This week, on a more focused episode of The TT Show, Jak and Kosta break down and go through the crazy Helldivers 2 controversy on PC. If you were offline for a few days (and this all played out throughout a single weekend), the decision to force the Helddivers 2's PC players to link their Steam Account to a PlayStation Network (PSN) account caused a veritable backlash storm.

From the review bombing to developers being grilled to Sony and developer Arrowhead's damage control to the surprisingly swift happy ending, Jak and Kosta discuss the implications and consider what might happen in the aftermath.

This week's other big story comes from the world of Apple, with the company lifting the lid on its new iPad Pro lineup powered by the new AI-powered 3 nanometer M4 chip. The big thing here is that it represents Apple's first dip into the world of OLED displays, with a groundbreaking 1000-nit SDR and HDR screen that has two OLED panels in one!

Microsoft has previously confirmed that it has been breached by hackers from both China and Russia, and now the US government wants to talk about it.

The House Committee on Homeland Security has selected Microsoft's vice chair and president, Brad Smith, to attend a hearing called "A Cascade of Security Failures: Assessing Microsoft Corporation's Cybersecurity Shortfalls and the Implications for Homeland Security." For those that don't know, Microsoft has recently been put under the microscope by security researchers and the US government following a slew of security breaches.

Prominent incidents that likely caught the attention of Homeland Security were the attack on Microsoft Exchange in June 2023 that resulted in senior US government officials having their emails compromised - approximately 60,000, and the January 2024 attack by Midnight Blizzard. The latter of the two was traced back to Russia, and the breach resulted in Midnight Blizzard breaking into the email accounts of Microsoft executives and stealing messages and files from the leadership team.

Astrophotography can be really easier and really difficult, and sometimes the most difficult attempts at capturing the cosmos pay off immensely. This is one of those examples.

Astrophotographer Betul Turksoy captured what is called an analemma, which is a figure 8 curve that is created from the elliptical curve of the Moon. Where it gets difficult is the requirements to take the above photograph. The above photograph was featured on NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day on October 10, 2022, where it's explained to capture an analemma, typically of the Sun, the camera needs to be planted in a single spot and the time of the time of the Sun marked for the first photograph. Then, take a photograph at the same time each day for one year.

However, a Moon analemma comes with some caveats. According to NASA, on average, the Moon returns to the same position in the sky about 50 minutes and 29 seconds later each day, which means to achieve a true Moon analemma, every photograph needs to be taken 50 minutes 29 seconds later each day. The duration of the photography bout will be one lunar month. Due to the above taking two months to capture, it technically shows a double lunar analemma.

The Nintendo 64, a 1996 console, has undoubtedly aged in the ensuing decades. However, as one of the first pieces of hardware to present full 3D worlds to explore, it's fondly remembered by many. A vibrant emulation and mod scene helped to keep the late '90s Nintendo gaming era alive. From Super Mario 64 to The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, some of the most beloved 3D games of all time were for the N64.

In recent years, we've had some impressive N64 projects and endeavors, including full decompilation and native PC ports. This has led to games like Super Mario 64 getting ray-tracing support and other enhancements. But the manual decompilation and then recompilation process is long, often taking fans years - until now.

One of the N64 scene's most talented coders, Mr. Wiseguy, has created N64: Recompiled - 'a tool to statically recompile N64 binaries into C code that can be compiled for any platform.' Any N64 can now be ported to a PC and run as a native app, paving the way for mods and ray-tracing support.

It was only a few weeks ago that Microsoft continued with its plan to roll out a controversial Windows 11 update that implemented new advertisements into Windows 11, and now users have spotted yet another additional promotion now baked into Windows.

The new advertisement from a few weeks ago was implementing a "Recommended" section within Windows 11's Start menu. This new section first began testing within Microsoft's Insider program and according to Microsoft the recommendations within the section will be for apps sourced from a "small set of curated developers" that will meet Microsoft's quality standards. Notably, users are able to switch off recommendations within the Personalization section of Windows 11.

Now, Microsoft has rolled out a new advertisement within the "Settings" option for Windows, and this advertisement is for its Game Pass subscription service. The advertisement was discovered in the latest Dev channel version 26120.470 (KB5037864). The new Game Pass promotion ties in with the company's previous statements regarding Game Pass growth on PC still being present, while it stagnating on Xbox consoles.

The race to achieve the world's first petabyte-sized SSD is being headed by Samsung Electronics, and the finish line may be closer than we previously thought.

