Category Archives: Blog

Volkswagen’s ID.LIFE concept car looks like a toy car.

The EV was presented late Wednesday at the IAA Mobility 2021 auto show in Munich, Germany, where its lit-up front “grille” and backside and illuminated doors were part of a noticeably smaller package than the usual electric SUVs and crossovers popular with consumers.

The German automaker scaled back on design with a smaller, lighter car that only has front-wheel drive (usually it’s in the back). Don’t worry, the vehicle can still move quickly, with the electric motor accelerating it from 0 to 62 mph in under 7 seconds.

Looking cute from all angles!
Credit: Volkswagen

Though compact, it’s still an electric car with a 62 kWh battery that can handle up to 249 miles on a single charge.

The inside of the car is a place to be entertained, play games, or relax — all centered around the extendable projector screen, removable roof, and foldable seats. A touchscreen on the hexagonal steering wheel provides all necessary driving information.

Sparse interior.
Credit: Volkswagen

There’s even a cute mini-frunk (a front trunk) next to the charging ports. VW says the battery will be compatible with fast-charging systems.

Even if small, it’s still a frunk.
Credit: Volkswagen

Some future version of car is geared for an urban European customer with a 20,000 Euro starting price (that’s $23,675) by 2025. The toy-looking car presented this week is not yet for sale.

Related Video: 10 car companies coming for Tesla’s EV crown

We’re still two months out from release day, but the hype for Dexter: New Blood keeps on coming.

On Thursday, Showtime dropped its first full-length trailer for the revival series, which sees Michael C. Hall return as the titular serial killer for the first time since 2013. While past teasers have given us only a vague sense of where the antihero’s journey will pick up — we’ve known he’s living in the woods under a new name, but not much else — this preview gives us a lot more to mull over.

First, we see Dexter pulled over by a police officer, whose subsequent stop-and-frisk reveals her to be his girlfriend Angela (Julia Jones). Set 10 years after the vicious murderer got away in the original, New Blood follows “Jim” and his picturesque new life in upstate New York. Not only does Jim have Angela and own a store, but warm greetings from neighbors tell us the homicidal maniac formerly known as Dexter has become something of a Mr. Popular.

But of course, the urge to kill is eating away at this wolf among sheep’s new lease on life. When the mysteriously resurrected Deb (Jennifer Carpenter) appears, telling her brother, “You cannot wait to kill again”, it’s clear it will only a matter of time before the darkness of Dexter reemerges. Then, his son Harrison (Jack Alcott) shows up.

The trailer still leaves us with major questions, but the excitement is greater than ever. Dexter: New Blood is streaming Nov. 7, and airing at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Showtime.

Save $150: Buy the MSI Pulse GL66 15-inch gaming laptop with Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 GPU, 16GB RAM, and 512GB SSD for $1,349 at Amazon as of Sept. 9.

Gamers have a lot of options if they’re ready for a new gaming laptop. You can’t just go with anything if you want to run new releases like Deathloop at their highest settings.

Prepare for the onslaught of new fall releases with the MSI Pulse GL66 15-inch gaming laptop, which is on sale for $1,349 at Amazon. Released this year, the MSI GL66 is back at its lowest price to date thanks to the $150 discount.

This specific build of the MSI Pulse GL66 includes the 11th Generation Intel Core i7-11800H processor, 16GB of RAM, and 512GB of SSD storage. That alone offers the essentials for any gamer, but the real star of the show here is the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 GPU. The RTX 3070 is often praised as one of the best graphics cards for gaming, including by PCMag.

Outside of the internal engine, the MSI GL66 boasts other nifty features. Its 1080p 15.6-inch display is able to deliver realistic images with up to a 144Hz refresh rate. It’s quite lightweight at around 4.6 pounds. And it offers two cooling fans to help prevent overheating during long gaming sessions.

Explore related content:

• Level up: 7 of the best laptops to net you a great gaming experience

• 7 of the best gaming chairs to maximize your gaming experience

• 9 of the best gaming routers to supercharge your game

Welcome to Porn Week, Mashable’s annual close up on the business and pleasure of porn.

We all know that a ton of art and artifice goes into crafting every movie, show, and half-decent YouTube or TikTok clip that we watch. So it should come as no surprise that almost every aspect of the vast majority of porn — even most amateur and reality scenes — is likewise carefully constructed in an attempt to maximize its audience appeal. Creators lean into specific tropes and scenarios (like those associated with the ubiquitous fauxcest genre), often repeatedly and farther each time, to charge or heighten viewers’ reactions to the sex they frame. They include or highlight key visual cues, like money shots, at key moments to give a sense of navigable structure to their content. They even make sure that, when performers are going at it, they don’t fuck like they would in real life, but instead adopt specific positions, and contort themselves into odd angles that may not feel great, but yield ideal explicit imagery.

“In 90 percent of the films we shoot, the sex is completely different than the sex you have in your personal life,” says performer Ryan Driller, “fully due to the need to play to the camera.”

