The GoPro Max2 can use your earbuds as a microphone over Bluetooth. A 360-degree camera is a great way to ensure you capture every bit of the action, but prices tend to be on the high end for models worth your attention. That’s why it’s notable that the GoPro Max 2 accessory bundle is discounted to $369 at Amazon (a dollar more at Best Buy and GoPro). The bundle is stuffed for being just $70 more than the base camera, containing everything you need to shoot the best angles during all-day adventures. The capable camera can shoot 360-degree 8K video at 30 frames per second, or 180-degree 4K video at 60FPS, and it can attach to the wide ecosystem of GoPro-compatible mounts.GoPro Max 2Where to Buy: $569 $369 at Amazon (accessory bundle) $569 $369 at Best Buy (accessory bundle)In addition to the Max 2 camera, the bundle includes a four-foot extension pole, two protective lens caps, two high-capacity batteries, a 64GB microSD card, a curved adhesive mount, a mounting buckle for GoPro mounts, a mounting finger adapter for cameras, two thumb screws, a wrist lanyard, a microfiber cloth, and a USB-C cable. The standalone camera includes most of those accessories, but has fewer mounts, a single battery, no SD card, and no extension pole. The pole and extra battery are $75 on their own, so you’re getting a solid deal before you even take the free microSD card into account.The Max 2’s six-mic array records in every direction and automatically reduces wind noise. Alternatively, you can connect Bluetooth microphones, too. The 1.82-inch LCD touchscreen lets you quickly check your footage and manage settings, and it’s waterproof up to 16 feet in case you want to take it swimming or surfing. A single battery should last 66 minutes at full 8K, or 90 minutes at 5.6K resolution. The lenses are replaceable, too, in case a bad fall damages them. View this post on Instagram

There is a steep retail price gap between baseline appliances and their smart equivalents. Just for the addition of basic Wi-Fi and app connectivity, you'd be paying a massive price premium, often hundreds of dollars. And even after that, you may still be forced into a proprietary corporate ecosystem with slow cloud APIs, aggressive data tracking, and apps that constantly break whenever the manufacturer pushes a server update. Chasing high-priced native smart appliances isn't the true way forward for many smart home enthusiasts.

Sometimes, the tech world produces a device so far ahead of its time that looking back, it's hard to believe it ever existed — and in this particular case, it basically didn't.

I used Google Drive for years without questioning it. My documents, photos, backups, and personal files were saved across its servers for convenience. OneDrive and Dropbox offered similar experiences, but switching between major cloud providers never felt like a real upgrade.

Carter, there’s a couch RIGHT THERE. | Image: Carter Sherman has been covering sex, gender, and the complex personal and national politics that accompany them for years. She was a senior reporter for Vice and has written for Elle, Ms. magazine, and Los Angeles magazine as well. Along the way, she's garnered a Scripps Howard Award, a National Press Club Journalism Award, and four Emmy nominations. She's also the author of The Second Coming: Sex and the Next Generation's Fight Over Its Future. That book looks at how the internet and our polarized political landscape have changed sex and relationships, from school board battles over sex ed to abortion access. These days she finds herself …Read the full story at The Verge.

Every few months, I convince myself that one more layer of sophistication will make my home lab easier to manage. I’ll test a different deployment method, automate another maintenance task, or move a service because the new arrangement looks cleaner on paper. Sometimes it genuinely helps. Other times, I end up staring at a plain Linux container in Proxmox and wondering why I spent an afternoon trying to improve something that had already been working without complaint. LXC containers aren’t the newest or most interesting part of my setup, but they keep winning because I can understand them quickly, repair them without digging through several layers, and then stop thinking about them.

Sony’s flagship Bravia 9 II is the best RGB LED TV I’ve seen this year. The Sony Bravia 9 II is the most anticipated new TV in years. It's an amazing RGB LED TV. I watched Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves on the new Bravia with my son, who has been getting into the roleplaying game but had never seen the movie. The landscapes of Faerûn looked natural and real, while the magic cast by the Red Wizards of Thay was vibrant and colorful. Specular highlights in HDR really pop. I saw it with Xenk's glowing sword as he fought in the Underdark in Honor Among Thieves, but also in the explosions as Furiosa flees across the desert in Mad Max: Fury Road and the sun reflecting off the waves in The Meg.The Bravia 7 II …Read the full story at The Verge.

Dave Eggers attends the "The Turning Point: To Be Destroyed" premiere. | Image: John Lamparski/Getty Images for Tribeca Festival Last year, Sam Altman invited author Dave Eggers to give a talk to around 200 OpenAI staffers. The man has written countless novels, screenplays, pieces of journalism, started McSweeney's, and founded multiple schools and nonprofits that support writers and the arts more broadly. So one might expect he'd roll into the company's offices and offer tips on being relentlessly prolific, or how to excel in multiple fields. Instead, he apparently laced into the company. According to the Financial Times, Eggers told the staff:"The effect of ChatGPT on educators' lives is catastrophic. Whether you intended to do it or not, you've made every teache …Read the full story at The Verge.

Now, if you want to, you can use Google's 3D emoji in your own creations. The company shared some details about how it went about designing the little pictograms and why, as part of World Emoji Day on Friday. Things you might not necessarily worry about in a 2D illustration suddenly become very important when you're talking about a 3D model. Is a smiley face a sphere? A mask? A flat disc? In addition to offering a behind-the-scenes look at Google's design process, it also announced that it would be completely open-sourcing the emoji set:We're handing over raw .OBJ files to the community so they can use them to build immersive VR worlds, …Read the full story at The Verge.

Now that Amazon's new Fire TV Stick devices ship with their own Vega OS instead of the Android-based Fire OS, my 2022 Fire TV Stick is more valuable to me than ever. Of course, owning a four-year-old unit also means acknowledging that it's just not as fast as it used to be. That's hardly surprising, though, considering the years of cached data, installed apps, and dwindling storage space that accumulate over time.

Facial recognition smart locks are here; now you can unlock your door the same way you unlock your phone. | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge Hands-free unlocking is the future of smart locks. The best smart home tech removes friction, and having your door unlock for you as you walk up is as frictionless as it gets - no passcodes to remember, no need to have a free hand to wave, press, or poke at the lock. One way to achieve this nirvana is through facial recognition. You already unlock your phone with your face; why not your home?Hands-free unlocking using geofencing has been around for a while, but it can be slow and unreliable, and requires an app running in the background on your phone. Newer innovations - facial recognition and unlocking using an ultrawideband (UWB) radio - …Read the full story at The Verge.

The Pixel 10a shipped with a last gen processor. | Photo: Dominic Preston / The Verge Mystic Leaks suggests that the Pixel 11a will return to featuring a flagship-grade processor with the Tensor G6. Rather than the Tensor G5 found in the Pixel 10 and 10 Pro, the Pixel 10a shipped with the previous generation Tensor G4. That was a huge disappointment since, typically, the Pixel a lineup kept the modern processor, but cut corners in other places to keep costs down.The Tensor G6 is rumored to feature the same PowerVR DXT-48-1536 GPU as the G5, but it should still be an improvement over the Mali-G715 in the Tensor G4. The big upgrade is that the G6 moves on from Samsung's Exynos modems and instead uses a MediaTek M90 modem. Tha …Read the full story at The Verge.