Warning: contains spoilers for Doctor Who episode “The Reality War.” In Doctor Who’s frankly mind-boggling season finale, the Doctor’s epic battle with the two Ranis, Omega, Conrad and a herd of skyscraper-sized bone creatures ultimately comes down to the restoration of a single life – and will require a sacrifice nobody expected. Spoilers ahead. It’s honestly difficult to know where to start with this episode. There are so many potential jumping-off points for discussion – though, somewhat tellingly, very few of them relate to the actual story that kicked off in earnest last week, which the episode itself seems positively impatient to get out of the way. It takes about 15 minutes for the Doctor to stop hugging every member of the extended supporting cast so the titular war can kick off, then by the halfway mark it’s over. Audacious? Yes, though that’s not to say it actually works. Do we start with Billie Piper? Or the unexpected and quite charming Jodie Whittaker cameo? Or the fact that they somehow snuck Ncuti Gatwa’s regeneration onto the screen without anybody knowing? No, because this season didn’t start with Billie Piper, or Jodie Whittaker, or the Rani, or Ruby Sunday. It didn’t even start with the Doctor. It started with Belinda Chandra. A character with so much potential – compassionate, uncertain, a little bit spiky, competent in a new and interesting way, compellingly distrustful of the Doctor. Potential that has, at this point, been mostly wasted. There is a point in “The Reality War” where Belinda basically tells the Doctor “OK I think I’m done contributing to this episode, good luck tho” and is left holding the baby in a soundproofed box where she can neither affect or be affected by the story happening outside. We even have an unintentionally comical cut back to her standing in there, doing nothing, saying nothing. It’s hard to think of a more literal way to sideline a key player. This is the co-lead of the show! The companion! And instead of having any real agency, instead of contributing to the plot in any meaningful way whatsoever, she functionally stops existing as a narrative presence. She doesn’t even get to go with the Doctor when he rushes off to save what turns out to be her child. And for what? So that the companion who supposedly left the show last season can have all the big dramatic moments instead? There were no advanced screeners available for this episode – given what happens at the end, it’s easy to see what they were scared might leak – so I’m writing with less distance than usual, reacting fairly rapidly to a first watch. But even with several days to digest, it’s difficult to imagine feeling anything other than bafflement at this storytelling choice. This is what Belinda’s whole story arc was leading to? This is the big twist? It’s truly one of the most bewildering decisions that Russell T Davies has made. It already kind of felt like he’d run out of meaningful stuff for Belinda to do after “The Well”, and there have been plenty of complaints about her sidelining in “Wish World”, but nobody could have predicted this. Sorry Belinda. And sorry Varada Sethu. You both deserved better. Now to Ncuti Gatwa. It’s pointless getting into behind-the-scenes gossip, or speculating on the actor’s motivations – if he only ever wanted to do two seasons, of course that’s his choice. But what are we to take away from his brief tenure in storytelling and character terms? A Doctor defined by his joy, his exuberance, his love for people (frustratingly, a point this episode hammers until it becomes tedious). A smile as powerful as a billion supernovas. A killer wardrobe. Even in lesser episodes, Gatwa’s energy has carried us along, infectious and delightful. It’s a genuine shock and a shame to see him go. Join our mailing list Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox! Not least because, as with Belinda, it feels like his Doctor had unfulfilled potential. Was this episode truly a satisfying conclusion to Fifteen’s story? He gets plenty of good moments, big and small, and of course he plays the hell out of all of them. You could argue that sacrificing their life to save one child is about the most Doctor-ish thing possible. I wouldn’t necessarily argue with you. But that’s broad strokes stuff, generally applicable to any incarnation. What about this Doctor makes this specific set of circumstances a fitting send-off? Is it satisfying for this Doctor, a Doctor representing a particular streak of joyful hedonism, a Doctor who releases UNIT from their stifling roles in Conrad’s reactionary wish world via an explicit and triumphant assertion of his queerness, to go out in this way, for these reasons? It just doesn’t feel like that’s what these past two seasons – the bi-generation, his relationship with Rogue, his torturing of Kid, the seemingly forgotten Susan stuff – have been leading to. It’s a shame that the episode also feels so messy on a minute-to-minute level. There are individually effective moments – Dark Souls boss Omega is a fantastic visual, and him casually munching The Rani is enjoyably WTF (though I can’t help wishing they’d offed the other one and kept Archie Panjabi around). The moment with the Doctor and Belinda passing Poppy’s jacket back and forth and folding it until it vanishes is kind of jaw-dropping in how understated and upsetting it is. Anita’s first joke about being in hospitality is funny (the second and third iterations not so much). Millie Gibson does a great job, even if it feels like a misstep to give Ruby so much heavy lifting to do instead of Belinda. But the whole thing feels so all over the place that not even Gatwa’s megastar energy can hold it together. And now he’s gone, regenerated into Billie Piper. At this point, we have no idea when the show will be back. It’s impossible to know where this is going. And it’s hard not to feel torn – on the one hand, Billie Piper is a fantastic actor, and it’s fascinating to consider what her take on the role will be (though it should be noted that the credits pointedly don’t say “Billie Piper as The Doctor”, whatever that could mean). On the other hand, didn’t we just do this? We had the second Tennant Doctor, it was a lovely gift for fans that wrapped up some loose ends and gave everyone a big warm glow for the anniversary, and then we flew off with Ncuti Gatwa, an actor who couldn’t have screamed more loudly that things were going to be different. But now we’re looking backwards again. And as fun a surprise as Piper’s appearance is, as fully as she will no doubt own the role… it feels like another retrograde move. It’s Doctor Who celebrating itself, getting lost in its own mythos, turning inward. And so we end this oh-so promising season in a strange, unsettling place. An episode that doesn’t really seem to care that much about the story it claimed to be telling, which makes discussing it seem weirdly beside the point. A show in limbo. A whole incarnation of the Doctor gone, when we’d barely started to get to know him. A promising companion wasted. A showrunner everyone expected to be a safe pair of hands making some utterly confounding choices. Where do we go from here? Doctor Who series 15 is available to stream now on BBC iPlayer in the UK and on Disney+ around the world.

