Gadgets & Tech – Spoken Edition

The economic crisis stemming from the coronavirus pandemic has hit countries all over the world, costing millions of jobs and putting a freeze on a lot of non-essential spending, like upgrading your old phone or computer. Apple knows this, and that’s presumably why it’s reportedly planning to launch an installment program for its products. Bloomberg reports that Apple is planning to roll out this monthly installment program—which will be tied to its Apple Card credit card, issued by Goldman Sachs—over the next few weeks. The service will let customers buy a product through Apple and split the cost over several months with interest-free payments. The Bloomberg report states that Apple will offer a 12-month, interest-free payment plan for iPads, Macs, Apple Pencils, iPad keyboards, and Mac XDR Display monitors. Meanwhile, AirPods, Apple TVs, and HomePods will be offered at zero interest for six months. The program aims to increase enrollment for the Apple Card and boost sales of Apple products by letting users split the cost over time, according to Bloomberg report. Installment payments will be added to a customer’s monthly Apple Card bill and will be managed through the Wallet app. Of course, Apple isn’t the only company that offers payment installment programs to pay for products. Cell phone carriers also offer this service. However, Apple’s program would allow customers to use an installment plan to pay for a wide variety of its products. Apple, like many companies, has been impacted economically by the coronavirus pandemic. In February, it announced that it did not expect to meet its own revenue guidance for the March quarter because the worldwide iPhone supply had been temporarily constrained by the health crisis. This also affected demand for its products in China, Apple said. “In this difficult environment, our users are depending on Apple products in renewed ways to stay connected, informed, creative, and productive. We feel motivated and inspired to not only keep meeting these needs in innovative ways, but to continue giving back to support the global response,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said during the announcement of the company’s second quarter results. Apple also hasn’t stopped releasing new products during the health crisis. The company has launched its new MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, iPad Pro, Magic Keyboard, Powerbeats, and the iPhone SE. And we still haven’t seen the new iPhone 12 that’s expected this fall. If any of those gadgets sound appealing to you, rest assured, as it appears Apple is making every effort to make sure you can still buy them one way or another. [Bloomberg]

The Winklevoss twins—the brothers Mark Zuckerberg allegedly stole the idea for Facebook from—are making a movie about themselves, Deadline reported this week. If that doesn’t seem masturbatory enough, rejoice: said film is about how they amassed a net wealth of more than $1 billion by getting really into Bitcoin.

A popular painting app for the Nintendo DS and 3DS that relied on each handheld’s stylus is finally coming to the Switch. But instead of forcing users to paint with their fingers, Colors Live will include a stylus that cleverly uses the Switch’s headphone jack for pressure sensitivity and a better painting experience.

Every September, almost like clockwork, Apple releases a new iPhone. Based on recent comments from an unlikely source, the CEO of wireless component supplier Broadcom, the iPhone 12's release might get delayed until much later in the year. According to Bloomberg, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan made the prediction during a recent earnings call, though he didn’t quite spell it out.

You step outside, finding the usually bustling streets peaceful and empty. Despite a weather forecast pushing 80 degrees, the air is refreshingly cool. And while your schedule is filled with work, errands, and work that’s basically just one big errand, in this little moment you have no responsibilities at all. What is this strange magic? Well, it’s a lesser-known time of day I’d like to turn you on to.

Boots with a thick tread are a must-have accessory for safely traversing ice and snow in the winter, but slipping hazards can exist anywhere, especially for people with mobility challenges. Researchers at MIT and Harvard University have developed a new material that could radically improve the grip on the bottom of a shoe—without making it bulky or heavy like a snow boot. Finding ways to stay safe and stable on slippery surfaces has long been a pursuit of companies known for making outdoor gear. Four years ago, Vibram demonstrated its Arctic Grip material that improved the traction of rubber-soled boots on smooth surfaces made slick with ice, but to date the innovation has only been available on boots and shoes designed for outdoor use, and it doesn’t provide any help on smooth tile floors or other indoor surfaces that also pose a slipping risk to some. With this in mind, a group of researchers from MIT and Harvard University set out to find an alternate way to improve the grip of shoes, taking a mechanical approach instead of just tweaking a recipe for the rubber used in the soles. They were inspired by the Japanese art of intricate paper cutting known as kirigami, which involves making a pattern of small cuts in a rigid sheet to give it flexibility and malleability so that it can be shaped into three-dimensional structures. Most often the art, which is related to origami, is practiced with paper, but the researchers needed something more durable, so they turned to thin sheets of metal and plastic. Their approach involved testing different designs with repeating patterns of spikes, curves, and even assorted shapes cut into the thin sheets that were then affixed to the bottom of shoes. The various sample materials remain flat while the wearer is standing, but when they start walking, the foot and shoe naturally bend, and the material morphs into a 3D structure with protruding spikes that provide extra grip. It’s not unlike stretching those rubber traction boosters covered in small metal spikes that can be attached to a pair of boots, but here the spikes only extend when they’re needed. The researchers found that all of the kirigami designs increased traction by anywhere from 20 to 35 percent on various types of shoes used on surfaces including wood, vinyl flooring, and even artificial turf—not just ice. But the standout was a pattern consisting of concave curves. What’s still to be determined is how to implement or incorporate the kirigami surfaces into footwear. It could be part of the shoe’s sole permanently, or something applied only when needed. There’s also the concern of how certain materials will affect floors; if kirigami materials are permanently integrated into the sole of a shoe, there’s a risk of shredding carpeting or leaving marks on wood floors. But the potential here for people who need extra stability on slippery surfaces is certainly exciting.

