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Southwest Airlines canceled over 2,600 flights on Tuesday. | Photo by Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images Southwest Airlines has left thousands of travelers stranded at airports throughout the country after a winter storm barreled through most of the US before and during the holiday weekend.While Southwest canceled over 2,600 of its flights on Tuesday, the trouble’s expected to extend well into this week, with data from Flight Aware indicating that the airline has already called off more than 2,400 flights on Wednesday and over 1,500 on Thursday. Southwest canceled nearly 3,000 flights on Monday. Other airlines with notable flight cancellations didn’t even come close to Southwest’s total, as Spirit canceled 83 flights on Tuesday, while Alaska Airlines called off 75.According to The New York Times, unlike the June 2021 computer network... Continue reading…

Home Assistant’s Conversation integration can already take text commands and could become the basis of its new voice assistant efforts. | Image: Home Assistant Home Assistant, the open-source smart home platform, is getting its own voice assistant. Its founder, Paulus Schoutsen, posted a blog last week announcing a new project that could localize all voice commands that control smart devices — without the need to connect to a cloud that assistants like Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant have. The voice assistant is targeted to be available sometime in 2023.Schoutsen also runs Nabu Casa, a company that provides what’s effectively first-party cloud services for Home Assistant and also contributes to the development of the free platform. In addition, it’s making the Yellow out-of-box hardware solution that can run Home Assistant in your home without your needing to manually build one on a computer... Continue reading…

It’s only a matter of time before Excel can take over my job. | Alex Castro / The Verge Microsoft has announced it’s making Excel’s autocomplete even smarter, at least in the web version that comes with Microsoft 365 (formerly known as Office 365). Last week it announced formula suggestions and formula by example, both of which may help automate some things that you had to do manually.Formula suggestions are pretty much what they say on the tin: if you type the equal sign into a cell, Excel for web will try to intelligently suggest what type of formula you should be using, given the data that’s around it. For example, if you have a full of quarterly sales numbers and a column at the end labeled “total,” Excel might suggest summing the range of cells. According to a blog post from Microsoft, the feature currently only works... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Mobile carriers, including AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile, could temporarily avoid paying $200 million in privacy penalties because of the Federal Communications Commission’s partisan split, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. Sources familiar with the situation told the WSJ that the FCC, which has two Democratic commissioners and two Republican ones, needs one more vote of approval to levy the fines, and both Republican members haven’t voted yet.Although Gigi Sohn, the person the Biden administration nominated to fill the FCC’s empty seat over a year ago, could potentially provide the tie-breaking vote to fine the companies, the Senate has yet to vote on her nomination. Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile may be able to avoid... Continue reading…

Give Microsoft Edge a try, your RAM will thank you | Image: Microsoft Google Chrome is the preferred browser for over 65 percent of the internet, according to statcounter.com. But I don’t think you needed me to tell you that; odds are you’re reading this article on some Chrome derivative right now. But why does Chrome have the lion’s share of the market? It's not even the default browser on most desktops, meaning you have to deliberately go out of your way to make Chrome your go-to browser. Image: Wikimedia Odds are you were using Internet Explorer 7 in 2007 Chrome doesn’t even have to be good, it just has to be slightly better than the alternative, and for a long time, the only alternative available was Internet Explorer. In its heyday, Google Chrome was faster, prettier, and... Continue reading…

A woman takes a photo of the “2023” numerals after the illumination ceremony in Times Square on December 20, 2022 in New York City. | Photo by Alexi Rosenfeld/WireImage 2023 is forecast to be a hotter year than 2022, according to the UK’s Met Office weather service. Why? Well, an unusual three-year-long weather pattern that typically has a cooling effect on our planet should finally come to an end next year. On top of that, global average temperatures are expected to rise as greenhouse gas emissions continue to climb.As a result, the Met Office predicts 2023 will be one of the hottest years on record. That’s no surprise, considering the last eight years are on track to be the eight hottest on the books, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).The Met Office predicts 2023 will be one of the hottest years on record.Next year is expected to mark 10 consecutive years with global... Continue reading…

