Technology

If you’ve ever tried to get ice cream at a McDonald’s restaurant, there’s a better-than-average chance you were stymied in your quest for soft-serve goodness by an out-of-order ice cream machine. A new report from Wired attempts to get to the bottom of the mystery of the McDonald’s ice cream machines, why they have a secret repair menu that most McDonald’s workers don’t have access to, and one couple’s attempts to hack the machines for the greater good. …after years of studying this complex machine and its many ways of failing, O’Sullivan remains most outraged at this notion: That the food-equipment giant Taylor sells the McFlurry-squirting devices to McDonald’s restaurant owners for about $18,000 each, and yet it keeps the machines’ inner workings secret from them. What’s more, Tayl...

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, will be hosting Saturday Night Live on May 8th, the official SNL account tweeted Saturday. The musical guest will be Miley Cyrus. Musk is known for his— how shall we put this — quirky sense of humor on Twitter, his preferred method of social media communication, but it’s not totally clear whether he’s actually funny enough to sustain a 90-minute hosting gig on the late-night comedy show. Musk has made many notable media appearances over the years— there was that time he smoked weed on Joe Rogan’s podcast, and he had a cameo in Iron Man 2 (he even had a line for his debut in the Marvel Cinematic Universe). He also played himself on an episode of The Simpsons, titled “The Musk Who Fell to Earth,” and on the now-retired show The Big Bang Theory, and its spi...

During Tuesday’s Spring Loaded event, Apple announced (among other things) that the second season of its runaway hit show Ted Lasso would drop on July 23rd. This is extremely good news for fans of the show (including myself) who have missed the earnest football coach with the impossibly sunny outlook on life, which provided a bit of a respite during the coronavirus pandemic last summer. At the very end of Spring Loaded, however, there was a Ted Lasso-related Easter egg: a graphic of a little box with the text “Ted Lasso’s Secret Shortbread (Makes about one box).” The recipe itself was barely visible. But eagle-eyed developer David Smith was able to read the text, and Googled it, only to find it matched a New York Times recipe for shortbread (albeit a slightly different recipe than Ted’s). ...

If a $100 budget phone is the fast-food dollar menu and a $1,000 flagship is a steakhouse dinner, then the Samsung Galaxy A52 5G sits comfortably halfway between the two: the laid-back all-day cafe with surprisingly tasty food. It’s good. More importantly, it’s good where it matters. Sure, you have to order your food at the counter and get your own water refills, but it’s worth it because brunch is fantastic and the prices are reasonable. The A52 5G is the highest-specced of the budget A-series Galaxy phones we’ll see in the US this year, offering all of the basics for its $499 price tag along with a few good extras. Its 6.5-inch screen comes with a fast 120Hz refresh rate that’s scarce at this price point. Its main camera includes optical image stabilization, something I missed when I use...

Thursday marked a major milestone in the United States’ COVID-19 vaccination campaign: 200 million shots given in President Biden’s first 100 days in office. Over 40 percent of the US population now has at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. But over the past week, the average number of vaccinations reported per day started to fall. Last week, the US was averaging around 3.3 million shots per day. This week, that number dropped to around 3 million shots per day. Every one of those shots takes us another step closer to the end of the pandemic in the US. The slowing pace, though, is a warning sign that we’re reaching an inflection point where the supply of COVID-19 vaccines will outpace the demand. It’s already happening in some places: states have vials of vaccine, but people aren’t signi...

Model and actress Emily Ratajkowski is selling a link representing a composite image that features a photograph of herself in front of a print by another artist that contains a photo (of herself) taken by (presumably) yet another artist. In other words, she is selling an NFT. The New York Times reports that Ratajkowski will be selling the NFT at Christie’s, the storied auction house that sold Beeple’s NFT for $69 million in March. The NFT is, for Ratajkowski, an effort to reclaim images of herself that have been created and sold, sometimes without her permission, throughout her career. Last year, Ratajkowski published an essay in The Cut describing moments when she was unable to control often vulnerable images of herself. Image: Emily Ratajkowski “As somebody who has built a career off of ...

Twitter has removed more than 50 tweets critical of the Indian government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, and did so at the request of the Indian government. First reported by Indian news site MediaNama, the Indian government sent Twitter an emergency order on Friday to censor 52 tweets, according to a disclosure notice on the Lumen database. The censored accounts include a sitting member of India’s Parliament, two filmmakers, an actor, and a West Bengal state minister. A Twitter spokesperson said in an email to The Verge that the company may make certain tweets unable to be viewed by people within India if the tweets violate local law. Twitter says it notified account holders before it withheld content to make them aware that the action was taken in response to a legal request fro...

Lenovo’s Ideapad Flex 3 Chromebook is one of the tiniest Chromebooks I’ve ever used. It’s also one of the cheapest, retailing for just $349.99. Any laptop that costs that little is going to have some serious drawbacks — and the Flex 3 certainly does. On the other hand, if you’re the sort of shopper who’s willing to set those aside, this little IdeaPad also has a number of pleasant surprises up its sleeve. There are even a few areas (in particular, the battery life) where it gives significantly more expensive devices a run for their money. Verge Score 7 out of 10 Good Stuff Excellent battery life Good keyboard Modern port selection Chassis feels sturdy Bad Stuff Bad screen Ugly and dated design Weak processor I’ll start with the pleasant surprises. The Flex 3 offers a more modern port selec...

A SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft with four astronauts aboard successfully docked with the International Space Station early Saturday to start its six-month mission, NASA announced. Crew-2, as it’s been dubbed, is SpaceX’s third astronaut mission under NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. It brings NASA’s Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur, Akihiko Hoshide of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and Thomas Pesquet, a French aerospace engineer from the European Space Agency (ESA) to the ISS, which travels at more than 17,000 miles per hour in orbit roughly 250 miles above Earth. A Falcon 9 rocket which was used for SpaceX’s Crew-1 mission in 2020, launched early Friday for its 24-hour trip to the ISS. The Falcon 9 carried Endeavour, the same Crew Dragon capsule that launched SpaceX’s debu...

It’s the weekend, so that’s our cue to fire off this handy list of the best tech deals we’ve laid eyes on over the past few days. There weren’t many big surprise price drops, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t some great pieces of tech to buy. This week’s best deals are for people trying to stretch their dollar as far as possible. There’s a discount on a feature-packed soundbar for under $100, and Google’s Pixel 3 that has a solid camera is just $170. Plus, there are some more gaming deals below. Have a nice weekend! Save on this capable yet affordable TCL soundbar TCL might be known more for its TVs than soundbars, but we still think this deal from Woot is worth sharing. The TCL Alto 8 Plus, which has both a subwoofer and Amazon’s Fire TV 4K streaming hardware built in, is just $70 new a...

The United States should resume use of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine for all adults, an independent advisory committee to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said today. There is a small risk of a rare type of blood clot in women under 50, and health officials should warn patients of that risk, the committee stressed during its deliberations. Federal officials at the CDC and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) could lift the pause on the shot based on that recommendation soon — within hours or days. The FDA will likely add a warning label to the vaccine about the blood clots. Federal officials at the CDC and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) could lift the pause on the shot based on that recommendation soon Use of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine has been pau...