Parts of the U.S. are starting to open up again, but with covid-19 continuing to plague communities throughout the country, it’s still important to maintain proper social distancing where needed when out in public.

Earlier this year, clues indicated that Google was working on a new streaming video dongle that would both replace the Chromecast Ultra and run Android TV. But now, thanks a new round of leaks, we suddenly have a much better look of what that device could actually be. Based on product renders obtained by XDA Developers (thanks to user deadman96385), Google’s dongle, internally codenamed Sabrina, sports a more oval-shaped body than the Chromecast Ultra and notably also comes with an included remote. This is a big change from Google’s previous streaming video efforts, because devices like the Chromecast Ultra require users to pull up content on their phones before casting it to their TV. The remote itself features a handful of buttons, including a dedicated Google Assistant button, along with buttons for Home, Back, Favorites, Play/Pause, and Mute. The device is also likely to come with an IR blaster so users can configure it to work natively with their existing TVs. Unfortunately, because the renders don’t show the entire remote, it’s unclear if the remote will also feature dedicated buttons for third-party streaming services like Netflix or Hulu (though that’s unlikely). Furthermore, it seems Sabrina will also run full Android TV, instead of being limited strictly to casting duties, with the screenshots in the renders suggesting that Google has some relatively major UI overhauls planned for its TV platform sometime in the future. Like a lot of other recent Google products, its TV hardware will be available in flat black and white, along with a pastel pink color reminiscent of the “Not Pink” hue Google introduced with the Pixel 3. And as you’d expect from a Google device, Sabrina is expected to support a wide range of Android TV apps, along with native YouTube TV integration and support for voice commands with a built-in remote microphone. Sadly, while previous reports claimed that this new Android TV dongle could cost as little as $80, there hasn’t been any additional details about when Sabrina will officially get announced or go on sale (though I’d bet sometime in the early fall). Still, considering that the Chromecast Ultra originally came out way back in 2016, a new streaming video dongle from Google has been long overdue, so it’s nice to see that Chromecast and Android TV fans could have something new to look watch out for later this year. And for people looking for expanded support for Stadia, Google’s new device could double as both a great video player and relay for their cloud gaming needs.

Finally acknowledging that the original Game Gear was a hefty beast as far as handhelds go, Sega has just released details on its latest throwback console: a miniature version of the Game Gear that’s reminiscent of Nintendo’s Game Boy Micro. It’s tiny, but even Sega wonders if it’s too tiny, given the company will also be selling a screen magnifier accessory for its 1.15-inch screen. There’s no shortage of miniaturized throwback consoles out there to help scratch your retro gaming itches, but the Sega clones have typically been disappointing at best, and frustrating at worst. That changed last summer when Sega itself released a mini Sega Genesis that delivered an experience on par with Nintendo’s excellent NES and SNES Classic Edition consoles. So there’s good reason to be excited for the new Game Gear Micro, which dramatically reduces the footprint of one of the original color screen portables to a handheld that’s just a few inches in size. With a price tag of around $45 each (official pricing is listed at 4,980 yen given the Game Gear Micro will only be available in Japan at launch) when it arrives on October 6, it’s priced cheap enough to fly off shelves, unless you want more than four games. At launch the Game Gear Micro will be available in four colors: classic black, blue, yellow, and red, but each one will include four different games from the original Game Gear catalog like Sonic, Gunstar Heroes, and Out Run. If you’re itching to play all 16 games, in glorious 240x180 pixels, you’ll need to buy all four colors. But Sega is making that easier with a $200 (21,912 yen) multi-pack that includes a clunky snap-on screen magnifier reminiscent of the hundreds of awful accessories designed to improve the original Nintendo Game Boy experience. As much as this feels like a console designed to appeal to Game Gear fans, Sega’s approach feels a little cash-grabby as all 16 games could have easily been included on a single console. There’s also no word on if or when the Game Gear Micro will be made available outside of Japan, or if North American gamers will have to pay a premium to import the hardware overseas. Paying more than $45 for a collection of just four games that, and let’s be honest here, weren’t the most compelling titles even 30 years ago, is a harder sell. But at least Sega delivered something to fans for the Game Gear’s 30th anniversary—we’re still waiting for the Game Boy Classic Edition which never arrived for its 30th birthday.

The Trump regime plans to ban all passenger flights from China as early as June 16, according to a new report from Reuters that cites airline officials. The plan is reportedly retaliation for the Chinese government’s refusal to allow most American flights to land in China while Chinese carriers continue to fly into the United States.

