Gadgets & Tech – Spoken Edition

Look, we’ve been a little amped about Acer’s absurd curved display laptop, the Predator 21-X. It has a stupid name, isn’t practical or reasonable, and if you have brittle bone disease it would probably destroy your lap. But it’s also a laptop with a 21-inch curved display and goddammit that is as cool as it is stupid. It is also, we’ve just learned, going to be very very expensive. As in it starts out at $9000.

As 2016 comes to a close, many people will countdown the seconds until midnight with friends and family. For some it will be a party, for others, it will be a burial—but they’ll have their loved ones close to experience it together. But many people will be alone, and Facebook has just the thing to bring some New Year cheer to those sadly staring at their news feed.

It’s an age-old question: what exactly was going on when you laid waste to cartoon ducks with the Nintendo Zapper? The 8-Bit Guy is here to exhaustively explain exactly how this beautiful little accessory worked its magic. The answer is actually fairly simple. Obviously, the CRT monitor is a big dumb box that doesn’t provide feedback. The gun itself is also not particularly complex. It uses a lens that creates a very narrow focus for the light sensor located at the end of the barrel.

Today, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey took questions from Twitter users about what they want the company to do better in 2017. Dorsey seemed receptive to one idea that Twitter’s power users have been begging for: the ability to edit tweets. This is an awful idea. With the rise of fake news, trust in things posted online is at an all-time low.

Apple’s long-awaited refresh of its MacBook Pro line is disappointing for many reasons, but it looks like we have something else to add to the list: awfully unpredictable battery life. The problem is significant enough that it might just topple Apple’s machine from its throne. Consumer Reports decided to pass on recommending Apple’s new line of laptops because the battery performance varied wildly during its tests.

The cool thing about Uber is that it lets virtually anybody become a taxi driver. The downside? Sometimes, without any safeguards in place, those amateur drivers do things that are against the law. Like driving passengers while they’re high as hell. Below we’ve compiled a list of just a few people who think that their Uber drivers were high. Precisely 101 people, to be exact. In some cases, their Uber drivers were kind enough to share a joint with them.

In the 1950s, NORAD started “tracking Santa” to ensure that he could pass safely into the US without fear of being mistaken for a Soviet bomber. But here in 2016, it seems like getting approval from the military isn’t enough to prove that Father Christmas isn’t a terrorist. Santa has to go through Customs now. In a video posted by the US Customs and Border Protection agency, Santa is seen entering the US in a pretty bleak fashion.

He was a Zuckerberg. She said, see you, Fuckerberg. On Thursday, Avril Lavigne condemned the Facebook CEO for using Nickelback as a punchline in the wack promotional video for his robo-butler Jarvis, calling the jab at her husband Chad Kroeger’s band “in poor taste.

Last week, Samsung announced it was going to issue an update to all US Galaxy Note 7 smartphones that would basically turn the explodey device into a brick. But Verizon clapped back and was like, actually we won’t issue the update, because its the holiday season and people being without a phone could be bad. Well now, the nation’s largest wireless carrier has had a change of heart.

The Algerian town of Ain Sefra is known as the Gateway to the Sahara, and it’s not the kind of place that gets associated with winter weather. So imagine the surprise of amateur photographer Karim Bouchetata when he awoke to see his picturesque town and the surrounding sand dunes covered in a blanket of snow. Thankfully for us, he grabbed his camera.