McDonald’s is doing what a lot of other companies love to do: cash in on nostalgia. Many things from the ’80s and ’90s are back these days. Now “Mickey D’s” has done something pretty cool: an adult happy meal. It’s a collaboration with a secretive streetwear brand called Cactus Plant Flea Market. Even better, it still comes with a toy. Nicholas Vega at CNBC gives us the details. The Cactus Plant Flea Market Box is a collaboration between McDonald’s and the famous streetwear brand, and will roll out to participating stores starting on Oct. 3. Unlike the smaller menu items…
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Ice cream is one of the best desserts out there. There are enough flavors being made all over that there is truly something for everyone’s tastes. But, like most food, cultural and geographic differences can change what is popular. We can now see, thanks to the Top agency, how each state in the US stacks up against the others. Top Data team analyzed digital commerce trends in 2022 to determine the most searched ice cream flavors in America. Looking through Top’s analysis of search data, we get some interesting results. Rocky Road is quite popular, along with Strawberry. One I…
Minecraft, one of the most popular and longest-lasting games out there, made an interesting rule change earlier this year: no integrations with NFTs would be allowed anymore. To many (or even most) players of Minecraft, this would likely be no big deal. But to a few who parlayed their servers into a play-to-earn model, the results would be disastrous. That is how I came across this fascinating story by Neirin Gray Desai at Rest of World. Desai recounts the story of how one savvy player established his own server, used NFTs to create an in-world currency, and make money doing…
Since the invention of disk storage, a drive with spinning platters has been the standard in nearly all computers. Then something interesting happened in the early 2000s: storage on chips became cheap enough to replace a “spinning” hard drive. Hence, Solid State Drives (SSDs) were born. But were they better than the old standard? Andrew Cunningham at Ars Technica has the rundown. Over their first four years of service, SSDs fail at a lower rate than HDDs overall, but the curve looks basically the same—few failures in year one, a jump in year two, a small decline in year three,…
Many TV shows and movies have plots involving deadly asteroids plummeting straight for Earth. Us humans here on Earth have been as helpless as the dinosaurs. Now, we’re finally doing something about it and standing up to these Near Earth Objects. Earlier today NASA DART completed a nearly-year-long mission to deliberately slam a satellite into an asteroid. The goal? To see if we can create significant change in the object and protect the planet. Andrew Tarantola at Engadget has more of our planetary defenses. Results and data from the collision are still coming in but NASA ground control confirms that the…
In all the years of Star Wars movies and television shows, one thing has remained a constant: James Earl Jones. The actor who has appeared in countless movies throughout his career is the defining voice of Darth Vader. At age 91, Jones has agreed to call it quits. It makes sense that would want to hang up his Vader mask. But who will replace him? A computer, of course. [Lucasfilm] has enlisted the assistance of Respeecher, a Ukrainian startup that uses AI technology to craft new conversations from revitalized old voice recordings. Respeecher’s relationship with Lucasfilm began with the Disney+…
Facebook Meta isn’t the only game in town when it comes to virtual reality. In an approach based in… reality, Sony is developing their second PSVR hardware for the application people would actually use: playing games. Sony released its first edition of the Playstation VR add-on to the PS4 back in 2016. While it was not a massive success, it was good enough to do what they promised. PSVR allowed for immersive gaming using only a pair of Move controllers, the PS Camera, and your existing PS4. Out the door, the entire kit (minus the PS4) was only $300. This…
Smart home devices are great until they’re not. The earliest device to get smart and go mainstream is the thermostat, thanks to Nest. The device is sleek and easy to use. Over time many others have come to the market. But now we see the downside: a power company in Colorado locked out their customers from adjusting their thermostats during a heat wave. Justine Calma at The Verge has more. When the utility adjusts a customer’s thermostat, the customer typically has the option to opt-out. But, “On rare occasions, system emergencies may cause a control event that cannot be overridden,”…
Star Wars has always been a cash cow. However, in the Disney-ownership era, there’s been hits and misses. An early risk they took with their newly-purchased franchise was Rogue One. This was going to be a non-Skywalker side story. Nobody knew what to expect, but it turned out to be fantastic. On the heels of the Andor TV show releasing on Disney+ tomorrow, Shirley Li at The Atlantic looks back on this odd duck of a Star Wars movie. It primarily follows an ensemble of new characters, none of them named Skywalker, Solo, or Palpatine. The Force is mentioned but…
AT&T plugging holes in its G5 network by placing winning bids on “mid-range” bandwidth. These frequencies allow faster-than-4G speed, but now they seem to have pulled a fast one. After confirming multiple times about phones that will support their 3.45 GHz spectrum, they’ve now come out and said JKLOL MY BAD! Only brand new phones will get it. Womp womp. Kevin Purdy at Ars Technica has more. The carrier told CNET on August 23 that it would release a software update that would allow phones like the iPhone 12 and 13, the Pixel 6, Galaxy S21 models, and low-cost Motorola phones…
