Mashable Tech – Spoken Edition

These days, on the internet, everybody knows you're a dog. Practically everything you do online is tracked, analyzed, categorized, packaged, and sold off to hordes of faceless behemoths exploiting your clicks for that sweet reward of fractions of a penny. But maybe it doesn't have to be that way. A new free app from DuckDuckGo offers an encouraging bit of pushback to the churning maw that is online tracking. It takes a step beyond simply private searches, and you should totally download it.

About a week ago, my wife and I ate a meal that was entirely prepared by a robotic chef. The GammaChef — a machine akin to a large coffee maker — did everything on its own. It heated the pot and added the ingredients — beef steak chunks, pasta, mushrooms, water, oil, seasonings and sauces — then stirred them until the meal was done. To my surprise, the food was delicious. The meat was perfectly cooked and tender, the pasta was al dente, and the aromas and flavors were rich.

Die With Me is not your typical messaging app. You can only use it when your phone has less than 5 percent battery life. And it only lets you chat up random strangers whose phones are also dying. And you thought there would never be a Great App Idea ever again. Ha! First, this is not an April Fool's joke. It's a real app for iOS and Android. Now that you know Jimmy Kimmel's not punking us all, you probably want to know why.

With Bitcoin crashing, some cryptocurrency HODLers are hurting. That might include the Winklevoss twins. Tyler and Cameron bought 120,000 bitcoins in late 2012 with money from the $65 million payout from their lawsuit against Facebook. That's more than $1.32 billion worth of bitcoin at Wednesday evening's value of about $11,000 per bitcoin. That seems like a lot, but just two days ago a bitcoin was worth $14,000. Here's the chart on Bitcoin since 2012. Up and up and up.

The crypto faithful, however, abide by one word: HODL. HODL, an intentional typo of "hold," has become the rallying cry for cryptocurrency traders in the face of this recent Bitcoin crash, which has extended to other popular coins like Ethereum and Litecoin. It's an instruction for traders to, um, "hold" their Bitcoin instead of selling it.

Can't get enough Google? You're in luck. The company, a division of Alphabet Inc., has announced that it will expand its Cloud services to five new regions, and build three new submarine cables to service its capacity needs. Google's Cloud platform is already up and running in thirteen regions including Tokyo, Taiwan, Mumbai, Singapore, Sydney, London, Belgium, Frankfurt, Sao Paulo, Oregon, Iowa, Northern Virginia, and South Carolina.

Except when it's directed toward your iPhone and its unending series of notifications, at which point, if you're anything like me, is nothing more than a specific kind of anxiety unto itself: "Why am I staring at this thing so much, and why's it making me feel awful?" To really fix this, you'd need a psychiatrist. But! One modest, simple change could help put a stop to this: Stop your phone from displaying the percentage of battery life it has left.

One small tweak to an algorithm, one giant crater in Mark Zuckerberg's net worth. The Facebook CEO took a $3 billion hit to his net worth on Friday as his company's stock dipped following news of major changes to the company's News Feed. Facebook warned that the changes, meant to boost the visibility of posts by friends and family, could mean people spending less time on Facebook. That would mean less ads, which means less money. Facebook stock declined about 4 percent.

Who actually likes doing laundry? First you have to sort through your clothes, organize them by material and color, wash them, dry them —then after all that, fold them. But what if you could have a subservient robot take care of the last step for you? That's the (um ... bad) idea behind FolidMate, the $980 laundry-folding robot being shown off at CES 2018 in Las Vegas. The original concept for the machine was on display at last year's conference, but it didn't have any moving components.

Ride-sharing has disrupted transportation in many cities, and not always for the better. Some surveys show services like Uber and Lyft actually add to the congestion in urban areas, with more cars on the road competing for the same amount of road space. To solve the problem, many are looking to the skies.