larger room (bigger than, say, 400 square feet) and value moisture over ease of maintenance, this is your best bet. Just be careful not to overhumidify your space on high settings.

The Sunpentown is super-quiet, even for an ultrasonic humidifier, and has an ion-exchange water filter (a filter that draws the calcium and magnesium ions in your water in and then replaces them with sodium ions) to help keep microbial growth and mineral dust to a minimum. However, it’s not as easy to clean as we’d like, and we noticed mildew tends to build up along several of the sharp angles inside.

An efficient but expensive option

The Venta Airwasher LW25 is worthy of its high price tag only if you are willing to pay a lot more money up front for lower power consumption and less-frequent refills and cleanings. Though your typical humidifier should be cleaned about every third day, Venta recommends cleaning only every 10 to 14 days and relies on a proprietary chemical mixture to keep funk down between cleanings. These chemicals cost about $40 per year, which when combined with the high sticker price make the Venta the second most expensive option we considered—$425 over three years.

The Venta works by drawing air over a set of slowly rotating discs. It’s incredibly efficient, requiring just 0.2 gallons of water per day to achieve the same amount of humidification as the other midsize units we tested (an 18 percent increase over three hours). However, the Venta still requires that you top it off every day to maintain maximum humidifying efficiency—it works best when full.

This guide may have been updated by Wirecutter. To see the current recommendation, please go here.

Note from Wirecutter: When readers choose to buy our independently chosen editorial picks, we may earn affiliate commissions that support our work.

It’s not too late to make your first website – here’s how

If you’ve been wanting a website for your business or hobby and have made the bold decision to make it yourself — good for you! Learning how to make a website today is far easier than ever before with all the resources and tools available on the internet. Better yet, you don’t need a lick of coding knowledge to get started.

Today there are a host of tools and services to walk you through the entire process, regardless of what kind of site you want to build. Whether it’s your first attempt at building a website or you just need a refresher on what all the options are, this guide will give you a quick overview of the most important things you need to know, along with a selection of links to other helpful resources on the web.

Refining your idea

racorn/123rf

The first step in the process is whittling down your idea into something that’s actually feasible to create. You can make just about anything on the web, and things can get really complicated and off track if you don’t have a clearly defined goal to work toward.

If you’re here reading this, you probably already have a general idea of the website you want to make. While you’ll be able to customize the layout and the look of your site later, the most important thing to do at this stage is figuring out are the basics. What’s it going to be called? What do you want its URL to be? What kind of site do you actually want to build?

We’d recommend perusing some sites that have a similar goal to your own for ideas. Write down a list of elements from the sites you visit that you like and don’t like. Perhaps even consider pulling out a pen and paper to sketch out some of the pages of your site if you are more of a visual thinker.

If you aren’t too sure about the specifics of any of that, don’t fret just yet, as you can iron some those details out as you go about putting the site together.

Building your site

Now comes the (not so) hard part. You actually need to create the site itself. But how do you go about doing that? Building a website today is far easier than it’s ever been thanks to the myriad of tools available. In this section, we’ll break down some of our favorites and the different ways in which you can use them.

Website Builder Services

The most popular way to build a website today, especially if you’ve never done it before, is to use a website builder service. They utilize drag and drop interfaces which should be intuitive for most PC users and streamline many processes such as publishing content, adding links, and making your site compatible with various devices.

Webflow

There are some limitations to them in that you often can’t build more complicated websites and in some cases, they do force you to use a parent domain name, but if you’re willing to pay a small subscription fee, you can have most of the advanced features without the drawbacks.

Do bear in mind though that you are often reliant on that service for future updates, so if you strive for independence, you may prefer to go in alone.

Services like Squarespace and Wix have improved how much customization you can do without having to know a single thing about HTML. These provide a great entry-level service to start with. For more information, check out our guide to the best website builders to make the right choice for you.

Content Management Systems (CMS)

Although you could technically bundle these tools under the same banner as website builders, Content Management Systems provide a much greater depth of flexibility than their hand-holding cousins. While they tend to be best for making specific types of websites, with additional modules and widgets, you can use a CMS to make whatever you want.

In the world of modern website making, this is probably about as hands-on as you want to be without involving a professional, but that doesn’t mean using any of them is overly complicated. There are plenty of guides, tutorials, free themes and widgets to help you make your site and have it looking and operating just how you want it.

