Welcome to ThinkBoxly! In case you hadn't noticed, things look a bit different around here today! If you've followed ThinkBoxly since the beginning, you'll have heard me say this a number of times—six, to be exact. Quite a lot for a website just celebrating its third birthday! And indeed, it could be said that ThinkBoxly has always suffered a bit of an identity crisis. What is ThinkBoxly? Tech news and reviews have always been at the center of its content, sure, but functionally it has never been your average news portal. So what is it, then? The new ThinkBoxly finally has the answer. Up until now, each successive redesign has been considered a new 'version', another building block on the same foundation. With the new ThinkBoxly however, this sort of thinking was set aside completely. The site you're browsing now was never considered 'ThinkBoxly 7', but rather was codenamed 'ThinkBoxly NEXT', symbolizing a step forward to a new foundation, not m...

It’s been some time since we last saw a major step forward for laptops in the 12-13″ range. Initially the form factor was the sole territory of low-powered netbooks, but then in 2009 Intel and NVIDIA teamed up for a one-two punch with the Atom and ION chips, offering then-unparallelled performance for such small packages, and soon after Intel joined the graphics game with their own Intel HD chipsets. In the years since we’ve seen upgrades only trickle in, with each successive model being an appreciable step up from the last, but never enough to justify the cost of upgrading from similar products. While netbooks stopped being called netbooks, the product category remained and simply fell into a new niche as super cheap ultraportables without substantially more grunt than their original predecessors. Put simply, another major step forward for 12-13″ laptops has been a long time in coming. And with Intel’s new Core M processor, that step up is finally here. It’s the chipset that Apple wil...

Sometimes it feels like there's always more that can be done with display scaling. Just when Edge Display Scaler got its first major update to 1.2.0, 1.2.1 is already a thing and out in the wild! The new update adds just one new feature: edgeds_set_screenres, an alternative script to the default edgeds_set_scale that gives the developer a bit more control over the display while still utilizing the 1:1 scaling Edge DS is designed for. To be more specific, edgeds_set_scale runs with each CPU cycle to check for changes in the display and scale the game window to match, whatever resolution that display might be. This means you can resize the game window however you like on desktop platforms, or on mobile devices not have to worry about how many pixels navigation and status bars occupy. But sometimes there can be too much of a good thing, and allowing the user absolute scaling freedom isn't always the easiest design choice to work with. Therefore, edgeds_set_screenres takes a differ...

It's no April Fools joke! There's a new one for the Marketplace: Make Color Hex ! While this script itself is nothing new (it's been around since the first release of Edge VN ) it represents the start of a new addition to the Edge Engine family: Edge Utils. Edge Utils will not be a product of its own, but rather a broad term for any handy Edge Engine scripts that get independent releases such as this. So what makes Edge Utils special? Well, put simply: it's free . Yup, anything released under the 'Edge Utils' banner comes with no price tag whatsoever. These are utilities you can use anywhere in your own projects, personal or commercial, provided they retain their original form (in other words: don't plagiarize). Well, what are  you waiting for? Go ahead and pick up the first member of the Edge Utils family! It's free!

When it comes to choosing a pair of headphones of any form factor, it can be difficult to sort through product opinions to come to any solid conclusion about the product at hand. Some audiophiles base their purchasing decisions solely on brand or just assume that higher price equals better sound, while less knowledgeable customers will struggle to find any noticeable difference between the audio quality of a $30 pair of cans and a $300 pair. In other words, both the high-end and low-end camps have their own rampant forms of skewed opinions, which can make it tough to make an informed purchasing decision when you don’t commit to either camp hardcore yourself. With that in mind, it was with mixed expectations that I first tried the Monoprice 9927 Hi-fi Bass-Enhanced in-ear ear buds. For a mere $10 it seemed hard to go wrong no matter the result, but to call the 9927s merely not a bad choice would be a pretty serious disservice to the product. No, you won’t be a cool kid wearing Monoprice...