20 great Green Monday sales on cool gadgets, tech, and fun toys

20 great Green Monday sales on cool gadgets, tech, and fun toys

If you somehow managed to miss out on both Black Friday and Cyber Monday and thought those were your only chances to score sweet deals before the holidays, you are mistaken. There’s no need to panic: you’ve still got another day of discounts awaiting on Green Monday. 

Falling on the second Monday of December, Green Monday is the biggest online shopping day after Cyber Monday. It’s also when you come to the realization that you only have 10 shipping days left before Christmas arrives.

Below, we’ve rounded up some of the top Green Monday deals we could find in the Mashable Shop on a variety of different products, suitable for all budgets. Just be sure to enter the code GREENMONDAY20 at checkout to score the best deal. Read more…

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Nearly 800,000 applications for birth certificate copies exposed online for anyone to access

Nearly 800,000 applications for birth certificate copies exposed online for anyone to access

At this point, it’s getting harder to determine which pieces of your personal data haven’t been exposed online.

According Fidus Information Security, the company that discovered the data, nearly 800,000 applications for birth certificate copies are currently sitting completely unsecured online. 

And the number keeps growing.

First reported by TechCrunch, the exposed records were compiled by a company that allows people in the U.S. to request copies of their birth certificates. Sitting on the company’s Amazon Web Services bucket is private information including names, birthdays, past and present addresses, emails, phone numbers, family members’ names, and the stated reason people are trying to get the copy.  Read more…

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Google Maps finally goes ‘Incognito’ for iPhone users

Google Maps finally goes 'Incognito' for iPhone users

The secretive incognito mode from the Chrome browser app is here for more privacy-conscious Google Maps users.

Starting Monday, Google’s navigation app will let iPhone users use the same incognito mode from Chrome web browsing to turn off activity tracking on Google Maps. The feature launched back in October  for Android users. 

Now that iOS is all caught up, users will be able to choose how much information about places they’ve searched for or navigated to is saved and stored. To turn on incognito mode, simply click on your profile photo in the top right corner of the app to toggle the mode on and off.  Read more…

More about Ios, Google Maps, Incognito Mode, Navigation Apps, and Tech

Want to read more in 2020? This app will train your brain to do it faster.

Want to read more in 2020? This app will train your brain to do it faster.

TL;DR: Become a better reader with the ZapReader Speed-Reading: Lifetime Subscription for $39.99, a 91% savings. 


When there’s so much to do, yet so little time to do it, being a speedy reader sure can make a difference. The thing is, when we learn to read as children, we often pick up bad habits – like speaking words in our head or re-reading the same sentence multiple times – that prevent us from processing words as quickly as we could. Luckily, we’re not stuck with those bad reading habits forever, though. With this lifetime subscription to ZapReader Speed-Reading, you can ditch those habits and boost your productivity with ease. Read more…

More about Reading, Apps And Software, Online Learning, Mashable Shopping, and Tech

Watch all the Golden Globes nominees with $1,000 off Samsung’s ‘The Frame’

Watch all the Golden Globes nominees with $1,000 off Samsung's 'The Frame'

Golden Globe nominations were announced this morning. Cue the “Oh shit, I haven’t seen any of these,” scramble.

Luckily, a good handful of them are available on the streaming services you probably already have: The Irishman, Marriage Story, and The Crown are all Netflix originals, HBO gets you Big Little Lies and Succession, Fleabag and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel are on Amazon Prime, and Rocketman can be rented for $4.99 on YouTube. Finding them is the easy part — the only other thing you need is a 4K TV to experience these award-worthy films in the way the directors intended.

Just when remnants of Cyber Week TV deals were dying down, we’re met with a new wave of Green Monday TV deals in time for the holidays, award season, and winter sports. Some quick highlights: Save $800 on a 2019 65-inch Q60R TV from Samsung (that’s its Black Friday price) plus get a 65-inch TCL TV for $500. Read more…

More about Streaming, 4k Tv, Vizio, Mashable Shopping, and Tech

Visiting an explosive volcano, like White Island, is always dicey

Visiting an explosive volcano, like White Island, is always dicey

Volcanologist Erik Klemetti has turned down opportunities to visit White Island, the New Zealand volcano that erupted Monday afternoon and killed at least five tourists.