WordPress

WordPress is the most popular CMS in use today, with almost 30 percent of all websites built on it. It’s even the platform that DigitalTrends runs on, so you know it’s good. That popularity isn’t without reason and it’s part of the reason that it’s such a solid recommendation. With so many people using it, updates are regular and there is a tonne of support and ways to customize it.

At its core, WordPress is easy to use and navigate around and caters to all sorts of websites. While specifically good at handling blog and e-commerce sites, you can make it into what you want with a host of free and premium widget options.

Drupal

Arguably the most difficult of these three recommended CMS, Drupal is still a popular choice, partly because it’s the most versatile. Although you may want to learn a little HTML and even CSS and PHP in order to fully utilize it, it still has tens of thousands of free plugins to expand its capabilities.

That versatility is what makes Drupal a solid choice for those looking to build something that’s not a typical blog or storefront. There’s some evidence to suggest it can produce faster sites too, so if you’re looking to build something content heavy, Drupal may be your best bet.

Joomla

Although Joomla is no way near as popular as the above alternatives, it’s still a decent choice of CMS for building a modern website. It serves as a middle ground between WordPress and Drupal, where you don’t need super technical skills to get the most out of it, but it’s not as beginner-friendly as WordPress.

Best suited to e-commerce and social websites, Joomla also has free themes and plugins, though fewer than the other CMS listed here. It does, however, feature a robust help system and community that is easier to use and parse than Drupal’s more technical guides.

Do you need to know how to code?

The short answer? No. As much as there’s nothing stopping you learning how to build a website yourself from the ground up, the days of that being a popular choice are long gone. There are also a number of modern security concerns and device compatibility issues to consider which are far beyond the reach of this entry-point guide.

In reality, the best way to get your first website online is to use a service or toolset that’s made exactly for someone like you. If you want to learn a little about the basics of coding a website, it can’t hurt, but it’s far from necessary.

For those looking to learn a little HTML or CSS, CodeAcademy is a great starting point. It offers free programming tutorials that will teach you as you code, and there are a few apps that can help you learn to code on the go.

Registering your Domain

In order to get your site up and running, you need to register a domain. If you’re using a website building service, then you’ll be prompted to buy the domain before getting started. Some website builders like Squarespace offer deals within their service to streamline the process a bit, but whether you use that or not, make sure you have your domain secured before getting started.

If you’re using a CMS and building the site yourself, you need to go through a domain name registrar. There are dozens of these to choose from, and lucky for you, we’ve got a pretty solid roundup of the best domain name registrars. Be sure to shop around until you find one that suits your needs — don’t necessarily just go with the cheapest one you see.

Purchasing hosting

Domain name registration and hosting are tightly connected, and many services offer the two of them bundled together. Don’t let that confuse you — they’re not the same thing. If buying a domain name is akin to securing your address, hosting is the plot of land you actually build your new digital property on.

Hosting generally costs a monthly fee based on your bandwidth and availability needs, and there are tons of companies out there that offer it.

If you end up using a website building service, chances are your hosting has been bundled in as part of that package. If you’re using a CMS though, you’ll need to secure your own hosting. These are the best website hosts as far as we’re concerned.

If you’d rather save some money while you practice building your site, these free alternatives should fit the bill.

Summary

When building a website today, we’d recommend either a website building service or using one of the most popular CMS. Although building your own site with a CMS is harder, it does offer more freedom and there is plenty of help out there for those that need it.

If you don’t use a website builder, you’ll need to secure a domain name and hosting too, but the links above in those respective sections will help you through that part of the process.

Updated: 11/02/2017 by Jon Martindale – Updated methods and links. The original article was posted on October 6 2013.

Editor’s Recommendations

• Want to build your own site? These are the best website builders to do it with
• Need to register a domain? These are the best domain registrars in the world
• Looking for free public domain images? Here are the best websites to find them
• The value of cryptocurrencies is on the rise, but so are the risks from hackers
• These tips on how to get followers on Tumblr will leave you feeling popular

Ben Heck’s Hex game: Fun with soldering

After working out the kinks with the layout of the Hex board game, Ben and Felix have received the PCBs from OSHPark and they’re all ready for soldering. That’s interesting, because ultimately the game itself will be used to teach soldering in schools. How’s your own soldering technique? And what do you think of the Hex game? Let us know over on the element14 community.

