In the Thelonious Monk universe, I’ve noticed over the years a general perception among aficionados that the artist’s work diminished significantly later in his career. Personally, I have not found that to be accurate, as evidenced by the excellent 1968 Palo Alto concert that Impulse! Records issued several years ago. That notion comes to mind again while listening to an outstanding 1967 live concert recorded in Paris.

Monk Live in Paris 1967 (Volume One) marks the first in a series of official releases selected by Thelonious Sphere Monk III. This new release was sourced from digital remasters created in 2002 by the late, great audio engineer and producer Rudy Van Gelder, working from a pristine archival tape reel discovered in France. The recordings were restored at the time for the Monk Estate’s then-label, Thelonious Records, but unfortunately remained unreleased for more than 20 years.

These revelatory performances are finally being issued to the public on the Estate’s own terms. Portions of the recordings have circulated as bootlegs over the years.

For this performance, Monk’s classic mid-1960s quintet was expanded to a full nonet, adding several significant players, as documented in the album’s official press materials: “… it showcases Monk’s longstanding quartet featuring tenor man Charlie Rouse and the bass/drums tandem of Larry Gales and Ben Riley, who are joined by five very special guest horn men. Alto saxophonist Phil Woods, trombonist Jimmy Cleveland, Ray Copeland and tenor titan Johnny Griffin (Rouse’s predecessor in the quartet) perform in various permutations – with the full nonet, including trumpet legend Clark Terry…”

The 180-gram audiophile vinyl features disc mastering and lacquer cutting by Warren Defever of Third Man Mastering, with United Record Pressing handling the plating and pressing. The recording is also available as a digital download. You can order the vinyl now for about $30 from Amazon.

Pressed on translucent blue vinyl, the record is well centered and, happily, quite quiet. The album also includes a bonus insert with additional liner notes.

The band is swinging on Monk Live in Paris 1967 (Volume One) and, as far as I can tell, Monk seems to be having a great time taking the music into some interesting spaces. One of the standouts for me is trumpeter Ray Copeland, who launches into some joyful, soaring solo flights.

As an added bonus, the Monk Estate has partnered with luxury hatmaker Optimo to recreate a limited run of 88 hats, one for each key on a piano keyboard, like the one Thelonious Monk wore back in the day. Each hat comes with the first pressing of the recording, produced in a special edition color and signed by Thelonious Sphere Monk III and Optimo founder Graham Thompson. The hat is titled, simply, The Monk.

Part two of the concert is expected to be issued later this year, so as soon as we get our hands on it, I’ll be sure to follow up with a review. Can’t wait!

Our Ratings:

★★★★★★★★★★ Music

★★★★★★★★★★ Sound Quality

★★★★★★★★★★ Packaging

Where to buy:

Mark Smotroff is a deep music enthusiast / collector who has also worked in entertainment oriented marketing communications for decades supporting the likes of DTS, Sega and many others. He reviews vinyl for Analog Planet and has written for Audiophile Review, Sound+Vision, Mix, EQ, etc. You can learn more about him at LinkedIn.

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XPENG said on Monday that its robotics business has raised more than $900M in what the company described as its first funding round, a substantial sum for a unit that has yet to sell a single robot commercially.

The timing is deliberate, since the Chinese carmaker has committed to putting its IRON humanoid into mass production before the end of this year and is running out of calendar to do it in.

IRON was unveiled at XPENG’s AI Day in November 2025 and runs on the same Turing chips the company designed for its own electric vehicles. That shared silicon is the core of the pitch, alongside more than 60 joints, a spine with five degrees of freedom, and a layer of what XPENG calls bionic muscle fascia intended to soften the machine’s movement.

The robot demonstrated publicly is a seventh-generation prototype, with an eighth generation earmarked as the production model. Moreover, the company has said it wants full capability integrated before the production line starts, which is a considerable amount of engineering to compress into the remaining months of the year.

Deployment plans start close to home. The first units are expected to work as showroom assistants and tour guides, patrol XPENG campuses, and take positions on the company’s own factory floors, with commercial deliveries in China and abroad following in 2027.

