Lead Hacker

Nanoleaf’s smart holiday string lights are compatible with Matter, so they can work with a wide range of smart home platforms. | Image: Nanoleaf If you’ve got a holiday party or gathering coming up, Nanoleaf’s Essentials Matter Smart Holiday String Lights will help set the mood without putting a dent in your wallet. Typically $119.99, right now, the 65-foot string lights are only $44.99 at Best Buy , which is significantly cheaper than they were on Black Friday and a new all-time low. If you’re looking for a piece of decor that’ll get everybody in the Christmas spirit, these twinkly string lights are it. With 250 addressable LEDs capable of displaying more than 16 million colors and an IP44 rating, they’ll make any tree, fireplace, or porch pop. The lights also come with festive preset scenes and will even dance along to the beat of holiday tunes. Plus, the Wi-Fi string lights... Continue reading… source https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/15/24001447/nanoleaf-essentials-matter-...

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. | Image: Rockstar Games Netflix just released its biggest games yet . The Grand Theft Auto trilogy — which includes GTA III , Vice City , and San Andreas — is now available on both iOS and Android, and the games are all free to play if you’re already a Netflix subscriber. But while the streaming service has offered mobile games for a while now ( and added some excellent titles to its library ), actually finding games you want to play can be a bit fiddly. In the mobile Netflix app, every game is confined to a single row, which means lots of scrolling around icons that don’t seem to be in any particular order. It’s definitely easy to miss things. So here’s a handy trick for finding all the games Netflix offers — and it works on both Google Play and the App Store. It’s... Continue reading… source https://www.theverge.com/24001319/gta-trilogy-netflix-download-iphone-android

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge The next time you sit down to watch YouTube on your TV, you might notice fewer ads breaking up the video you’re watching. That’s because YouTube is making ads on TVs appear less frequently, but in exchange, you’ll have to sit through longer commercials. YouTube started testing longer but less frequent ad breaks in September, and now they’re launching across all TVs. The change means you’ll see an updated countdown timer in the bottom-right corner of your screen that will now show how long you have left until the entire ad break ends or when you can skip. GIF: YouTube YouTube previously displayed how many ads were included in the break in the top-left corner of your screen, along with a countdown timer for each... Continue reading… source https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/14/24000286/youtube-fewer-ad-breaks-tv

Image: Bungie Epic Games plans to give away 17 free games during its annual holiday sale for the Epic Games Store, the company announced on Wednesday . The first free game you can snag is Destiny 2: Legacy Collection (2023) , which includes three expansions: The Witch Queen , Beyond Light , and Shadowkeep . If you want to catch up on some older Destiny 2 content before the recently delayed release of The Final Shape , the Legacy Collection might be a good thing to add to your Epic Games Store library (though note that it doesn’t include the current Lightfall expansion). Legacy Collection will be available for free until December 20th at 11AM ET; at that time, the next free game will unlock. The 2023 holiday sale has some pretty good deals, too. Epic is... Continue reading… source https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/13/23999921/epic-games-store-holiday-sale-2023-free-games

Image: Sega Netflix has figured out that the only thing better than having a bunch of Sonic cartoons on its platform is having a Sonic game. The streamer has announced that Sonic Mania Plus — y’know, the best Sonic game this decade — is coming to mobile via Netflix in 2024. Sonic Mania launched on console and PC in 2017 and, in 2018, was updated to Sonic Mania Plus . The upgrade to Plus added two new playable characters — Mighty and Ray — a new tutorial zone, and expanded, color-swapped levels. But the biggest addition was a new game mode called Encore mode. In this new mode, instead of Sonic and pals accumulating lives that get spent every time they find themselves on the wrong end of the drowning timer music, you accumulate party members a la the... Continue reading… source https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/13/23999780/sonic-mania-plus-netflix-cozy-grove-2024

The Stand One Max is a handsome charging station, but I think it could have maintained its good looks even with better spacing to accommodate StandBy mode. | Image: Nomad After releasing various MagSafe chargers , cheaper MagSafe-compatible Base and Stand chargers , and a 3-in-1 MagSafe Base One Max charger , Nomad is further filling out its lineup by announcing the Stand One Max . Much like its recent charger, the similarly named (and even pricier) Stand One Max is a MagSafe 3-in-1 that simultaneously charges your iPhone, Apple Watch, and a pair of AirPods — all for $180. But its design has a small miscalculation that prevents me from charging all those devices and simultaneously using my favorite new iOS feature, StandBy mode , which lets a charging iPhone in landscape orientation show you all kinds of fun, customizable widgets. You see, plopping down your phone on the charger’s upright MagSafe stand... Continue reading… source https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/12/239976...

Just tap the blue dot for more control. Google Maps has gotten some fun updates recently , and now it’s offering some more privacy-forward tweaks as it adds more ways to control your location data. It starts, as so many journeys do with that little blue dot in Google Maps: aka, you... or, your current location at least. Right now, tapping the blue dot in Google Maps offers shortcuts to save your parking or share your location. This update — which I’m already seeing on my Pixel 8 Pro review unit — adds options for device location and location history. You can see at a glance whether they’re on or off, and you can toggle them with just a couple of taps. Image: Google Clicking the blue dot now offers quick control over more settings. ... Continue reading… source https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/12/23997581/google-maps-timeline-location-history-activity-blue-dot