If I were to ask you “Remember the ‘S’ from school?” I bet more than a handful would answer “absolutely.” If you don’t know what I’m talking about, it is an angular letter S that is drawn with six vertical lines and then connecting them with some diagonal lines. But where did it come from? Over on YouTube, LEMMiNO has gone down the rabbit hole to find its origins. I loved watching this. The “Universal S” is a really interesting design because anyone can draw it. I, who is not artistically skilled in any way, used to draw it all…
While we’re running head-first into a global climate crisis, we might as well unearth some interesting pieces of history. In Europe’s Danube River, the water level is so low, that WWII Nazi warships are resurfacing along with their thousands of onboard explosives. Dipo Faloyin at Vice has more. Twenty explosive-filled German warships have resurfaced after a historic drought pushed the waters of Europe’s second-longest river to its lowest levels in a century. The sunken World War II warships, part of Nazi Germany’s Black Sea Fleet, were discovered along the Serbian stretch of the Danube River. The ships are believed to…
You can’t keep a good classic down. Leave it to the Spielberg movie that made everyone afraid of the water to make big bucks in a limited return to theaters. Recently national theater chains held a National Cinema Day event and movie tickets were a cool $3 to see a movie. Jaws ended up being a big draw. David Pierce at The Verge has more. Playing in theaters around the country, the movie made about $2.6 million over the three-day weekend. That put it 10th for the weekend. On a per-theater basis, Jaws actually outperformed every other movie in theaters…
Stow, Massachusettes is in a bit of a crisis. The small town that sits about 30 miles east of Boston has had the most Massachusetts of slights committed against it: the closing of its Dunkin’ Donuts locations. WBZ’s Matt Shearer reports that where there were once two locations in the small town, there are now zero. Shearer interviews various people. One notable local is frustrated he now has to drive a lot further for his Dunkin’ fix: a mile and a half.
The border of the US and Mexico has a smuggling problem. One that causes hundreds of pounds of meat to illicitly flow into the US. This high-value item is definitely unexpected. It’s bologna. Madeleine Aggeler at Texas Monthly tells us more. The bologna arrives in darkness. Hundreds of pounds cross into the U.S. from Mexico at once. Rolls are stuffed into the backs of SUVs, sewn into car seats, shoved into spare tires, or hidden in suitcases beneath heaps of shirts and socks. Once, in El Paso, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer drilled into a car’s bumper and…
For all the hullabaloo in Apple’s announcements last week, one key item was also announced: the iPhone 14 in the US will not come with a spot for a physical SIM card. eSIM, a software-only equivalent, will be the only way to go from now on. Is this a smart move on Apple’s part? Eli Blumenthal has some reporting from some carriers that say “absolutely”. “I think it’s transformational,” Ahmed Khattak, founder and CEO of US Mobile, a mobile virtual network operator that offers service on Verizon and T-Mobile’s respective networks. “I think the fact that it even happened ……
On the eve of the iPhone 14 announcement, I thought it would be good to pause and look back on this fantastic comparison the folks at Simple Ghar mocked up. The team over there went through and compared photos from Samsung, Apple, and other smartphones going back to 2000. To compare the capabilities of camera phones over the years, SimpleGhar’s experts gathered data on the tech specs of the best-selling devices and those that made a significant leap in image quality. Then, we created mock-up images of the effect each camera phone would have on a consistent set of sample…
A new entry from the “we never asked for this” department. LG has announced its Arts Lab with this bonehead feature: you can display, buy, and sell NFTs directly on the television. Emma Roth at The Verge brings us this gem of an idea. For now, only users in the US with an LG TV that runs webOS 5.0 or later can access the app, which is available to download from the TV’s home screen. Through the portal, you can buy and sell digital works made available through LG’s NFT drops. The first one of these drops is set to…
The early days of the internet lasted a long time. Notably, the start of people getting online differed from childhood, to something teenagers tried out, to people only getting a computer in the home past 2000. It wasn’t like the iPhone where people all got it within a compressed timeframe. Because of that long time, the “wild west” of the internet remained so for nearly a decade. At the time this new technology was beginning to creep into our homes, this time capsule of a video, Internet Power, was created. And thanks to Andy Baio, it has been digitized and…
Apple, like most companies, has most, if not all manufacturing taking place in China. While this has been debated hotly in the US for decades if it’s good to do, COVID and the inability to make things have hit the tech sector hard. Apple is now doing something about it. Arnold Zafra at The Mac Observer has the ways Apple is working to make sure they can continue to build at scale. According to Nikkei Asia, Apple suppliers Luxshare Precision Industry and Foxconn started test production of the Apple Watch in northern Vietnam. With the level of sophistication that making…
