The new Windows Insider build makes it impossible to uninstall some Steam games

Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 25211 went live on September 29th. | Image: Microsoft

In 2019, Microsoft finally introduced support for Win32 games on the Microsoft Store for Windows. But if you downloaded the games, you might want to hold off on the latest Windows Insider build. The most recent Dev Channel update prevents users from uninstalling Win32 apps, which means many of the games found on the Microsoft Store and Steam will be stuck on your computer for the time being.

Microsoft’s Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 25211 was recently released to subscribers of the Windows updates Dev Channel. The new build comes with a host of new features, bug fixes, and one big catch. This particular update has only rolled out in the Dev Channel and shouldn’t affect Windows Insider subscribers who use the Beta Channel or Release...

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A week with the BTS Tamagotchi

Adorable and ethically questionable. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Earlier this year, Bandai America announced that the TinyTan Tamagotchi, a new handheld game featuring the members of BTS, was on its way. The $19.99 gadget is up for preorder now, and it ships on October 3rd. As a fan of all things BTS and K-pop who also happens to review things for a living, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to test it out.

The conceit of a Tamagotchi is innocuous enough. It’s a teensy egg-shaped device with a screen in the middle and three buttons across the bottom. Traditionally, that screen is occupied by a virtual pet — you feed this pet, play games with it, and such by pressing various combinations of said buttons. The TinyTan Tamagotchi is like that, except the pet under your care happens to be a member of the...

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Oh goodie, now everyone can share NFTs on Instagram or Facebook

Now, your posts can have a little verified check mark to prove you didn’t just right-click, save, and post. | Image: Meta

Meta announced on Thursday that it’s giving everyone in the US the ability to share “digital collectibles” (read: NFTs under a new name that social media execs think is more appealing) on Facebook and Instagram. Sharing on the latter platform is also available in over 100 other countries. The feature, which was limited to select users at first, works by having you connect your crypto wallet to your profile, after which you can create a post featuring the NFTs in that wallet. According to a blog post from Meta, sharing a digital collectible results in “automatically tagging the creator and collector.”

Going to Settings > Digital Collectibles in the Instagram app, it shows that there are currently five wallets supported if you’re trying to...

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Teenage Engineering’s new Record Factory is your own personal record maker

The PO-80 has an arm to play music with, and another to carve it in. | Image: Teenage Engineering

Teenage Engineering is known for its playfully designed audio synthesizers you can digitally make music with, but now it’s made a way you can save your tunes in the most analog way possible: on records. The Swedish company’s new PO-80 Record Factory is a turntable that lets you cut your own lo-fi vinyl records and play them back as well.

The PO-80 only supports 5-inch records for cutting and supports four minutes or three minutes of recording time per side at 33 rpm and 45 rpm, respectively. You can also attach an included 7-inch record adapter to play back larger records, though you can’t cut them.

Teenage Engineering (TE) built the PO-80 to be portable, just like its calculator-inspired Pocket Operator line of synthesizers that let you...

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I fell in love with Stadia right as it shut down

Image: Google

Google is shutting down Stadia, its polarizing cloud gaming service, only four weeks after the company’s target audience of me, Makena Kelly, actually started using it.

When Stadia was announced in 2019, Google pitched it as the future of gaming, providing a more accessible alternative to expensive PC rigs or whatever $500 next-gen console iteration was on the horizon. And when Stadia finally launched, it worked. Sure, features were missing, and connections were shaky, but suddenly I had access to a handful of games that would have previously cost me hundreds of dollars in hardware and controllers to play — a steep investment I wasn’t willing to make for games I may have only thrown on for a few hours.

Despite Stadia’s obvious benefits,...

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Anker’s new earbuds line includes models for gaming and sleep

Anker’s Soundcore VR P10 earbuds are designed to provide lag-free audio for gaming. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

Anker announced its latest wave of wireless earbuds yesterday, and the products indicate that Anker is expanding its focus beyond the usual sound quality upgrades. The company announced three pairs in all: the Soundcore Liberty 4, Soundcore Sleep A10, and Soundcore VR P10 earbuds.

The new Liberty 4 earbuds do offer better sound; they’re Anker’s first “stick”-style buds to include dual drivers in each earbud. But they can also read your heart rate for fitness and wellness purposes. This functionality has been rumored for Apple’s AirPods lineup but has yet to materialize.

