Gadgets & Tech – Spoken Edition

In October and November, around 70 people left their laptops at a single airport security checkpoint at the Newark Airport. It’s not only the cheap stuff that’s gets abandoned—a fair amount of Macbooks are getting left behind as well. If 70 laptops get left behind at Newark Liberty Airport—the 15th busiest airport in the United States—in two months, how many lonely laptops live in the airports of the world? Resigned to existing in a stack of its peers.

An electronic dance music party came to a tragic end late Friday night when a fire broke out, leaving at least nine dead and another 25 people unaccounted for. The evening was part of Golden Donna’s west coast tour—a DJ from Madison, Wisconsin. The fire broke out around 11:30PM in a Fruitvale district artists collective, taking hold of a two-story building on the 1300 block of 31st Avenue.

If you’re a Roku user and a Sling TV subscriber, your experience is about to get a whole lot better. Sling announced today that it is going to roll out a new cloud DVR beta program to Roku users in December. Sling TV is a service that offers live TV (and some on-demand) channels over the internet. Pricing starts at $20 a month, and that gets users access to live networks such as ESPN, AMC, and CNN.

Donald Trump is known for having never used a computer. Yes, he infamously writes his own tweets on his phone (and dictates them to lackeys before 7pm) but we have precious little evidence that he has actually sat down and used a desktop or laptop computer. Until now.

For the last few weeks, I’ve noticed that I’ve been getting an influx of spam calendar invitations to my iCloud account, often from random counterfeit retailers. “Save 20% on UGGs” one says. “$19.99 Ray-ban&Oakley Sunglasses,” says another. I’m not the only one. Users across the web have complained about this influx of spam. The New York Times even covered it. And when The Times is on it, you know it’s a real thing.

The Democrats lost the election, and now they’re just trying to pick up the pieces. The party’s current social media strategy is unfortunate—using reaction gifs to warn of the horror a Trump presidency might bring. Reaction gifs, Ashley Feinberg wrote Gizmodo in May, are for idiots: “Gifs are always going to be a little bit obnoxious... It serves no funny, clever, particularly expressive purpose.” In the case of the Democrats, these gifs have more sinister connotations.

We can put a man in space, but once he’s there, NASA still has no idea what to do with his shit. Here’s where you come in: NASA will award $30,000 to whoever can solve their space poop problem. Astronaut Rick Mastracchio asks you to “imagine a scenario where a crew is on their way to the moon, and there is an emergency where the vehicle begins losing cabin pressure. The crew will need to quickly put on space suits to protect themselves from the vacuum of space.

When he sat down with some of the editors of The New York Times on Tuesday, President-elect Donald Trump admitted that Apple CEO Tim Cook had called him. Cook and Trump haven’t always been on the best of terms—back in February, Trump (then an iPhone user), called for a boycott of Apple products during the San Bernardino iPhone unlock dispute. And don’t forget that Tim Cook was on Hillary Clinton’s list of potential VP candidates.

Microsoft has a nifty new app that can help colorblind people see exactly what they’re missing out on. Called Color Binoculars, the app makes use of the phone’s camera to adjust colors in such a way that a colorblind person can see whatever’s in the frame in the same way a non-colorblind person would. I love this idea, because I’m colorblind.

The European Space Agency’s Schiaparelli lander did not touch down on Mars as planned yesterday. During a press briefing this morning, ExoMars mission scientists confirmed that the lander’s signal cut out about 50 seconds before landing, and that something went wrong in the final steps, right around when the parachute was jettisoned. ESA is still analyzing data collected by satellites and telescopes to get the full story.