Technology

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. Zillow also says that winding down the business in the c...

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. [embedded content] The video shows off virtually the whole development process. It’s quite a journey, going from proof of ...

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. [embedded content] The video shows off virtually the whole development process. It’s quite a journey, going from proof of ...

Ford has started selling an electric crate motor based on the one that powers the GT version of the Mustang Mach-E. The “Eluminator e-crate motor” makes 281 horsepower, 317 pound-feet of torque, and costs $3,900. The motor is just the first in a series of EV building blocks Ford says it plans to sell, like battery systems, motor controllers, and inverters, all of which would make it easier to retrofit internal combustion engine vehicles with all-electric drivetrains. Right now, those types of conversions are still mostly limited to specialty shops and hobbyists who often cobble together parts from all sorts of random places in the supply chain. To promote the new motor, Ford built a one-off all-electric version of a 1978 F-100 pickup truck, which it brought to the Specialty Equipment Marke...

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 worked at Google from 2006 to 2019 and has done work arou...

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 titles on your Switch, but players have found that the button layouts for some g...

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 towards meaningful, lasting change with their whole h...

Indoor lighting has gone from functional to fun in the last few years, whether that involves simply screwing in a couple smart light bulbs or adding complicated, colorful effects that can change the entire mood of your home. Nanoleaf is one of many companies forging ahead with innovative, colorful smart lighting products, and its latest offering — the $199 Nanoleaf Lines — might just be the most entertaining yet. The Lines join Nanoleaf’s growing catalog of LED wall panels in various sizes and shapes, this time adding a new trick — backlighting. Available for pre-order now and on sale November 8th, these are ultra-lightweight LED light bars with dual-color zones where each zone is capable of displaying one of over 16 million RGB colors. They can be mounted on the wall or ceiling and can go...

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 the potential for Minecraft with augmented reality at...

For my first session with Inscryption, knowing nothing about the game and only playing it on the recommendation of a trusted friend, I played for seven hours straight. It meant ignoring my adult responsibilities and most of my bodily functions to do it, but I learned early on that the choice between “eating lunch” and “playing more Inscryption” was a very easy one to make. Inscryption is a collectible card game (or CCG) like Magic: The Gathering or Hearthstone while also combining elements of roguelikes and hidden object games that’s also an extremely unsettling horror experience. If none of those genres appeal to you, that’s okay. Inscryption blends its various elements together to form an experience so damn compelling that even if the idea of playing a Magic: The Gathering-esque game rep...

Dropbox is adding a feature that will let you add automation to folders so new files are automatically renamed, grouped into subfolders, or more. The feature is called, perhaps unsurprisingly, Automated Folders, and Dropbox says it can help you (and any co-workers you share files with) stay organized with standardized names and tags. The automation you add to folders can be configured with various rules, so you can tell the system to rename any files you add to the folder following a certain pattern or to sort them into subfolders based on the date the file was uploaded to Dropbox. The rules are currently predefined, but Dropbox says it’s working to make the system more customizable. You can have Dropbox automatically sort your files by month, a system that I’ve hacked together on my own c...

Tempo, the smart home gym that uses computer vision to track your workouts and offer guidance in real time, has gone on a diet. Today it’s launching the Tempo Move, a new home workout setup that ditches the original’s 42-inch touchscreen with Microsoft’s Azure Kinect sensors built in, in favor of using existing TVs combined with the sensors built into the iPhone XS / XR and up. It means that the Tempo Move’s setup is slimmed down compared to the original Tempo Studio, but there’s still a lot of hardware here. At the center is what Tempo’s calling the “Core,” which is effectively an iPhone dock that can connect to a TV via HDMI. The kit also comes with a storage unit containing “smart weights” including plates and dumbbells. With a suggested retail price of $495 plus a monthly subscription ...