Less than three years after its debut, Amazon has banished its style-centric Echo Look device to the Goodwill pile. The company stopped selling actual units back in December 2019, but the company said this week it would be officially dropping support for the device in July. According to CNET (and first spotted by Voicebot.ai), emails started going out to Echo Look customers yesterday letting them know of the change, and that its capabilities would migrate to other apps and services. The $200 Echo Look was an unusual Echo device. It used built-in camera to take photos of you in different outfits and then store those images in a personal ‘look’ database. Amazon would use an artificially intelligent algorithm to offer clothing suggestions that matched your personal style—recommendations that you would then buy on Amazon, of course. The Echo Look also judged your outfits like Joan Rivers the morning after the Academy Awards. Out of the images taken by the Echo Look, you could pick two different outfit options for the AI (and Amazon’s in-house fashion ‘experts’) to compare side by side, and the device would tell you which one looked better on you. Both would take into account color, fit, trends, and style of the time. I never got to try the Echo Look myself, and was not even aware of its existence until today, but good riddance. There are so many different kinds of fashion, and it’s all subjective. The Echo Look was just a kitschy way to get people to spend $200 on a product so Amazon could sell them more products. But after July, those people are going to have an expensive paperweight. Amazon did say it wanted people to stop buying so much stuff off its website, after all. The idea itself is neat, and I could see it working if it was implemented more like the wardrobe software from Clueless. But I do the bulk of my shopping on online alternative clothing boutiques, Etsy, or sometimes a personalized styling service like Stitch Fix, if I’m feeling lazy and don’t want to hunt for a pair of pants that won’t be too long on me. Amazon would probably have gotten tired of recommending me all-black clothing, anyway. If you have an Echo Look and want to recycle it, Amazon is telling its customers to do so through its own device recycling program. You also have until July 2020 to save any of your photos, if you wish. Amazon says it will provide a free Photos account to users who want to save their photos through July 24, 2021. (There’s an Amazon Photos?! What doesn’t Amazon have?!)

For Nestlé, its meatless beef with Impossible Foods Inc has ended less than incredibly. Last week, a European court ruled that the multi-national food and drink giant must change the name of its “Incredible” plant-based burger for violation of trademarks. The legal tiff began when Nestlé decided it would launch its soy and wheat protein burger in Europe in April 2019. Impossible isn’t in Europe just yet but last October it filed an application to the European Food Safety Authority to sell soy leghemoglobin—also known as heme, the protein that makes Impossible Burgers look bloody and taste like meat. At the time, the application seemed like a big signal that Impossible Foods was looking to make inroads in the European market. In its ruling, the Dutch court highlighted the fact that Nestlé had reached out to Impossible for a potential licensing deal in summer 2018—only to later announce it would strike out on its own. According to the Financial Times, that led the court to believe Nestlé was trying to trip up a rival by offering a similar product under a similar name. To be fair, if you google ‘Incredible burger’, the first result is the Impossible Foods website. “We are disappointed by this provisional ruling as it is our belief that anyone should be able to use descriptive terms such as ‘incredible’ that explain the qualities of a product,” Nestle said in a statement to the Financial Times. “We will of course abide by this decision, but in parallel, we will file an appeal.” The plant-based meat industry is hot right now, and the alternative meat market is expected to grow by roughly 28 percent a year and could be worth $85 billion in 2030. The Wall Street Journal reports that in the U.S., retail stores earned over $1 billion in plant-based meat sales in 2019. Meanwhile, another Financial Times report notes that the novel coronavirus has led to plant-based meat sales skyrocketing 200 percent due to supply chain issues and staffing shortages as meatpacking plants shut down. So, what is Nestlé going to rebrand its burger as? Apparently, the burgers will now be known as ‘Sensational’ in Europe. In America, Nestlé already sells its plant burgers under the ‘Awesome’ moniker. Seriously? While most fake meat burgers are sold under superlative names—Beyond Meat, is another example—it could be that a salty Nestlé is just reaching for an old thesaurus. If you look up ‘incredible’ at Thesaurus.com, ‘impossible’ is actually one of the alternate options. I don’t know about you, but a Sensational Burger sounds ridiculous. Awesome Burgers also sound like that overeager friend hawking you a dressed-up turd. What’s next? A Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious Burger? The Improbable Burger? A Wallace Shawn-themed Inconceivable! Burger? Look Nestlé, there’s nothing wrong with a more straightforward burger name. Trader Joe’s named its meatless burgers “Protein Patties” and based on Gizmodo’s taste test—they’re not bad! People will eat your meatless burgers if they’re not horrible or super expensive. In the meantime, put the thesaurus down.

While most people know that using “private” or “incognito” mode stops your browser from saving things like your history or cookies, those modes don’t fully prevent you from being tracked online. And in a new proposed class-action lawsuit filed on Tuesday, plaintiffs are seeking upwards of $5 billion in damages from Google for persistently tracking users and misrepresenting Chrome’s privacy options.

As the future of theaters remains uncertain post-pandemic, cinema chain AMC said in a regulatory filing this week that “substantial doubt exists” about its “ability to continue as a going concern” and its chances of springing back even after its theaters are, eventually, permitted to reopen. The largest theater chain in the U.S.

If you’re going to put a smart speaker in your home that disregards your privacy and functions only to rake in profits from you in any way possible, it might as well be a disembodied interactive version of Futurama’s Bender instead of Siri, Alexa, or Google Assistant. “Bite my shiny metal ask me anything.

Netflix is planning to purge its service of subscribers whose accounts are no longer actively being used—but you may have a chance to save your precious streaming data if you resubscribe before it’s wiped. In a very uncommon move by a subscription-based service, Netflix announced Thursday that it will begin canceling the accounts of users who have not watched anything on the platform for a year since they joined, as well as anyone who hasn’t used the service in two years. The company said it will begin sending these subscribers emails and in-app notifications this week giving them the chance to keep their accounts active, but if they don’t receive a response, those accounts will automatically be deactivated. The good news is that if a user does decide that they’d rather reactivate their account, they can do so within 10 months and still have access to their profile data. “We’ve always thought it should be easy to sign up and to cancel,” Eddy Wu, the company’s director of product innovation, said in a statement. “So, as always, anyone who cancels their account and then rejoins within 10 months will still have their favorites, profiles, viewing preferences and account details just as they left them.” To be clear, the number of people who aren’t watching Netflix is small. According to Netflix, the number of inactive users on its platform represent less than half of one percent of its total number of subscribers, or “a few hundred thousand.” To put that into perspective, Netflix reported in April it had nearly 183 million total subscriptions, a number that includes the roughly 16 million new subscriptions it’s added in recent months during the coronavirus pandemic. The company said it’s already factored the soon-to-be deleted accounts into its financial guidance. In other words, this is merely a drop in the bucket for the king of streaming. And you probably should have killed that unused subscription anyway.

