A tiny robot wand for your blinds

The SwitchBot Blind Tilt can tilt your blinds automatically. | Image: SwitchBot

SwitchBot, the smart home company that takes robotics to places no one imagined, has come up with another ingenious gadget. The new $69 SwitchBot Blind Tilt launches today on Kickstarter, with orders expected to ship before Christmas. And, yes, it looks as ugly as you’d expect. But as an inexpensive way to replicate the benefits of smart shades, it’s a promising product.

Automated motorized shades and blinds are something of a luxury as they’re generally very expensive — starting at around $300 to $400 per window and rapidly rising from there. The benefits, though, are quite impressive: energy savings, convenience, security, and smart lighting.

Smart blinds can automatically adjust to keep your home well-lit throughout the day, keep...

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Wikipedia’s mobile app is the cure for my Google frustrations

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Last night, I was casually wondering (as you do) which songs from Scottish electronic duo Boards of Canada’s seminal debut album, Music Has the Right to Children, use audio samples from Sesame Street? It’s the sort of idle fact-checking that humans in the 21st century are blessed to indulge in, and so (as you do), I whipped out my smartphone to Google it.

Thirty seconds later, I got so annoyed, I downloaded the Wikipedia app instead.

The problem I faced is not a new one. Many people have noted the slow degradation of Google’s search in recent years, partly a result of macro changes to the web’s structure and partly Google’s own fault for relentlessly privileging its own ads and services. And in this particular case, when I searched for...

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Pokémon Scarlet and Violet’s Paldea region is big, beautiful, and built for exploring

A pokémon trainer getting ready to catch a pokémon. | Image: Nintendo

The first truly open-world Pokémon games feel like what Game Freak and Nintendo have been building toward this whole time

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Google Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro review: better and better

They’re not quite the super-helpful, ultra-intelligent phones that Google wants them to be, but the latest Pixel devices are more competitive than ever

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God of War Ragnarök’s designers want you to express yourself (with violence)

Kratos and Thor face off in God of War Ragnarök_._ | Image: SIE

Lead combat designer Mihir Sheth explains how the team at Santa Monica Studio approached the PS5 sequel

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Microsoft’s PC Manager is like CCleaner for your computer

Microsoft’s PC Manager app. | Screenshot by Tom Warren / The Verge

Microsoft is working on a PC Manager app that’s designed to boost your computer’s performance. Much like CCleaner, a beta version of Microsoft’s PC Manager includes storage management and the ability to end tasks quickly and control which apps start up with Windows.

Much of this functionality is already baked into Windows, but this PC Manager app puts it all in one useful location. There’s even a browser protection section that makes it easier to change default browsers than what exists in Windows right now.

Image: Tom Warren / The Verge

You can easily switch default browsers with this app.

The storage manager feature includes the ability to manage apps or remove those that are rarely used, and there’s also a...

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The joys — and perils — of off-roading in an electric vehicle

EVs are perfect for off-roading, but how will other nature lovers react? | Image: Rivian

Everyone knows off-road vehicles are loud, obnoxious, and polluting. But what this article presupposes is, what if they weren’t?

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What on earth is going on with Elon Musk and Ukraine?

Who’s whispering in Elon Musk’s ear? | Illustration by Lille Allen / The Verge

Look, I’ve been avoiding talking about Elon Musk’s meddling in international affairs largely because I am not expert enough in international affairs to say much of anything. But now we’ve got Fiona Hill, formerly an advisor to Donald Trump who gave testimony at his first impeachment hearing, out here suggesting that Musk is “transmitting a message for Putin.”

This shit’s weird, dude, even for me. Musk set off an international shitposting incident by tweeting a peace proposal for the war in Ukraine. In response, sitting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy polled Twitter about whether users preferred a pro-Russia or pro-Ukraine Musk; sitting Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda likened Russia’s actions to someone stealing the wheels...