It was only in March last year that reports surfaced that Samsung Electronics was approximately a decade away from creating the first petabyte SSD, but now new research has come out that may reduce that timeline significantly. Firstly, Samsung is preparing to launch its 9th Gen V-NAND flash that features 290 layers stacked, a new global benchmark. Additionally, the manufacturer announced the existence of its 10th Gen V-NAND flash that features 430-layer stacking.

The quest to achieve a 1,000 terabyte, or 1 petabyte single SSD may still be some years away, but recently, we got a peak into the behind-the-scenes at what new technology the company is working on to make that storage goal a reality. Giwuk Kim, a Ph.D student at the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), is set to present an analysis on Hafnia Ferroelectrics, and how ferroelectric properties could lead to smaller and more efficient capacitors/memory.

NASA has taken to its website to reveal some brief plans for constructing the first levitating robot on the surface of the Moon.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has proposed plans to construct the first lunar railway system, which will be designed to provide reliable, autonomous and efficient payload transport between locations on the surface of the Moon. The space agency has proposed developing FLOAT, or Flexible Levitation on a Track, which is a system that uses magnetic robots that levitate over the track.

How is this possible? NASA explains the track will be comprised of three layers: a graphene layer that enables robots to float above it using diamagnetic levitation, a flex-circuit layer to generate electromagnetic thrust to move the robots along the track, and an optional, but preferable solar panel layer to catch any sunlight. The additional benefits of FLOAT is the robots won't be touching the track, which minimizes the chance of wear and tear.

DIY gadget YouTuber "Bitluni" has built his own personal RISC-V megacluster, inside of a compact design, check it out:

Overall, the megacluster features 256 x RISC-V-based microcontrollers, operating at a mind-boggling 14.7GHz single-core frequency. Impressive. Remember, these are RISC-V chips, not x86-based processors inside of a regular PC.

The idea behind this is to fit 16 of the superclusters into a single interface, but that created issues down the line, so he designed his own "cluster blade" that featured two microcontrollers mounted on the board, each of them managing the supercluster on top of it. The cluster blade allowed Bitluni to give each supercluster its bus interface.

AMD's next-generation high-end Ryzen AI "Strix Halo" APUs have turned up in new shipping manifestos, featuring up to 64GB capacities and up to 120W TDPs.

The shipping manifestos were noticed by "nbd.ltd" and @harukaze5719, with multiple shipments of the same APU that would've been sent out for evaluation and testing purposes. These manifestos show the Maple DAP reference evaluation platform, which is available in both 32GB and 64GB memory capacities.

The Maple DAP reference systems feature 32GB or 64GB of pre-soldered memory, set by AMD, unlike Intel which is using on-package memory with its next-generation Lunar Lake CPUs.

Before it created Halo and before it created Destiny, veteran game development studio Bungie released the classic first-person shooter Marathon for the Apple Macintosh in 1994. Hailed as the Mac's answer to Doom, Marathon spawned a sequel several years later, leading to the studio's creation of the iconic Halo: Combat Evolved.

With Bungie now a first-party PlayStation studio owned by Sony, the team is developing a new entry in the series called Marathon. It takes place in the same futuristic sci-fi universe as the original but is shifting the gameplay and style to fit the mold of a PvP extraction shooter - ala Escape From Tarkov.

We've got some great news if you want to get a taste of where it all began. The community-driven team at Aleph One Developers has released a remastered version of the 1994 original - playable on modern PC gaming hardware and available for free on Steam.

MSI and Capcom announced and showcased limited edition Monster Hunter-themed PC gear earlier this year at CES 2024. The line-up of PC hardware included a gaming laptop, GeForce RTX 4060 Ti GPU, a custom gaming controller, case, motherboard, monitor, and liquid cooler. It's quite the line-up, with the MSI GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 8G GAMING SLIM Monster Hunter Edition GPU now available.

The limited edition graphics card is bundled with the custom Monster Hunter controller, both sporting unique designs inspired by the franchise to help celebrate its 20th anniversary. The custom GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 8GB GPU looks very cool with red, gold, and black flourishes to mimic Rathalos - one of the game's giant monsters.

The MSI GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 8G GAMING SLIM Monster Hunter Edition sports a thin 2-slot design and MSI's TRI FROZR 3 cooling system, which includes the company's latest TORX FAN 5.0, core pipe, and airflow setup. However, as a limited edition bundle that also features custom packaging, the price tag is much higher than the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 8GB's MSRP of $399 USD. It's currently listed for $499.99 USD at Newegg.