Technology

Best Buy has an attractive deal on Razer gaming gear, including headsets, keyboards, mice, and mouse pads. If you buy any two listed on the site, you’ll get 20 percent off the total at checkout. But if you get three, you’ll get 25 percent off the total. This deal seems especially great if you just got a gaming PC and are looking to get set up with all of the peripherals you need. For around $50, you can get the BlackShark V2 wired headset, the excellent Viper ambidextrous mouse, or the DeathAdder V2 wired gaming mouse. Near the $100 level, you’ll be opened up to deals on wireless gaming mice, keyboards, and more. Digital storefront Eneba is selling copies of Resident Evil Village for PC (redeemable on Steam) for around $43 when you use the offer code REVILLAGE (per Slickdeals). This game j...

Venom: Let There Be Carnage, the extremely on-the-nose sequel to 2018’s Venom, has gotten its first trailer ahead of its pandemic-delayed September 24th release date. It promises more of the peculiar buddy cop comedy and Tom Hardy’s over-the-top acting that made the original a surprisingly fun watch. Picking up after the last movie, the trailer shows that Eddie Brock and the Venom symbiote have achieved a sort of domestic peace: a “no eating people” sign is tacked up on the wall of Brock’s apartment, and Venom helps Eddie make breakfast in what might be the worst Ratatouille impression of all time. He’s trying. “No eating people” Things shift focus to Cletus Kasady, a murderous serial killer (Woody Harrelson, doing his best Dark Knight Joker impression) who gets a hold of his own symbiote,...

For years, “infrastructure week” was a kind of running joke in Washington — a stand-in for all of the boring but popular rebuilding work that could happen if Donald Trump ever decided to get serious. Under Joe Biden, this idea has become something more tangible: the trillion-dollar American Jobs Plan, which lays out investments in everything from bridges to broadband. But while Congress grinds away on the details, we still want to think bigger. The pandemic showed just how shaky America’s foundation really is, whether it’s having enough hospital beds to survive a pandemic or having a connection fast enough to support a Zoom call. Fixing our infrastructure means looking at all of that — even the stuff like power grids and credit systems that only get noticed when they break. It also means b...

Sony doesn’t expect the PlayStation 5 supply situation to improve any time soon, according to comments its CFO reportedly made to analysts following the company’s recent earnings report. Hiroki Totoki said that it’s difficult for Sony to keep up with demand for the PS5, according to Bloomberg, and that the situation is likely to continue into 2022. “I don’t think demand is calming down this year and even if we secure a lot more devices and produce many more units of the PlayStation 5 next year, our supply wouldn’t be able to catch up with demand,” Totoki reportedly said, later adding “We have sold more than 100 million units of the PlayStation 4 and considering our market share and reputation, I can’t imagine demand dropping easily.” “I can’t imagine demand dropping easily.” Sony is aiming...

Vivo’s upcoming X-series flagship phones will receive three years of Android OS upgrades and security updates, the company announced today. The policy will come into force for phones launched after July 2021 in Europe, Australia, and India. “We are making a promise to our customers that they will be able to enjoy a premium smartphone experience for an extended period and continue to benefit from the latest software features,” Vivo’s CTO and senior vice president Yujian Shi said in a statement. With today’s announcement, Vivo is joining a small but growing group of Android manufacturers promising three years of OS updates for their flagship smartphones. Google has long had a similar policy for its Pixel phones. Last year, Samsung announced a “three generation” OS policy covering some Galaxy...

The online bank Simple shut down on Saturday and was supposed to seamlessly transition customers’ accounts over to its parent company, BBVA. But instead, many users found themselves unable to access their bank account at all, as BBVA’s website returned an assortment of error messages, from “system error” to warnings that their account information was mismatched. The transition has gone so poorly that BBVA’s US website now opens on a large red banner warning users of extended customer service wait times. Anyone who visits the Simple transition page will see a different red banner, apologizing for the issues. “To Simple customers converting to BBVA: This has not been a good conversion experience for many of you,” part of the message reads. “We know this, and we sincerely apologize.” A banner...

