This week’s look at kidz’ pop-culture features an overload of useless web-celebs, a fight over Wonder Woman, and even a talking dog. So dig in—I promise I won’t mention COVID-19 at all! (Except there, where I just did.) Thank Odin the holidays are over and our lives can go back to normal, eh?
If you didn’t get an Instant Pot as a gift this holiday season, it’s probably because you already have one (or you because you don’t cook that much and didn’t ask for one). The tabletop pressure cooker has been quite popular for several years now, which means the internet is full of related recipes, but I’d like to…
If you bought a new Windows laptop on Black Friday or received one as a gift, you may be struggling to figure out which apps to download. Never fear. I have scoured the internet, the Microsoft Store, and my own downloads folder to find all the best Windows apps for whatever purpose you may need.
You might be surprised how many online services you already use that have their own dedicated Windows app. I find that the main benefit of many Windows apps is to help mentally separate my life. It can get hard to navigate all of my various streaming services, work apps, chats, and social media using Chrome tabs — and it also puts me at greater risk of getting distracted.
There are also some services that are significantly better in app form...
You can snag a refurbished set of the Beats Powerbeats Pro, the company’s latest truly wireless earphones, for $90 at Best Buy. This deal is exclusive to the green “moss” color variant shown in the picture above. Looking at new options, the price ranges from $130 to $180 depending on the color you want, so today’s deal is worth jumping on if you don’t care as much about what the headphones look like. And hey, if this shade of green happens to vibe with your look, then even better.
Though these are refurbished, they’ve been cleaned and tested by Best Buy. They come with a 90-day warranty, as well as all original accessories including ear tips and the charging case.
Also at Best Buy, Apple’s latest iPad with 128GB of storage is $50 off of...
The Acer Nitro 5 and a Crane & Canopy winter sale lead Tuesday’s best deals.
Netflix is currently testing out a special audio-only mode for its mobile apps—Android, specifically. While that’s no guarantee that the ever-so useful feature will see the light of day in a stable release, it’s promising, and if you’re lucky, you can test out the feature right now.
I wish I had a way of quantifying the sheer volume of LEGO bricks that have taken up residence in my home the past several years. After each and every birthday or holiday, I think to myself that we can’t possibly absorb the weight of one more set. The sets cover my son’s dresser, bookshelf, and LEGO table; they live…
This year marked the introduction of the first Macs to be powered by Apple’s own silicon instead of Intel chips. As is evidenced by our reviews of the M1 MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, and Mac mini, these machines are incredibly powerful and offer wicked fast performance. This is especially true for apps that are designed to run natively on them and take full advantage of Apple’s latest technologies.
So in that vein, this year’s Mac apps list is going to focus on some of the software that has already been optimized for this new era of Apple hardware. Last year’s picks remain just as relevant and useful today if you’re on an Intel machine. But if you’ve been gifted (or are gifting yourself) one of these new speed-demon Macs, these are...
I received a hand-addressed letter in the mail last week—pretty rare these days. The return address was my church’s, so I assumed Brooklyn’s Unitarians were trying to drum up some end-of-year contributions, but what floated out of the envelope instead was a single sheet of crisply folded typing paper bearing a message…
New images and video purporting to show an Apple Watch prototype, concealed by a security case that resembles a tiny iPod, offer a rare look behind the product-development curtain of the notoriously secretive company built by Steve Jobs. First teased a few months ago by Twitter user Apple Demo, this is our first look at the device turned on and running Apple’s own internal development apps on a pre-watchOS 1.0 software build.
The video starts by showing what appears to be the original cardboard packaging used to deliver the prototype hardware to testers. “This product is classified as Apple Confidential and is designated an ‘Ultra’ security program,” reads the label. “This prototype MUST be returned when recalled or when your,” says the...
LG might be the company that’s most synonymous with OLED TVs, but tonight it’s announcing what to expect from its LCD-based sets in 2021. Like other manufacturers including TCL have already done (and Samsung is expected to soon join in on), LG is adopting Mini LED technology for its premium LCD 8K and 4K TVs coming next year.
LG says Mini LED allows for “a giant leap forward in LCD TV picture quality.” The best LCD TVs today have what’s called “full-array local dimming,” where LEDs — in some cases hundreds of them — serve as the backlighting behind the screen. These can be controlled in zones, and each zone can be dimmed as appropriate for dark scenes, which helps improve black levels and contrast.
Mini LED changes up the strategy a...
Coinbase announced today that it is halting all trades of XRP on its cryptocurrency exchange, according to an official blog post (via Coindesk). Certain kind of trades became restricted today, and the full suspension will go into place January 19th, 2021 at 10:00AM PT. Coinbase is the largest cryptocurrency exchange, and suspending a currency like XRP naturally casts doubt on the currency’s future, even before the SEC lawsuit over it is settled.