After shutting down its US-based repair centers over two months ago as a result of the pandemic, Nintendo is starting to reopen them again, which is good news for Switch owners still dealing with Joy-Con drift. Hacker Matteo Pisani came up with a different solution: a Switch without joysticks is a Switch that never experiences drift problems, so he upgraded his console with a touchpad instead.

End-to-end encryption for RCS appears to finally be in the pipeline for Google’s messaging app. That’s according to code spotted in an upcoming version update by the folks at APKMirror, as first reported by 9to5 Google this weekend. Rich communication services, or RCS, is a type of messaging protocol that puts its predecessor, SMS, to shame. It offers a lot of the modern conveniences found on apps like Apple’s iMessage and WhatsApp that users have already come to expect: group chats, read receipts, typing indicators, an 8,000 character limit (as opposed to SMS’ measly 160), and the ability to tap into both wifi or data to send messages. While far from groundbreaking, these features have been a long-time coming for Google Messages. After promising a successor to SMS as far back as 2016, Google finally finished its stymied rollout of RCS on Android phones in the U.S. at the end of last year. Many international markets are still waiting on it. And even with how much of a mess widespread adoption has been, Google Messages still lacks a key security feature already supported by competitors like Signal and iMessage: end-to-end encryption. This keeps third-parties from possibly snooping on your messages, and has been a hot-button issue in recent years as more and more of our daily (and potentially sensitive) communications bleed onto online platforms. The code for an internal build of Google Messages version 6.2 includes 12 new strings that reference encryption, according to an analysis by 9to5 Google. Details are scarce, though, and it’s still unclear whether both the message’s sender and recipient would need to be using Google Messages app for it to be successfully encrypted. If so, that could change once more apps gain support, 9to5 Google notes. To that effect, the update’s code suggests that users may be able to toggle permissions to allow other Android apps that have access to messages view these encrypted messages as well. Of course, there’s no telling when such a feature might materialize. While Google’s indicated that it’s exploring development of end-to-end encryption, no timeline exists as of yet for when users can expect to get their hands on it.

After shutting down indefinitely in response to the coronavirus pandemic, Universal announced last week that its Orlando parks will reopen their gates beginning on June 5. Universal Studios Florida, Islands of Adventure, and Volcano Bay have been empty for months following several other high-profile theme park closures. To abide by federal guidelines, Universal outlined the additional health precautions it’s adopting during this first phase of reopenings in a blog post.

There are plenty of ways to use your phone to pay with stuff: You can use your face, your fingerprint, a passcode, and, now, simply your voice. Google just rolled out a limited pilot program that will let a few lucky people make purchases with nothing but their voice, according to The Verge. You can only make purchases through the Google Play store and at restaurants, which seems like it could help limit accidental purchases. Unfortunately, the Voice Match feature is not enabled on my phone, but there is a Google Assistant help page that guides you through the setup process if you think you might have it. Android Police originally spotted the feature and also provides a (better) step-by-step guide to see if you have it. This new feature has not been officially announced by Google, but the company did confirm to Android Police that it has officially started a pilot test. It’s possible Google was going to announce it at its now canceled I/O 2020 event, which was set to take place this month. If you are able to get to the set-up screen, take special note of Google’s ‘Keep in mind’ message: “Someone with a similar voice or recording may be able to confirm purchases on devices you’re logged into.” I can see how this feature could be beneficial to individuals with a disability that would make it hard for them to confirm purchases with a fingerprint or a face scan. However, that warning makes it clear that Assistant Voice Match is the least secure option out of the three. As Google notes, it could be easy for someone to trick its Assistant into thinking it’s your voice. It seems like it would be easy and smart to add another security measure like Amazon’s Alexa, which gives you the option to set up a voice-activated PIN number to confirm purchases. However, there’s a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode that clearly lays out the worst possible scenario for something like that: Data takes control of the Enterprise by mimicking Captain Picard’s voice and locks the entire crew out of the computer with a long, numeric encryption. While I don’t foresee anyone getting locked out of their Google or Amazon accounts in the same way, anyone in your household with a recording of your voice, especially of you saying your pin number, could order something using your stored credit card information. Voice assistants aren’t that secure in general. Professionals who deal with sensitive client information have been advised to turn off their smart speakers while working from home; Google or Amazon employees could be listening in on your recordings, but you’ll have no idea if they actually are or not. You can always change your credit card and password information if it gets stolen, but you can never get your dignity back if you find out someone has listened to you confirming, ahem, adult purchases.

Facebook announced last week that it would be completely rebranding the wallet for its long-anticipated cryptocurrency—perhaps in an attempt to shake off its troubled reputation.

That sure was quick. Last weekend, the hacking group unc0ver released a new tool that can jailbreak Apple’s newest version of its mobile operating system, iOS 13.5, just days after its initial debut. Per multiple reports, the tool works on all versions of iOS from 11 onward and doesn’t drain battery life or impinge on your device’s other apps and baked-in security measures. “This jailbreak basically just adds exceptions to the existing rules.

