TV writers, like all of us, are developing a love-hate relationship with Zoom

Enlarge / ATX TV's panel on writers' room Zooms: From L to R, top row: IndieWire's Ben Travers (moderator), Sera Gamble (Netflix's You), Dan Goor (Brooklyn Nine-Nine). Bottom row: Melinda Hsu Taylor (Nancy Drew) and Beth Schwartz (Sweettooth)  (credit: YouTube)

Every week now seems to bring news of another Hollywood project being delayed. Sometimes this is because you can't make money in an empty theater, but it's just as often due to production halts in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. While most of that industry hits pause for now, one crucial segment has not—the writers. Like many of us, they've instead become intimately familiar with the inner workings of on-the-job Zoom calls.

"I kind of feel for every aspiring TV writer at home right now due to the pandemic," said Sera Gamble, showrunner of Netflix's You (formerly of Supernatural and The Magicians), during this year's online-only edition of the ATX TV Festival. "They're trying to write while doing a bunch of other stuff; well, congrats, you're now in showrunner training. I've frequently had to sit down in the past and rewrite a script in a moment that felt like a severe crisis, and sometimes it was a severe crisis. But it feels like that times 10. I have to reset expectations every morning: I wake up, wait a minute before checking my phone, check in with loved ones, and then take the problems of the day as they come... [I tell my writers] 'You can't solve what you can't solve, so what can we get done in the next hour?'"

For this late-addition panel to this year's ATX TV Festival, Gamble (virtually) joined Dan Goor (Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Parks and Rec), Melinda Hsu Taylor (Nancy Drew, Lost), and Beth Schwartz (Sweet Tooth, Arrow) to take streamers "Inside the Writers (Zoom) Room." For some, the change came abruptly. Hsu Taylor and her staff had nearly completed both writing and production on the latest season of Nancy Drew when suddenly they had to convert everything to be remote-friendly (she credits doing a Zoom birthday for her son around that time for helping her grasp the basic logistics and experience). Other writers started wholesale in a digital world, like the staff of Brooklyn Nine-Nine. They were five weeks into story-breaking at the time of this panel and hadn't been together in-person at all while working on the upcoming season eight.

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We bought Walmart’s $140 laptop so you wouldn’t have to

Enlarge / The cheerful purple chassis is by far the best thing about Walmart's cheapest laptop. (credit: Jim Salter)

One glance at the specs on Walmart's cheapest laptop—the EVOO EV-C-116-5—makes it clear to any technical enthusiast that the device is not exactly going to be a powerhouse. But the little laptop only costs $139, and its stats appear to stack up well with $200-$250 Chromebooks. So recently, I ponied up my credit card and ordered one. In purple.

Amongst us Arsians, it's obvious that the EVOO is not going to be a good choice for a Windows laptop. With only 2GiB of RAM, the EVOO won't be able to run anything without hammering virtual memory (swapping data from RAM to disk and back again). Beyond that, a 32GB SSD simply is not enough room for Windows itself, let alone any applications. The first time the EVOO tries to upgrade to a new build of Windows 10 (for example, Windows 10 build 2004, which just released last month), it will fail due to lack of space.

That doesn't necessarily mean the laptop is entirely useless, though. Perhaps it could be reloaded with Linux—even "heavyweight" distributions like Ubuntu are considerably easier on both RAM and storage than Windows is. Heck, maybe even the assumption that a 2GiB RAM, 32GB SSD laptop can't run Windows 10 well isn't quite right. There was only one way to find out.

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An in-depth look at how Figma, a browser-based collaborative design tool, has found success, as it seeks to become a platform by building out a plugin ecosystem (Kevin/kwokchain)

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Oppo Enco W11 TWS price and features revealed ahead of June 25 launch

Oppo has confirmed the launch of its affordable truly wireless Enco W11 earbuds in India. A dedicated microsite of the product got live on Flipkart, revealing all the essential details and price of the earphones. The truly wireless earbuds will go on sale starting June 25 on Flipkart. It is an affordable entry to the company's new Enco series of headphones including truly wireless Enco Free, Enco W31 and neckband style Enco M31. According to Gadgets360, the Oppo Enco W11 will be priced at Rs. 2,999. 

The teasers have revealed the design in white colour along with some key specifications and features. It is still not confirmed whether the earphones will be in other colours or just the white variant. 

Oppo Enco W11 TWS features 

As per the teaser, the Oppo Enco W11's key features will include Bluetooth v5.0 support, touch controls, and IP55 dust and water resistance. The touch control feature will allow users to play/pause, change tracks, pick and end calls, raise Google Assistant and adjust the volume. It automatically resumes Bluetooth connection when the user gets in 10 meters of the connected device. The poster shows that the W11 will have 8mm drivers.

The company is also showing off its "binaural simultaneous Bluetooth transmission", which delivers sound to the left and right earbuds simultaneously. In contrast, most traditional TWS earbuds use left-to-right relay Bluetooth transmission, where only left is paired with the phones, and it transmits signals from to the right earbud.

It is teased to provide a combined battery life of 20 hours where the earbuds last for five hours on a single charge and the case carries 15 hours of power. Also, it will be able to deliver one hour of playback with five minutes of charge. The posters do not reveal more details about their claims and what were the test conditions. In addition to these, the company has also teased its lightweight design, background noise cancellation during calls.

The earphones will mark Oppo's entry into the budget TWS earphones market which has seen a sudden rise in competition from brands like Xiaomi, Realme, Moto and some many new small players as well.

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A look at Toronto's growth as a tech hub, selling itself as a gentler, kinder version of Silicon Valley (Brian Barth/MIT Technology Review)

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A look at Toronto's growth as a tech hub, selling itself as a gentler, kinder version of Silicon Valley  —  The Canadian tech hub is selling itself as an antidote to the tech industry's worst impulses.  But what does that entail?  —  It is a frigid February day when I visit Communitech …

New phones from Samsung, Nokia, Oppo and other top tech news of the week

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TikTok users and K-pop fan accounts claim they registered thousands of tickets for Trump's Tulsa rally as a prank, resulting in lower than expected attendance (New York Times)

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Urbint, which uses AI to predict and prevent threats to energy infrastructure and worker safety, raises $20M Series B (Christine Hall/Crunchbase News)

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Urbint, which uses AI to predict and prevent threats to energy infrastructure and worker safety, raises $20M Series B  —  Urbint, an artificial intelligence company for infrastructure and utility safety, secured $20 million in a Series B funding round co-led by Energy Impact Partners and Piva, the company said Thursday.

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