Technology news

Onkyo advertises its new NCP-302 speaker as being able to connect to most any streaming service, including Play-Fi, Cast, Apple AirPlay, Onkyo’s own FireConnect, and Bluetooth. There’s also auxiliary inputs. That's choice.
The NCP-302 has dual three-inch woofers and a one-inch tweeter, which are encased in wood. The speaker is controlled through Onkyo's iOS / Android app, although it does also come with built-in controls. This speaker is definitely competing more with Sonos than

In 1845, Sir John Franklin set off with two ships on an expedition to try and discover the Northern Passage — only to vanish. Now, 168 years after it disappeared, the ship HMS Terror has been discovered, according to The Guardian. (The other, the HMS Erebus, was found in 2004.)
Franklin’s expedition sailed North to chart the last unknown regions of the Arctic’s Northern Passage — a sea route that would connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and help British traders save

Company of Heroes was released 10 years ago, and it still holds up today as a must-play game for anybody who enjoys strategy. The "complete pack," including the original Company of Heroes and its expansions, is on sale for $9.24 on Steam, and it's worth every penny. Don't bother with Company of Heroes 2, which was weird and disappointing — just look to the original.
COH takes place in World War II, and while the setting may now look aged and unremarkable, the game's mechanic

JLab Audio is the latest company to release a new pair of Bluetooth headphones just in time for the iPhone 7 launch. The Flex Bluetooth Headphones are the company's second pair of over-the-ear Bluetooth headphones, but the first with Active Noise Cancelation. JLab Audio says the headphones will give you 60 hours of noise-canceling playtime, 30 hours of Bluetooth playback, or 10 hours of Bluetooth playback with noise-cancellation active.Coming in at $149, the Flex headphones are on the cheaper en

20th Century Fox is taking superhero cinema to its logical extreme by turning Marvel Comics icon Stan Lee into an action star. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the studio has acquired Lee's life rights, and plans on making an action-adventure film set in the 1970s with Lee as the hero, complete with alter ego.
The film, coming from the producers behind Twilight and the upcoming Power Rangers movie, is currently being described as similar to Kingsman: The Secret Service in tone, which me

Instagram has issued another Snapchat-inspired update to its app, the latest in an aggressive series since the company’s big redesign in May. In version 9.3, released today, Instagram has added some new options to the app’s Snapchat-style “stories” feature that it unveiled last month. Users will now be able to save the photos and videos that they post to their stories to the camera roll automatically by default, and they can also mute the stories of people they follow.Sav

On the surface, there isn't a lot of common ground between J.A. Bayona's 2007 creepy ghost story debut The Orphanage, his tsunami disaster tale The Impossible, and his new film A Monster Calls, a tremendously effective tear-jerker about a young British boy named Conor coping with his mother's illness by sneaking off to confront a roaring, blazing tree-monster that insists on telling him fables. But all three films are about mothers and sons, about loss and grieving and coping, and about the stre

Who knew Bruce Lee and Freddie Mercury would make a good Odd Couple?
Japanese Twitter user @suekichiii has taken a pair of action figures and turned them into a photographic sitcom. The account is dedicated to all manner of action figures, but seems particularly fascinated with these particular action figures and their wacky hijinks.
What really makes the series hilarious is the antagonistic relationship that seems to exist between each of the figures, with Bruce playing any number of pranks, us

Apple just released iOS 10, which promises to be the best version of the platform to date. Unfortunately, some users are complaining that the update is bricking their phones. Even if it isn't technically a full brick, it's the furthest thing from ideal, and no one wants a useless phone. Apple has issued a statement that it has resolved the issue already, but for anyone who was affected, here's a quick-and-dirty guide to getting your phone back to normal: Continue reading…

Apple's just-launched iOS 10 update is off to a rough start. According to widespread complaints across social media, many iPhone and iPad users are running into installation problems. For some, the update process fails with a subsequent error message asking users to plug their iOS device into a PC or Mac for a complete restore of the operating system. Here's Apple's support page with a step-by-step explanation of how to do that.
But this is a major headache for people who are installin

Virtual reality backpack computers are still in that liminal state where we know a lot about the general concept, but few people have actually gotten to try them — or in some cases, even see finished designs and specs. This week, that’s changing for at least one product: MSI’s VR One, which is debuting at the Tokyo Games Show.
The VR One is the final iteration of a design from May, and instead of looking like a rough render of an angry trash bin, it now looks like a much better

Apple released tvOS 10 today, which is available for the 2015 model of the Apple TV.
The update begins to refine the interface and round out the features that Apple introduced on the new Apple TV last October. That includes updates to Siri, which can now search YouTube and control HomeKit products, and the ability to replace your Apple TV remote with a remote app on the iPhone or iPad. There's now also a dark mode, which might look way better on your TV than the bright interface the system

iOS 10 for the iPhone and iPad is available to install now. We'll have a full review of it soon — some of the biggest updates involve new apps that you can use in both Siri and iMessage, so it didn't make sense to review it without trying those out. It's also usually a good idea to wait a day or two before installing it. But all that said, our initial impressions of the OS is that it's "wonderful," as Nilay Patel wrote in his iPhone 7 review. There are more options in notifications, a