Long before Spotify was a thing, I collected music on my computer during my college days. That collection, which had everything from Cradle of Filth to Dashboard Confessional, to Reverend Horton Heat, easily surpassed 10,000 songs by the end of my first semester as a freshman. By the time I graduated, I had close to 40,000 songs, which are still on that old external hard drive.

After three days of negotiations, House lawmakers have struck a deal on an amendment to protect innocent Americans from being spied on by their own government online.

Unless you’re completely irresponsible and utterly lacking in empathy, wearing a face mask is going to be a routine part of life well into 2021. In a questionable attempt to make masks more comfortable, a YouTuber has shared his custom creation that can automatically open to let fresh air in when no one’s around—at the cost of looking like a Batman villain.

As resolutions and file sizes continue to grow, it’s important for storage —especially removable storage—to keep up, and with the SD Association’s new SD 8.0 spec, memory cards have just gotten a massive bump to their top-end speed. In a press release issued on Tuesday, the association announced that transfer speeds for SD Express cards will now top out at just shy of four gigabytes per second (3940 MBps to be exact)the SD 8.

Alibaba founder and Michael Jackson enthusiast, Jack Ma, is stepping down from his role on Softbank’s board just as the company is reporting the biggest losses in its history. The company announced that Ma is set to resign June 25, a departure that comes as Softbank continues to reel from its no good, very bad year from hell. Softbank on Monday reported an annual operating loss of 1.

As many of us are sheltering in place or social distancing right now, our ways of connecting with friends and family have been severely limited. One way we’re still able to connect with others, regardless of their physical distance from us, is watching a movie together on the same streaming service.

An international operation led by Spanish authorities has arrested 18 members of a drug gang in Spain, Bulgaria, the Netherlands, and Colombia that allegedly smuggled cocaine by embedding it in cardboard. Per the Guardian, cops say the investigation was focused on a criminal going by the moniker “the Surgeon” (identified by the Local ES as Mauricio Vergara) who they allege was using his clinic as a front for drug negotiations. The operation involved the smuggling of cocaine by infusing cardboard boxes used to ship limes and pineapples from Colombia to Europe with small amounts of cocaine, which then had to be extracted by chemists, according to the police. It also allegedly involved the Los Castaña drug gang, which operates on Spain’s southern coast and whose kingpin Francisco Tejón was arrested in 2018. Police told the Guardian they had been clued into an adulterated shipment of over 5,000 boxes of limes and over 1,600 boxes of pineapples earlier this year. “Small quantities of the drug – never more than 100g – were placed in each box and later extracted by complicated chemical processes in the gang’s own laboratories,” Spanish authorities said, according to the Guardian. “The gang’s chemists were then sent from Colombia to Spain, where they stayed until they were dispatched to Bulgaria and the Netherlands, where they set about extracting the cocaine. Once their job was done, they returned to Spain and then to Colombia.” “Using international police cooperation mechanisms, Bulgarian police and prosecutors then tracked the shipment to a warehouse in Sofia where the legal and illegal imports were due to be separated, with the contaminated cardboard bound for the purpose-built lab,” police added. A video posted by Spain’s National Police showed what appeared to be machinery used to mulch the cardboard into a fibrous mass for pressing and subsequent extraction of the cocaine. Former soccer player Edwin Congo, who retired from the sport at the age of 33 in 2009, was among those arrested. He was released after questioning, according to the Local, and insisted that his only involvement with the gang was the emerald trade. “I am innocent, I have absolutely nothing to do with the sale, manufacture or anything that has to do with cocaine,” Congo told Spanish TV station La Sexta on Tuesday evening, the Local wrote.

It’s staggering to think that Matthew Scott Hunter came up with a way to combine his love of clean floors and Star Wars before the marketing teams at Disney, Lucasfilm, and iRobot did. Using random household items he turned his functional robot vacuum into an Artoo unit that roams and cleans his home.

As impressive as Spider-Man’s abilities are, there’s not much that a superhero who shoots webs from his wrists can do to combat covid-19. But what if you upgraded Spidey’s web-slingers with virus-killing hand sanitizer instead? That’s the idea behind the wrist-worn PumPiX blaster.

Archivists in Australia working on the digital restoration of an incomplete travelogue from 1935 discovered that it contains the last known footage of a Tasmanian tiger. The newly restored footage, prepared by the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA), shows a male Tasmanian tiger pacing around in his cage.

Norma McCorvey, the previously unidentified woman known as ‘Jane Roe’ in the milestone Roe v. Wade case, makes a stunning confession in a new FX documentary about her life: She was paid by the evangelical Christian right to disingenuously further their anti-abortion agenda. McCorvey became a pivotal fixture of the abortion rights movement after becoming a plaintiff as out-of-work, unwed, and unable to get an abortion in the state of Texas in 1969. McCorvey was an imperfect and controversial public face for the pro-choice movement. But in the mid-1990s, she seemingly flipped sides, joining the right in their anti-choice crusade after claiming to become a born-again Christian. “This is my deathbed confession,” McCorvey says in a trailer for the forthcoming film AKA Jane Roe. In McCorvey’s own words, her public support of the anti-choice movement was “all an act,” and McCorvey describes herself in the film as “a good actress.” “I was the big fish. I think it was a mutual thing. I took their money and they’d put me out in front of the cameras and tell me what to say. That’s what I’d say,” she says, per the Los Angeles Times. Per the Daily Beast, the documents revealed in the documentary disclose that Roe received at least $456,911 in “benevolent gifts.” Sweeney told the Times that the film is meant to explore how, with the extremely polarizing topic like abortion, “there can be a temptation for different players to reduce ‘Jane Roe’ to en emblem or a trophy, and behind that is a real person with a real story. Norma was incredibly complex.” Indeed, McCorvey’s story isn’t easily unpacked. Per a Dallas Morning News obituary from when she died in 2017, McCorvey said that she lied about being raped in order to attain an abortion, which she wasn’t able to have. The film explores her troubled upbringing, alleged sexual abuse by a family member, and her relationship with longtime girlfriend Connie Gonzalez, whom she reportedly continued seeing long after her “conversion.” Per the Times, Rob Schenck, an evangelical minister who was formerly closely linked to the anti-choice cause, says in the film that what the movement “did with Norma was highly unethical. The jig is up.” AKA Jane Roe premieres May 22 on FX, and the following day on FX on Hulu.

