Technology

If your PlayStation Plus membership is about to expire or you want to extend the subscription for another two years, Eneba is offering an exclusive deal to The Verge readers. You can purchase two one-year PlayStation Plus subscriptions for only $56 when you enter the discount code VERGEFEB at checkout, while supplies last. This is a great deal — the usual price for one year of PlayStation Plus is $60, so purchasing two one-year subscriptions for less than the price of one is a real bargain. If you want just one year, you can buy it for $29. (No code needed.) This works for both PS4 owners and early adopters of the PS5; the subscription is compatible with both consoles. So if you own a PS4 but are lucky enough to then get hold of a PS5, you do not have to double-dip on PlayStation Plus. If ...

Romance can be difficult after months of living during tense times, whether you’ve been sharing living space or forced to express your affection via Zoom. It’s a problem many of us are facing. But a simple Valentine’s Day gift, no matter how impractical or stereotypical, can make your partner feel special and loved. We asked the staff of The Verge to come up with some ideas of what they would consider the ideal Valentine’s Day gift. Whether you’re into cooking together, watching movies together, or simply being together, you should find something here that can help you express the simple phrase “I love you.” For the partner who wants to look and feel their best Theragun Mini massage gunPhoto: Theragun At a time when tension is on the rise and many of us could use a relaxing massage, a lot ...

Nintendo has posted earnings for a huge holiday quarter in which the Switch sold more consoles than ever. 11.57 million consoles were moved in total, bringing the Switch close to 80 million sold since its 2017 launch. Nintendo has increased its forecast for the fiscal year ending March 31st to 26.5 million Switch units, also boosting its net profit estimate 33 percent to 400 billion yen, or about $3.82 billion. The Switch has now outsold the 3DS in terms of lifetime sales, with the older handheld reaching a total of 75.94 million units before production was ended. Only 730,000 3DS games were shipped during the last quarter, underlining that the platform really is dead at this point. It was also a massive quarter for Nintendo in terms of software sales, with nearly 76 million units sold. Ma...

Chrome’s Android app is being updated with a new interface for switching tabs, and a new tab grouping feature to help organize open web pages, 9to5Google reports. The new interface and functionality has reportedly been appearing for some users after the release of version 88 of Chrome last month, but doesn’t appear to be live for everyone just yet. The grid layout replaces the previous interface consisting of a vertical list of tabs, and is similar to Chrome’s existing iOS tab interface. Around six tabs are shown onscreen at a time, and these can be swiped to the left or right to close them. Incognito tabs can be accessed via a small icon on the top of the screen. When browsing a tab that’s part of a group, shortcuts to switch to other grouped tabs appear at the bottom of the app.Screensho...

Apple has released an official extension for the Windows and Mac versions of Chrome that lets you use passwords stored in your iCloud Keychain. For anyone who uses Chrome as their browser and iCloud Keychain in lieu of a dedicated password manager, this could make bouncing between Windows and Mac computers much easier. The release of the extension means that if you’ve used Safari to automatically generate strong passwords on other platforms, those can now be available to you in Chrome when you’re prompted for a login. Passwords created in Chrome for Windows will also sync back to iCloud so they’ll be available on Apple devices as well. The extension is called iCloud Passwords and is available now in the Chrome Web Store. Details of the functionality were prematurely revealed last week in a...

The first two months of the COVID-19 vaccination campaign have been chaotic: local health departments and hospitals are struggling put the limited shots they have available in arms, and people eligible for those shots are often frustrated by buggy sign-up websites. Older adults, in particular, are having trouble with online tools. In New York City, one of the main pain points is that everything is fractured. Multiple different groups — including the city, the state, and various hospital groups — are distributing the vaccine across dozens of sites. That leaves New Yorkers juggling multiple registration websites as they search for open slots After experiencing the frustration of jumping from site to site to site firsthand, software developer Dan Benamy reached out to some friends and colleag...

