Banished Music and Strange News have announced Strange Universe: Summer Edition, a late November to early December run of nine gigs across six Auckland venues.
Suzanne Ciani opens the season at Hollywood Avondale on 25 November, playing in quadraphonic sound with Dream Chambers. Romi Wrights, Courtney Marie Andrews, Allegra Krieger, Dictaphone Blues, Die! Die! Die!, Purple Pilgrims and the Tara Clerkin Trio follow through to 8 December. Nadia Reid closes the series on 12 December at Pitt St Methodist Church, joined by Mimi Gilbert. Other venues include K?hui St David’s, Double Whammy, Whammy Bar and Public Bar.
The Strange Universe Tiny Film Festival runs alongside it at Hollywood Avondale, with a film on each Thursday from 12 November to 10 December. It opens with The History of Concrete, which has a Ciani soundtrack. The programme also includes Almost Famous, The Outsiders, UHF and The Cable Guy, each picked by one of the organisers.
Tickets are on sale now at banishedmusic.com.

After 13 years and more delays than anyone cares to count, Grand Theft Auto VI finally lands on Thursday 19 November, exclusively on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. Before then you’ll want to pre-load, and this is where being organised pays off. Digital pre-loading opens on PS5 from midnight local time on Tuesday 10 November, and on Xbox from 1pm NZ time the same day. Code-in-box copies reach shops from 12 November. The catch is the size: the pre-load file runs up to a hefty 212GB, so if your console’s drive is anywhere near full, start clearing room now rather than finding out the hard way on launch day. Rockstar is also dropping a free printable map of Leonida and a cover-art poster on the official site on 19 November. Still no PC version in sight, so it’s consoles only for now.

Google has a new Fitbit, slotting neatly between the full Pixel Watch and the screenless Fitbit Air. The Fitbit Edge is seriously thin at 11.5mm, with the biggest and brightest screen Fitbit has put on a tracker, up to seven days of battery, and a five-minute top-up that buys a full day. It handles the essentials well: 50-plus workout modes, improved GPS that works without your phone, auto-detection of up to 100 activities, plus ECG, skin-temperature and overnight recovery scoring. The genuinely refreshing bit is that it’s Google’s first repairable Fitbit, with a modular build and a replaceable battery, a welcome nod to not binning the thing the moment the battery fades. Two catches: the smartest tools, including the AI coaching and the blood-pressure and insulin-resistance trends, need a paid Google Health Premium subscription, and several health features vary by country. It’s US$179.99, on sale 27 October, with NZ pricing and availability still to be confirmed.

Here’s a music series worth your time. Beyond the Beat is back for a second season on YouTube from Thursday 29 October, and the premise is deceptively simple: take a well-known Aotearoa track and hand it to a different artist to tear down and rebuild in a completely foreign genre. The season-two lineup is a treat. Country star Kaylee Bell’s “Cowboy Up” becomes roots reggae, The Black Seeds’ “So True” is stripped into an R&B ballad, and JessB’s hip-hop cut “MOOD” turns country-pop. The showstopper is Alien Weaponry’s “Crown”, with the M?ori metal trio’s thundering original reworked into multilingual Afro hip-hop across te reo M?ori, English and Shona. The clever part is that it doesn’t just serve up a polished cover at the end. It puts the whole messy process on screen, the false starts, the disagreements, the moment two very different artists actually click. Made with NZ On Air support, and five weekly episodes to come.

Xbox has a new entry-level controller, and the pitch is right there in the name. The Xbox Nano Controller is the brand’s smallest yet, a touch over 5 inches long and just 100 grams, shorter and lighter than most phones, but it keeps all 18 standard inputs so nothing about the layout feels unfamiliar. It’s squarely aimed at younger players, smaller hands, and anyone who wants something to toss in a bag for gaming on the go. At around US$50 it’s also the affordable way into the ecosystem, with a rechargeable battery, a programmable Action Button for shortcuts like screenshots, and both Xbox Wireless and Bluetooth so it pairs across consoles, PCs and phones. It’s up for pre-order now and lands in New Zealand in November, though local pricing is still to be confirmed.

Apple’s “Welcome Home” event was its biggest smart-home push yet, squaring up properly against Amazon and Google. The centrepiece is HomeView, a US$299 7-inch smart display that recognises your face, fills a room with spatial audio, handles FaceTime and runs your smart home by voice, in both tabletop and wall-mounted versions. It lands alongside a new Apple TV 4K with an A19 chip and four-speaker HomePod surround sound, a second-gen HomePod mini (US$149) with music-reactive lighting, and the Apple Home Collection, a range of cameras, a doorbell, a smart lock and thermostats built with LG and Schneider Electric. The thread tying it all together is Siri AI, a rebuilt and far more conversational Siri. That’s also the gamble: after years of Siri being Apple’s weakest link, the entire strategy rests on it finally being good. New Zealand is a launch market, with HomeView pre-orders open now and shipping from 13 November, though local pricing is still to be confirmed. The EU, tellingly, misses out altogether, because Siri AI isn’t available there yet.

Here’s one for the festive calendar. On Friday 11 December, the Auckland Youth Orchestra and Holy Trinity Cathedral Choir join forces for Sounds of Christmas, putting 75 of the city’s finest young players and singers on one stage for a night of orchestral favourites, festive pieces and carols. The programme runs from Tchaikovsky’s Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy and Leroy Anderson’s Sleigh Ride through to Piazzolla’s Libertango, with the Cathedral Choir adding Rutter before the whole room is invited to sing along to Silent Night and the rest. There’s real history behind it too: AYO was the first formal youth orchestra in the Southern Hemisphere, and has been a launchpad for Kiwi musicians aged 16 to 26 for more than seven decades. Bring the wh?nau and your singing voice.

Over a single week in early October, Ukraine knocked out three of the six data centres belonging to Yandex, the sprawling tech company often called Russia’s Google. Long-range drones sparked fires at facilities in Sasovo, Kaluga and Vladimir, and the fallout spread well beyond the blast sites. Yandex runs search, ride-hailing, food delivery, music, smart home and cloud services used by millions, and the strikes took scores of them offline across Russia and into Belarus, Kazakhstan and further afield. Network monitors clocked Yandex Cloud traffic dropping to roughly a third of normal. The Sasovo site mattered most: it housed two of Yandex’s three supercomputers, the ones training its AI models. Kyiv calls the strikes payback for Russia hitting Ukrainian data centres. Beyond the war, it’s a blunt reminder that the cloud isn’t some abstract elsewhere. It’s buildings full of servers, and buildings can burn.

That drawer of retired phones might have a future as a robot brain. Researchers at UCLA have built PhoneBot, a knee-high humanoid that uses an Android phone as its torso, borrowing the handset’s camera for vision, its motion sensors for balance, and its processor to run the software that drives its legs. It’s about 48cm tall, walks, tracks a person, and can pick itself up off the floor, all for roughly US$400 in parts plus whatever phone you already own. The clever bit is the reuse: rather than buying dedicated cameras, sensors and compute, PhoneBot leans on the gear packed into a phone you’ve already paid for. They tested it on handsets as old as a 2017 Honor 9, proving you don’t need a flagship. Best of all it’s open-source, designed to be rebuilt and tinkered with in classrooms and labs. A small, cheerful antidote to throwing perfectly good tech in a drawer forever.