The Verge

Image: Nintendo The major 2.0 update for Animal Crossing: New Horizons is now available to download, which is somewhat surprising because Nintendo previously said it wouldn’t be released until November 5th. That means you’ll be able to dive into all the new features two days earlier than expected.The free 2.0 update was announced last month in a Nintendo Direct presentation. It includes a ton of expanded functionality including new house exterior designs, boat tours to other islands, more item, storage, a “pro” camera mode, the ability to cook food with grown ingredients, and more. Perhaps the most anticipated addition is Brewster’s coffee shop, a notable omission from the base game.In addition to the free update Nintendo announced a $24.99 expansion... Continue reading…

The Sonos Roam. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge When Sonos purchased a privacy-focused voice assistant Snips in 2019, it strongly implied that it planned to build an assistant that would “add to our customers’ ease of use and control” instead of going head-to-head with bigger assistants from other big tech companies. Nearly two years later, we might be close to being using the company’s homegrown assistant, as a Reddit user found code in the Sonos app that appears to show voice commands for Sonos Voice Control (via Protocol).According to the code strings, you’ll be able to do things like play and pause music, adjust the volume, and check your Sonos’ battery. The Reddit user also found what looks to be the logo for Sonos’ assistant and evidence suggesting you’ll be able to have it... Continue reading…

Nestled in Take-Two Interactive’s most recent earnings report was information that it was charged $53 million dollars for an unannounced title that has been cancelled.“Cost of goods sold included a $53 million impairment charge related to the Company’s decision not to proceed with further development of an unannounced title in its pipeline,” Take-Two said in a press release.The report did not name the title nor the affiliated studio that worked on it. However, according to a Bloomberg report, the cancelled title is from Mafia III developer Hangar 13. The California-based developer also released the Mafia: Definitive Edition in 2020.The Bloomberg report says that according to sources at the studio, the game was codenamed Volt and... Continue reading…

Notability | Image: Notability Blog Notability developer Ginger Labs announced today that, in a change of heart, its popular note-taking app wouldn’t eventually require current users to switch to a subscription model. This news comes just two days after the developer announced a new subscription model where current app owners who wanted to keep the same features would be forced to start a $14.99 / month subscription by November 1st, 2022.Notability rolled back its original Monday pricing announcement and today posted an update on its company blog addressing current customers:

Photo by Nilay Patel / The Verge It was an exciting moment when Starlink rolled out preorders for its satellite internet service in February since it can potentially provide faster speed and better service to those in rural areas or with spotty internet access. But a single feature on the Starlink site is causing preorders to be delayed by years and there appears to be no fix in sight, an issue first spotted by Ars Technica.“If you don’t already have service and move your address you go straight to the back of the line”According to the report, some users on the r/Starlink subreddit moved their service area by just a few feet using the digital map tool on the site and wound up having their preorder dates moved from late 2021 to as far as 2023. One user wrote, “I moved... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The US Department of Commerce has ordered American companies to not sell their tech to NSO, citing reports that the group’s Pegasus spyware is used against journalists, government officials, activists, and more. In its press release, the regulator says that the company is being added to the Entity List because its tool threatens “the rules-based international order” when its sold to repressive foreign governments.Pegasus is a program designed to infect targets without notice, allowing police and intelligence agencies to get access to a phone’s text messages, photos, and passwords, all without leaving a trace. The Washington Post reported in July that the spyware could infect someone’s phone with a single, invisible text message: a... Continue reading…

An Instagram link preview on Twitter. | Image: Instagram The ice is thawing on a nine-year internet feud. When you share Instagram links on Twitter, you’ll see a preview of the link that includes an image instead of just the URL text starting on Wednesday. The feature is rolling out on Android, iOS, and the web. I didn’t see a preview when I tried sharing an Instagram post on my Twitter feed, so it might not work for you just yet.Both Instagram and Twitter are promoting the change.