Performers always need to make sure that the lenses trained on them can capture clear shots of all the action viewers want to see, explains adult actress Sofie Marie. This is one of the reasons you see so many wild, acrobatic positions in porn that rarely translate well into real life, like the pile driver, in which a receiving partner is placed upside down, neck and shoulders on the floor and legs up by their ears, while a penetrating partner squats over and plows down into them: It’s great for getting a clean shot of every bit and bob of interest to the average viewer, every hydraulic pump, and every facial reaction. But, as performer Larkin Love points out, it’s also “a ridiculous and miserable move” for many people. In fact, it’s often “profoundly uncomfortable for both partners.”

The need to play to cameras, and ultimately viewer desires, also leads to the underrepresentation of some positions performers love in their offscreen lives, like good ol’ missionary, which don’t lend to clear shots.

“Missionary hides a lot of what most of the viewers want to see,” explains performer Alex Saint. “Seeing a guy’s ass bouncing up and down isn’t usually what’s wanted.”

Conversely, it leads to the overrepresentation of positions like reverse cowgirl, which performer Kimmie KaBoom explains “opens everything up” to the camera easily and inherently.

“Boy, am I just bored with reverse cowgirl.”

“Boy, am I just bored with reverse cowgirl” at this point, grumbles performer Verronica Kirei.

Every sex act and position, whether under- or overrepresented, also has to be tweaked to favor visual impact over visceral pleasure. In practice, this often means that performers have to twist out towards a camera, and hold a dynamic pose, all while having what is often extremely athletic sex. As Marie succinctly puts it, “good camera angles usually mean an uncomfortable sexual position.”

“The best performers can make it look like their posture, body positioning, hand positioning, the way their hair falls, and everything else is natural,” adds Love. “But it’s not.”

In fact, these angular alterations are specialized, intense physical labor.

To help viewers get a better sense of all the little positional tweaks and preferences at play in porn, I reached out to a handful of adult stars and asked them to break down everything they do for the sake of a good visual. I also asked them what, if anything, they or their fans can or should take away from the strange positional logic that dominates the porn world. Here’s what they said:

How do you play up cunnilingus for the camera?

Bunny Colby: Going down on a girl is the most edited one.

Verronica Kirei: When I am eating a woman out, I can’t necessarily be face deep in her pussy, [like I would be in real life].

Johnny Goodluck: You can’t see a tongue if you’re sucking a vagina.

Ryan Driller: While the girl is on her back, with her legs spread as far as possible, I push the full side of my face opposite the camera and lighting, stick my tongue out as far as it possibly can, and barely graze her labia or clitoral-area. All the while, I spread her labia as far as possible.

Bunny Colby: You need to make sure your face is pulled enough away for cameras to see all the action going on. You’ll often barely graze a pussy with your tongue.

What about blowjobs?

Larkin Love: My blowjobs off-camera are far more intense and complex than the ones I deliver on screen. When the camera is rolling, I’m more concerned with giving good face, not with sucking in my lips and cheeks, or with a male partner’s pleasure. I’m turning my head at specific aesthetic angles, regardless of what might feel best. When I stroke the dick, I do so with a flourish that adds nothing to physical stimulation, but shows off my manicure and makes the cock look as large as possible.

The list goes on.

Alex Saint: If it is a POV blowjob, the girl turns her face a lot more toward the camera… You’re really just bumping your dick against the roof of her mouth.

Rina Ellis: You have to make sure your hair isn’t covering your face, and angle your face so you don’t have five chins.

And missionary?

Larkin Love: My favorite position in real life is missionary, with full body contact and French kissing. It’s the most erotic, spine-tingling act in the whole repertoire for me.

Sofie Marie: Smothering missionary is very romantic. I always have my biggest orgasms in missionary with my partner making a scooping-driving motion to hit my g-spot and cervix. Slow, deep, rhythmic pumping with hip action. Yummy.

“My favorite position in real life is missionary.”

Larkin Love: However, you’ll almost never see this in porn. The shot isn’t interesting to look at. There’s no room for the camera to get a view of penetration. You can’t even see the girl’s boobs.

Johnny Goodluck: When you’re in mish, you’re turning your hip and chest out towards the camera, thereby slamming the opposite hip into your partner, as opposed to what normal sex would involve: You slamming your pelvis against their pelvis for more orgasmic pressure.

How do you show off doggy-style?

Johnny Goodluck: We are generally adjusting one side of our body about 30 degrees away from the parallel of the other person’s body [to give the cameras a good view]. One hip hits their ass. The side towards the camera never even touches, so that you can see the penetration.

Larkin Love: Point-of-view doggy style requires the receptive partner to bend her body severely at the waist, like a U, thereby putting both their face and pussy or ass on display simultaneously for the camera. You wouldn’t believe the spinal flexibility this takes to pull off correctly.  It doesn’t look weird in two-dimensional pics and videos. But it’s a hideously unnatural way to fuck.

How do you adjust cowgirl and reverse cowgirl?

Sofia Marie: Cowgirl and reverse cowgirl are the easiest to pose for the camera. But I get the biggest workout.

