Smart home pioneer LIFX will live on under new ownership

Smart lighting company LIFX has been bought by Feit Electric.

A few years back, there were two big names in the high-end smart bulb game — Philips Hue, which worked with a proprietary Zigbee bridge, and LIFX, which worked over Wi-Fi, no extra white plastic box required. (We all know how much people hate hubs and bridges cluttering up their smart homes.) Yet, the Zigbee-based Hue went on to become the Kleenex of smart lighting, whereas LIFX went into receivership earlier this year.

However, there’s good news for LIFX customers and for the smart home in general. California-based Feit Electric has stepped in and snapped up LIFX from its bankrupt Australian owner Buddy Technologies and says it will keep LIFX alive.

“Feit Electric will offer the current suite of LIFX products and plans to expand the...

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Netflix’s The Sandman is a dream adaptation of a classic

Tom Sturridge in Neflix’s The Sandman. | Image: Netflix

Neil Gaiman’s beloved story comes to life on the screen

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The best free apps for video calling

Illustration by Samar Haddad / Photo by Becca Farsace

The COVID-19 pandemic has had long-lasting effects on the way we work. Despite the semi-official “opening up” of many public and commercial venues, many of us are still relying on video calls to keep in touch with work colleagues, family, and friends. Zoom continues to top the list of videoconferencing apps, but there are a bunch of other free applications out there that will allow you to meet others online.

What follows is a list of some of the best videoconferencing apps, along with a couple of popular text chat apps and social networks that include video calling features. We’ve also tried to concentrate on applications that allow at least 10 or more participants on their free version.

A good idea is to try one or two out for yourself...

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How to keep your kids busy while you work from home

Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge | Photography by Halfpoint Images / Getty Images

Working from home can be a balancing act between your business and personal life — especially if you’ve got kids. If your children are toddlers, then you must depend on partners, family, or childcare providers to keep them away from your Zoom sessions. If they are school age, you may have some time for yourself and your job during school hours — until the school day is done.

Below are some toys, videos, and ideas that some of our staffers with kids have come up with to help keep things a little saner while you’re finishing up your work day.

Keep the kids busy

Marbrasse Acrylic Pen Holder

Image: Marbrasse

Marbrasse Acrylic Pen Holder.

Esther Cohen, associate director of audience development for The Verge, says,...

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Amazon acquires Roomba robot vacuum makers iRobot for $1.7 billion

Image: iRobot

Amazon has signed an agreement to acquire iRobot, makers of Roomba robot vacuums. The deal is valued at approximately $1.7 billion, and Amazon will acquire iRobot for $61 per share in an all-cash transaction.

“Customers love iRobot products — and I’m excited to work with the iRobot team to invent in ways that make customers’ lives easier and more enjoyable,” says Dave Limp, SVP of Amazon Devices. It’s not immediately clear how iRobot will be integrated into Amazon once the deal is finalized and cleared by regulators, but Amazon intends to keep Colin Angle as the CEO of iRobot.

iRobot has been designing robot vacuums since 2002, and it has sold millions of its popular Roomba vacuums. Earlier this year iRobot launched its latest iRobot OS,...

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Microsoft Word 101: how to convert a Word doc to a PDF

Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge

For a long time, Adobe’s PDF file format has been the format for legal and business documents, largely because they most closely resemble their hardcopy versions — and because they can be locked down relatively easily so that no changes can be made. But while PDFs are great for producing accurate digital versions of paper documents, you can also very easily create a PDF out of an ordinary Word document as well.

Save a Word file to a PDF from Microsoft Word

As you might imagine, creating a PDF from a Word document is very easy when you do it using Microsoft Word.

On a desktop / laptop

• Open the document in Word.
• Click on File > Save as > Download as PDF.

On an Android device

• Tap on the three dots in the upper-right...

