Technology

Health departments in many Florida counties are using event management website Eventbrite to schedule COVID-19 vaccine appointments for the public. Officials told The Verge that the platform was the easiest way to get vaccinations up and running quickly during the initial rollout, which has been confusing for residents and inconsistent across the state. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis bumped all adults over the age of 65 to the front of the vaccination line along with health care workers and long-term care facility residents — breaking from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommendations around vaccine prioritization, which said essential workers should have first access. That opened up vaccine access to over 4 million people in the state while supplies were still limited, c...

Industrial sensor giant Teledyne will acquire FLIR, an Oregon-based company that makes thermal-imaging and night vision technology, the companies announced Monday. The deal is worth $8 billion in a mix of cash and stock. “At the core of both our companies is proprietary sensor technologies. Our business models are also similar: we each provide sensors, cameras and sensor systems to our customers,” Teledyne chairman Robert Mehrabian said in a statement. The companies’ sensors are “uniquely complementary, with minimal overlap,” he added, which could be important when regulators decide whether to approve the acquisition. You probably already know FLIR Oregon-based FLIR makes thermal-imaging and night-vision technology for the military and for industrial and consumer applications — if you’ve e...

Apple has been shutting down loads of retail stores as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to peak — on December 20th, it temporarily closed every single location in California, Mexico, Brazil, and over a dozen in London. Now, as England and Scotland go into a pair of new national lockdowns, Apple is closing all of its remaining stores in the UK. As 9to5Mac’s Michael Steeber reports, that means 18 additional stores are now closed across the UK, including several in Scotland and one in Belfast, Ireland — though it looks like the Belfast store may have already been closed. (Northern Ireland went into lockdown even earlier, on December 26th, shutting down all non-essential shops.) All 18 UK Apple Stores open today will close from January 5. Includes every location in Scotland. Most of the other 2...

As part of its January Pixel updates, Google might have fixed an issue that meant Pixel 5 system sounds could be a lot louder than you might have wanted. Since the Pixel 5’s launch in October, numerous users on Reddit and on Google’s own support forums have reported that Pixel 5 system sounds (like the camera shutter or the sound you hear when you take a screenshot) could be quite loud, even when the phone’s volume was set to a lower level. In the release notes for the January Pixel updates, however, Google says that the Pixel 5-specific update includes “further tuning & improvements for volume level of system sounds.” A few users on Reddit have reported that the system sounds are much quieter after installing the update, though some say that the sounds are too quiet now. The release n...

If you’re Nintendo and you need a bunch of non-playable characters (NPCs) for your soon-to-be smash-hit Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, what do you do? Apparently, you may use your Mii creation tool to generate them. Twitter user and self-proclaimed Mii expert Alice (@HEYimHeroic) has discovered that some of the minor characters in the game’s world (shopkeepers, townsfolk, etc.), are based on Mii characters, and Miis are able to be brought directly into the game — albeit with a fair amount of effort. As with all systems like this, there are edge cases and caveats It’s been speculated before that Breath of the Wild’s NPCs were somehow related to Miis (especially after the discovery that their game files were labeled as UMiis), but Alice’s discovery reveals that Miis can be directly map...

Fortnite developer Epic Games is moving its Cary, North Carolina headquarters across town to a large shopping mall, the company announced. It’s planning to convert the 87-acre Cary Towne Center into its new home base by 2024. Once development is complete, Epic says the site will include recreational and office space, “customized from the ground up to accommodate its long-term growth.” The company says it plans to begin development on the new HQ site this year. Epic purchased the property from Turnbridge Equities and Denali Properties, which bought it in January 2019 as part of a distressed sale after the mall lost three of its anchor tenants, according to the Triangle Business Journal. Turnbridge and Denali planned to turn the site into a mixed-use development named Carolina Yards. Epic’s ...