Ryan Driller: Cowgirl is a bit closer to the real thing at home, only as a guy you’re pulling her butt cheeks apart to let the camera see the penetration — as opposed to at home, where you grab and almost push her butt cheeks together tighter for the added pressure and sensation.

Rina Ellis: With cowgirl, you need to sit up straight or arch your back for it to look flattering.

Alex Saint: For reverse cowgirl, the girl will often position herself higher on her knees so that the guy can really thrust his hips up and down, further and faster.

Rina Ellis: Reverse cowgirl is a lot of work on the legs, so you need to be toned.

Kimmie KaBoom: It is the most difficult and painful position. I like it least.

Has working in porn ever introduced you to a camera-friendly position, or a positional adjustment, that you enjoyed enough to take back into your private sex life?

Johnny Goodluck: I’ve learned new, interesting positions and how to perfect some positions. But I don’t think I’ve learned any magic tricks from performing [that I wouldn’t have from other experiences] — other than self-control and perfect posture. Experience gets you there, no matter what.

Ryan Driller: Anything that we have brought home was not anything you’ve seen us do on camera. The tricks and tweaks we enjoy are discovered between takes, when your partner and you are still on set and the cameramen and directors are resetting or moving around a bit, so you get to real fuck to maintain the chemistry, erection, and enthusiasm. It might be that, for two minutes, after [a female performer] had been riding you while squatting over you, she gets on her knees and just grinds, and you discover that is a perfect g-spot massage, and an instant orgasm.

The only times we bring this back to our own beds are on accident — when we’ve been working so much that we fall into a habit.

What does all of this mean for people who watch porn to get ideas for new positions to try?

Rina Ellis: Porn isn’t sex education and shouldn’t be used as a how-to guide for having sex.

Larkin Love: If you are going to watch porn for inspiration, positions are one of the worst possible take-aways. Instead, draw inspiration from the themes and settings, or adopt a role-play scenario that you enjoyed on screen. Just make sure to take the idea and make it your own.

Ryan Driller: Personally, I’d say to just get a Kama Sutra book and try those positions out. Or just let loose and have fun with each other. You’ll find what works best for you two.

Kimmie KaBoom: Everyone should try a bunch of new things they see in porn to see what works for them. Just don’t be discouraged if it doesn’t work out, or you can’t do a position with your body. Sex should be a fun and exploratory playtime! Only do what you’re comfortable doing.

Bunny Colby: Definitely check out and see some new stuff — but adjust positions for comfort!

Verronica Kirei: If you see an act being done in one of your favorite pornos and want to try it out, don’t focus on the position part so much. Use that as a general marker. Then do what feels good after. You don’t have a camera pointed on you.

Keep reading

• Porn games are ready for their big data money shot

• The best alternatives to Pornhub and Xvideos

• Pornhub deleted millions of videos. And then what happened?

• Porn ushered in a golden age of TV dicks

• Can’t figure out what kind of porn to consume? This handy infographic can help.

Would-be wunderkind, current criminal defendant, and new mom Elizabeth Holmes is in the building. The federal courthouse, that is.

After jury selection wrapped September 2, opening arguments began Wednesday in the U.S. government’s case against Holmes, the former CEO of disgraced biotech company Theranos. Holmes faces 12 counts of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud, all centered around allegedly misleading investors about the value of the company and the capabilities of Theranos’ blood testing tech. The penalty could be up to 20 years in prison.

Theranos had claimed its proprietary miniature laboratory could perform a range of medical tests just by taking blood from the prick of a finger. It couldn’t. But that didn’t stop Holmes, along with business partner and ex-boyfriend Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, from raising more than $700 million on the premise that it could.

Balwani faces the same charges as Holmes, but will have his own trial. Pointing the finger at Balwani appears to be part of the defense’s strategy.

Tweet may have been deleted

The Holmes trial faced a long road before it could actually begin. The government indicted Holmes in 2018, but there have been many procedural arguments about the scope of claims, and the evidence both sides could include, as well as delays related to COVID, and Holmes’ 2020 pregnancy. Holmes reportedly got married in 2019, and had a baby in July of this year.

And it’ll be a while until we know Holmes’ fate, since the trial is projected to last three months. However, both the defense and the prosecution gave a preview of who would testify, and the sorts of evidence each would produce, during opening statements Wednesday. While cameras aren’t allowed in court, reporters on the scene live tweeted highlights.

The defense is arguing that Holmes was a hard-working — if young and naive — businesswoman. She purportedly made mistakes while under the influence of more experienced men who should have known better, and she herself never intended to deceive anybody.

Intention is the crux of the issue, since the government has to prove Holmes meant to deceive and mislead in order to prove fraud.

Tweet may have been deleted

On the other side, the prosecution is arguing that Holmes oversaw all the important elements of the company, was aware of problems, and knowingly misled partners and investors while harming patients along the way.

Tweet may have been deleted

Holmes’ appearances in court have generated a lot of interest, since she is such a puzzling figure herself. But apparently, she has some fans, too — who decided to dress up like her.

