Gadgets & Tech – Spoken Edition

Sometimes, owning a smartphone feels pricy. There’s the hefty chunk of change you’ll need to spend on the phone itself, and then the monthly fee you’ll need to fork over to operate it. But for just $400 and the cost of a few old Zack Morris-style brick phones, you can avoid those expenses and build your own damn 1G cellphone network. Hackaday first pointed us to the DIY 1G project this past weekend at Shmoocon, a Washington, DC-based hacker convention.

Elon Musk, our beloved spaceboy, sat down yesterday with Y Combinator’s Sam Altman to talk about, well, a whole bunch of stuff: Colonizing new planets, productivity, artificial intelligence. Stuff we generally associate with Musk and his business ventures. But in one of these video clips Altman asks for recommendations on video games and Musk, without hesitation, replies: Overwatch.

A new Sunday Times interview between British Parliament member Michael Gove and our soon-to-be Supreme Leader Donald Trump offers much interesting insight into how Trump will use Twitter as president. When Gove asked about whether Trump would use the @POTUS handle, he offered up the following response: @realDonaldTrump I think, I’ll keep it . . .

A family in Kansas would like to see reforms in wildlife legislation after game wardens arrived at their home and shot their pet deer, Faline, five times. On December 19th, two game wardens arrived at Kim Mcgaughey’s workplace to inform her that she was violating the law by confining wildlife. For almost two years, Mcgaughey’s family had kept a mule deer as a pet that was free to come and go as it pleased.

Have you seen this shocking clip of Meryl Streep making fun of a disabled person? Well, unlike the clip of Donald Trump, this one is actually fake. Back in 2015, Donald Trump mocked a disabled reporter at a campaign event. He flailed his arms around, mimicking Serge Kovaleski from the New York Times. As you probably know, actress Meryl Streep recently condemned Trump (without using his name) for this obscene ridicule at the Golden Globe Awards.

These clouds are weird. Usually, clouds look like fluffy puffs or big, mean anvils. But these clouds... these clouds look like stripes. These clouds are weird Virgin Australia shared a picture of these weird clouds yesterday on their Facebook page after Instagrammer Ilya Katsman noticed that the clouds were weird. “These clouds are weird,” he probably thought. Here is another picture of these weird clouds.

Elon Musk tweeted this morning that an update that enables Tesla’s most advanced autopilot functions will roll out to the entire fleet on Monday. The HW2 software will be fully functional in 1,000 cars and run in “shadow mode” for the rest while data continues to be collected. All Tesla models sold since October, 2016 have the HW2 autopilot ability but owners have been waiting for the software to be released in a fully functional form.

The Senate is currently debating the repeal of Obamacare. And since Senators love their visual aids, it makes sense that Bernie Sanders brought one along with him to work today. But Bernie’s sign marks the dawn of a new era in a lot of ways. He literally just printed out a tweet from President-elect Donald Trump.

If you weren’t watching Samsung’s TV event and LG press conference you might have missed it. The curved TV, once considered the whizzbang tech that would save televisions, is dead. Not quite in the ground, but no longer the darling of its makers. The curved TV is being quietly shuffled away from the limelight to make way for newer, and better, fads in televisions. Last night Samsung showed off its newest flagship television.

At 2.57mm thick, LG’s new OLED W7 television might be the thinnest giant television ever made. I don’t want to say that. It feels like hyperbole, and over the next few days I have no doubt that a lot of other televisions are going to use similar tech for similar results, but look at that image above. Note how that 65-inch display is actually thinner than that woman’s finger. Now come back and tell me that isn’t incredible.