Technology

If you’re hoping to get one of the new 12.9-inch iPad Pros with a Mini LED display, you may be waiting a while — the delivery times for even the base model have slipped to late June or early July (via Bloomberg). Leading up to the device’s announcement, there were rumors that the display tech could be a production bottleneck for Apple, and that appears to be the case — Apple’s site says the 11-inch iPad Pro, announced alongside the 12.9-inch, would be delivered in late May. The Mini LED display that could be to blame for the short supply of iPads is a new tech for Apple, but it promises to bring a ton of improvements compared to normal LED displays. However, they’re trickier to produce — Apple says that the previous iPad Pro’s display had 72 LEDs, while the Mini LED version boasts over 10,...

A report from Vice has opened my eyes to just how big the Pokémon trading card collecting market is getting — apparently to the point where card rating companies have waitlists that range from six to ten months, with one company claiming it’s receiving over 500,000 cards to grade per week. The card graders, who rate trading cards’ conditions to determine how collectable (and therefore valuable) they are, are so swamped that people who want to get their Magic, Yu-Gi-Oh, or sports cards graded are also having to wait in line (or pay out the nose to skip it). One card rating company apparently needed employees so bad it offered $1,000 starting bonuses — and then bumped them up to $2,500. Another company had to buy two warehouses to store all the cards it was getting in. Apparently, even the t...

The Biden administration’s version of a COVID-19 vaccine-finding website launched today, along with a Spanish-language version, text messaging tool, and phone hotline. The new website, vaccines.gov, is a new version of VaccineFinder, a site run through a partnership between Boston Children’s Hospital and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. VaccineFinder was originally created during the 2009 swine flu outbreaks and has hosted COVID-19 vaccine information for the past few months. The new version has the same features as the old site. It lets people locate sites offering COVID-19 vaccines nearby, shows which vaccines are on offer at each location, and says if the vaccines are in stock or not. “In stock” does not necessarily mean there are appointments available, just that the sit...

NASA has suspended work on SpaceX’s new $2.9 billion lunar lander contract while a federal watchdog agency adjudicates two protests over the award, the agency said Friday. Putting the Human Landing System (or HLS) work on hold until the GAO makes a decision on the two protests means SpaceX won’t immediately receive its first chunk of the $2.9 billion award, nor will it commence the initial talks with NASA that would normally take place at the onset of a major contract. Elon Musk’s SpaceX was picked by NASA on April 16th to build the agency’s first human lunar lander since the Apollo program, as the agency opted to rely on just one company for a high-profile contract that many in the space industry expected to go to two companies. As a result, two companies that were in the running for the ...

Facebook’s Oculus division has snatched up yet another popular virtual reality game developer. On Friday, the company announced it has acquired Downpour Interactive, the studio behind the hit multiplayer military simulator Onward. “We’ve seen great success with Onward on the Oculus platform for several years — first on Rift and more recently on Quest,” Mike Verdu, Facebook’s VP of AR / VR content, said in a blog post. “Becoming part of the Oculus Studios family will give Downpour Interactive the opportunity to cultivate both the Onward community with the full support of Oculus Studios resources, and, in the future, pursue other projects.” Everyone from Downpour will move to Oculus Everyone from Downpour Interactive will move over to the Oculus Studios team “in some capacity,” Verdu said. H...

If you’d like a visual of one way that doom could overtake Earth almost immediately, then YouTube user Anselo La Manna has just the video for you: a large asteroid impact simulation scored to nothing other than Pink Floyd. Specifically, that’s “Great Gig in the Sky,” off what might be the band’s most beloved and over-analyzed album, Dark Side of the Moon. It’s got everything total annihilation needs: contemplative piano, pedal steel guitar, and of course, a plaintive wail, capturing the whole range of emotions that people might feel if they were burned to a crisp because one big rock hit another. Anselo La Manna also hosts the original clip the mashup video uses on their YouTube page, a simulation of a large asteroid impact. It appears to be from Miracle Planet, a documentary series that a...