I’m sticking with The Handmaid’s Tale for now; in the latest episode we see a lot of very improbable situations that need to happen in order to move the plot along but at last, finally, the main story moves away from Gilead. Does that mean things are going well for June? I don’t think it’s a major spoiler to say “nope, not really.” But we get to see some backstory for Janine, who asks June some uncomfortable questions in the present. More of that, please. The back half of the season looks promising. Our trailers this week have a theme of sorts: Sequels. Trailers for the sequels to A Quiet Place and Stranger Things, and third trailers for Loki and In the Heights. [embedded content] A Quiet Place Part 2 As my colleague Alex Cranz noted, this movie had its theatrical premiere last March but w...

As you’ve surely heard, last night’s guest host on Saturday Night Live was not a charismatic movie actor promoting a new project but instead an endlessly hyped CEO named Elon Musk. Over the course of an hour and a half, SNL had Musk dress up as a misunderstood Wario, mock some of his more questionable ideas during a cowboy sketch, and play a version of himself set some years into a future where SpaceX has made it to Mars. Musk’s partner, Grimes, also made a cameo appearance as Princess Peach. I’ll let you guess which sketch. While the show was streamed internationally on YouTube last night, those of us in the United States who don’t pay for cable were stuck waiting for clips to appear the following morning. As of press time, it is now the following morning. And as expected, the clips have ...

After more than a year of iOS exclusivity, social audio platform Clubhouse is releasing its Android app. It will be available in beta on Google’s mobile OS today in the US, allowing users to sign up and participate in its audio-only chat rooms. “Our plan over the next few weeks is to collect feedback from the community, fix any issues we see and work to add a few final features like payments and club creation before rolling it out more broadly,” the company said in a blog post. The Android app, which the company says has been the top request from its community by far, will roll out to other English-speaking markets and the rest of the world in the days and weeks ahead, the company said. Users outside the US will be able to pre-register for access via the Clubhouse page in the Google Play s...

The champions of the first season of the Call of Duty League are being honored in a unique way: with their faces plastered at the stadium in Call of Duty: Warzone. Today, Activision revealed that the front entrance to Verdansk Stadium in Warzone will soon display a giant rendition of the CDL trophy, along with pennants featuring all five members of the Dallas Empire who were crowned champions for the 2020 season. It’s a unique kind of crossover and an example of how game developers and publishers are able to leverage popular games to promote esports. In the past, games like League of Legends and Overwatch have introduced unique skins to celebrate championship teams or players. But this move by the CDL is more akin to traditional sports, where championship banners are raised in local stadiu...

SpaceX is now accepting Dogecoin, and it’ll be paid exclusively in the cryptocurrency to launch an upcoming satellite named DOGE-1 to — yes — the Moon. The DOGE-1 is a cubesat meant to acquire “lunar-spatial intelligence” using onboard cameras and sensors. It’s being sent and paid for by a company named Geometric Energy Corporation, and it’ll be flown up on a Falcon 9 rocket in the first quarter of 2022. Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency that started out as a goofy meme and is now a somewhat more valuable goofy meme, has been on the rise lately, with enough trading around spikes in the currency to cause crashes of the trading app Robinhood. Elon Musk is the coin’s highest profile supporter, tweeting Dogecoin memes, referring to himself as the “Dogefather,” and hyping it up (sort of) on Saturday N...

Apple’s Shortcuts app is a fantastic piece of iOS, a nearly limitless corner of the operating system that lets users automate almost anything they can think of, limited only by imagination and ability to use Apple’s coding system (Federico Viticci’s comprehensive collection on MacStories is a great place to start.) But Shortcuts has an issue so awful it renders it one of the most annoying parts of my phone, instead of one of the most useful: Apple insists on always showing notifications when I do something, and it’s virtually impossible to turn it off. Yes, I am aware that there is an extremely janky hack for disabling notifications on Shortcuts on a global level. The trick, as detailed by HowToGeek, involves going to the Screen Time part of settings and toggling back and forth between wee...