Facebook Facebook has found a way to skirt Apple’s 30 percent tax on in-app transactions.On Wednesday, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook parent company Meta, announced that creators will soon be able to share custom web links directing their fans to pay them for subscriptions using Facebook’s native payments system. If a fan signs up through the link rather than Apple’s in-app subscription, the creator will keep all of the money minus taxes. Facebook subscription feature, which lets creators charge on a reoccurring basis for access to exclusive content, is available in 27 countries and accessible to creators who meet certain eligibility requirements.Facebook is operating in a gray zone under Apple’s rules for the App Store, though a... Continue reading…

Microsoft is continuing to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Xbox in style this year with a second themed Adidas sneaker: the Xbox 360 Forum Mid, which, as the name suggests, is inspired by the company’s second console.The Xbox 360 design follows the first Xbox / Adidas collaboration, announced in October which took inspiration from the original Xbox console. The Xbox 360 Forum Mid, however, is decked out in the 360’s white, silver, and green color scheme for a 2005-era look, complete with plenty of subtle details that reference the original design. The velcro strap, for instance, is emblazoned with the disc tray from the 360, while the air vents and Xbox button are featured on the outside. Even the heel is designed to look like the... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge What’s 14.545 inches across, weighs one ton (around 907kg or 2,000lbs), and just sold to a group of anonymous crypto investors for roughly $250,000? Why, it’s the biggest tungsten cube ever to be manufactured by Midwest Tungsten Service of Willowbrook, Illinois.Confused? Yes, that’s understandable. But consider this: tungsten cubes are one of the most popular memes in the world of cryptocurrency right now, a realm where value is defined as much by attention as anything tangible. (Call it the stonk market if you like.) Tungsten, if you’re not familiar, is a metal 1.7 times as dense as lead, and since 2015, nerdy types have been able to buy small cubes of tungsten manufactured by outfits like the Midwest Tungsten Service. Owning one has... Continue reading…

Why suffer for a $300 budget 5G phone? Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The Biden administration is requiring civilian federal agencies to fix hundreds of cybersecurity flaws, as reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal. As the WSJ states, the BOD 22-01 directive from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) covers around 200 known threats that cybersecurity experts discovered between 2017 and 2020, as well as 90 more flaws that were found in 2021. Federal agencies have six months to patch older threats and just two weeks to fix the ones that were discovered within the past year.The WSJ report points out that federal agencies are usually left to their own devices when it comes to security, sometimes resulting in poor security management. The goal is to force federal agencies to fix all... Continue reading…

GitHub CEO Nat Friedman is stepping down after three years at the company. Friedman originally joined Microsoft after the company acquired Xamarin, which Friedman helped found. He then took over as the head of GitHub when Microsoft acquired GitHub three years ago.Friedman is now returning to his startup roots. “With all that we’ve accomplished in mind, and more than five great years at Microsoft under my belt, I’ve decided it’s time for me to go back to my startup roots,” says Friedman in a GitHub blog post today. “I’m moving on to my next adventure: to support, advise, and invest in the founders and developers who are creating the future with technology and tackling some of the biggest opportunities of our day.”Microsoft’s new GitHub... Continue reading…

Volkswagen revealed the ID 5, a smaller, sportier version of its landmark ID 4 electric SUV that will only be available in Europe. It’s the latest vehicle to join VW’s growing “ID family” of electric vehicles as the company gets closer to its 2035 deadline to stop selling gas-powered vehicles in its home continent.VW is releasing two versions of its new EV: the entry level ID 5, and the more premium ID 5 GTX, with dual electric motors on both the front and rear axel. (GTX is for VW’s ID models what GTI, or Grand Tourer Injection, means for the Golf.) The entry-level ID 5 will be equipped with a single rear-wheel-drive motor with an output of 174 horsepower and a 77kWh battery pack — theoretically enabling over 320 miles of range. (VW... Continue reading…

The Brydge 11 Max Plus keyboard with an 11-inch iPad Pro in it. Following the launch of the 12.9-inch Max Plus keyboard for the iPad earlier this year, Brydge is now releasing an 11-inch version. The new, smaller keyboard has all of the same features as its bigger sibling, including Brydge’s new magnetic mounting system and Instant-On Bluetooth tech, but is sized to fit all generations of the 11-inch iPad Pro and the fourth-generation of the 10.5-inch iPad Air. It’s available starting today, November 3rd, from both Brydge’s online store and Amazon for $199.99.Despite its smaller size, the 11-inch Max Plus’ pitch is exactly the same as the 12.9-inch model’s: it’s meant to provide a MacBook-like experience with an iPad. That includes a full keyboard layout with a function row, plus a large trackpad... Continue reading…