6 Gestural Interface Tricks to Try Out With Your New iPhone X

Most iPhone X owners have had barely 48 hours to get to grips with Apple’s new home bar-based user interface which does away with traditional home button functions, but the general consensus is that it becomes extremely intuitive to use after just a few hours. In this article, we’ve gathered some neat tips and gestural tricks for using iOS 11 on iPhone X that you may not have come across.

Some of the tips listed below offer an alternative one-handed approach to gestures that typically require two hands, while others simply demonstrate a quicker way of interfacing with your iPhone X that Apple hasn’t made explicit in its support literature. Hopefully at least one of them will be new to you and will help you get more out of your new smartphone.

Faster App Switcher Access

Apple’s Guided Tour of the new iPhone X interface would have you believe that to access the App Switcher you must swipe upwards from the middle of the home bar and then pause for a moment, before swiping along to see your open apps.

Actually there’s another, faster method you can try: simply swipe up from the home bar at a 45-degree angle towards the right of the screen and then let go, and the app switcher should move straight into view almost immediately. Granted, it’s a tiny adjustment to the official way of doing things, but you’ll probably find it a little speedier and more intuitive.

Quit Apps Quicker

At first sight, quitting apps from within the App Switcher seems to require two fingers: one to tap-hold the app, and another to tap the app card’s minus button that the first action elicits. Thankfully though, the whole process can be performed with one hand by tap-holding and swiping up on the app as soon as the minus button appears.

Reach for Control Center

Accessing the Control Center on iPhone X is completely different to how it’s done on older iPhones running iOS 11. Instead of swiping up from the bottom of the screen, users must swipe down from the top-right “ear”, which requires another hand. The change is a curious one, given that Apple considered locating the Control Center at the right of the App Switcher, which looks more intuitive during one-handed use. Apple could always introduce this implementation as an option in a later version of iOS 11, but until then, Reachability is your friend.

To enable the setting in iOS 11.1, go to Settings -> General -> Accessibility, and turn on Reachability. Now simply swipe down from the gestural home bar to bring the top of the interface halfway down the screen, and you should be able to swipe from the top-right with your thumb to bring down Control Center.

This method can also be used as a quick way to check your battery percentage, or to see if your VPN is connected – just a small drag from the top-right reveals the information, without you having to invoke the Control Center wholesale.

Return to Last App

Swiping the home bar to switch between apps is a smart gesture that most iPhone X owners will have already grasped. But did you know that you can perform the same swipe action from the home screen to return to the last-used app? Simply drag your thumb right across the bottom of the dock, where the home bar usually appears.

Exit App Wiggle Mode

Holding an app on the home screen makes all apps wiggle, indicating that you can now re-locate or delete them individually. With no home button to turn “wiggle mode” off, Apple added a “Done” button to the top-right on the screen. But you don’t have to raise your other hand to tap it and exit wiggle mode – just swipe up from the bottom of the dock instead.

Instant Siri Search

This last one is less a new gesture, and more a combination of two, the latter of which has existed since iOS 9. Whenever you’re in an app and want to do a quick search, swipe up, release for a split second, then immediately swipe down again. (Note: this action won’t work if the app you’re using is located in a folder.)

This is a particularly useful swipe combo given that in iOS 11 you can now search both your iPhone and the web, with Siri offering autocomplete options similar to how it does when you perform a search in Safari. Finally, to exit the Siri Search window and return to the app you were just using, simply swipe right across the bottom of the screen.

Know of any more neat UI tricks for iPhone X? Let us know in the comments below.

Related Roundup: iPhone XBuyer’s Guide: iPhone X (Buy Now)
Discuss this article in our forums

Meet the amateur astronauts trying to crowdfund their way into orbit

There’s a nondescript warehouse tucked behind an opera house in Copenhagen, Denmark, where a few dozen rocket scientists meet every week to discuss what has become their collective obsession: sending an astronaut into suborbital space.