Tweet may have been deleted

Tweet may have been deleted

Beyond opening arguments, more evidence and details of the case are emerging. A transcript of texts between Holmes and Balwani shows them acknowledging bad reviews and problems with the product — in between love notes like “You are [a] breeze in [the] desert for me / My water / And ocean.”

Tweet may have been deleted

After opening arguments, Theranos’ controller took the stand to testify about the financial health of the company, and what Holmes was privy to.

From nitty-gritty financial and medical jargon, to high profile figures taking the stand, there’s a lot more to come in the trial. “Will Holmes’ groupies heist her out of there via a classic body double scheme?” is just one burning question of many.

Tweet may have been deleted

The internet is a crazy place, if you didn’t already know.

From the creeps, to the weirdos, to the reply guys, to the people who are just generally unpleasant, we’re very grateful to have the block feature on Instagram (and other social media sites).

Of course, in order for it to be effective, you have to know how to use it. It might also be helpful to know how to unblock someone on the occasion you need to do that, too.

You can now also remove a follower. This practice used to be called a “soft block,” or a “block-unblock.” We’ll also show you how to remove a follower below. But we’ll start with the blocking.

How to Block

1. Go to the profile you want to block

2. Tap the three dots in the top right corner

Tap the three dots to find the “Block” option
Credit: Screengrab / instagram

3. Tap “Block” in the menu that pops up

In the options that follow, tap “Block”
Credit: SCREENGRAB / INSTAGRAM

4. Read your options on the following pop-up

Read the prompt that follows and select a block option
Credit: SCREENGRAB / INSTAGRAM

We recommend choosing the top option to be on the safe side.

5. Tap “Block”

That person is now blocked. They won’t be able to see your posts, see your Story, or find your profile. They won’t be able to follow you or message you on Instagram, and they won’t be notified that you blocked them.

How to Unblock

Should you decide that this person has served their time on the blocked list, and you feel safe allowing them to see your profile again (or if you made an oops and accidentally blocked someone you didn’t mean to), you can Unblock them just as easily.

1. Navigate back to their profile

2. Either tap the three dots in the top right corner and then tap “Unblock” or tap the blue “Unblock” button under their display name and bio

Unblock via the three dots or the blue “Unblock” button
Credit: SCREENGRAB / INSTAGRAM

3. You’ll be prompted to read a pop-up explaining what Unblocking this person will allow.

Read the pop-up and if you still want to Unblock, tap “Unblock”
Credit: SCREENGRAB / INSTAGRAM

4. Then, if you still want to Unblock them, simply tap “Unblock”

Easy enough, right? Blocking is one of the primary tools you can use to keep yourself safe on Instagram and other social media. Somebody making you feel unsafe? Block. Somebody replying to your posts with rude comments? Block. Somebody just generally annoying you lately? Block.

Blocking keeps us safer online, gives us more power to curate our own digital space, and allows us to try and keep social media from hurting our mental health. Social media will always have pros and cons, but that doesn’t mean we can’t use the tools available to us to maximize the pros and limit the cons as much as possible.

How to remove a follower

1. Go to your Instagram profile

2. Find your followers list by tapping “Followers” at the top

3. Find the follower you want to remove by scrolling or typing their account handle in the search bar

4. Once you find their account, tap “Remove” on the right

How to remove a follower on Instagram
Credit: andy moser / instagram

5. When prompted, tap “Remove” once more. The follower will be removed from your followers list.

You can also remove a follower by going straight to their profile page, tapping the three dots in the top right corner, and tapping “Remove Follower” in the pop-up menu.

So you saw a fun GIF on Twitter. That’s cool, good for you, seems like fun.

Now you want to save it for your own personal use. That’s cool, too, but unfortunately a bit more involved than you might think. The task isn’t difficult, necessarily, but it does take a few more steps than you might’ve previously thought. But once you master the process, you can take a fun GIF from Twitter and add it to your library in no time at all.

Here, we will walk you through saving a GIF from Twitter on your computer and your phone.

Saving a Twitter GIF to your computer

First, we need to select a GIF to save. Easy enough. I love the sketch show I Think You Should Leave and the many memes it has spawned, so I thought it might be nice to save this GIF from the show. After all, I love this show and I love to eat.

Tweet may have been deleted

Now that we’ve located a good GIF, let’s walk through the steps for saving it on your computer. Apologies in advance for how many steps this entails.

1. Right-click the GIF

When you right-click the GIF, you’ll see a button pop-up that reads “Copy GIF Address.” It should look like this.

2. Click “Copy GIF address”

That’s simple enough, right?

3. Go to a GIF downloader

OK, this is where things get a bit complicated. Twitter actually publishes GIFs as small video files, which are much more efficient than GIF files. So you have to download Twitter GIFs as videos in order to save them on your device. Kind of backwards, but that’s the way it is.

It’s OK, though, because you can use a tool like TWDownload or twittervideodownloader.com.