The Asus Vivobook 13 Slate OLED has a keyboard and kickstand. | Image: Asus Asus is known for delving into unconventional form factors, and its latest experiment is no exception. The VivoBook 13 Slate OLED is a 13.3-inch Windows tablet with an OLED screen and a detachable keyboard which starts at $599.99.OLED screens are unusual, though not unheard of, in the detachable form factor. Asus claims that this one is capable of displaying 1.07 billion colors, covers 100 percent of the DCI-P3 color gamut, and has a 0.2-millisecond response time. It’s said to have blue-light levels “up to 70 percent lower than an LCD display” (although many modern LCD PCs also have technology to reduce blue light).Rather than framing the Slate as purely a tablet for artists, though, Asus seems to be pushing it as an entertainment... Continue reading…

The Amazon Echo Show 10 | Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge Amazon has affirmed its support for the smart home connectivity standard Matter, announcing in a blog post today that it will support Matter over Thread in its Echo devices and Eero Wi-Fi routers. Eero had previously confirmed its support of the standard. Amazon says the announcement is about “further expanding Amazon’s commitment to Matter and reinforcing its smart home philosophy of flexibility, privacy, collaboration, and interoperability.”Additionally, Amazon has joined Apple, Google, and Samsung on the Thread Group Board of Directors — it has been a member for five years. Alongside Wi-Fi, Thread is a primary protocol for Matter. It provides a low-power, low-bandwidth, and low-latency mesh network for smart home devices to connect... Continue reading…

Hear me out Continue reading…

November has come roaring out of the gates with some strong deals and early Black Friday sales. It’s not every year that you can start buying holiday gifts and know you’re getting the best deals possible, even before we push the clocks back, but that’s what we’re looking at here with these discounts on Eero mesh routers.You can pick up a one-pack, two-pack, or three-pack of Eero Pro 6 tri-band mesh Wi-Fi 6 routers at Amazon and Best Buy for all-time low prices. Eero mesh routers are popular for good reason. They offer one of the simplest and streamlined ways to bring a solid Wi-Fi connection to all corners of your house, regardless of its size or tricky layout. And, you can add more routers to your mesh Wi-Fi system later on.When we r... Continue reading…

Pokémon Go. | Photo by Sam Byford / The Verge Creating a follow-up to Pokémon Go is an impossible task. The game was the kind of breakout success that had never been seen before — and might never happen again; it’s hard to overstate how the game was absolutely everywhere when it first launched in 2016. People were trespassing to catch Squirtles as the game set App Store download records. The wish fulfillment that came from seeing pokémon in the real world created a sensation that, even years after its peak, remains one of the biggest games in the world.It was only natural that developer Niantic would try to follow that with something new. But re-creating the lightning in a bottle that is Pokémon Go hasn’t gone quite as planned, despite Niantic snapping up some enviable properties... Continue reading…

The air quality monitor (right) can show information on Echo Show devices. | Image: Amazon Amazon’s latest smart home device is the $69.99 Smart Air Quality Monitor, a small puck around half the size of the latest Amazon Echo that’s designed to keep an eye on the quality of the air in your home. It can track your home’s temperature and humidity, and the presence of dust, carbon monoxide, and volatile organic compounds (VOCs).A key selling point of the Smart Air Quality Monitor is its Alexa integration. It lets you ask compatible Alexa-enabled devices for an update on the air quality of the home at any time or view trends via the Alexa app or an Echo Show device. Importantly, the Smart Air Quality Monitor’s temperature sensor can also integrate with Alexa Routines. That allows it to function as a trigger for things like smart... Continue reading…

