Gadgets & Tech – Spoken Edition

After years of floundering, T-Mobile has become a real threat to Verizon and AT&T by offering options that the latter carriers didn’t. One of those options was the Mobile Without Borders plan that provided unlimited LTE data when customers traveled to Canada or Mexico. But now, the “Un-carrier” has announced the end of that deal.

Cuphead. It’s a game people were excited about for a long time, and I hear it’s great. But there’s something that’s been bothering me about the titular protagonist and his co-op buddy Mugman: what’s inside their tiny cartoon heads? We as humans are separated from most life on Earth through our ability to make tools, and for those tools to have specific uses. A cup holds liquids. A mug does the same.

If you’re going to commit a crime, it’s probably best not to brag about it. And it’s especially dumb to brag about your crime on the internet. But that’s precisely what happened when a defense contractor bragged on LinkedIn about bilking the Department of Defense out of money, according to new documents obtained by Gizmodo.

Every once in a while, the internet remembers that conchs have eyes, wild looking colored things sitting at the ends of stalks like a creature watching you on behalf of Jareth the Goblin King as you navigate The Labyrinth. The internet remembered this fact again this week. I don’t think much about mollusks, their morphology, or how they experience the universe. When I eat an oyster or mussel, it’s usually in a single bite without appreciating its body.

Do not lose sleep tonight, the world will not end as the result of some enormous supervolcano eruption in Yellowstone National Park any time soon. But there is a whole lot of other interesting stuff going on there—so maybe it’s worth losing sleep by getting excited about science. Nerd. A swarm of earthquakes rumbling since June has begun to die down, according to an update from the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory.

The new trailer for The Last Jedi dropped last night. And it’s all some Star Wars nerds are talking about. But it’s clear that one character stole the show. That’s right. It’s porg time, baby. Every Star Wars trilogy needs its cuddly comic relief. The Return of the Jedi had the Ewoks, Episodes I-III tried to make Jar Jar Binks a thing, and now The Last Jedi is introducing us to the porgs, a bird-like creature that hails from the island of Ahch-To. And people have feelings.

Today is another sad day, a Friday like so many others save for one tear-jerking bit of news: AOL announced its Instant Messenger will die on December 15th. It was 20 years old. This isn’t the first time that AIM has passed away. Gizmodo first reported on its death in 2012, when AOL sacked almost all of the aging service’s team. Only support staff were left, and they kept AIM alive in the same way that a hospice unit might watch over a patient with not much time left.

Lifelogging—the act of recording your every waking moment—has been declared dead numerous times. But now it looks like Google is trying to resuscitate the movement with a new camera it introduced at its Pixel 2 event on Wednesday. Google Clips is a portable camera that takes photos and videos for you. According to Google, the AI-powered camera will learn to capture photos of the people and pets—cats and dogs— you are with most often.

Looking at the new Pixelbook from afar, it’s really hard to understand why anyone, let alone Google, could demand a retail price of $1,000 for this thing. It’s got Chrome OS inside—the operating system you stick in cheap laptops with cheap guts because it needs practically no processor power to run. And Google made no attempt to explain why a Chromebook should go for $1,000 during the presentation today.

For a brief shining moment Walmart allowed anyone with a quick clicker finger to pre-order Google’s next smart speaker, the Google Home Mini. Unfortunately, that speaker isn’t expected to actually be announced until tomorrow. Oops. The speaker was available online for a glorious few minutes starting at 12pm EST/9am PST, which suggests someone maybe hit the publish button a day early—as Google’s event is expected to start tomorrow, October 4, at that same hour.