4. Paste the address to the GIF then click download

So, this is pretty simple: Paste the link then click download. Here’s what that looks like on Twitter Video Downloader.

Easy enough, right?
Credit: Screenshot: Twittervideodownloader.com

5. Download the GIF

After the initial screen, your GIF will pop up on another page. Then hit download again, and you’ll see an MP4 version of the Twitter GIF pop up on your screen.

Ignore the ad for Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania.
Credit: screenshot: twittervideodownloader.com

Click the three dots in the bottom-right corner of the video, then, yes, again hit download. It should look like this.

This is the button you’re looking for.
Credit: twittervideodownloader.com

Here is the download button you have to hit.
Credit: Twittervideodownloader.com

Now you officially have a version of the GIF in your download folder. But what if you want to turn that MP4 video back into a GIF that you can use across all platforms? After all, you wanted to save a GIF and not a video. Well then…

6. Go to EZ GIF’s video to GIF converter

OK, I promise there isn’t too much more work. EZ GIF has a tool that lets you easily convert video files into GIFS. You can find it here.

7. Choose and upload your MP4 video

Choose the MP4 file of your GIF from the download folder on your computer. Then click upload video.

Here are the buttons you need.
Credit: Ez GIF

8. Convert the video to a GIF

Your video should autogenerate on the page after you upload it. From there, scroll down and hit the button that reads, “Convert to GIF.”

Note: You could trim the GIF and edit it further, should you desire.

The convert button should be around the bottom of the page.
Credit: EZ GIF

9. Save the GIF

OK, phew, we have finally arrived at the end of the road for saving a Twitter GIF. All you have to do now is right click the output image on the next page, then save it with whatever name you desire. Then you have finally saved your GIF.

There is also the save button, but a right click lets you choose the name of the GIF.
Credit: ez gif

Saving a Twitter GIF on your phone

As you might’ve guessed by this point, saving a GIF to your phone from Twitter is, well, not super simple.

Once again, since GIFs are effectively videos without sound on Twitter, the saving process is far more complicated than it would be for a still image.

The long and short of it: You’re going to need an app to save Twitter GIFs on your phone.

A small interjection here: It might just be easier to Google the GIF you’re looking for, at this point, especially if you do not feel like downloading a new app. Resources like GIPHY and other image-focused sites have tons of GIFs that are super easy to save to your phone. Chances are, if you saw it on Twitter, it exists elsewhere and is just a Google query away.

OK, but if you simply must save the GIF from Twitter, and if you have an iPhone, then the easiest choice is likely the app GIFwrapped. Here’s how you use it.

1. Download the app

You can find the GIFwrapped app here for iOS. Unfortunately, there is currently no version of this app for Android.

2. Copy the link to the tweet

Here’s how you do that, using the same tweet I had in the earlier section.

Here’s the button to find the copy link button.
Credit: screenshot: Twitter

This button will automatically copy the link to your tweet.
Credit: screenshot: twitter

3. Paste that link in GIFwrapped

When you open the app, GIFwrapped has a search bar where you can paste links. Put your link in that search area then search. Simple enough.

Here’s the link to my tweet in the search bar.
Credit: screenshot: Gifwrapped

4. Save the GIF to your GIFwrapped library

Once you search the GIF in the app, it should populate on the next page. All you have to do is save it to your library inside the app — via a button on the bottom-left of the screen — and presto, you have your GIF saved. From there, you can copy and paste it wherever you like.

The lower arrow shows the first button you hit. The top arrow shows the button you hit to save the GIF.
Credit: screenshot: gifwrapped

Here is my GIF, saved in the GIFwrapped library on my phone.
Credit: screenshot: gifwrapped

Now, unfortunately, GIFwrapped is available for iPhone users only. Android users do have options, but they still must, once again, download a third-party app because nothing about saving Twitter GIFs is easy.

A few different Android apps, like the popular Tweet2GIF have degraded over time, but one that should still work is is the TWdownload app. You can download it here. As the app’s Google Play page shows, all you do is paste a link — just like GIFwrapped — then hit the download button.

The final screen shows how you can choose the quality of the image when you download.
Credit: screenshot: Google Play Store / mashable

From there, you should have you GIF and be ready to go. But then again, maybe just search Google and/or GIPHY and save yourself the hassle.

There’s an ongoing quest to improve VPN speeds without sacrificing security features. Just by doing what they need to do, they can slow your connection down in different amounts, depending on which one you use. This means the best VPNs are intuitive, secure, and they do their thing without slowing you down too much.

That’s exactly what I saw when I was testing ExpressVPN.

“Wait… has it been on this whole time?”

Registering for ExpressVPN was pretty straightforward, and installing it was even easier. After I got the welcome email, I installed and set up the app in the background while working on some other things on my laptop. It was so easy that I didn’t even really have to think about it, so I finished up what I was doing online and went to turn the VPN on to take a closer look.

That was when I remembered that I’d started it up already.

We tested ExpressVPN and found that it delivered in all of these areas, making it one of the best VPNs on the market. It isn’t exactly replete with options for customizing your actual experience; for that, you’d have to turn to NordVPN. But it does everything that most people would want by default, and if you need help, the support team is quick to respond.