That might not seem like such a feat. Russia ticked the suborbital box over 55 years ago, and NASA has literally sent people to the moon and back.
SpaceX could launch the world’s most powerful rocket by year’s end.
But considering that every member of Copenhagen Suborbitals (CopSub) is an amateur and a volunteer with a day job outside of the warehouse, the organization’s goal is one of the more ambitious in aerospace.

For nearly a decade, the exclusively crowdfunded group has built over a half-dozen unmanned rockets, launching them from floating barges out in the Baltic Sea. Some, like the Sapphire, pierced the sky in spectacular fashion. Others made more of an impression through their failures to ascend as expected, like the Nexø I, which reached less than 20 percent of its intended altitude before plummeting back into the Baltic.

The Sapphire pierced the sky in spectacular fashion.

I met with CopSub’s communications director, Mads Wilson, at the Copenhagen facility over the summer. “Do you see the big white rocket?” he asked. “That’s where we are.”

Although the group holds its weekly meetings on Sunday, there were still a few members about, toiling with electronics while the machine shop was silent. CopSub members are committed to its mission and, for many of its volunteers, the warehouse acts like a home away from home. But this isn’t NASA. The organization is relatively flat and roles often overlap.

The group is loosely divided into three teams. The rocket engine team works to refine the liquid propellant engines that boost the rocket vertically, whereas the computer and electronics team works on CSduino: a CopSub-developed variation of Arduino that serves as the rocket’s central nervous system. The communications team makes sure the rocket and its creators stay in contact during its mission.

In the future, these teams will have added roles and responsibilities once a human is strapped into the nose of the rocket. If all goes as planned, that amateur astronaut will be snugly positioned in the latest generation of CopSub’s Tycho space capsule (SpaceX recently revealed what that astronaut may wear).

But no one is sure just when that will be. Launching rockets is a tricky endeavor, and no shortage of variables — from rough weather to electrical malfunctions — have caused CopSub to reassess, delay, and even cancel a handful of launches. Even when they’ve managed to launch a rocket, many haven’t flown as planned, like last year’s Nexø I.

“The whole rocket is a system, and 99 percent went as it should,” Wilson said. “Even if just 0.5 percent doesn’t work, that can have a cascading effect.”

“Technology is not the problem. Time and money are the problems.”

In the case of the Nexø I, the rocket ended up on the launch pad longer than intended, causing the liquid oxygen in its tank to overheat and begin to boil. The rocket was thus left with too little fuel for its planned flight. Adding injury to insult, the parachutes failed to open because the computer system thought the rocket was still in flight. The rocket was devastated in its collision with the water, and CopSub has since implemented checklists to the flight plan to avoid such errors in the future.

But a checklist can’t save you from all unforeseen variables. This past summer, CopSub planned to launch the Nexø II, its final step towards the manned Spica class rockets. But after postponing the launch a few times, the team decided to reschedule for summer 2018 due to an array of internal and external stresses, from late deliveries to double-booked launch areas.

The Spica missions are CopSub’s ambitious aim to put an amateur astronaut just above the Karman line that delineates space — over 60 miles above Earth. Estimated to cost somewhere in the $1 to $2 million range, just for parts, Wilson said the team still needs three or four times its current budget for development.

“Technology is not the problem,” he said. “Time and money are the problems.”

Which is where the public comes in. CopSub is fueled by donations and takes to Indiegogo annually to raise funds. The team hopes their efforts will engage people around the world and help democratize spaceflight (incidentally, that’s also the mission of tiny FemtoSats). In jest, Wilson calculates that NASA’s coffee budget could help send Spica to space in just a few years.

Whether CopSub can get a person into suborbital space in the foreseeable future is anyone’s guess. For now, space is beckoning these aerospace amateurs — but Earth’s gravity is holding them back.

Editor’s Recommendations

• Elon Musk unveils prototype for SpaceX astronaut suit with Crew Dragon capsule
• SpaceX’s slim new spacesuits look straight out of sci-fi
• This ‘inflatable space yacht’ could be in orbit by 2022
• SpaceX sees a payoff from its pioneering work with reusable rockets
• The future of satellite propulsion in space could be … water?

