Gadgets & Tech – Spoken Edition

When two brothers from Naples decided to stop doing fashion design for other companies and start a brand of their own, they went hunting for an attention-grabbing name. They discovered that “Steve Jobs” wasn’t trademarked and decided on that. Now, a protracted legal battle has come to an end, and they have big plans for using the Apple founder’s name on pretty much anything.

2017, a dumb and stupid year which even the Pope agrees was pretty miserable, will shortly give way to 2018. Fortunately, 2018 is already planning on greeting us with the icy cold of the grave. Per the Washington Post, January 1st, 2018 will be the coldest New Year’s Day on record in the Eastern U.S. in at least 70 years, with the lower 48 states predicted to experience an average temperature of just eight degrees Fahrenheit (-13.33 Celsius).

There are two things everyone should look for in a good set top box: ease of use and versatility. A set top box is terrible if the menus are a horror to navigate and you can’t just plunk down after dinner and watch a movie. But it’s also terrible if it can’t actually play the media you want it to play when you want it to play it. Thanks to Kodi’s arrival on the Xbox One this morning, the Xbox One X and Xbox One S are now the most versatile set-top boxes available.

Three years ago, it seemed like everyone experiencing near-zero temperatures stepped outside with a pot full of boiling water and flung it into the air to make instant snow. Not surprisingly, many of those same people—including a pair of Kentucky meteorologists—scalded themselves in the process! Even on a frigid winter’s morning boiling water is very hot, you see.

Today Uber, the biggest ride-sharing company in much of the world, got its hands on even more money by selling up to 20 percent of itself to Softbank and other investors in exchange for a giant sack of cash. But those investment dollars come with a catch. In order to raise more money, Uber sold a chunk of itself at a lower price than investors were once willing to pay. And with that, the company’s estimated worth suddenly looks incredibly different.

HQ Trivia, the alarmingly popular trivia app which increasingly threatens to take over our reality, has been iOS-only since its mid-October launch. The result has been that 12 times a week, iPhone owners have been swarmed by everyone else trying to get a slice of that sweet, addictive trivia. The good news: Soon all those Android users will have their own version of the HQ app, meaning they can stop doubling up on your phone screen and shouting inaccurate answers.

While analysts are divided over the future demand for the latest iPhone, some are now prophesizing that hey, consumers might be turned off by a stupid expensive price tag. Like a $1,000 smartphone. Sinolink Securities analyst Zhang Bin walked back his iPhone X sales forecast on Monday, predicting in a report that Apple will ship 35 million of the devices in the first quarter of 2018, which is about 10 million less than his original estimate.

A total solar eclipse by itself isn’t so unusual—the moon shades the Sun every 18 months, from the view of somewhere on Earth. But this year’s “Great American Eclipse” was special simply for how much inhabited land it covered, crossing the length of America from Oregon to South Carolina. And that led to some amazing new scientific observations.

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has helped create a new way to protect you from potential snoops. Snowden joined with the Freedom of the Press Foundation to create an open-source Android app called Haven, which turns your phone into a pocket-sized security system. All you need is a spare phone and a healthy dose of paranoia.

Earlier this month, scientists discussed a new syndrome, “Marsili syndrome,” a rare disorder in which people feel significantly less pain than others—so little pain, in fact, they they can break bones without noticing. As far as scientists can tell, there’s only one family that has Marsili syndrome: The Marsili family in Italy. The syndrome has a genetic component, a mutation on a gene called ZFHX2.