Standard modular construction was given a softened appearance with the addition of residential wood truss roofs and the introduction of shorter modules in select locations to create courtyards. Photo by doublespace photography PROJECT Durham Modular Transitional Housing, Beaverton, Ontario ARCHITECT Montgomery Sisam Architects Inc. In cities, homelessness can be painfully visible, in the form of encampments or people sleeping rough. But in rural areas, people experiencing homelessness are often hidden away. It’s this largely invisible but clearly present need that led to the construction of Beaverton Heights, a 47-unit transitional housing residence about 100 kilometres from Toronto that serves the northern part of the Regional Municipality of Durham. The region had run a pilot project for transitional housing in Durham during the Covid pandemic, out of a summer camp property—so when provincial and federal funding became available for modular, rapidly delivered transitional housing, they were quick to apply. Montgomery Sisam Architects is no stranger to modular supportive housing, or to the site, for that matter. 15 years ago, they designed Lakeview Manor, a 200-bed long-term care facility for the region, on an adjoining parcel of land. At the time that they took on Beaverton Heights, they had completed two modular supportive housing projects for the City of Toronto. (They have since completed four more.)  The initial Toronto projects were done on a massively compressed timeline—a mere eight months from design to the move-in date for the first, and nine months for the second. “So we knew that’s as tight as you can crunch it—and that’s with all the stars aligned,” says Montgomery Sisam principal Daniel Ling.  As transitional housing, the Beaverton facility is designed to help residents overcome their barriers to housing. To achieve this, the program not only includes residential units, but communal spaces, including a double-height dining room and lounge that occupy the western half of the project. This part of the complex can also be used independently, such as for community activities and health supports. To create the needed volume, Montgomery Sisam decided to prefabricate the community structure in steel: the entire west half of the project was constructed and assembled in a factory to ensure that it would fit together as intended, then disassembled and reassembled on site. The double-height community space includes a reading room, terrace, administrative areas, and communal dining room served by a full commercial kitchen. The building can also be used for community-wide functions, such as medical clinics. A cluster of columns marks the area where the dining area’s eight steel modular units join together. Photo by Tom Ridout For both the steel community structure and its wood residential counterpart, the prefabrication process was extensive, and included the in-factory installation of plumbing, electrical and mechanical systems, interior and exterior finishes, and even furnishings in each module. “Basically, just remove the plastic from the mattress and take the microwave from the box that’s already in the unit,” says Jacek Sochacki, manager of facilities design, construction, and asset management at the works department of the Regional Municipality of Durham. Within the building, the most extensive on-site work was in the hallways, where the modules met: building systems needed to connect up, and flooring and finishes needed to be completed over the joints after the modules were installed. One of the most surprising aspects of the project is how un-modular it looks. Montgomery Sisam’s previous experience with modular construction allowed them to find leeway in the process—small tweaks that would change the look of the project, without affecting the construction cost. The long site allowed the architects to use a single module as a glazed hallway, connecting the two buildings, and creating generous courtyards on its two sides. In two other areas, shorter modules are specified to transform the massing of the building. The resulting cut-outs serve as an entry forecourt and as a dining terrace. Instead of flat roofs, the team used residential trusses—“the same wood trusses you would see in subdivisions,” says Ling—to create sloped roof forms. From the outside, the windows of the residential units are slightly recessed behind a frame of wood cladding, adding further dimension to the façade.  Photo by doublespace photography Since it was a design-build process, all of these decisions were vetted through the builder for their cost effectiveness. “It wasn’t hard to convince them, we’re going to use some shorter modules—you are going to build less there,” recalls Ling. “These are things that actually don’t cost a lot of money.” The resulting massing is intentionally lower towards the front of the property, where the community space faces residential neighbours, and doubles to four storeys towards the back. As you approach the project, the courtyards and cut-outs give it the appearance of smaller discrete masses, rather than a single volume. Topping the project is the region’s largest solar panel array, which provides 35 to 40 percent of the all-electric building’s energy needs. Modular construction aided in airtightness and performance—in its first months of operation, it delivered an EUI of 102 kWh/m2/year.   Balancing between independence and community was an important principle for the program, and for the design. To this end, each studio is designed to function as a self-sufficient dwelling, with its own kitchen, full washroom, and heat pump with independent temperature control. Small spatial nudges—like daylight at both ends of corridors, seating nooks with built-in benches throughout the project, and generous common rooms—aim to coax residents outside of their units. The property is bracketed by the dining area at the front, and an outdoor basketball court at the rear. A long storage shed holds some of the facility’s mechanical equipment along with bikes—an easy way to get into town for residents who may not have cars.  Located between the residences and the community building, a semi-private courtyard offers a quiet place for clients to rest or socialize with others. Photo by doublespace photography The building looks so good that, had the finishes be chosen for luxury rather than durability, it could easily pass as a family resort. But is that too nice? Often, government-funded buildings—especially for a stigmatized program such as transitional housing—come under criticism if they appear to be too fancy.  