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What to expect from Samsung’s August Unpacked event

A teaser for Samsung’s August 10th event. | Image: Samsung

Samsung’s annual summer launch event is almost here. The company will hold its August Galaxy Unpacked event on August 10th at 9AM ET, one year and one day after last year’s foldable-focused event. And, if rumors are to be believed, we’re set for a very similar lots of announcements consisting of a pair of foldables — the Galaxy Z Fold 4 and Galaxy Z Flip 4 — a new lineup of smartwatches with the Galaxy Watch 5, and most likely some new earbuds.

We know there are foldables on the way because Samsung’s basically showed them to us in its promotional images and official trailer for its August 10th launch, and Samsung’s smartphone boss teased “new Samsung Galaxy foldables” in a blog post about the launch. The sheer quantity of Watch 5 leaks...

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DuckDuckGo browser’s stricter privacy protection will also apply to Microsoft scripts now

Image by DuckDuckGo

After a revelation in May that DuckDuckGo’s (DDG) privacy-focused web browser allows Microsoft tracking scripts on third-party websites, the company now says it will start blocking those too. DuckDuckGo’s browser had third-party tracker loading protection by default that already blocked scripts embedded on websites from Facebook, Google, and others, but until now Microsoft’s scripts from the Bing and LinkedIn domains (but not its third-party cookies) had a pass.

A security researcher named Zach Edwards pointed out the exclusion that he apparently uncovered while auditing the browser’s privacy claims, and noted it is especially curious because Microsoft is the partner that delivers ads in DDG’s search engine (while promising not to use...

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The new cheats menu in Vampire Survivors makes me wish more games had them

Vampire Survivors_._ | Image: Poncle

Vampire Survivors’ new 0.10.0 update adds a cheats menu, and after using it to unlock some things I had been stuck on, I dearly wish that more games included one.

Vampire Survivors, if you haven’t heard of it, is a delightful game about leveling up and destroying literally thousands of monsters in a single run. I’d describe it as roguelike-ish; you pick a starting character with certain attributes and a specific weapon, and you’ll level up that weapon, other weapons, and other items as you collect gems by defeating enemies. Your weapons fire automatically, so you mostly just have to worry about picking up experience and items while avoiding baddies.

The game launched in Early Access on Steam late last year, and has received regular...

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Alex Jones must pay $4.1 million for spreading Sandy Hook conspiracy theory

Photo by Zach Roberts/NurPhoto via Getty Images

A jury has ordered conspiracy broadcaster Alex Jones to pay $4.1 million to the parents of a child killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. The decision followed a trial that saw Jones and his counsel break courtroom protocol and — at one point — accidentally send copies of Jones’ phone records to the opposing legal team. The fine marks one of the first concrete legal consequences for Jones’ false claims that the shooting was a staged “false flag,” which led to years of harassment for parents. But it represents only a fraction of the money Jones has made in the years since.

Scarlett Lewis and Neil Heslin, whose son Jesse Lewis was one of the 20 children killed at Sandy Hook, had requested $150 million in compensation for...

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The best burns Twitter’s lawyers deployed to deny Elon Musk’s claims

Twitter admits that Musk is a Twitter user | Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images

So I don’t know entirely what’s in Elon Musk’s counterclaims against Twitter — they are still under seal — but I did get an inkling today, when Twitter dropped its response. It’s spicy! Rather than let Musk get his complaints out first, Twitter went ahead and released a blow-by-blow response, the better with which to dunk on Elon along the way.

I do love this:

The Counterclaims are a made-for-litigation tale that is contradicted by the evidence and common sense

Usually legal documents have arcane, passive-aggressive digs at the other party in them. Twitter’s lawyers, however, came out swinging in their reply to Musk’s counterclaims. Maybe that’s because they know how many people will read these documents; maybe it’s just because they’re...

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The best noise-canceling headphone deals

You can currently buy the AirPods Max for around $449 instead of $549. | Photo by Becca Farsace / The Verge

With more people working from home than they used to, owning a good pair of noise-canceling headphones has become more appealing than ever. However, they can be expensive and difficult to shop for due to the range of available models, many of which cater to different lifestyles and priorities. Some are better suited for long-haul flights, for instance, while others are ideal for multitasking and marathon listening sessions.