Putting robots in your own dealerships is becoming a recognisable pattern in the Chinese car industry, with BYD already committing to a humanoid in every showroom. It has the useful property of generating deployment numbers without requiring a customer to be convinced first.

The longer-term target is a million units a year by 2030. He Xiaopeng, XPENG’s chief executive, has said the robots could eventually be priced at levels “very similar to car prices” within five years, and that software accounts for more than half the value of the machine from the first day it ships.

He has also taken personal charge of the division. In an internal note reported earlier this year, he wrote that the robot industry “is becoming increasingly hot and competitive, and we have clearly seen the direction and timing of victory, but it still requires more arduous implementation and extremely high decision-making ability”.

That reshuffle came alongside the departure of Shi Xiaoxin, the senior director of robotics product planning who had overseen the IRON project, which is not the sort of personnel change a company usually makes with a production deadline months away.

One point deserves care. XPENG Robotics, then known as Pengxing Intelligence, completed a $100mn Series A in July 2022, so the description of this as a first round most likely reflects a restructured entity rather than a first-ever raise, and XPENG has not published the investor list or a valuation for the new money.

The capital arrives in a market that has been repricing humanoid companies upwards for two years, with LimX Dynamics reaching a $2.2bn valuation before an IPO and Morgan Stanley doubling its forecast for Chinese humanoid shipments to 50,000 units. Against a million-a-year ambition, that industry-wide figure is a reminder of how early this all is.

Robotics also sits inside a wider reorientation at the company, which now describes itself as a physical AI business spanning humanoids, robotaxis, and flying vehicles rather than a carmaker with side projects. Each of those lines consumes capital on a scale that vehicle sales alone are not currently covering.

The car business is why the money matters, as XPENG reported a 17.6% revenue decline in the first quarter alongside widening net losses, having been profitable the quarter before, and management has been describing robotics, robotaxis, and flying vehicles as the eventual drivers of revenue and profit.

Raising outside capital for the robotics unit keeps that spending off the carmaker’s own balance sheet while the vehicle business works through a difficult year. Whether IRON reaches a production line before December is the question the $900M is meant to answer.

Microsoft has confirmed that .NET Framework updates released as part of the August 2026 Patch Tuesday are breaking printing and PDF export in some applications.

In a Windows release health alert seen by BleepingComputer, Microsoft says this known issue affects only apps that use the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) UI framework, an open-source graphical subsystem for building Windows desktop client applications.

“After installing the August 2026 .NET Framework cumulative update, some WPF applications may fail with a System.IO.FileFormatException when printing or generating PDF/XPS content that uses certain fonts, including Calibri,” Microsoft says.

The complete list of impacted platforms includes both Windows client releases (including the latest versions of Windows 10 and Windows 11) and Windows Server (from Windows Server 2012 up to Windows Server 2025).

Microsoft says it is still investigating the issue and, until it can ship a permanent solution, has provided a temporary fix to help affected users work around these printing problems.

This workaround requires enabling the Switch.MS.Internal.TtfDelta.DisableCmapAndSbitOverflowProtection AppContext switch in the application config file by adding the following:

However, the company warned that doing this will also disable protections introduced with the August 2026 .NET Framework update, exposing the system to attacks that could exploit vulnerabilities addressed by this month’s security updates.

“Microsoft recommends using this workaround only as a temporary measure and only when required to address this issue,” it warned.

Roughly five years ago, in February 2021, Microsoft addressed another known issue that caused WPF apps and Visual Studio to crash after installing Windows 10 cumulative updates.

On Friday, Microsoft also shared a temporary workaround for a known issue triggered by Windows 11 updates released during the August 2026 Patch Tuesday and causing games like ARC Raiders, MARVEL Tōkon: Fighting Souls, and The Finals to crash and freeze.

Overall prevention scores can hide what happens after initial access. Once attackers are using valid credentials, prevention drops sharply.

The Blue Report 2026 measures defenses technique by technique across 338 million simulations run in customer production environments.

Get the report

How do I touch you
across the ocean,
across cold depths
where light travels through glass.