Image: LG LG and Korean AI sleep tech startup Asleep are working on smart home appliances that can detect when a user is asleep and adjust accordingly, according to LG’s Korean site and The Korea Economic Daily.Asleep’s AI technology lets users track the four sleep stages based on their breathing sounds, using devices that have microphones such as smart TVs and smartphones. LG plans to integrate that tech into other products like TVs, fridges, air conditioners, air purifiers, and washing machines.With that information, these appliances can turn on or off and optimize settings based on whether or not a user is asleep. For example, LG’s Whisen air conditioner could automatically adjust and optimize the room temperature based on which sleep stage... Continue reading…

Image: Square Enix Finding a place to call your own in Eorzea is a bureaucratic nightmare. Continue reading…

The average price of a 15-minute phone call from jail is around $3. | Photo by Michael Reichel/picture alliance via Getty Images A new rule allowing the Federal Communications Commission to regulate the rates of prison phone calls is one step closer to becoming law. After it passed through Congress last week, the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act of 2022 now awaits President Joe Biden’s signature.The prison phone call industry has been broken for decades, with telecommunications companies, like Global Tel Link and Pay Tel Communications, charging unfair fees for phone and video calls from inmates. These fees vary by state, but they involve the phone provider offering kickbacks to prisons and local governments using the money they collect from the friends and families of incarcerated people. The result is a $1.4 billion industry built on... Continue reading…

The Nest Hub Max is a great alternative to Amazon’s larger Echo Show devices | Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge Just in case Santa didn’t make it to your house this year, we’re bringing you a handful of post-Christmas content. Because, unlike the big dude that lives up north, The Verge Deals team works hard all year scouring the internet to make sure its best discounts are all front and center for you to see. The discounts available right now are a bit sparse, but we’ve still managed to wrangle a handful that we think are worth looking into if you’re looking for something to treat yourself.Currently, Google’s Nest Hub Max is still on sale at Best Buy and Target for $174.99 (normally $229.99). While it may not offer the same, room-filling sound as the Nest Audio, the Max features a gorgeous 10-inch screen with a great camera for making video... Continue reading…

Apple’s iPad Mini launched at the end of 2021. | Photo: The Verge Apple is updating its iPad Mini with a new processor, says respected analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. The inbetweener is supposed to begin shipping by the end of 2023 or the first half of 2024.The iPad Mini received an all new design at the end of 2021 after remaining largely unchanged since it was introduced way back in 2012. The 8.3-inch tablet fits in between Apple’s largest iPhone (the 6.7-inch Pro Max) and 10th-gen iPad (10.9 inch). It runs on an A15 Bionic chip with a USB-C port and an option for 5G connectivity. Kuo says the new processor will be “the main selling point,” so we shouldn’t expect too much else to change.The iPad Mini will certainly be ready for a chip update after two years, if Kuo’s timeline is correct. That could mean an... Continue reading…

Photo by Alexi Rosenfeld/WireImage Oh no, it’s almost January 1st and you forgot to make a resolution! This doesn’t have to be hard. Like, I mean, if you want to do your first marathon, knock yourself out. But I’ve found simpler is better for resolutions. You might consider tending to yourself as though you are a garden: you don’t need to be bulldozed and totally revamped every year, just revitalized a little to let yourself bloom.You don’t even have to struggle to come up with something — because I have some suggestions right here:

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge In my favorite TikTok video of 2022, an amateur interviewer with a tiny microphone approaches a stranger in an AC/DC T-shirt minding their own business. Pushing the mic in front of the person’s face, the interviewer comes in with the favorite question of gatekeepers from time immemorial:“Can you name three AC/DC songs?”Wordlessly, without hesitation, the person in the AC/DC shirt glances down at the mic, back up at the interviewer, and swats away his hand, like how you’d shoo away a fly near your food. It is beautiful, amazing, perfect, and, if we’re all so lucky, will hopefully become way more normalized in the future.