That’s why we’ve curated this list of the best deals on noise-canceling headphones. Here, you’ll find sales on all kinds of on-ear and over-ear headphones, all of which are designed to eliminate outside noise but come with their own strengths and weaknesses. And if you want to do even more research before making a...

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HBO Max will be replaced next year by a new service combined with Discovery Plus

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

HBO Max isn’t dead...yet. But come the summer of 2023 it will be, and there will be a new service replacing both HBO Max and Discovery Plus, Warner Bros Discovery CEO David Zaslav said on an earnings call today.

“HBO Max has a competitive feature set, but it has had performance and customer issues,” Zaslav said, being much more polite than I would be about the app, which regularly struggles to stream when people tune in for big appointment shows like Euphoria and Succession. He went on to claim Discovery Plus has a better tech stack and would become the core of the new service which will combine the content of HBO Max with the content and tech of Discovery Plus.

“We think that product is going to be superb,” Zaslav said later in the...

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AMC investors will go APE, company announces

APE not pictured | Image: The Verge

You may remember our friends at AMC, the theater chain with the pantless CEO, who’ve leaned all the way in on the meme stock thing. Hordes of enthusiastic retail investors maybe rescued AMC from crushing debt. Now AMC is hoping to tap them again to create more shares of the company.

This quarter, AMC announced a dividend for shareholders: AMC Preferred Equity units, which will trade as APE on the New York Stock Exchange. One of these babies will exist for every common share, and can be converted to common stock if the company and investors vote for that to happen.

That “if” is kind of sticky though. See, AMC wanted to sell more shares and was shot down by investors. Maybe those investors didn’t want to be further diluted — AMC sold a lot...

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SoundCloud is firing 20 percent of its global workforce

SoundCloud’s CEO sent out a memo on Wednesday | Photo Illustration by Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Streaming company SoundCloud is cutting about 20 percent of its global workforce. Billboard reported on August 3rd that SoundCloud CEO Michael Weissman told the staff in a company memo that the change is mostly due to the current economic climate. Employees affected would be notified over the next several days.

“Today’s change positions SoundCloud for the long run and puts us on a path to sustained profitability,” Weissman wrote in the memo. “We have already begun to make prudent financial decisions across the company and that now extends to a reduction to our team.” In a statement to Billboard, a SoundCloud representative confirmed the news, and said: “During this difficult time, we are focused on providing the support and resources to...

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Argo AI assembles panel of outside experts to oversee safety of its autonomous vehicles

A Ford Argo AI test vehicle, being tested, drives through the downtown area in Detroit, Michigan on July 12, 2019 | Photo credit should read JEFF KOWALSKY/AFP via Getty Images

As autonomous vehicle testing ramps up, Argo AI announced the formation of a panel of outside experts to oversee the safe deployment of its technology.

The startup, which is backed by Ford and Volkswagen, will “provide feedback on Argo’s safety and security practices and policies, including maintaining a world-class safety culture, scaling safely across multiple cities and countries, and responsibly launching and operating commercial driverless services,” the company said.

The announcement comes as public opinion seems to be turning on autonomous vehicles (AVs), with recent surveys suggesting nearly half of Americans think that AVs would be a “bad idea” for society. And it comes as the Biden administration continues to scrutinize...

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How to enable your Mac’s VoiceOver screen reader

VoiceOver has been part of every Mac since macOS X | Photo by Monica Chin / The Verge

Starting with macOS X, Apple has included a native screen reader called VoiceOver on its Macs and MacBooks. The feature is designed to help low-vision or blind users navigate their computers — and the internet — more easily. It works by reading aloud text descriptions of everything that appears on the screen, as well as reading any displayed text. The technology also allows users to interact with elements on the screen.

While VoiceOver is primarily meant for those with visual impairments, it can be helpful in many different scenarios — for example, if you’re someone who has a learning disability and prefers to listen to text rather than read it.

Apple has a whole user guide that gets into the nitty-gritty of how to use VoiceOver with...

