Gadgets & Tech – Spoken Edition

Affordability and Razer are not, typically, words that go together. The PC peripheral company has developed a reputation in the last few years for making sharp looking laptops that are ultra thin and ultra pricey for the guts inside of them. But the new 1080p Razer Blade Pro, at $2300, is positively reasonable. No one else is making a giant laptop that is this thin and powerful at that price. The 1080p Razer Blade Pro is technically a new option.

Sony’s MDR-1000X headphones do it all. They’ve got best-in-class noise-cancelling, impressive sound, a sleek design, and loads of app-powered goodies. That’s precisely why I was excited, when Sony showed me the new WH-1000xM2. They’re just like the old 1000X headphones but better. Much to my dismay, they’re also $50 cheaper. Now I wouldn’t say all these nice things about the 1000X headphone family if I didn’t mean it.

As they say: Life comes at you fast. Yesterday, you were looking at a YouTube logo with the red thing on the right side, highlighting the word “Tube.” Today, it’s on the left side, sporting a play icon. It’s a small update to the design of a popular website, you might say. But will any of us ever be the same? How could we be? The world has changed.

Remember that guy on Facebook a couple of weeks ago who said he got stabbed by some stranger because he had a “neo-Nazi” haircut? You’re never going to believe this, but the story was total bullshit. He accidentally stabbed himself. And blamed it on a non-existent black guy. Joshua Witt, a 26-year-old from Colorado, posted some photos to Facebook on August 16th, claiming that he had been stabbed for his “neo-Nazi haircut.

Folks yak a lot of crap about the High Plains—mainly they complain about it being flat or boring as they drive down the infinitely straight highways. But a tour of places like Western Nebraska or South Dakota reveals a sublime landscape beneath a vast sky, accompanied by the humbling realization that you are just one tiny human on this very big, stormy planet.

The guided-missile destroyer USS John S. McCain collided with an oil tanker near Singapore last night, leaving 5 injured and 10 sailors still missing. It’s the second US Navy ship to have a major collision with a civilian ship since June and the fourth in the past year. The collision occurred at 5:24 am local time on Monday, or 5:24pm on Sunday, New York time. The USS John S. McCain collided with the Alnic MC, a 600-foot oil tanker with a gross tonnage of 30,000, according to the US Navy.

Tomorrow, 7.5 million people will crowd a 70-mile-wide, 2800-mile-long strip of land as the moon blocks the sun’s light for somewhere around two minutes. The sky will turn dark, several million-degree solar corona will become visible, and the stars will appear in the middle of the day. All that is, of course, if it’s clear out. “It might get cloudy, even in the driest place,” Angela Speck, Director of Astronomy at the University of Missouri told Gizmodo. But have no fear.

It’s a lot harder to “take the money and run” when the cash you want is trapped inside an ATM. But some daring thieves in Arkansas recently used a forklift in their effort to do just that. The thieves crashed an enormous CAT forklift into the drive-thru portion of a bank on Wednesday, August 16th, and made away with an ATM. And police now believe that these criminals might have some ties to the construction industry. I wonder what gave them that idea.

NASHVILLE—The Sun is disappearing. I don’t know how else to say it. I looked up in the sky, and part of the Sun was gone. It was completely missing, like a bite taken out of a cookie. The Sun is a “star,” a ball of gas 93 million miles away from our planet, Earth. It serves a very important purpose: Plants turn its energy into fuel that we humans can eat. It is the force behind our weather. It keeps us warm. It is the reason that we stay alive. It is disappearing.

There are a lot of reasons not to stare at your phone while you’re driving. A little kid might jump into the road, a car in front of you might have to stop unexpectedly, or a giant fucking sinkhole might swallow the entire road. A man in China learned that last one the hard way recently. CCTV footage shows the man on his scooter, staring at his phone before driving directly into the sinkhole.