After some users expressed concerns that the OnePlus 8 Pro’s Photochrom camera filter could pose privacy issues, OnePlus announced that it will temporarily disable the filter while it figures out a way to address the situation. The latest announcement from OnePlus was posted on Weibo following last week’s discovery that in somewhat specific circumstances, because of the way the OP8 Pro’s Photochrom color filter processes infrared light, it could be used to see through the outer later of certain electronics, or possibly even thin layers of clothing. That said, after exploring the issue more in depth last week, I found that anyone worried about people using the OP8 Pro to spy or take creepy shots of others shouldn’t be all that concerned. Even in the best-case scenario, while the OP8 Pro’s Photochrom can reveal some additional details hidden behind thin clothing, the overall effect isn’t significantly different than what can be achieved with a bright camera flash, and in many typical everyday situations, the OP8 Pro’s color filter doesn’t reveal anything at all. On the flip side, when taking pictures of electronics with tinted or smoky plastic, the OP8's color filter does allow users to see through exterior cases and housings, potentially revealing the components inside. But that generally only applies to gadgets, not people. Still, temporarily disabling the filter while OnePlus investigates the situation more thoroughly is the prudent move. OnePlus says it hopes to re-enable the color filter sometime in the future after any privacy concerns have been addressed. The one wrinkle is that because the announcement was made on Weibo, it’s unclear how devices sold in other regions like the U.S. may be affected. Gizmodo has reached out to OnePlus’ U.S. team for more information, we will update the story if we hear back.

Satellite images have captured the result of a lake of lava collapsing on Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano, revealing an enormous new lake of water. The new lake formed as a result of the caldera, a crater called Halema’uma’u, collapsing at Kilauea’s peak. Now that the crater has filled with water, it’s possible that it may lead to even more explosive eruptions on the Hawaiian volcano. Kilauea is a wide, 4,091-foot-tall shield volcano that erupted from 1983 until 2018. From 2010 on, Halema’uma’u filled with lava, creating a lava lake (which is exactly what it sounds like). But 2018 marked a months-long wave of activity at Kilauea, setting off a destructive eruption expelling nearly a cubic kilometer of lava that flowed through inhabited areas and into the ocean. This event was Kilauea’s largest eruption in two centuries. Alongside the eruption came the slow, dramatic collapse of Halema’uma’u’s floor, leaving a hole over 1,500 feet deep as the lava drained out. This changed landscape of the crater, which now appears to be much deeper and is flanked by a tall cliff. But Halema’uma’u’s story didn’t end there. Water started to collect at the bottom of the crater a year later, and today, it’s a lake at least 100 feet deep taking up an area larger than five football fields, according to the NASA Earth Observatory press release. Basically, the crater has now dipped far below the water table, or the upper limit where groundwater saturates the earth. That water has now started to fill the open pit. This new lake could spell bad news for future Kilauea eruptions. The volcano more typically erupts explosively. If water dissolves into the magma, it could cause the build up of steam, an increase in pressure, and perhaps a more dramatic and potentially dangerous release of lava. Volcanologists will continue to study Kilauea in order to understand what its future eruptions might be like.

A large, out-of-control piece of space debris crashed into the Atlantic Ocean last week, passing over much of the United States. China launched the the Long March 5B rocket on May 5 from the Wenchang launch site in order to deploy a test model of its upcoming crew capsule. After a week in orbit, the nearly 18-metric-ton core stage re-entered the atmosphere and crashed into the Atlantic Ocean, becoming the largest piece of uncontrolled space debris to re-enter the atmosphere since 1991, as Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics astronomer Jonathan McDowell noted on Twitter. After the launch, the rocket began a week-long orbit. The U.S. military soon started tracking the rocket’s core stage. After a trajectory that took it over heavily populated areas such as New York and Los Angeles, the rocket hit the ocean off the coast of West Africa. Uncontrolled reentries and eventual crash sites are difficult to model, since scientists don’t fully understand the complex dynamics of the upper atmosphere, Holger Krag, head of ESA’s Space Debris Office, said in a 2018 statement. Such debris can travel vast distances in short stretches of time. The 176-foot Long March 5B rocket is designed to bring large payloads, like components of China’s upcoming space station, into orbit. This mission deployed a prototype crew capsule that would be used to bring astronauts into orbit, as well as an experimental cargo return capsule, which malfunctioned as it returned into the atmosphere, reports Spaceflight Now. This all might remind you of the 2018 uncontrolled reentry of the Chinese satellite Tiangong-1, a relatively small piece of space debris that crashed into the Pacific Ocean. The Tiangong-2 rocket reentered the atmosphere in the South Pacific as part of a controlled deorbiting last year. But the Long March 5B core stage stands out in its size. While most of the rocket would have burned up in the atmosphere, some of the denser parts could potentially survive the descent and cause localized damage on the ground, McDowell told CNN.  The largest piece of space junk to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere was the Skylab space station in 1979; the larger Mir space station returned to the Earth as part of a controlled reentry in 2001. Earth is really big and mostly water, so the odds of death-by-space-debris are exceedingly slim. Still, we’re launching more satellites all the time, so it’s something that space agencies are increasingly having to consider. Freak accidents do happen, though: In 1997, a woman in Oklahoma was struck (but nt injured) by a piece of metal from a disintegrating rocket.