Things didn’t end there. Anker also introduced its first-ever set of sleep earbuds, which are clearly meant to challenge Bose’s $249 Sleepbuds II and other products in...

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The Nord Stream pipeline leaks are a disaster — the oil and gas industry has a much bigger mess

In this Handout Photo provided by Swedish Coast Guard, the release of gas emanating from a leak on the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline in the Baltic Sea on September 28th, 2022, in At Sea. | Photo by Swedish Coast Guard via Getty Images

This week, the world watched what’s likely to be the fossil fuel industry’s single largest methane release ever. An astonishing amount of methane is floating up from the now-notorious Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines and rising above the surface of the Baltic Sea. It’s a pollution nightmare. It also pales in comparison to the vast amount of methane that oil and gas operations constantly release.

Up to 778 million standard cubic meters of methane gas could spew from the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines in a worst-case scenario, according to the Danish Energy Agency. That’s equivalent to nearly a third of Denmark’s greenhouse gas emissions for the entire year of 2020.

The Nord Stream disaster “is an extraordinarily huge one-time event,” says...

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Ubisoft will let you transfer your Stadia purchases to PC

A screenshot from Assassin’s Creed Valhalla_._ | Image: Ubisoft

Stadia may be shutting down next year, but if you’ve purchased Ubisoft titles on the cloud gaming platform, you’ll be able to transfer those purchases to PC at some point in the future, Ubisoft confirmed to The Verge.

“While Stadia will shut down on January 18th, 2023, we’re happy to share that we’re currently working to bring the games you own on Stadia to PC through Ubisoft Connect,” Ubisoft senior corporate communications manager Jessica Roache said in a statement. “We’ll have more to share regarding specific details as well as the impact for Ubisoft+ subscribers at a later date.”

This means that players who may have invested in Ubisoft’s games on Stadia will be able to play them again on their PC down the line. That said, some people...

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Blonde’s CG fetus is anti-abortion propaganda dressed up as art

Adrien Brody as the playwright Arthur Miller and Ana de Armas as Marilyn Monroe in Blonde_._ | Image: Netflix

Director Andrew Dominik’s experimental Marilyn Monroe biopic gets downright weird and borderline offensive in its discussion of abortion

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How to get a Stadia refund

Stadia is shutting down in January. Here’s how to get a refund for your games and hardware. | Image: Google

Google Stadia is shuffling off this mortal coil on January 18th, but thankfully, Google is offering refunds for anyone that purchased Stadia hardware or games from the Stadia store. Google has made an official statement with details regarding the Stadia platform and when users can expect refunds, but here’s a synopsis of what we know so far.

Stadia will remain operational until January 18th, and you’ll continue to have access to your games until then, giving you the opportunity to transfer progress and tie up other loose ends. However, Google has disabled the Stadia storefront, so you won’t have the ability to make any additional purchases.

If you purchased any of the following hardware through the Google Store or made any game...

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The KitchenAid mixer has burly levers that still offer refined control

A lever counts as a button, right? Roll with me on this one. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

It took me joining a baking club to realize just how good my KitchenAid stand mixer’s controls are. Ever since I got it a few years back, I’ve admired the simplicity of its two-lever system: one that lets you tilt the head up and down and one to control the speed. But now that I’m using it every week, I’ve finally figured out what makes it click so well for me: it’s the fact that the speed lever feels sturdy and rugged while also providing incredibly precise control.

The speed control lever’s job is made fairly obvious by its name: it lets you control how fast your mixer is mixin’ and also acts as an off switch at its “0” setting. The lever is a sturdy metal affair, and the version on my mixer is capped off with a piece of black plastic...

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After six seasons, Community will get its movie

Community Season 6 Episode 609 “Grifting” Danny Pudi, Alison Brie, Joel McHale, Gillian Jacobs, and Ken Jeong | Photo by Justin Lubin / Yahoo / Courtesy of Sony Pictures Television

After making improbable returns for its fourth, fifth, and sixth seasons, Community will deliver on a long-running joke / promise with a movie, but this time, it’s on NBC’s streaming service, Peacock. Community debuted in 2009, and when NBC canceled the show in 2014, fans began a social media campaign for #SixSeasonsandaMovie based on a line from the show, which they’re now going to get.

And a movie?

— Peacock (@peacock) September 30, 2022

Series creator Dan Harmon is on board, along with much of the original case, including Joel McHale, Danny Pudi, Alison Brie, Gillian Jacobs, Jim Rash, and Ken Jeong. In recent months, Harmon had been saying the movie was a matter of “when and not if,” and now it’s clear why he was so confident....