How to burn a CD to store your data or music or use it on any device

The compact disc (CD) was once the preferred method for storing data long-term and for saving audio for playing in CD players. As technology progressed and formats changed, the CD was superseded by the digital video disc (DVD) and then the Blu-ray disc. Nevertheless, it remains an important option for millions of people — and it’s worth keeping your CD-burning skills sharp just in case you need to share data or music with someone who’s only equipped with a CD player. Here, we take a look at how to burn a CD for those occasions when this seemingly archaic technology might come in handy.

The first thing to note in burning a CD is the limitation on exactly how much the format can store. You’ll need to keep that in mind, because while today’s hard disk drives (HDD) and solid-state drives (SSDs) are measured in terabytes (TBs), and both DVD and Blu-ray formats are measured gigabytes (GBs), CDs are measured in megabytes (MBs) of storage. Specifically, the most common CD can store 700MBs of data, which translates to roughly 80 minutes worth of music.

Step 1: Gather your tools and materials

To burn a CD, you’ll need two things. First, you’ll need a CD or DVD recorder drive (a.k.a, a burner). If you don’t have one and you’re using a desktop with an open external drive bay, it’s easy enough to get one purchased and installed. You can also use an external USB drive, which is handy for a notebook that doesn’t have a CD or DVD drive. You’ll spend about $20 for an internal CD/DVD combo drive an external CD/DVD combo drive.

Next, you’ll need a supply of blank CDs. Stick with CD recordable (CD-R) discs to be sure your CDs will be supported on any hardware. You’ll spend around $20 for a 100 CD-R spindle from a reputable manufacturer like Verbatim.

Finally, give some thought to what you want to burn to your CD. If you want to burn data for safekeeping or to pass along to someone else, then the simplest way is to use Windows 10’s File Explorer utility. If you want to burn music that’s most likely to play on either a computer or a dedicated CD player (such as in a car stereo or a boombox), then you can use the Windows Media Player that still ships with the latest versions of Windows 10.

Step 2a: Burn your data CD

Burning a data CD is simple enough. Just place a blank CD-R into your burner and close the tray. Open File Explorer, and then check out the status of your CD burner — you should see an indication that a CD-R is inserted and how much space is free.

Mark Coppock/Digital Trends

Next, decide which data files you can burn to the CD. It’s easiest to create a working folder and then open a second File Explorer window for selecting your data files. Hit Ctrl-A on your keyboard to select all of the files, then right-click. From the context menu, select Sent to and then select your CD burner from the list of options.

Mark Coppock/Digital Trends

A dialog will open asking how you want to use the disc. You have two options for how you burn your CD. You can also enter a disc title via this dialog.

Mark Coppock/Digital Trends

First, you can select “Like a USB flash drive,” then Windows 10 will not “close” the disc. This means that in Windows XP or later, you can add more files to the same CD-R, edit files, or delete files. The downside is that the CD will not work on any other kind of PC, such as MacOS or a Linux-powered system. Once you’re finished with the CD and want to make sure it can work with any system, then you can go to File Explorer, right-click on your CD burner, and select “Close session.” Note that once you close the CD, you will no longer be able to make any changes to it.

Mark Coppock/Digital Trends

Second, you can select “With a CD/DVD player.” Choosing this option will copy your files to the CD and then close the session, making the data available on any PC.

Note that if you copy some kinds of files, such as music (MP3 or WMV) or images (JPEG), those files can be played on supported PCs. They may or may not work on standalone electronic devices such as CD or DVD players, however. If you want to make sure that your music will play on any CD or DVD player, then skip to the next section.

Step 2b: Burn your music CD

Windows 10 has advanced in a number of ways, but it retains some older tools that can still be useful in a pinch. Windows Media Player is essentially a legacy application and hardly the best media player, but it includes a handy CD burner utility that makes it easy to create a music CD that can play just about anywhere.

To get started, go to the Cortana search box and start typing “Windows Media Player.” Once it pops up in the list, click on it. Then, select the Burn tab in the upper right-hand corner.

Mark Coppock/Digital Trends

Next, go to File Explorer and locate the music files that you want to burn to the CD. Drag them over to the burn list. Windows Media Player will tell you how many minutes you’ve used; make sure you’re not exceeding the 80-minute limit. You can hit “Clear list” to start over.

Mark Coppock/Digital Trends

Next, hit “Start burn” to begin the process of burning your music files to the CD. Windows Media Player will provide a progress report as the burn is running. Note that it takes a few minutes to close the session, so be sure to wait until the process is all the way done before ejecting your CD.