The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) announced today that Russian hackers gained access to its database and viewed information on athletes involved in this year’s Olympic games. The agency claims the state-sponsored group Fancy Bear is behind the attack, although it doesn’t clarify how that attribution was made.
The accessed data included medical information, like Therapeutic Use Exemptions issued by International Sports Federations and National Anti-Doping Organizations. The group ha

TP-Link has released three new smart Wi-Fi light bulbs, and as with just about every smart product released this year, it's compatible with Amazon's Alexa. If it wasn't clear before, Alexa has become the default smart home integration option for the majority of smart device manufacturers.TP-Link LB110
The TP-Link LB100, LB110, and LB120 bulbs don't require a hub like its Philips Hue counterparts — they can be fully controlled through the Kasa app on Android and iOS. All three white LED bul

Apple is releasing a major update for the original Apple Watch today. watchOS 3 is designed to overhaul the Watch entirely, from the way apps load to how you launch them and use the watch interface. You'll need to connect your Apple Watch to your iPhone and launch the Watch app to check for software updates and install watchOS 3. Installing watchOS 3 will require 50 percent charge and for the watch to be connected to a charger during install.
So what's new? Apple has made one big change that alt

Foursquare and Swarm are both getting app updates today. And though it’s been a little more than two years since the check-in / restaurant discovery Foursquare app split itself into two, it still seems as though it’s necessary to remind people how these two interrelated apps work: Swarm is for check-ins and competing to be the mayor of your local haunt and Foursquare for finding stuff nearby.
Of the two, Swarm is getting the more important update. Version 4.7 is going to start offeri

 Y Combinator, which has been expanding rapidly in recent years, is making broad, organizational changes– for the second time this year.
Most dramatically, Y Combinator will be winding down its YC Fellowships and launching a MOOC, or massively online open course, in 2017.
Additionally, the venture fund that started as an accelerator in 2005, has appointed Michael Seibel as CEO of its Y… Read More

Apple's biggest update to iOS is now available for existing devices. iOS 10 can be downloaded from the general part of the settings page on compatible iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad devices. It's the biggest update to Apple's mobile operating system so far, with a Siri digital assistant overhaul and a new iMessage interface that integrates stickers, apps, and games.
If you're a Mac user then Apple is enabling a Universal Clipboard on iOS 10, so you can copy text or images from your iPhone and past

Today, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced an $835,000 settlement with Viacom, Hasbro, Mattel, and Jumpstart over online tracking on children’s websites.
The Attorney General’s investigation found that websites for Barbie, Dora the Explorer, and other popular children’s brands were tracking users to serve ads. While common on the web, ad tracking is forbidden for sites directed at children under 13 by the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (or COP

It feels odd to say this, but the primary problem with Christopher Guest's latest improvised-dialogue mockumentary is that it just isn't mean enough. And the reason that statement feels odd is because Guest's movies have always had a deep-seated affection for their openly ridiculous characters. They've never been about cruelty or contempt. But they aren't above having a laugh at these insular communities — community theater in Waiting For Guffman, the competitive dog-show circuit Best

The Moment is a screenless wearable that its creators designed to experiment with UI. Unlike a wearable with a screen, the band vibrates in specific patterns to signify when you have a notification. So if your mom calls, it might vibrate in a square two times or maybe only the right side of the watch will pulse. The band supposedly relies on something called "tactile illusions" to make the vibrations seem as if they’re moving across a wearer’s wrist as opposed to buzzing in place.
Mo

 Evernote — the popular note taking and productivity startup with 200 million users — has built its reputation around an app that lets you record and track all your life’s details hold them there, for life. Today, the company is shifting gears on the question of how it will keep hold of and track that information: Evernote is migrating all of its data to Google’s… Read More

Though it's the first electric car that is both affordable and has a range over 200 miles, the Chevy Bolt is almost aggressively normal. Slipping into the driver's seat, it feels like any number of other cars I've driven. There's a steering wheel, a couple of pedals, a shift knob, and all the other stuff one expects from a car built in 2016. The only hint to the high-tech infrastructure hiding beneath the floor is the complete lack of noise when I hit the power button.And that's very, very impre

Bless the late night air waves, Samantha Bee is back. The face of Full Frontal returned after over a month of hiatus for the show, turning her sarcastic scrutiny this time on Marco Gutierrez, the founder of Latinos for Trump. Bee's team interviews Gutierrez, who uses phrases like "us illegal immigrants" and smiles while saying that Hispanics are a "primitive and underdeveloped culture. We'll whatever we can take if you let us."
"WTF" is right.
SEE ALSO: Samantha Bee goes after 'Bernie or Buster

Last week I was one of the first journalists in the world to take the Chevrolet Bolt EV on a road trip. Unaccompanied, hewing vaguely to a route prescribed by General Motors reps, I drove the electric car through thick soups of fog and oases of sunshine on the most beautiful chunk of the California coast.
The route between Monterey and Santa Barbara was designed not just to be photogenic, but also difficult, curvy and with plenty of hills in the way. I drove the first part of the trip at tremend