Twice as nice: Buy one Samsung Odyssey G8 OLED gaming monitor and get a 27-inch monitor for free
SAVE $529.99: As of Nov. 6, buy a 32-inch Samsung Odyssey OLED G8 4K gaming monitor at Samsung for just $999.99, down from its usual price of $1,529.98. You also get a free 27-inch Samsung Odyssey G3 FHD gaming monitor free with purchase.
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Credit: Samsung
32-inch Samsung Odyssey OLED G8 4K gaming monitor
$999.99 at Samsung
$1,529.98 Save $529.99
$1,529.98 Save $529.99
Get a 27-inch Samsung Odyssey G3 FHD gaming monitor free with purchase
A great gaming monitor can totally transform your favorite titles. Whether you're cruising through Dragon Age: The Veilguard or getting in some Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 matches, seeing games in rich, crisp 4K can be an awesome experience. And when it comes to monitors, the bigger the better, and two are always better than one — especially when you can buy one and get the other totally free. And right now, thanks to Samsung, you can do just that.
As of Nov. 6, you can get the 32-inch Samsung Odyssey OLED G8 4K gaming monitor on sale for $999.99 at Samsung. That's $529.99 off its normal price of $1,529.98 and a 38% discount. You also get the 27-inch Samsung Odyssey G3 FHD gaming monitor (a $229.99 value) completely free with purchase. That's two monitors for less than the price of one.
The Samsung Odyssey OLED G8 4K monitor is no slouch when it comes to displays. It boasts 4K OLED visuals with a 240Hz refresh rate and a 0.02ms response time, all of which are absolutely essential to creating the best possible gaming experience, especially if you play multiplayer matches. That all goes toward giving you the best picture possible, with glare-free visuals, G-Sync compatibility, and a dynamic cooling system that can auto-dim logos and other imagery on-screen to stave off burn-in. Plus, at 32 inches, it's large and in charge so you can immerse yourself further in your game.
The smaller 27-inch Samsung Odyssey G3 FHD monitor may be a bit less souped-up, but it makes for a great secondary display or a unit you might want to use with your daily driver PC to get some work done. But however you use it, it's an excellent deal.
via IFmashable.com
Prime members: Kick off cozy season with free reads from Amazon
GET A FREE E-BOOK: Prime members can cash in on one free e-book in November from the selection of Amazon First Reads titles. Non-Prime members can grab one title for just $1.99.
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Credit: Amazon
We're now well into soup season, which also means it's time to cozy up with some good books. If you're in a money-saving mood to prep for Black Friday sales, Amazon is offering Prime members some free reads during the month of November.
The Amazon First Reads program gifts Prime members one free e-book title this month and tosses in an additional free short story. If you're not a Prime member, you can score one Amazon First Reads title and the short story for just $1.99 each.
This month's selection of First Reads covers tons of genres, so all readers are likely to find something that's appealing. Historical fiction title White Mulberry by Rosa Kwon Easton is included in the deal, as is the suspenseful tale Mirror Me by Lisa Williamson Rosenberg. There's also women's fiction, a phycological thriller, true crime, and a contemporary fiction title included in this month's First Reads picks.
November's bonus short read is also free for Prime members, which means you can laugh along with The Answer is No by Fredrik Backman.
Joining the Amazon First Reads program is free, and signing up means you'll get a monthly email with details about the latest First Reads picks. To read these Kindle titles, you'll want either an e-reader or the Kindle app downloaded on a tablet or your smartphone. We're partial to the Kindle Paperwhite, but you certainly don't need a Kindle to dive into these titles.
In a time when everything seems to be getting more expensive, a free deal is something worth celebrating. Prime members get a free e-book and short story this month from the Amazon First Reads program, while non-members can purchase each for just $1.99. Kick off cozy reading season ASAP.
via IFmashable.com
Best 'Wordle' starting word? Step up your game today.
Trying to game Wordle isn't my bag, I'll admit.
My ideal daily Wordle session starts with me plucking a legible five-letter combination out from my stream of consciousness and seeing where that random guess takes me.
