You can learn more about ArmorPaint in our recent hands-on video. ArmorPaint is open source and is free, but you need to build the binaries yourself. For instructions on how to build ArmorPaint from source check out our guide available here. For more details on the ArmorPaint Epic MegaGrant be sure to check out our video below.
Streaming services like Apple Music, Spotify and Pandora generated $8.8 billion to account for 79% of all U.S. music industry revenue in 2019, according to new data from the Recording Industry Association of America.
Source: RIAA
In its full-year 2019 revenue report for U.S. recorded music, the RIAA says streaming revenues were up 20% from 2018, a marked rise largely attributed to growth in paid streaming services. The overall industry grew 13% to hit $11.1 billion in retail value.
According to the report, revenues derived from subscriptions hit $6.8 billion last year, up 25% year-over-year. That sum equates to 61% of total recorded music revenues in the U.S., the group notes. Impressively, subscriptions accounted for 93% of streaming sector growth, with for-pay services adding an average of one million new accounts per month to top 60 million subscriptions in 2019.
RIAA Chairman and CEO Mitch Glazier in a blog post on Tuesday said, “Music isn’t transitioning to digital’ – it is leading a digital-first business.”
“Today’s report reflects the prospect of a future in which creators have a path forward,” Glazier said. “But it also reveals how much farther we must go to assure a healthy music community in which all music is valued and creators are fairly compensated. We still have not realized the full value of music on all digital services.”
Over the past ten years, streaming revenue has grown from a minuscule 5% slice of the overall pie to overtake both traditional physical media and digital downloads initially popularized by iTunes. In 2009, physical media accounted for 59% of all industry revenue followed by digital’s 34% share, figures that slid to a respective 10% and 8% of the whole in 2019.
Downloads have dropped precipitously as streaming usurps per-track and per-album purchases. According to the RIAA, digital fell 18% between 2018 and 2019, with last year being the first since 2006 in which downloads brought in less than a billion dollars, reports Variety. For reference, streaming revenues first surpassed sales of digital downloads in 2015.
After revolutionizing the music distribution industry with iTunes and iPod, Apple debuted its own streaming service, Apple Music, in 2015. The product challenges market incumbent Spotify, which boasted 124 million paid subscribers as of February. Apple last released public Apple Music statistics in June 2019, when the service accumulated 60 million subscribers.
All DOOM Games Heavily Reduced On Switch, Some Now As Low As £1.20
Update: The sale has now gone live in North America, too! Details have been added below.
If you’ve been on the fence about grabbing any of the DOOM series games available on Nintendo Switch, now is absolutely the time to do so.
All games in the series currently available on the system have been heavily reduced for a limited time. We’ve got all the prices and details you need below:
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 02-26-2020, 07:42 AM - Forum: Lounge
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Mass Effect Comes To Minecraft, Here’s Everything In The Pack
A Mass Effect mash-up pack is coming to Minecraft. Players can take control of 36 unique skins, including iconic Mass Effect characters like Commander Shephard, Liara, Illusive Man, and Garrus. The pack also contains unique locations like the Mars Base Camp, custom-made game textures, Mass Effect-themed menus, and a Mass Effect 3 soundtrack compilation.
Calibrate your engines, krogans and kroganettes, the Mass Effect Mash-up pack is coming to Minecraft! Roam around the Mars Base Camp as Commander Shephard, Liara or 34 other classic characters, and shape the fate of the entire galaxy! ↣ https://t.co/rMxnnEntge ↢ pic.twitter.com/gAuydLIJmR
Longtime Minecraft fans may know that this isn't the first time a Mass Effect pack has made its appearance in the game. The discontinued legacy console edition received a similar pack back in 2014, but the Bedrock edition has not received it until now. Time will only tell if Minecraft will continue to release past packs from legacy console editions.
Minecraft also recently went through a big update on February 14 called the "Nether Update." New crafting materials like an ore called Ancient Debris, wood materials, soul soil, and more blocks were added. Additionally, three new biomes--Crimson Forest, Soulsand Valley, and the Warped Forest--opened up for exploration and provide Netherite and new types of vegetation for players.
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The long running open source GIMP, or GNU Image Manipulation Program, just released version 2.10.18. After skipping the release of 2.10.16 due to a critical bug, there is a fair bit in this release.
