Rick’s days could be numbered as we ready ourselves for episode 5 of The Walking Dead Season 9. “What Comes After” airs today in the UK, and here’s how you can watch The Walking Dead completely free online or on TV. (Click here for spoilers.)
The series is broadcast a day earlier in the US than it is here in the UK, so while the first broadcast actually took place on 4 November on AMC, in the UK you’ll be looking for the Fox UK broadcast at 9pm on Monday 5 November 2018.
You’ve four options for viewing Fox UK: via (channel 124), (channels 157 and 199) or (via an), or you can go with our preferred option of .
The latter service costs just £7.99 per month for an Entertainment pass, and if you’re prepared to binge-watch all 16 episodes (each an hour long) you can watch it completely free online, on TV or via dedicated mobile apps by taking advantage of a .
NowTV also offers more than 250 on-demand TV boxsets, plus catch-up facilities, and previous seasons of The Walking Dead returned to its boxsets on 1 October.
You don’t need a Sky subscription to watch NowTV, and nor do you need a NowTV box or streaming stick (unless you want one) – apps are available for Chromecast, PlayStation, Xbox, Roku, smart TVs, Windows and Mac, and iOS and Android.
The Walking Dead Season 9 is also available through Amazon Prime, but it won’t be part of the subscription. Based on the prices it is currently charging for Season 8, you’ll pay £1.89 per episode (or £2.49 in HD), or you can buy the entire season for £24.99 (SD; £29.99 HD).
It’s also possible to buy older episodes of The Walking Dead through the following services:
: single episode from £1.99 (SD); season from £24.99 (SD)
: single episode from £1.99 (SD); season from £24.99 (SD)
: single episode from £1.89 (SD); season from £24.99 (SD)
Like all popular TV series and films there will almost certainly be people uploading The Walking Dead torrents or hosting illegal streams of the programme, but we won’t advise you on these here.
Data gets everywhere. Every time we send a message, search for something online, or interact with an app, we’re generating masses of information that businesses can make good use of to better tailor services and offers for us. It’s real-time, it’s personal, and it’s now expected. While retailers were the first to join the dots to capitalise on this treasure trove of data, digitisation has left nearly no industry untouched. As entire sector ecosystems evolve, business models are challenged and assumed economics and value chains are shaken. Partners and technology providers must rally around to support and enable, ensuring longstanding businesses are able to remain relevant and competitive.
The world of asset finance doesn’t often see the light of day, but we’re seeing radical shifts in requirements here. Let’s take the auto sector as an example – big ticket headline trends such as Car-as-a-Service, Connected and Electric Vehicles reflect the changing way in which transport is delivered, managed, used, and therefore – paid for.
Although we’re all used to dialling up a ZipCar for an emergency trip to the tip, or listing our own vehicle on a car sharing network such as hiyacar, this trend exposes automotive leasing businesses to a whole new layer of complexity. Conventional leasing models, whereby contract prices are determined by fixed parameters – i.e. mileage requirements, car choice, duration, post contract vehicle valuations – will no longer be applicable in a world where drivers become users of lots of vehicles rather than owners of their own.
Pricing electric vehicles
The plot thickens when we think about the trend towards electric vehicle ownership. This will have a major impact on traditional models for residual vehicle valuation. Due to a mix of governments’ evolving subsidy strategies, shifting demand patterns, and new technology developments, electric vehicle lease contracts will have to be priced differently to traditional vehicles.
For example, conventional depreciation models used to calculate sales cost for combustion engine vehicles after lease expiry will not apply to electric vehicles as there are a number of unique additional considerations to bear in mind. This includes everything from wear and tear of the electric motor (which is very different to an internal combustion engine), to the amount of software updates made to an ECU. The latter will completely reverse traditional ‘depreciation theory’, and mess with assumed economies as software increases vehicle intelligence and performance. A standard car is valued as a whole ‘piece of metal’, unlike an EV which can be valued in components – the battery can make up 50% of the EV’s value.
This becomes even more complicated when we consider the connectivity of cars, with manufacturers and software providers beaming ‘over the air’ updates into vehicles, imbuing them with intelligence and functionality that will increase their value over time – contrary to what might be expected for a leased car.