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Here are the best iPad deals right now

Select iPad models go on sale quite regularly. | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

While some of the best iPad deals typically occur around Black Friday and Cyber Monday, you can still find plenty of great discounts at all times of the year if you know where to look. Whether you’re after the high-end iPad Pro or the most affordable entry-level iPad, there’s likely a sale going on somewhere you may be interested in.

Of course, it’s difficult to know exactly where you can find the most notable deals unless you’re scouring the major retailers on a daily basis. But that’s often what our deal hunters at The Verge are doing each and every day, so let us help you out. Below, we’ve listed the best deals you can get on each iPad model that is currently available, including the latest ones equipped with Apple’s powerful M1 chip.

...

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Apple’s latest Studio Display update fixes an audio problem

Photo by Becca Farsace / The Verge

Apple has released a new software update for the Studio Display following reports of audio problems like sound dropouts and choppy playback (via MacRumors). The new update, which Apple only says “resolves an audio issue”, is a revised version of update 15.5, and to download and install it, your Mac will need to be on macOS Monterey 12.4 or later.

MacRumors reported this week on a memo indicating that Apple was aware something was going on. In the memo, Apple apparently said that the audio problems were not due to the Studio Display’s hardware, and to fix the issues, the company recommended that customers unplug the display from power, disconnect any accessories or devices, and then plug it back in after waiting 10 seconds.

It’s not clear...

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YouTube’s latest experimental feature lets you zoom in on videos

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

YouTube is testing a new mobile app feature with its premium subscribers that allows them to zoom in on any video. As noted by 9to5Google, the latest opt-in experimental feature enables a pinch-to-zoom gesture for videos — and it works both in portrait and full-screen landscape view.

According to the company, the zoom feature will remain in testing until September 1st, giving YouTube about a month to gather user feedback and refine things before potentially rolling it out more widely.

Screenshot: Richard Lawler / The Verge

You can opt in through the “try new features” section of YouTube’s settings.

To enable pinch to zoom, open YouTube’s settings menu either on your phone or from the website. As long as...

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Microsoft gives Xbox Series S devs more memory to improve graphics performance

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Microsoft is giving Xbox Series S game developers more control over memory on the console. A new Xbox software development kit has been released to developers recently, and it frees up more memory for developers to access for Xbox Series S games and boosts performance in certain titles.

“Hundreds of additional megabytes of memory are now available to Xbox Series S developers,” says Microsoft’s Game Dev team in a video detailing the updates. “This gives developers more control over memory, which can improve graphics performance in memory-constrained conditions.”

The $299 Xbox Series S launched as a console capable of 1440p gaming at up to 120fps, but many games have only hit 1080p and without the higher frame rates of the more powerful...

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Biden administration declares monkeypox a public health emergency

Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images

The monkeypox outbreak is a public health emergency in the United States, Xavier Becerra, the secretary of health and human services, said today. The disease has been spreading in the US since May, and cases have been rising around the world.

“We urge every American to take monkey pox seriously,” he said in a press briefing today.

The decision to declare a public health emergency follows the World Health Organization’s declaration in late July that monkeypox is a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. A number of states, including New York and California, have also declared health emergencies.

A public health emergency could accelerate access to existing treatments for the painful disease. Monkeypox vaccines already exist...

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Microsoft starts testing an Xbox Game Pass family plan

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Microsoft is starting to test an Xbox Game Pass family plan that will allow subscribers to share their benefits with other people. A preview of this Xbox Game Pass family plan is available in Colombia and Ireland today, and testers will be able to add up to four people to their subscription as long as they’re in the same country.

“Starting today in Colombia and Ireland, Xbox Insiders can begin to preview a plan that allows multiple people to share Game Pass Ultimate benefits,” explains Tyler Mittleider, a senior technical program manager at Microsoft. “This makes it even easier to play the best Game Pass games with friends and family across console, PC, and cloud by enabling you to add up to four people to your subscription, all with...