The game becomes a sort of linguistic Magic Eye at that point: If I loosen my focus and look past the initial guess to imagine all the words that might be formed from any yellow- or green-marked letter, I'll eventually find the answer. Or not! And that's OK, I'm fine with a loss.
Some people like to win under any circumstances, though, and I get it. It feels great to maintain that daily streak, especially as it jumps into the double digits and beyond.
Sure, you could always cheat and look up the answer, but there's no sense of accomplishment in that. Gaming Wordle is the only agreeable middle-ground there, and the best place to find that comfort zone is starting word strategy.
So let's get into it. The internet has lots of thoughts.
Looking for the Wordle answer today? Here are hints and the answer for the Wordle on November 6.
How should we think about Wordle starting word strategies?
Let's think about this holistically first. You've got 26 letters in the alphabet. Of those, five (plus the letter "Y" at times) are vowels, the basic building block for most words.
So at a very basic level, any five-letter combination that helps you rule out more vowels early is going to trim down the galaxy of possible answers.
With that basic reality in mind, we can immediately pick out a few ideal starting words There are others, but ADIEU, AUDIO, and OUIJA all cover four vowels. You won't know if any yellow or green letters appear twice, say if the answer is "sweet" or "radar," but you can at least spot some critical letters right at the start.
Credit: Brandon Bell / Staff via Getty Images
That's good enough for most people. Starting with vowel-heavy words will give you an edge with Wordle's puzzle-solving every time. But it's also not that simple, since not every letter is created equally. Yes, vowels appear in basically every word, but some are more or less common. The same goes for consonants.
There's also the Wordle dictionary. There are more than 10,000 words the game will recognize as allowable guesses, but there's a much smaller list of words — only a few thousand — that qualify as possible solutions. The NYT even trimmed down that solution list after it acquired Wordle. So while you could use a more obscure word like AUREI (the plural form of aureus, an ancient Roman gold coin, for those who are curious!) as a guess, it's not going to be the day's answer.
If going vowel-heavy isn't enough and you want to cover some of the more common consonants as well, RAISE is an ideal starting word since it covers the three most common vowels and the two most common consonants as they appear in dictionaries.
14 Wordle clones: Because one Wordle a day just isn't enough
What is the best Wordle starting word, really?
For those who don't want to risk feeling like they're cheating Wordle, you might want to stop reading here. You can use the strategies and ways of thinking above to give yourself an edge in every day's new puzzle, and that's plenty for most players.
For those who want to dive deeper down the rabbit hole, however, there's an excellent video from Grant Sanderson, a mathematician and computer scientist who goes by 3Blue1Brown on YouTube. Sanderson applied his knowledge of "information theory" to Wordle, and he coded some testing programs that measure things like letter frequency to determine the best of the best starting words.
It's a dense 30 minutes of explanation that's heavy on the math talk, but Sanderson's friendly demeanor and willingness to take the time necessary to break down complex ideas for viewers makes it a fascinating watch.
In this initial video from Sanderson (you didn't think it was going to be as easy as one video, did you?), the ultimate takeaway leaves us with CRANE as the best Wordle starting word. But it's not that simple. Because Sanderson's breakdown focuses on letter frequency, CRANE is just the first stage of information gathering. It's only the "best" if you use what you know about the right and wrong letters in that first word to inform a perfect second guess.
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Is your head swimming yet? Do you wish you'd just tapped out after the first section?? That's where I'm at! But wait, we're not even done yet.
A week after the above video post, Sanderson dropped another one, titled "Oh, wait, actually the best Wordle opener is not 'crane'...." It turns out, there was a slight bug in his original test program. He says right up front that the bug "affects a very small percentage of cases," so it doesn't undermine the substantive lessons from the first video.
Without getting into the heavy math, the bug relates specifically to solutions that have multiples of the same letter, and how Wordle handles that.
Sanderson felt the need to put out a second video because, while "very little of substance actually changes" from the original video, the final conclusion relating to optimal starting word is affected. The same caveat from before applies here as well: An optimal starting word is only as good as how the guess that follows uses the information gleaned from the first one.