This data surge brings a challenge, but also a considerable opportunity for asset finance firms that embrace the opportunity to do more with the information that is flowing through their systems. Think real-time, dynamic quotes, the ability to remotely monitor assets to ensure they are not being mis-used or breaking agreements, leasing contracts based on insight from past usership rather than factory-set guesstimates, and stronger customer relationships. Many asset lenders are playing catch up against retailers, hospitality providers, airlines and utility providers, but these businesses can’t shy away from the role of data in delivering the user experience we’ve all come to expect.
FlipDrive is a New York-based company that’s been in the cloud storage business for at least eight years. It’s a relatively small player in this sector having under 100 staff and a modest $16.5m turnover.
Can FlipDrive punch above its weight and compete with the big players to offer something unique to a small but clearly loyal customer base?
Features
Many of those assumptions you might have about a cloud storage service, and what features they normally provide, you can throw out of the window with FlipDrive.
Because this is one of the few solutions with no client application to link the computer or mobile device to the service.
Instead, all file transactions are done through a web interface.
A design choice that by definition rules out the possibility of live synchronisation of any folders or files on the client device.
And, you can only drop files on to the web interface, not folders, amazingly.
After you have uploaded files, then you can create folders on the FlipDrive space, and move the files to those folders, but it makes even the earliest versions of Dropbox seem sophisticated.
It can show you scaled down versions of pictures, but the web interface can’t play MP3 files or do anything remotely clever with files.
Tag more than one file to move to a folder, and it just takes the first, ignoring the rest. Or, sometimes it just doesn’t move anything, for a little variety.
The underlying issue here is that by design web pages don’t have free access to the files on your computer unless a security flaw is found. And therefore, without using a plugin with security credentials, any permanent connection between files stored on the computer and those out in cloud storage was always going to be impossible.
We could bore you with all the other ways that this facility fails to live up to what its competitors are offering, but if you want file versioning, local encryption, or anything like that you should look elsewhere.
As a service, FlipDrive stretches the definition of SaaS (storage as a service), possibly beyond breaking limits.
Interface
As we’re already eluded, the FlipDrive interface is purely a web page and not a very sophisticated one at that.
What’s slightly odd about the FlipDrive web solution is that there are hints that it was meant to be so much more, because alongside the file storage parts in ‘My Drive’ are also other subsections for Photos, Contacts and Bookmarks.
If, as we did, you’ve already uploaded some images to My Drive, you might be confused not to find them in the Photo section already, because they won’t be.
Photos that use the photo section don’t appear in the general drive space; you can’t add images that you’ve uploaded to there as it is something entirely separate.
However, it does have a few benefits in that you can put notes alongside the images, and you can also ‘bulk upload’ a folder, something My Drive can’t handle.
If the Photo tool made us scratch our heads, the Contacts and Bookmarks are even more confusing, because they’re built for the person who doesn’t have a contact list already or doesn’t save bookmarks on their browser.
There is no mechanism to link either of them to other sources of that information, but then you probably guessed that already.
I’m not sure what the thinking was that created these sections, but without external connections to other services they’re not much use and could distract someone from using an interoperable service like those run by Google and Microsoft.
Security
A quick surf through the FlipDrive website reveals that security isn’t something those behind it considered important, because it hardly gets a mention.
The only secure aspect to this facility appears to be the HTTPS connection that the web interface uses because files aren’t encrypted in transit to the storage, or while they’re on the server for that matter.
That leaves only your password to guess or have by default on a mobile device to deliver nefarious access to your files. There isn’t any two-factor authentication or alert when a new device accesses the service using your account.
From a security viewpoint, FlipDrive is for those who are highly optimistic or inherently lucky.
Pricing
For those wishing to test out what FlipDrive has to offer, FlipDrive offer a 10GB free account that isn’t time limited in any way but only allows files of up to 25MB.
The paid tiers are called Personal, Pro and Business, and offer 25GB, 100GB and 250GB respectively, all with a 15-free trial to start any new account.
Again, there are limits of 1GB on how big files can be on then Personal account, but Pro and Business allows any file sizes.
If like us, your reaction to this business model is that these options seem remarkably small by current standards, you’ll also be disappointed in the pricing which isn’t proportionately scaled.