That’s because White Island, also known as Whakaari, is the top of an explosive volcano, and Klemetti didn’t like the risk. (The rest of the volcano is submerged under the sea.) Whakaari is similar to the imposing Cascade volcanoes on the western coast of the U.S., which are liable to erupt violently, sometimes with relatively little notice.

“You need to be conscious that there could be an unexpected explosion,” said Klemetti, who is an associate professor in the Department of Geosciences at Denison University. “And if you’re caught near it, you could be out of luck.” Read more…

More about Science, Nature, New Zealand, Volcanoes, and Science

‘Watchmen’ Episode 8: Doctor Manhattan, revealed to us at last

'Watchmen' Episode 8: Doctor Manhattan, revealed to us at last

Nothing ever ends, right?

We’re one episode and one hour away from the moment when credits roll on the Episode 9 season finale of HBO’s Watchmen. Though it’s fair to wonder what time really means after the events of Episode 8. 

“Nothing ever ends” is a quote from the comic and the show, and it signifies the important thing to always keep in mind about Watchmen: We’re watching a linear story unfold, but every single moment of that story is shaped in the writer’s room by the events that both precede and follow it.

For its first four episodes, Watchmen told a relatively chronological story set in the (alternate) present. The four episodes that followed, culminating in Sunday’s eighth chapter, “A God Walks Into Abar,” turned the notion of time on its head. But while the show leapt all around in time, we viewers at home experienced the story in the only way it makes sense, irrespective of where the in-universe calendar might fall from one moment to the next. Read more…

More about Hbo, Watchmen, Entertainment, and Movies Tv Shows

René Auberjonois, Odo from ‘Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’, has died

René Auberjonois, Odo from 'Star Trek: Deep Space Nine', has died

Veteran actor and singer René Auberjonois has died of metastatic lung cancer at his Los Angeles home on Dec. 8. Auberjonois’ son Rèmy-Luc confirmed the news to The Associate Press on Sunday. He was 79.

Auberjonois was a well-respected and admired actor, having worked in the industry for over four decades. After studying theatre at Carnegie-Mellon University, Auberjonois performed with various theatre companies before landing his first Broadway role in 1968. His career quickly took off, the actor winning a Tony the next year for his role in as Sebastian Baye in Coco, opposite Katharine Hepburn. Read more…

More about Obituaries, Star Trek Deep Space Nine, Rene Auberjonois, Entertainment, and Celebrities

‘South Park’ joke accidentally turns Coloradan’s life into a hell of prank calls

'South Park' joke accidentally turns Coloradan's life into a hell of prank calls

South Park jokes often very pointedly come at someone’s expense. But a throwaway joke from the Season 23 episode that aired Tuesday, Dec 3 had an unintended victim for a change.

A real person from Fairway, Colo. got bombarded with hundreds of calls from fans misdialing a number advertised as co-creator Trey Parker’s during the episode titled “Basic Cable.” The number appeared in an in-universe commercial urging streaming services to call and buy the rights to a variety of fake spin-off shows like “PC Babies” and “The Scott Malkinson Show.”

Trey’s number is 719-838-4002https://t.co/lPumdoUEHn pic.twitter.com/RxwUaAgkKj

— South Park (@SouthPark) December 7, 2019 Read more…

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Snapchat Cameo is like a less scary deepfake for your Snaps

Snapchat Cameo is like a less scary deepfake for your Snaps

There’s been a lot of (understandable) hand-wringing around deepfakes, but consider this: What if you could swap your face onto your cat’s body? Not so apocalyptic anymore, right?

It looks like that’s the pitch for Snapchat Cameo. You can use it to superimpose a face over another face in your Snaps, creating a sort of low-rent deepfake GIF or video clip.

While the upcoming feature hasn’t technically been revealed, some Snapchat users in France got to access it a bit early on Sunday. TechCrunch then confirmed with Snapchat that Cameo exists, and it’s undergoing limited testing in international markets. Read more…

More about Snapchat, Snapchat Cameo, Tech, and Big Tech Companies