Author Archives: Carol Edwards

Pink wants to help.

As the struggle continues to beat back Australia’s raging bushfires – yet another glaring example of how climate change is reshaping our planet in real time – a growing number of public figures are stepping up to offer their assistance. The pop singer Pink did so herself early Saturday, pledging in a tweet to donate $500,000 “directly to local fire services.”

“My heart goes out to our friends and family in Oz,” the tweet reads, referring to the bushfire-stricken country by one of its nicknames. Pink’s work has resonated in Australia over the years, with the singer having posted big sales and top-of-the-charts recordings multiple times. She’s also done a lot of good there, and even donated $250,000 back in 2009 after a smaller bushfire broke out. Read more…

More about Australia, Donations, Pink, Bushfires, and Social Good

Finding more juice for your electric car might be something of a scavenger hunt in certain states  across the U.S.

A new study from the nonprofit Pew Trusts found that public electric charging stations are harder to come by in certain parts of the country. States like Alaska and North Dakota only have 26 and 36 public chargers, respectively. That’s throughout the entire state. Electric vehicle owners might want to look elsewhere for new homes.

California crushes it as the only state with more than 4,000 stations. Throughout the Golden State you’ll find a whooping 22,620 stations to recharge your EV. Read more…

More about Electric Vehicles, Charging Stations, Tech, and Transportation

The promo looks legit. The timing lines up. Keep those salt shakers handy, but it sure looks like we know when the next Samsung Unpacked event is happening.

There’s an allegedly leaked promo floating around that, if accurate, confirms a Feb. 11 date for our first look at the next round of new Samsung products. The promo comes courtesy of Max Weinbach, from XDA Developers. (Though Weinbach also points out that M. Brandon Lee found it first.)

What does it mean? Why are the two As in the word Galaxy replaced by bulges that appear to be hiding squarish objects? Is this a hint of what the next Unpacked might bring – a first look at two new devices, perhaps? – or is it just some vague promo mystery with no obvious conclusions? Read more…

More about Samsung, Samsung Unpacked, Tech, and Big Tech Companies

Going down the list of most popular car purchases in each state, it’s easy to see that 2019 was the year of the pickup truckAgain. 

Although hybrid or electric pickups aren’t available yet, models from Tesla, Rivian, and Ford are coming soon and hoping to cash in on America’s love affair with a sturdy workhorse. If the truck-obsessed public can hop onto electric, things look promising.

Car shopping website ISeeCars.com looked through 10.9 million new car sales throughout the U.S. in 2019 and found Ford’s F-150 was the most popular new car in 22 states. (It’s even more popular as a used car.) That’s followed by the Chevrolet Silverado, GMC Sierra 1500, and Toyota Tacoma as the next most popular vehicles. Yup, those are all pickup trucks. Read more…

More about Tesla, Electric Pickup, Cybertruck, Ford F 150, and Tech

Most video game fans are familiar with Portal and it’s numbered sequel, but developer Valve originally had a different idea for following up its unexpected 2007 hit.

F-Stop, as the canceled game was reportedly called, would have ditched the original game’s portal gun for the Aperture Camera. (Aperture is a reference to the fictional corporation behind the portal gun, among other things.) Players would have used the camera to snap photos that would let them re-position objects in the world and tackle perspective-based puzzles.

The previously unreported Valve project is the subject of a new YouTube series called Exposure, from the indie studio Lunch House Software. The first episode, which released just before Christmas, takes a look at what would have been F-Stop‘s “base mechanics,” with more episodes to come. Read more…

More about Portal, Valve Corporation, Entertainment, and Gaming

Surprise, surprise — Google News is done hosting digital recreations of print magazines.

The announcement was made via email to people who subscribe to any of the PDF magazines available through Google’s service, Android Police reported on Friday. Subscribers who’ve paid for content beyond 2019 will get refunds.

While magazines will no longer get to host their issues on Google’s services, let us not forget that most publications have websites where you can read their content, or even apps if you’re into that kind of thing. No need to go through Google at all.

Perhaps that’s why the service has been shuffled around and was eventually shuttered. It launched as a standalone app called Google Play Magazines in 2012, then folded into Google Play Newsstand in 2013. That was discontinued in 2018 and magazines were dumped onto Google News. Read more…

More about Google, Magazines, Tech, Big Tech Companies, and Media Industry

There are some people who would advise against having a poop emoji engraved on your AirPods case. To those people I say: You lack imagination.

Apple extended its free product engraving service to AirPods cases back in 2019, but it was limited to text only at the time. Now, buyers also have the option of choosing between a limited selection of emoji for their engraving.

It looks like Engadget was the first to spot this change. It’s an easy thing to do for anyone who’s placing an order. Simply click the “Personalize it for free” link near the top of the page and follow the straightforward instructions from there. Read more…

More about Apple, Emoji, Airpods, Airpods Case, and Tech

Siva is tiny toddler who can successfully ride a hoverboard. Legendary.

Look at her go, making turns, bending down to pick things up and hand them to people, rolling over to her sibling to give him a high five. It’s a spectacle, to say the least, especially considering some kids don’t even begin to walk until they’re 16 months old.

Siva has some older kids in the house with her and has been watching them ride the hoverboard, which made her curious to try it herself, the video’s description says. Read more…

More about Hoverboards, Culture, Kids, and Consumer Tech

The decade we just mercifully exited may have left you drained for many reasons, but few things became more exhausting by the end of the 2010s than Elon Musk’s Twitter account.

The enigmatic Tesla and SpaceX CEO spent the past several years building his personal brand, in part, by being weird on Twitter. Most wealthy CEOs have the good sense to either stay off social media entirely or use their accounts to post very unremarkable things. Tim Cook either posts pictures from his travels or congratulates Auburn sports teams on their big wins. It’s a perfectly bland online presence. 

Musk is a little more plugged into modern internet culture and, as such, refuses to tweet like that. He wants to post memes. He wants to go viral. In fact, he frequently does, but not always for the right reasons. Musk’s tweets have landed him in legal trouble multiple times.  Read more…

More about Twitter, Tesla, Elon Musk, Tweets, and Elon Musk Tesla

Words matter — especially to those at the American Dialect Society. So it spoke volumes when the top linguists who make up the group voted to crown the singular pronoun “they” as the Word of the Decade at its annual meeting on Friday.

The other contenders in the category included #BlackLivesMatter, climate, #MeToo, meme, emoji, opiod crisis, selfie, and woke, according to the society’s official Twitter account. It initially came down to a runoff between “meme” (at 110 votes) and “they” (128), with only singular votes cast for “emoji” and “opioid crisis.” Read more…

More about Lgbtq, Words, They, Social Good, and Web Culture