Personal costs $5 (£3.85), Pro $10 (£7.70) and Business $20 (£15.41) per month, making FlipDrive one of the most expensive per GB cloud services around. For $10 (£7.70), or less, most of the big competitors give you 1TB, so FlipDrive offering 10% of that capacity seems entirely unrealistic.
Final verdict
When you combine the high cost with the lack of features, any real stab at security or the ability to sync, FlipDrive manages to complete almost all the boxes you don’t want to be ticked.
If you can’t find a better cloud storage solution than this one, you’re not looking very hard.
Traditional external hard disk drives have managed to carve a niche in the storage market and as margins get eroded, vendors have had to come with new ways to maintain profits, which is why we see many storage players – outside of Seagate and WDC – produce ruggedised hard drives.
One player, Adata, has been particularly active in that market maintaining a portfolio of no less than ten devices plus a few external rugged SSDs. The HD830 is the latest model to be released and one that put particular emphasis on its durability above everything else. We tested the 2TB version but it is available in 4TB and 5TB models as well.
Design
This hard disk drive looks like a brick. Really. It houses a 2.5-inch hard disk drive and has been designed in such a way as to protect the latter from any potential shock. The outer layer of the device with fins, grooved probably to maximise surface area to facilitate heat dissipation.
The manufacturer argues that the HD830 is “virtually indestructible” thanks to a “robust” triple-layer construction consisting of a shock protection coating, an aluminum exterior that can withstand up to 3000 Kg of pressure (a claim we have no way of testing in normal lab conditions) and a silicone casing.
There’s a flap that covers the flat USB connector, one that clips firmly in place and allows the HD830 to exceed the IP68 rating. It is both dustproof and waterproof, as it can remain submerged for two hours in two metres of water. It meets the U.S. Military’s MIL-STD-810G 516.6 standard and can survive falls from up to 1.22 meters.
Like for other Adata devices we tested previously, there’s a short USB cable with a Type-A USB 3.0 connector at one end and an old-school flat USB connector on the other. A blue LED lights up to indicate when the device is on and when it is transferring data.
In use and performance
Unlike the HD710M Pro which used an old 5-year old 7mm-high Western Digital Blue 1TB hard disk drive (WD10SPCX), the HD830 opts instead for a 2-year old 2TB Seagate ST2000LM007 drive, a two-platter, 5400RPM model with a whopping 128MB cache and a two year warranty. Interestingly, the HD8630 carries a longer, three year warranty.
Despite being newer, the drive failed bet the WD Blue drive in benchmarks, hitting 103.2 and 110.4 MBps on CrystalDiskMark’s read/write tests – which is less than a third of what an average SSD can achieve – and scored up to 108.8 and 105.5MBps respectively on the popular ATTO disk benchmark. Its AS SSD sequential read/write scores were 118.1 and 101.3 MBps with a single 10GB file taking 78 seconds to transfer.
The external drive didn’t become warm to the touch during our benchmarks. At 140 x 96.2 x 33mm with a weight of 510g, it is amongst the heaviest non 3.5-inch external hard disk drives we’ve tested to date.
Adata has equipped the storage device with shock sensors that will automatically implement protection mechanisms that will safeguard the user’s data in theory. Spinning hard disk drives are more likely to suffer from damage when subjected to vibration or shock when in use.
Adata also bundles two pieces of software, both of which will turn 10 next year: HDDtoGo allows you to backup from your PC to external HDD, backup external HDD to PC, synchronized backup (updating files to the same version on multiple storage locations), locking your PC, and encrypt using 256-bit AES while OStoGo converts your Windows setup system into a format that can be used on an external hard drive.
The competition
The HD830 can be had for as little as $123.33 (£94.52) from some online storage specialists. Note that all prices are correct at the price of writing.
The Silicon Power Armor A60 has been tested to the MIL-STD 810G standard and carries a three-year standard warranty. It doesn’t look as ruggedised but at less than $78 (£60) at the time of writing is clearly an attractive alternative especially if you’re on a budget.
The Adata HD710 Pro is the predecessor of the HD710M and is available at a significant discount from the main online retailers, at $98.66 (£72.52). It retains most of the key features of the HD710M; the design, the IP68 sticker, the anti shock sensors and the 3-year warranty.
