What makes the perfect gaming mouse? The trusty mouse. The chances are you're currently wading your way through your PC or laptop with help of the decades old technology, but boy have we come far from the original trackball invented by Ralph Benjamin in 1946. In fact, today's pro gamers are using mice that pack in tiny little pieces of tech more advanced than the computers they connected to until not so long ago, including dedicated processors and customisable weights. Redbull

Exploring DirectX 12: 3DMark API overhead feature test To say there's a bit of excitement for DirectX 12 and other low-level APIs is probably an understatement. A big understatement. With DirectX 12 ramping up for a release later this year, Mantle 1.0 already in pseudo-release, and its successor Vulkan under active development, the world of graphics APIs is changing in a way not seen since the earliest days, when APIs such as Direct3D, OpenGL, and numerous vendor proprietary APIs were first released. AnandTech

Dissecting G-Sync and FreeSync - how the technologies differ As a part of my look at the first wave of AMD FreeSync monitors hitting the market, I wrote an analysis of how the competing technologies of FreeSync and G-Sync differ from one another. It was a complex topic that I tried to state in as succinct a fashion as possible given the time constraints and that the article subject was on FreeSync specifically. I'm going to include a portion of that discussion here, to recap... PC Perspective

'A wrong move means instant death': How to power your home with a hacked Tesla car battery You need $20,000, plenty of time - and an iron nerve. But but is ripping up a Tesla car and adapting its battery the future of cheap, sustainable home power? In a small garage in suburban New Jersey, a man has hacked an electric car battery. And used it not, as you might imagine, to solve the energy crisis or time-travel a DeLorean back to 1955 ... but to power his own home. Raw Story

Many password strength meters are downright weak, researchers say Website password strength meters, like a spouse asked to assess your haircut or outfit, often tell you only what you want to hear. That's the finding from researchers at Concordia University in Montreal, who examined the usefulness of those pesky and ubiquitous red-yellow-green password strength testers on websites run by big names such as Google, Yahoo, Twitter and Microsoft/Skype. Network World

Microsoft is getting close to perfecting a universal communicator Gurdeep Pall was confident Skype's automatic translation program would work. But as Microsoft's corporate vice president in charge of Skype prepared to hold the first public demonstration of the program last May, Pall found himself worrying about the room itself. "Any sound that goes into the microphone, you basically have logic running trying to figure out what the sound said," he says. Time

AT&T's plan to watch your web browsing -- and what you can do about it If you have AT&T's gigabit Internet service and wonder why it seems so affordable, here's the reason---AT&T is boosting profits by rerouting all your Web browsing to an in-house traffic scanning platform, analyzing your Internet habits, then using the results to deliver personalized ads to the websites you visit, e-mail to your inbox, and junk mail to your front door. Ars Technica

Boeing patents 'Star Wars'-style force fields new patent granted to aircraft, defense and security company Boeing is taking its cues from science fiction. Just like the glowing energy shields seen protecting troops, machines and even spacecraft in Star Wars and Star Trek, the design – named "Method and system for shockwave attenuation via electromagnetic arc" – uses energy to deflect potential damage. CNET

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak on the Apple Watch, electric cars and the surpassing of humanity Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has said he wants Apple to take on Tesla in the car business, that he plans to buy the cheapest Apple Watch available when it goes on sale, and that he has recently resigned himself to the fact that computers will one day become the masters of humanity. Australian Financial Review

How I taught my dog to text me selfies A couple months after Twilio launched MMS, I was reading through Ricky Robinette's post on Training Your Dog with a Tessel and started to wonder if we could teach Kaira to send selfies. I'm pleased to say that, thanks to the Arduino Yun and a big red button, the answer is a resounding "Yes!"...What you're seeing in the video is a cigar box housing a massive arcade button and an Arduino Yun. Twilio

Is Internet addiction a real thing? You hear a lot about people "addicted" to the Internet, whether it's the Internet as a whole, or articles telling you how to stop being "addicted to Facebook" or "addicted to your phone." Sometimes they actually do mean real addiction, but more often, those articles use "addiction" in the colloquial, where it's just inconvenient to be without access to the Internet -- not a real illness. LifeHacker

One professional Russian troll tells all More and more, posts and commentaries on the Internet in Russia and even abroad are generated by professional trolls, many of whom receive a higher-than-average salary for perpetuating a pro-Kremlin dialogue online. There are thousands of fake accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal, and vKontakte, all increasingly focused on the war in Ukraine. RFE/RL

All The Game Of Thrones fan theories you absolutely need to know If there's two things fans of the A Song of Ice and Fire book series can agree on, it's that 1) author George R.R. Martin is weaving an incredibly dense tale where far more happens (andhas happened) than what's just on the page, and 2) that no character is safe from GRRM's murderous pen. iO9

Rowhammer attack exploits shrinking process size in DRAM A couple weeks ago, Google's Project Zero team demonstrated a very clever exploit of modern DDR3 memory. Their inspiration came from a research paper, Flipping Bits in Memory Without Accessing Them: An Experimental Study of DRAM Disturbance Errors... The Tech Report