Valve has always been an industry leader in terms of groundbreaking gaming experiences, ranging from competitive multiplayer shooters to unforgettable single-player experiences that paved the way for so many games to follow. Having entered the hardware market in a big way with the Steam Deck, gamers now have access to a powerful handheld device with all the capabilities of a midrange gaming PC, with all the portability of a Nintendo Switch, delivering great performance on the go and giving players the option to experience some of the best titles the gaming world has to offer from wherever they choose.

The Basement is a room in Blue Prince that you’ll need to access in order to reach Room 46. There’s a lot going on down there, and there are several ways to reach it. Our Blue Prince guide will show you how to reach the Basement, give you the map of the Basement and Underground, and explain what to do down there. How to get the Basement Key in Blue Prince To get into the Basement, you’ll need to find the Basement Key. Happily, there’s a short answer to how to get the Basement Key: reach the Antechamber. Reaching the Antechamber is a much longer process, though. You’ll need to find (at least) one of the three levers that open the Antechamber doors and then draft a path to that door. Once you do that, you’ll pick up the Basement Key. The Basement key is your main way into the Basement. Even if you (eventually) find other paths in, you’ll still the Basement Key at least once. How to use the Basement Key in Blue Prince The easiest (well, relatively) way to get to the Basement is through the Foundation. You’ll need to draft it, move the lift down into position by revealing a hidden crank on the back side of the wall, and then take the elevator down where you will find a Basement door. To get that open, you’ll need the Basement Key (see above). As you explore, you’ll find other ways into the basement like through the Cliffside Exit (if you have a Power Hammer), the Fountain (after you drain it), or the Tomb (in a roundabout way), but the Foundation is the most straightforward. Full Basement and Underground map in Blue Prince The Basement is part of a larger Underground complex in Blue Prince. You can find a complete map in the Reservoir’s rotating gear room, or see it below: There are nine locations labeled on the map: Foundation elevator. This is the elevator in the Foundation that will bring you to the main Basement Door. Concealed Entrance. This is a hidden door that you open by solving the pallet jack puzzle in the Basement. Cliffside Exit. Outside of the house, go past the Fountain and down the stairs to where the blue braziers are. To the right, there’s a boarded up tunnel. If you have a Power Hammer (Sledgehammer + Battery Pack + Broken Lever in the Workshop), you can smash your way through. This opens a new path into the Basement. Mine Cart. The Mine Cart is just an obstacle that you can’t move from the Reservoir side. You’ll find a note about it in the Gemstone Cavern. To move it out of the way, you’ll need to solve the puzzle in the Tomb Fountain Entrance. With a bit of work, you can drain the Fountain in front of the house via the Pump Room. Doing so will reveal a new set of stairs and a new Basement door (that you’ll need the Basement Key for). Tomb Entrance. The Tomb is an Outer Room that you can draft once you unlock the West Gate Path. Inside, you’ll need to interact with the statues in a specific order to open a path to both the Mine Cart and the Reservoir. Torch Chamber. The Torch Chamber is an odd room that both relates to the larger Sigil puzzle and has torches you can light if you have the means (like with a Burning Glass made with a Magnifying Glass and a Metal Detector in the Workshop). Rotating Gear. This is your last puzzle to solve before reaching Room 46. To North Lever (and Room 46). Basement walkthrough in Blue Prince Since the Basement is part of the larger Underground, there’s a lot going on down there. There are also multiple goals you can achieve. The most obvious is reaching Room 46. For that, you’ll have to: Solve the Tomb puzzle by drafting the Tomb in the Outer Room and visiting the statues in order, and then move the Mine Cart out of the way (for later) Solve the Basement’s pallet jack puzzle and open a path across the tops of the boxes to reach the Concealed Entrance With the Mine Cart out of the way, you can solve the Rotating Gear puzzle to… Reach Room 46. While you’re down there, though, you can also: Drain the Reservoir via the Pump Room to get at some chests at the bottom. Explore the Torch Chamber and its Sigil puzzle. One final note: The elevator you unlock by lighting the four braziers isn’t connected to the Underground or the Basement. That’s its own area, the Precipice, with its own puzzle — the chess puzzle. For more Blue Prince guides, check out our full walkthrough on how to reach Room 46 or see our list of all safe codes.