Coinbase says it made the decision to suspend XRP “in light” of the suit the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed against XRP’s original creator, Ripple. With the suspension in place, people will no longer be able to trade XRP on Coinbase, though they will still be able to deposit...
Pixel 5 and 4a 5G users can no longer use their ultra-wide cameras to take pictures of the stars: Google apparently removed the lens’s astrophotography capabilities with the Google Camera 8.1 update. The feature was a selling point of the Pixel 4, and was available on the regular and telephoto cameras. When the 4a 5G and 5 were announced with new wide-angle lenses, the feature was added to those as well. Now it’s been taken away.
The astrophotography feature lets users capture the night sky by pointing their phone up and keeping it still, either by balancing it on a nearby object or putting it on a tripod. The feature is still available on the phones’ other cameras, but if you go to Night Sight mode and switch to the ultra-wide angle...
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In theory, New Year’s resolutions should make your life less stressful, or at least give you a means to address things about your life you’d like to change. In reality, however, a lofty New Year’s resolution can often loom over you, forming a nagging reminder of your supposed failure to reinvent yourself just because…
Xiaomi has announced their new flagship for 2021: the Mi 11. The Chinese variant of the phone sports a modified design and upgraded specs that give a good look at the kind of high-end features top Android phones will ship with in the coming year, according to AnandTech. There’s bound to be some changes to the European and global versions of the Mi 11, but for now this is an early peek into what’s likely to be 2021’s first major Android flagship.
The changes to the design of the Mi 11 in comparison to the Mi 10 appear minor. From the front, the display is slightly larger at 6.81-inches in comparison to the Mi 10’s 6.67-inch screen. That extra space seems to have come from shrinking the bezels of the device (always welcome), while...
Volkswagen says it’s made a prototype of the electric vehicle charging robot concept it first showed off in proof-of-concept form in late 2019, and that it plans to keep developing the idea. The giant German automaker apparently liked the concept so much that the prototype charging robot looks almost identical to the concept version, complete with blinking digital eyes and R2-D2 noises.
The robot — which, shockingly for Volkswagen, doesn’t have a garish or cutesy name — works simply enough in theory. When you park your electric vehicle in a parking garage, you (or your car) can request to have the battery topped up. The robot unmoors from its docking station, hooks up to one of a dozen or so mobile batteries, which it then drags to your...
Whether you have a brand-new Windows laptop or you’re giving your PC a little TLC in the form of a new reinstallation of Windows 10, setting up your operating system correctly is easy. There are a bunch of variables you might not know about, sure, but this isn’t rocket science. It doesn’t take very long to get Windows…
If you woke up last week and found a drone under your tree (or more likely, in a cardboard box wherever you receive package deliveries) you probably can’t wait to try it out. But unlike other new gadgets, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) like drones take a little more effort to get up off the ground. Specifically, you…
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We’ll likely see a formal Samsung Galaxy S21 announcement on January 14th, but thanks to a raft of detailed specs from WinFuture and an assortment of previous leaks, there won’t be much to speculate about until then. Heck, you can even go ahead and reserve a pre-order if you like what you see.
This leak confirms some details that have surfaced previously, like the move from displays that curved slightly around the device edges to totally flat panels, and a redesigned camera bump that melds into the edges of the phone. WinFuture manages to identify a few new details though, including a slightly lower 2400 x 1080 screen resolution for both the S21 and S21 Plus, compared to the 3200 x 1440 resolution used by their predecessors. This equates...
Every year, Jezebel compiles a list of the most inspiring women, femmes, and nonbinary people who have shifted our perspectives over the last 12 months, motivating us to joy and mirth and in some cases activism and cooking.
This was a year of many “firsts,” as it seems an isolating pandemic has a way of spurring us on to try new things, to find little glimpses of joy wherever we can. (Remember all that bread we baked in March?) For many families, being stuck at home for the holidays was the perfect excuse to finally buy a real tree to…
I don’t know about your cat, but mine is all about trash. She loves eating trash. She loves playing with trash. She loves being trash. No matter how many cute, not-cheap cat toys I purchase for her with my hard-earned money, she will always have a preference for bits of refuse that fall to floor. (What does she do if…
AT&T says its services have mostly recovered from a bombing that caused multi-state internet outages on Christmas. The explosion of an RV in Nashville injured three people and destroyed a section of the city’s downtown, including “significant damage” to a key AT&T transmission facility. This brought down wireless and wired networks across parts of Tennessee, Kentucky, and Alabama — disrupting cell service, some 911 networks, and communications at the Nashville International Airport, which briefly grounded flights as a result.
