Gadgets & Tech – Spoken Edition

Viewers of BBC’s News at Ten were entranced last night when a glitch in its system produced over four minutes of surreal beauty. As the program began, the usual opening rush of clips from around the world accompanied by dramatic music played. A breaking news graphic flew up onscreen and then there was silence. The host, Huw Edwards, sat at his desk, patiently awaiting his cue. But the cue was not coming. Instead, the breaking news graphic came up again... and again, and again.

Look, I’m a straight woman with the maturity level of a 13-year-old boy. I am willing to admit that maybe—maybe—I sometimes see phalluses where they don’t exist. But this thing totally looks like a dick, right? Amazon announced today that it had erected the “largest Times Square advertising installment ever,” which is actually a 79-foot-tall Echo replica.

Steve Jobs was legendary for knowing what he wanted and leaning on his designers until he got it. But according to a new book on the history of the iPhone, he insisted that it should have a back button. After one of his people presented a good argument for the distinctive single home button, he backed down.

When House Republicans passed a draconian healthcare plan back in May, Donald Trump rushed to the Rose Garden to celebrate this “very, very incredibly well-crafted” plan. But that was a long time ago. Today, Trump met with Senate Republicans about the new bill that they are attempting to put together, and he reportedly urged them to make this one less “mean.

Bloomberg News reports that Amazon will buy Whole Foods for $13.7 billion in cash. In cash! That breaks down to Jeff Bezos and company paying $42 per share for a chain of health food and lifestyle stores. In cash! Amazon confirmed the Bloomberg report just minutes after it hit the web. “Millions of people love Whole Foods Market because they offer the best natural and organic foods, and they make it fun to eat healthy,” said Bezos in a press release.

Hexadecimal format allows us to instruct a computer to display a color using three or six characters. For example, #000 will produce black. But how many words can be created in Hex and what colors do they produce? One intrepid programmer has tackled this problem so that we don’t have to.

As fans of Battlestar Galactica will recall, every episode began with a short synopsis: “The Cylons were created by man. The rebelled. They evolved. There are many copies. And they have a plan.” But... did they? Or was that just a big tease? Turns out it’s the latter, and now we know why: because an executive producer thought it sounded cool. At the ATX Television Festival, executive producer Ronald D.

As the mortar of brick and mortar businesses slowly crumbles, retailers are scrambling to come up with a reason why you should use them instead of companies like Amazon and... well, pretty much just Amazon. Best Buy’s solution? Be more like Blockbuster Video.

When State Representative Ramon A. Perez says he didn’t mean to print a screenshot of a Wikipedia page with open porn tabs, we believe him. When he says that he didn’t realize the open porn tabs were visible when he handed out the page, we believe him. When he says that he didn’t personally take the screenshot, it’s a little harder for us to believe him.

A 27-year-old man had been suffering frequent headaches and had been falling over frequently for around three years. But when he had a seizure, he headed to the emergency department. They took an MRI and found THIS. If you need to get your bearings, the squished brain looking stuff is a squished brain. The black horror is an arachnoid cyst. Internist Jennifer De Longpre at Metro Health Hospital in Michigan spotted it and wrote the case report up for TheNew England Journal of Medicine.