Final verdict
There’s not much that Adata can do to improve the HD830. The focus of this storage device is maximum protection rather than being the speediest ruggedised device around. And it achieves it in a spectacular manner delivery a hard drive that is and feels solid with almost no compromises. Yes it is big and heavy but better be safe than sorry.
The drive does carry a significant premium (around 55%) compared the cheaper options but the premium price buys you an altogether more sturdy product that is better suited at protecting your data in very extreme conditions. We would love to As always, make sure you have some sort of cloud backup to prevent loss of data.
Most Android phones these days have grown to the size where two hands are needed to operate them safely. Chinese manufacturer takes a different route with its compact A1 Pro. So let’s see if good things really do come in small packages.
Umidigi A1 Pro: Price & Availability
As with many Chinese brands, you can’t actually buy Umidigi products directly from mobile operators / carriers, but they are available unlocked on Amazon.
To see which other phones you should consider, check out the best Budget Phones.
Umidigi A1 Pro: Design & Build
When we said that the A1 Pro was small, that was a subjective term. The 145.3 x 69.1 x 8.5mm chassis is essentially the same size as an iPhone 6S, albeit a little taller to accommodate the 18:9 ratio 5.5in display.
In the hand it’s a comfortable device, with a smooth metal rim and thin glass back that doesn’t feel too wide or slippery. Umidigi does include a silicon case in the box, and that adds enough grip to make the A1 Pro secure from escaping your clutches or surviving a short drop if it does so.
The front panel is comprised mainly of the display, with small bezels at the top on bottom, not dissimilar to the Pixel 3. There’s no notch, thankfully, just a speaker and front facing 5Mp selfie camera.
Umidigi does include a Face Unlock feature that uses this camera, but it isn’t as secure as the fingerprint scanner, and when we tried to set it up the dialog boxes were all in a Malaysian dialect that we couldn’t understand. Terms and conditions are often difficult enough to read as it is, but we shied away from agreeing to things that are actually in another language.
On the rear there’s a fingerprint sensor, flash, and dual-cameras. You’ll find the dual-SIM tray at the top edge, volume and power on the right side, with a USB-C port at the bottom between the speaker and microphone.
Features & Specs
At this price we weren’t expecting too much of the A1 Pro, and in many ways it delivers on that promise.
Internally there’s a MediaTek 1.5GHz MT6739 quad-core processor driving everything, ably assisted by 3GB RAM and a rather cramped 16GB of storage. The latter can be expanded by up to 256GB via the SIM card/microSD card slot, but 16GB is very small in 2018, and if you usually have lots of apps on the device then this could quickly become an issue.
Performance is decent, if not blistering, with apps opening quickly and running without issue. There are occasional stutters here and there, but for the most part the A1 Pro is a good little runner.
Display
The 5.5in display has a 1440 x 720 resolution, which is perfectly acceptable at this price. No need for a 2K screen that drains the battery and demands more of the processors. In use the panel is bright and clear with plenty of colour.
Umidigi does make some interesting statements on its website, claiming the display is 5.5in but 5in in size. It doesn’t make any sense, but it’s a decent sized panel all the same.
Cameras
Here’s where the budget nature of the A1 Pro becomes apparent. There are dual lenses on the back, a 13Mp and 5Mp combination, which are capable of some nice shots in good lighting. Add any complicated light sources though and things quickly go south.
Exposure can be a real issue, with scenes either massively blown out or so dark you can hardly make out the subject. Tapping in various places on the screen will change the levels, and you may finally find the one you want, but you couldn’t trust the A1 Pro to be a camera that you pull out and capture those fleeting moments of beauty.
Also, regardless of what you do, dynamic range is limited and you don’t get the fancy auto HDR modes you see on flagship phones to sort out the highlights and shadows.
Video footage is acceptable and tops out at 1080p. Focus holds if there’s not too much going on, but again the light meter struggles to keep things properly exposed.
There are the usual Bokeh and Beauty modes that accompany devices from the Far East, but neither is that useful and the Bokeh can be quite frustrating to use.
Here’s a few sample pictures:
Battery life
The 3150mAh battery returned around seven hours in our tests, which means it should get you through a full day of medium usage. Fast charging is there to help with this and a thirty-minute top-up saw our unit rise back up to 39 percent.
