Gadgets & Tech Spoken Edition

It seemed like Apple completely reinvented the way we used iPads with the recent iPadOS 13 update that added support for trackpads and mice. But now iPadOS 14 is here. It’s not quite the overhaul that iPadOS 13 was, but the update adds a few useful features that could make it easier to get work done on your iPad. To start, an interface redesign puts puts navigation and organizational tools front and center in the apps you use most.

In an email, Amazon notified Dash Wand owners that it’s ending support for the device as of July 21. What’s that you say? You’ve never heard of the Dash Wand? Well, that’s hardly surprising. The first iteration of the gadget was introduced back in ye olde days of 2014. It was a lil wand thing with a barcode scanner and microphone, meaning you could scan your groceries or tell the stick to restock up what you were running low on. It got a quiet refresh in 2016.

Japan’s Riken institute has ripped through prior records on computing speed, with its brand-new Fugaku supercomputer performing 2.8 times more calculations per second in a biannual speed ranking than the previous record holder, the IBM system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Summit, the Oak Ridge computer, is now second place.

Our big boy president has once again angered the mods, with Twitter flagging another one of his tweets for violating its rules. Last week, Donald Trump tweeted, “There will never be an ‘Autonomous Zone’ in Washington, D.C., as long as I’m your President. If they try they will be met with serious force!” (The autonomous zone is a reference to a group of protesters against police brutality in Seattle who have occupied parts of the Capitol Hill neighborhood and declared it a cop-free area; local officials have described it as resembling a block party, while the right-wing media and Trump have played it up as an apocalyptic threat to national security organized by terrorists.)

Apple users will now be able to trade-in their old Macs in physical Apple Stores rather than having to use the company’s online system for these devices. An Apple representative confirmed the change to Gizmodo, and an updated FAQ on Apple’s trade-in hub now omits language that previously stated that the only exception to in-store trade-ins was Apple’s line of computers.

Video chat service Zoom will finally add end-to-end encryption to calls placed by users on the free version of its service, weeks after announcing it would only be available to premium users who shelled out for the privilege. In April, Zoom faced a shareholder lawsuit alleging that the service boasted it used true end-to-end encryption, which prevents malicious parties from intercepting the contents of a conversation unless they have access to one of the devices involved.

It’s been a rough few years for Olympus, and with smartphones cannibalizing the sales of pocket cams and Sony dominating the sales of high-end mirrorless cams, Olympus has decided to sell off its camera division and exit the camera game entirely. In a press release issued last week, Olympus says that following due diligence it will sell its imaging business to Japan Industrial Partners by September 30, 2020.

Apple’s super-stuffed developer’s presentation last week brought new announcements for wearables, an overhauled iOS interface, and a new macOS with the debut of Big Sur. But Apple dropped a bunch of updates coming to the Apple tech we use in our homes—a place we’re now spending more time than ever. The big push here was the ease with which you can use multiple products with the least amount of trouble, as you might with features like Airplay to push a video from your phone to your Apple TV or using the Home app to control the various smart devices around your space. Apple says it has open-sourced HomeKit to prioritize privacy and ease of use, so that when you add a smart device and set it up through the iOS 14 Home app, it’ll automatically suggest various automation options. Apple has long supported smart bulbs that can change to nifty colors. But with iOS 14, it’s adding something called Adaptive Lighting, which can be used to change the colors you see in specific rooms automatically based on your preference

On Tuesday, China launched the final satellite in its BeiDou Navigation Satellite (BDS) System, marking the completion of its homegrown GPS-esque navigation system. The project has been decades in the making. It began in the 1990s, and the first satellite launch was in October 2000, according to Space.com. BDS is currently one of four global navigations systems. The others are the U.S. government-run GPS, Russia’s GLONASS, and the European Union’s Galileo.

After releasing a line of new outdoor lights earlier this year, Philips Hue has returned with some new lights better suited for indoor use including an updated Lightstrip Plus and Hue Bloom lamp, along with a new 1600 lumen bulb which is now the brightest smart light out of Hue’s entire portfolio.

Apple’s butterfly keyboard will go down as one of the biggest tech blunders of recent years, but there’s another egregious sin the company has committed against its MacBooks that hasn’t been properly addressed yet: the elimination of the built-in SD card slot. There are lots of workarounds for the loss, but ElevationLab’s new ElevationHub appears to be the least intrusive. When Apple switched to using USB-C ports on its laptops, the company also decided it was time to eliminate the incredibly useful memory card slots it had been including on many of its notebooks for years. One less component meant there was more room inside for other tech, and milling out that tiny slot on the side of MacBook housings undoubtedly shaved a few precious seconds off the manufacturing process. It wasn’t as beneficial to consumers, though, as it once again meant that external hubs and card readers were accessories you had to keep close at hand for their inevitable use. The move gave birth to another accessory market for the MacBo

Microsoft has had one heck of a time fixing bugs in its last couple of Windows 10 versions. Many users, myself included, stuck with version 1809 longer than we anticipated because of all the bugs in version 1903 when it rolled out last year. One bug prevented users from upgrading to version 1903 if they had a USB device or SD card connected to their PC. Other bugs affected the Microsoft Game bar.

