Technology

Turns out Ron Gilbert’s April Fools’ joke wasn’t a joke at all. He is indeed working on a new entry in the classic Monkey Island adventure game series, titled Return to Monkey Island, and it’s set to release this year. You can watch the first trailer for the game here or at the top of this post. According to the YouTube trailer’s description, Return to Monkey Island is a “long-awaited follow-up” to The Secret of Monkey Island and Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge. Protagonist Guybrush Threepwood is back, and he’ll once again be voiced by Dominic Armato. The trailer reveals that Return to Monkey Island is being made by Terrible Toybox, the developer of the 2017 old-school adventure game Thimbleweed Park, in collaboration with Disney-owned Lucasfilm Games, which was involved in the first fo...

The world needs to slash greenhouse gas emissions in half this decade, a landmark new United Nations report urges. To reach that goal, the globe needs to make a speedy shift to clean energy, reduce energy use, and deploy technologies that can trap some of our planet-heating carbon dioxide pollution, the report’s authors say. “We are at a crossroads. The decisions we make now can secure a liveable future,” Hoesung Lee, chair of the UN Intergovernmental Panel Panel on Climate Change, said in a press release. “We have the tools and know-how required to limit warming.” “We have the tools and know-how” Hundreds of leading climate scientists participated in the report, which outlines what’s needed to avoid all-out climate catastrophe. It boils down to one key call to action: “rapid and deep” red...

Two executives building former President Donald Trump’s alternative social networking platform Truth Social have left the company, according to a new report from Reuters. Chief technology officer Josh Adams and head of product development Billy Boozer both resigned from their roles less than a year after joining Trump’s social media venture. Their departures come following the Truth Social app’s disastrous debut on February 20th, a launch plagued by technical glitches and a 13-hour outage. More than a month after launch, the service has shown little improvement. New users are still being put on an ever-expanding million-person or more waitlist to join the app. Trump has only ever posted to the network once. More than a month after launch, the service has shown little improvement As of publ...

The Unofficial Bridgerton Musical took home the Grammy for best musical theater album last night, marking the first Recording Academy win for a project that began on TikTok. Emily Bear and Abigail Barlow created songs inspired by the Netflix hit series Bridgerton, racking up millions of views on TikTok since early 2021. Writing from the perspective of characters on the show, Bear and Barlow used TikTok to solicit suggestions, interact with fans, and share the songwriting process with viewers. The duo released songs as they were completed and eventually recorded and released a 15-song album in September. Netflix did not immediately respond to a request for comment. “A year ago when I asked the internet, ‘What if Bridgerton was a musical?’ I could not have imagined we would be holding a Gram...

Tesla CEO Elon Musk now owns 9.2 percent of Twitter according to a 13G filing released today, Bloomberg News reports. According to the filing, Musk purchased the stake on March 14th. Musk has long been one of Twitter’s highest profile users and recently polled his over 80 million followers about the platform’s adherence to free speech. Twitter’s share price was up over 25 percent in pre-market trading on the news. CNBC notes that Musk’s Twitter stocks were worth $2.89 billion based on Friday’s closing price. Musk’s shares are classified as a passive stake, but Wedbush analyst Dan Ives told CNBC that the purchase “could lead to some sort of buyout.” Musk had been publicly calling into question Twitter’s approach to free speech via a poll conducted on his Twitter account on March 25th. “Free...

Wing, the drone delivery company operated by Google-parent Alphabet, will launch its first commercial service in the US on April 7th. The company’s quadcopters will be available to “tens of thousands” of homes in the suburban towns of Frisco and Little Elm, both of which are part of the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area, the company said. Customers can order items from a limited number of stores that are partnering with Wing, including Walgreens, Blue Bell Creameries, Easyvet, and Texas Health. Wing’s operational model involves parking small shipping containers next to participating stores to act as tiny hangers from which Wing’s drones will be deployed. After receiving orders online, employees at each partnering store take the items outside and load them into a cardboard package attached to th...

Picture-in-picture mode has been an option on Apple’s streaming media device, the Apple TV, for a couple of years now. But with the recent tvOS 15.4 update, Apple has made it easier to view a live feed from HomeKit cameras in a small window on top of any other content you’re playing on your Apple TV. This is a useful feature if you want to keep an eye on the baby’s room while you’re watching a movie, or watch over the front door for that special delivery during a big game. You can view a live feed of a HomeKit camera in picture-in-picture mode on an Apple TV.Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge Here’s a step-by-step guide to enabling and using Apple TV’s picture-in-picture mode to view a live feed of a HomeKit camera. For this, we used the Siri Remote second generation; it’s also p...

Google is preparing to bring its employees back to the office this week, and as an added bonus, it’ll be offering them free electric scooters to help ease the transition. The tech giant is teaming up with e-scooter maker Unagi to launch a new program called “Ride Scoot,” in which most of Google’s US-based workers can get reimbursed for the full cost of a monthly subscription to Unagi’s stylish Model One scooter. The Model One, which retails for $990, is a lightweight dual-motor scooter with a top speed of 20mph and a range of 15.5 miles. Unagi founder and CEO David Hyman said the idea was to help Google employees get to work — or even just to the closest bus stop. (Google famously provides free shuttle bus service to its employees in Silicon Valley.) “They know there’s apprehension amongst...