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Mark Zuckerberg is minting an NFT of his Little League baseball card for some reason

Image: Mark Zuckerberg (Instagram)

Other than “turning up the heat a little bit” on Meta employees who shouldn’t be there and hitting the metaverse runway, Mark Zuckerberg is highlighting Instagram’s expanded NFT support. The founder and CEO took the opportunity of announcing expanded NFT support on Instagram to tell everyone he’s turning his 1992 Little League baseball card into an NFT soon.

Why is that important? I couldn’t possibly tell you, but I do know that at age eight, Zuckerberg hit for .920 as a right-handed infielder in Dobbs Ferry, New York. And soon, that information will be backed up with a blockchain entry.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Mark Zuckerberg (@zuck)

This comes at an interesting time for Meta....

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Monkeypox can’t use the same at-home testing playbook as COVID-19

Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images

After two years of COVID-19, the conversation around monkeypox testing gives off an unnerving sense of deja-vu. The similarities are right there: painful swabs, the struggle to even find a test, bottlenecks, and a long wait for results. But the diseases are different enough that experience with COVID-19 didn’t give researchers much of a leg up in their efforts to improve the monkeypox testing process.

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, experts bemoaned the lack of investment in rapid, at-home testing for various diseases in the United States. The thought was that if the infrastructure had been in place before the coronavirus emerged, it would have been easier to scale up testing — and maybe help control the pandemic....

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One of the best Google search hacks is getting even better

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Did you know you can search for an exact word or phrase on Google by putting quotation marks around it? It’s a great way to get specific about something you’re looking for. And on Thursday, Google announced what I think will be a nice improvement: the small snippets underneath a search result link will now be created based on where the quoted term appears on the page.

Google’s blog post about the change has a good image that illustrates how this will work in practice, which I’ve included below. Google googled “google search,” and the two snippets shown in the example both include the bolded phrase “Google Search.”

Image: Google

The Google search re sults for “google search.”

Previously, Google would show you...

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MultiVersus delays launch of season 1

Player First Games

Player First Games, developer of MultiVersus, the arena brawler that pits Warner Bros. and DC Comics characters against each other in battles to the death, has announced it’s delaying the start of season 1 and the release of the Morty character.

We want to let everyone know that we are delaying the start of Season 1 & the release of Morty to a later date. We know this might be disappointing for some and want to assure our Community that we are dedicated to delivering new and exciting content that delights players. (2/3)

— MultiVersus (@multiversus) August 4, 2022

There wasn’t an updated release date provided, and no reason was given for the delay.

The game, which began its open beta last month, has been a surprise hit. Yesterday,...

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HBO Max might get maimed

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

And with it goes some of the good TV

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TuSimple reportedly tried to pass off a self-driving truck crash as ‘human error’

TuSimple is in trouble.

Last April, a semi-trailer truck operated by the San Diego-based company that was traveling down I-10 in Tucson, Arizona, suddenly lurched left, slamming into a concrete divider, according to dashcam footage leaked to YouTuber Asian Mai. TuSimple blamed “human error,” but a report in The Wall Street Journal says that’s a major oversimplification.

An internal report viewed by the Journal says that the crash occurred because “a person in the cab hadn’t properly rebooted the autonomous driving system before engaging it, causing it to execute an outdated command.” The left-turn command was 2.5 minutes old and should have been erased but wasn’t, according to the internal report.

The left-turn command was 2.5 minutes...

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The Verge’s favorite ways to relieve stress

Going offline. | Photo: Becky O’Bryan

It’s been a really stressful few years. We’ve all been living through pandemics (plural!), political upheaval, economic awfulness — you name it. And this isn’t even mentioning the normal pressure of work and family. So how do you deal?

We asked the staff of The Verge to let us know how they cope with the anxiety and pressures of living in today’s world (including having to write about these problems on a day-to-day basis). We got a variety of answers, ranging from running and meditation to pulling weeds and creating chain mail.

In other words, here’s how some of us here at The Verge relieve our stress. Perhaps one of these will work for you — or you can let us know any strategies that have worked for you.

In the garden

P...

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