When preparing for homemade pizza, it’s easy to hit the grocery store with mozzarella on your list. But what kind of mozzarella is best? Fresh, shredded, string? And is that really the best cheese for the pizza you’re craving? I sit here typing away when I should be nursing the burnt roof of my mouth because great pizza discoveries have been made in my kitchen today—my cheese-scorched mouth can wait. Similar to why there are good and bad cheese options for the best grilled cheese sandwich, pizza requires one with good melting properties (a fatty cheese), with a good balance of water, and not an overload of protein (which can resist melting). There are some surprises here, including cheeses you’d normally find at the sandwich counter and cheeses you’ve probably seen on pizza before. Here are the best cheeses to try on your next pizza, and unexpected ones to avoid.Muenster cheese (and fatty cheeses)For the longest time, I thought shredded cheese was the only cheese for my homemade slice, but I auditioned sandwich slices of Muenster cheese and was blown away. Muenster is a semi-soft cheese that doesn't break into oily pockets after cooking. I tore up a slice of muenster and scattered the irregular flats around my sauced pie. After 15 minutes or so in the oven, I removed a pizza that could stand up to even the most bougie Brooklyn pizzeria. Fatty sandwich slices of cheese—the same ones you use for grilled cheese—make great melting cheeses for high oven temperatures. They don’t become greasy after they melt, and they reward you with a lovely gooey cheese pull after slicing. Since they really melt out far and wide, don’t load up the pie too much. You can leave some space between each island and still have a nice balance of cheese to sauce. Other fatty cheeses like muenster: havarti, gouda, taleggio, and fontina.Some mozzarella Mozzarella is the pizza cheese. There’s no question that the flavor and stretchy consistency make for both the perfect centerpiece and a great canvas for toppings. However, there are a couple mozzarellas out there, and not all of them can stand up to the heat.  The fresh mozzarella starts to squeeze out water which is puddling in the middle of the pie. Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann Fresh mozzarella and the like. Fresh mozzarella, burrata, and buffalo mozzarella are these gorgeous, moist orbs of creamy white cheese. They’re usually wrapped with some moisture in the packaging or submerged and floating in liquid. While you might think these cheeses would be insanely creamy and wonderful on pizza, stay your eager cheese hand. When fresh mozzarella cooks, especially at high temperatures like 350°F to 450°F, the protein network in the cheese begins to denature and tighten up, squeezing out the moisture that used to live in the network. Fresh mozzarella has a lot of moisture to give and it’ll end up on the surface of your pizza as a watery puddle. Besides the sadness of a floppy, wet pizza crust, you also have globs of rubbery cheese that pull off in one bite. There is a way to avoid this unfortunate result: During my tests, after about five minutes, the fresh mozzarella was lovely and melted. But after 10 minutes in my 450°F oven, the water started to puddle up as the cheese began to take on some color. Pizza takes at least 15 minutes to cook in a screaming hot oven. If you must use fresh mozzarella, my advice is to add it to the pizza during the last five minutes of the cooking time. Low-moisture mozzarella. Fresh mozzarella, burrata, and buffalo mozzarella are expensive and decadent. I’d hate for you to ruin them by cooking them for too long on your pizza. Instead, rely on trusty low-moisture mozzarella. This cheese is produced with way less moisture captured and you won’t risk it ending up on your pizza. You can buy it shredded, in slices, or in big bricks. You can enjoy all the flavor and meltability of fresh mozzarella in a more pizza-friendly.  Parmesan (and hard cheeses) Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann Parmesan and other aged, hard cheeses exhibit strong, bold flavors that are lovely on pizza. However, when cheeses age, they lose moisture, and that’s when they can become broken and greasy on a pizza. Cheeses melt best when they have a balance of fat, water, and protein, so when you have a hard cheese under a high temperature, it doesn’t do much except squeeze out fats and become even harder. I added shredded parmesan to cover one of my pizzas, and when I took the pie out of the oven, the cheese stayed put in its shredded form, not really melting out but instead becoming rather translucent. It almost looked like I barely added cheese at all. That said, the flavor was bangin’. Parmesan has a presence; it’s not a mild cheese like mozzarella. I would recommend shredded parmesan if you prefer flavor over cheese pull. It’s important to note that parmesan actually might be better on the bottom of your pizza. It makes a crispy, cheesy frico crust if you make a cast iron skillet pizza. Check out the recipe here.Flavor-packed hard cheeses like parmesan: Asiago, manchego, aged swiss, aged cheddars. The winner is a mixtureIt may not come as a surprise, but the best homemade pizza cheese will always be a mixture of cheeses. Each cheese has its strong suit, so don’t deprive yourself. Low-moisture mozzarella is stretchy but mild, so add some shredded asiago for a sharp touch of flavor. Love a good melty cheese pie? Skip the asiago and opt for something like fontina to mix in with your mozzarella. My favorite mixture so far has been mozzarella with pepper jack and a bit of muenster. The opportunities are only limited by your grocery store's cheese section, so grab some sandwich slices and get experimenting. Once you've selected your cheese combo, you're ready for more of my tips for making the best homemade pizza every time; to start with, you should ferment your dough.