Games Done Quick (GDC), the charity event series that raises money while expert players blast their way through classic games, kicked off its first 2021 iteration yesterday on Twitch, and the event is running all week for anyone interested in tuning in to this year’s speedrunning spotlights. The January event, typically focused on “awesome” games done quick, is on its second day and has some great titles on the schedule over the next few hours, including speedruns of Dishonored 2, Divinity: Original Sin II, and Diablo 3. Later this week, we’ll see speedruns of classics like Final Fantasy VII, Mega-Man, Metroid, and The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening. Check out the full schedule here. [embedded content] GDC has been organizing its charity speedrun marathons since 2010, and this year’s ev...

Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter and Square, isn’t happy about the new proposed cryptocurrency regulation. He emphasized how the regulation would hurt Square, a financial services company, in a letter posted to the company website. In October, Square bought $50 million in bitcoin. The company also has invested heavily in the cryptocurrency ecosystem, so Square has plenty of skin in the game. The regulations create “unnecessary friction and perverse incentives for cryptocurrency customers to avoid regulated entities for cryptocurrency transactions,” Dorsey writes. The regulation could end up driving customers “to use non-custodial wallets or services outside the U.S.” The regulation, proposed by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), would require financial institutions (like Squ...

Persona-heads rejoice: it looks like all the original soundtracks for most of the games are coming to Spotify tomorrow at midnight. That’s right. The news comes courtesy of AniPlaylist, purveyors of fine anime song playlists. According to their Twitter account, the music includes main game soundtracks from Persona 5, Persona 4 and Persona 4 Golden, Persona 3 and Persona 3 FES, and Persona 2. There’s also a bunch more stuff, apparently. Main games soundtracks:– Persona 5 OST– P4 & Golden OST– P3 & FES OST– P2 Sound Collections But also: – P4 Dancing All Night OST– P4 Arena Ultimax OST– Never More -Reincarnation: Persona 4-– P3 & P4 Vocal Sound Collection– PQ & PQ2 OST– MUSIC FES 2013– SUPER LIVE 2015 — AniPlay...

Slack is down on the first full work day of 2021. The company said Monday morning “Customers may have trouble loading channels or connecting to Slack at this time. Our team is investigating and we will follow up with more information as soon as we have it. We apologize for any disruption caused.” Users began reporting issues around 10AM ET, and the company posted its first status update about the problem at 10:14AM. At first, Slack was reporting issues with connecting to the service and messaging. An update on its status page at 11:20AM ET upgraded the situation to a full-blown outage, with all aspects of Slack— including log-ins, messaging, calls, and connections— showing as unavailable. “All hands are on deck on our end to further investigate,” according to the update page. The service a...

Nier: Automata, the mind-bending roleplaying game from legendary Japanese director Yoko Taro, has one last magnificent secret, discovered nearly four years after the game’s release. The secret, a cheat code you can input in the game’s intro sequence to skip to the very end of the game, was unearthed by modder Lance McDonald, who said he spent hundreds of hours reverse-engineering Nier: Automata to come across this ultra-rare find. For those interested, the cheat is a relatively simple button sequence you must input while positioning main character 2B between a set of barrels during the game’s very first boss fight, something no player would think to do unless they dug deep into the game’s code. Without spoiling much about the game’s rather unorthodox storytelling structure, this cheat will...

PayPal-owned banking app Venmo is launching a check cashing feature for both its Android and iOS apps for “eligible” users in the US, the company announced Monday. Cash a Check will allow users to snap a photo of a check and deposit it into a Venmo account. The review process that makes the funds available should only take a few seconds, but in some cases may take up to an hour, the company says. Fees will apply to most check deposits, but Venmo is waiving the fees for deposits of stimulus checks for a limited time. Its usual fees, according to PayPal’s terms of service, will include a 5 percent check cashing fee for hand-signed payroll and government checks for a minimum fee of $5 and 1 percent fees on payroll or government checks with pre-printed signatures. To use Cash a Check, a Venmo ...