When you're working from home for the first time, you quickly realize that it requires more thought than plunking your laptop on the coffee table.
Nailing down the tech is a large part of it. But we realize, too, that there’s a “softer” side: what hours you keep, how to stay in contact with coworkers and friends, and even what to wear. PCWorld's editors are ready with all the tech tips we’ve learned from years of working from home ourselves.
Define your workspace
First things first: As we’re learning, there’s no “normal” with the coronavirus. But that also applies to where you live. “Home workers” now include apartment dwellers, Millennials who share a house, Midwesterners with basements, suburbanites in McMansions, and more. You’ll have to figure out what works for you, within your own unique environment. Still, some rules apply to just about everyone.
Our kids' books columnist Juanita Giles reports that, stuck at home with her family, she's turned to the I am series, by Brad Meltzer and Christopher Eliopoulos, for stories about relatable heroes.
(Image credit: Dial Books)
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The YubiKey Bio is a security product seemingly made for the growing number of people working from home during the coronavirus threat, but the security issues facing remote workers are hardly new. Even if they’ve figured out everything else—bought a second monitor, rearranged some furniture, or upgraded their router—security remains an oft-forgotten, but vital detail.
The transition from working in an office to working at home creates a juicy opportunity for attackers intent on stealing your personal information. “With a rapid shift toward remote workforces, the attack vector grows larger and we’re already seeing an increase in targeted phishing attacks,” said Guido Appenzeller, chief product officer of Yubico. “Not to mention, operating remotely is new territory for many companies, involving steep learning curves and confusion. This is the perfect scenario for an attacker to thrive in and opens opportunities for social engineering and phishing attacks.” That’s why Yubico is developing a security key with built-in biometrics for the ultimate portable encrypted key.
Quarantine, day six. I’m standing in Paris, in one of my favorite spots. It’s a fountain in the Tuileries, near the Louvre. There are green metal chairs scattered around, inviting people to sit and relax for a few moments, or for an afternoon. Wind mixes with birdsong as I stand and take it all in. It feels as if I’m the last person on Earth, standing here alone in an empty park—but at least I’m outside.
Quarantine, day seven. I’m in a different city, vaguely Soviet in appearance. Again, there is nobody else around—or nobody living, anyway. City 17 is quiet, but for the headcrabs. I holster my pistol and admire the crumbling remains of the North Star Hotel, imagine it in happier times.
Even if you use your garage only as an oversized storage locker, you’ll wonder how you ever got along without a smart controller for your existing garage door opener.
From a young age, Nydia Blas was able to understand the importance of representation. Speaking from her home in Atlanta, Georgia, the African-Panamian photographer recalls the vast archive of images that adorned her family’s walls as a girl: her ancestors — “all beautiful shades of brown” — graduating from college, enlisting in the army, playing musical instruments. “It said to me, ‘Black folks come from greatness. And here’s the proof of that.’”
Much of Blas’s adult life has been dedicated to instilling these same convictions in the minds of younger generations. In an arts landscape fraught with inequality — and a wider Western culture swift to challenge the self-pride of non-white girls — Blas refuses to be a monolith. Her ongoing and most recognised work, The Girls Who Spun Gold, is the culmination of the Girls Empowerment Group she founded for young women of colour in the predominantly white neighbourhood of Ithaca, New York. Blas now works in Atlanta as assistant professor of art and visual culture at Spelman College, a historically all black women’s school. “My students are all black women,” she muses. “I just don’t know if there’s any other space like that that exists in the world.”
Lauded for her “unflinching”, “courageous” and “powerful female perspective” by Peggy Sue Amison — who nominated the artist last year as one of British Journal of Photography’sOnes to Watch — Blas’ trajectory as a photographer has been unconventional at times. She started college as a single mother, aged 18; “somebody who was working while making art at my kitchen table, mixing chemicals where my kids were eating,” she says. “I feel like the first time I ever sat down in a college photo class, people were like, ‘who the heck is she?’”
Recalling white male professors who were uncomfortable with her work (specifically a series of lynching photographs in which bodies were covered in gold glitter), there were times when Blas would stop showing them her images. But she would never stop making them. “There were important things I had to say,” she remarks. “That’s what art is about. It’s this thing that you just have to do, regardless. Even if nobody’s looking at it. You’d still have to make it — you’d still have to say those things somehow.”