On Wednesday, Apple pushed updates to most of its platforms: iOS 18.4.1, iPadOS 18.4.1, macOS 15.4.1, tvOS 18.4.1 and visionOS 2.4.1. They contain two security fixes for flaws that may have been used in real-world attacks, so it's wise to update your devices without too much delay. Apple is aware of a report that both security issues "may have been exploited in an extremely sophisticated attack against specific targeted individuals on iOS." One patched bug is in Apple's audio framework, CoreAudio. This memory corruption issue allowed malicious media files to execute code when processed as audio streams. The other relates to the Remote Participant Audio Control (RPAC) framework, which lets communications apps manage audio streams. That flaw allowed an attacker with arbitrary read / write capabilities to bypass Pointer Authentication (a security feature in Apple's processors). Apple "strongly advises" all users to update their devices.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/smartphones/ios-1841-patches-two-iphone-security-flaws-used-in-extremely-sophisticated-attacks-194922877.html?src=rss

Following a price hike for prepaid customers earlier this year, Optus has increased the cost and data limits for postpaid users.

TSMC beat profit expectations for the first quarter, thanks to a continued surge in demand for AI chips.

The breathtaking heart of Skar King’s lair in Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire is an arena like no other, a colossal battleground carved deep into Hollow Earth. Wētā FX brought this epic space to life, filling it with towering apes and glowing molten lava that casts an ominous light over the entire domain. The lava fall isn’t just a visual marvel — it’s the final barrier holding back the fearsome ice titan, Shimo, adding tension and power to every frame. This monumental environment blends scale, mood, and story into one seamless visual feast, showing the true artistry behind creating worlds fit for titans. The post Building Skar King’s Arena by Wētā FX appeared first on Vfxexpress.