With that context in mind, Sanderson's amended ideal starting word is SALET (which is an alternate spelling for "sallet," a type of helmet worn during the Middle Ages #themoreyouknow), though TRACE and CRATE work nearly as well. Especially since both of those latter options are potential Wordle solutions.
Honestly, one of the most important takeaways from all these dives down math-y rabbit holes is the notion I mentioned above: Your first guess is only strong in the context of the guesses that follow. That's the whole game of Wordle in the end: A single guess provides you with information that you then need to use to narrow down the list of subsequent guesses.
But! (Yeah, we're not done here.) There's another school of thought on how to approach solving Wordle. Instead of playing the game as intended and using each previous guess to inform the next one, you instead stick to the letter frequency game and try to rule out the most common letters, consonants and vowels both, up front, irrespective of any clues you pick up.
This approach effectively "wastes" your starting stretch of guesses on locked-in choices that are meant to narrow down the number of possible letters you have to work with. Just know that if you play Wordle in "hard mode," this strategy won't work, since each successive guess needs to include any letters that are confirmed to be in the solution by the previous guess.
Is there a best Wordle starting word that doesn't go so hard on all the math?
As the top commenter on Sanderson's original video legendarily notes: "Interesting video, real good stuff. Gonna keep using PENIS but this was really cool and informative!"
For those who want to skip the long and winding road into math-land, YouTuber Bentellect has a short, sweet breakdown of his starting strategy.
So RATIO first, then MENDS, then LUCKY. That's it. With those three choices, you'll have slimmed down the list of possible letters to the point that figuring out the solution with your final guesses becomes significantly easier. It's not a surefire winning strategy for every day's puzzle. I'm not sure there is one, and even if there is, knowing it would essentially break the game.
Mashable's own Wordle expert Caitlin Welsh prefers a different three-word starter combination: SCALY, GUIDE, and THORN. The premise is the same though: Caitlin, like Bentellect, is narrowing down the list of possible letters that could appear in the solution by casting the widest net possible, alphabetically speaking, with her first three guesses.
So there you have it. There's no single perfect starting guess for Wordle. There's a whole spectrum of them, along with a long list of caveats that basically boil down to: How much do you want to break the game? I said it at the start and I'll say it again: Stream of consciousness is the way to go. Use Wordle like I do, as a meditative brain-bender to loosen up those thinking muscles at the start of your day.
For those who want to win at any cost, though, hopefully this extended rundown of what works best will get you closer to climbing that daily streak into the triple digits.
Not the day you're after? Here's the solution to yesterday's Wordle.
via IFmashable.com
Save 50% on Amazon Fire Kids' tablets and start checking off the holiday shopping list
SAVE 50%: The Amazon Fire HD 8 Kids and Fire HD 8 Kidfs Pro tablets are just $69.99 at Amazon, down from the normal price of $139.99. That's a savings of $70.
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Credit: Amazon
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Credit: Amazon
We're just a few weeks away from the beginning of holiday travel season. If you're coming up with ways to keep the kids happy while en route to the grandparents, Amazon is here to save the day (or car ride or plane journey.)
As of Nov. 5, both the Amazon Fire HD 8 Kids and the Fire HD 8 Kids Pro tablets are just $69.99 at Amazon, down from the typical price of $139.99. That's an impressive 50% discount or a savings of $70.
Both of these Amazon Fire tablets designed for kids are great for keeping minds busy during holiday travel or during school breaks. The Amazon Fire HD 8 Kids is designed for kids between the ages of 3 and 7, and the Amazon Fire HD 8 Pro is meant for older kids that are between the ages of 6 and 12.
Both tablets come with an 8-inch HD screen and 32GB of storage space for plenty of downloaded shows, games, and books. Amazon mentions both models get about 13 hours of battery life with each charge, so you should be good to go for any holiday journey.
Parents get ultimate access to the tablets, with the ability to review activity on the tablet, approve or deny purchases, and manage download requests.
