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Today — 19 September 2024Main stream

YouTube confirms your pause screen is now fair game for ads

18 September 2024 at 22:14
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

It’s been nearly six years since we warned you that ads were coming for your pause button and 18 months since Google revealed that YouTube would serve them up, too.

Now, YouTube confirms advertisers can broadly target your paused screentime: “As we’ve seen both strong advertiser and strong viewer response, we’ve since widely rolled out Pause ads to all advertisers,” YouTube comms manager Oluwa Falodun confirms to The Verge.

Technically, YouTube started piloting pause ads in 2023 with a limited selection of advertisers, but Google chief business officer Philipp Schindler revealed this April that they were unsurprisingly a big hit with ad firms and lucrative for Google.

Last week, Redditors started posting that the pause ads seemed to be...

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Yesterday — 18 September 2024Main stream

PayPal has a new logo that makes it look just like everything else

18 September 2024 at 21:42
The new PayPal logo.
Image: PayPal

Roughly 25 years after it launched payment processing, PayPal is “ushering in a new era for customers” with some generic black text. The company has a new logo, designed by Pentagram, that looks incredibly plain — especially compared to previous iterations of the logo that featured a rakish slant, two shades of blue, and prominent PayPal P’s.

Image: PayPal
The evolution of PayPal’s logo.

The company justifies the change by saying that the new black standalone wordmark won’t be confused with the rest of the payments processing world — especially “the blue that has become synonymous with fintech.”

And yet:

Image: PayPal
That is a very blue word.
Image: PayPal
Also...

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Before yesterdayMain stream

The first Thunderbolt 5 dock appears to have arrived

17 September 2024 at 19:26
The Kensington SD5000T5. | Image: Kensington

The first Thunderbolt 5 cables arrived in July, and now it looks like we’re finally getting the first Thunderbolt 5 dock! Kensington has just announced the Intel-certified SD5000T5 EQ is now available to buy, seemingly beating every rival to the 120Gbps single-cable docking punch. (I just checked: Hyper, J5Create and OWC’s docks aren’t yet available.)

The new dock claims to support up to three 4K monitors or two 8K monitors on Windows, or dual 6K monitors on MacBook Pros with M1 Pro chips or better. It also offers up to 120Gbps speeds for connected peripherals — assuming your computer has a Thunderbolt 5 port, anyhow. Last we checked, only a single $4,500 version of the Razer Blade 18 has that port, though PCWorld points out the $3,899...

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Tile’s new AirTag competitors now double as panic buttons

16 September 2024 at 21:48
A sea green credit card-sized item tracker, next to a sea green keychain in the shape of a rounded rectangle.
The new Tile Mate and Tile Slim. | Image: Tile

Tile, one of the leading makers of Bluetooth item finders, has just added a twist — its newest trackers can now send SOS alerts that notify friends, family, and possibly even emergency services.

The 2024 Tile Pro, Tile Mate, Tile Slim, and Tile Sticker are the first new products since Life360 bought the company nearly three years ago, and many facets are unchanged: they should each ring slightly louder and have slightly better water resistance, but the credit card, key fob, and sticker configurations are all roughly the same size and weight. There’s no mention of UWB signals for precision tracking, unlike Apple’s AirTags and Samsung’s SmartTag 2. The Tile Pro is once again the only model that offers a user-replaceable battery.

All but...

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Bungie will compensate an artist after its Destiny 2 Nerf blaster ripped off their work

13 September 2024 at 19:11
It’s a white revolver with black and orange stripes.
The Destiny 2 Nerf Ace of Spades blaster. | Image: Hasbro

When Bungie and Hasbro decided to create a real-life, dart-blasting Nerf version of one of the most famous Destiny 2 guns, someone got lazy — stealing a fan artist’s nine-year-old work instead of creating the Ace of Spades from scratch.

To Bungie’s credit, the game company has just announced it will “make sure” to compensate and credit Tofu Rabbit “for their incredible artwork,” after a rapid investigation.

As you can see in Tofu’s examples below, this is an incredibly clear-cut case of copying, despite the changes that Bungie or Hasbro’s artists made to the blaster.

Hey @Bungie @BungieHelp @DestinyTheGame @A_dmg04 @Cozmo23 @DestinyComArt soo, the NERF ace of spades DIRECTLY lifts a commission i did in 2015. This is not "similar" or...

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iFixit made its own USB-C soldering iron, and it’s already a joy

12 September 2024 at 15:00
A hand holds up a soldering iron connected to a battery, with a red ring of light around the iron signaling that it’s hot and a 360 degree temperature indicator on the battery’s screen.
The iFixit portable soldering station. | Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge

My first USB-C soldering iron was a revelation. “You mean I can make liquid metal connections anywhere, in seconds, just by plugging this tiny stick into a USB cable?” Now, repair company iFixit is introducing its own take on the idea. It claims the iFixit FixHub Smart Soldering Iron is powerful enough for pros and easier for beginners than any others that have come before.

So far, it’s not a new revelation, but after my first couple of hours, I’m loving iFixit’s improvements on an already great idea.

For starters: the $80 iron comes with a heat-resistant magnetic storage cap so you can safely put it away at a moment’s notice, an LED...

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AMD’s new Variable Graphics Memory lets laptop users reassign their RAM to gaming

11 September 2024 at 22:00
A close up of a white laptop keyboard against a background of blue and purple.
An AMD Strix Point laptop. | Photo by Joanna Nelius / The Verge

Many laptops and gaming handhelds share a single pool of memory between the CPU and GPU — and sometimes, you might want that RAM boosting your graphics instead. Now, AMD won’t make you dive into a BIOS to reroute that power. The company’s new Variable Graphics Memory lets you turn up to 75 percent of your system memory into dedicated video RAM, just by tapping a button in AMD’s desktop Adrenalin app.

It’s only currently available for AMD AI 300 “Strix Point” laptops, and how much RAM you’ll be able to divert depends on your system’s total — AMD explains that the “medium” setting will turn a 32GB laptop that came with 512MB of video memory into a 24GB one with 8GB of dedicated VRAM.

Image: AMD

You might be wondering:...

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