Were wrapping up 2024, so why not do it with some frivolous CES announcements? Like this premium (it has to be premium!) microwave from LG, with a touchscreen bigger than your iPad. Im not sure what youll watch in the three-and-a-half minutes it takes to heat that butter chicken curry, but you can do it in glorious full HD resolution.LGThe touchscreen integrates with LGs ThinQ Smart Home Dashboard if you think its the right time to change channels on your TV or tinker with compatible Matter and Thread devices, like smart lights and er, and other things. It can also pair with the companys induction range oven to display cooking progress if you struggle to crane your neck from your microwave to your kitchen burners. Its no washing machine inside a washing machine, but still, you gotta love CES.LG is on a trip this year. Mat SmithGet this delivered daily direct to your inbox. Subscribe right here!The biggest tech stories you missedYouTube copies Netflix's old 'Play Something' button in new testDonald Trump asks the Supreme Court to delay the TikTok banCES 2025: What we're expecting to see in Las Vegas The US Treasury says it was hacked in a China-linked cyberattackThe breach was first reported on December 8.Documents and workstations at the US Treasury Department were accessed during a cyberattack linked to a "China state-sponsored Advanced Persistent Threat actor." The attack was pretty bad, and its been cited as "a major cybersecurity incident." The Treasury Department said it has worked with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the FBI to understand the full scope of the breach but hasn't shared how long files and workstations were accessible or what was accessed. Beijing has denied any involvement.Continue reading.In 2024, the camera of the year was a droneDJIs Neo made aerial video accessible for everyone.EngadgetHonesty? 2024 was a dull year for cameras, with new devices offering small tweaks and minor improvements. But drones? Specifically, entry-level ones? DJI made it an intriguing year, spitting out multiple models, including the versatile, easy-to-use Neo, all while fending off the US government's plans to ban sales from the company.Continue reading.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/general/the-morning-after-engadget-newsletter-121536994.html?src=rss

This tiny Mirumi robot straps to your bag and looks around.

Everything you need to know about Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 in 2025.

Analyst says that an early January Nintendo Swich 2 reveal "could make sense".

Intel lost over 60% of its value in 2024, the biggest drop in its 53 years as a public company. Broadcom's stock price more than doubled.

Alibaba is offering the price cuts on its visual language model, Qwen-VL, which is designed to perceive and understand both texts and images.

Some activities are so synonymous with their holidays that its hard to imagine celebrating without them. Think, eating turkey on Thanksgiving, exchanging presents during Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, or Christmasand watching the ball drop in Manhattans Times Square on New Years Eve.Lets explore the options for tuning in to the latter, but first . . .How did NYE in Times Square become a tradition?According to the Times Square website, the New York Times opened a new headquarters in 1904 called Times Tower at the intersection of 7th Avenue/Broadway and 42nd Street.Adolph Ochs, the papers owner and publisher, convinced the local powers-that-be to change the name of the area, then known as Longacre Square, to Times Square. In celebration of the newspapers new address, One Times Square, Ochs threw a massive party on New Years Eve that included a huge fireworks display illuminating the new building and ushering in 1905.Why do they mark the new year with a ball drop?Necessity is the mother of invention because in 1907, after the city banned fireworks for safety reasons, the concept of a ball descending the flagpole atop One Times Square was born. And a ball has been lowered every year since, except for 1942 and 1943 in observance of WWIIs wartime lighting restrictions.How often do they change the New Years Eve ball?Over the traditions 100-plus-year history, there have been multiple versions of the beloved ball. The first was created in 1907 by Jacob Starr and consisted of iron, wood, and 100 25-watt incandescent bulbs. It weighed in at 700 pounds and was five feet in diameter. In 1920, a 400-pound iron ball replaced the original; in 1955, an aluminum ball adorned with 180 light bulbs and weighing only 150 pounds became the next standout. In 1981, the ball was completely redone with an aluminum skin covered in hundreds of red light bulbs with a green light-bulbs stem as a salute to the Big Apple, NYCs nickname.Then in 1999, to welcome the millennium, the Waterford Crystal company took over the design, debuting a ball comprised of 2,688 triangular crystal panels and measuring 12 feet in diameter for six tons of incredible sparkle. In 2007, the 100th anniversary of the ball drop, 32,256 LED bulbs replaced the incandescents. And now, 2024 is the last year this crystal ball will dropfollowed by 3,000 pounds of confetti released at midnightas a new design is set to debut next New Years Eve. How can I watch the ball drop online for free?The actual ball drop doesnt cost a thing to see if you have internet access. You can watch, commercial-free, on the official website of Times Square on Tuesday, December 31, 2024, beginning at 6 p.m. ET. There will also be a live stream with open captions and American Sign Language (ASL) available on YouTube.How can I watch the ball drop on a mobile device?If you find yourself out and about, not a problem. You can catch all the festivities on your phone, using one of the following:TimesSquareNYC.orgNewYearsEve.nycTimesSquareBall.netHow can I watch the Times Square performances and TV coverage?A number of television networks will offer coverage of the Times Square festivities and live music performances. They include: New Years Eve Live: Nashvilles Big Bash: For those who are more than just a little bit country, tune into CBS at 8 p.m. ET. Keith Urban and Rachel Smith are hosting the hoedown with performances from Jelly Roll, Kane Brown, and others. Viewers who have Paramount+ with Showtime can also stream this program live.New Years Eve Live With Anderson Cooper and Andy Cohen: Besties Anderson and Andy are stoked to help you count down the minutes with things kicking off on CNN at 8 p.m. ET. The duo will receive support from celeb friends, including Neil Patrick Harris, Patti LaBelle, Jeremy Renner, David Blane, Bowen Yang, and Matt Rogers. Musical performers are Maroon 5, Darius Rucker, Enrique Iglesias, Flo Rida, and Rod Stewart, among others. You can also stream it on Max.Dick Clarks New Years Rockin Eve with Ryan Seacrest 2025: Ryan Seacrest is keeping Dick Clarks legacy alive by hosting this annual special, which travels around the country to celebrate the new year. The Jonas Brothers will take the stage in New York City, Blake Shelton will rock Vegas, with Rene Rapp holding down Hollywood. The party gets started at 8 p.m. ET on ABC.You dont have to have cable to watch these TV events. Cord-cutters can utilize a live-TV streaming service. The following all offer CBS, ABC, and CNN along with free trials to new subscribers.Hulu + Live TVYouTube TVFuboTVHappy New Year!