Since a few tablet tumbles are bound to happen, Amazon includes a protective kid-friendly case. Both tablets also come with Amazon's worry free warranty which covers the tablet for two years should it break or get damaged. Within those two years, Amazon will replace the tablet at no charge.
If you'll be heading off on holiday travel soon or you're shopping for a curious kiddo, an Amazon Fire tablet could be the perfect gift. They're not only a great way for kids to watch their favorite shows while traveling, they can be a terrific learning device. Snag either the Amazon Fire HD 8 Kids or the Fire HD 8 Kids Pro for 50% off today at Amazon and beat the holiday shopping rush.
via IFmashable.com
'Scram!' just made it to Taylor Swift's Eras Tour
It's almost the end of Taylor Swift's Eras Tour (almost 150 shows later), and dancer Kameron Saunders is still stealing the show every night. This week in Indianapolis, he delighted fans with a sublime TikTok shout out.
That's right friends, "Scram!" made the Eras Tour, the TikTok-viral delight made by comedian, actor, and writer Kel Cripe (@reallygoodimpressions).
During the live version of Swift's GFY anthem "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together," Saunders has carved a fan-favourite moment in the Eras Tour. In particular, it's the part of the song when Swift does her spoken monologue — "Ugh, so he calls me up and he's like, "I still love you" / And I'm like, "I just, I mean, this is exhausting, you know / Like, we are never getting back together, like, ever."
Every night of the Eras Tour, Swift hands the mic over to Saunders for the final "like, ever," which he delivered to script for the U.S. dates. But for the international shows, Saunders has shaken up the line each show, and it's become one of the most anticipated moments for fans.
So this week, at a show at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Saunders used the line to scream one very online word: "Scram!"
TikTok fiends will immediately recognise Saunders' reference, Los Angeles based-comedian Kel Cripe's viral post in which they send "a message to all the guys tryin' to talk to my girl" wearing an outstanding wolf tee and holding raised fist, ready to deliver a freshly made knuckle sandwich.
At the time of writing, the video has 9.3 million views on TikTok. And it rules so hard.
"Scram! Leave her alone! She...she doesn't want to talk to you! Get outta here!" Cripe says in the video, as a piano version of Pixies' "Where Is My Mind?" plays and the camera recedes. Honestly, it's the perfect accompaniment to Swift's song about telling someone to absolutely piss off — or else.
Cripe indeed saw the Eras Tour moment and crafted a lip-synched post to celebrate the occasion.
"scram is also my ringtone. I'm never changing it," commented @mrs.jessi.g.
"This is like, bigger than going viral?! CONGRATULATIONS!!!!!" wrote @essmeow.
"My fiance and I can’t stop saying scram to our kids and animals 😂😂😂" wrote mandynvr04.
If their official "Scram" tee wasn't already sold out, it'd be near impossible now.
via IFmashable.com
Amazon begins drone delivers to Phoenix, provided the weather is favorable
Amazon has started making deliveries via drone in parts of Phoenix, according to reporting by TechCrunch. We knew this was coming and now it’s here. Customers in the West Valley Phoenix Metro area should now have access to a selection of products that will arrive at doorsteps via the friendly skies. These include household, office, health and beauty supplies, among others.
Phoenix residents will be able to click on a drone delivery icon before checking out. The company promises that items will be delivered within an hour. This is due to the improved specs of the company’s latest drone, the MK30, which was recently approved by the Federal Aviation Administration to fly beyond the visual line of sight.
There are some caveats. Products must be five pounds or less to be eligible, though Amazon says that around 50,000 items are already available for drone deliveries. Also, the drones will only make deliveries during daylight hours and “favorable” weather conditions. “Currently we do not offer drone delivery at night, during heavy winds, or during heavy rain,” the company wrote in a blog post.
This is happening just a few months after Amazon ended its drone-based delivery program, Prime Air, in California. The company still makes drone deliveries in Texas and it's planning a major expansion into Europe.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://ift.tt/dYahPzAvia engadget.com
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