I put this to Sochacki, who replies: “There’s this misnomer that if the building looks good or unique, it costs a lot of money. I think we proved that it doesn’t.” Apart from a wood surround for the fireplace, the components of the building are utilitarian and basic, he says. “It’s just like: how do you make the most out of common materials? It costs us exactly the same, but we’re doing things that are actually nice.” Screenshot That niceness is not just a perk, but essential to the core purpose of helping people experiencing homelessness to make their way back into society. “Making it nice is important,” says Sochacki. “Nice lighting, nice windows, nice places to sit, nice spaces that people enjoy being at—because that’s what’s going to make the difference.”  “If you build a place that people just want to spend all their time in their room and they don’t come out, that’s not going to help them with transitioning back to a sustainable, permanent housing lifestyle,” he adds. “You’ve got to create a place where they feel welcome and that they want to spend time in—they want to meet other people and they want to get the support, because there’s a place and space for it, and it’s successful for them to get the support.” A terrace adjoins the reading lounge and dining area, inviting outdoor barbecues and gatherings in warm weather. The cut-out was created by using a shorter module in this section of the building, minimizing the impact to construction costs and logistics. Photo by Tom Ridout CLIENT Regional Municipality of Durham | ARCHITECT TEAM Daniel Ling (FRAIC), Enda McDonagh, Kevin Hutchinson, Sonja Storey-Fleming, Mateusz Nowacki, Zheng Li, Grace Chang, Jake Pauls Wolf, Mustafa Munawar, Paul Kurti, William Tink, Victoria Ngai, Kavitha Jayakrishnan, Max Veneracion, Megan Lowes | STRUCTURAL/MECHANICAL/ELECTRICAL Design Works Engineering | LANDSCAPE Baker Turner | INTERIORS Montgomery Sisam Architects | CONTRACTOR NRB Modular Solutions | CIVIL Design Works Engineering | CODE Vortex Fire | FOOD SERVICES Kaizen Foodservice Planning & Design | ENERGY MODELlING Design Work Engineering | SPECIFICATIONS DGS Consulting Services | AREA 3,550 m2 | COMPLETION October 2024 ENERGY USE INTENSITY (operational) 101.98 kWh/m2/year   As appeared in the June 2025 issue of Canadian Architect magazine  The post Invisible Need, Visible Care: Beaverton Heights, Beaverton, Ontario appeared first on Canadian Architect.

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 85, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, sorry in advance that this week is a tiny bit politics-y, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I’ve been reading about Sean Evans and music fraud and ayahuasca, playing with the new Obsidian Bases feature, obsessing over every Cliche” more times than I’m proud of, installing some Elgato Key Lights to improve my WFH camera look, digging the latest beta of Artifacts, and downloading every podcast I can find because I have 20 hours of driving to do this weekend.I also have for you a very funny new movie about tech CEOs, a new place to WhatsApp, a great new accessory for your phone, a helpful crypto politics explainer, and much more. Short week this week, but still lots going on. Let’s do it.(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you reading / playing / watching / listening to / shopping for / doing with a Raspberry Pi this week? Tell me everything: installer@theverge.com. And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, tell them to subscribe here. And if you haven’t subscribed, you should! You’ll get every issue for free, a day early, in your inbox.)The DropMountainhead. I mean, is there a more me-coded pitch than “Succession vibes, but about tech bros?” It’s about a bunch of (pretty recognizable) billionaires who more or less run the world and are also more or less ruining it. You’ll either find this hilarious, way too close to home, or both. WhatsApp for iPad. I will never, ever understand why Meta hates building iPad apps. But it finally launched the most important one! The app itself is extremely fine and exactly what you’d think it would be, but whatever. It exists! DO INSTAGRAM NEXT.Post Games.Polygon, all about video games. It’s only a couple episodes deep, but so far I love the format: it’s really smart and extremely thoughtful, but it’s also very silly in spots. Big fan.The Popsockets Kick-Out Grip. I am a longtime, die-hard Popsockets user and evangelist, and the new model fixes my one gripe with the thing by working as both a landscape and portrait kickstand. $40 is highway robbery for a phone holder, but this is exactly the thing I wanted.“Dance with Sabrina.” A new, real-time competitive rhythm game inside of Fortnite, in which you try to do well enough to earn the right to actually help create the show itself. Super fun concept, though all these games are better with pads, guitars, or really anything but a normal controller.Lazy 2.0. Lazy is a stealthy but fascinating note-taking tool, and it does an unusually good job of integrating with files and apps. The new version is very AI-forward, basically bringing a personalized chatbot and all your notes to your whole computer. Neat!Elden Ring Nightreign. A multiplayer-heavy spinoff of the game that I cannot get my gamer friends to shut up about, even years after it came out. I’ve seen a few people call the game a bit small and repetitive, but next to Elden Ring I suppose most things are.The Tapo DL100 Smart Deadbolt Door Lock. A $70 door lock with, as far as I can tell, every feature I want in a smart lock: a keypad, physical keys, super long battery life, and lots of assistant integrations. It does look… huge? But it’s pretty bland-looking, which is a good thing.Implosion: The Titanic Sub Disaster. One of a few Titan-related documentaries coming this summer, meant to try and explain what led to the awful events of a couple years ago. I haven’t seen this one yet, but the reviews are solid — and the story seems even sadder and more infuriating than we thought.