Technology

Apple TV Plus has announced an April 8th start date for Friday Night Baseball alongside a streaming schedule for the first half of the season. The revised 2022 season schedule was announced by Major League Baseball (MLB) earlier in March after players and team owners negotiated an end to a lockout, setting a date for the regular season to begin on April 7th. Streaming will be available for anyone with Apple TV Plus in the US, Canada, Australia, Brazil, Japan, Mexico, Puerto Rico, South Korea, and the United Kingdom. In the US and Canada, that also includes access to a 24/7 livestream with replays, highlights, and other programming. Even if you don’t pay for Apple TV Plus, it will also be available without a subscription on all hardware that supports the service “for a limited time,” Apple ...

Devialet today announced the Dione, a $2,400 Dolby Atmos 5.1.2 soundbar with built-in subwoofers and a central “ORB” speaker that can rotate depending on the soundbar’s installed position (via Gizmodo). The French audio company calls it the “ultimate all-in-one soundbar” since it completely forgoes satellite speakers in favor of a virtual surround solution and has built-in subwoofers. Crammed into the three-inch-thick profile of the Dione are 17 drivers: eight of them serving as the subwoofers, another eight for full-range audio, and a center driver inside the rotatable orb. The Dione also houses a gyroscope that will automatically correct the sound orientation whether you mount the soundbar or lay it flat — no need to make that adjustment via its mobile app. The orb is pretty distinctive....

Google is adding Markdown support to Google Docs on the web, letting you format your document using text shortcuts rather than keyboard ones. In a blog post announcing the feature, Google says it’s doing this through its autocorrect feature, so it will automatically format the text for you after you type it in Markdown format. For example, if you type “# Google Docs is getting more Markdown support” it’ll automatically get converted to a level one heading. Google says that Docs already supported a few Markdown autocorrections for bulleted and numbered lists, and checkboxes. It’s adding much wider support, though — you can now use Markdown to add headings, bold and italicize text (or do both), strikethrough (though it’s done using a – on either side of your content, rather than the tr...

Greenpeace and other environmental groups launched a new campaign today to push the Bitcoin network to slash its growing greenhouse gas emissions. The goal of the campaign, dubbed “Change the code, not the climate,” is to switch up the energy-hungry process of verifying transactions and mining new Bitcoins. The cryptocurrency uses more electricity annually than global gold mining operations or the entire country of Norway, according to the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance. Burning through so much energy generates some serious greenhouse gas emissions, but campaign organizers argue that it doesn’t have to be that way. Other cryptocurrencies use just a fraction of the energy Bitcoin requires because they use a different system to verify transactions. “Change the code, not the climate...

The latest court filing in Elon Musk’s battle to wrest back control of his Twitter account from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) includes a citation of the 2002 song Without Me by rapper Eminem. Yes, really (see the filing embedded below). In the song, the rapper complains that “The FCC won’t let me be or let me be me so let me see/ They tried to shut me down.” That’s a reference to a 2002 penalty the Federal Communications Commission handed out to a Colorado radio station for playing Eminem’s 2000 song The Real Slim Shady (after clutching its collective pearls for a bit, the FCC ultimately decided not to fine the radio station). In the Tuesday court filing, Musk’s lawyers just substituted “SEC” for “FCC” to make the comparison, noting that “the First Amendment requires that ag...

Love it or hate it, fail or succeed, the Steam Deck will go down in gadget history. It’s a bold attempt to make PC gaming more portable and affordable than ever before, an ultimate gadget with exotic features and infinitely customizable controls, and perhaps the most powerful gaming PC ever sold for a mere $400. But it also shipped incomplete. We titled our February 28th review “Steam Deck: it’s not ready” — even though I also called it the most fun I’ve had in years. One month and many updates later, has anything changed? Yes and no! Here’s what I learned spending another month with the Steam Deck, as well as the answers to many burning questions I wasn’t able to address in our original review. Consider this our Steam Deck FAQ. What is the Steam Deck, in one sentence flat? It’s a Linux ga...