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Apple’s new M2-powered MacBook Air is cheaper than ever

The MacBook Air models with both 256GB and 512GB of storage are on sale. | Image: Dan Seifert / The Verge

If the deal on the 512GB M2-powered MacBook Air we featured earlier this week was too spendy for you, fret not, because Apple’s base model is currently even cheaper. Right now, Amazon and Best Buy are selling the model with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage for just $1,049 ($150 off), the laptop’s lowest price to date. Unlike Amazon, however, Best Buy is discounting all colors in case you’re not a fan of dark blue or gray.

True, it may take a while to perform some tasks given the storage on the base model is slower than that of the new 512GB M2-powered Air, but it’s still faster overall and should satisfy the average person’s needs. Plus, it significantly improves upon one of the things we disliked the most about the M1-powered Air: its...

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UK startup Arrival’s unique ‘microfactory’ produces its first electric van

Arrival’s first production verification van at its microfactory in southern England. | Image: Arrival

Arrival, an electric vehicle startup based in the UK, announced that its so-called “microfactory” based in southern England has produced its first production verification vehicle. The news comes as the company is reportedly in talks to raise money so it can build and sell its electric vehicles in the US.

The electric van was produced using “in-house technologies, including composite materials, autonomous mobile robots, in-house components and a software defined factory,” the company said. The milestone is proof that Arrival’s microfactory concept, which are highly automated small-footprint facilities where it plans to build its vehicles, is working.

“This is the first time a vehicle has ever been built in our Microfactory, using a new...

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How to cancel your account at Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, and others

Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge

Let’s face it: many of us don’t pay enough attention to what streaming services we are subscribed to — and paying for. Especially now, when there are more and more services vying for our attention, it’s easy to go for a trial subscription, or to decide that you’re going to subscribe “just for a couple of months,” and then completely forget about it. Meanwhile, your charge card is being pinged every month.

For example, over a year ago, Matthew Inman, the comics artist who creates the site The Oatmeal, reported (to his apparent chagrin) that he had been paying for Netflix’s DVD subscription for the last 13 years:

Today Netflix was kind enough to let me know that I've accidentally been paying for a DVD subscription for THIRTEEN FUCKING...

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The FBI says it caught an ex-NSA employee trying to sell top-secret intelligence documents

The Verge

The NSA, as a rule, wants to employ people who are good at spying. But according to the FBI, one former employee tried to turn the tables on the agency and was caught in the act.

Per details released by the Department of Justice this week, a Colorado resident was arrested Wednesday and charged with attempting to transmit classified information to a representative of a foreign government.

The press release says that Jareh Sebastian Dalke, 30, was employed by the NSA from June 6th to July 1st, 2022. Between August and September 2022, feds say that he used an encrypted email account to transmit portions of three classified documents to an individual who he believed to be working for a foreign government.

In fact, that individual was an FBI...

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Spotify keeps making it harder for me to listen to music

Nick Barclay / The Verge

Thursday morning, I woke up in a haze and decided to listen to ambient music while I drank my first cup of coffee. The night before, I’d saved an album to Spotify, but when I fumbled through the panels of the desktop app, I couldn’t find it. The menu was full of recommendations and recent plays — I couldn’t find “Albums” anywhere in the list. There wasn’t even a clear way to navigate to it. I tried cycling between the Home and Your Library tabs, but nothing turned up an Albums button. The side panel showed playlists, and the album I wanted wasn’t in my recent listens. I could search for it if I remembered the album’s name, but I didn’t.

Eventually, I got there by tinkering with the window size and keeping an eye on the top menu bar, but...

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The first trailer for Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities looks like just the thing for Halloween

Guillermo del Toro presents his Cabinet of Curiosities_._ | Image: Netflix

Guillermo del Toro is finally ready to show off the first proper trailer for his intriguing Netflix anthology called Cabinet of Curiosities. The series is made up of eight stories with names like “Graveyard Rats” and “Dreams in the Witch House,” and the first trailer definitely makes it seem like — while they’re all spooky — we’ll get a nice mix of genres and styles: haunted houses, gothic horror, and straight-up slasher stories.