Here’s a breakdown of the main technical specifications;
5GHz MediaTek MT6739 Quad-Core processor
IMG 8XE 1PPC 570MHz GPU
3GB RAM
16GB Storage (expandable by up to 256GB via microSD)
5in 1440×720 18:9 LCD display
Dual 13Mp and 5Mp rear cameras
5Mp front facing camera with facial recognition
Fingerprint sensor
11 a/b/g/n
4G LTE
GPS
Dual Nano-SIM
Bluetooth 4.0
USB-C port
5mm headphone jack
53 x 6.91 x 0.85 cm
183 kg
Software
Stock Android 8.1 Oreo means that the A1 Pro is very close to being on the current iteration of Google’s operating system. This is good, as there is only a small selection of models that have upgraded to the Android 9.0 Pie version released on 6 August 2018.
How often Umidigi will upgrade the software is unknown, but at least it’s starting in the right place.
Should I buy the Umidigi A1 Pro?
The A1 Pro is a nice device to hold, works well enough for general tasks, and is very cheap. That price comes with some compromises though, including average performance and sub-par cameras.
If the latter isn’t a big issue, then the Umidigi could be a reasonable option, but there are plenty of other smartphones that can offer more for around the same price.
Deep under the island of Darkwater, something stirs. Leviathan. I’m not sure what that word entails yet, but I’ve seen the signs—the dead whales, the greenish pall on the town, the nightmares. I know Leviathan is nothing good. Now if only I could figure out why, pry up the secrets hidden under these rotting floorboards and in crumbling mansions.
Who is Sarah Hawkins, and how did she die? Or did she die? And what of her husband, Charles Hawkins? Where is he? And uh…why don’t people’s mouths move when they’re talking to me? Is that part of the horror? I can’t tell.
Elementary
Call of Cthulhu ($60 on Humble) is a game I should love. Hell, at points I did love it. Based to some extent on the Call of Cthulhu tabletop game, this video game adaptation takes cues directly from its analog counterpart. You play as Edward Pierce, a detective sent to Darkwater to investigate the death (or disappearance) of Sarah Hawkins, a painter known for her terrifying portraits of otherworldly monsters.
IDG / Hayden Dingman
Pierce is very much a detective, and that’s why I should love Call of Cthulhu. Aside from one late-game sequence there is zero combat to be found here. You’re here to dig up clues, to talk to witnesses, and to draw conclusions. Like most great Lovecraft adaptations, Call of Cthulhu operates under the idea that the mythos is unknowable, unbeatable. The best you can do as a mortal is try to stay out of its way.
And when Call of Cthulhu leans into this aspect, it’s fantastic. The first few acts are delightful, despite some cliché environments, low-budget visuals, and clumsy character animations. Pierce alights in Darkwater and starts looking for answers in the local bar, among the fishermen and the smugglers and the overworked police. He then manages to gain access to the Hawkins mansion, a part of which burned down recently, there to find even more clues.
It’s slow and it’s deliberate, and the tension builds. The charming captain who brought you to Darkwater maybe isn’t so charming as he seems. And hey, the Hawkins mansion has a secret tunnel that leads into a network of caves—surprise! Maybe all those references to the “Miracle Catch,” an enormous whale that fed everyone on the island for weeks, are more sinister than they seem.
IDG / Hayden Dingman
Again, it’s very Lovecraftian—not just Lovecraft-as-set-dressing, but truly in the spirit of those stories. The approach is a bit heavy-handed, and the atmosphere laid on thicker than it needs to be. At its core though, Call of Cthulhu is the story of a man forced to look into an abyss. As you discover more clues, you realize maybe you don’t want to know all the answers here, or perhaps that Pierce can’t handle the answers.
You have to keep looking though, picking up documents and listening to recordings on old wax cylinders, trying to find Sarah Hawkins. Most of the early game is spent quietly wandering through various rooms, hunting for items to interact with. It’s an adventure game, really.
Pierce is a fine detective, too. His skill tree is lifted from tabletop, albeit simplified. There are seven skills in all: Psychology, Investigation, Eloquence, Strength, Spot Hidden, Medicine, and Occult. The first five of these are player-governed, and you can sink points into them as you head through the story. The other two, Medicine and Occult, are only improved by finding items in the game.