Easy as TV dinners

I’ve never understood the expression “easy as pie.” Pies can get pretty complicated, and if you’re making your own crust? Forget about it. This VPN is as easy to use as firing up the microwave to warm up a frozen meal. Some may want to play with the protocols or set it up to connect automatically, but you can also pretty much just start it up and let it go to work.

Both the “power” button and the button to choose your server are front and center. And to make things even easier, some devices — macOS, Windows, and Android — allowing you to create shortcuts right from the home screen.

What ExpressVPN looks like when you’re connected.
Credit: screenshot: expressvpn

As far as using other options like split tunneling and “network lock” goes, they’re very well-organized, so you won’t have any trouble finding what you’re looking for. And if you don’t know what those are, the menus include descriptions of what they do, so you can experiment without any confusion.

I appreciated that both the interface and the features are more or less the same across the four types of devices I tried: a MacBook, a PC, an iPhone, and an Android phone. There isn’t much to look at, but what’s there is modern enough and well thought-out.

ExpressVPN offers three pricing options:

• Monthly: $12.95

• 6-Month: $59.95 ($9.99/month billed every 6 months)

• 12-Month: $99.95 ($8.32/month, billed every 12 months)

You can use several payment methods in order to sign up, including PayPal and even bitcoin, which may not appeal to everyone, but is nonetheless pretty cool.

Express? Yes.

VPNs work by routing your internet connection away from your ISP’s servers and through private servers owned by the VPN provider. They also encrypt the data you send and receive, adding an extra layer of security on top of the protection offered by the HTTPS protocol used by most modern websites.

Doing all of this allows you to manipulate things like the location that sites receive via your IP address, but that ability comes at a cost: speed.

Speedtest while connected to ExpressVPN.
Credit: Screenshot: expressvpn

Speedtest with normal connection.
Credit: Screenshot: branford shaw

Technically speaking, I did get Speedtest results that showed a drop in speeds compared to my normal connection. But those numbers don’t really tell the whole story. Websites appeared to load just as quickly either way, and I could still watch HD video without pausing or buffering.

I also noticed that the recommended settings seem to do a pretty good job of offering the best experience. I played around with the location and protocol, but I never got faster Speedtest results than when I left them both at their default settings. Again, those numbers aren’t everything, but they’re a useful marker to look at for reference.

Unblocks most things

One of the main reasons a lot of people use VPNs is to access content that isn’t available in their region. I actually used to think that Netflix US had the full catalog, but in doing these tests, I discovered that some of my favorite shows are on Netflix UK while they aren’t available here. The danger of this knowledge aside, a VPN is a powerful tool for opening up the web.

To add to the complexity, some streaming platforms (hello again, Netflix) have implemented software to detect when you’re connected through a VPN. This means providers who want to advertise that they allow users to pass through geoblocks have this to navigate as well.

ExpressVPN isn’t perfect, but it does a pretty good job in this area. There was one instance where I went to watch Netflix while connected, but it detected that I was using a VPN and the library was limited. After trying a few different servers and doing some digging, I found that other people were seeing the same thing. I read that someone had contacted support, and was told that they knew about it and were working on a fix.

Sure enough, I tried again the next day and everything worked like normal. The same thing happened with BBC iPlayer, and since there wasn’t much chatter about it, I contacted customer support myself. I got a response immediately, and before we even finished the conversation, I tried it again and found that it was back online.

The point of all this is that it may not work to unblock sites 100% of the time, but the team is extremely responsive and helpful, and they seem to care about providing a quality experience.

A strong contender

ExpressVPN is one of the most popular VPNs out there, and it’s not hard to see why. It’s easy to use, it works well, and there’s ample support available whenever you need it. To the casual user, it’ll feel like a full-featured VPN without being overly laden with complexity.

My only gripe is that it’s probably on the higher end of the cost spectrum, but I think it works well enough to justify the cost. You save a lot with the annual plan, and it did everything I needed it to do. Plus, if you try it out and find it isn’t the right one for you, you can always get your money back as long as you request it within the first 30 days.

SpaceX is reportedly churning out only 5,000 Starlink dishes each week for the satellite internet service. But the company is preparing to boost manufacturing later this year to help meet the massive consumer demand.

SpaceX CFO Bret Johnsen revealed the manufacturing numbers during Tuesday’s Satellite 2021 conference in Maryland, according to reporters in attendance. 

Tweet may have been deleted

Tweet may have been deleted

The company currently has over 600,000 pre-orders for Starlink. So producing only 5,000 dishes per week means SpaceX would need more than two years to address its backlog. Waiting that long would be especially painful for prospective Starlink users since many are saddled with unbearably slow internet speeds. 

The good news is that SpaceX plans on increasing the 5,000-dish capacity by “multiples” in the coming months, according to Johnsen’s remarks at the conference.  

