Author Archives: Carol Edwards

Marvel’s Loki doesn’t hit Disney+ until Wednesday, but critics who received early screeners shared their thoughts Sunday morningLoki might be the best MCU show yet, and after all the fun we had with WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, that’s really saying something.

Read our handy Loki primer here, and find out what critics thought below.

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While much of the United States was either sleeping or winding down their Saturday evening, SpaceX was keeping busy.

The aerospace company sent one of its Falcon 9 rockets skyward at around 12:30 a.m. ET in an overnight launch that ferried a hefty Sirius XM satellite, dubbed SXM-8, into Earth’s orbit. It was a smooth 125th mission for the company, also its 18th of 2021.

It was the third successful launch and landing for the Falcon 9 rocket that did most of the (literal) heavy lifting. Unlike NASA rockets of the past, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 booster is built to be reusable. After ferrying its payload out of Earth’s atmosphere, built-in thrusters flipped the rocket around and reoriented it for the return trip. Read more…

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As a millennial born in the late ’80s, Shaun Connors came out online long before it was a TikTok trend.

“For me, coming out online was a good, first easy way to test the waters with my friends and see ‘is this my identity?'” says Connors, chapter engagement manager with PFLAG National, an LGBTQ advocacy organization. His experience coming out online, and that of others, may help those seeking to do the same.

During his teen years, Connors tested coming out as transgender through different online platforms, such as chat forums, Facebook, and Craigslist. He stumbled upon a digital chat forum with trans people and, for the first time in his life, didn’t use his birth name. Read more…

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Whether you’re human or canine or something in between, there’s definitely an app for you. But while apps are often designed to capture your attention and sell you something, they aren’t always as helpful as they claim to be. How do you decide which to download and which to pass by? 

My nine (yes, nine) dogs and I got together to put together a list of recommended canine-focused apps, with an eye on their actual usefulness for both species. 

1Dog Whistler

Cost: Free with ads

This free iPhone app is an in-phone dog whistle, and it works on baristas as well. Dog whistles have been around since 1876. Traditionally, they are standard-looking whistles that emit a frequency so high that only dogs can hear and respond to them. They are often used in training, pairing the novel tone with a command like “Come.” Sitting in a cafe, testing out this app version, I tapped on the cute dog whistle image. Although I couldn’t hear a thing, the barista screamed, “Are you doing that?” Read more…

More about Tech, Culture, Smartphones, and Consumer Tech

TL;DR: Share photos of your special day using the SamSaidYes Premium Wedding Photo Sharing App, on sale for 50% off. As of June 6, sign up for $24.99.

Weddings are a blast — so naturally, everyone takes a ton of pictures. But you probably won’t see all of everyone’s shots. There are just too many. That’s where SamSaidYes comes in.

The SamSaidYes Premium Wedding Photo Sharing App lets the happy couple and all the guests relive the party again and again. This simple and elegant photo-sharing app is designed for couples and allows for unlimited uploads of photos and 60-second video clips.

To get started, the hosts simply register with the app or on a PC and create the name of the event. From there, they can invite guests via Whatsapp, email, or a personal QR code they can scan at the wedding. Then, guests can share and view all the photos from the event. That’s basically it. Read more…

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A Shortcut, per Apple, is “a quick way to get one or more tasks done with your apps,” and Apple’s free Shortcuts app is, in fact, a popular tool that can save you some serious time. 

There are ready-made Shortcuts, such as the popular “Speed Dial,” which gives you quick dial access to a certain contact, and “Running Late,” which can notify a contact if you’re not going to make a meetup on time. You can browse and search for these and more in the Shortcuts app’s “Gallery” section. 

The Shortcuts app also lets you create your own Shortcuts with multiple steps. An example of a DIY Shortcut from Apple: Build a “Surf Time” Shortcut that grabs the surf report, gives an ETA to the beach, and launches your surf music playlist.  Read more…

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Amazon’s Ring video doorbell service has a cop problem. The latest Ring policy change won’t fix that, but it could at least add a tiny bit more transparency to the way police departments use Ring.

Ring announced in a blog post that police departments will have to use a new feature called Request for Assistance in the company’s Neighbors mobile app to get information out of Ring users, such as videos from the device cameras. Request for Assistance posts are public by nature, attached to verified police department accounts, and cannot be deleted. If a user wants to see the entire Request for Assistance history of a particular police department, they can do that. Read more…

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Ubisoft might be on to something with Far Cry 6 in a way that its games historically haven’t been: It’s getting political. Or that’s the promise, anyway. And the promise is what matters for our purposes here.

A  blog post from Far Cry 6 narrative director Navid Khavari, released on Monday, (which was also, notably, a very offline Memorial Day in the United States) laid everything out. It amounted to a hopeful look ahead and a tacit acknowledgment of Ubisoft’s recurring struggles with mixing games and politics — something the French publisher has repeatedly said it’s not interested in doing.

“Our story is political,” the blog post states right up front. “There are hard, relevant discussions in Far Cry 6 about the conditions that lead to the rise of fascism in a nation, the costs of imperialism, forced labor, the need for free-and-fair elections, LGBTQ+ rights, and more within the context of Yara, a fictional island in the Caribbean.” Read more…

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Sifting through the masses on a dating app can be difficult and discouraging enough on its own, but nothing is worse than when you see someone you’d really rather not see while swiping. After years of it being a problem, Tinder’s introducing a solution.

After a testing phase in India, Korea, and Japan, Tinder is rolling out the ability to block personal contacts from appearing in the popular dating app’s feed of potential partners. Users can dig into the new feature by going to the settings menu and selecting the “Block Contacts” option. From there, they can go through their phone’s entire collection of contacts and block anyone they’d like to avoid for any reason. Read more…

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