“The growing scandal of $TRUMP.” I love a good Zeke Faux take on crypto, whether it’s a book or a Search Engine episode. This interview with Ezra Klein is a great explainer of how the Trump family got so into crypto and how it’s being used to move money in deeply confusing and clearly corrupt ways. Cameron Faulkner isn’t technically new to The Verge, he’s just newly back at The Verge. In addition to being a commerce editor on our team, he also wrote one of the deepest dives into webcams you’ll ever find, plays a lot of games, has more thoughts about monitors than any reasonable person should, and is extremely my kind of person. Since he’s now so very back, I asked Cam to share his homescreen with us, as I always try to do with new people here. Here it is, plus some info on the apps he uses and why:The phone: Pixel 9 Pro.The wallpaper: It’s an “Emoji Workshop” creation, which is a feature that’s built into Android 14 and more recent updates. It mashes together emoji into the patterns and colors of your choosing. I picked this one because I like sushi, and I love melon / coral color tones.The apps: Google Keep, Settings, Clock, Phone, Chrome, Pocket Casts, Messages, Spotify.I haven’t downloaded a new app in ages. What’s shown on my homescreen has been there, unmoved, for longer than I can remember. I have digital light switches, a to-do list with the great (but paid) Stuff widget, a simple Google Fit widget to show me how much I moved today, and a couple Google Photos widgets of my lovely wife and son. I could probably function just fine if every app shuffled its location on my homescreen, except for the bottom row. That’s set in stone, never to be fiddled with.I also asked Cameron to share a few things he’s into right now. Here’s what he sent back:Righteous Gemstones on HBO Max. It’s a much smarter comedy than I had assumed (but it’s still dumb in the best ways), and I’m delighted to have four seasons to catch up on. I’m really digging Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, which achieves the feat of breakneck pacing (the game equivalent of a page-turner) and a style that rivals Persona 5, which is high praise. I have accrued well over a dozen Switch 2 accessories, and I’m excited to put them to the test once I get a console on launch day.CrowdsourcedHere’s what the Installer community is into this week. I want to know what you’re into right now, as well! Email installer@theverge.com or message me on Signal — @davidpierce.11 — with your recommendations for anything and everything, and we’ll feature some of our favorites here every week. For even more great recommendations, check out the replies to this post on Threads and this post on Bluesky.“The Devil’s Plan. This Netflix original South Korean reality show locks 14 contestants in a windowless living space that’s part mansion, part prison, part room escape, and challenges them to eliminate each other in a series of complicated tabletop games. (If this sounds familiar, it’s a spiritual successor to the beloved series The Genius from the mid-2010s.)” — Travis“If you’re a fan of Drive to Survive, I’m happy to report that the latest season of Netflix’s series on NASCAR is finally good, and a reasonable substitute for that show once you’ve finished it.” — Christopher“I switched to a Pixel 9 Pro XL and Pixel Watch 3 from an iPhone and Apple Watch about 6 months ago and found Open Bubbles, an open source alternative to BlueBubbles that does need a Mac but doesn’t need that Mac to remain on, You just need a one-time hardware identifier from it, then it gives you full iMessage, Find My, FaceTime, and iCloud shared albums on Android and Windows using an email address. So long as you can get your contacts to iMessage your email instead of your number, it works great.” — Tim“Playing Mario Kart 8 Deluxe for the last time before Mario Kart World arrives next week and takes over my life!” — Ravi“With Pocket being killed off I’ve started using my RSS reader — which is Inoreader — instead as a suitable replacement. I only switched over to Pocket after Omnivore shut down.” — James“I just got a Boox Go 10.3 for my birthday and love it. The lack of front lighting is the biggest downfall. It is also only on Android 12 so I cannot load a corporate profile. It feels good to write on just, almost as good as my cheaper fountain pen and paper. It is helping me organize multiple notebooks and scraps of paper.” — Sean“Giving Tweek a bit of a go, and for a lightweight weekly planner it’s beautiful. I also currently use Motion for project management of personal tasks and when I was doing my Master’s. I really like the Gantt view to map out long term personal and study projects. (I also got a student discount for Motion, but it’s still expensive.)” — Astrid“Might I suggest Elle Griffin’s work at The Elysian? How she’s thinking through speculative futures and a cooperative media system is fascinating.” — Zach“GeForce Now on Steam Deck!” — SteveSigning offOne of the reasons I like making this newsletter with all of you is that it’s a weekly reminder that, hey, actually, there’s a lot of awesome people doing awesome stuff out there on the internet. I spend a lot of my time talking to people who say AI is going to change everything, and we’re all going to just AI ourselves into oblivion and be thrilled about it — a theory I increasingly think is both wrong and horrifying.And then this week I read a blog post from the great Dan Sinker, who called this moment “the Who Cares Era, where completely disposable things are shoddily produced for people to mostly ignore.” You should read the whole thing, but here’s a bit I really loved:“Using extraordinary amounts of resources, it has the ability to create something good enough, a squint-and-it-looks-right simulacrum of normality. If you don’t care, it’s miraculous. If you do, the illusion falls apart pretty quickly. The fact that the userbase for AI chatbots has exploded exponentially demonstrates that good enough is, in fact, good enough for most people. Because most people don’t care.”I don’t think this describes everything and everyone, and neither does Sinker, but I do think it’s more true than it should be. And I increasingly think our job, maybe our method of rebellion, is to be people who care, who have taste, who like and share and look for good things, who read and watch and look at those things on purpose instead of just staring slackjawed at whatever slop is placed between the ads they hope we won’t really notice. I think there are a lot of fascinating ways that AI can be useful, but we can’t let it train us to accept slop just because it’s there. Sorry, this got more existential than I anticipated. But I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and I’m going to try and point Installer even more at the stuff that matters, made by people who care. I hope you’ll hold me to that.See you next week!See More:

Silicon Valley nerds have been lonelier since Fry’s Electronics shut down in February 2021 in the midst of the pandemic. The electronics store chain was an embodiment of the valley’s tech roots. But Micro Center, an electronics retailer from Ohio, has opened its 29th store in Santa Clara, California. And so the nerd kingdom has returned. I see this as a big deal, following up on the opening of the Nintendo store — the second in the country after New York — in San Francisco earlier this month. After years of bad economic news, it’s nice to see signs that the Bay Area is coming back. No. To answer your question, nerds cannot live at the Micro Center store. But this isn’t just any store. It’s a symbol — a sign that shows tech still has a physical presence in Silicon Valley, in addition to places like the Buck’s Restaurant, the Denny’s where Nvidia started, the Intel Museum, the Computer History Museum, the California Academy of Sciences and the Tech Museum of Innovation. Other historic hangouts for techies like Walker’s Wagon Wheel, Atari’s headquarters, Lion & Compass — even Circuit City — have long since closed. But hey, we’ve got the Micro Center store, and the Apple spaceship is not that far away. The grand opening week has been going well and I got a tour of the superstore from Dan Ackerman, a veteran tech journalist who is editor-in-chief at Micro Center News. As I walked into the place, Ackerman was finishing a chat with iFixit, a tech repair publication which has its own space for podcasts inside the store. That was unexpected, as I’ve never seen a store embrace social media in such a way. Can you stump the geniuses at the Knowledge Bar at Micro Center? Nearby was the Knowledge Bar, where you can get all your tech questions answered — much like the Genius Bars in Apple Stores. And there were repair tables out in the open. There are a lot of things for tech enthusiasts can like about Micro Center. First, it’s not as sprawling as Fry’s, which had zany themes like ancient Egypt and a weird mix of electronics goods as well as household appliances, cosmetics, magazines and tons of snack foods. (The Egyptian-themed Campbell, California Fry’s store that I drove by often was 156,000 square feet, and now it’s home to a pickleball court complex). Fry’s was a store that stereotyped nerds and Silicon Valley, which also had its own HBO television show that carried on the stereotypes. Nvidia’s latest RTX 50 Series GPUs were in stock at Micro Center. The Micro Center store, by contrast, is smaller at 40,000 square feet and stocked with many more practical nerd items. For the grand opening, this store had the very practical product of more than 4,000 graphics processing units (GPUs) in stock from Nvidia (which just launched its 50 Series GPUs) and AMD, Ackerman told me. Some of those graphics cards cost as much as $4,000. Not to be outdone. AMD has a row of GPUs at Micro Center too. “There were people waiting to get to the GPUs,” Ackerman said. On display was a gold-plated graphics card that was being auctioned off for charity. It was signed by Jensen Huang, Nvidia CEO. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang signed this GPU being auctioned for charity at Micro Center. “I joke that whoever wins the bid should get a Jensen leather jacket as well,” said Ackerman. And this Micro Center store has a good location (5201 Stevens Creek Boulevard in Santa Clara) that is just a six-minute drive from Apple’s worldwide headquarters and (perhaps better yet) a one-minute walk from the Korean Hair Salon. Micro Center had a previous store in Silicon Valley, near Intel’s headquarters in Santa Clara. But that store close in 2012 because the company couldn’t negotiate better terms with the landlord. For its return to the Bay Area, Micro Center bided its time and came back at a time when many other retail chains were failing. It proves that the once proud region — the birthplace of electronics — still merits its own electronics store. You can buy dyes for liquid-cooled tubes at Micro Center. Sure, we have Target, Best Buy and Walmart selling lots of electronics gear. But there’s nothing like the Akihabara electronics district in Japan, which is full of multi-story electronics stores and gaming arcades. But this store is loaded with today’s modern top gear, like AI PCs, Ubiquity home networking gear, and dyes for multi-colored water-cooling systems. Vendors like Razer and Logitech had their own sections. Ackerman was pleased to show me the USB-C to USB-A adapter in stock, among many obscure items. And he showed me the inventory machine that could rotate its stock of 3D-printing filaments and give you the exact SKU that you scanned with a bar code. Tech hobbyists can find their love at Micro Center. “That’s super fun. I call it Mr. Filaments,” Ackerman said of the inventory robot. There’s a section for hobbyists who like single-board computing and DIY projects. There’s a set of video, audio and digital content creation tools for content creators. All told, there are more than 20,000 products and over 100 tech experts who can help. It even has the numbered cashier locations where you can check out — the same kind of checkout stands that Fry’s had. The Mr. Filaments robot inventory system at Micro Center. Customers can receive authorized computer service for brands like Apple, Dell, and HP, benefiting from same-day diagnostics and repairs, thanks to over 3,000 parts on hand through partnerships with leading OEMs. I only wish it had a help desk for Comcast. Micro Center has gear to entertain geeks. Micro Center started in 1979 in Columbus, Ohio. It’s a surprise there aren’t more nerd stores, given how ubiquitous tech is around the world these days. But Ackerman said, “These guys are really doing it right, picking and choosing, finding the right cities, finding the right locations. That’s why Charlotte is great. Miami is a big tech hub, especially for health tech. And we’re literally five minutes away from Apple headquarters and plenty of other places. People from HP and Nvidia and other companies are coming in today to hang out.” “Even though this store is big, the CEO (Richard Mershad) is really into curation, making sure it’s the right mix of stuff. He’s making sure it doesn’t go too far afield. So you’re not going to come in here and find, you know, hair dryers or lawncare equipment,” Ackerman said. “You’re going to find computer and home entertainment stuff, and DIY gear. There are components, just like in a Radio Shack, that hobbyists care about.” Dan Ackerman knows how to install a TV on your wall. As for the Micro Center News, Ackerman told me he has around 10 regular contributors and 20 more freelancers writing gadget reviews and other stories about tech gear. It is a kind of refuge for that vanishing breed of professional tech journalists. No wonder I was so nostalgic visiting Micro Center.