Blas weaves gold throughout her work as a reference to value: specifically one’s personal value versus the value placed upon an individual or group by society at large. Its use questions and assigns value where it has been denied, ignored, or assigned in negative ways. Crucially, Blas’ art speaks to the complex and conflicted process of learning to interpret one’s identity — and indeed one’s value — in relation to pre-existing structures.
“We don’t choose the bodies we’re born into,” she explains. “We don’t choose where we’re born, in what neighbourhood, who our parents are, our socioeconomic status. We’re just born into these bodies that already carry history, stereotypes and consequences, and then we have to navigate for ourselves who we are inside of them.” She thinks about this, she says, when she considers her upbringing in a largely white neighbourhood — and the implications of her recent move to the South.
In The Girls Who Spun Gold, props function as extensions of the girls’ bodies, costumes become markers of identity, and gestures reveal the performance and confrontation involved in learning to define oneself within preconceived constructs of gender and race. Blas’ subjects often straddle a blurred line between childhood and adulthood: her earliest project, When Time Stands Still, documents the intricate bond between her two nieces as they grow. Whatever You Like unfolds the ways that young women of colour learn to reclaim themselves for their own pleasure. To behold the latter project — the girls touching themselves, taking up space, observing their reflections — is to witness them unseeing themselves through the eyes of others. Unlearning their bodies as objects to please men.
“It’s such a confusing time,” Blas remarks, considering her own adolescence. “It’s full of contradictions. There’s this thin line when your body changes, and suddenly you have to wear a bra, you shouldn’t sit on a grown man’s lap, older women can be threatened by you. These are all things you have to learn outside of yourself.” Above anything, during these years, it was Blas’s relationships with other girls that propped her up — a dynamic dealt with inimitably in her art. “We live in a culture where we’re told that women don’t support women, or we’re always in competition with each other,” she says. “For attention from a man, or who’s prettier. But I’ve always had such strong relationships with other women.”
Indeed, Blas demonstrates an enchanting ability to capture the stirring intimacy of these relationships. Namely, she explores bonds between photographer and subject, or subject and subject, while the viewer is often consigned to the periphery. “It’s about the interior, and the individuals,” she says. “Like you don’t even matter as the viewer.”
In The Girls Who Spun Gold, one portrait shows a girl lying tautly on a bed of grass; her eyes are closed, negating the viewer, as two feet clamp tightly around her face. In Sometimes Your Edges are Rough and I Wrap You in Rainbows — another ongoing project — Blas’ husband holds her face as he spits into her mouth. “When my mom saw that photo,” Blas recounts, “she called me and she was crying, like, ‘I don’t understand. How is that powerful?’” But the image speaks to all we are willing to give and share as humans. “It’s just another notion of intimacy to me. Like the feet on the face,” she says. “And intimacy isn’t just a tightly-wrapped, beautiful process. It’s painful. It’s a struggle. It’s hard to trust people.”
For Blas, the line between photographer and subject is a delicate one. When asked by the girls (many of them now women) what all of it meant, Blas recalls telling them, “It’s about us. It’s about our story.” Put simply, Blas is who she shoots — it’s about her, it’s about them, it’s about every girl and woman of colour, past and present. To this end, she ensured The Girls Who Spun Gold was void of references to any specific period: no buildings, stores, cars or even shoes. “I wanted the project to be able to shift through time,” she says. “I was thinking about oppression, and the way that it shifts and gets repackaged, and becomes trickier in its operation.”
On the topic of time, Blas pauses to ponder the here and now. “We’re in this crazy time that’s about money,” she says. “It’s about profit. About people not knowing how powerful and magical and amazing they are as individuals. It’s about beating us down with these everyday things we have to do just to function and take care of ourselves — and so we never get to dream or have magic or do the things we love.”
Naturally, Blas will always make space for magic. She will always endeavour to create the conditions whereby women are attuned to their wonder. She will forever spin gold with girls.
The author and illustrator — who, by his own reckoning, worked on more than 270 titles — died Monday at age 85. Among his classics is the Caldecott winner Strega Nona, a seemingly ancient folk tale.
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The author of Station Eleven weaves together stories of a hotel worker and an ultra-wealthy con man in a novel that captures how precarious life is — in a way that feels particularly resonant now.
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McBride's novel, Deacon King Kong, takes place in 1969, in a Brooklyn housing project similar to the one he grew up in. The host of RuPaul's Drag Race says loving yourself is a cornerstone of success.
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We’ve tested the new ROG Zephyrus G14, which debuts with AMD’s stellar Ryzen 9 4900HS CPU, and we can safely say: Just give Asus your money. This laptop packs a stupid amount of performance into a stupidly small and stupidly light frame.
