Technology

Just in time for the launch of Microsoft Flight Simulator on Xbox Series consoles next month, developer Asobo Studios has added some extra details that players will appreciate. World Update V is focused on the Nordic region (specifically Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden), bringing stunning vistas to an already visually impressive title. [embedded content] A brief trailer shows the payoff for some extra attention on landscapes (so many fjords) and urban areas with detailed architecture for you to fly around showing off everything from ancient castles to modern stadiums, towers and bridges. According to the team, the new areas include “100 airports and 77 carefully selected points of interest.” You can see Lego House and Frederiksborg Castle in the trailer, along with the Arctic...

Snap is removing its controversial “speed filter” from Snapchat this week, NPR reports. The in-app effect displays your current speed in miles or kilometers per hour, and many critics have claimed the feature encouraged reckless driving — with some saying that Snap should be held liable when the speed filter was connected to deadly car crashes. There have been multiple lawsuits over the years connecting Snapchat to car crashes. One concerning a 2015 car accident in Georgia arrived just a few years after Snapchat was first updated to include the filter. In the years since, the company has demoted the filter to a sticker, burying it in a separate menu, and making it a bit harder to use. The Ninth Circuit Appeals Court recently ruled that Snap could be sued for the speed filter / sticker’s in...

Apple is cutting the prices for its AppleCare Plus extended warranty for both its M1 MacBook Air and MacBook Pro laptops. AppleCare for the new M1 Air now costs $199 (versus the old $249 price), while AppleCare for the M1 Pro is down $20 to $249, as spotted by MacRumors. If you’ve got an Intel-based laptop, those price cuts are a mixed bag. Apple is applying the $199 price for the MacBook Air to both the M1 and Intel-based models, even though it no longer directly sells the Intel Airs. If you’ve got an Intel-based Pro, on the other hand (which Apple does still offer, at least for now), you won’t be getting any discount — AppleCare Plus for that model will still cost the same $269 as before. Note the “New Lower Price.”Image: Apple AppleCare Plus for Macs extends the 90 days of coverage incl...

Update June 17th, 4:15PM ET: Walmart appears to have sold out of Series X consoles for today. I hope that you got one! Microsoft’s next-gen console may have arrived, but getting your hands on an Xbox Series X isn’t exactly easy. Much like the PlayStation 5, Microsoft’s console remains in short supply due to increased demand and ongoing chip shortages, a problem that will likely extend into 2022. Thankfully, if you haven’t managed to secure either console, the Series X is available at Walmart right now for $499.99. (Walmart is releasing new waves of consoles every 10 minutes for now, so check again if you strike out.) If you’re not sure how the Series X differs from the more affordable but weaker Series S console, there a few things to consider. First, unlike the Series S, the Series X feat...

Nielsen, the nearly century-old research firm which produces the eponymous gold standard for television ratings, is taking a more serious look into how much Americans are streaming. The result of its labors: an ominously named rating system it calls The Gauge. While Nielsen has tried to calculate the popularity of various streaming programs before (through audio analysis), The Gauge seems to hew closer to the ways Nielsen has measured TV viewership in the past: via a device which, according to The New York Times, “observes internet traffic that passes through a router.” Presumably, this device is attached directly to the televisions of the roughly 14,000 homes from which The Gauge currently gathers data, as the Times once again reports that the measurement does “not count what is watched o...

Amazon’s body fat percentage scanner performs better than other, more cumbersome methods of calculating body fat, a new study showed. A body scan is one feature on the Amazon Halo Band subscription service, which the company announced last August. The Halo Body feature works through smartphone cameras. Users take four photos of their bodies, which are then combined into a 3D image. Then, Amazon’s tool uses machine learning to calculate the user’s body fat percentage. When Amazon launched Halo, the company said it did an internal study to validate the feature. Now, they’ve released a study — which was funded by Amazon, but conducted with leading experts in the field — showing that the tool works well. The results show that the tool could be a benchmark for people looking to get more informa...

