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.

Here’s an ugly glimpse of where cyberattacks are heading. Overnight on 11 October, attackers hijacked the refrigeration controllers at hundreds of French supermarkets, including Intermarché, Carrefour and Coopérative U stores, forcing them into a non-stop defrost cycle. Fridges and freezers were driven to around 50°C for roughly six hours, spoiling enormous quantities of fresh and frozen stock. Losses run into the tens of millions of euros, prosecutors have opened a criminal investigation, and reported fires at some stores are being examined. No group has claimed it. The telling part: the controllers, made by Danfoss and others, were internet-connected and in many cases running outdated, end-of-life software, even though researchers had flagged the flaws months earlier and a patch existed. And they destroyed all that stock without stealing a single customer’s data, which is exactly what makes this a landmark: it’s being called the first cyberattack to physically hit a nation’s food supply. It happened in France, but the lesson travels. Any business running critical kit on old, exposed controllers is a sitting duck, here included.

JustWatch, the guide 50 million people a month use to work out which of 1,500-odd services a given film is buried on, is becoming a streamer of its own. JustWatch TV launches in October, and New Zealand is in the first wave rather than the usual afterthought. It lives right inside the existing guide across web, mobile and TV apps, so there’s no separate app or sign-up, with a free ad-supported tier, rentals, and an ad-free subscription. The clever bit is that it isn’t a land grab: the catalogue is shaped by a decade of tracking what people actually search for, including titles they can never find, and the model is happy to either serve you the film on JustWatch or point you to whichever service already has it. Viewers can even request titles to bring in. Launch partners include Paramount, New Regency, Fremantle, Bleecker Street and Vortex Media, with more to come.

Brewtown is throwing a proper summer party, and the bill reads like a who’s who of Aotearoa music. Summer Meltdown is a one-day, all-ages festival at Upper Hutt on 23 January 2027, headlined by SIX60 on their first Wellington return in two years, fresh off 2026 album Right Here Right Now. Around them sits a genuinely loaded roster: reggae stalwarts Katchafire, Wellington’s own The Black Seeds, the fierce Ria Hall, one-man-band force Tiki Taane, and the endlessly inventive Troy Kingi, currently wrapping his decade-long 10/10/10 project. It’s the kind of homegrown lineup that doesn’t come around often, all in one paddock for a classic Kiwi summer’s day. Tickets are on sale now.