Indiegogo and GoFundMe have partnered to form the Crowdfunding Trust Alliance | Indiegogo Crowdfunding platform Indiegogo is changing the way it does business, shifting from an open platform where anyone can raise money for just about any purpose to a closed model where every campaign will receive a manual review before it can go live.“Candidly, we have not always lived up to our backers’ expectations,” said Will Haines, vice president of product and customer trust at Indiegogo. When the company launched in 2008, there were few restrictions on would-be entrepreneurs seeking to raise money from like-minded backers. But Haines says that “open” isn’t what the crowdfunding community really wants now, more than a decade later.“Crowdfunding is not shopping — people generally understand that now — but it also shouldn’t be a leap... Continue reading…

A new Turkey Mode coming to GE’s Wi-Fi connected ovens and ranges this week promises to cook the perfect turkey | IMAGE: Kriech-Higdon Photography The smart kitchen is getting a little more intelligent this holiday season. Appliance manufacturer GE Appliances has a new Turkey Mode for its smart ovens that promises to take the prep and guesswork out of roasting that big bird. It arrives on over half a million GE connected ovens and ranges this week via an over-the-air software upgrade.The Kentucky-based GE Appliances gave me a demo of the new tech, and it’s pretty impressive. You put the bird in the roasting tin, pop it in a cold oven, insert the temperature probe built into the oven, push the Turkey Mode button (either on the LCD screen of the oven or in the GE SmartHQ smartphone app), and sit back and relax. Image: Kriech-Higdon Photography GE Appliances... Continue reading…

The latest autonomous vehicle company to tackle the mean streets of New York City will be Waymo. The Google spinoff is bringing a handful of cars to the Big Apple, where they will start mapping the city streets using manually driven vehicles with two people riding inside.Waymo cited New York’s vibrant street life, “unusual road geometries” (which is a nice way of saying utterly confusing), and the likelihood of heavy rain and snow as being among the reasons the company is eager to test there. Presumedly the company is also curious to see how its vehicles will react when down-on-their-luck street hustlers slap their hoods and shout “I’m walking here!”Waymo won’t have more than five vehicles on the street at a time to start out, a... Continue reading…

It can be difficult to figure out what to do when you’re asked to provide a hard copy of a document but don’t have access to a printer at home. While it used to be a safe bet that everyone had a printer at home, that’s no longer the case — but if you don’t have one, odds are that at some point, you’ll come across someone who hasn’t gotten the memo and insists on a hard copy.If you’ve found yourself in this situation, you’ve got options. To help, I’ve researched the various methods you can use to get a document from your computer to whoever needs it and have come up with a few tips and considerations for printing without your own printer.Before I get to that, though, you’ll have to...Prepare to printPresumably, the file you want... Continue reading…

Sophie Mutevelian Marvel’s epoch-spanning epic has too many heroes but still feels empty Continue reading…

US President Joe Biden during the World Leaders’ Summit of the COP26 UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland, on November 2, 2021. | Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images On a call Tuesday morning, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rallied Democrats to pass two ambitious bills at the heart of President Biden’s agenda, aiming for a final house vote later this week. But the climate provisions of the $1.75 trillion budget reconciliation bill that progressives want to pass alongside a bipartisan infrastructure bill are newly uncertain after Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) pushed to further delay the vote during a surprise press conference on Monday.It’s the latest twist in a long struggle for Congress to pass meaningful legislation in support of the ambitious climate goals President Biden set on entering office. The reconciliation framework released last week puts $555 billion into clean energy, the first major effort to... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Who should get paid when big tech platforms aggregate news stories? This was the question that prompted Google to shut down its Google News platform in Spain in 2014, after the country decided the US tech giant should cough up a monthly fee to Spanish papers. Today, though, Google announced that Google News will return to Spain “early next year” after the country overhauled its online copyright laws in line with EU regulation.The big difference from Google’s point of view is that it no longer has to pay a fee to Spain’s entire media industry and can instead negotiate fees with individual publishers. Some may want to charge Google for sharing stories in Google News, and Google can pay them or exclude them, depending on its preference.... Continue reading…

Controversial facial recognition firm Clearview AI has been ordered to destroy all images and facial templates belonging to individuals living in Australia by the country’s national privacy regulator.Clearview, which claims to have scraped 10 billion images of people from social media sites in order to identify them in other photos, sells its technology to law enforcement agencies. It was trialled by the Australian Federal Police (AFP) between October 2019 and March 2020.Now, following an investigation, Australia privacy regulator, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC), has found that the company breached citizens’ privacy. “The covert collection of this kind of sensitive information is unreasonably intrusive... Continue reading…