There are too many productivity apps out there. | Photo by Victoria Song / The Verge I’m an organized person. I have to be. Writing is a deadline-oriented job, and I have the working memory of an elderly goldfish. Gone are the days when I could store an entire week’s worth of events, deadlines, and schedules in my head. Now, all of that stuff needs to live somewhere tangible.The problem is, there isn’t a single app that can handle the majority of my needs. By my count, there are at least 10 productivity apps I use on a daily basis to function — and they all suck.There’s Airtable for work projects so my editors can see what I’m working on — just one of the project management apps I’ve used in my career. There’s also been Basecamp, Asana, Trello, and in one instance, a rickety Excel sheet maintained by sweat and tears.... Continue reading…

A sample specimen of a dead northern giant hornet is shown by a pest biologist from the Washington State Department of Agriculture on July 29th, 2020. | Photo by Karen Ducey / Getty Images What’s in an insect name? If that name happens to be “murder hornet” or “gypsy moth,” the moniker happens to be loaded with misinformation and / or prejudice. That’s why the Entomological Society of America (ESA) has axed both names — and more changes are likely on the way.The ESA has a project called Better Common Names that aims to put an end to insect names that might be harmful to people. This year, the group announced that it adopted the name “northern giant hornet,” refusing to accept popular colloquial titles for the invasive insect. It also changed “gypsy moth” to “spongy moth.” They’re also on the lookout for other names that need changing. Just about anybody can fill out a form, and the ESA will consider the proposal along... Continue reading…

Image: Q-Games Earlier this year, Google announced that it was shutting down its game streaming service Stadia, a short three years since its launch in 2018. While it’s mostly fans of the service feeling the impact of the closure, there are a handful of developers with Stadia exclusives that will unfortunately lose their games when the service shuts down for good in January. One of those is Q-Games, makers of PixelJunk Raiders. The Verge spoke with Q-Games’ founder and CEO, Dylan Cuthbert, who explained the unique situation Q-Games is in, trying to get their exclusive off Stadia’s foundering ship and somewhere safe where people can play it.PixelJunk Raiders is a space exploration roguelike that takes advantage of Stadia’s unique “state share” feature... Continue reading…

Alex Castro / The Verge A Microsoft employee appears to have accidentally announced that Windows 11’s Notepad app is getting a tabs feature. The employee, a senior product manager at Microsoft, posted a photo of a version of Notepad with tabs, enthusiastically announcing “Notepad in Windows 11 now has tabs!” with a loudspeaker emoji.The tweet was deleted minutes later, but not before Windows Central and several Windows enthusiast Twitter accounts had spotted the mistake. The Notepad screenshot includes a Microsoft internal warning: “Confidential Don’t discuss features or take screenshots.” That warning suggests the tabs feature is still in early internal testing at Microsoft, but that the Notepad tabs feature may arrive to Windows Insiders at some point in... Continue reading…

The desktop feature is finally coming to phones. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge YouTube is starting to test out its queueing system on iOS and Android. The feature has been available on the web for years now, and shows in the YouTube apps under certain circumstances — users who control their Chromecast with their phones might recognize it, as will those who use the YouTube Music apps — but now YouTube Premium users who opt-in to the test will be able to add videos to a stack that acts like an impermanent playlist.After you turn on the feature (which we’ll cover how to do in just a second), you’ll have access to a new “Play last in queue” button in the three vertical dot menu that appears on video thumbnails. Tapping it will add the video to the bottom of your queue — or will create a new queue if you’re currently... Continue reading…

Illustration: Andreion de Castro Earlier this year, I wrote about genre-fiction authors using AI in their novels. Most wrote for Amazon’s Kindle platform, where an extremely rapid pace of publishing, as fast as a book a month, is the norm. AI helped them write quickly, but it also raised complex aesthetic and ethical questions. Would the widespread use of AI warp fiction toward the most common conventions and tropes? What parts of the writing process can be automated before the writing no longer feels like their own? Should authors have to disclose their use of AI?With the debut of ChatGPT, many of the questions these writers were dealing with have become more urgent and mainstream. I checked back with one of the authors, Jennifer Lepp, who writes in the cozy... Continue reading…