Amid tariff whiplash and the rejuggling of global trade, GE Vernova’s CEO Scott Strazik is finding a way to stay “relentlessly optimistic.” Strazik returns to the Rapid Response podcast to share how the company plans to continue its success as one of Wall Street’s top-performing stocks, despite looming supply chain disruption and market unpredictability.  This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. GE Vernova is now one year into life as an independent public company, much to celebrate—your revenue rose to $35 billion. In 2024, GE Vernova was the year’s fourth best performing stock. Again, a lot to celebrate. But in 2025, the external environment hasn’t been as friendly. The Trump tariffs have everyone scrambling. How do you think about this moment? How do you think about it compared to a year ago at this time? Well, our end markets really haven’t changed very much, Bob. I would start there. I mean, we continue to see very strong end markets in our larger core businesses and gas power, in our electrification and grid businesses. So, frankly, there’s going to be moments of dislocation between the stock market and our end markets. It doesn’t mean that depending on where the tariffs go, that doesn’t create an opportunity for us to prove out our nimbleness and managing our global supply chain, and we’re going to have to do that. But I think it’s frankly an opportunity for us to demonstrate how much we’ve grown in our first year as a public company to be able to operate in this kind of environment. How do the tariffs practically impact your business? I mean, you’re a global business, so changes in global relationships and reputation, all of that requires some adjustment. Yeah, I think even if you take a step back and think about some of the stuff I’ve talked to our investors about on where we want to make investments, we want to invest in our business where we can improve the durability or the resiliency of our supply chain, and that’s simply because we have a lot of organic growth that’s coming in our businesses, irrespective of any policy changes. Now, policies are going to change, they’re going to evolve. This is going to force us to relook at where we source certain things. It’ll force us to revisit our terms with some of our suppliers in different locations, but we know how to do that. So, we don’t want to be too fast to respond as we’re kind of trying to make sense of everything. But I’d also rather be a company that is quick on its feet. In this environment, President Trump announced the tariffs on a Wednesday afternoon after the market closed. Rest assured by Friday afternoon, our teams were actively working evaluation plans of what our alternatives are. Now, it doesn’t mean within 40 hours you pull the trigger in a dynamic period of time. So, we’re working it pretty hard right now to figure out what our alternatives are, and with a growing backlog, to the extent our backlog is growing so substantially, that also puts us in a privileged position with our supply base to come and say, “Listen, this is what it’s going to take to keep serving GE Vernova.” It’s almost like there’s been a pullback around the very idea of globalization that maybe it’s not good to be a global organization. Do you think about that? Well, when I think about my first four months of the year. I mean, my first trip of the year was to Singapore and Japan, the first week of January. I had a great trip in the Middle East in February visiting Saudi, Qatar, Dubai, Abu Dhabi. These are all important markets for us. I think we’ve got opportunities to serve these markets throughout, and we’re going to work really hard to earn those opportunities. At the same time, long before announcements with tariffs, the reality is there has been an evolving shift with globalization. There’s certainly been a lot of strategic moves towards concepts of decoupling from the Chinese supply chain explicitly. So, we’ve been working that over a long period of time. Now, the last week certainly has been broader than any one country, and with it, it forces you to really revisit it in an even more intimate way, what you do and where you do it, but we can do that. We’re capable of taking that on, and I’m highly confident we can use this moment to make ourselves a better company for the long term. You have announced investing $600 million in U.S. factories yourself creating over 1,500 jobs. Yes. How much does GE Vernova need to be an American company? I would say more we need to be a local company for our local markets. I think in your bigger markets, you’re going to have a local supply chain to serve that market, local teams to serve that market. We’re a global company where, at this moment, one of our most important local markets certainly is the U.S., and that’s why we’re investing into that market. But we’re not going to not invest in some of these other countries that are attractive and markets too to be local there. There’s been some speculation that the speed with which U.S. manufacturing can ramp up to replace things that might have come from abroad, that that’s going to take a while and there’s going to be disruption. Is that something for your business that you see that you worry about, or is that part of the nimbleness, I guess, that you’re talking about on the part of your team? We do have a fair amount of industrial footprint in the U.S. that allows us to build on existing assets. So, the $600 million investment is reinvesting in existing assets, 1,500 jobs to locations that already have the concrete poured. They already have the cranes. They already have the logistics with the railroad adjacent to the factory. So, we can move reasonably quickly. Now, to the extent the policy environment drives us towards greenfield investments to reindustrialize parts of our supply chain, that would take longer, truth be told. And that’s a multiyear journey that, at this point, we aren’t necessarily evaluating, but we will keep looking in that regard. But first and foremost, we’re going to keep trying to eliminate waste in our existing processes and build upon the assets we have, and we feel like that can carry us for a period of time. Now, where we don’t have it, as an example, we announced and closed an acquisition of a supply chain footprint from Woodward. That was a vertical supply chain integration of a small part of Woodward’s business, but for our gas business, an important part of our supply chain where we thought it made more sense to just have that internal. How much do you tune your long-term decision-making when there’s noise and change and pressure in the near term? We need to scrutinize how long the status quo is, for sure. And that can be hard to do in a volatile moment that we’re in. But if nothing else, it gives us a chance to really challenge ourselves on what we have been doing, whether there’s a different way to do it. And that’s the way we talk about it internally is: “This is an opportunity for us to really revisit past assumptions and think about how we can be better.” Now, in some cases, we may gain conviction with exactly the play we’ve been running. In others, there may be a better alternative. I mean, do you have, sort of, I don’t know, leadership principles or lessons that you use as a touchstone when things do get volatile? Well, we’re not going to suck our thumbs and cry on our beer as things kind of change. We want to use change as an opportunity to improve. In that regard, this moment when we’re just reaching our one-year anniversary as a public company is a moment when I feel pretty confident we’ve got our feet on the ground, and we can play into this and use this moment of change to play offense on not just how we want 2025 to go, because we won’t change 2025 in any material way certainly from a supply chain strategy, but we can use 2025 to challenge ourselves for the next decade, and that’s very much what we’re doing.