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Valve will soon tell you what components are in your Steam Deck

A new beta client update will list the factory-installed components within Steam Deck handhelds. | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Valve is rolling out a fresh batch of beta updates for its Steam Deck, one of which could help with servicing and repairs for the handheld gaming PC by listing internal components and saving owners from cracking the device open themselves to find out.

The new component lookup view will display the model and manufacturer of each major hardware element within individual Steam Decks. However, the list is only a snapshot of factory-installed components, and so won’t recognize or update for any fresh hardware that users install themselves. Users who have enabled beta client updates can access the new component lookup via Settings > System > Model/Serial Numbers button.

The feature will list factory-installed componants, but not recognise new...

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Jordan Peele’s Nope is coming to Peacock next month

Keke Palmer, Daniel Kaluuya, and Steven Yeun star in Nope. | Image: Universal Pictures

Nope, the part-horror, part-sci-fi, part neo-Western from Get Out director Jordan Peele, will be available to stream on Peacock from November 18th. The film, which we called “a breathtaking celebration of filmmaking as an art form” in our review, stars Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer as they investigate the supernatural goings on in the skies above their ranch.

Although Nope was well-received by critics, I have to admit I personally bounced off it when I saw it on the big screen. But Alissa Wilkinson’s writeup over at Voxhas me interested in giving it a second watch. “Nope is centrally about how our experiences of reality have been almost entirely colonized by screens and cameras and entertainment’s portrayals of what it calls reality,”...

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Bayonetta 3 developer reiterates support for replacement voice actor after controversy

Bayonetta 3 is scheduled for release on October 28th. | Image: PlatinumGames / Nintendo

Bayonetta 3 developer PlatinumGames has responded to the controversy that’s embroiled its upcoming game after it replaced longtime protagonist voice actor Hellena Taylor with Jennifer Hale. The studio published a statement saying, “We give our full support to Jennifer Hale as the new Bayonetta,” and asking people to “please refrain from any further comments that would disrespect Jennifer or any of the other contributors to the series.”

The studio also says that it agrees with a statement recently posted by Hale herself. The actor, who is best known for voicing the female version of Commander Shepard from the Mass Effect series, recently posted a tweet emphasizing her support for the right of actors to be properly paid. She asked for...

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Bethesda’s letting people rescue their Elder Scrolls Online games from Stadia

Image: Bethesda

If you played The Elder Scrolls Online using Google’s now-doomed Stadia cloud gaming service, I have some good news. Bethesda is making good on its promise to let people port their ESO accounts over to Windows and Mac, including all their progress, characters, purchased content, achievements, and inventory items.

According to several members of the Stadia subreddit, the company has been sending out emails to players with instructions on how to get the game up and running on their computers, which basically just involves logging into the Elder Scrolls Online site and downloading the game. The company has also posted the information on its website. The one downside is that you won’t be able to transfer your account to the PlayStation or...

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TikTok fires back at Forbes, denies report of a plan to track specific US citizens using its app

Nick Barclay / The Verge

TikTok is strongly pushing back against a Forbes report alleging that its parent company wanted to use the video app to “monitor the personal location of some specific American citizens.” In a series of tweets, TikTok accused Forbes of leaving off a vital part of its statement, which says that “TikTok does not collect precise GPS location information from US users,” despite the article’s claims that its parent company ByteDance considered obtaining “location data from U.S. users’ devices.”

The article, posted earlier on Thursday, said that ByteDance’s Internal Audit team — usually tasked with keeping an eye on those who currently work for the company or who have worked for the company in the past — planned on surveilling at least two...

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The Glow is gone — Amazon shuts down support for its kid-focused video calling device

Amazon Glow was designed to help keep kids engaged on video calls. It’s shutting down this year. | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge

Amazon will stop supporting its Glow video calling device for kids on December 31st, 2022. The innovative projector-powered gadget with a screen built-in was designed to make it easier for children to communicate with friends and family remotely by making games and activities part of the process. Last month, the company announced it was discontinuing sales, and it recently confirmed in an email to users that Amazon Glow devices, accessories, and the companion app will stop working entirely at the end of the year.