The AT&T building, located blocks away from the company’s better-known office tower, provides a regional network connection point in addition to local service. The blast reportedly damaged the building’s structure...
You can pick up Vizio’s 65-inch M-series (model M65Q7-H1) 4K TV for just $580 at Best Buy when you’re signed in with a free My Best Buy account. Otherwise, it’s $600. This model regularly costs $700, and today’s offer is a good one considering its size and specs. Not many TVs at this price point are going to be worth your money, but this one stands out with a QLED panel that offers more accurate contrast and colors than a standard LED.
It also has four HDMI 2.0 ports with support for FreeSync variable refresh rate (up to 60Hz at 4K resolution). Vizio actually advertises HDMI 2.1 support here, but review site Rtings tested this model in-depth and claims that, even after a recent firmware update, all of its ports are limited to HDMI 2.0...
Resolutions are overrated, and we all know it. Even if you enjoy making lofty goals for the new year, simply declaring a resolution is not the same as making a plan to get there. But you know what? You don’t have to do that, either. This year, make a resolution that is small and boring as hell.
Microsoft’s Surface Laptop 2 and a Baby Yoda holiday tumbler lead Monday’s best deals.
Podcasts used to define my commute. But now that I don’t have a commute anymore, I have to fit them in where I can. This means I have sadly been forced to ditch many of the shows I used to listen to regularly and focus on only the best of them—the ones I simply can’t miss.
And that’s what we’re focusing on today: the…
Home maintenance is one of those things that’s easy to forget or put off, because many tasks only need to be done once in a while or a few times a year. If you’re not careful, though, you can end up being that house in the neighborhood with the overgrown yard, peeling paint, and a list of expensive, but possibly…
The quest to banish the notch from modern smartphone design has resulted in some pretty clever innovations, the latest of which happens to be the under-display selfie cam on the ZTE Axon 20 5G.
The 32-megapixel camera hiding underneath the screen didn’t quite impress us in our review of the device earlier this month, but it is a worthy sidestep to the hole punch or the pop-up selfie cam we’ve seen in past devices. Now, a new teardown video from YouTuber JerryRigEverything gives us a closer look at how exactly the Axon 20’s under-display camera works.
Beyond being just a generally insightful breakdown of the various components of a modern smartphone, the Axon 20 teardown shows us how ZTE is actually using two screens stacked on top of...
The first thing to do when you get a new phone is to log back into all your accounts — email, Facebook, Signal, and so on — to make sure you’re getting all the important notifications you need and messages from friends. But after that, you’ll want to install apps that replace the default tools (like the web browser or weather app) with something better, along with apps that’ll just make your day-to-day usage of the phone a lot more helpful.
Here are our suggestions for where to start when setting up an Android phone.
We’ve rounded up our favorite and most-used games, apps, and entertainment. Check out our app picks for iPhones, Android phones, Windows PCs, and M1-equipped Macs; our favorite mobile games from Apple Arcade and Google Play...
Samsung’s Galaxy S21 lineup of phones will reportedly debut on January 14th. If there’s even a slight chance you might pick one up, you can now place a reservation to guarantee a preorder slot when those become available, which they usually do right after an Unpacked event ends.
Samsung’s page will take down some basic information like your name, email address, and zip code in exchange for dibs on buying one of these new phones. You won’t pay anything to reserve your preorder — Samsung will collect that once you actually order the phone yourself. But what you can also do now is get a quote for a phone you might like to trade in.
You can get up to $700 of instant trade-in credit toward the purchase of a Galaxy S21 if you trade an iPhone...
At a glance, it’s easy to assume that frozen vegetables aren’t as healthy as their fresh counterparts, but that’s not always the case. In fact, frozen vegetables are often just as full of nutrients. In some cases they even retain nutrients better.
We’ve learned a lot this year, don’t you think? We know more about respiratory droplets than we ever cared to know, we have a more thorough understanding of the nuances of our electoral process, and we’ve learned that apparently we can work from home and our kids can learn from home for months on end even if we…
You can now use Google Assistant for voice searches in Google Chrome on Android, and not a moment too soon. The move saves Chrome users from the lackluster voice recognition you were forced to deal with previously.
If you’re lucky enough to have unwrapped a new iPhone as a holiday gift this year, you’ll probably want to install some new apps on it. Fortunately, we’re here to help with some suggestions. We’ve included great apps that are just generally fun or useful to have on your phone, and apps that you should download to replace the default ones that Apple ships.
