
Prison tablets offer a few basic purposes: to provide approved entertainment, messaging, and limited services to those jailed while limiting access to anything else. Manufacturers go to great pains to reinforce these boundaries through hardware and software decisions.

Valve recently revealed the price of the Steam Machine this week, after months of suspense from potential buyers. Four variants gives fans several options based on their storage needs and if they want the bundled Steam Controller. Entry-level storage of 512GB costs $1,049, and adding the controller boosts the total to $1,128.

Original NES hardware shipped with a graphics processor that handled everything through a single chip and a set of strict rules. Backgrounds stayed flat. Sprites capped out at eight per horizontal line. Colors came from a fixed palette with tight limits on how many could appear together on screen. Nintendo built in four extra pins on that processor and left them grounded, effectively locking away a path to more complex visuals. One modder recently put those pins to work and gave the console a second graphics processor.

Tucked behind the familiar glow of the Orion Nebula sits a stretch of space where new stars are taking shape right now on an impressive scale. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope captured a northern section of the Orion Molecular Cloud 2, known as OMC-2, which forms part of the larger Orion A complex roughly 1280 light years from Earth.