Conclusion

That’s all there is to it. You’ve now burned a CD that can be used either as a handy USB flash-drive-like storage media with Windows XP or later machines, or as an easy way to share data or music with any other PC or CD/DVD player users. CD-R media is relatively inexpensive, running around $0.20 cents for a 700MB disc, and can last for years without worrying about degradation. There are newer and higher-capacity storage options available today, but sometimes the tried-and-true comes in handy.

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3D gel stacks can grow enough stem cells to treat brain disease

Programmed stem cells promise to tackle all kinds of illnesses, but there’s one catch: making them. It’s hard to cultivate large numbers of them, and the need to grow them on 2D surfaces isn’t very practical. That’s where researchers might come to the rescue: they’ve developed a method of growing neural stem cells in large volumes, but without chewing up too much valuable real estate. The trick is to use polymer-based gels that allow these juvenile cells to grow in 3D stacks.

The gels help the stem cells remodel their environment and stay in contact with each other, which is key to preserving “stemness” — that is, the ready-to-program state — in the third dimension. The result is a culture that takes up just 16 square inches of space versus the 16 square feet required for a conventional 2D approach. It uses fewer nutrients and less energy, too, and the entire stack is a mere 0.03in tall. A doctor could cultivate large batches of stem cells without having to dedicate significant chunks of a room to the process.

This technique doesn’t apply to other stem cell types, as their stemness is dictated by more by the stiffness of the gels. However, this could be a breakthrough. Now that large neural stem cell quantities are viable, scientists are raising the possibility of repairing spinal cord injuries or curing brain diseases like Parkinson’s. The challenge is injecting these stem cells directly into the body. If that happens, though, seemingly permanent conditions could be entirely treatable.

Source: Stanford, Nature

Blizzard’s Jeremy Feasel on how ‘Battle for Azeroth’ puts war back in ‘Warcraft’

World of Warcraft has existed for 13 years, and the franchise’s story has moved past the rivalry between orcs and humans that drove the original real-time strategy game. In World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth, the MMO’s latest expansion, Blizzard will return to that conflict with a deeper, more focused story that revolves around Azeroth’s never-ending war, and the characters driving it.

We spoke with Blizzard senior game designer Jeremy Feasel at Blizzcon 2017 to find out more about the big ideas behind the next chapter in gaming’s longest running saga.

Digital Trends: The conflict between Horde and Alliance is core to Warcraft’s lore, but from a gameplay perspective, it hasn’t played into World of Warcraft significantly in the last several years. What drove the designers to return to it?

Feasel: In WoW’s current arc, we are currently on another planet fighting gods with a pantheon at our back, with an awesome raid coming in Antorus. I feel like when you’re telling a story, you get up to this point where you have this cataclysmic finale of a particular story arc, which we’ve just hit with Illidan and the Burning Legion, and it’s important at that point to reset things a little bit. [We need to] come back to the core of why we’re heroes, who we’re fighting for, and what this world is.

Way back in the day, when you started your adventure in World of Warcraft, you were saving Princess the Boar for a farmer in Elwynn, and passing love letters between one kid on a farm another. You were helping out an orc farmer by kicking some peons off in Durotar. These are the people that make up the world of Azeroth. These are stories about the people who live there. They make those people important to us. They make it matter when we lose them.

Jeremy Feasel

When we’re way off on other planets fighting gods, I think it’s easy to lose sight of all those awesome characters, and how much they mean to us. It’s really worthwhile to get back to that every once in awhile, and remember that there are people back in Stormwind who would really, really, really care if Sylvanas came in there and had her way with the entire city. It’s our chance to build up those people, to build up their leaders, and build up the awesome political intrigue between Anduin, and Sylvanas, and Thrall, and even Vol’jin (he’s not gone completely! He’s coming back!). Going back to those characters ultimately allows us to tell awesome stories on into the future. They make those things significant and more real.

It’s really worthwhile to get back […] and remember that there are people back in Stormwind.

Also, this is the core story of the World of Warcraft. It’s the core of the Warcraft franchise. It was originally Alliance vs. Horde. It’s not something we’ve significantly touched on since classic WoW. We went there a little bit with Pandaria, but ultimately that was about the Panderan people. We haven’t really had an expansion since Classic, which focused purely on the politics of these two warring armies, and all the people impacted by their choices.