Launched a little over a year ago, the $300 Glow struggled to find an audience, possibly because kids can once again play with friends and family in real life. If you bought one, expect to see a refund by the end of October,...

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Elon Musk reportedly wants to fire most of Twitter’s employees

YIKES

About 7,500 people currently work at Twitter — and 75 percent of them can expect to be shown the door, The Washington Post reports. Elon Musk, who is acquiring the company, has been telling prospective investors that he plans drastic firings to bring down costs.

Musk has a deadline to close the purchase of Twitter by October 28th. In a sign the deal is proceeding, Twitter froze its employees’ equity awards, Bloomberg reported. Anonymous sources tell The Post that the deal is moving forward in good faith.

Job cuts were planned anyway. Before Musk’s bid, Twitter management planned to slice almost a quarter of the workforce, chopping $800 million from payroll. Musk’s planned cuts, which are larger, are “unimaginable,” the former head of...

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Tesla is now taking votes for its next Supercharger locations

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

The next Supercharger station location is up to Tesla owners.

The all-electric automaker put out the invitation to vote on new locations via its Tesla Charging Twitter account but had originally announced its intention to democratize Supercharger station expansion last month. Tesla owners can log in to participate via their user accounts and can vote for up to five locations in the list of 183 possible sites. There’s even a page where you can suggest a location that’s not on the list yet.

Vote for a Supercharger ⚡️ https://t.co/PFYek5I7sm

— Tesla Charging (@TeslaCharging) October 20, 2022

Currently, Lake Okeechobee, Florida, is in the lead with 558 votes (at the time of writing). The town of about 5,000 people doesn’t have any...

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YouTube Premium’s family plan just got more expensive

The plan now costs $22.99 per month. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

A YouTube Premium family plan now costs $22.99 per month following a price hike, as reported by 9to5Google. The family tier offers benefits like ad-free viewing and background playback for you and up to five other people, and it now costs $5 more per month.

The price change is already in effect for new subscribers, meaning you can’t sign up at the previous $17.99 price any longer. For current subscribers, “this change will take place on your next billing cycle starting on or after November 21, 2022,” YouTube said in an email shared by 9to5Google. However, if you were grandfathered in at a lower price as a former Google Play Music subscriber, you’ll pay that lower rate until your April billing date, according to an email sent to a Verge...

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GMC Sierra EV Denali revealed: plug-in-powered pickup goes premium

Egads! Another jumbo-size electric truck from GM!

The oversize electric truck will get an estimated 400 miles of range and can power a whole house for up to 21 days. Is it just me, or is the electric truck category getting crowded?

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Black Adam is Warner Bros.’ most brutal superhero letdown yet

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as Black Adam. | Image: Warner Bros. Pictures

Black Adam, Warner Bros.’ latest superhero movie based on DC’s comic books, has been in the works ever since the studio first came around on the genuinely inspired idea of casting Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as a terrifying Superman analogue best known for beefing with children. In Black Adam, you can plainly see how much hope and faith Warner Bros. has placed in the idea that a darker, more brutal antiheroic figure might be just what its beleaguered cinematic universe of cape films needs to pull itself out of what seems like a death spiral. What’s harder to see, though, is how anyone at Warner Bros. looked at the completed Black Adam and didn’t immediately recognize it as yet another sign of what a messy place the DCEU’s become.

Black...

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Amazon is quietly shutting down Fabric.com, one of the largest online fabric stores

Amazon acquired Fabric.com in 2008. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Crafters, home sewists, and small businesses will soon lose a major online fabric source. Fabric.com, a longtime retailer of fabrics, trims, notions, and other supplies, is shutting down.

Since launching in the late ’90s, Fabric.com has been a mainstay for casual crafters and small business owners alike, offering by-the-yard fabric from hundreds of companies as well as other sewing supplies. When Amazon acquired the company in 2008, the tech giant said the acquisition would give its crafting customers more variety to choose from. The website’s vast inventory and competitive prices made it a favorite for many craftspeople and companies buying in large quantities to make products.