That likely comes down to the variety of creative minds working on the show. While del Toro penned two original stories for Cabinet of Curiosities, the anthology also includes episodes from The Babadook director Jennifer Kent, Cube director Vincenzo Natali, and Mandy director Panos Cosmatos, among others. The...

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RIP Google Stadia: the latest news on the discontinued cloud gaming service

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Stadia will shut down on January 18th, 2023. Here, you’ll find the latest developments on the service as its winds down as well as pieces from our writers on its impact (or lack of it) on the gaming and tech industry.

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Hurricane Ian flooded some Florida hospitals — climate change puts even more at risk

Photo by Paul Hennessy/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Rising sea levels and increasing storm intensity will put more and more hospitals in danger of flooding, just like the ones facing Hurricane Ian this week, a new study found.

Ian sent water pouring into HCA Florida Fawcett Hospital in Port Charlotte, Florida, this week. The hurricane churned through the coastal town just north of Fort Myers on Wednesday, flooding the building’s lower levels just as winds ripped the roof off — letting the pounding rain in from above. Doctors in the hospital were expecting issues, internal medicine specialist Birgit Bodine told The Associated Press.

“We didn’t anticipate that the roof would blow off on the fourth floor,” she said.

Doctors at the hospital are doing their best to care for patients on the...

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The best wireless Nintendo Switch controllers in 2022

Each option (except for the Hori Split Pad Pro and 8BitDo USB Adapter) is compatible with all Switch models, including Switch Lite.

The best controllers for your Nintendo Switch aren’t the ones that come with each system. The removable Joy-Cons included with all Switch consoles (except for the Switch Lite) are convenient since they can be detached to use as wireless controllers for two people. But their tiny, contourless design isn’t that comfortable for long gaming sessions or large hands. And don’t get me started on the dreaded Joy-Con drift.

Thankfully, you have plenty of alternatives, though only some of them are worth your money. In this buying guide, I focus on wireless controllers that are comfortable and reliable and a few with unique features that enhance your play time, like input customization and long battery life. I’m not covering wired controllers that...

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How to watch Tesla’s 2022 AI Day event

Elon Musk said he expects to show off a prototype of the Tesla Bot. | Image: Tesla

Tesla’s AI Day kicks off today, September 30th, at which Elon Musk has said he hopes to show off a working prototype of the company’s humanoid robot, Optimus. The event, which will be held at Tesla’s headquarters in Palo Alto, California, will be livestreamed for the public and is estimated to start at 5PM PT / 8PM ET — assuming the event begins around the same time as last year’s AI Day.

The company hasn’t yet shared details on tuning into the AI event, but it’ll likely be streamed on its YouTube account like the first Tesla AI Day. We don’t have a lot of details about what will be announced, but based on the invitation, we’re likely to hear about the “latest developments in artificial intelligence, including Full Self-Driving, Tesla...

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USB kills off SuperSpeed branding as it tries to simplify its ubiquitous connector

USB-C, the cable that (sometimes) does it all. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

The SuperSpeed USB branding is no more thanks to a new set of guidelines currently being rolled out by the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF), the body that manages and maintains the USB standard.

It’s part of a rebranding initiative that the organization kicked off last year with the introduction of a new series of packaging, port, and cable logos. But with its latest set of branding and logo guidelines it’s going even further, simplifying its legacy branding and signaling the end of the decade-old SuperSpeed branding. If the name doesn’t ring any bells, then that’s probably because you (like most other people) simply referred to it by its USB 3 version number. Alongside it, the USB-IF is also ditching USB4 as a consumer-facing brand...

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Bipedal robot sets 100 meter record

A bipedal robot named Cassie has set a new Guinness World Record for the 100 meter dash, clocking in a time of 24.73 seconds and an average speed of 4m/s (9mph).

That’s much slower than a human, for whom record times stand at 9.58 seconds for men (set by Usain Bolt) and 10.49 seconds for women (set by Florence Griffith-Joyner). However, it’s still extremely impressive for a robot of Cassie’s design.

“This may be the first bipedal robot to learn to run, but it won’t be the last,” said OSU robotics professor Jonathan Hurst in a press statement. “I think progress is going to accelerate from here.”

Cassie was created by engineers at Oregon State University (OSU) and is manufactured by OSU-spinout Agility Robotics. Agility uses the bipedal...

