Reviewers sometimes have to step outside their comfort zone, listening to artists they’ve either overlooked (for better or for worse) or outright steered clear of for one reason or another. Amidst the onslaught of grunge bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam, the rich power pop-rock of Weezer, and the emergence of Northern California’s pop-punk heroes Green Day, I admittedly didn’t pay much attention to blink-182. No one I knew was into them, but that doesn’t really matter, as it was clearly music for another generation to enjoy. The band’s 1999 megahit Enema of the State (EOTS) went on to sell 15 million copies globally.

Listening to the new Definitive Sound Series One-Step audiophile edition of EOTS, I hear a well-produced slab of hyperspeed, punk-ish power-pop rock. While it feels familiar, often relying on the same four chords so many bands fall back on, I can’t deny this album’s underlying likability. These guys had something going on, reminding me at times of what a Weezer 33 1/3 RPM LP might sound like played at 45 RPM (sans Chipmunk vocals).

Sonically, EOTS is a surprisingly enjoyable, round-sounding rock record, having been mastered by Chris Bellman at Bernie Grundman Mastering from the original analog tapes. This reissue was pressed on Neotech VR900-D2 180-gram high-definition vinyl using a “one-step” process at one of the best vinyl manufacturing facilities, RTI (Recording Technology, Inc.).

Interscope’s website offers more insights:  

“… a specialized manufacturing technique renowned for its superior sound quality. Traditional vinyl pressing involves multiple steps with the potential for quality loss at each stage. The “One Step” process eliminates these steps with the lacquer master being used to create a stamper which is then used to press the records.”

So, you may wonder are there really that many audiophile Blink 182 fans out there to warrant this edition?  Clearly there are as this DSS edition is “almost sold out” according to Interscope’s website, which is where you can snag one of these numbered limited edition (of 3,000) copies for $100 (click here). As of this writing, there also seem to be two over at Amazon selling for $129.99.

A very deluxe package inside and out, each Definitive Sound Series (DSS) “One-Step” album is housed in a heavyweight, old-school gatefold “tip-on” style jacket featuring original artwork, which fits into a specially designed hard-shell slipcase. Complete production details are included on the back cover (a transparency I greatly appreciate across the entire DSS series).

If you like blink-182, you should grab one of these before they’re gone. EOTS is a surprisingly strong listen, with great-sounding drums hammering against relentless, overdriven but remarkably warm, densely layered, wall-of-sound electric guitars. Good fun!

Our Ratings

★★★★★★★★★★ Music

★★★★★★★★★★ Sound

★★★★★★★★★★ 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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Researchers from ETH Zurich’s Robotic Systems Lab have shown that a standard four-legged inspection robot can fully solve a giant Rubik’s Cube on its own, relying entirely on its feet for every contact with the puzzle. The machine, an ANYmal-D, first walks around the freestanding cube and tips it onto different faces so its onboard depth camera can build a complete picture of the colors. Once it has that map, a planner turns a conventional cube solution into a short list of robot actions, and the machine carries them out without further help from people.

The cube is so heavy that flipping it over and rotating one layer is a completely different ballgame. A single slip-up, such as accidently twisting a layer while tipping, would entirely disrupt the sequence, thus the robot must maintain all of the layers locked in place while reorienting the cube, then consciously release them when it needs to turn a face. To tip the cube 90 degrees forward or backward, simply grasp an edge with one front foot and roll the entire thing onto a new face. To rotate a layer, the right foot firmly plants on the bottom half to keep the cube stable, while the left foot gently pulls the top half through a crisp quarter turn. To turn the layer the opposite direction, simply reverse the motion and repeat.

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Initially, all of these motions were learned in a virtual setting. A teacher policy that could see every joint and contact point had to practice these abilities for several hours, earning prizes for landing its feet in exactly the right location, shifting the layers cleanly, and keeping its body straight.

The policies were then simplified and made into student controllers that run on the real robot, relying just on the depth images from the two front cameras and the robot’s joint readings. The resulting controls can tolerate minor differences in the cube’s position relative to the robot, recover if it slips or is bumped by an outside force, and continue working on low-friction surfaces, cobblestones, and even mossy surfaces.

On the hardware side, the entire procedure consists of about 30 separate actions and lasts approximately 8-9 minutes. The team tested the autonomous system three times, and the robot solved the cube each time. The perception system adjusts the cube’s pose between each part of the sequence, allowing the robot to step into the correct starting position.

While the sequence is being executed, the learnt policy runs constantly and makes modest tweaks as it goes to rectify faults. The beauty of this is that the robot’s feet can also be the only tools that touch the cube, so this video shows how a machine designed for inspection can be taught to do a long chain of accurate, coordinated interactions without the need for any extra arms or grippers.

Instacart might sell itself to a larger competitor, according to multiple news reports

The Information reported Friday that the grocery delivery company has hired an investment bank to help it evaluate its options, and that it’s held acquisition talks with DoorDash. And Bloomberg reported that the company has also talked to Uber — although Uber reportedly walked away from those discussions.

