Technology

Some social platforms limit the number of times you can change your username, while others don’t let you do it at all. Instagram is a username free-for-all; you can alter your Instagram handle whenever you want, as many times as you want — within certain limits. There’s a difference between your username and your display name. The display name is on your profile below your avatar. It doesn’t need to be unique to you, and it can contain emoji and special characters. (And yes, it can also be changed — up to two times within 14 days.) Your username, on the other hand, appears at the top of your profile and at the end of your profile’s URL. It needs to be unique to you. It’s also subject to more restrictions: it can’t be longer than 30 characters and can only contain letters, numbers, periods,...

The PS5 is a giant console, the biggest in modern history, and a DIY YouTuber has now created a PS5 “Slim” model that’s a fraction more than the thickness of the plastic cases that house PS5 games. Matt Perks, known as DIY Perks on YouTube, has spent a considerable amount of time and effort to create a PS5 “Slim” that brings the size down from nearly four inches to just under an inch. The result is a slim copper console that contains the key PS5 components, and a rather giant external power supply and cooling solution that can be hidden away. Most of the thickness of the PS5 comes from its cooling heatsink and power supply, so DIY Perks relocated those into a long external unit to make the actual console far more attractive on top of a TV stand. The modded PS5 ‘Slim’ in action.Image: DIY P...

Twelve South’s latest accessory is the HiRise3, a $99.99 three-in-one charger designed to keep your iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods topped up with power. It has a very similar set of features to Belkin’s Boost↑Charge Pro 3-in-1 Wireless Charger with MagSafe with a more compact design, lower starting price, and a couple more caveats. Let’s get the caveats out of the way first. Although the HiRise3 only works with MagSafe-compatible iPhones, it’s not an MFi-certified MagSafe charger. iPhone 12 and 13 devices will still magnetically stick to it, and they’ll still charge — but only at 7.5W rather than the full 15W of charging that MagSafe is capable of. That doesn’t mean an iPhone will literally charge half as fast, but it’s not as speedy as it could be. The charger is designed to work with i...

As Alice Newcome-Beill describes herself, she’s currently the “commerce / deals writer for The Verge, 35 years old, a Scorpio, and a chaotic neutral.” With the other members of the commerce team, she helps handle The Verge’s daily deals posts and newsletters in addition to maintaining the “best deals” announcements and other buying guides across the site. Tell us about the two desks in this space. Where did you get them, and where in your home have you placed them? The desks aren’t anything special, really. They’re both identical versions of the Alex desk from Ikea and an attached drawer. They could stand to be a little more durable, but they get the job done for the most part. The secondary desk was my fiancé’s workstation before she got a job that required her to be largely on site, so i...

Last November, Uber launched a pilot of its Uber Pool replacement, dubbed UberX Share, in Miami, Florida. Today, the company says shared rides have returned to nine cities: New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Phoenix, San Diego, Portland, Indianapolis, and Pittsburgh. Like Lyft, Uber paused its Uber Pool service in March 2020 with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. Lyft Shared rides resumed in several cities over the last few months, and now, UberX Share is following a similar rollout. According to Uber senior vice president of mobility Andrew Macdonald, the feature will only match riders headed in the same direction and is designed to add no more than eight additional minutes to your trip’s arrival time. UberX Share information in the Uber app.Image: Uber The main diff...

Cloudflare experienced an outage on Tuesday morning, according to its status page. Cloudflare’s technology powers numerous other sites and services across the internet, and the outage seemed to impact a range of different sites, including Discord, Shopify, Grindr, Fitbit, and Peleton, according to Downdetector. Reports of issues started at around 2:30AM ET. Cloudflare reported that it resolved the issue at 4:06AM ET. The issues were most problematic for users of Cloudflare’s own DNS lookup service. Multiple Verge staff members found they were unable to access any websites at all during the outage as a result of using Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 DNS service. Thankfully, the fix here is simple: change your DNS configuration. I found that simply switching back to using my ISP’s default DNS settings ...