Release features include:
Tools are now grouped in the toolbox by default
Sliders now use a compact style with improved user interaction
Vastly improved user experience for the transformation preview
Dockable areas now highlighted when a dockable dialog is being dragged
New 3D Transform tool to rotate and pan items
Much smoother brush outline preview motion on the canvas
Symmetry painting enhancements
Faster loading of ABR brushes
PSD support improvements
Consolidated user interface for merging down and anchoring layers
Update check to notify users of new releases available
28 bug fixes, 15 translation updates
You can learn more about the 2.10.18 release in the release notes available here. GIMP is available for download on Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD and Solaris. GIMP is open source under the GPL v3 license with source details available here. You can learn more about GIMP and the 2.10.18 update in the video below.
As we reported last month, Epic Card Game – the follow-up to Star Realms – was getting a digital adaptation which included mobile versions. It was released last week on February 18th, but the news got lost amidst me being on holiday and Ian having a more limited scope for covering news in my absence.
In case you didn’t know, or are unsure what Epic is, a quick overview: It’s a more traditional TCG-style game vs. Star Realms’ deck-builder design. Players have 30 health, with the goal being to knock your opponent’s down to zero health first. Economy is even more streamlined than Hearthstone – every card either costs one of zero gold to play, and you only get one gold at the start of your turn. Here’s the launch trailer:
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The game itself is also quite forgiving in terms of monetisation. You only pay money for things like extra deck slots, cosmetics, and tickets needed for competitive play. Otherwise, you can play the single-player campaign and the casual modes for free, and have unlimited copies of every card from the get-go.
When Apple launched Mac Pro in December, the company took flak for designing a machine with non-interchangeable feet, restricting owners from swapping out foot pegs for wheels without the help of Apple or an Authorized Service Provider. That will soon change.
Buried in the Mac Pro Technology Overview published on Monday is a section titled “Enclosure Considerations,” under which is a note on chassis wheels. The passage suggests Apple will soon make the option available as an aftermarket purchase.
“The tower enclosure comes standard with feet; wheels are a configurable option. Both feet and wheels are available as a customer-installable kit and therefore can be converted from feet to wheels or vice versa.”
Apple does not offer an estimated launch timeline for the wheel kit, saying only that “some options may have delayed availability.” The company directs users to the Apple online storefront for more information, though no such product listing is present on the website at the time of this writing.
Relay FM’s Stephen Hackett spotted the notice in Apple’s white paper on Monday.
Mac Pro’s $400 hubless wheel option was the butt of many a joke last year, with press outlets taking jabs at Apple for charging exorbitant fees for seemingly standard hardware. Compounding the perceived problem, customers who elected against a wheeled Mac Pro currently have to take the desktop in to an Apple retail store or ASP to install the part.
What, exactly, Apple’s Mac Pro wheel kit will include and at what price remains unknown. The standard issue wheel set integrates directly into the stainless steel space frame, which normally extends “from foot to handle” as a single unit. It is possible that the wheel units will be designed to attach to Mac Pro’s large feet, facilitating easy installation but adding inches to the machine’s height.
Make free encrypted backups to the cloud on Fedora
Most free cloud storage is limited to 5GB or less. Even Google Drive is limited to 15GB. While not heavily advertised, IBM offers free accounts with a whopping 25GB of cloud storage for free. This is not a limited time offer, and you don’t have to provide a credit card. It’s absolutely free! Better yet, since it’s S3 compatible, most of the S3 tools available for backups should work fine.
Head over to the IBM cloud services site and follow the steps to sign up for a free account here: https://cloud.ibm.com/registration. You’ll need to verify your account from the email confirmation that IBM sends to you.
This brings up the Configure your resource section.
Next, click on theCreate button to use the default settings.
Under Predefined buckets click on the Standard box:
A unique bucket name is automatically created, but it’s suggested that you change this.
In this example, the bucket name is changed to freecloudstorage.
Click on the Next button after choosing a bucket name:
Continue to click on the Next button until you get the the Summary page:
Scroll down to the Endpoints section.
The information in the Public section is the location of your bucket. This is what you need to specify in restic when you create your backups. In this example, the location is s3.us-south.cloud-object-storage.appdomain.cloud.
