Technology

During day two of the weekend-long Star Wars Celebration event, we got a first look at the sequel to Jedi: Fallen Order, called Jedi: Survivor. It’s expected to launch in 2023 for the PS5, Xbox Series X / S, and PC. Cal Kestis, who happens to be the galaxy’s least interesting Jedi (especially when Cere Junda is right there), is back, kicking space fascist ass with the help of his extremely cute droid helper BD-1. The Jedi: Fallen Order series follows Cal as he works to rebuild the Jedi after the infamous Order 66. The sequel takes place five years after the original game and is once again described as a “third person, narrative-driven action-adventure game.” Director Stig Asmussen says the sequel will include some next-gen features as well, most notably ray-tracing support and faster load ...

Workers at the Cumberland Mall Apple store will no longer hold a union election in June, according to a report from Bloomberg. The Communications Workers of America (or CWA), the union attempting to organize the store, says it withdrew the request to hold an election because “Apple’s repeated violations of the National Labor Relations Act have made a free and fair election impossible.” The vote, which was scheduled to begin on June 2nd, would’ve been the first union election at a US Apple store had it gone through. Now, that title will go to a store in Maryland, barring that petition also being withdrawn. Workers at the Towson Town Center store are set to start voting in person on June 15th. The union says Apple intimidated workers and interfered with organization In the runup to the now-c...

The last few years have been incredibly hard for almost everyone, so now that summer is about here, it’s a good idea to step outside and decompress a bit with whatever activity suits you best — whether it’s a favorite sport, a long hike, overnight camping, bird-watching, bicycling, or just sitting on a beach and watching the waves come in. As we’ve done for the last couple of years, we asked some of our colleagues from The Verge what they were planning to take with them in their outdoor escapes. Here are some of their recommendations, including outdoor tech, camera gear, rugged footwear, and gadgets that help them take it easy. Outdoor tech Months predominantly spent indoors did wonders for my battery anxiety. Not only was I using my phone less thanks to having constant easy access to a ta...

Analogue Pocket’s long-awaited 1.1 update will finally be arriving in July, Analogue announced in a short blog post on Friday. The Analogue Pocket OS v1.1 release will include beta versions of the Library, Memories, and FPGA development features, according to the blog post. You can read more about the first two features in our article from October; the Library will be a huge historical archive about retro games, while Memories will let you capture and load save states as well as capture screenshots. It seems like the development feature will allow developers to take advantage of the Analogue’s second FPGA (field-programmable gate array). “Pocket is designed to be as easy as possible to develop and port FPGA cores to,” Analogue says on its website. “We added a second dedicated FPGA just for...

Samsung is reportedly scaling back the number of phones it’s planning on producing in 2022, from 310 million to 280 million, according to SamMobile, which cites a report from Korean outlet Maeil Business News. In absolute terms, that’s still quite a lot of phones, but it’s a relatively sharp decrease from the company’s original goal (and from the reported number of phones it and its partners produced last year). It seems that there may be a trend of manufacturers preparing for the economy to get worse before it gets better. Reportedly, the lowered production targets will affect phones across its lineup, from low-end models to flagships. In a way, cutting the production of its less expensive phones sounds counter-intuitive — wouldn’t more people turn to those during an economic downturn? Bu...

Google’s latest Chromebook update adds a feature that tells you if your USB-C cable has limited functionality, the company announced Friday. USB-C cables can have widely varying capabilities, offering things like different charging and data transfer speeds on a cable-by-cable basis, so this new Chromebook feature seems like it could be a useful tool to help troubleshoot issues. “Eligible Chromebooks will notify you if the USB-C cable you’re using won’t support displays, or isn’t performing ideally for your laptop,” Google says in a blog post. “You’ll also get a notification if the cable you’re using doesn’t support the high performance USB4 / Thunderbolt 3 standards that your Chromebook does.” The new feature is coming first to Chromebooks with 11th or 12th Gen Intel Core CPUs that support...

Chrome OS isn’t the most option-packed operating system around, but there are some things you can do to make your Chromebook’s desktop look and work the way you want. Ready? Customize your Chromebook’s wallpaper First, let’s tackle your desktop’s basic appearance: Right-click anywhere on your Chromebook’s desktop and select Set wallpaper from the menu that appears. Click on one of Google’s categories to see a selection of preset images, or click the My Images option to choose an image from your own local storage. If you want your wallpaper to change to a new image every day, click the Change Daily button that’s available at the top of any of Google’s category pages. (That option, unfortunately, isn’t currently available with your own images.) You can choose from several categories of wallp...

Spice DAO, the cryptocurrency collective that bought a script bible for Alejandro Jodorowsky’s never-made Dune adaptation, is apparently still figuring out what to make of its success. Earlier this week, the collective stopped working with a core member who posted virulently hateful messages as part of a self-described internet art project. Now, the project’s originator has suggested Spice DAO will back off its quixotic goal of creating a community-owned media powerhouse — but it’s not clear the group is actually changing any plans. Towards the end of 2021, the decentralized autonomous organization (or DAO) raised millions of dollars to purchase a rare copy of Jodorowsky’s Dune bible, then found itself with a sizable leftover treasury after winning the auction. Its backers voted to launch ...

Sony will broadcast almost half an hour of PlayStation trailers and announcements during its State of Play livestream next Thursday at 3PM PT (6PM ET), the company announced today. It’s yet to announce any specific games that are set to appear at the event but says it’ll include “exciting reveals from our third-party partners” as well as a look at “several” games in development for its upcoming virtual reality headset, the PlayStation VR2. News of the livestream follows an announcement at Sony’s investor day that it plans to have over 20 “major” titles available for the VR headset at launch (the date of which is yet to be announced). There’s currently just one confirmed game for Sony’s upcoming headset, a spinoff of the Horizon franchise called Horizon Call of the Mountain, so hopefully th...

Valve has responded to a campaign from Team Fortress 2 players who want it to fix the game’s bot infestation that has made it almost unplayable in recent years. “TF2 community, we hear you!” the company tweeted from the official Team Fortress 2 Twitter account. “We love this game and know you do, too. We see how large this issue has become and are working to improve things.” Currently, Team Fortress 2 is suffering from huge numbers of automated players on its public servers that are ruining the game for legitimate users. According to IGN, bots will post endless spam in chat, snipe other players with unflinching accuracy, and even crash servers entirely. Last year, podcast Reply All dedicated an entire episode to the issues plaguing the nearly 15-year old game. TF2 community, we hear you! W...