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Zendure launches a giant ‘semi-solid state’ battery on motorized wheels

Image: Zendure

Zendure’s SuperBase V is the largest and most powerful portable battery yet. Not only can the 6.4kWh battery-on-wheels be expanded to 64kWh via stackable modules, it stores electrons in what the company calls the “first home energy system with semi-solid state batteries.” It can accept up to 3,000W of solar input, can be charged at a level 2 EV station, and includes external running lights, voice control, and powered wheels (because of course it does).

According to Zendure, semi-solid state batteries offer 42 percent higher energy density and improved safety compared to lithium-ion phosphate (aka, LFP or LiFePO4) batteries — the current gold standard. As Professor Hobo explains it on YouTube, Zendure’s semi-solid state batteries are...

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I’m going to miss Google Stadia

Image: Google

I’ve had a love-hate relationship with Google Stadia, but I’m certainly going to miss it now it’s shutting down. While the writing has been on the wall for Stadia pretty much since it launched, I was one of the many (or the few as the joke goes) to be intrigued by this cloud-powered future of gaming. I paid the entry fee for a (mostly) empty stadium, but I enjoyed it anyway.

It hasn’t been easy to like Stadia. The first few months of the service felt like a beta I was paying Google to test. I couldn’t initially connect the Stadia controller wirelessly to a PC or phone; the browser streaming wasn’t as high quality as the Chromecast output; and Google Assistant integration was useless.

Google had also promised neat YouTube integration and...

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The 2x “lens” on the iPhone 14 Pro is surprisingly good

The 2x lens is a 12-megapixel crop of the main sensor... not actually a lens at all. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

One of the iPhone 14 Pro’s big new features is a big new camera sensor. For the first time, an iPhone has a high-resolution main camera sensor — 48-megapixels to be exact — and the best thing about it isn’t that you can take 48-megapixel photos. You can, sure, but RIP your phone’s storage space. Nope, one of this sensor’s best features is the 12 megapixels in the middle. Apple has added a 2x zoom mode to its camera app, and all it does is use the central portion of the main camera sensor to crop in and mimic the effect of a 48mm-equivalent telephoto lens. That’s it. Simple, but it’s actually kind of a big deal.

I wasn’t expecting to like the 2x zoom. For starters, it feels dangerously close to digital zoom. That’s when you zoom in on a...

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Remembering all those times Google said it was committed to Stadia

In the end, were we not the ones getting played? | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Come January, Google will be shutting down its Stadia cloud gaming service. In some ways, the move isn’t much of a surprise — as my colleagues have pointed out, there’s been doubt about whether Google was in it for the long haul with Stadia basically ever since it was announced in March 2019.

If you’ve been listening to what the company said about the service, though, you’d be forgiven for being blindsided. Up until the very end, Google insisted there’s a wonderful future for Stadia, and that players should keep signing up for and using the service, despite rumors that it was about to go bust. Now that Stadia’s officially being shut down, let’s take a look at the times Google promised us this wouldn’t happen.

October 2019 — “It is a long...

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Food delivery drone lands on power lines resulting in power outage for thousands

The Wing delivery drone on the power lines. | Image: Energex via ABC Radio Brisbane

A food delivery drone operated by Alphabet subsidiary Wing landed on overhead power lines in Brisbane, Australia, and caught fire. As a result, the network was shut down by energy firm Energex to respond to the incident, leaving thousands without power.

Some 2,000 individuals were left without electricity for around 45 minutes, reports ABC News and The Age, while 300 customers had no power for three hours.

Energex spokesman Danny Donald told The Age that the drone “landed on top of 11,000 volts and whilst it didn’t take out power, there was voltage tracking across the drone and the drone caught fire and fell to the ground.”

A spokesperson for Wing told the publication that the drone made a “precautionary controlled landing yesterday …...

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Hyper officially recalls its stackable (and overheating) GaN chargers after all

The chargers were designed to stack to offer up to 1600W of charging power. | Image: Hyper

Hyper is officially recalling its stackable 100W and 65W GaN chargers and a 130W battery pack, following reports that all three devices can overheat and may pose a fire hazard to consumers. Recall notices for the HyperJuice Stackable GaN USB-C chargers and HyperJuice 130W USB-C battery pack have been posted on the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission (US CPSC) website, and the company is emailing its customers directly to ask them to return the devices in exchange for store credit.

According to the CPSC, Hyper has received seven reports of its stackable GaN chargers overheating “resulting in damage to the changing units,” plus two reports of the battery pack overheating and causing “smoke, melting, and property damage.” No...

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