Getty With a logo on a memo and a little bit of language trickery, Theranos snookered rich investors Continue reading…

Image: Zillow Zillow is trying to offload around $2.8 billion worth of houses onto investors after it bought them with the intent of selling them to hopeful homeowners and landlords, according to a report by Bloomberg. This follows another Bloomberg report that the real estate browsing website had to stop buying houses when it found itself with excess inventory after the company told investors it planned on ramping up its flipping business.On Tuesday, Zillow announced in its earnings report that it’s winding down the practice entirely, and estimated that it’ll lose over half a billion dollars in value on the houses it owns. It also announced that it would be laying off about a quarter of its employees, and said that it had underestimated how... Continue reading…

Robotics engineering student Ken Pillonel wowed the internet last month with a wild hack that managed to put a working USB-C port inside an iPhone X for a fully functional USB-C iPhone. And now, Pillonel has published a far more detailed video showing just how he managed to pull off the hack, along with a Github repository with technical details, CNC instructions, and information on the custom PCB that he designed for anyone brave enough to try and put together a similar hack.The 13-minute-long video shows off the nitty-gritty of Pillonel’s mod, which is simple in theory: combining a Lightning to USB-C connection together in a daisy chain to mimic a proper USB-C port.The video shows off virtually the whole development process. It’s... Continue reading…

Zillow has announced that it’s winding down the Zillows Offers program, a day after reports surfaced that it’s selling over 7,000 of the houses it purchased with the intent of flipping them to would-be home buyers. In a press release announcing its Q3 results, the company says that Zillow Offers only served “a small portion” of its customers. CEO Rich Barton now says that “We’ve determined the unpredictability in forecasting home prices far exceeds what we anticipated and continuing to scale Zillow Offers would result in too much earnings and balance-sheet volatility.”With the program shutting down, the company says it’s reducing the estimated value of the houses it’s purchased in Q3 or will purchase in Q4 by more than $500 million.... Continue reading…

Blizzard Entertainment During Activision Blizzard’s third-quarter earnings call, the publisher announced that Diablo IV and Overwatch 2 will now launch later than expected.“As we have worked with new leadership in Blizzard and within the franchises themselves, particularly in certain key creative roles, it has become apparent that some of the Blizzard content planned for next year will benefit from more development time to reach its full potential,” a Blizzard executive said during the call.Activision Blizzard mentioned “higher voluntary turnover” and “the departure of a number of individuals across the company” as factors contributing to this new delay.Blizzard Entertainment suffered a large number of firings and high-profile departures, including Diablo... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Jen Oneal is stepping down as a co-lead of Blizzard just three months after taking the role in the wake of the sexual harassment lawsuit brought against Activision Blizzard by the state of California. Mike Ybarra, a former Xbox executive who had stepped into the co-lead role alongside Oneal, will now be the sole lead of the studio, effective immediately.“I want you to hear from me personally that I have made the decision to step away from co-leading Blizzard Entertainment and will transition to a new position before departing ABK at the end of the year,” Oneal said in a statement on Blizzard’s website. “I am doing this not because I am without hope for Blizzard, quite the opposite — I’m inspired by the passion of everyone here, working... Continue reading…

The Nintendo Switch N64 controller. | Image: Nintendo The special Nintendo 64 controller for the Nintendo Switch briefly went on sale again on Tuesday, but if you missed buying one before they sold out, you won’t get a chance to pick one up until 2022, according to the controller’s listing on Nintendo’s website. We don’t know exactly when it will be back in stock, as all Nintendo says is that “more controllers will be available in 2022.” Switch N64 controllers are out of stock until 2022. The Nintendo 64 controller was released in October ahead of the availability of the Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack, a premium Nintendo Switch Online tier that gives you access to Nintendo 64 games and Sega Genesis games. You don’t need the controller to play Nintendo 64... Continue reading…

illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Former Google employee Meredith Whittaker could soon be working at the Federal Trade Commission as an AI policy advisor, according to a report by The Information. Whittaker may be best known for helping to organize a 2018 walkout at Google, where 20,000 employees protested against how the company handled alleged sexual harassment, and for leaving Google afterward, claiming that it had retaliated against her and other organizers. Now, the FTC seems to be in the process of hiring her to help shape regulations around AI and Big Tech.According to The Information, Whittaker hasn’t been officially appointed yet, as steps like running a background check aren’t complete. If she is hired, though, she’ll bring a good deal of experience — she... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Walmart’s latest PS5 and Xbox Series X restocking event was back for a second day of console restocks at 4PM ET / 1PM PT, but it seems to be over now. Perhaps these near-holiday restocks will be happening with greater frequency than we expected, since Walmart did two consecutive events.We expected to see Walmart’s new queueing system in action, which we saw for the first time during the November 1st restock. If you load one of these pages, you’ll get a place in line, and you can keep browsing Walmart’s site as a timer runs down to let you purchase a console, assuming there’s still stock left. However, that new queueing system wasn’t used for the November 2nd restock, for reasons unknown.The consoles may be the main course, but don’t... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Microsoft just announced its Microsoft Teams metaverse for meetings and video calls, but the company also has plans for gaming and entertainment. Speaking to Bloomberg TV, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says the software maker is “absolutely” focused on gaming for the metaverse with Xbox.“You can absolutely expect us to do things in gaming,” says Nadella. “If you take Halo as a game, it is a metaverse. Minecraft is a metaverse, and so is Flight Sim. In some sense, they’re 2D today, and the question is can you now take that to a full 3D world, and we absolutely plan to do so.”We’ve been waiting to see what Microsoft will do for Minecraft to transform it into a metaverse for VR and AR headsets for years. The company originally demonstrated... Continue reading…

These modular light bars add some flexible futuristic fun to your smart home Continue reading…

These days, hard copy paperwork is fast becoming the exception rather than the rule, and more and more official papers are being turned into PDF documents. (PDF stands for Portable Document Format; it is a standard created by Adobe in the early 1990s that allows paper documents to be turned into exact digital copies.) However, even digital documents have to be signed. You can do it the long way — print those documents out, sign them, and then scan them back into your computer — or you can create a digital signature and place it directly on the PDF.If you’re using a Mac, the process is refreshingly easy — just use the built-in Preview app to create and save your digital signature. (If you’re using a Windows PC, unfortunately, it’s not... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge It’s the AI system once deemed too dangerous to release to the public by its creators. Now, Microsoft is making an upgraded version of the program, OpenAI’s autocomplete software GPT-3, available to business customers as part of its suite of Azure cloud tools.GPT-3 is the best known example of a new generation of AI language models. These systems primarily work as autocomplete tools: feed them a snippet of text, whether an email or a poem, and the AI will do its best to continue what’s been written. Their ability to parse language, however, also allows them to take on other tasks like summarizing documents, analyzing the sentiment of text, and generating ideas for projects and stories — jobs with which Microsoft says its new Azure... Continue reading…

The biggest change to Microsoft’s Office documents in decades is expanding into Microsoft Loop, a hub for a new way of working in Office. Microsoft Loop is the new branding for Microsoft’s Fluid work, blocks of collaborative Office content that can live independently and be copied, pasted, and shared with others.Much like Fluid, Microsoft Loop has three main elements: Loop components, Loop pages, and Loop workspaces. Loop components are live pieces of content that can exist across multiple apps, updated in real time and free for anyone to jump into. That could be a list shared in a Teams channel and also editable in a Loop page, or notes in a calendar entry that are also available to be pasted into Outlook and edited in real time within... Continue reading…

The Pro Type Ultra and Pro Click Mini. | Image: Razer Razer has updated its suite of productivity peripherals with the new Pro Click Mini wireless mouse, the Pro Type Ultra wireless keyboard, and the Pro Glide XXL mouse mat (also wireless). Among the new features of the peripherals are sound dampening foam in the keyboard, “silent mechanical” switches in the mouse, and improved battery life across both models.As its name suggests, the Pro Click Mini is a more compact version of Razer’s existing Pro Click wireless mouse, so it’s easier to stash in a laptop bag. Despite being cheaper at $79 rather than $99, it benefits from having a similar dual-mode scroll wheel to the Basilisk V3, which lets you swap between a free-spinning scroll mode and more traditional tactile scrolling. It’s not... Continue reading…