Valve’s latest Steam Game Festival begins Wednesday, giving access to playable demos of more than 500 upcoming games from indie developers, along with livestreamed chats and panel discussions. The first iteration of the festival took place alongside The Game Awards in December 2019, and was followed by similar events last fall and spring that provided indie developers a chance to show off their titles after the 2020 Game Developers Conference was canceled. A trailer video from Steam titled Play What’s Next teases a few of the games that look to be available for demo during the event, which include Genesis Noir from Feral Cat Den; The Riftbreaker from Exor Studios; Narita Boy from Studio Koba; Almighty: Kill Your Gods from Runwild Entertainment; Fling to the Finish by Splitside Games; and B...

On November 10th, a Facebook employee sent out an unusual email to an unknown outside party, hoping to arrange a conversation about how the platform moderated against anti-Semitism. “We are looking at the question of how we should interpret attacks on ‘Zionists,’” reads the letter, whose recipient was redacted, “to determine whether the term is a proxy for attacking Jewish or Israeli people.” That strange but seemingly innocuous email has set off a firestorm in certain corners of the left. Since Tuesday, activists have been circulating a petition calling on the platform to halt any potential changes to the way Facebook moderates the word “Zionist.” Both sides agree the term is often used as part of racist rhetoric that is accurately described as hate speech and should be removed. At the sa...

I think I’m in Ted Lasso withdrawal, you guys; no other shows are quite working for me since I finished it. I just started season 2 of Servant, though, thinking maybe I needed a genre-switch. Servant is still creepy, and Lauren Ambrose’s Dorothy is still both totally unlikeable and totally sympathetic at the same time, which is a marvelous bit of character development. We’ll see how things go, but chances are I’m just going to re-binge Ted again. This week’s trailers are a nice mixed bag of comedy, teen romance, and spy thriller. Also The Rock! [embedded content] The Map of Tiny Perfect Things So the trailer gets the obvious out of the way early on— it’s about is a teenager stuck in a repeating time loop a la “Groundhog Day and Edge of Tomorrow,” as lead character Mark tells his friend— bu...

The Motorola One 5G Ace is a $399.99 phone that does a somewhat convincing impression of a more expensive phone. It’s large, which feels like a flagship kind of thing, even if that’s not strictly true. It’s relatively heavy, which, in keeping with the wisdom of Jurassic Park’s unluckiest lawyer, means it’s probably expensive. It’s shiny. I held it up for a friend to look at it from six feet away, and he described it as “sleek, like an old iPhone.” And of course, there’s 5G, which was (until somewhat recently) reserved for premium devices. It makes a great first impression, but once you look closer, you start to see where it lacks the polish of a high midrange or flagship phone. Its processor stumbles with heavy tasks, that big screen lacks the resolution or faster refresh rate commonly fou...

A thousand years ago, back in 2019, a regional councilor in the Netherlands named Marcel Steeman undertook a seemingly impossible challenge: convince the makers of one of the most popular toys in the world to do something a little different. He wanted Lego, the toy production company based in Billund, Denmark, to add bike lanes to their tiny, brick-made cities. For years, the streets in Lego’s city sets — once called base plates — had space for cars, people, even tiny storm drains, but no designated lanes for zero-emission, human-powered vehicles like bikes. Even worse, it appeared that Lego’s streets had become more hostile toward pedestrians and cyclists over time. As compared to Lego sets from years ago, the cars seem to have grown larger — evolving from four- to six-studs wide — and th...

All but two US states — Montana and Wyoming— now have police or fire departments participating in Amazon’s Ring network, which lets law enforcement ask users for footage from their Ring security cameras to assist with investigations, the Financial Times reported, Figures from Ring show more than 1,189 departments joined the program in 2020 for a total of 2,014. That’s up sharply from 703 departments in 2019 and just 40 in 2018. The FT reports that local law enforcement departments on the platform asked for Ring videos for a total of more than 22,335 incidents in 2020. The disclosure data from Ring also shows that law enforcement made some 1,900 requests — such as subpoenas, search warrants, and court orders— for footage or data from Ring cameras even after the device owner has denied the r...