The impending closure was first reported by the Craft...

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Wireless ISP Starry lays off half its workers in a bid to save cash

The company uses wireless antennas to provide internet, rather than cables or fiber. | Image: Starry

Starry, the ISP that delivers internet to your home using wireless antennas instead of cables, is laying off around half its workforce, or just over 500 people, according to a statement from the company and a report in The Boston Globe. The company is also telling investors that they can no longer count on the expectations it set for this year — information that probably doesn’t come as a surprise after its earnings report this summer revealed that it had around $100 million in cash and had lost almost $90 million since the beginning of 2022.

Starry says it’s also freezing hiring and non-essential expenditures, again in order to “curtail our cash burn while we pursue strategic options,” as Chet Kanojia, the company’s CEO, put it in a...

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How to show your phone’s battery percentage in iOS 16

Lots of recent iPhone models will let you add battery percentage info right to your status bar. | Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge

With the release of iOS 16, many iPhones can now display the remaining battery percentage right in the phone’s status bar. But even if your iPhone doesn’t support the feature, you’re not completely out of luck. Here’s how you can make sure your precise battery level is always visible at a glance.

I followed these steps on two phones: an iPhone 11 running iOS 16.0.2 and an iPhone 14 Pro Max on iOS 16.1.

The first thing to determine is whether you can add the battery percentage to your iPhone’s status bar because not all models support it. iPhone 8 models and older include this legacy feature as well as second- and third-generation iPhone SE devices. iPhone X models and newer support it with the exception of these devices:

• iPhone XR
• i...

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Snapchat Plus subscribers can now set their stories to run for an entire week

Snapchat Plus subscribers are getting a host of new features today that won’t be available to those who use the free service. | Image: Snapchat

Snapchat is adding some new features today exclusively for its Snapchat Plus subscribers, which include custom notification sounds, colorful camera borders, and the ability to customize story expirations. Snapchat Plus, in case you’ve forgotten, is the company’s premium subscription tier that provides some exclusive features, with prices starting from $3.99 a month.

The new Custom Story Expiration feature lets you set a preferred expiration date on your story, with options ranging from one hour up to a week. That way, if you have anything you’d like to stick around longer, such as a birthday party or engagement, you don’t have to watch it vanish before all of your loved ones can get around to watching it. Prior to this update, Snapchat...

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Tech companies added fertility features just in time for the culture war

Anti-abortion groups are pushing back against hormonal birth control. | Photo by Jim Watson / AFP via Getty Images

Tech companies picked an interesting time to start including women’s and reproductive health in their products. For years, they sidestepped the issue: Apple didn’t include period tracking in its health app until 2015. Fitbit only added “Female health tracking” in 2018. For products that claim to help people understand their bodies, most spent years sidestepping the basic biology that affects half the population.

But over the past year or so, companies have started juicing up their menstrual tracking and fertility features, and there’s been more investment in so-called femtech. And they caught up just in time for the end of federal abortion protections in the United States, a right-wing pushback on birth control, and a culture war...

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Biden group casts Dark Brandon in student debt relief ad

Dark Brandon directs voters to the StudentAid.gov debt relief website. | Image: Building Back Together

Building Back Together, a pro-Biden political advocacy group, launched a six-figure digital ad campaign on Wednesday to boost the administration’s student loan relief program in key battleground states across the country. And to make sure it landed with young voters, they enlisted the help of President Joe Biden’s online alter ego: Dark Brandon.

The ad, titled “Pocket,” takes cues from the fancam style of online video, featuring a series of viral memes and GIFs set to a bass-heavy remix of television news segments. The ad campaign will air on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, ESPN, and Hulu, targeted at users in Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

The Dark Brandon meme — essentially a modified image of Biden with glowing eyes —...