Not copper—fibers. Optical.

Through liquid glass, through flickering light
that carries you in fragments. Light broken into pulses.

You say: it’s easier this way. What are we missing like this? You smile.
Safe distance.

I say: network.

Signals slide beneath the sea, through cables thinner than trust, faster than touch,
slower than longing.

We stand alone, together. Synchronous, yet apart. Icons replace skin, latency replaces breath.

This distance protects us. Silence that feels intentional.

Everything is under control as long as nothing truly hurts.

And we choose it
because it shields us
from what we might become if we actually met.

You are my counterpoint. My response.
My reflection
at a safe distance.

Beneath the ocean, nodes remember paths.

Packets shake hands without bodies.

If we get lost,
we resend everything, with error,
with noise,
with hope.

Even though I’ve been a bird-watcher most of my life, nothing prepared me for the experience of witnessing—on my phone—the entire process of birds being born in my own backyard.

I’ve maintained a regular “dumb” nest box for years, the birthplace of generations of black-capped chickadees. I’ve seen them going in and out, but I always wondered what was happening in there, especially the year I opened up the box in the fall and found five deceased fledglings at the bottom. How could this have happened? I wondered.

Thanks to the Birdfy Nest Duo smart nesting box and its built-in thermometer and hygrometer, I now at least have an educated guess. (The poor things likely overheated during an early season heat wave.) Being able to watch the entire nesting operation from all angles, starting with excavation and egg-laying and ending in hatching and fledging, has been one of the most educational and entertaining bird-watching experiences I have ever had, and something I’d recommend to anyone interested in birds, nature, or just life science in general.

Eye Spy

Birdfy makes three smart nest boxes in addition to the Duo. The original, the Birdfy Nest, has one camera—located inside the box—and can only hang from an eye hook screwed into the top. There’s also a version made out of solid fir in contrast to the others’ lightweight bamboo. I have also tested Birdfy’s artful Polygon, but persistent connection issues prevented me from using it this season.

I have not tested the first two single-camera versions, but I can’t imagine not having a second camera outside the hole to see who’s unexpectedly poking their head in. (At one point in my testing, it was a confused flicker; another, a curious starling—this is when I learned chickadees can hiss). It’s also critical to be able to pole-mount the box to keep it away from predators.

SCREENSHOT: Kat Merck

The Nest Duo is substantial—16 inches tall and about 8 pounds—with one 1080p HD camera facing the nest entry hole on the exterior and another tucked discreetly inside the nest box itself. There’s also an internal hygrometer (humidity) and thermometer (temperature) that show readings on the live view in Birdfy’s easy-to-use app. There are four easy-to-install, screw-on entry hole sizes for different species, from 0.9 inches for wrens up to 2 inches for starlings or bluebirds, along with corresponding metal predator guards to prevent chewing. The entire side of the box opens with a latch for easy cleaning and access.

In the app, each screen capture appears as a split-screen image, which you can tap to view 20-second videos (with audio) of both the inside and the outside of the box. The videos are immediately downloadable and shareable—no subscription is needed.

The screen captures work much like one of Birdfy’s smart bird feeders, but with images shunted to sections labeled “Prelude,” “Nesting,” “Brooding,” “Nestling,” “Fledgling,” and “End.” There seemed to be no rhyme or reason for what process the app thought was happening at the time (for example, if a nestling was simply turned around, the app asked if it should label it as “Fledgling”), but this story format was easy enough to ignore onscreen.

House Hunters

In March of this year, at the beginning of nesting season on the West Coast, I installed the Duo with the 1-inch entry hole on a pole stand and mounted the included solar panel below the box with hose clamps. Black-capped chickadees were consistently interested, popping in and looking around, but something was preventing them from staking a claim. It took me a while to realize they were looking askance at the holes on the metal tray “floor,” which is perforated for drainage. The idea is that this tray can be inserted into one of a series of slots to increase or decrease the nest cavity depth, depending on your local species’ preference.