When Hurricane Helene hit North Carolina, bringing torrential rain and flooding to the western part of the state, it was a shock to many that such a storm could cause that level of devastation so far from the coast. It was a surprise even to Getty Images photographers who frequently cover disasters.The photographers I spoke with, none of us could remember covering a hurricane, or the effects of a hurricane, in such a mountainous region, says Mario Tama, a staff photographer at Getty Images who was on the ground after the hurricane. That speaks to how these things are evolving.Asheville, North Carolina, October 3, 2024. [Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images]Tama has worked for Getty for more than 20 years, and hes had a front row seat to the way climate change has evolved. Year after year Tama photographs the hurricanes, fires, droughts, and other disasters fueled by the immense amounts of greenhouse gases were emitting into the atmosphere.Liesl Steiner outside her flood damaged home in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene on October 4, 2024 in Swannanoa, North Carolina. [Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images]Not only have the disasters changedtheyve gotten stronger and more commonthe way photographers cover them has as well. During Helene, Tama says one photographer hiked over a mudslide that blocked a road in order to reach a remote, devastated town. (He himself made it through after the road was cleared.) The level of destruction was a new challenge for photographers to navigateand, he notes, for FEMA and other first responders, too.Flooded streets near Porto Alegre City Hall on May 17, 2024, in Porto Alegre, Brazil. [Photo: Jefferson Bernardes/Getty Images]Technological advances have also changed the experience. Thanks to Starlinks satellite internet, photographers can get their images out even faster when in remote areas, like when covering wildfires, or if cell coverage is down. Its incredibly important to get images out quickly that are from verified sources in this era of misinformation, he says. Imagery has a way of bringing home the truth, in a way that words cant quite do. During Helene, he remembers, people thanked him for being there and getting their story out.Even amid all that tragedy, Tama has witnessed uplifting moments of communities coming together to respond to these climate events. Whether its doctors driving from faraway states to help in the aftermath of Helene, or the way the residents of Lahaina, Hawaii, came together for the one-year anniversary of its devastating fire, hes seen the power and bonds of community.A man walks through a debris-covered street after flash floods in the Sedav area of Valencia, Spain, on October 30, 2024. [Photo: David Ramos/Getty Images]In 2024, the FEMA declared an unprecedented 179 disasters in the U.S. That equates to a disaster every two days. And its not only the U.S. seeing these effectsfrom the flooding in Spain to the Canadian wildfires, climate disasters were felt around the world.Billing Aquadrome flooded after heavy rain on November 25, 2024, in Northampton, England. [Photo: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images]Tama has felt that increase in his work, too, having to respond to more and more eventssometimes even in his own backyard. Tama lives in Los Angeles, and in early December got a call while asleep to go and cover the Franklin Fire in Malibu. He worked through that night and all the next day capturing the effects of theblaze.A firefighting helicopter drops water as the Franklin Fire continues to burn on December 10, 2024, near Malibu, California. [Photo Mario Tama/Getty Images]Its nothing compared to what the firefighters go through, he notesthey can work for days on end fighting these extreme fires. But its a sign of the dedication, and the demands, on photographers to capture this reality, and share it with the rest of the world. In a way, most photojournalists are becoming kind of responders to climate events, he says, whether that was why they got into this or not.