It’s time to fight the power. | Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge Every major phone manufacturer is guilty of a serious crime, and I won’t be quiet about it any longer: they stole the power button from us. Apple, Google, Samsung: guilty, guilty, guilty.Long-pressing the power button used to bring up an option to turn your phone off, but then these companies decided to get cute and make this a shortcut to summon their digital assistant. This is bad and wrong, and I’m politely demanding that these companies return what they took from us.Look, I get the logic. When phone screens got bigger, physical buttons like Apple’s home button were axed, and existing buttons had to pick up the slack. In the iPhone X, Apple re-homed the Siri function to the power button. Since then, turning your iPhone off has... Continue reading…

Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge The torrent of former tweeters streaming toward alternative social networks seems to be ongoing, and the social network that is probably gaining the most attention is Mastodon. This open-source network of independent servers (called “instances”) had jumped to 2.5 million users between October and November — and is continuing its ascent.Admittedly, there has been a bit of confusion among the new members of the Masto-set as to how it resembles Twitter and how it differs. To go through all the various permutations of how to really use Mastodon to its full capabilities would take more than a single article, and as a matter of fact, there are a variety of resources available (a few of which I’ll list at the end of this article). So, since... Continue reading…

The Dell XPS 13 Plus has a heck of a lot in common with the XPS 13 — but its audience is very, very different. | Photo by Monica Chin / The Verge Gadgets, since time in memoriam, have worked a certain way.You, a company, release one. It’s good, but it’s not perfect. No gadget is perfect! So you do market research and focus groups. You figure out who’s buying. You figure out what they like and what they don’t like. You refine. You fix problems.The next year, you release a version of that device that is objectively, concretely better. This is the next-gen device, the Device 2.0. You call this device an “upgrade.” You tell your customers to recycle Device 1.0 and replace it with Device 2.0. Some of them do. “Should you upgrade?” the tech bloggers write, calculating the pros and cons of doing so.I know, I know, this is a vast oversimplification of how consumer tech actually... Continue reading…

A game-changing all-in-one power system for cabins and RVs that can be installed relatively quickly. Just add solar. Continue reading…

Google Calendar thinks you don’t have enough to do today. | Photo Illustration by Igor Golovniov/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images Numerous users have reported experiencing an odd glitch in the Google Calendar mobile app over the past few days. The app appears to be creating random, nonexistent all-day events based on the content of users’ Gmail messages.As 9to5Google (who reported the news earlier today) notes, various sorts of emails including delivery notifications, purchase receipts, and newsletters appear to be showing up as all-day calendar events. Some Verge staffers who use the Google calendar app are experiencing this glitch. “It’s like finding landmines in my calendar,” one writer (whose calendar is screenshotted below) complained.Google has not yet responded to a request for comment. Make sure you’re not late for your Epic Games... Continue reading…

The option to upgrade to new Home architecture has been removed from iOS 16.2 | Image: Apple / The Verge Apple has removed the option to upgrade to the new HomeKit architecture on devices running iOS 16.2. The change follows multiple reports of issues and problems with the Home app after the upgrade was installed.Apple spokesperson Emily Ewing confirmed the change in a statement provided to The Verge:

A nice, peaceful fire. | Photo by Sebastian Gollnow / picture alliance via Getty Images People who make Yule Log videos — are you okay? I’m worried about you. The standard flame-filled videos of holiday cheer seem a lot darker lately, and while I would love to know why, I’m also just generally concerned for your mental well-being.My first sign that something was wrong was The Witcher: Fireplace on Netflix, which technically came out last year but is understandably getting re-promoted now. It’s got a nice-looking fire crackling away in the Great Hall at Kaer Morhen, but the lightly ominous music lurking in the background killed “the perfect backdrop for a cozy vibe” that Netflix promised.Then Yellowjackets got in the game on Wednesday with a Yule Log that kept the logs but seems to have missed the Yule. It’s just two... Continue reading…