Technology

Moleskine Classic Notebook A tried-and-true staple of any student, Moleskine notebooks are a great way to jot down homework assignments, love poems, or really anything that comes to mind. These soft-cover notebooks are available in a wide variety of sizes and colors, making them a great way to keep track of your thoughts before you inevitably post them on the internet for all the world to see. Price: ~$17 to $21 Amazon Target Roku Streaming Stick 4K The Roku Streaming Stick 4K is one of the easiest ways to ensure you always have access to your favorite streaming apps. The handy device is no bigger than a pack of gum, yet it supports 4K HDR content along with Dolby Vision and Apple’s AirPlay 2, which makes it easy to play content from an iPhone, iPad, or Mac. The best feature, however...

A jury in Texas found Charter Communications liable for $7 billion in punitive damages this week as the result of a lawsuit from the family of Betty Jo McClain Thomas, an 83-year-old woman who was stabbed to death by one of its employees in December 2019. The $7 billion is in addition to $375 million in compensatory damages the jury assigned in June. The explanation behind the staggering figure of the verdict goes well beyond the horrific crime committed. It also includes the company’s policies and responses to previous incidents of theft and an attempt to forge a document showing Thomas agreed to forced arbitration that would have limited potential damages to the amount of her last bill. localhost:62220/VewContracts.aspx Charter-submitted evidence to compel arbitration.Image: Dallas Count...

On Friday, Mashable reported that Helium, a crypto project praised by The New York Times earlier this year and whose parent company is backed by investment firms like Andreessen Horowitz, had been misleading people about the companies it works with. Helium advertises on its homepage that Lime, the mobility company behind those electric scooters and bikes, uses its crypto-powered mesh wireless network. The company, however, told Mashable that it hasn’t had a relationship with the company since 2019, and that it had only ever initial testing with Helium’s tech. Now, Salesforce, whose logo appeared on Helium’s website right next to Lime’s, says that it also doesn’t use the technology. “Helium is not a Salesforce partner,” Salesforce spokesperson Ashley Eliasoph told The Verge in an email. Whe...

It’s a mod. After the Nier: Automata community went through a good 96-ish hours of pure, high-octane gas trying to figure out if a heretofore undiscovered church was a mod or an Easter egg or an ARG put together by Yoko Taro and his merry band of weirdos, a trio of modders has come forward and admitted it was a mod. “We have been loving all the discussions and theories — it has been an amazing journey,” reads a statement from the trio. “It has been inspiring to see the community come together after so many years, it has made all the hard work well worth it.” Image: Reddit The mod represents an impressive technological advancement for the Nier: Automata modding community, which in and of itself makes the entire “hoax” worth it. Browsing Reddit and Twitter, it seems the majority of the commu...

The federal courts’ document system was hit by a breach with a “startling breadth and scope” in early 2020, according to a report from Politico that cites testimony from House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerrold Nadler. The Department of Justice (DOJ) reportedly informed the judiciary about the breach in March and told lawmakers that an investigation is ongoing. Other lawmakers, such as Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), expressed concern that the DOJ had been hiding information about the breach and was refusing to explain it to the public and Congress. Nadler reportedly said that the “system security failure” was the work of “three hostile foreign actors,” though, according to Reuters security officials for the DOJ didn’t specify which countries could be involved. The courts have since moved their m...

If you want to know what frame rates your Steam games are running at, there are many third-party programs out there to help. But if all you need is a very basic counter and you don’t care about other hardware stats, you don’t need to download any of these — you can use a feature that’s built right into Steam. Here’s how to set up Steam’s built-in FPS counter for your PC. I go with the top left, myself. Open Steam. Go to Steam > Settings > In-Game. Under In-game FPS counter, select the corner where you’d like the counter to appear. You can also check High contrast color if you prefer. Click Ok. Now, go ahead and start your game. You should see the frame rate your game is running at displayed in the corner that you specified.

This interactive world map visualizes “a cross-verified database of notable people” to show you the most notable person in your hometown — or anywhere else you might want to look. Topi Tjukanov, a geographer and senior map designer at Mapbox, put the visualization together, which features different influential people from fields including culture, science, leadership, and sports. What someone contributes to society to be considered notable can vary, so researchers tried to narrow it down and account for biases where possible. Each name featured on the map was determined using a baseline of information scraped from Wikipedia and Wikidata for use in a recent study published in Nature that tried to calculate a person’s notability based on several rules: The number of Wikipedia editions of eac...

It doesn’t take long for the Paper Girls comic books to get strange. The series from Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang starts out with a dream about an astronaut with angel wings and a skull for a face, and before the first issue is done, you’ll have seen an odd partially-organic space capsule and read a completely incomprehensible language from people who might be monsters. Things only get weirder from there. But the new live-action series of the same name, the first season of which is available on Amazon Prime Video, dials back the strangeness. It’s still a science fiction story about a group of girls from the ‘80s who are pulled into a time-traveling war that spans centuries. But it doesn’t have nearly as much fun with the concept as its source material. It isn’t until the finale that P...

The world’s first video game is coming to an Analogue Pocket near you. Today, Analogue announced that it’s launching Spacewar!, a game originally designed for the PDP-1 minicomputer that predates Pong by a full decade, on the Pocket as a part of its larger strategy to bring pioneering video games into the modern era. The original Spacewar! was created in 1962 by a cadre of engineers led by Steve Russell at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Using a PDP-1 minicomputer and a 1024 x 1024 pixel CRT display, Russell and his colleagues programmed a game in which two spacecraft duke it out in the gravitational well of a star. Two controllers were created for the game featuring switches for maneuvering and buttons that were designed to be quiet when pressed so your opponent couldn’t hear w...

In early May, the Meta executive in charge of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, shared some news: the social media app’s main feed would start looking dramatically different to some users. For those in a small test group, the feed they’d been using for a decade would be replaced with an “immersive viewing experience” containing full-screen photos and videos with many posts coming from people they weren’t following. In other words, Instagram would start to look and feel even more like TikTok, the short-form video app that Meta sees as its fiercest competition. “Let me know what you think down in the comments below,” said the ever-earnest Mosseri. And with the patience of a parent showing their child both sides of an argument, he invited Instagram users to be honest with him: “If you love it, great. ...

Bad news for the (presumably few) people out there who have relied on Amazon Drive for storing their important files in the cloud: Amazon is shutting down the service. On the plus side, you’ve got well over a year to figure out an alternative and get everything moved over. The company says Amazon Drive will no longer be supported as of December 31st, 2023. That’s when access will be completely cut off. Uploads are going away earlier and won’t be accepted as of January 31st. The Amazon Drive apps for Android and iOS will be taken down on October 31st, 2022. “We will continue to provide customers the ability to safely back up, share, and organize photos and videos with Amazon Photos,” Amazon said in an email to customers. But for all files that aren’t images or videos, you’ll have to downloa...