This year was all about Brat Green, Pantone Peach Fuzz, andmustaaaaaaaard. Were hyped for a 2025 slathered in Pantone Mocha Mousse. But, with all due respect to Prince, I want to talk about a color that should never get a year: purple.Let me count the heinous hues: plum, lilac, orchid, lavender, violet, mauve.Barf.As Fast Companys creative director, I love color. My job is to use color to create meaning and evoke emotion. But I try* to steer clear of purpleits a confused color, unsure of what its trying to say.To analyze purples confusing nature, I spoke with Lee Eisenman, the executive director of the Pantone Institute. Purple has the excitement of red, but the calmingness of blue, she says, noting that while orange is also a secondary color, its red and yellow components share warm messaging. Fair. But in the world of branding, purple mumbles with indecision. Purple feels like a client that cant choose a direction and a designer eager to wrap up the project: Lets just pick purple and call it a day. And when brands settle for indecision, they miss out on making an emotional impact.Decisiveness drums up emotion. Red energizes a brand; blue soothes it. But purple makes a brand feel emotionally torn, perplexed, ambivalent.[Images: Roku]Consider Roku and its color battle with other streaming services. While Amazon Primes blue pours me onto the couch, Hulus green sprouts my interest in fresh content, and Netflixs red fires me up to watch the screen, Rokus purple leaves me feeling cloudy. What are they trying to say? While the top-tier streaming services snagged the good colors, it feels like Roku smashed the purple button as an easy way to stand out. Conversely, Roku comes across as second-rate due to its use of purple without clear messaging.Eisenman, who consulted with Roku on its purple hue, said the company wanted to grab a second look from a consumer by creating a sense of mystery.Ready for me to solve that mystery?Heres our collective experience: purple is the color of pop-culture psychopaths. In the Batman franchise, The Joker, fitted in a purple suit, constantly tries to blow up Gotham City. In Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory, our purple festooned ferryman takes the Salt family on a dark tunnel ride, terrorizing their minds with creepy projections of crawling millipedes. In Avengers: Endgame, Thanos, the purple-skinned alien warlord, snapped his fingers and ended half of humanity. If only he couldve ended Barney, that furry purple dinosaur who haunted children with his song, I Love You.[Images: Warner Brothers, Disney, Getty Images]Oh, and that smiling purple devil emoji? Total asshole. Despite our villainous associations with purple, brands often use the color to communicate a contrived sense of luxury and pomp. Consider Cadbury and Hallmark. Cadbury slaps some purple on their wrapper, signaling their chocolate is of the highest distinction. Meanwhile, beneath the wrapper, the chocolate is overly sweet and creamy, which masks the subpar quality. And Hallmarkhave you ever watched one of its movies, especially around the holidays? In A Gingerbread Romance, an architect and a baker fall in love during a contest to produce a gingerbread house. It feels like the frenzied Hallmark writers chugged bottles of Robitussin and coughed out these stories, which are sticky-sweet, artificially flavored hallucinations of romance. Thats the real flavor of purple.To dive deeper into purples artificial luxury, I also spoke with Brian Collins, a branding expert and Chief Creative Officer of COLLINS. He pointed to Rolls-Royces recent rebrand as a poor use of purple. The rebrand uses a purple gown, mimicking Rolls-Royces iconic hood ornament. It falls flat as it deploys little new imagination, he says. By relying on the familiar purple symbol to convey luxury, Rolls-Royce comes across as cheap and easy.[Images: Rolls-Royce, Silk Cut]These aforementioned brands want us to associate purple with luxury, but associations require experienceand while weve experienced purple villains, most of us havent experienced purple luxury. Eisenman explained that purples luxurious associations date back to 1200 BC, when only the rich could afford the laborious process of extracting purple dye from the shells of Murex snails, creating the rare and coveted Tyrian purple. So, unless we can hop into a time machine, well never experience the true luxury of purple.So, can a brand successfully use purple to communicate luxury? Collins, though not a smoker, cited the cigarette brand Silk Cut as a success. In its classic advertisements, the brand repurposes a purple silk scarf in surprising ways. The scarf becomes a body of water traversed by a boater, a troop of leaves carried by ants, and even a veil of threads extruded from a meat grinder. This advertisement forced me to imagine their meat grinder as a precise machine, capable of extruding these purple fibers into the finest filigree. Ill give it to Mr. CollinsSilk Cut made purple feel high-end. Unlike Roku, Silk Cuts messaging was clear.But I still hate purple.Eisenman said its rare for a creative person to bear such a grudge towards purple, and Collins commented that I must have a deep-seeded hatred for the damn color. So join me on the therapists couch, wont you?[Source Image: ume illus/iStock/Getty Images Plus]In college, I dated a girl whose mom hated me for no good reason. When Id knock on the front door, shed greet me with a purple laser-beam stare. The inside of her home was adorned with wall-to-wall purple carpeting. There were purple curtains. Purple pillows on all of the couches. Purple napkins on all of the tables. It was a puke-y purple palace of coldness, and it forever changed the way I saw the color.My distaste is a concept known as affective conditioning, where my emotional experience influences my attitude towards color. Or, as Collins said, purple scarred me for life. *Earlier this year, Taco Bell CEO Sean Tresvant wore a purple sweater to his cover shoot. Stuck with purple, I added other colors to lean into the weirdness of Taco Bells branding.Can affective conditioning apply to other colors? Of course. Color is an individualized experience. But purple is a tricky one. It straddles warmth and coolness. It can be easily confused as artificial. It carries so much mystery. Purple creates a blank slate, leaving too much space for the audience to apply their own affective conditioning, making it a volatile color choice.Prince owned purple because he played guitar like no one else. His artistry redefined purple. Designers who dare to use purple to make a brand look luxurious, romantic, or creative, must rise to a similar challenge. They have a responsibilityto themself, to their audience, and to Prince himselfto wield the color with decisiveness and to use it in surprising ways that challenge expectations.