To discourage cheating, high schools and colleges limit what gadgets can be brought into an exam, and they require students to use very basic calculators if math is involved. But that doesn’t mean cheating is impossible, it just requires considerably more effort, like upgrading a dumb Casio calculator with a secret screen, wifi, and even messaging functionality.

Some of the nation’s top health leaders are in coronavirus quarantine, including its leading infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, a worrying sign that the virus is managing to spread between the people in charge of making highly important decisions about the pandemic. According to the New York Times, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases; Dr.

They’re better for the environment than a gas-guzzling car, but the other big advantage of commuting every day on an electric bike is that they’re easier to park. With Poimo, a prototype inflatable e-bike created at the University of Tokyo, you don’t even need to find a bike rack when you get to work, just an empty backpack to stash your ride. Inflating the Poimo (short for Portable and Inflatable Mobility) is no more challenging than inflating an air mattress.

More than two years later, the battle between ex-Google engineer James Damore and the company is over, although we won’t know much about how it ended. Earlier this week, Damore and three other menasked a California court to dismiss the lawsuit, which claimed that the company discriminated against conservative white men. Google also joined their request for dismissal.

Accidentally hitting reply-all on an email thread was one of the earliest online faux pas to emerge. This week, Microsoft began rolling out a feature to help save future inboxes from ever knowing the horror. Aptly named “Reply All Storm Protection,” it detects possible reply-all screw-ups and essentially puts all recipients on a temporary time-out to keep them from spamming requests to be taken off the thread or trolling everyone’s inboxes.

Joined by Senators Bernie Sanders and Ed Markey, Kamala Harris is pushing new legislation that would provide up to $2,000 a month for every U.S. resident. There’s another term for that: a universal basic income. While UBIs are usually associated with the magical thinking that we’ll at some point reach a fully-automated post-work economy, the closest America came to instituting one was arguably through vast expansions of unemployment benefits during the Great Depression.

Paul Vasquez, the colorful character behind the viral “double rainbow” video, has died. Vasquez, 57, died Saturday in the emergency unit at the John C. Fremont Hospital in Mariposa, California, a spokesperson for the Mariposa County Sheriff’s Office confirmed to Gizmodo. The spokesperson did not comment on Vasquez’s cause of death; however, Vasquez posted on Facebook late last week that he was being tested for covid-19.

Days after South Korea relaxed its social distancing measures, Seoul, its capital city, has tightened them once more after dozens of new coronavirus cases were linked tobars and nightclubs. On Saturday, the mayor of Seoul, Park Won-soon, shut down the city’s bars and clubs and claimed that at least 40 infections were connected to the venues.

Coronavirus has upended lives in countless ways, and of those, my inability to unlock my iPhone with Face ID while wearing a mask in public spaces is not that consequential. But, fuck, it’s so annoying. According to CNBC, Apple is preparing to roll out a feature in iOS 13.

Chinese startup Rokid has found a unique and somewhat terrifying market foothold for its AI and augmented-reality tech amid the coronavirus pandemic: smart glasses that clock the temperature of those around you. The Hangzhou-based company has already sold roughly 1,000 pairs to governments, businesses, and schools, according to a Reuters report. While its products are typically tailored to manufacturing and video game markets, Rokid recently pivoted to creating a better way to streamline screening for covid-19 symptoms in response to the outbreak. In about two weeks, the company developed what it’s calling its T1 glasses, a device that can “see” people’s temperatures up to 3 meters (roughly 10 feet) away. Here’s how it works: The glasses come equipped with an infrared sensor that measures nearby temperatures with the help of a camera, and communicates that information in real-time to the display. It carries a Qualcomm CPU, 12-megapixel camera, Rokid’s U.S. Director Liang Guan told TechCrunch last month, and can also deploy augmented reality features to record photos and videos hands-free.   Given the prevalence of fixed thermometer checkpoints in industrial parks and public spaces across China amid the outbreak, Rokid Vice President Xiang Wenjie told Reuters that demand for its T1 glasses has been ramping up rapidly. “Apart from fixed temperature measurement, T1 can provide portable, distant and prompt temperature checking, which would be a great help,” Xiang said. As of early April, Rokid reported it was also negotiating deals to supply its T1 smart glasses to American hospitals and local governments, per TechCrunch. In 2018, Rokid completed a round of “billion-dollar” financing, per the company’s website, led by investors Swiss bank Credit Suisse, Singaporean holding company Temasek, and others. The company is currently working on an upgraded model capable of measuring multiple temperature readings at the same time to quickly scan crowded spaces such as malls and airports, Reuters reported. Chinese authorities have been deploying increasingly Orwellian technological measures to track the spread of coronavirus as far back as February, with a few big names in American tech following suit soon afterward. Amazon, for instance, has begun using thermal cameras to quickly scan workers at its warehouse and delivery facilities for fevers. 