Inside the vaulted Galleria Meravigli, something other than fashion or furniture stole the scene at this year’s Milan Design Week. ASUS arrived not with product displays but with a full-on sensory encounter. The exhibition, titled Design You Can Feel, unfolded across a series of spatial experiences—from sculptural installations to textured laptops that hum with the energy of Icelandic lava and Maldivian surf. This exhibition moved beyond messaging—it was full sensory participation. Designer: ASUS Willful Wonder, the centerpiece installation by Studio INI, greeted guests with fluid, wing-like panels that moved in rhythm with each step. Every step triggered movement. Touch fed into sensors, and those signals morphed into reactive, AI-generated visuals that shifted in real time. As visitors moved, the sculpture responded—flexing, folding, revealing, and resetting with each gesture. Material design met behavioral input without screens or instructions. ASUS built the entire exhibition on three themes: materiality, craftsmanship, and artificial intelligence. These weren’t just taglines; they were baked into the surfaces of every object on display, especially the laptops. Four Finishes, Four Stories The Zenbook Ceraluminum Signature Edition series debuted as a tactile tribute to nature’s most evocative terrains. ASUS moved past brushed metal and predictable silhouettes. Each variant in the collection became a study in geological storytelling. Obsidian Black draws from the volcanic force of Geldingadalir in Iceland. Laser sintering sculpts the surface, mimicking the movement of lava frozen in time. There’s a tangible duality between gloss and matte that feels like magma cooling mid-motion. Pamukkale White channels Turkey’s cascading terraces. Its soft sheen and gold accents emerge from CNC diamond cutting—light bends and bounces along every curve, like mineral-rich water sliding over travertine steps. Terra Mocha reaches into Jordan’s Wadi Rum. Its rosette-like geometry emerges not from surface prints, but from within the material, shaped entirely through ASUS’s own ceramization technique. You don’t see the pattern—you sense it, like the grip of sandstone under palm. Luminous Blue is the most ethereal. Inspired by Vaadhoo Island’s glowing tides, its surface dances under ambient light thanks to calibrated laser-induced oxidation. It shimmers, pulses, disappears in shade, and returns in reflection. These designs weren’t made for decoration. They were shaped with geological intent, built to retain the memory of the environments that inspired them. Ceraluminum: Skin and Skeleton What connects these finishes isn’t aesthetic alone. It’s the material itself—Ceraluminum. ASUS spent four years developing this patented ceramic-aluminum hybrid. No pigments are used, and no acids are involved. The surface is formed by exposing aluminum to precise voltage and mineral inputs through a high-voltage water-based process. That creates a hard, scratch-resistant shell with three times the fracture toughness of anodized aluminum. It’s not a coating. It is the surface. The hues and porosity are intrinsic, not sprayed on. ASUS refers to this as “modern alchemy.” Fair. It balances mass reduction, structural strength, and textural richness with zero chemical runoff. And it’s 100% recyclable. The first laptop to feature it fully was the Zenbook A14, already available in Iceland Gray and Zabriskie Beige. At 2.18 pounds and measuring just 0.53 inches at its thinnest, it showed the material’s production potential. The Signature Editions expand that ambition with storytelling built into every curve. Engineering, Hidden in Plain Sight Every Signature Zenbook includes top-tier hardware. Intel Core Ultra Series 2 processors and Intel Arc graphics drive the experience. Up to 32GB of LPDDR5X memory and a 1TB PCIe 4.0 SSD handle creative workloads without lag. The vapor chamber cooling system keeps noise low and heat down. ASUS Lumina OLED displays—3K, 120Hz—show off deep blacks, punchy highlights, and subtle midtones. The sound system is Harman Kardon-certified. There’s a dedicated Copilot key, and the glass touchpad supports smart gestures. No spec is tacked on. Every feature serves a purpose. The machines feel as refined inside as they do on the outside. Even the sleeves—made from Kvadrat Febrik’s Arda textile—extend the story. Woven from wool using water-efficient methods, they provide grip, protection, and texture. Not a Concept. Not a Campaign. Zenbook Signature Editions are real machines built to handle real work. They’re thin enough to slip into a tote, strong enough to live untethered, and precise enough to become part of your everyday rhythm. They aren’t pretending to belong in a gallery. They operate, perform, and happen to also carry the clarity and restraint of something display-worthy. ASUS hasn’t announced the release date yet, but the Zenbook A14 is already on sale in the U.S. and offers a preview of the Ceraluminum experience in two colorways. For those who value tactility, quiet resilience, and design rooted in place, the Signature Editions mark a new intersection—where Earth meets interface. Where your next laptop stops feeling like a device and starts behaving like something alive.The post ASUS Brings Earth, Emotion, and Engineering Together at Milan Design Week 2025 first appeared on Yanko Design.

The antihero crew celebrate Thai New Year with a splash.