Even as children, we in the U.S. learn that June brings good things—warmer weather, ice cream trucks, and most significantly, summer break from school. As an adult, all of those things still matter to me (substitute summer break for outdoorsy weekends), but the arrival of summer produce has crept up to the top of my June list of good things. In this monthly article, I take a look at the fruits and veggies coming into season and some incredible ways you can use them. Let’s dive into June's offerings. Why seasonal and local produce is greatLong distance shipping for out-of-season produce is convenient, but there is usually a price to pay with literal higher prices or lesser quality (or both). Using seasonal produce is a step toward supporting smaller farms situated somewhere closer to where you live rather than a monoculture farm somewhere far away. A big, healthy harvest with shorter shipping distances likely means a cheaper price tag for you. And hopefully the produce exhibits the best possible flavor profile since it doesn’t have to travel great distances to arrive at your market. Buying local and in season means you’ll possibly see a greater variety of tender greens and delicate fruits that don’t travel out of state well. Those little strawberries that pop up at the farmers market are so juicy and delicate you’d never see them packed up and shipped out across the country—they’d be turned into jam before they got a chance to leave. Go to those summer farmers markets downtown and reap the benefits of the juiciest summer fruit.  What’s in season right nowYou’re probably seeing it already, but everywhere from tiny produce markets to big box grocery stores are growing fuller with the very beginnings of summer produce glut, and the prices are dropping. Personally, I’m celebrating the low berry prices with morning smoothies. (If you’re a fruit smoothie-enthusiast like I am, here are a couple great blenders that might interest you.) For those who are growing their own food, keep up with our Home and Garden section for tips.The new produce coming in for June:ApricotsSweet Cherries (not quite yet for tart cherries)StrawberriesBlueberriesRaspberriesBlackberriesBeetsBroccoli Cabbage Garlic scapesGreen peasMustard greensZucchini & summer squashSay, "au revoir" to:AsparagusArugulaRampsParsnipsProduce in peak season:Beet greensLettuceRadishes and their greensRhubarbSpinachTurnipsChardSnap peasSnow peasNote that your specific region may be warmer or cooler, or farther away—so don’t worry if floods of strawberries haven’t arrived yet, or if you still have loads of wild ramps growing in the yard. Nature will do its thing, and we’ll continue trying to keep up.What to cook with your spring bountyFruitsJune is the beginning of having all the fun you want to have when it comes to recipes. Let’s start with fruit. We’re looking at loads of berries for the next few months and the beginnings of stone fruits, so I recommend warming up those ovens. I know that sounds too hot, but think of the pies! Cherry pies, Strawberry-rhubarb, apricot and blackberry, blueberry-goat-cheese tarts—you simply must make some. To help you along, here’s my fail-proof way to lattice pie crust, and my best advice on preventing soggy fruit pies. They’re well worth a read if you’ve had trouble in the past.If you’d rather be stuck in a room with a pack of wild 7-year-olds than make a pie, OK fine. Make a fruit trifle with leftover cake, stuff delicious biscuits with summer fruit and whipped cream, and why not take a crack at your own homemade berry ice cream. I made vanilla bean ice cream with a swirl of fresh raspberry compote and I felt pretty damn pleased with myself. If you’re shopping for affordable ice cream machines, I just tested and reviewed this Cuisinart.As I mentioned, fruit smoothies always welcome a handful of frozen berries. I should mention (and I’ll say this again at the end of the season): Freezing your berries is the best way to reduce waste. (Here’s the best way to freeze fruit.) If you’re using berries to top yogurt or granola, there’s no need to freeze it, but if you’re baking with fruit, making jams, or blending smoothies, freezing is extremely helpful. Pop the fruit in the freezer in the container it came in (hull strawberries first, and halve the big ones). After a few hours, they’ll be solid and you can dump them into a zip-top freezer bag for easier freezer storage.Vegetables All the cruciferous veggies are going strong right now, so go ahead and get that fiber. Use shaved broccoli and cabbage in a salad. Wilt spinach, chard, or mustard greens down in a hearty soup. My absolute favorite thing to do with summer zucchini is to make Thai kai jiao. You can use different vegetables in this dish, but zucchini is my all-time favorite. You also can’t go wrong with grilling big, fat planks of summer squash and drizzling them with a light vinaigrette. Got lots of crisp lettuce? Well, you can always bulk up your warm salads or do what I do and add it to every sandwich. Bacon, egg, cheese, and lettuce. Meatball parm sub and lettuce. Peanut butter and—OK, maybe not that one. Pay special attention to the fleeting produce like rhubarb, ramps, and scapes. They’re around for just a blink so grab them up. Try roasting your rhubarb with strawberries for a sweet, tart, and caramelized treat. Enjoy the best of June produce, and hopefully we’ll get a peek at tomatoes at the end of the month. 

A new developer diary video has been released by Hangar 13 for the upcoming Mafia: The Old Country. The 5-minute video, which you can check out below, features various developers of who worked on the game from Hangar 13 and Italian studio Stormind Games talking about the upcoming title. Among the notable talking heads in the video are game director Alex Cox, lead writer Matthew Aitken, and art director Steve Noakes, among others. Stormind Games’ senior project manager Salvo Fallica also chimes in about the title, saying “Our priority has always been to ensure that everything in the game feels authentic.” Authenticity is a key word in this developer diary, with even Cox and Aitken talking about the steps the developers had taken to make sure that things in Mafia: The Old Country feel exactly how they should. “The details are absolutely key in keeping the immersion of the player,” said Aitken in the video, before being followed up by Cox talking about how much of the title is grounded in real-world history of the Sicilian Mafia. According to Cox, the studio got field experts to help it realise its vision for the game and provide context. “We need to make sure that the game is grounded in the real history of the Sicilian Mafia,” said Cox. “Experts in their field are able to kind of help us contextualize things that we read in the stuff that we see on the screen with real lived experiences.” Noakes also spoke about how much attention was paid to the details in some of the smallest aspects of Mafia: The Old Country. He brings up knives, which can be used in the game, and how much work the studio had to do to figure out what knives would look like in the time period in which Mafia: The Old Country takes place. “When it comes to something like the knives in the game, there’s very little reference that’s available for that. Right?” said Noakes. “And so really we had to dig very deep. We went into some tiny little backwater of a machine shop where this guy and his son were still crafting knives by hand, imbuing them with their particular regional styles, known for their thumbprints, if you like, of their particular approach to building knives. We just wouldn’t really experienced that any other way.” Associate art director Jakub Vavrik also spoke about how different Mafia: The Old Country will feel when compared to its predecessors, since the previous games in the franchise take place in dense cities. “The upcoming title, on the other ”Previous Mafia games were more or less city heavy, and now we are moving to more organic wildlife setting of Sicily,” he said. Mafia: The Old Country was announced back in August 2024. The game, under development for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, is slated for release on August 8. The release date was announced with a trailer that also showcased some gameplay. In the meantime, if you’re planning on playing the title on PC, check out its hardware requirements.

