Technology

Logitech has announced a lineup of PC gaming accessories that are designed to be more gender-inclusive — and specifically geared toward women — than any of its previous releases. Companies shouldn’t be trying to market consumer technology by gender in 2022 and should instead recognize the wide variety of tastes and physical needs consumers have. But Logitech’s gone and done it anyway. And the gadgets in the Aurora collection do seem cool, and notably, they’re new — not just new colorways of existing products. But aside from a few interesting features across the entirety of the Aurora collection, it still feels like a case of the pink tax at work. With its latest collection of gaming accessories (and the many pricey add-ons you can purchase to customize them), Logitech wants to let you know...

Amazon is raising the price of its Prime subscription across Europe in September by up to 43 percent a year. In an email to customers overnight, Amazon revealed its annual Prime cost will jump 20 percent in the UK from £79 to £95 from September 15th. In France the price hike is even more acute, moving from €49 per year to €69.90 — a 43 percent increase. Amazon will also hike prices in Spain and Italy by 39 percent annually, with the company’s second-biggest market, Germany, seeing an annual 30 percent rise. Amazon’s Prime price increases in Europe come just months after the price of Prime in the US rose to $139 per year, up from the previous $119 annual fee. Amazon Prime typically includes fast shipping, access to sales, and free movie / TV streaming in most markets. Amazon is also increas...

Meta has recently launched a new feature called Music Revenue Sharing, which allows creators to monetize Facebook videos that feature music from artists such as Post Malone and Tove Lo. The company described the tool as “a new way to earn money with popular music.” Creators will gain access to a licensed library of music and will be able to monetize these videos featuring the specified music with ads. Creators can get a 20% cut of the ad revenue, and the rest goes to Meta and the music rights holders. However, videos must be at least one minute long, and the music itself cannot be the video’s primary focus. Unlicensed videos will be muted or blocked or have their account disabled if the offense continues repeatedly. Currently, the new tool will be exclusive to Facebook videos as it does no...

Issue There is no obvious way to download an image from a Google Docs document. Quick fix Download the document to an HTML file. The full story Like most online publications, The Verge uses a CMS (content management system) to upload its content to the web. This particular CMS demands that you upload any images you want to use separately from the text — which usually presents no problems. But recently, a writer submitted an otherwise fine story in which they had included the images within the text. The writer had gone on vacation, so I couldn’t ask them to send the images separately — and there didn’t seem to be an obvious way to download the pictures so I could pop them into the CMS. After doing some research, I discovered there are several ways that you can download an image from a Googl...

The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, a video game where you play as the titular jewelry fan, has been delayed from its September 1st release date. According to a statement posted on Twitter by the game’s developers, Daedalic Entertainment, it’ll be releasing “a few months” later, with the exact date coming soon. Game delays are exceedingly common these days, but this does make it so the Gollum game won’t be launching alongside Amazon’s Prime Video show, The Rings of Power, which is premiering on September 2nd. While the show is set long before Sméagol ever got his hands on the Ring, it’s easy to imagine the game getting a bit of a boost if it came out a day before a blockbuster show from the same franchise. Still, it’s more important to give developers, QA, and everybody else involved the time t...

A giant pipeline spewed millions of gallons of fuel into a nature preserve for more than two weeks until two teens on four-wheelers noticed the spill and alerted authorities. The teenagers discovered the leak in the Colonial Pipeline in August 2020 in the Oehler Nature Preserve outside Charlotte, North Carolina, E&E News reports. Just how massive the leak actually was — about 2 million gallons — came to light recently on Friday, July 22nd. Colonial Pipeline Company was required to give an updated estimate of the damage because of a recent consent order with the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality. The company had previously reported that the spill released 63,000 gallons of gasoline shortly after the spill was discovered. The spill is actually about 30 times larger than ...