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SpaceX has blamed the ongoing chip shortage for limited Starlink dish manufacturing, a necessary requirement for a consumer to connect to the company’s satellite internet network. 

The dishes are also expensive to make. The company sells them to consumers for $499 as a one-time fee for Starlink. But originally, the first dishes cost SpaceX $3,000 to produce before the company managed to reduce the manufacturing to $1,500 and then $1,300. 

Last month, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said the dish production cost is expected to fall even more. “The ones we will have later this year will cost roughly half of what our current user terminals cost,” she said at the annual Space Symposium event. “And then we think we’ll be able to cut that in half yet again.”

Whether this means SpaceX will also reduce the $499 Starlink dish cost to consumers remains unclear. But lowering it would make Starlink more affordable, particularly for users on a budget. Subscriber also must pay $99 a month for the internet service.

The new Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 3 might be the best foldable phone to date. And yet, I cannot for the life of me imagine buying one.

After years of hype around foldable displays, the “what” has almost never been sufficiently paired with a compelling “why.” Just because tech companies can do something futuristic, that doesn’t necessarily mean they should. The Z Flip 3 is the latest and greatest example of this.

The Z Flip 3 is, by all means, a good phone: It’s got a large, gorgeous display with a buttery smooth refresh rate, and it delivers solid everyday performance. It even packs a few bendy screen bonuses for things like web browsing and photography that look flashy and cool…in a commercial. In reality, however, these foldable-centric “features” don’t actually make the Z Flip 3 any more useful than the teetering-on-obsolescence iPhone 8 I use every day.

They made “flip” happen

The cover display is nice.
Credit: molly flores / mashable

Samsung’s foldable journey has been an odyssey and a half up to this point. We all remember 2019’s original Galaxy Fold, a gimmicky turd that cost nearly $2,000 without the guarantee that it would even work properly after a week, at least in the initial run of devices sent to reviewers. Its follow-up the next year, the Z Fold 2, was undeniably an improvement thanks to not being totally broken and offering some real novelty with variable screen sizes. But a similarly exorbitant price relegated it to the realm of “really expensive toys that normal people don’t need.”

The story is the same for the recently launched Galaxy Fold 3, too: Pretty neat in theory, and even in execution, but, once again, too expensive and not life-changing enough to justify the cost.

In the spirit of fairness, Samsung did accomplish just about everything it set out to here.

The first Z Flip at least had novel (and nostalgic) value, but at $1,380 and with durability issues, it was still a tough sell. The same goes for the 5G version that acted as a weird stopgap between the OG model and 2021’s Flip.

With the Z Flip 3, however, Samsung has finally addressed the price issue, selling the base model for $1,000. That’s…still a lot of money, but it’s at least comparable to other “normal” smartphones, like the iPhone 12 Pro.

In the spirit of fairness, Samsung did accomplish just about everything it set out to here. This is a folding phone that doesn’t appear to be fundamentally busted and isn’t comically expensive.

The 6.7-inch AMOLED main display is sharp and vibrant, giving all of your photos, videos, and apps a chance to shine. That 120Hz refresh rate should never be discounted, either. It just makes even basic tasks like scrolling through Twitter so much smoother. There’s also a 1.9-inch cover display that’s active when the Z Flip 3 is fully closed, showing users the time, weather, notifications, music, and other things that you might want to see at a glance. It’s not huge, but it’s big enough that you can get the gist of text messages or Twitter DMs.

From a performance perspective, the Z Flip 3 sings thanks to 8GB of RAM paired with a Snapdragon 888 processor. I certainly didn’t encounter any slowdown or hitching whatsoever in my time testing it. For reference, that same processor powers plenty of other flagships, including Samsung’s own Galaxy S21 line, so it’s no slouch.

Photography is perhaps the only aspect of the Z Flip 3 where its foldable nature makes a difference.

As for its imaging prowess, the Z Flip 3’s rear dual-camera array (two 12MP lenses, one ultra-wide) comes with a full suite of software-enhanced photo tools, encompassing everything from nighttime photography to portrait mode, and even AR doodling.

Photography is perhaps the only aspect of the Z Flip 3 where I feel its foldable nature actually sort of makes a difference. Fold the phone at a 90-degree angle while in photo mode, and a preview will appear on the upper half with camera controls relegated to the bottom screen. It’s a feature that could come in handy for low-angle shots.

You can even show camera previews on both the main and cover displays so your homies can see how they look while they’re posing for photos. That’s genuinely neat. I can’t hate on that.

But this phone also starts at $1,000. There are a lot of very nice, non-folding smartphones you can get for that much money or less. Samsung even makes some of them! The Galaxy S21 and Asus Zenfone 8 come to mind, if you want to stick to Android.

With the exception of a couple of nifty applications for photography, my entire experience with the Z Flip 3 left me wondering one thing: What is the point of all this?

Kinect-ing the dots

The hinge makes a prominent dent in the middle of the display, visible even against a bright background like this.
Credit: molly flores / mashable

Let’s take a walk down tech memory lane for a moment and examine another famous instance of “what” instead of “why.”