Photograph: Kat Merck

In context: Most companies mark a major birthday with a press release and a photo of a cake in the break room. But Valve has done nothing of the sort so far for the big day. On August 24, 1996, thirty years ago today, Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington signed the paperwork on a company they registered as Valve, LLC.

Interestingly, both Newell and Harrington had just quit Microsoft before they started Valve. Newell had been there for thirteen years by that point, working on early versions of Windows. The job had also made him rich enough to fund a startup himself, since he left with more than a million dollars of his own money.

However, it was Harrington who suggested they spend it on games. The two had known each other since a birthday party in 1987, and once they agreed to go ahead, they set up shop in Kirkland, Washington. That put their new office about five miles down the road from the Microsoft campus in Redmond.

Their own savings did not cover the whole endeavor, though. A publisher in the same state, Sierra On-Line, agreed to back them with roughly a million dollars. In exchange, Sierra took 30% of the revenue and every scrap of intellectual property.

Even with that deal signed, the pair were still four million dollars short. Harrington sold his Microsoft shares to cover his side of the gap. Newell would not part with his, so he borrowed against them instead.

The bet paid off about two years later. Half-Life arrived in November 1998 and sold 2.5 million copies within twelve months. A lot of that came down to how it handled its story, which played out around you as you kept moving rather than pausing to show you a scene.

Steam came along five years later, and you’d be surprised to know that it started off as something far less ambitious. Valve built it just to deliver updates because patches for games like Counter-Strike kept breaking them for days at a stretch.

Eventually, Steam grew into a storefront also stocking everyone else’s games. Today, it’s where the bulk of Valve’s revenue comes from. The company takes a 30% cut of most titles sold through the store. They’re doing pretty well, too, with Alinea Analytics estimating that Steam grossed $11.1 billion in the first six months of this year.

Money on that scale is what let Valve start building its own machines. The Steam Deck handheld landed in 2022, and this June brought the Steam Machine, a compact living-room PC. It starts at $1,049 for the 512GB model, a number Valve settled on after a shortage of memory chips ruined its original pricing.

“URGENT: Immediate Action Required” blasts into my eyeballs as I scroll through the impossibly giant email inbox looming directly in front of my face.

I’m reclined way back in a chair, wearing a pair of Xreal smart glasses. Tethered to my laptop via a USB-C cord, these glasses mirror the laptop screen and project it into a virtual display. The virtual screen is gigantic, equivalent to a 170-inch TV that feels about a foot away from my nose. I’m the only one who can see it, and so I’ve got this massive display all to myself.

With this technological marvel, I conjure the most riveting view imaginable: five workplace training modules about business principles and cybersecurity that my boss has repeatedly reminded me are very overdue. The text on the screen is blurry, but I complete them all within my virtual display. It takes several hours. By the time I’m done, the glasses have overheated, my forehead is sweaty, and I’m still not sure I can actually recognize a phishing email.

Virtual display glasses are a much more niche category of mixed-reality smart glasses than the camera-equipped, AI-powered frames that have dominated the product market—namely, Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses. Made by companies like Xreal, Viture, and Rokid, these glasses aim to bring a screen directly to your face. Like a portable monitor, plug the USB-C cable into the arm of the glasses, then stick the other end into the port of just about any laptop, phone, tablet, or handheld gaming console. Slap ’em on, and that screen mirrors in a holographic VR-style projection, right in your center of vision.

Wearing them, you can chill out in an airplane seat, lie prone, even dangle upside-down if you like, and the big screen stays right there with you. (No tech neck!) Yup, you’re basically cosplaying the lazy humans in Wall-E. Hooray.

The ROG Xreal R1.

Photograph: Courtesy of XREAL

Virtual display glasses don’t get the heat of privacy issues that Meta’s “pervert glasses” do. No cameras, no recording—just sweet, sweet content consumption beamed out an inch from your eye holes. If you’re feeling generous, the Xreal glasses could even be lauded for their privacy protections, at least for the user. Got sensitive documents or embarrassing videos you’re trying to watch on a plane? A virtual display is one only the wearer can see. (The Xreal glasses also have speakers in the frames that do leak sound, so be careful with your audible content consumption.)