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Arlo is now protecting residents when they leave their residence

Arlo’s new Safe app has a “Walk with Me” hold button that will trigger an emergency response if no longer pressed, and the new Safe button accessory is a Bluetooth panic button. | Image: Arlo

Arlo is launching a new family and personal mobile safety app and service that includes features like crash detection, a software panic hold switch for walking safely in unfamiliar places, and an optional Bluetooth alert button.

Known for its wireless cameras, smart video doorbells, and, more recently, its DIY home security system, Arlo is expanding into the growing market of family tracking and personal safety apps. “Features like 24/7 live agent emergency support, location sharing, family check-ins, and safety alerts provide on-the-go protection to keep you safe in a time of need,” said Arlo’s SVP of products, Tim Johnston, in a press release.

Arlo’s Safe app includes a “Walk with Me” feature that operates like a dead man’s switch

The...

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Climeworks closes a chapter in early carbon removal tech

At the base of an Icelandic volcano, Climeworks’ direct air capture plant sucks carbon dioxide from the air and turns it to rock, locking away the main culprit behind global warming. | Photo by HALLDOR KOLBEINS/AFP via Getty Images

Swiss company Climeworks plans to phase out the first-generation technology that made it a pioneer in the business of carbon removal. The move is part of Climeworks’ pivot away from selling its captured carbon dioxide to companies like Coca-Cola. Instead, Climeworks says it will focus on efforts to store the CO2 underground permanently.

Climeworks became the first company to suck carbon dioxide out of the air and sell it as a product back in 2017. That’s when its direct air capture (DAC) plant called Capricorn opened in Hinwil, Switzerland. Beyond being foundational to Climeworks’ continued growth, Capricorn’s mere existence was a major milestone for the brand-new carbon removal industry. Five years later, Capricorn is essentially...

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How to share a calendar on Mac

Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge

Need to show a friend or relative what you’re up to next week and don’t have your phone handy? Try sharing your calendar from your MacBook with a few easy steps.

Before you start, you’ll want to make sure iCloud is set up on your Mac and that the calendar you want to share is stored via iCloud (not just stored locally). To check if this is the case, you can go to Calendar > Preferences > Accounts.

Once that’s all sorted, here’s how to share a calendar from your Mac.

I have a lot of calendars called “Work.” Don’t @ me.

How to share a calendar from your Mac

• Open the Calendar app on your Mac.
• In the tab on the left, you’ll see a list of your calendars. Right-click on the one you want to share.
• Click Share Calendar.
• I...

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How to make green bubbles easier to read on iPhone

Here’s what the darker green bubbles look like. | Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge

Apple probably won’t be fixing the green bubble problem anytime soon. But over the weekend, while scrolling Reddit, I found an awesome setting that at least makes green texts a lot easier to read on my iPhone. (Thank you to u/oishiirecipe for sharing the steps!)

By default, any texts you send to a device that doesn’t have iMessage turned on show up as a harsh, bright green bubble. It’s a very obvious signal that you aren’t texting somebody with an Apple device and losing out on things like smoother group chats and snazzy message effects. Frankly, those green texts can also be difficult to parse, something Google has pointed out on its “Get the Message” website.

To make green texts more readable, you’ll have to dive a bit into your...

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Help, Foxconn has gone from AI 8K+5G to ‘3+3=∞’

That’s Foxconn president Liu Young-way going way beyond the boundaries of traditional mathematics. | Image: Getty

It has never been clear what Foxconn is attempting to do in Wisconsin, and every time the company or one of its executives tries to explain it, things have just gotten weirder. For example, the company has said for years that its empty warehouse in southeastern Wisconsin is the centerpiece of an “AI 8K+5G” strategy, without ever explaining what that means. (Nothing. It means nothing.)

Anyway, throw that mystery out of your brain because AI 8K+5G has been completely scrubbed from Foxconn’s Wisconsin website. Instead, get ready for “3+3=∞,” which is Foxconn’s new strategy, or Foxconn 3.0, which the company claims follows the famous and beloved Foxconn 1.0 and Foxconn 2.0 strategies that totally made sense and revolutionized the industrial...

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