Making your credentials
The last thing that you need to do is create an access ID and secret key. To start, click on Service credentials.
Click on the New credential button.
Choose a name for your credential, make sure you check the Include HMAC Credential box and then click on the Add button. In this example I’m using the name resticbackup.
Click on View credentials.
The access_key_id and secret_access_key is what you are looking for. (For obvious reasons, the author’s details here are obscured.)
You will need to export these by calling them with the export alias in the shell, or putting them into a backup script.
Preparing a new repository
Restic refers to your backup as a repository, and can make backups to any bucket on your IBM cloud account. First, setup the following environment variables using your access_key_id and secret_access_key that you retrieved from your IBM cloud bucket. These can also be set in any backup script you may create.
Even though you are using IBM Cloud and not AWS, as previously mentioned, IBM Cloud storage is S3 compatible, and restic uses its interal AWS commands for any S3 compatible storage. So these AWS keys really refer to the keys from your IBM bucket.
Create the repository by initializing it. A prompt appears for you to type a password for the repository. Do not lose this password because your data is irrecoverable without it!
$ restic -r s3:http://s3.us-south.cloud-object-storage.appdomain.cloud/freecloudstorage backup Documents/
Enter password for repository: repository 106a2eb4 opened successfully, password is correct Files: 51 new, 0 changed, 0 unmodified Dirs: 0 new, 0 changed, 0 unmodified Added to the repo: 11.451 MiB processed 51 files, 11.451 MiB in 0:06 snapshot 611e9577 saved
Restoring from backups
Now that you’ve backed up some files, it’s time to make sure you know how to restore them. To get a list of all of your backup snapshots, use this command:
$ restic -r s3:http://s3.us-south.cloud-object-storage.appdomain.cloud/freecloudstorage snapshots
Enter password for repository: ID Date Host Tags Directory ------------------------------------------------------------------- 106a2eb4 2020-01-15 15:20:42 client /home/curt/Documents
To restore an entire snapshot, run a command like this:
$ restic -r s3:http://s3.us-south.cloud-object-storage.appdomain.cloud/freecloudstorage restore 106a2eb4 --target ~
Enter password for repository: repository 106a2eb4 opened successfully, password is correct
restoring <Snapshot 106a2eb4 of [/home/curt/Documents]
If the directory still exists on your system, be sure to specify a different location for the restoreDirectory. For example:
$ restic -r s3:http://s3.us-south.cloud-object-storage.appdomain.cloud/freecloudstorage restore 106a2eb4 --target /tmp --include file1.txt Enter password for repository: restoring <Snapshot 106a2eb4 of [/home/curt/Documents] at 2020-01-16 15:20:42.833131988 -0400 EDT by curt@client> to /tmp
Team17 Snaps Up Ageless, A Puzzle-Platformer Currently In The Works For Switch
Team17 has revealed a partnership with Malaysian developer One More Dream Studios to release puzzle-platformer Ageless on Nintendo Switch.
The game has you playing as Kiara, a young woman who discovers a mystical bow armed with the ancient power to control ageing. You’ll need to shoot animals and plants to age them, both backwards and forwards in time, to progress through a series of vibrant puzzles.
A press release for the game notes that “Kiara’s new-found power is not without consequence; the narrative follows the journey she must make to confront her inner demons and find herself along the way”. We also have a feature list for you, so feel free to check that out below:
Features of Ageless: –Multi-stage ageing for plants and animals: Age flora and fauna through various stages of their life cycle to solve the puzzles standing in your way. – Platforming:Ageless uses the environment to produce intricate platforming challenges. While ‘ageless’ players can use living creatures to dash through the air, consuming the life force and de-ageing the plant or animal in the process – Unique worlds: Each area has its own unique plants and animals to utilise, realised in a hand-drawn pixel art. – Collectables: Becoming ‘ageless’ allows players to see and collect optional hidden items that will only be accessible via intricate platforming challenges hidden throughout the levels.
We don’t have any news on a release window for this one just yet, but the game will be playable at the Team17 booth at PAX East this weekend.
Liking what you see? Will you be keeping an eye out for more news on this one going forward? Let us know with a comment below.
The Massive Gameplay Giveaway 