To give you an idea of just how impressive this 3.5-pound, Ryzen 4000-based laptop is, you’re talking about a weight class that typically gives you lower-power CPUs and GPUs. Yet the G14 can hang in CPU performance with laptops that weight 10 pounds.
Obviously the star of the show is the Ryzen 9 4900HS CPU, which we review in detail separately. But the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 as a whole package is nearly as impressive, so keep reading to find out more.
Maybe you’ve already read our main review of the first Ryzen 4000 CPU we’re testing, the Ryzen 9 4900HS (the ‘H’ means its intended for power users, and the ‘S’ means it’s for “slim”-profile laptops). While that story contains a core suite of benchmarks, this story compiles all the tests we ran. We’ll add more benchmarks as we test more of the first generation—AMD expects about 100 laptops with Ryzen 4000 parts to ship this year.
Now we’ve tested those claims in AMD’s Ryzen 9 4900HS chip, an 8-core, 7nm chip with Radeon Vega cores. We’re stunned at the CPU’s impressive tour de force that defeats just about every Intel 8th- and 9th-gen laptop CPU we’ve ever seen.
The experience of looking through Molly Matalon’s new photobook is like revisiting memories of relationships you never had. You lock eyes with a naked stranger, who poses sensually on a velvet sofa in an unfamiliar apartment somewhere in New York City. In any other situation, the scene could seem probing, or voyeuristic, but the moments and expressions that Matalon captures in her subjects are so intimate and vulnerable that, without even thinking, you see a whole relationship flash before your eyes.
When a Man Loves a Woman is Matalon’s first photobook. “[The title is] like one of those things that feels like an inside joke with no one,” says the New York-based photographer, whose book is a collection of staged portraits of men — a mixture of friends, lovers, and acquaintances — arranged in between meditative still-lifes of drooping flowers and softening fruit. The book is an exploration of masculinity, but, rather than undermining it, the gentleness with which Matalon photographs her subjects allows for a new way of thinking about sexuality and desire.
The idea of using photography to “build a world that isn’t real” is central to Matalon’s project. The images came about during a time when she was “struggling with thinking about relationships, dating and my own desire,” and, almost unconsciously, they became an exploration of something the photographer has always been fascinated by: “Masculinity and the small box that men are given to perform in.”
Matalon’s life has not been short of male presence: she has a brother, is close to her father, and spent her teens in a male-orientated punk scene. But, until now, she had never had a boyfriend, or “figured out how to deal with intimacy”. “I feel that it was something I was maybe avoiding, unconsciously,” she admits. “In my head, I was gonna make these sexy, erotic pictures of men, but then I got back these soft, sensual pictures. And I thought, ‘maybe this is what I find sexy’.”
The book was planned to launch at the LA Art Book Fair in April, which was unfortunately cancelled due to the spread of Coronavirus (COVID-19). Matalon, one of British Journal of Photography’sOnes to Watch in 2019, speaks over the phone from her apartment in New York City, where she is in lock-down with her boyfriend of three months. “He’s actually my first boyfriend. We met after the book wrapped up, which is funny because the book is about desire, romance and fantasy. I feel like maybe I manifested something,” she laughs.
What is so compelling about Matalon’s photography is her ability to make us realise that perhaps this “new world” she portrays is one we knew of all along. In this world, masculinity is not performed by flexed biceps and oiled abs, or expressions of dominance and power, instead, it is communicated through soft tufts of chest hair, a daydream caught off-guard, or a pair of socks hanging out to dry. It is intentionally ambiguous and vulnerable because that is the very nature of romance and desire.
Whether you suffer from allergies or asthma or just want to optimize your indoor environment, these devices will give you insight into the air you're breathing.
NPR's Michel Martin speaks with poet Nikky Finney about her favorite listener-submitted poems and her upcoming collection, Love Child's Hotbed of Occasional Poetry: Poems & Artifacts.
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With much of the nation locked down, Americans are finding creative ways to celebrate weddings, birthdays and other events that would normally bring people physically close.
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The comic couldn't have known her memoir would come out in the midst of a global pandemic. But her aptly titled book includes observations that feel eerily pertinent to these unsettling days.
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Multidisciplinary artist Felix Quintana created honest portraits of South Central Los Angeles' people and urban landscape with the help of archived images.
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The new Netflix series was inspired by Deborah Feldman's best-selling memoir about ending her arranged marriage. In the TV adaptation, the young woman leaves her home in Brooklyn and moves to Berlin.
