Technology

On a Tuesday in mid-March, Jennifer Lepp was precisely 80.41 percent finished writing Bring Your Beach Owl, the latest installment in her series about a detective witch in central Florida, and she was behind schedule. The color-coded, 11-column spreadsheet she keeps open on a second monitor as she writes told her just how far behind: she had three days to write 9,278 words if she was to get the book edited, formatted, promoted, uploaded to Amazon’s Kindle platform, and in the hands of eager readers who expected a new novel every nine weeks. Lepp became an author six years ago, after deciding she could no longer stomach having to spout “corporate doublespeak” to employees as companies downsized. She had spent the prior two decades working in management at a series of web hosting companies, ...

Discord and Microsoft are bringing Discord voice calls to the Xbox. The feature, available now to Xbox Insiders and coming soon to the rest of us, will allow users to connect to Discord voice chats from their Xbox, facilitating all kinds of cross-platform play shenanigans. The process of connecting your Xbox and Discord accounts and starting up a voice chat is pretty involved. First, you have to download the Xbox mobile app, as you’ll use your phone to transfer Discord calls to an Xbox. Then, you have to connect your Xbox account to your Discord one. If you’ve connected them in the past, the instructions state that you’ll need to do so again to accept the new voice permissions. Once that’s done, whenever you want to talk with your Discord homies on Xbox, you can start a call on Discord, hi...

After Nanoleaf’s recent announcement of the new, limited edition Ultra Black Triangles to celebrate its 10th anniversary, it’s also running celebratory deals that run until July 24th. The smart home lighting company is discounting various starter kits (cleverly dubbed “smarter kits”) and various wall panel light expansion packs, with some getting discounts as hefty as 58 percent off. There’s a lot to browse on Nanoleaf’s site, but we’re highlighting the ones we feel are the best. The biggest price drop is on the Nanoleaf Shapes Mini Triangles, which are down to just $49.99 for a five-pack smarter kit at Amazon and Best Buy. These triangles may be tiny, but they’re easy to expand into much larger forms that are kind of cute. Nanoleaf Shapes Mini Triangle $50 $120 59% off Nanoleaf’s smaller ...

Every Wednesday and Friday, The Verge publishes our flagship podcast, The Vergecast, where our editors make sense of the week’s most important technology news. On Wednesdays, editor-at-large David Pierce leads a selection of The Verge’s expert staffers in an exploration of how gadgets and software affect our lives — and which ones you should bring into your home. David starts today’s episode with Verge managing editor Alex Cranz and news writer Mitchell Clark to chat about what it took for Mitchell to get service from Dish’s new cellular network Project Genesis and why he was rewarded with NFTs to test the connectivity in Spokane, Washington. Later in the show, David talks with senior policy reporter Makena Kelly about VPNs and why US lawmakers are urging the Federal Trade Commission to st...

Alaska Airlines says it’s becoming the first US-based airline to roll out support for electronic bag tags, small programmable devices with e-paper displays that are designed to replace the paper tags currently in use. It plans to launch the new program in phases, and it’ll initially be focused on San Jose airport in California. The airline will initially give out 2,500 of the tags for free to its frequent flyers from the airport in late 2022, TechCrunch reports, and they’ll be available to purchase by Mileage Plan members next year. Alaska Airlines intends for the tags to cut down on the amount of time its customers spend on flight admin at the airport. Rather than having to print a luggage tag in person, they can instead set up the electronic bag tag at home while checking in on the mobil...

Scorching hot weather hit the United Kingdom this week, with the temperature hitting a record-breaking 40.2 degrees Celcius (104.4 Fahrenheit) today, which led to Google Cloud and Oracle servers struggling with cooling-related outages at the companies’ data centers. Both companies blamed the high temperature for the unexpected shutdowns. Google stated that it experienced a “cooling-related failure” in one of its data centers in the UK. “This caused a partial failure of capacity in that zone, leading to VM [virtual machine] terminations and a loss of machines for a small set of our customers.” The company added that to prevent further damage, they “powered down” some of its machines. Oracle also had a similar issue, stating that the data centers are struggling with “unseasonal temperatures”...

Elon Musk and Twitter are scheduled to go to trial in October after Delaware Court of Chancery chancellor Kathaleen McCormick granted the social media platform’s plea. Representatives for Twitter and Musk appeared in court for the first time today after Twitter filed its lawsuit against Musk for attempting to back out of his acquisition of the company for $44 billion USD in April due to the platform consisting of too many bots. According to reports, the social media giant initially requested a four-day trial in September, however, Musk responded by asking for a ten-day trial in February, adding that it wouldn’t be fair to go to court so soon. Judge McCormick ruled that the hearing will be expedited and take place in October for five days — slightly favoring Twitter as they asked for a...

Thanks to the popularity of Razer‘s range of Quartz pink gaming peripherals, the company has now finally produced what fans have been asking for: a Razer Blade 14 entirely dressed in a brilliant tone. Utilizing what Razer calls a “unique anodization process,” the Quartz layer manages to keep its durability thanks to being electrochemically bonded to the aluminum chassis. Of course, the keyboard keys and touchpad are also colored in a matching tone to make the laptop truly as pink as it can get. The whole machine measures o.66 inches by 8.66 inches b 12.59 inches, making it one of the most compact 14-inch gaming laptops currently on the market. Internally, the Blade 14 Quartz is equipped with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti Laptop GPU paired with an AMD Ryzen 9 6900HX processor to give you pl...

Netflix’s upcoming ad-supported offering won’t include all of the content you can currently watch on the streaming service, Netflix executives said during the company’s Q2 2022 earnings interview video. “Today, the vast majority of what people watch on Netflix, we can include in the ad-supported tier,” Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos said. “There are some things that don’t — that we’re in conversation about with the studios on — but if we launched the product today, the members in the ad tier would have a great experience. We will clear some additional content, but certainly not all of it, but we don’t think it’s a material holdback to the business.” “It’s certainly a nice to have,” said CFO Spencer Neumann. “But it’s not a must-have. As Ted says, we can launch today without any additional con...

Uber has settled with the Department of Justice over claims that the company violated the Americans with Disabilities Act by charging disabled passengers fees when they take longer than two minutes to get into vehicles. Uber will credit double the amount of wait time fees charged to the 65,000 eligible riders, estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands or millions. In a statement, DOJ’s assistant attorney general for civil rights, Kristen Clark, said that people with disabilities “should not be made to feel like second-class citizens or punished because of their disability.” According to the DOJ, the ride-hailing company has agreed to pay $2.23 million USD to affected passengers, including an additional $1.73 million USD to over a thousand passengers who have complained to Uber regarding...