Technology

With summer just around the corner, DJI is now launching its new Mini 3 Pro compact drone to gear you up for your outdoor excursions. Just like its predecessors, the new Mini 3 Pro retains its lightweight construction, keeping the total weight below 249 grams, meaning you won’t have to register it according to most countries’ regulations. With a larger 1/1.3-inch sensor, the drone is now capable of shooting 48-megapixel stills or recording videos at 4K 60fps, giving photography and videography fans plenty to work with. The rotatable gimble allows the camera to be set up in portrait mode if you’re looking to shoot for social media. Capturing capabilities aside, the Mini 3 Pro also receives a series of other new features to make your flying experience safer and more enjoyable. The drone is n...

El Salvador has doubled down on its Bitcoin initiative, making the country’s largest purchase to date as the cryptocurrency sees a significant plummet in price over the past week. On Tuesday, El Salvador president Nayib Bukele announced via Twitter that the country has now acquired another 500 Bitcoins at an average price of $30,744 USD, marking a new low in purchase price for the Central American country which now owns 2,301 BTC. At current prices, the number equates to roughly $72 million USD, which was accumulated over a series of 10 separate purchases since the nation introduced Bitcoin as legal tender back in September last year. Last October, El Salvador made its most expensive purchase yet, buying 420 BTC at an average cost of $58,800 USD, but the cryptocurrency has since dropped by...

Last fall, Google announced a key improvement to devices running its Google TV front end with personalized access so that each user in a home could have individual profiles with their own recommendations and Assistant responses. In December, that feature was delayed until “the coming months,” and it’s still nowhere to be found; however, 9to5Google reports glanceable cards for Google TV’s ambient mode screen saver that were also announced at the same time are starting to roll out. When they were announced in October, Google showed a version of the UI (the picture above) with large personalized cards scrolling across the middle of the screen. They could display information like weather, sports scores, and news or toss in shortcuts to content you might like, including podcast episodes, music,...

I have been told to blog about Senator Josh Hawley’s new copyright bill, and I do this with nothing but the greatest reluctance. Normally, I love talking about copyright! I’ll talk about copyright all day long! [Ed note: And she does.] But writing this post is agony, because the thought of giving this absolutely asinine piece of legislation any attention is killing me on the inside. This is a deeply unserious bill. There is not a line in it that is meant to pass muster. It is knowingly in violation of the Constitution, and an insult to the democratic process. In brief, the bill is targeted at the Walt Disney Company, also known as, a person that (i) has a market capitalization of more than $150,000,000,000; and (ii)(I) is classified under North American Industry Classification System code ...

Tesla is recalling 130,000 cars due to an issue causing the CPU in vehicles’ infotainment systems to overheat during fast charging, potentially making the car’s touchscreen malfunction or go completely blank (via The Associated Press). The electric car maker started rolling out an over-the-air update (OTA) on May 3rd to fix the issue on affected vehicles, which include the 2022 Model 3 and Y, as well as the 2021 and 2022 Model X and S. “During fast-charging or preparation for fast-charging, the infotainment central processing unit (“CPU”) may not cool sufficiently to prevent higher than expected temperatures, which may cause the CPU to slow processing or restart,” the recall notice from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) reads. “Slower processing or restarted proces...

YouTube is launching gifted memberships in beta, and they’ll be available for select channels beginning Wednesday. Memberships are YouTube’s take on Twitch’s subscriptions, which viewers can use to show financial support for creators and get access to certain perks like custom emoji. Twitch users have been able to buy gift subscriptions for some time, but if you’ve wanted to buy gift memberships to other fans of a YouTube channel, you haven’t been able to. The memberships gifting beta will be available to a “small group of creators” to start and will be expanded to more “over the next several months,” YouTube says on a page about the feature. Channels interested in trying the feature can fill out this Google Form, though you’ll need to already be eligible to enable memberships in the first...

One of the questions about Elon Musk’s pending purchase of Twitter is what will happen to Donald Trump. The former president’s account was banned on January 8th, 2021, “due to the risk of further incitement of violence,” while Jack Dorsey was still the company’s CEO. During an interview conducted remotely during the Financial Times’ Future of the Car conference and livestreamed on YouTube, the current Tesla and SpaceX CEO responded to a direct question about the ban and what will happen when he owns Twitter. With the caveat that “I don’t own Twitter yet, so this is not, like, a thing that will definitely happen,” Musk said, “I guess the answer is that I, I would reverse the permaban,” citing a shared opinion with his text messaging buddy Dorsey that permabans should not exist except ...

It seemed like AMD and Nvidia were living in a fantasy world. They’d throw out prices like $329 or $479 for a midrange graphics card, knowing you’d actually pay hundreds more by the time pandemic middlemen had their cut. But today, AMD seems to be waking up. With the recently announced $1,099 AMD Radeon RX 6950 XT, $549 Radeon 6750 XT, and $399 Radeon 6650 XT, the company is finally pricing its graphics cards based on the market instead of creating a fake MSRP. When you combine that with the fact AMD graphics cards have nearly come back down to sane prices in general, it means there’s a chance in hell you might actually be able to buy these new ones for the price that AMD is quoting. Image: AMD That’s good — because price is by far the most interesting thing about the cards AMD is announci...

Activision is adding a wild crossover to Call of Duty: Warzone — the giant monsters Godzilla and Kong will appear in a new limited-time mode that kicks off tomorrow, May 11th. In the new mode, called Operation Monarch, players will compete to be the last team standing as Godzilla and Kong roam the island. While the monsters “usually don’t get too aggressive,” at certain points during a match, they might “become enraged and recklessly attack” in a “Titan Frenzy,” according to a blog post by Activision’s James Mattone. “After receiving a Titan Frenzy alert, an Operator has two options: tactically withdraw (run away) from these dangerous creatures or attempt to suppress them by dealing direct damage,” Mattone says. If you do enough damage to either monster during a Titan Frenzy or earn enough...

In early 2019, Michele Turner sat down for dinner with her colleague Grant Erickson. Joining them at the restaurant in Silicon Valley’s Woodside were two of their counterparts from Amazon and two from Apple. Turner and Erickson both worked for Google. The hosts of this dinner party were Tobin Richardson and John Osborne from the Zigbee Alliance. The aim of the evening was simple: fix the smart home. Turner, the senior director of Google Smart Home Ecosystem, and Erickson, then a software engineer at Google, had agreed to meet with their competitors to find a solution to the major paint points in the smart home: reliability, connectivity, setup, and “the multi-platform problem.” While this was not the first conversation between the companies, it was a significant step forward in an ongoing ...

Apple on Tuesday announced that it is finally discontinuing the iPod, after more than 20 years, with the latest seventh-generation Touch to be the last model ever released. The tech giant shared the news on its website, stating that the music-playing device has essentially become unnecessary among Apple’s extensive lineup of products that are capable of playing music, including the iPhone, iPad and HomePod Mini, among others. “Music has always been part of our core at Apple, and bringing it to hundreds of millions of users in the way iPod did impact more than just the music industry — it also redefined how music is discovered, listened to, and shared,” said Greg Joswiak, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing, in a statement. “Today, the spirit of iPod lives on. We’ve integra...