Tech

In September of 2023, Danny and Steven Sanicki played a round of minigolf. The Sanickis are twins, are both competitive golfers, and were budding content creators at the time, so of course they filmed the whole round. Danny edited the footage on his phone, recorded a quick commentary track, slapped a scoreboard over top of the video, and posted the …

SpaceX launched Starship for its fifth flight test at about 8:25AM ET from its South Texas launch site. The company succeeded in returning the Starship Super Heavy booster to its landing pad, where it was “caught” using arms on the launch tower that SpaceX refers to as the “chopsticks.” The catch was a first for the booster, which the company …

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 56, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, so psyched you found us, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)  This week, I’ve been reading about Bill Lawrence’s TV shows and the massively powerful crypto lobby and the wild …

SpaceX plans to launch Starship for the fifth time tomorrow, October 13th, during a 30-minute launch window that opens at 8AM ET. That’s after the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) declared today that the company has “met all safety, environmental and other licensing requirements for the suborbital test flight,” reports Reuters. The company will livestream the launch, starting about 35 minutes …

WordPress.org has introduced a fork of a popular WP Engine plugin in order “to remove commercial upsells and fix a security problem,” WordPress cofounder and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg announced today. This “minimal” update of the Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) plugin is now called “Secure Custom Fields.” It’s not clear what security problem Mullenweg is referring to in the post. …

Someone gained access to Ecovacs Deebot X2 Omni robotic vacuums across several US cities earlier this year and used them to chase pets and yell racist slurs at their owners, reported ABC News in Australia this week. The outlet spoke with multiple Deebot X2 owners who say their Deebot X2s had been hacked in May, including Minnesota lawyer Daniel Swenson, …

It’s been a pretty good year for horror fans. When it comes to movies, the summer was packed with the likes of Cuckoo, MaXXXine, and Alien: Romulus, while gaming has seen releases such as a Silent Hill 2 remake and the retro Crow Country. So, if you’re looking for something new to play or watch in the lead-up to Halloween, …

I no longer expect video games that tackle the subjects of racism and discrimination through fantasy — as Metaphor: ReFantazio does — to surprise me. Those stories never go beyond well-trodden depictions of “racism is bad,” and I tune them out like so much white noise. But Metaphor: ReFantazio has done the work, and its willingness to go beyond surface-level …

Meta has a suggestion for folks like me who forgot to go outside and look at the Northern Lights on Thursday night: just use AI to fake it! But Threads users who replied to Meta’s idea, posted along with three AI-generated images of the Aurora Borealis Meta last night, seem to disagree. The images show the Northern Lights hovering over …

There have been plenty of rumors swirling regarding a new iPad Mini for more than a year now, but most indicators point toward a processor bump and little else. We haven’t heard much about a new entry-level iPad, though, which makes it a great time to pick up either the ninth- or 10th-gen model — both of which are still …