Roughly $625 million worth of cryptocurrency has been stolen from Ronin, the blockchain underlying popular crypto game Axie Infinity. Ronin and Axie Infinity operator Sky Mavis revealed the breach on Tuesday and froze transactions on the Ronin bridge, which allows depositing and withdrawing funds from the company’s blockchain. Sky Mavis says it’s working with law enforcement to recover 173,600 Ethereum (currently worth around $600 million) and 25.5 million USDC (a cryptocurrency pegged to the US dollar) from the culprit, who withdrew it from the network on March 23rd. The attack focused on the bridge to Sky Mavis’ Ronin blockchain, an intermediary between Axie Infinity and other cryptocurrency blockchains like Ethereum. Users could deposit Ethereum or USDC to Ronin, then purchase non-fungi...

TikTok on Tuesday announced a new in-app video creation tool called TikTok Library, which will allow users to more easily participate in trends with a wide selection of content from GIPHY, including sound-enabled GIFs known as GIPHY Clips. Launched under GIPHY Video, which was founded in 2019, GIPHY Clips provide a new method for entertainment companies, gaming studios, moviemakers, record labels, sports teams and various other organizations to create licensed content for social media sharing. At launch, TikTok confirmed that the Library will include GIPHY Clips categories for Reactions, Quotes, People and Iconic Moments. In addition to GIPHY Clips, TikTok notes that it plans to expand the Library with various other content sources and sounds in the future, though it declined to specify wh...

Good morning, dear readers! The temperature went from 55 to 25 overnight, and my sinuses are in so much pain that I’ve been hanging upside down in the dark for relief. Like a bat. Why podcasts pop up to cover Ukraine New this morning, I reported a piece for The Verge about why so much coverage of Ukraine has taken the form of pop-up podcasts. The labor required to report out and produce a show isn’t easily condensed to match the breakneck speed of the news cycle, yet NPR, The Telegraph, independent teams, and more have rallied resources toward the medium. A lot of these teams have reason to believe that this commitment is worth it — and many of them have a lot of the same reasons for thinking so. Many, after all, have quickly started new podcasts before, and some have even been able to rep...

As part of its latest season, Fortnite removed building, one of the game’s most iconic features. And now, developer Epic appears to be making the change a more permanent part of the experience with the introduction of Zero Build mode. As the name implies, the mode is a combat-focused option where players can’t gather resources to build defensive structures; Fortnite recently introduced a new shield and more mobility options to make up for it, making for a faster-paced experience. Zero Build is available to play across solo, duos, trios, and squad modes, and it joins an ever-growing list of ways to play Fortnite, including Creative, Impostors, and the violence-free Party Royale. However, at the time of this writing, the standard battle royale mode isn’t accessible in the game. The existence...

Today, let’s talk about Europe’s aggressive move to require big online messaging services to be interoperable, and see how WhatsApp is thinking about the contradictory mandates it’s receiving from regulators. In Europe, two big ideas currently hold sway among the people regulating technology companies. One is that it should be easier to compete with tech giants, and that a good way to accomplish this is to force their services to play nicely with others. Two is that users’ data privacy is of paramount concern, and any data sharing between corporations is to be treated with the utmost suspicion. It’s unclear the extent which regulators realize that, in hugely important ways, these ideas are often in conflict. But at the moment they are on an absolute collision course, and it doesn’t feel hy...

The still-unnamed sequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has been delayed to spring 2023, producer Eiji Aonuma announced today in a video update. The game had previously been set for a 2022 release window. “We have decided to extend our development a bit and change the release to Spring 2023,” Aonuma said. “In order to make this game’s experience something special, the entire development team is working diligently on this game, so please wait a while longer.” [embedded content] Nintendo first revealed that it was working on a sequel to Breath of the Wild in 2019, followed by a brief look at the upcoming title’s new gameplay at E3 2021 last year. According to Aonuma will see gameplay extend up into the skies of the vast, open-world iteration of Hyrule, along with new gameplay ele...