Best Buy is opening a digital-first, small-format store on Tuesday in Monroe, North Carolina, that takes a very different approach than most of its “big box” retail locations. The 5,000-square-foot location is only about 15 percent as big as the typical 35- to 40,000-square-foot Best Buy location and is even smaller than many smaller Apple Stores, which are typically between 6,000 to 8,500 square feet. Bloomberg reported last year that Best Buy was testing downsized locations of about 27,000 square feet to as small as 15,000 square feet, but this is much smaller, squeezing nearer to the now-closed Best Buy Mobile footprint. This test store is in the Charlotte area, where Best Buy also launched five other test stores last year, trying experiences ranging from a remodel to an outlet-style ap...

Remember when everyone wanted to own your phone and your laptop? Dell’s finally tossing in the towel (via Windows Central). On a support page, Dell announced that it’s discontinuing Mobile Connect, the program that syncs your phone’s texts, calls, and notifications to your computer. While Dell is stopping downloads on November 30th for users in the US, Canada, and Japan, it will no longer be available to use starting January 31st, 2023. The service is shutting down even earlier for users outside these three countries, with downloads stopping on July 31st and a total shutdown occurring on November 30th. Dell Mobile Connect — sometimes called Alienware Mobile Connect — made its debut in 2018 and is, naturally, supposed to work best with Dell laptops from 2018 or later. The program’s compatib...

Prepping for a summer cookout? If you head over to Amazon right now, you can pre-order the retailer’s hottest new charcoal grill: the Google Pixel Buds Pro. Yes, that sentence you just read didn’t make a lot of sense, but Amazon’s search engine thinks it does! The algorithm has apparently decided that not only do the new charcoal colored earbuds count as a “charcoal grill,” they’ve apparently been the best-selling product in that category for over 24 hours now (via Reddit and Mishaal Rahman) without Amazon doing anything about it. See for yourself: One of these things is not like the others.Screenshot by Sean Hollister / The Verge “#1 new release in charcoal grills,” reads the badge provided by Amazon. In general, I wouldn’t read too much into any badges you’d see on an Amazon product. As ...

The Department of Energy’s Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing program, which famously helped put Tesla on the map, is set to hand out its first loan in over a decade. The department will announce a $2.5 billion loan to a joint venture of General Motors and LG Energy Solution to help fund the construction of a new lithium-ion battery manufacturing facility, the company confirmed. (The news was first reported by Reuters.) The Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing program, or ATVM has attained almost mythical status in the EV startup world thanks to its timely $465 million loan to Tesla, which is credited with helping save the company from an early death. Since then, a number of cash-strapped EV startups have also requested loans but to no avail; the program has basically been do...

If you’ve opened Instagram recently and noticed more Reels on your feed or less engagement on your posts and felt the platform was beginning to look a liiiittle too much like TikTok, you’re not alone. The app’s second most-followed person agrees. Kylie Jenner shared a screenshot of another user’s post on her Instagram Stories today, longing for the good old days of Instagram as a photo sharing app. “Make Instagram Instagram again,” the post says. “(Stop trying to be tiktok i just want to see cute photos of my friends). Sincerely, everyone.” Her sister Kim Kardashian also shared the same post, which has over 1.1 million likes. The associated Change.org petition has nearly 100,000 signatures. Image: Instagram Instagram’s steady creep into TikTok territory isn’t new — Meta, which owns Instagr...

Genshin Impact’s impending Sumeru update is set to add some beautiful new areas to explore, and the game’s developers shared a look at some of the new zones in a new video. The new areas will be divided into two major zones: a rainforest and a desert, environment artist Jax Huang says in the video. The rainforest is filled with rolling hills, lush vegetation, and towering trees. The desert biome, on the other hand, is more sparse but also contains ruins with intricate architecture. Both look like natural additions to Genshin Impact’s rich and colorful environments. Two mysterious robots can be found Each biome has some more fantastical elements, too. The forest has a city built on a huge tree and zones with giant, glowy plants, while the desert has ruins that are floating upside down in th...