IDG / Hayden Dingman
And I didn’t realize until late in the game, but the skills are quite literally handled like a tabletop RPG character. Certain options are gated based on how many points you’ve put in—you might see, for instance, a dialogue option that’s grayed out because you haven’t achieved the “Professional” rank in Psychology yet. For the most part they’re treated as percentages though, with behind-the-scenes dice rolls. A 60 percent in Medicine means you have that much chance to succeed, even though the game won’t tell you it’s rolling dice to determine that fact.
It’s not a great system. Not for a video game, anyway. It works fine in tabletop, when the person running the game (the DM or dungeon master) can re-route the story around players missing a clue. In Call of Cthulhu though, it feels arbitrary. You might have an 80 percent in Investigation and Pierce breaks the lock trying to pick it. Then usually that’s it, you’ve locked yourself out of that room. There’s no subsequent option to, you know, break the door down or whatever.
Those issues get worse over time, too. I’ve said already the early chapters are the best, and I mean it. Call of Cthulhu starts strong. When you first arrive on Darkwater for instance, you’re told you need to get into an old warehouse, once a storage space for the Hawkinses.
IDG / Hayden Dingman
You’ve got plenty of options. You can convince the police guarding it to let you through, or bribe some sailors with a bottle of alcohol, or crawl through some gas-filled tunnels to come up through the rear entrance. Another standout mission follows soon after, as you try to sneak out of an asylum and are given a number of different ways to cause a distraction.
The longer you play, the fewer branches there are though. Later missions are basically “Go here and do this,” ditching any real roleplaying opportunities for Pierce.
It gets bad, too—or more scattered, at the very least. Call of Cthulhu starts at a meandering pace, truly a detective game at its core. A few hours in it gets restless though and starts bombarding the player with mediocre stealth missions, with guards that alternate between omniscient and blind. Then it starts mixing stealth with trial-and-error puzzles, which is even more frustrating.
IDG / Hayden Dingman
And then it goes completely off the rails towards the end, with the only real combat section of the game. Pierce is given a gun and apparently infinite ammo, just mowing down the people who are sent to stop him. It’s not even a satisfying FPS segment, nor do the controls make any sense. You tap “E” to fire, and it’s quite literally rolling whether you hit an enemy against Pierce’s strength stat. You can fire right at someone and the gun misses regardless.
The whole section feels unnecessary. A lot of it does, the stealth bits included. I’d love a Call of Cthulhu that was 100 percent Edward Pierce playing detective, but instead those parts are mixed in with a cavalcade of more “traditional” video game ideas, none of which are executed very well. Hell, most aren’t even explored much. There’s an entire “sanity” mechanic for instance where Pierce starts freaking out in dark or confined spaces, but it has zero bearing on the game and you’ll be hard-pressed to even trigger it. There’s a clever twist on the dialogue wheel later in the game too, but after a few gimmick uses it disappears.
It makes the otherwise interesting story a chore to play through, even if the game is only seven or eight hours long. A lot’s been made of Call of Cthulhu’s technical issues, and there are certainly many. Lip-sync and other animations are stiff, or even nonexistent. Textures are muddy, with lots of pop-in. Slowdown and hitches crop up for no discernible reason.
IDG / Hayden Dingman
But I could honestly overlook those problems, given the right game. They’re a factor, sure, but I’ll take a unique-but-flawed experience over a polished-but-empty one every day. See also: Vampyr.
Call of Cthulhu just feels disjointed. It’s got a ton of great ideas, but all of them feel half-explored and even less finished. The tone is spot-on, but that’s about it.
Bottom line
Give me a sequel, though. It’s not so much that Call of Cthulhu is irredeemable as much as it feels flawed. “Less than the sum of its parts,” I’d say. Any one aspect of Call of Cthulhu sounds intriguing in isolation, but put them all together and it’s a mess of disparate elements, all fighting for control.
I hope the developers get a second chance to iterate on Pierce’s story, one that’s more confident in its approach—one that’s a detective story through and through, that doesn’t feel the need for hackneyed stealth sequences or a dreadful combat scenario just because “Games have to have those things.” They don’t, and Call of Cthulhu didn’t.
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