If there is one subset of PC hobbyists that can simultaneously become a rabbit hole and an obsession, it’s those who are enamored with mechanical keyboards. These fans create custom keyboards, cobbled together from bespoke keycaps and individually suited switches in order to make their perfect input device. It is a fun hobby and can be an expensive one. For those looking to level up, Scharon Harding at Ars Technica has the story of an awesome keyboard in Elvish, the fictional language from Lord of the Rings. The Drop + The Lord of the Rings Dwarvish and Elvish Keyboards ($169) are the first to gain official Lord…
In an event that wasn’t leaked beforehand or tipped off to any insiders, T-Mobile made a big announcement last week. The company, which merged with Sprint recently, will partner with Starlink to fill in gaps within their coverage map. The coolest part? It will work with existing cell phones without the need to buy special equipment. Eli Blumenthal at CNet has more. …with this program T-Mobile users should be able to connect to the SpaceX satellites through a “new network, broadcast from Starlink’s satellites using T-Mobile’s midband spectrum nationwide.” Although the company hasn’t yet offered specifics on where the network…
With the rise in remote learning, partially due to COVID, there have been a fair number of companies working to get in on this new way of education. Many colleges and universities have purchased service agreements with electronic proctoring companies in order to achieve some form of honesty amongst test-takers. However, the means by which these companies are conducting themselves have run afoul of the law. Monica Chin at The Verge has a story about one student who fought back. Chemistry student Aaron Ogletree sat for an online test in the spring 2021 semester. Ogletree was asked to show the…
Coffee that is brewed by laser beams. What better combination could there be? Well, fantasy is becoming a reality thanks to Anna Rosa Ziefuss. She is a German scientist who has invented a speedy way to make cold-brew coffee. Total time? Three minutes! Jesus Diaz at FastCompany has the scoop. Ziefuss and her colleagues used a stock, ultrashort pulse laser from the lab, arranging a series of optical lenses to enlarge the beam and point it at a vessel that contained the coffee powder. While regular cold brew sits undisturbed for several hours, in Ziefuss’ method, the solution gets stirred,…
The phrase “OK, Boomer” is nearly played out, but still makes a point to an older generation about the way to do things. Playing on this, Bronwyn Petry at MoneyWise makes a list attempting to equate “old things” with “don’t do this anymore” or “this is a good skill to have”. The weirdness of Petry’s list is that it tries to ride a line between “things we don’t need” and “things you should still know how to do”. However, it is lobbed into a single list. Many of these are things modernized by current technology while others are things that…
Notable and famous people come from nearly every town in the world. Sure, you likely know some famous people in your area, but most people don’t know anyone just outside that area. Now, Topi Tjukanov has gone ahead and made an interactive map letting you zoom in and out to see all the famous people from any area. Using data from Morgane Laouenan et al., the map is showing birthplaces of the most “notable people” around the world. Data has been processed to show only one person for each unique geographic location with the highest notability rank. The map interacts…
Google launched a new campaign two weeks ago that looks to do two things: The first is to tout how far RCS has come since Google began pushing it a few years ago. The second is to shame Apple into supporting it on iOS. Google will fail. That isn’t simply my opinion. While it is true I am an iOS user and I do prefer Apple’s products above Google’s, I also have seen this before. Let us hop in the Delorean and go back to 2004 when Real Networks (remember them!?!) waged a similar campaign against Apple, but that time…
Atari was a fascinating company, responsible for both the rise of home video game consoles in the US and also the market crash of the same industry. The legendary 2600 was everywhere in the early 80s and there was certainly no shortage of software. The company may be a shell of itself these days, but Ben Edwards at How To Geek has a great interview with its founder Nolan Bushnell. When it came time to develop and release a more advanced home video game console with cartridges (the 2600), Atari needed capital, and Bushnell sold his company to Warner Communications.…
Weird Al is one of those national treasures of incredible talent. The man has been making parody music for over four decades and he hasn’t stopped. Most musical eras contain clever parodies of his and original music that easily gets stuck in your head. Recently, there’s a video has hit YouTube with an entire alternate take of his Eat It music video. The three-and-a-half-minute song is here in full, but you can see the camera work is a continuous take. It is obvious that this film would be cut and spliced with other takes and scenes used in the music…
There’s the saying “Better late than never” but this definitely takes it to a whole new level. At the Sheffield Cathedral, a building that is 800 years old, now has finally received back its 300-year book loan from a patron. David Kessen has more over at The Star. Now the book, The Faith and Practice of a Church of England Man, is set to go on display at the church, which was well known for its library until Geogian times. The Reverend Canon Keith Farrow, vice dean and canon missioner at the cathedral, said when it was still a church it…