The Beatles: Get Back, a documentary about the iconic band directed by Peter Jackson, will debut as a three-part series on Disney Plus over the Thanksgiving holiday later this year. Jackson spent three years restoring and editing some 60 hours of footage shot in January 1969 by Michael Lindsay-Hogg that hasn’t been seen before, and more than 150 hours of previously unheard audio. It captures John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr preparing for their first live show in more than two years, writing and rehearsing 14 new songs. The documentary also includes the band’s famous rooftop concert on Savile Row in London— you’ve probably seen parts of it — a show that ended up being The Beatles’ final public performance. The film also includes songs that later were released on...

During a normal week, Leiti Hsu dedicates at least one night to hosting her Dream Dinner Party. She hops on Clubhouse to interview guests, describing the food and atmosphere of her fictitious party as a gateway into deep, emotional conversations. Wagyu steak sizzles in front of you, she calls out, a massage table and masseuse sit on call for anyone who wants to take some time away from the (imaginary) table, she reminds you. But last week, Hsu showed us what her Clubhouse room looks like when brought into the real world. Packed inside a New York City apartment, Hsu has brought in an actual masseuse, Tony Qin, to rub people down. A chef stands behind an island prepping “roving omakase,” like octopus salad and spicy tuna onigiri, along with various a la minute dishes. Tom Shpetner, aka Tom t...

More than six months after its initial debut, the PlayStation 5 remains as elusive as ever. Sony also expects console shortages to stretch into 2022, however, as of 5:15PM ET / 2:15PM PT, both the PS5 and PS5 Digital Edition will be available at Sony’s store. You can head to that site right now, and the page will automatically toss you into the queue to (hopefully) secure a PS5 from the batch being released into the wild today. Sony says that you don’t need to refresh the page, but make sure that you stick around once the queue begins because it’ll likely ask you at some point to verify that you’re still present, or else you might be booted from the queue. If it’s your first time, welcome to the needless drama involved with buying a PS5. So, what’s the difference between the two models? Th...

Bharti Kamble is on the lookout for fake messages related to COVID-19. Late in the afternoon, she carefully reads over 500 messages from eight WhatsApp groups. As she finishes her search, she’s relieved. “For 30 days now, I didn’t come across a single piece of misinformation as WhatsApp forward,” she says. But after a year spent fighting misinformation, Kamble remains wary. “It’s still too early to declare a victory,” she says. Kamble is an accredited social health activist (ASHA worker), the foot soldier of India’s rural healthcare system. When she started work as an ASHA, she never thought she’d be fact-checking hundreds of messages every week. Selected under India’s National Health Mission, ASHA workers are women who care for about 1,000 people within their village. They are tasked with...

Around 15 years ago, Yoshio Sakamoto had an idea for the next mainline Metroid game. Called Dread, the game would feature longtime protagonist Samus Aran constantly pursued by some kind of all-powerful force. The idea was to instill fear in players with an enemy they couldn’t defeat. This was the same time that the Nintendo DS was becoming a breakout hit, but Sakamoto soon realized that the handheld wasn’t powerful enough for his ideas. “It was difficult to realize that concept with that hardware,” he said recently during a meeting with reporters. Development on Dread stopped and started a few times due to these technical limitations, before eventually being shelved indefinitely. “We had put it on hold,” Sakamoto explains. Which is what made this year’s announcement at E3 such a surprise: ...

The biggest change to Microsoft’s Office documents in decades is coming to life soon, as the company’s Fluid framework arrives in Microsoft Teams, OneNote, Outlook, and Whiteboard. Microsoft first unveiled Fluid last year, showing how the framework allows blocks of Office content to live independently across the web. That idea is now becoming a reality, with collaborative content that can be copied, pasted, and shared with others. Instead of tables, graphs, and lists that are static and bound to specific documents, Fluid components are collaborative modules that exist across different applications. They will begin showing up in Microsoft Teams first this summer, embeddable in meetings and chats. Microsoft’s Fluid components roam across multiple apps. The launch of Fluid documents coincides...