Warfronts, a new type of mission in Battle for Azeroth, pits Alliance versus the Horde, is going to be Player-versus-Enemy (Co-op fighting A.I.), rather than player-versus-player. Can you talk about why you decided to focus on a purely team-based mode, rather than something more competitive?

Feasel: There’s a large portion of our population that enjoys PvP content. There’s a large portion of the population that enjoys PvE content. We don’t necessarily want to conflate the two in every single instance. In “Islands,” in particular, we wanted to do both. We have three different difficulty settings, we have a brand-new group of A.I. that plays much closer to players, rather than regular WoW mobs. They make strategic decisions, they can decide to go offensive or defensive, they can come and gank you if you’re playing against a particularly good A.I., without necessarily needing to play off against players.

Really, the goal here is to characterize the other faction, and that’s not always players. That is often characters, like trolls seeking justice for Vol’jin, and it’s important that we tell their story to build up the Horde and the Alliance. This expansion is one of those opportunities; not necessarily to purely focus on player-versus-player, but to focus on faction-versus-faction, and the members that make up those factions. And making each of those factions, and all of the allied races within them, even the existing ones — even the dwarves and Tauren and the trolls — to rebuild them as three-dimensional characters with their own desires and influences.

We wanted to have that PvP element in Islands … but for Warfronts, we wanted to have both factions in the same area, because building up your based, and choosing your technologies, are so specific to the group that you’re with. In order to have all those decisions be meaningful and interesting, it needed to be something that you could come together with as a group, and then ride out and feel awesome. Often, that’s a very difficult thing to get across in a PvP environment, where both sides need to feel the same level of building up and coming at each other. With a PvE opponent, we can control the difficulty of things being thrown at you and make it always a fun experience.

Do Warfronts position players in specific roles within a conflict?

Feasel: You can do whatever you want when you enter a Warfront. If you want to be the dude that takes territory and you want to do more combat, you can do that. If our playtesting so far, we’ve had people who just chose to go chop wood, because that’s how they wanted to contribute to their particular environment. Honestly, it’s pretty cathartic. You go off, you feel like a peon in Warcraft III, you’re chopping some wood. Your wood bar is going up. Then you go back to the base, you turn in your wood, and you get a big chunk towards building one of those buildngs. You feel like you’ve solidly contributed to the warfront.

You can do whatever you want when you enter a Warfront.

We want to offer a variety of ways you can play in this particular instance, whether you want to be the support guy, or the front-line guy, or even if you want to join the waves of forces that are exiting your base to help them push forward, you can be that guy. You can be the guy that yells to everybody and says, “Hey! We’ve got enough forces now! Now is the time! Everybody join me at the lumber mill [and] we’re gonna go kill this other faction!”

You’ve talked a lot about character development: Is your goal with Battle for Azeroth to build up larger characters?

Feasel: Sure. I think you saw that in Alex [Afrasiabi]’s presentation [on what’s next for World of Warcraft] yesterday. We have five different main characters that we want to follow during the course of the expansion. You’ve seen a little bit of Anduin’s expansion over time, you’ve seen some of Jaina [Proudmoore]’s expansion over time, but really, for the first time ever, we’re able to focus huge story arcs on these characters, to build them forward as characters and tell the next chapters in their stories. It’s an awesome opportunity for us to continue building these characters, and then see where that takes the storyline afterwards now that they’re front and center.

You focused heavily on one character in Legion, now you’re focusing on five. You’re moving a lot of stories forward. Does this signal a paradigm shift in World of Warcraft tells stories?

Feasel: I think it’s a continuation or an evolution of the endgame storytelling we did in Legion, where we took Illidan’s arc all the way through to the end. We thought that was an awesome story, and we felt that was an awesome arc to take throughout the course of the expansion. It told a great story, gave us an awesome finale, and when you see what Illidan’s eventual fate is you’re going to say, “great. That’s cool. That’s an awesome finale for this particular character.” This is the opportunity to apply those same learnings to a lot of our other big characters in World of Warcraft, where we have an expansion pack that makes sense.

Blizzard has not set a release date for ‘World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth’, which is currently in development. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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