Новости за 21.12.2018

If you’ve spent dozens of hours fine-tuning a home automation setup so that everything just works, you’d be pretty angry if a single firmware update screwed it up. But Logitech is now pledging to make it right for customers wronged by its latest firmware update to the Harmony Hub — by offering yet another update that’ll restore local network control.

Mars is looking like a cool destination this time of year, especially in this picture recently released by the European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter. The image shows the icy heart of the perennially chilly Korolev crater, and is one of a few snapshots sent back from Mars’ robot explorers to Earth this holiday season.

As long as there has been alcohol, there have been hangovers — and yet there has been no cure. Though there’s no lack of morning-after tips, we don’t have a pill or drink that can instantly reduce those telltale symptoms of nausea and exhaustion.

It’s easy to forget that Fortnite — a cultural phenomenon that now has over 200 million registered players — began as a failure. It was conceived as a player vs. environment game that Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney described as a cross between Minecraft and Left 4 Dead in 2015, before co-opting the last-man-standing mechanics of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds and becoming the biggest game on the planet. Fortnite stole that idea and then perfected the formula by making it less technical and more... Читать дальше...

2018 has been a good year for video games. From blockbuster epics to smaller indie experiences to inventive takes on VR, the breadth and variety of games that came out over the last 12 months is astounding. To celebrate, Verge staff members are writing essays on their own personal favorite games, and what made them stand out above the crowd.

On Saturday morning, SpaceX will attempt to launch a new GPS satellite for the US Air Force from Florida — the last mission of the year for the company. If successful, SpaceX will finish 2018 with 21 launches and beat out its own record of 18 missions last year. However, viewers won’t get to see one of SpaceX’s rocket landings this time around, as the Falcon 9 rocket carrying the satellite will be deposited in the ocean.

AT&T customers will start to see a 5G logo appear in the corner of their smartphone next year — not because they’re using a 5G phone connected to a 5G network, but because AT&T is going to start pretending its most advanced 4G LTE tech is 5G.

Walmart was granted a patent this week for a new listening system for its retail stores that, if ever deployed, may make some employees and shoppers uncomfortable. According to the filing and claims, it’s “an example system for capturing and analyzing sounds in a shopping facility.” In other words, it’s a kind of surveillance system.

LG announced its first-generation CineBeam 4K laser projector at last year’s CES, and ahead of the upcoming 2019 conference, the company is taking the wraps off the second-gen HU85L model.

The holidays are just days away, and if you haven’t mapped out your plan of attack for gift-getting, it might be too late to ship everything on your family or friend’s wishlist — at least without paying dearly for shipping costs. However, don’t forget about digital gifts. While some might miss having a box to open on the holidays, the big upsides to opting for digital gifts is that they’re easy to buy, sometimes more affordable to acquire than physical versions, and best of all, they arrive instantly. Читать дальше...

With DC Universe’s Titans ending its first season today, DC has announced that its next live-action television show Doom Patrol will hit its streaming service on February 15th. The announcement came with a brief trailer that introduced the show’s main characters.

Hulu’s Runaways faced a rare challenge for a superhero show. While fans might have favorite stories and characters they wanted to see in any onscreen story about Daredevil, Flash, or the Teen Titans, there are so many versions of those heroes that there isn’t a clear agreed-upon storyline writers would be expected to follow. That isn’t true for Runaways. While Marvel rebooted the comics series this year, for most readers, it was defined by Brian K. Vaughan and Adrian Alphona’s original run, which introduced the characters in 2003. Читать дальше...

Code discovered in the latest Android Pie build for Samsung’s Galaxy Note 9 suggests the company is working on a new night photography mode called Bright Night, reports XDA-Developers. The code says that it will allow you to “take bright pictures even in very dark conditions,” which is similar to the functionality we’ve seen from Google’s Night Sight mode and Huawei’s Night Mode.

Apple has launched a slick new website that makes it a lot easier to sort through the info it publicly discloses about government data requests, bringing a sharp and engaging design to a matter that had previously been handled by a dull list of PDF links. As spotted by MacRumors, the new site went live alongside Apple’s most recent data disclosure, covering the last six months.

There are so many streaming options available these days, and so many conflicting recommendations, that it’s hard to see through all the crap you could be watching. Each Friday, The Verge’s Cut the Crap column simplifies the choice by sorting through the overwhelming multitude of movies and TV shows on subscription services, and recommending a single perfect thing to watch this weekend.

Bringing a project like Christian Rivers’ film Mortal Engines to life was always going to require a significant amount of visual-effects work. Based on Philip Reeve’s novel series, the story takes place in a future dystopia where cities have become massive, roving machines that prowl the surface of the Earth, with London, the biggest of them all, gobbling up smaller cities and dicing them to pieces for resources. There was simply no way to realize the world without heavy use of digital animation. Читать дальше...

Facebook is building a cryptocurrency designed to make it easier to transfer money on WhatsApp, according to Bloomberg. The currency will reportedly be focused on India and allowing Indian workers abroad to send money back home, something that other Bitcoin startups have already been working to solve given the difficult and expensive process for international transfers.

It’s been quite a long year. Aside from all of the various world events that have happened, there’s also been a lot of... stuff released. And we’ve reviewed almost all of it. New phones, tablets, laptops, smartwatches, cars, gaming PCs... you name it, we’ve probably reviewed it.

brThe long and bleak year of 2018 is almost over. It was a year full of devastating storms and disasters, scandal after scandal from tech companies, and chaotic politics from around the world. If there was any bright point in the year, it was that 2018 also brought with it a bumper crop of fantastic science fiction, fantasy, and horror novels that served as an oasis to examine the world around us, or to escape for brighter pastures.

One of the reasons I never have a good answer to “How do you feel about Elon Musk” is because I spend so much time trying to figure out what the fuck is even happening that I rarely get around to deciding how I feel about it. This year in Elon was like watching a reality TV show where there are no rules. As pure spectacle, Musk in 2018 was basically unbeatable.

Time to make a choice

Continue reading…

Reality hasn’t exactly lived up to the future promised to us in Back to the Future. Our hoverboards don’t hover and occasionally burst into flames, and when we finally got self-lacing sneakers, they cost $720. Things are looking up for 2019 though, when Nike will launch a second generation of the hi-tech sneakers at a much more affordable $350 price point. The news was first reported by the sneaker culture site SoleCollector.

Samsung’s 2019 TVs will include Google Assistant, reports Variety. Current Samsung TVs are limited to using the company’s own Bixby voice assistant, which significantly lags behind the competition. The new TVs are also expected to produce better sound by automatically adapting the audio to the room they’re in.

Popular e-sport League of Legends is unexpectedly heading to VR — in the form of its viral Korean pop single in the new rhythm game Beat Saber. The VR game is getting “POP/STARS” by K/DA as a song you can perform as part workout and part lightsaber Dance Dance Revolution.

Google has quietly released a progressive web app called Chrome Canvas that lets you make quick doodles that automatically save to your Google account, via Chrome Unboxed. That means you can just type in “canvas.apps.chrome” into a Chrome browser on any computer, and pull up a basic drawing app without having to download any programs or apps. Chrome Canvas first showed up as an app in a recent Chrome OS Dev build, but it’s available now on any browser that supports WebAssembly, like Firefox.