Gadgets & Tech – Spoken Edition

Donald Trump can’t stop deleting his own tweets, and we’re not just talking about typos any more. On Tuesday, the president scrubbed evidence of his support for Alabama senator Luther Strange on Twitter, after Strange lost a primary runoff. A Trump tweet congratulating Roy Moore, the anti-establishment candidate that beat Strange, also disappeared, though it was reposted later in the night. Trump’s decision to delete these tweets Strange isn’t just weird and confusing.

On Wednesday, former White House communications director and fresh-faced divorcee Anthony Scaramucci, who has been teasing some sort of bizarre internet-based venture titled the Scaramucci Post for weeks, finally revealed what the damn thing is. Unfortunately, we are no closer to understanding what sort of sauce the Mooch is simmering after his explanation than before. In a video posted to Twitter, Scaramucci regaled viewers with a vision of, uh, something, with a huge emphasis on the italics.

Is it an asteroid? A comet? Both? Observations by the Hubble Space Telescope are revealing new details about a strange binary asteroid that’s performing double-duty as a comet. It’s the first time scientists have ever seen such a thing. Back in 2006, Spacewatch discovered an asteroid named 300163 (2006 VW139). Astronomers using the Pan-STARRS telescope detected some comet-like activity coming from the object in 2011, so it was also given a comet designation of 288P.

North Korea’s foreign minister Ri Yong Ho just had a rare press conference outside the United Nations in New York. And it’s not great. The diplomat declared that the US has declared war on North Korea. And he stressed that he hopes the world remembers that it was the US who declared war first in the future.

Hip-hop star B.o.B., who last year started a minor feud with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson over the extremely resolved question of whether the Earth is flat (it is not), apparently does not consider the matter settled. Last week, B.o.B. created a GoFundMe page to prove to him that the world is, in fact, curved. His plan? “I would like to send one, if not multiple satellites as far into space as I can or into orbit as I can to find the curve,” B.o.B.

You know what’s cool about finding someone you’re actually into? Holding hands. Making out. Gazing into each other’s (actual) eyes. You know where you can’t do these things? In the void. So why the hell are people proposing in virtual reality? For some inexplicable reason, people keep taking a tender moment and strapping somehardware on it.

Frida the disaster rescue dog is a social media star. Not only is she just generally a good dog (perhaps one of the goodest), she is going above and beyond by trying to find survivors after the devastating 7.1 earthquake in Mexico City this week. But tales of her heroics so far have been a bit exaggerated. It’s easy to see why people are confused. News outlets like Buzzfeed News have published videos claiming that Frida has saved over 50 people in Mexico.

Ask someone what their dream house is, and you’ll get a lot of different answers. Perhaps a rustic ranch house out on the plains. Maybe a New York or San Francisco brownstone. It could even be that perfect little cottage with the nice rose garden, or a remote farm in Lincolnshire, where Mrs. Buckley lives (every July, peas grow there). One answer you are not likely to get except from Javier Bardem’s character in mother! is a house shared with hundreds of strangers.

I was just trying to sleep. Unlike Netflix with its hated “are you still watching” (yes, yes I am) popover, YouTube’s autoplay function will theoretically play forever, making it something of a godsend for the chronically overstimulated trying to get some shuteye. Last night, I decided to give it a try, wondering what video I’d wake up to after the site’s suggestion algorithm ran amok for several hours.

It was bound to happen. Amazon storms into the voice-controlled gadget game, just like the tablet game, and eventually, a Fire tablet becomes an Echo. That just happened. Amazon’s new Fire HD 10 tablet is also a hands-free Echo. It’s mostly a tablet, but that Echo bit is interesting. Let’s talk first about the tablet element. The new Amazon Fire tablet has a 1080p 10.1-inch screen. There’s also a 1.8 GHz quad-core processor, 2 gigabytes of RAM, and 32 or 64 gigabytes of storage.