Instacart currently has a market cap of more than $13 billion, and its stock price is up 25% for the year to date. The company could see this as a good time to sell at a desirable price, before the grocery delivery market gets more competitive — but Bloomberg noted that these are early discussions that might not result in a sale.

TechCrunch has reached out to Instacart for comment. The reports of a potential sale caused the company’s share price to spike more than 9.2% on Friday, while Uber and DoorDash stock declined.

You won’t need expensive equipment or invest much time.

How to test a CR2032 battery with a multimeter

VGV MEDIA/Shutterstock

No multimeter? Here’s how to check your AirTag or key fob battery

Husain Parvez for Engadget

An experimental vaccine offers new hope to patients with melanoma, one of the most aggressive forms of skin cancer. The pharmaceutical companies Merck and Moderna released the results of a Phase 3 clinical trial that evaluated the efficacy of a personalized mRNA-based vaccine that, when combined with immunotherapy, reduced the risk of disease recurrence or death by 42 percent compared to treatment with the immunotherapy drug alone.

Georgina Long, medical director of the Australian Melanoma Institute and the study’s principal investigator, said in a statement that these results are “transformative” and “have the potential to make a foundational shift in how we treat patients with earlier-stage melanoma.”

The trial, known as INTerpath-001, included 1,137 people with high-risk melanoma who had undergone surgery to completely remove their tumors. The participants were divided into two groups. Those in the first group received only Pembrolizumab, a drug that helps the immune system detect and fight cancer cells, while those in the second group were treated with the same drug in combination with the mRNA vaccine, called Intismeran Autogene.

After monitoring the participants for an average of 24.6 months, the researchers determined that addition of the vaccine reduced the risk of cancer recurrence or death by 42 percent compared to Pembrolizumab alone.

The results also showed that the experimental treatment reduced the risk of the disease spreading to other parts of the body by 38 percent. At the end of the follow-up period, 82.2 percent of patients who received both treatments remained recurrence-free, compared with 70 percent of those who received Pembrolizumab alone.

“The results of the INTerpath-001 study represent a major breakthrough in the treatment of melanoma and, in particular, in the development of personalized medicine,” Eva Muñoz Couselo—who leads a melanoma research group at the Vall d’Hebron Institute of Oncology, in Barcelona and who was not involved in the study—told SMC Spain. “For the first time, a Phase III trial has demonstrated that an individualized therapeutic vaccine, designed on the basis of the molecular characteristics of each patient’s tumor, can significantly improve the outcomes of conventional immunotherapy.”

The laboratories explained that the vaccine was developed from a tumor sample taken from each patient, which was used to identify specific mutations that would create distinct proteins the immune system could learn to recognize in order to attack cancer cells. The scientists selected up to three of these molecular signatures per patient.

Researchers remotely disabled a vulnerable updater in the abandoned Time4Popcorn app, a fork of the Popcorn Time BitTorrent client, closing a security flaw that could have allowed attackers to execute malicious code with elevated privileges on millions of computers.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-30612, affects Windows and macOS updaters that contacted the app’s abandoned domain (popcorntimeupd.xyz) over unencrypted HTTP and accepted executables without verifying digital signatures.

Anyone controlling the update domain could manipulate HTTP traffic and execute code as SYSTEM on Windows and as root on macOS.

The Popcorn Time app featured a Netflix-style interface that integrated BitTorrent downloads, allowing users to consume illegal content right directly inside the app.

The project was abandoned for legal reasons but later relaunched as a legitimate content-streaming app. However, forks such as Time4Popcorn emerged under the Popcorn Time name, quickly attracting millions of users.

Researchers at Eye Security discovered the security risk after registering the popcorntimeupd.xyz domain and observed up to 3 million Windows and 350,000 macOS client connections to Time4Popcorn.

Connections came from residential ISPs and corporate, government, and military networks. However, none of the users appeared to be actively using the app, suggesting it had been installed and forgotten.

“If we were able to send an update, we could potentially get code execution on millions of systems,” Eye Securit notes, adding that “the impact would be severe if this were to fall into the wrong hands.”

Following this discovery, the researchers registered 14 more domains associated with the service.

Securing the systems

Between November 2025 and March 2026, Eye used the vulnerable update mechanism to deliver remediation code that stopped and disabled the updater.

Their payload collected no host data or telemetry, and deleted no files on the users’ computers, keeping their actions within a fully legal context.

Eye explains that it had to modify its payload during testing to evade antivirus products that flagged it for disabling a service.

After deploying the remediation, Eye recorded 2 million update downloads, and by March 1 this year, requests to its update domain dropped by 98%.

Following the successful completion of the remediation operation, domain ownership was passed to the non-profit security organization The Shadowserver Foundation.

Despite this success, the researchers warned that the risk is not fully eliminated for users of the app.

First, Android users remain exposed as installing an update would require user interaction, and researchers could not disable the updater remotely for the mobile platform.

Second, the Time4Popcorn app uses a severely outdated Chrome engine from 2014, with no sandbox protections, which could be exploited in attacks.

The best course of action would be for users to remove the software entirely from their systems.

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