Technology

The price of Dogecoin has jumped about 27% following the news that Elon Musk has purchased Twitter. The cryptocurrency, based on the meme doge, has been endorsed by the Tesla CEO in the past. Musk has even teased the idea that Dogecoin may be accepted as a form of payment for Tesla purchases sometime down the line. Many Dogecoin owners are hopeful that Musk will continue to fuel the coin’s growth. Founded in 2013 as a joke coin, Dogecoin currently ranks as the 10th-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization. Twitter, meanwhile, offers an option for users to tip creators in Bitcoin. It’s possible that Musk will introduce the same feature for Dogecoin. “Elon has openly supported Dogecoin and previously talked favorably of this token,” Teong Hng, chief executive of Hong Kong-based crypto...

For years, designer Zach Gage has been enamored with the works of famed Japanese game publisher Nikoli. The company is best known for popularizing sudoku, and is renowned for its minimalist takes on puzzles like nonograms (which Nintendo fans might recognize as Picross). For Gage, creating that kind of clean, straightforward, and accessible puzzle was a long sought-after goal. He describes it as a “kind of obsession,” one that “feels like a really great design challenge because it’s so hard to do.” He tried plenty of ideas but eventually landed on a solution: the humble crossword. This week Gage and partner Jack Schlesinger are releasing Knotwords on iOS, Android, Mac, and PC. It’s a game built on the premise that the most interesting part of a crossword puzzle isn’t actually all of the cl...

What’s next for Twitter and Elon Musk? Contributors: Verge Staff First, we learned that Elon Musk had purchased enough shares of Twitter to become its largest individual shareholder. The company announced Musk would take a seat on its board of directors, but within the space of a week, that plan unraveled, and Musk informed the board he would not accept the position. After a tumultuous week, Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal announced that Musk declined the board seat, which released the world’s richest human from his commitment to not acquire more than 14.9 percent of the company’s shares. In a letter to Twitter employees, Agrawal said, “There will be distractions ahead, but our goals and priorities remain unchanged.” He also asked employees to “tune out the noise.” It didn’t take long before the...

Sony will begin rolling out support for the Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) feature for the PS5 via an update released this week, the company announced Monday. “On HDMI 2.1 VRR-compatible TVs and PC monitors, VRR dynamically syncs the refresh rate of the display to the PS5 console’s graphical output,” Sony’s Hideaki Nishino said in a blog post. “This enhances visual performance for PS5 games by minimizing or eliminating visual artifacts, such as frame pacing issues and screen tearing.” The feature will be available globally. A handful of games will get VRR support “in the coming weeks,” according to Nishino’s blog: Astro’s Playroom Call of Duty: Vanguard Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War Destiny 2 Devil May Cry 5 Special Edition Dirt 5 Godfall Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered Marvel’s Spider-Man:...

The Brooklyn Public Library (BPL) is counteracting a ban on certain books by letting anyone in the US aged 13 to 21 apply for a digital library card. This gives teens and young adults, regardless of their location in the United States, access to the library’s entire ebook collection. The initiative, called Books Unbanned, is fighting what the BPL describes as an “increasingly coordinated and effective effort to remove books tackling a wide range of topics from library shelves.” According to the American Library Association (ALA), a total of 729 books were challenged in 2021, meaning a person or group attempted to ban these titles from public libraries. This led to 1,597 challenges or removals of individual books, most of which were written by or about Black or LGBTQIA+ people and targeted ...

Meta wants people to be able to try out its hardware with hands-on experiences. The parent company of Facebook has announced that it will be opening its first retail store come May. The Meta Store will be located on the company’s Burlingame, California campus, right near the Reality Labs HQ, where employees are working on building out the metaverse. In the 1,550-square-foot space, customers can take part in exciting new demos, such as making calls to retail associates with Portal and exploring the immersion of VR with a first-of-its-kind immersive Quest 2 experience. The Meta Store will feature a curved LED wall-to-wall display that showcases what customers participating in a Quest 2 demo see in-headset. After testing out games such as Beat Saber, GOLF+, Real VR Fishing or Supernatural, cu...

Meta is launching its first hardware retail store on its campus in Burlingame, California. The store, which opens May 9th, will let visitors try out and buy Meta’s Portal videophones and Quest virtual reality headsets. They’ll also be able to demo the Ray-Ban Stories smart glasses that debuted last year and get help ordering them online. Meta’s store will include a demo area for Portal where users can test its video calling features with a store employee. There’s a space to test several Quest 2 demos, including Beat Saber, GOLF+, Real VR Fishing, and Supernatural, and visitors will take home a 30-second mixed reality clip showing them playing a game. They can also try on different styles of the Ray-Ban glasses, which capture and share video with built-in cameras, and test their capabilitie...

Elon Musk raged at the head of the Saudi sovereign wealth fund for failing to back his bid to take Tesla private in 2018, complaining that he was being thrown “under the bus,” according to newly disclosed text messages. “I am deeply offended,” Musk wrote to Yasir Al-Rumayyan, governor of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), on August 12, 2018. The texts were sent a few days after Musk shocked the financial world by tweeting that he was considering taking Tesla private at $420 a share, adding “funding secured.” The now infamous tweet triggered a lawsuit from Tesla shareholders, who claim that Musk lied about having the money required to delist Tesla from the stock exchange and take it private. As part of the lawsuit, a series of texts between Musk, shareholders, board...