Yes, it’s a supercar, but it’s also sold very much as a track and road car, one that accommodates a passenger, all of which means road trips and weekend-away stays are very much possible. Well, they would be if there were anywhere at all to store luggage. Lamborghini managed to find some luggage space in its Revuelto design, so there’s no excuse here, really.

The design department otherwise has had a field day. Top-mounted exhausts, dihedral doors, and even an F1-style roof snorkel to accompany that air-braking rear wing deliver an exterior that is nothing short of arresting. Somehow, none of this looks garish or out of place on the Valhalla in person. Everything has a purpose, and nothing seems to scream as flexing or showing off. There’s a cohesion to the Valhalla aesthetic that others might not manage.

Inside, it is much more comfortable than you would imagine. The one-piece carbon-fiber seats look like they are going to be tricky, but on my two-hour road drive, they were supportive and, yes, comfortable. Visibility is surprisingly good, but a camera system is required for the rear view mirror because there’s no rear window. The rest of the interior is minimal, but the steering wheel is excellent (which, as Jony Ive will tell you, is no mean feat) and neatly signals some motorsport cool.

The one gripe for the interior is the dash and center screens, which are clear and responsive, and offer up the usual smartphone mirroring options, but they aren’t luxurious. We’re seeing a lot more effort these days with screen design from Ferrari’s new Luce as well as BMW in the iX3 and i3, but here, Aston has decidedly functional, off-the-shelf-looking displays. If I were parting with a million dollars, I might want more consideration here.

Odin’s Beard

On the road and track is where the Valhalla excels. Impressive doesn’t come close, and, despite the delays, the patience shown by Aston has clearly paid dividends. The ride is superb, as well as being ridiculously quick. The chassis is exceptionally agile, making the car feel alert and light. There are enormous reserves of grip to match the formidable braking and acceleration, and as a result, this is a car that flatters you; it effortlessly seduces you into driving much harder and better than you think you can, all while giving you levels of confidence you wouldn’t think possible.

I’ve driven the Lamborghini Revuelto, and yes, it’s exciting, but also there’s a part of you that is wary—the part that knows that if you don’t keep your wits about you 100 percent of the time, things will go bad very quickly. The Valhalla offers up all of that fun and excitement, but almost none of the trepidation. It is gratifying and intuitive to drive. Anyone can fully enjoy this car, not merely those used to track days. Some will say the engine note is not as full-throated as might be expected in such a car, but others will be having so much fun they won’t care. Nor should they.

You may have noticed a drop of AI in your weather app lately. As companies race to infuse artificial intelligence into every product, the wave has come for the humble weather app.

The Weather Company, operator of the Weather Channel, today released a revamped version of its Storm Radar app, featuring an AI-powered Weather Assistant that lets users customize how they view forecasts and weather maps, toggling between layers like radar, temperature, and weather conditions like wind and lightning.

It can also sync with other apps, like your calendar, to send text notifications and weather summaries that tie info about the upcoming weather into your daily plans. You can stick a voice on it to talk like an old-timey radio weatherman, if you’re into that. Like most weather apps, it gets the data comes from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Weather Service (NWS).

The app costs $4 per month. It is available on iOS only for now, but the company says an Android version is coming eventually.

“We wanted to build an experience that would be a weather level-up for anybody, really, from a casual observer to a seasoned storm chaser,” says Joe Koval, a senior meteorologist at the Weather Company. “If you’re looking for advice on when the weather will be good to walk your dog tomorrow, you no longer have to look at a bunch of different disparate weather data elements and try to figure out the answer to that question yourself.”

You can find the weather on your phone already, of course. Android and iOS devices typically place the weather prominently beside the time. Google and Apple have both fused their weather apps into their smartphones directly. AI features have since been infused, offering insights and summaries about the day to come.

But there are third-party weather apps galore, like Storm Radar, Carrot Weather, Rain Viewer, and Acme Weather—an app from the former Dark Sky app creators. New weather apps like Rainbow Weather aim to be AI-first. Weather services are also being integrated directly into AI chatbots, like Accuweather, which recently launched an app directly in OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

“Everyone has their idea of what they want in a weather app, what data they’re interested in, how they’re interested in it being presented,” says Adam Grossman, a founder of the DarkSky app. “How do you build a single weather app that works for everybody?”

DarkSky, one of the most popular iOS weather apps, was bought by Apple in 2020 and merged into its Apple Weather service. Grossman eventually left Apple to start Acme Weather, with the goal of making a weather prediction service that better telegraphs the uncertainty of forecasting.

“No matter how good your forecast is, you’re going to be wrong,” Grossman says. “That’s something that weather apps traditionally haven’t done a great job of doing. Our approach is trying to figure out how to add those pieces of context back in.”

Repositories of weather information usually come from government sources, like NOAA or other global weather services that collect data from weather satellites, radar, weather balloons, and on-the-ground instruments. All that data is fed into weather prediction models that simulate the physics of the atmosphere. Those predictions are often generated by resource-intensive supercomputers, but machine learning models have trimmed that processing down, making predictions quicker. (Though sometimes less accurate, which can be accounted for by comparing multiple models.)

Weather apps like Storm Radar and Acme Weather translate that bounty of information by corroborating and compiling the models, then helping to create high-resolution maps and a visual representation of the data, an area where AI can also be particularly useful.

Word documents, and even PDF files, aren’t necessarily safe. These normally innocuous files can be injected with malicious “poison” code or simple scripts of code that can be a serious security risk.

You probably already know it’s dangerous to open files from sources you can’t necessarily trust. If you’re an activist or journalist—or anyone who occasionally depends on anonymous tips to do their jobs—you might run into a situation where potentially useful information is inside a Microsoft Word document or PDF file that you can’t exactly vouch for. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could open those files and read them without exposing your device to potential security risks?

Dangerzone is a free and open source tool built for this purpose. Originally built by journalist and security engineer Micah Lee, this application opens files in a sandbox environment with no internet access, then converts the file to an image-based PDF with no scripting enabled. The resulting PDF has any malicious code stripped out and should be safe to open—at least, as safe as anything can be.

“You can think of it like printing a document and then rescanning it to remove anything sketchy, except all done in software,” explains the about page, which includes a lot of fascinating details about how the application works.

To get started, download and install Dangerzone. There are downloads for Windows, macOS, and various Linux systems. The first time you run it there will be a brief setup, after which you can simply drag files to the window.

The application can open and convert PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Open Office, EPUB, and image files. You can drag and drop multiple documents at once, if you’d like.

After adding documents you will be asked a few questions: where you’d like the resulting files to end up, whether they should open after the conversion is done, and whether you’d like to use optical character recognition (OCR) in order to make the document searchable. You can also move the original, potentially unsafe documents into a subfolder named “unsafe,” helping ensure you don’t confuse them with the newly made safe ones.

Photograph: Justin Pot