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Maron's new Netflix stand-up special, End Times Fun, was named before the coronavirus pandemic. Azaria reflects on his IFC comedy series Brockmire and why he no longer performs Apu on The Simpsons.
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Irby's new essay collection is Wow, No Thank You. She says it was inspired by moving from Chicago to Kalamazoo and feeling like a fish out of water, with no friends and a strange house.
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Nghi Vo's new novel is poised at the end of one empire and the beginning of another, as a cleric and their talking-bird assistant set about uncovering the dangerous secrets of a forgotten palace.
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Due to the coronavirus and social distancing, traditional video watch parties are off the table right now—but you can still safely view movies and TV shows with loved ones. Thanks to the efforts of a few great developers, you can stream movies and TV shows together in perfect sync by installing a simple browser extension on your laptop or desktop computer.
Of the options out there, TwoSeven stands out as my favorite in the bunch. This add-on is the most versatile, with support for Netflix, Amazon, HBO, Hulu, Disney+, YouTube, Vimeo, other web-based streaming sites (like Crunchyroll), and even files stored locally on a computer. You can use it in both Firefox and Chrome, and the interface even has built-in audio and video chat for sharing reactions in real time. It feels as close as you can get to having an in-person gathering.
There's so much we've yet to explore—from outer space to the deep ocean to our own brains. This hour, Manoush goes on a journey through those uncharted places, led by TED Science Curator David Biello.
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Following the Second World War, a quarter of a million Polish refugees settled in the UK. Many, including photographer Czesław Siegieda’s parents, had been deported to Soviet labour camps in Siberia in the early 1940s, and were lucky enough to escape, embarking on extraordinary journeys before eventually finding a home and community in Britain. But, as Siegieda came to realise through his own photography, the trauma from the journeys they made and the experience of settling in a foreign land had marked them for life.
Siegieda was born in a resettlement camp at Burton on the Wolds, Leicestershire, in 1954. He was raised within a close-knit Polish community that clung to Catholic customs and rituals — an echoing of post-war Poland. Siegieda began photographing at a young age; he was gifted a Kodak Instamatic, and by the time he was 13 he had built a dark room in his home. “I had no idea what I was doing,” he laughs, “but I was fixed on photography”.
Siegieda began to document the people around him, gaining easy access into the county’s Polish school, as well as private events like church services and funerals. Lasting throughout his teen years and into his time studying photography at Trent Polytechnic in Nottingham, the project became a unique record of a community who lived purposefully private lives.
In 1978, Siegieda had the opportunity to exhibit his images with the Half Moon Gallery, who were organising a touring show of laminated prints across the UK. One of the locations was the public library in Leicester, but the reception from Siegieda’s community was not as he expected. Having faced a slew of prejudice as immigrants, many of his parent’s generation felt uncomfortable seeing themselves in the images. “With hindsight and history I can see the issues and the concerns of the time,” Siegieda reflects, “but the bulk of my parent’s generation could not see all that. They felt like they were foreigners in a land where they weren’t welcome”.
Describing this feedback as a “wake-up call”, Siegieda decided to sit on the photographs for over 40 years, and now, they are finally seen, in a new photobook titled Polska Britannica. “I was waiting for my parent’s generation to pass away,” explains Siegieda, “that’s not me being mercenary or anything, but the sensitivity for them was just too much. I could see that they felt really vulnerable about being placed in a position of publicity”.
But now, Siegieda’s present-day Polish audience are thankful for these images; without the trauma, they are able to see the sensitivity, humour, and love with which the photographer captured their parents and community.
“My parents didn’t want to draw attention to themselves, they were just there, doing their own thing,” continues Siegeida, who, looking back after 40 years, recognises that what he has made is a record of a generation that existed privately, and which was in danger of being forgotten.
Find yourself suddenly needing to be more productive? Good news! Windows 10 comes loaded with all sorts of tools designed to help you Get Things Done, along with deeper tweaks that can optimize the operating system for productivity even more. Now for the bad news: All those excellent productivity-boosting Windows tools and tweaks aren’t immediately obvious, with many of the most useful settings buried deep inside a maze of options menus.
We can help. Taking five or ten minutes to tinker with Windows 10 can supercharge your setup, regardless of whether you’re trying to keep at work while stuck at home or setting up something more permanent. Let’s dig in.
The Grammy winner is coming out with a new album, Alicia, and has written a forthcoming introspective book, More Myself. She says she wishes she could tell her teenage self "to know she is enough."