We’ve rounded up our favorite and most-used games, apps, and entertainment. Check out our app picks for iPhones, Android phones, Windows PCs, and M1-equipped Macs; our favorite mobile games from Apple Arcade and Google Play Pass; and our top choices for gaming PCs, the PS5, Xbox One and Series X / S, Nintendo Switch, and VR. We’ve also listed our favorite streaming shows on Disney Plus,...
The ashes of the late James Doohan, who played chief engineer Montgomery Scott on the original Star Trek television series, have been aboard the International Space Station for 12 years— and the Sunday Times of London has the fascinating backstory of how it happened. Doohan died in 2005 at the age of 85, and his family wanted to fulfill his wish of getting on the ISS.
Official requests to bring Doohan’s ashes on the ISS were denied, but Richard Garriott— one of the first private citizens to travel on the space station— managed to smuggle some of Doohan’s ashes into the space station’s Columbus module. Garriott says he took a laminated a picture of Doohan and some of his ashes and put it in under the floor of the Columbus. He didn’t...
Just two days after Wonder Woman 1984 hit theaters and HBO Max, Warner Bros. says it has put the third installment in the franchise on the fast track. Gal Gadot will reprise her role as Diana Prince/Wonder Woman and Patty Jenkins will once again write and direct, Warner Bros. chairman Toby Emmerich said in a statement Sunday.
“As fans around the world continue to embrace Diana Prince, driving the strong opening weekend performance of Wonder Woman 1984, we are excited to be able continue her story with our real life Wonder Women – Gal and Patty – who will return to conclude the long-planned theatrical trilogy,” Emmerich said.
According to Warner Bros., Wonder Woman 1984’s opening weekend went better than expected, selling $16.7 million...
A 1080p webcam and a sale on Belei skincare products lead Sunday’s best deals.
So I watched Wonder Woman 1984 and I may need to watch a second time before I decide what I think because right now I think it’s sort of a parody of 1980s movies that doesn’t quite hit the mark despite a fine performance by Pedro Pascal (The Mandalorian!) as the villain. Also about to wrap season 7 in my binge-watch of Homeland... I’ve stuck with it this long so need to find out how it all ends. Note to self though: need to pick something a little less dystopian for the next binge-watching project.
It’s our final trailer wrap up for 2020 and we have a little bit of everything: a drama, a documentary, a “psychological thriller,” and a comedy.
A two-part documentary about the life and career of Tiger Woods — yes, it’s being called...
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Though it sounds like some type of superhero—specifically the unlicensed off-brand kind that hangs in Times Square—the “green flash” is actually a real thing that you can see in the sky with your own eyes. And while we know the green flash exists (there is plenty of photographic evidence), it has reached more of a…
If you’ve found yourself with a few days off for the holidays, and have already caught up on all your shows and your brain is open to looking at things, but not reading reading, we have a suggestion we think you might enjoy. Yes, it’s 70 years’ worth of IKEA catalogues.
When a car’s heat is working, it can feel glorious on a cold day—thawing you out so efficiently that you might have to take your coat off to keep from overheating. (Just make sure you don’t do that while you’re driving.) And if you’re lucky enough to have heated seats? Basically a trip to the spa. (Although instead of…
Kwanzaa is a Black holiday that takes place between December 26 and January 1 each year, during which Black people are encouraged to celebrate their community, culture, and kinship including by reflecting on the Seven Principles, or Nguzo Saba, that characterize some of our shared values as a people.
Lei Jun, the CEO of Chinese phone maker Xiaomi, has confirmed that its upcoming Mi 11 phone will not come with a charger, citing environmental concerns. While that’s a legitimate argument against providing yet another hunk of plastic that resembles all the other chargers people already have, Xiaomi joined other phone makers who poked fun at Apple a few short months ago for not including chargers with the iPhone 12.
Jun made the remarks on Chinese social media site Weibo, saying people have many chargers which creates an environmental burden, and therefore the company was canceling the charger for the Mi 11.
Apple’s decision not to include...
An end-of-the-year sale at Tarte Cosmetics and a Samsung 50-inch LED 4K UHD Smart Tizen TV lead Saturday’s best deals.
We’re now at a point where you can comfortably describe the Nintendo Switch as “mature.” It’s no longer a new device, but one several years into its life, with a robust and varied line-up of games available. There’s a good chance you picked up a Switch to play one of Nintendo’s tentpole franchises — whether that’s Super Mario, Animal Crossing, or Pokémon — but there are a lot of different kinds of experiences available on the tablet. That includes big social titles, classic games, and inventive indie releases. Heck, one of my favorite experiences this year has been relearning chess on the Switch.
If you’re new to the Switch ecosystem, here are 10 great games to get you started.
We’ve rounded up our favorite and most-used games, apps, and...
