Friday, December 19

Life Style

Disney Might Pull Its Channels From YouTube TV
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Disney Might Pull Its Channels From YouTube TV

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Credit: T. Schneider / Shutterstock.com Update 10/31/2025 at 2:00 PM:Disney and YouTube have reached the Oct. 31 deadline without an end to negotiations in sight. As such, more than 20+ Disney owned channels have been pulled from YouTube TV. For more, read on here.Nothing says Halloween quite like an ominous countdown. Right now, subscribers to YouTube TV, the company's live TV service, are waiting to learn if they'll still have access to Disney-operated channels, including ABC and ESPN, come Oct.31. It's the latest conflict in ongoing fee disputes between Google and its various content providers, but even if Disney takes its ball and goes...
What to Do If You’re Hearing Static in Your AirPods Pro 3
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What to Do If You’re Hearing Static in Your AirPods Pro 3

If you're in the Apple ecosystem, AirPods Pro are just about the best earbuds you can buy. They sound great, work across your various Apple devices, and ship with features like Adaptive Transparency and a built-in heart rate sensor. They're even FDA-certified hearing aids. Not bad for $249.But all those perks don't mean Apple's AirPods Pro are perfect. In fact, you can ask any of the customers complaining of a static noise coming from their AirPods Pro 3, when nothing is actually playing at all. As reported by MacRumors, it appears this is affecting some AirPods Pro 3 users when using Active Noise Cancellation, Adaptive Transparency, and Transparency modes, but only when there's no active audio playback. (That said, one user claims they can't even use their AirPods when they play music at ...
What to Expect From Best Buy’s Holiday Sales This Year
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What to Expect From Best Buy’s Holiday Sales This Year

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. The holiday season sales have officially started. This year, Best Buy is having a whopping six sales starting on Halloween and leading up to Christmas. The early (very early) Black Friday deals are already live, and they're good. Here are the best ones I've found so far. Great prices on OLED TVsI'm impressed by the price cut on the LG 48" Class B5 Series OLED. You can get it for $529.99 (originally $1,299.99), the lowest price it has ever been, and a great price point to get an OLED TV, most of which easily start in the $1,000s. If you can spend a bit more, the Samsung 65" Class S84F OLED is $949.99 (originally $1999.99)—that's a mi...
How Apple Plans to Improve AI Image Editors
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How Apple Plans to Improve AI Image Editors

Apple might be dead last in the AI race—at least when you consider competition from companies like OpenAI, Google, and Meta—but that doesn't mean the company isn't working on the tech. In fact, it seems most of the work Apple does on AI is behind the scenes: While Apple Intelligence is, well, there, the company's researchers are working on other ways to improve AI models for everyone, not just Apple users. The latest project? Improving AI image editors based on text prompts. In a paper published last week, researchers introduced Pico-Banana-400K, a dataset of 400,000 "text-guided" images selected to improve AI-based image editing. Apple believes its image dataset improves upon existing sets by including higher quality images with more diversity: The researchers found that existing datasets...
You Can Now Pay to Generate More Sora AI Videos, and I’m Concerned
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You Can Now Pay to Generate More Sora AI Videos, and I’m Concerned

Sora, OpenAI's short-form AI video generator, has been out for just about a month now, and already, it's helping to spread disinformation on social media. Accounts share Sora generations without any transparency, sometimes with the Sora watermark removed, and while shrewd observers see through the AI, many people scrolling by don't think twice and believe things happened that didn't. That could be as innocuous as Jake Paul putting on makeup, or as dangerous as a fake interview meant to manipulate viewers towards a political bias. It's getting scary out there. So far, for the free model, Sora has capped video generations at 30 per day. If you pay for the Pro model, you get 100 generations a day. But if you're using Sora free of charge, once you produce your 30th video, you aren't able to ma...
Google Says Androids Get 58% Fewer Scam Texts Than iPhones, but I Have Some Questions
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Google Says Androids Get 58% Fewer Scam Texts Than iPhones, but I Have Some Questions

If you're getting more scam texts than your friends and family, it turns out it might be your mobile platform, at least going by a recent poll from Google and YouGov. According to Google, users on Android report receiving 58% fewer scam texts than those on iOS, and that number is even better on Pixel devices. Credit: Google That data comes from a survey Google and YouGov conducted of over 5,000 Android and iOS users across the U.S., India, and Brazil. The data says that Android users as a whole were "58% more likely than iOS users" to report that they had not received any scam texts in the week prior to the survey, and that iOS users were 65% mo...
Try ‘Habit Stacking’ to Make New Routines Stick
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Try ‘Habit Stacking’ to Make New Routines Stick

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Why is it so easy to form bad habits and so frustrating to try to form good ones? We crave routine, at least to some degree, so it's frustrating when you can't make productive or helpful habits stick. But consider that you already have a bunch of good, small habits, like putting the coffee on in the morning or washing your face before bed. As hard as you might be struggling with the bigger ones, you know you can do it because you've done it countless times before in smaller ways. In fact, those smaller routines can do more than prove your capability when it comes to building them; they can help you entrench larger habits and be even more productive. Let's go over a technique called habit stacking, which is basically li...
Magic Leap, One of the Biggest Flops in AR, Is Back with Smart Glasses
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Magic Leap, One of the Biggest Flops in AR, Is Back with Smart Glasses

Magic Leap is back. The tech company, now owned by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, today revealed a prototype for a pair of Android XR smart glasses made as a "reference design for the Android XR ecosystem," and announced it had extended its partnership with Google. The AR glasses have thicker-than-normal frames, but not ridiculously so, and seem to have a camera. But that’s about all we know: there's no word on availability or what the glasses actually do.While Magic Leap didn't reveal a ton of concrete details about its new shades, it did say they combine "Magic Leap’s waveguides and optics with Google’s Raxium microLED light engine" with the goal being an all-day AR wearable. "Magic Leap and Google’s collaboration is focused on developing AR glasses prototypes that balance visua...
Elon Musk’s ‘Grokipedia’ Is Certainly No Wikipedia
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Elon Musk’s ‘Grokipedia’ Is Certainly No Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a treasured online resource that, despite massive changes across the web, has managed to remained truly great to this day. I, alongside millions of other users, visit the site daily to learn something new or double-check existing knowledge. In an age of non-stop AI slop, Wikipedia is something of an antidote.If you look at Wikipedia and think "this is alright, but an AI version would be a lot better," you might just be Elon Musk. Musk's AI company, xAI, just launched Grokipedia—yes, that really is its name—an online encyclopedia that closely resembles Wikipedia in name and surface-level appearance. But under the hood, the two could hardly be any more different. Though it's early days for the new "encyclopedia," I'd say it's not worth using, at least not for anything real. Th...
This Nintendo Switch (With a Gray Joy-Con) Is Under $300 Right Now
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This Nintendo Switch (With a Gray Joy-Con) Is Under $300 Right Now

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. Credit: Illustration by Zain Awais and product image courtesy of Amazon. The Nintendo Switch 2 is out, and it might not be worth the upgrade yet if you already own the original Nintendo Switch (especially at its $450 to $500 price point). If you don't, you can still get one and enjoy it before the Switch 2 really kicks off. Walmart is currently selling the Nintendo Switch Gray Joy-Con for $294.99 (originally $361.40). No other reputable seller has this version new on sale. If you're okay with a used console, GameStop has a pre-owned version for $209.99, ...