The housing catalogue includes 50 low-rise home designs, including for garden suites, duplexes, four-plexes and six-plexes. Each design was developed by local architecture and engineering teams with the intent of aligning with regional building codes, planning rules, climate zones, construction methods and materials. TEXT John Lorinc RENDERINGS Office In Search Of During the spring election, the Liberals leaned into messaging that evoked a historic moment from the late 1940s, when Ottawa succeeded in confronting a severe housing crisis.  “We used to build things in this country,” begins Prime Minister Mark Carney in a nostalgic ad filled with archival images of streets lined with brand new post-World War II “strawberry box” bungalows, built for returning Canadian soldiers and their young families.  The video also includes montages from the now-iconic design “catalogues,” published by Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC). These supplied floor plans and unlocked cheap mortgages for tens of thousands of simple suburban houses found in communities across the country. “The government built prefabricated homes that were easy to assemble and inexpensive,” Carney said in the voice-over. “And those homes are still here.”  Over the past year, CMHC has initiated a 21st century re-do of that design catalogue, and the first tranche of 50 plans—for garden suites, duplexes, four-plexes and six-plexes—went live in early March. A second tranche, with plans for small apartments, is under development.  Unlike the postwar versions, these focus on infill sites, not green fields. One of CMHC’s goals is to promote so-called gentle density to residential properties with easily constructed plans that reflect regional variations, local zoning and building-code regulations, accessibility features and low-carbon design. As with those postwar catalogues, CMHC’s other goal was to tamp down on soft costs for homeowners or small builders looking to develop these kinds of housing by providing no-cost designs that were effectively permit sets. The early reviews are generally positive. “I find the design really very compelling in a kind of understated way,” says SvN principal Sam Dufaux. By making available vetted plans that can be either pre-approved or approved as of right, CMHC will remove some of the friction that impedes this scale of housing. “One of the elements of the housing crisis has to do with how do we approve these kinds of projects,” Dufaux adds. “I’m hoping it is a bit of a new beginning.” Yet other observers offer cautions about the extent to which the CMHC program can blunt the housing crisis. “It’s a small piece and a positive one,” says missing middle advocate and economist Mike Moffatt, who is executive in residence at the Smart Prosperity Institute and an assistant professor at Western’s Ivey Business School. “But [it’s] one that probably captures a disproportionate amount of attention because it’s something people can visualize in a way that they can’t with an apartment tax credit.” This kind of new-build infill is unlikely to provide much in the way of affordable or deeply affordable housing, adds Carolyn Whitzman, housing and social policy researcher, and author of Home Truths: Fixing Canada’s Housing Crisis (UBC Press, 2024). She estimates Canada needs about three million new dwellings that can be rented for $1,000 per month or less. The policies that will enable new housing at that scale, she says, involve financing subsidies, publicly owned land, and construction innovation, e.g., prefabricated or factory-built components, as well as “consistent and permissive zoning and consistent and permissive building codes.”  Indeed, the make-or-break question hovering over CMHC’s design catalogue is whether municipalities will green-light these plans or simply find new ways to hold up approvals.   An axonometric of a rowhouse development from the Housing Catalogue, designed for Alberta. A team effort Janna Levitt, partner at LGA Architectural Partners, says that when CMHC issued an RFP for the design catalogue, her firm decided to pitch a team of architects and peer reviewers from across Canada, with LGA serving as project manager. After they were selected, Levitt says they had to quickly clarify a key detail, which was the assumption that the program could deliver pre-approved, permit-ready plans absent a piece of property to build on. “Even in 1947,” she says, “it wasn’t a permit set until you had a site.” LGA’s team and CMHC agreed to expand the scope of the assignment so that the finished product wasn’t just a catalogue of plans but also included details about local regulations and typical lot sizes. Re-Housing co-founder Michael Piper, an associate professor at U of T’s John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, came on board to carry out research on similar programs, and found initiatives in places like Georgia, Indiana and Texas. “I have not found any that moved forward,” he says. “Canada’s national design catalogue is pretty novel in that regard, which is exciting.” The noteworthy exceptions are California, which has made significant advances in recent years in pre-approving ADUs across the state, and British Columbia, which last fall released its own standardized design catalogue.  He also carried out a scan of land use and zoning rules in Ontario for 15 to 20 municipalities. “We looked to see [what] their zoning permitted and what the rules were, and as you might expect, they’re all over the place,” he says. “Hence the challenge with the standardized design.” At present, high-level overviews for the 50 designs are available, including basic floor plans, 3D axonometrics, and building dimensions. Full architectural design packages are expected to be released later this year. Levitt says the architects on the team set out to come up with designs that used wood frame construction, had no basements (to save on cost and reduce embodied carbon), and drew on vernacular architectural styles. They researched representative lot sizes in the various regions, and configured designs to suit small, medium and large properties. Some versions have accessibility features—CMHC’s remit included both accessible units and aging-in-place as objectives—or can be adapted later on.  