Exploring the stars, thousands of light years away from Earth, sounds pretty great right about now. While Darian Johnson hasn’t invented intergalactic travel, he has created a tiny desktop computer that looks straight out of Jean-Luc Picard’s ready room, letting you at least pretend that you’re safely aboard a distant starship. It’s a testament to Star Trek: The Next Generation’s production designers, including technical consultant Michael Okuda, that the fictional LCARS (short for Library Computer Access/Retrieval System) operating system used on the computers aboard the USS Enterprise-D still look futuristic, despite the show first airing 33 years ago. Gene Roddenberry himself insisted that the computer screens aboard the ship be as minimal and clean as possible to give the impression of the technology being incredibly advanced, and it’s an aesthetic that many fans of the show are still fans of, including Johnson. Johnson’s LCARS computer is based on an existing design for a similar TNG-themed alarm clock,

Three years ago, long after the rise (and fall) of Flash, Adobe announced that its once-ubiquitous multimedia platform was finally going away. But Adobe never provided a specific date for when Flash would reach its end-of-life. Now we know: Adobe Flash is going to officially die on December 31, 2020. While younger folks should be forgiven for not knowing about Flash, during the late 90s, and into the 2000s, huge swaths of the internet relied on Flash to add interactivity to websites in the form of animations, games, and even videos. In fact, in its early days, YouTube relied almost entirely on Flash to serve up streaming videos to millions of people around the world. However, that changed in the latter half of the 2000s thanks to the rise of more powerful open-source platforms, like HTML 5 and CSS 3, and the need for a more efficient standard designed to run on mobile phones. Adobe Flash (or Macromedia Flash as it was known before Adobe bought it out in 2005) quickly began to lose its appeal. And that’s bef

A NASA parallax experiment involving New Horizons shows the probe now sees some stars in slightly different positions than we do on Earth, revealing just how far the spacecraft is from home. You can actually replicate this effect at home, kids. Fully extend your arm away from your face and raise a finger (anyone, you choose). You’ll notice that, when alternating between your left and right eyes, your finger will change position.

As handy as a built-in trackpad is, there are many laptop users who absolutely despise the option. To them, a mouse is still the only way to push a cursor around, and for those times when they have to travel, the surprisingly tiny CheerPod packs an impressive amount of functionality into a pocket-friendly device that’s about the size of a lighter. Using the CheerPod looks like a bit of a balancing act between a traditional mouse and a touchpad. It can be slid around a table to control the Windows or macOS’ cursor over Bluetooth, with a pair of left and right clickable buttons used to make selections. But the surface of the CheerPod also has multi-touch functionality, so depending on how many fingers you rest on top, moving the tiny mouse around can alternately scroll documents, switch between windows and apps, or activate various other gesture-controlled shortcuts each operating system supports. For those times when you just don’t have room to plop a mouse down next to your laptop, like when working on the ti

Amazon is debuting a new software that will send its warehouse employees real-time visual cues about their physical proximity to other workers, one of the company’s latest initiatives in response to covid-19—a problem the company has been struggling to address in its facilities.

Matt Denton was one of the clever engineers responsible for designing and building the functional BB-8 robots and puppets used to film the most recent Star Wars trilogy. But online Denton is probably better known for his clever use of 3D printing to supersize Lego Technic sets, which now includes a functional go-kart he can actually drive On his YouTube channel, Denton has been sharing a series of videos detailing the planning, engineering, and construction of his latest XXL Lego build.

Officials in California and Washington State are investigating Amazon’s business practices with a focus on whether the tech giant abuses its power over third-party sellers on its online marketplace, according to reports from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Amazon’s been facing increasing antitrust scrutiny from both the U.S. and abroad over how the company aggregates data from these sellers and purportedly gives its own products an unfair advantage.

As a software company in the browser space, Brave’s made a name for itself by putting user privacy first and monetization second. But now, some of its users are pointing out that the pledge might be a bit duplicitous. As first pointed out by the folks over at Decrypt, Brave has been quietly redirecting its users from particular cryptocurrency sites, over to affiliate URLs that Brave, in turn, can use to track users and skim off revenue. The news came to light this past weekend when one Twitter user pointed out that, upon typing the URL for the cryptocurrency exchange Binance into his Brave search bar, the browser automatically reformatted the original URL—”binance.us”—into the affiliate-friendly “binance.us/en?ref=35089877:” a link that directs the end-user to the exact same destination, but the latter ensures that Brave gets a commission for referring that user to that particular site. According to Binance’s blog post explaining its affiliate program, the commissioner’s cut can be “up to 50%” of each trade