Back in 2010, Microsoft released the Kinect motion-sensing camera peripheral for the Xbox 360. All of its early marketing was centered around the idea that “You are the controller.” In other words, players could control games and navigate menus entirely with the movement of their bodies. The obvious comparison at the time was the sick hand gesture interface seen in the sci-fi movie Minority Report.

There were just a couple of problems with this approach: There wasn’t anything wrong with the way we controlled games and navigated menus in the before Kinect times (aside from accessibility-based problems, which Xbox addressed with a better device later). And also, the UI in Minority Report was just a fancy CG effect that was made to look cool rather than be an efficient, usable interface.

In real life, the Kinect was tedious to use at its best and buggy bordering on unusable at its worst. Kinect was innovation for the sake of innovation (sound familiar?); a solution to a problem that didn’t exist. Even with a handful of good games like Dance Central, Kinect has mostly gone down in tech history as a fart in the wind. Just a decade later, and you can’t even plug one into a new Xbox.

We’re so bored with the annual smartphone upgrade cycle that we need to latch onto something that looks “futuristic” just because it’s different.

Maybe foldable phones won’t go the way of Kinect. It’s totally possible some company will figure out a practical, commercial use for this technology that makes regular flat panels in portable devices a thing of the past. The overly expensive and imperfect Microsoft Surface Duo, for example, at least joined two large enough screens together that you could see how multitasking might work on a better version of that device. Even the Z Fold 3 lets you use multiple apps at once thanks to its larger display. The Z Flip 3, however, isn’t even really capable of that because of the way its screen is constructed. The fact is that it’s just not big enough for effective multitasking when its screen is folded. Besides, most apps aren’t even built with that flexible functionality in mind right now anyway.

There’s certainly a sort of nostalgic novelty to the specific form factor of the Z Flip 3. In particular, its size and shape when closed remind me a great deal of the Game Boy Advance SP, one of the greatest pieces of consumer technology ever conceived. And there’s even validity to the idea of a smartphone you can close — back in the heady days of flip phones, you weren’t always staring at your phone waiting for notifications to pop up like we do now.

But those phones kept their displays and their keyboards separate. The Z Flip 3 is built around the notion that the entire display can fold in on itself, and that’s supposed to be special. Instead of binary open and closed states, the phone purports to offer both a traditional flat smartphone experience and this weird, folded state where apps work differently, alongside the closed, cover display-only position. As it turns out, neither of the ways to use the Z Flip 3 while unfolded are ideal.

The hinge hurts more than it helps

When you aren’t taking photos, folding the Z Flip 3 into that roughly 90-degree angle typically crunches whatever app you’re looking at to fit in the upper half of the display. The bottom half then becomes an empty void with some generic device controls like a volume slider and a screenshot button. It looks ugly and just isn’t useful whatsoever. I tried reading our entertainment team’s What If episode recaps this way and the most it could fit on screen was the headline and maybe a whole paragraph, depending on length. The upper half also isn’t big enough to make this a good way to watch videos, either.

I don’t think this is a great way to read anything.
Credit: screenshot: Alex perry / mashable

But let’s stop beating around the bush and talk about that hinge. God, I hate it.

Using the Z Flip 3 like a regular phone, fully unfolded, means that you’ll constantly thumb over a very noticeable groove running horizontally across the exact center of the display. Oh, you want to check Twitter? Every few seconds you’ll slide your finger over something that feels roughly like an air bubble in a screen protector you put on the wrong way. If that were the problem, at least you could fix it. Here, it’s built into the device and can never go away. Even more unnerving is that, while the screen can apparently withstand 200,000 folds, this technology is still new enough that I don’t fully trust any foldable to last that long.

You can’t even smoothly and quickly open and shut the phone with one hand.

Also, you can’t even smoothly and quickly open and shut the phone with one hand. That most satisfying basic aspect of old flip phones isn’t present here. Hard pass.

I’ll hold onto flat smartphones until the day I die if this is going to be the case with foldables going forward. There just isn’t anything practically useful enough about the Z Flip 3’s bending screen to justify having a permanent dent in the middle of the display.

I’ve felt the same way about the limited experiences I’ve had with other foldable devices, too, such as the original Z Fold. It’s like we’re so bored with the annual smartphone upgrade cycle that we need to latch onto something that looks and feels vaguely “futuristic” just because it’s different, even if the concept hasn’t yet fully justified itself after two years in commercial smartphones.

So go ahead and buy the Z Flip 3 if you want, as it’s a perfectly competent machine that does what it tries to do. Who knows — maybe you’ll enjoy reading half-sized articles and fiddling with an intentionally dented screen more than I did.

I just want to go on the record now and state that I’ve never thought foldable displays were the future of smartphones and the Z Flip 3 didn’t do anything to change my mind. Sure, I might reconsider if someday some future foldable comes along without any noticeable crease but it would still have to prove more practically useful than traditional smartphones for me to fully buy in.

If that gets me on a tech version of Freezing Cold Takes somewhere down the line, then so be it. I’d welcome that.