As for climate and energy efficiency considerations, the recommended materials include low-carbon components and cladding. The designs do reflect geographical variations, but Levitt says there’s only so much her team could do in terms of energy modelling. “How do you do heat energy calculations when you don’t have a site? You don’t have north, south, east, west [orientations] and you don’t have what zone are you in. In B.C. and Ontario, there are seven climatic regions. There was a lot of working through those kinds of very practical requirements, which were very complicated and actually fed into the design work quite significantly.” As Levitt adds, “in 1947, there were no heat loss models because the world wasn’t like that.” LGA provided the architects on the team with templates for interior elements, such as bathrooms, as well as standards for features such as bedroom sizes, dining areas, storage sufficient to hold strollers, and access to outdoor space, either at grade or via a balcony. “We gathered together these ideas about the quality of life that we wanted baked into each of the designs, so that [they] expressed a really good quality of life—modest but good quality,” she says. “It’s not about the finishes. People had to be able to live there and live there well.” “This isn’t a boutique home solution,” Whitzman says. “This is a cheap and mass-produced solution. And compared to other cheap and mass-produced solutions, whether they be condos or suburban subdivisions, [the catalogue designs] look fine to my untrained eye.” A selection of Housing Catalogue designs for the Atlantic region. Will it succeed?  With the plans now public, the other important variables, besides their conformity with local bylaws, have to do with cost and visibility to potential users, including homeowners, contractors and developers specializing in smaller-scale projects.  On the costing side, N. Barry Lyons Consultants (NBLC) has been retained by CMHC to develop models to accompany the design catalogue, but those figures have yet to be released. While pricing is inevitably dynamic, the calculus behind the entire exercise turns on whether the savings on design outlays and the use of prefabricated components will make such small-scale projects pencil, particularly at a time when there are live concerns about tariffs, skilled labour shortages, and supply chain interruptions on building materials.  Finally, there’s the horse-to-water problem. While the design catalogue has received a reasonable amount of media attention since it launched, does CMHC need to find ways to market it more aggressively? “From my experience,” says Levitt, “they are extremely proactive, and have assembled a kind of dream team with a huge range of experience and expertise. They are doing very concerted and deep work with municipalities across the country.” Proper promotion, observes Moffatt, “is going to be important in particular, just for political reasons. The prime minister has made a lot of bold promises about [adding] 500,000 homes.” Carney’s pledge to get Canada back into building will take time to ramp up, he adds. “I do think the federal government needs to visibly show progress, and if they can’t point to a [new] building across the road, they could at least [say], `We’ve got this design catalogue. Here’s how it works. We’ve already got so many builders and developers looking at this.’”  While it’s far too soon to draw conclusions about the success of this ambitious program, Levitt is well aware of the long and rich legacy of the predecessor CMHC catalogues from the late 40s and the 1950s, all of which gave many young Canadian architects their earliest commissions and then left an enduring aesthetic on countless communities across Canada.   She hopes the updated 21st-century catalogue—fitted out as it is for 21st-century concerns about carbon, resilience and urban density—will acquire a similar cachet.  “These are architecturally designed houses for a group of people across the country who will have never lived in an architecturally designed house,” she muses. “I would love it if, 80 years from now, the consistent feedback [from occupants] was that they were able to live generously and well in those houses, and that everything was where it should be.” ARCHITECTURE FIRM COLLABORATORS Michael Green Architecture, Dub Architects, 5468796 Architecture Inc, Oxbow Architecture, LGA Architectural Partners, KANVA Architecture, Abbott Brown Architects, Taylor Architecture Group  As appeared in the June 2025 issue of Canadian Architect magazine  The post A housing design catalogue for the 21st century appeared first on Canadian Architect.

It's a compact and portable laser, perfect for the craft fair and small studio.

When I launched my third “brilliant” side project last year (don’t ask about the first two), I was hit with an annoying realization: having a website is crazy expensive. Ten bucks here, $15 there, and suddenly I was paying more to keep it alive than I was hoping to make selling my cute little stickers. So I started looking for alternatives, and that’s when I stumbled onto BonoHost’s lifetime web hosting plan. No monthly bills. No tiered “basic” vs “pro” nonsense. Just one payment, unlimited everything. Naturally, I was suspicious. But I took the plunge, and months later, I haven’t paid another cent, and everything still runs like clockwork. Here’s what you actually get For a one-time fee ($58.50 with code BONO10 at checkout, normally $64.99), you get unlimited websites, domains, bandwidth, email addresses, databases, and storage. No caps. No creeping usage fees. It also includes a beginner-friendly control panel and one-click installs for 1,500+ apps—like WordPress, e-commerce stores, CRMs, and more. Basically, BonoHost gives you the tools most other providers hide behind paywalls—and the support staff hasn’t ghosted me once. What it doesn’t include (but that’s OK) You’ll still need to buy your own domain name (think: myweirdproject.com), which usually runs $10–$15/year through registrars like Namecheap or GoDaddy. There’s no way around that. Also, this is shared hosting. So, while it works great for blogs, portfolios, and small business sites, it’s not meant for running a high-traffic SaaS empire or spinning up an AI chatbot with GPU needs. A no-brainer for anyone tired of paying monthly forever If you’re launching a blog, freelancing, selling art, or just want your own corner of the internet, this hosting plan gives you what you need without the recurring charge. It’s like buying your own coffee maker instead of paying $6 at a time for someone else to do it at Starbucks. Use code BONO10 at checkout to drop the price from $64.99 to $58.50 (MSRP is usually $1,614.60, so this is a crazy-good deal on an unlimited web hosting plan). StackSocial prices subject to change. _ BonoHost Unlimited Plan: Lifetime Web Hosting Subscription See Deal