Last year, scientists published a paper with an iconic diagram: a black circle representing, to scale, a 5-solar-mass black hole—and the size of the hypothetical Planet Nine if it were a black hole instead of a planet. So, if Planet Nine really is a black hole, how would we find it? Physicist Edward Witten, famed theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study, has an idea. All it requires is an army of small, laser-launched spacecraft with really accurate clocks.

Apple and Google aren’t developing coronavirus-tracking apps, but on Monday they shared examples of what those apps could look like. Most notably, the tech giants detailed what the public health authorities who can use their contact-tracing APIs to create those apps can’t do: namely, they can’t track your location and they can’t use your data to advertise to you. No one will be required to download the apps created by health agencies, unlike similar apps rolled out in other countries, so people will have to install them and opt into notifications if they want to see whether anyone else using the app who has tested positive for covid-19 has come within Bluetooth range. Apple and Google today published step-by-step screenshots of how public health authorities could design their apps, starting with sign-up. For the exposure-tracking apps to be useful, you’ll need to enable notifications (though you don’t have to, and you can also turn them off at any time). You can share a positive covid-19 diagnosis within the app, which you verify by working with your local public health department to obtain a unique test identification number and the date of the test. The app shares random Bluetooth identifiers generated by your phone with other devices that have come within Bluetooth range of you within the last two weeks. (Those identifiers change every 10-20 minutes, Apple explained, which the company says makes it impossible to track you.) If you have notifications enabled, your phone will receive an alert as to the date of possible exposure to covid-19 and what steps you can take. Here’s what a public health authority’s contact-tracing app could look like on an iPhone: The process is the same on Android, as you can see in the screenshots the two tech companies publicly shared: This isn’t how contact-tracing works in countries where using an app is government-mandated. Those apps, which are being rolled out in India and Russia, are privacy nightmares, as we’ve already detailed. The UK’s National Health Service is reportedly displeased with Google and Apple’s efforts because the data collected is decentralized as opposed to routed through a government server. But it might not matter how secure Apple and Google have made their APIs if people don’t trust the public health departments’ apps. A recent study showed that more than 40 percent of consumers don’t plan to use one of the contact-tracing apps, because they don’t trust tech companies. Exposure-tracking apps are just one part of the effort to curb the spread of covid-19. States are hiring thousands of human contact tracers to find covid-19 patients who don’t have access to smartphones or who might hesitate to report their diagnosis to an app.

We’ve seen phones with punch-hole selfie cams, pop-up selfie cams, and even 360-degree rotating cameras. But now, new leaks suggest that Lenovo’s upcoming gaming phone might get the wildest front-facing cam of them all thanks to a side-mounted motorized selfie shooter. The latest info about Lenovo’s upcoming gaming phone comes from XDA-Developers, who recently received some inside info and product renders from a “trusted” source with knowledge about the project. Like a lot of other gaming phones, Lenovo’s Legion Gaming Phone is expected to feature flagship specs including a Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 processor, a screen with a 144Hz refresh rate, a massive 5,000 mAh battery, and ridiculously fast 90-watt wired charging. And based on some leaked product renders, the Legion Gaming Phone will sport a very aggressive esports-inspired design including a neon blue paint job, a bunch of Xs scattered around its frame, and potentially even some customizable RGB lighting. OK, enough about that, let’s go back to the Legion Phone’s mysterious side-mounted pop-up camera. For a lot of people, the question is: What’s the point? On other phones with innovative (and also sometimes gimmicky) cameras, the goal behind rotating or pop-up selfie cameras is to remove any distractions from the front of the phone so people can get an unobstructed full-screen experience. But in that case, a top-mounted selfie cam would work just as easily a side-mounted camera. But for gamers, who typically like to hold their phones in landscape while gaming, a top-mounted selfie camera (either a punch-hole cam or some kind of pop-up cam) doesn’t work because their view would get blocked by your hands. So by putting a pop-up camera on the side of the phone, it appears Lenovo’s goal is to allow people to take pictures or more likely livestream from their phone while gaming, instead of needing to rely on a secondary video capture device. Admittedly, this may be an incredibly-niche use case, especially here in the west where mobile gaming culture isn’t quite as big as it is in Asia. But for gamers, it actually makes a lot of sense, and when you combine that side-mounted camera with the Legion Phone’s rumored side-mounted USB-C ports, everything Lenovo is doing to support a landscape-first gaming phone could result in a really interesting device. After all, it’s not like the world really needs another fancy glass brick with big specs, so it’s nice to see Lenovo flip the script a bit when it comes to traditional smartphone design. Unfortunately, we’re still in the dark about the Legion Phone’s pricing or availability, or if Lenovo even has any plans to release it outside of Asia. Hopefully, we’ll know more later this summer as more phones continue to trickle out.

You can spend as much money as you want to customize a mechanical keyboard and install the fanciest switches, but it will never sound as satisfyingly clackety as this setup by Jatin Patel who built an unusual contraption that recreates the sounds of an old-school mechanical typewriter.

It’s absolutely primitive by today’s standards, but when Pong arrived in 1972, it was a technological marvel. So how did Tomy create a handheld knock-off of the game in 1977 when the electronics needed to miniaturize it didn’t exist yet? It created this mechanical alternative that might be one of the most bizarre portable gaming machines I’ve ever seen.