Microsoft is launching the stable version of its Edge browser for Linux this week. While preview versions of Edge for Linux have been available for more than a year, the official launch will now see Edge supported fully on Linux with regular stable channel updates.If you’re already running preview builds of Edge on Linux, you can get the latest stable version by running the sudo apt install microsoft-edge-stable command. If you’re new to Edge on Linux, then the installer is now available on Microsoft’s website.Many Linux users will already be using Chrome or Firefox, but Edge is yet another browser option that might work on distros where Chrome isn’t fully supported. Microsoft has also added a number of privacy features to Edge to... Continue reading…

Image: Microsoft Microsoft is entering the race to build a metaverse inside Teams, just days after Facebook rebranded to Meta in a push to build virtual spaces for both consumers and businesses. Microsoft is bringing Mesh, a collaborative platform for virtual experiences, directly into Microsoft Teams next year. It’s part of a big effort to combine the company’s mixed reality and HoloLens work with meetings and video calls that anyone can participate in thanks to animated avatars.With today’s announcement, Microsoft and Meta seem to be on a collision course to compete heavily in the metaverse, particularly for the future of work. Image: Microsoft Teams will soon have new 3D avatars. Microsoft Mesh always felt like the future... Continue reading…

Image by Alex Castro / The Verge Microsoft Excel used to only allow two types of data: text and numbers. After overhauling Excel with its own live custom data types last year, Microsoft is opening up Excel to give developers the freedom to create their own custom data types that can contain images, arrays, and more.A new JavaScript API will be available to preview inside Excel later this month, which will let developers create these custom data types for inputs and outputs and enable custom functions. Excel developers will be able to create their own add-ins or update existing ones to use the JavaScript API. Image: Microsoft Bloomberg is using Microsoft’s new JavaScript API in Excel. This will open Excel up to far more custom data types,... Continue reading…

Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge Microsoft SwiftKey is getting a handy new feature that syncs your clipboard across Android and Windows devices (via MSPoweruser). So if you use SwiftKey on your Android device, you’ll be able to paste any text you’ve copied on your Windows computer (and vice versa).As MSPoweruser notes, the feature, called Cloud Clipboard, comes as a part of the most recent SwiftKey update, pushing the current version to 7.9.0.5. It was first available in the beta version of Microsoft SwiftKey in August, but now it’s officially rolled out to everyone.The Cloud Clipboard will only save the last piece of text you’ve copied and will automatically delete the clip after one hourSwiftKey has instructions on how to use the Cloud Clipboard on its support... Continue reading…

For the first time in nearly two years, there’s a new trailer for the upcoming Spider-Man spinoff Morbius, which stars Jared Leto as Dr. Michael Morbius, an ailing scientist who inadvertently turns himself into a “pseudo-vampire” while searching for a cure for his rare medical condition.Morbius is an unusual film, even by Sony’s Spider-Man universe standards. The character is what can best be described as a C-list Spider-Man villain, which Morbius is reimagining as a Venom-style antihero who wars between his doctoral duties as a healer and his newfound bloodlust.The new trailer helps give a broad introduction to the character, including his origin story and his powers, which include the usual super-strength and speed, “some form of... Continue reading…

The Nest Audio is a well-reviewed option from Google, and even more worth considering now on discount. | Photo: Dan Seifert / The Verge The world of smart home accessories grows each year, with the occasional new idea and the latest iterations on mainstay staples. This segment also heats up around the holiday shopping season and Black Friday as discounts become available, which is ideal because so many of them make great gifts. If you’re invested at all in Google’s Nest products — or you’re looking to dive in and test the waters — this week’s deals have a variety options you might want to strongly consider. Right now, there are significant discounts on Google Nest products at multiple retailers, including Best Buy, Wellbots, and more, encompassing smart speakers, video doorbells, home security, and smart displays.First off, and leading our selection of Nest deals, is... Continue reading…