Due to an issue with QuickBooks processing direct deposits, some people had a very unpleasant morning, waking up to see either that their paycheck hadn’t arrived, or that they had a ton of employees asking why they hadn’t been paid. If you’re one of those people, it may not be time to panic just yet — QuickBooks says that the issue has been resolved and that the money should be arriving in accounts by the end of today. QuickBooks claims the missed payments were caused by an issue with a third party. Some users, though, are upset with how Intuit, which owns QuickBooks, handled the situation, claiming that they couldn’t get a hold of the company on their phone or chat lines. What the heck @QuickBooks. My employees need to get paid. Fix your stuff ASAP. Nobody is answering the phones or helpi...

Some Instacart shoppers claim that the company has wrongfully terminated their accounts in response to fraudulent activity, locking them out of future earnings until they get reactivated, CNN Business reports. The shoppers CNN Business spoke to were identified as having “linked accounts,” which, in Instacart’s terminology, means an account believed to have indicators of fraud, though not necessarily with compromised data connected to a shopper. The shoppers may be the victims of phishing scams The company offers a process for appealing deactivations, but at least one of the shoppers CNN Business spoke to, Rachael Freedman, still hasn’t had her account reactivated because her appeal was denied. Instacart didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment on Friday. The company did tell CNN t...

On Friday morning, Roku pulled YouTube TV from its channel store. Its removal came after Roku’s distribution agreement for the app expired and negotiations between it and Google fell apart without any new deal in sight. The popular streaming hardware maker warned customers of this outcome earlier in the week, claiming that Google was demanding unrealistic terms to renew YouTube TV’s slot on the platform. Those asks, according to Roku, included access to sensitive customer data and an apparent commitment from Roku to support AV1 decoding in future products. That requires extra hardware that Roku maintains could increase the cost of its devices. Roku also says that Google is trying to have changes made to Roku’s search feature, an assertion that Google has strongly denied. The war of words h...

After a controversial blog post in which CEO Jason Fried outlined Basecamp’s new philosophy that prohibited, among other things, “societal and political discussions” on internal forums, company co-founder David Heinemeier Hansson said the company would offer generous severance packages to anyone who disagreed with the new stance. On Friday, it appears a large number of Basecamp employees are taking Hansson up on his offer: according to The Verge contributing editor Casey Newton’s sources, roughly a third of the company’s 57 employees accepted buyouts today. As of Friday afternoon, 18 people had tweeted they were planning to leave. Not long after Fried’s Monday blog post went public — and was revised several times amid public backlash online — Hansson outlined the terms of the new severance...

Trade groups representing some of the largest telecom companies, including AT&T and Verizon, are suing New York over a new state law forcing them to provide cheaper broadband plans for low-income families in the state, as first reported by Axios. Earlier this month, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signed a bill that would require internet service providers to offer a $15 a month broadband internet option for low-income consumers and families in the state. It’s one of the first laws in the country enforcing such a rule. But groups like USTelecom, CTIA, and the New York State Telecommunications Association argue that the state has no authority to set broadband prices and that the law could impair the companies’ abilities to upgrade their networks in the future. “While well-intended, this ...

I woke up feeling a little strange this morning, but I didn’t think much of it. It’s just another day living in the pandemic. But after I got some strange looks at the cafe, I started to get a little worried. On my way home, I took a sip of my coffee and somehow pierced through the paper cup with bottom fangs that I didn’t have yesterday. I ran to the bathroom mirror when I got inside, only to discover that I’d turned into an ork. Awesome! As decreed by the Shadowrun lore (via Twitter user @Gen_Ironicus), April 30th, 2021 is the day of Goblinization. The Shadowrun wiki over at Fandom says that, today, 10 percent of the world’s population will be transformed into orks and trolls for no apparent reason. Guess I just got lucky! I thought maybe Goblinization would primarily target people who h...