As powerful as smartphones might be, they also have the potential to distract us from the more important things we need to do in life. Sometimes, that productivity does include plenty of reading on the go, which makes the smartphone convenient but also potentially harmful to ones eyes in the long run. These contradictory features and needs make the smartphone less than perfect with the common design it carries right now.With some tweaking and imagination, however, its certainly possible to transform the smartphone into a more productive mobile computer. This concept, for example, tries to offer the best of all worlds by slapping an E Ink screen on its back for more comfortable reading, and a sliding mechanism that completely hides the cameras so you can enjoy both screens in their full glory.Designer: Kii JiiThis isnt the first smartphone design to put a second screen on the back for double the productivity. Most notably, the Yota Phone even dared to use an E Ink display that offers a more eye-friendly experience that also helps save battery life. After all, if all you want is to show a mostly static image or information, an E Ink screen wont use up any battery until the content changes. It also happens to be a good way to read lots of text on the go, much like what the new breed of eReader phones are trying to do today.What makes the inkPhone duo concept different is that it makes those two screens stretch from edge to edge, or at least almost edge to edge. Theres still a sizeable amount of bezels around them, but it might be possible to squeeze those out even further. There are no cutouts that give the illusion of hidden cameras either. Instead, the screens slide out to reveal the two sets of cameras, one for selfies and another for regular photos, that quickly get out of your way when no longer needed.In theory, this would mean you get full-screen experiences both in color and in grayscale, depending on your need or preference. Need to do some work in full color? Use one side with the OLED display. Need a distraction-free reading experience that discourages social media scrolling because of its slow refresh rate and pixelated quality? The E Ink side is going to be your cup of tea. And when you do need to take pictures or jump on a video call, simply slide out the two halves and get the job done quickly.In practice, however, the design could have a few gotchas that could get in the way of that nearly perfect experience. A sliding mechanism is an open invitation to mechanical failure down the road, and the camera lenses could get scratched over time due to friction. Theres also the matter of the temptation of distractions still within easy reach, making you just as unproductive as before.The post Dual-screen slider smartphone concept tries to solve all your productivity problems first appeared on Yanko Design.