Fly Or Die: AKG By HARMAN N90Q

The AKG By HARMAN N90Q headphones are, in short, awesome. Harman has long been one of the top names in audio, but its newest pair of over-ear headphones — the latest in Quincy Jones’ signature line — add a new type of technology called TruNote, which uses microphones to tailor music to your environment. And it goes beyond loud cars driving by or noise from being on a plane,… Read More

Wild Wednesday: Chromebooks, Chromecasts and more!

From the Cheapskate: The planets must be aligned in some weird way, because there are some truly spectacular deals to be had today!

Twitter wants to know your birthday so it can shower you with balloons and ads

Twitter wants to know when your birthday is, so it can shower you with animated balloons (yay!), and better target you with ads (boo!). The social network today introduced the option for users to set their birthdate in its settings menu and have it appear on their profile. Twitter says the new feature will allow people to celebrate your birthday more effectively, sending you all-important #HBD tweets to commemorate the anniversary of your existence, but its introduction also has a less altruistic side — it will help the social network work out which ads it thinks you want to see.

Last week Twitter introduced new audience insights for brands that allowed them to choose groups of users — including millennials, seniors, college grads — at...

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Reddit is changing because it wants celebrities to visit more

Reddit's removal of talent director Victoria Taylor sparked a community protest over the weekend, and now the site seems to be touching on some of the reasons why it let her go. In a comment, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian essentially writes that her dismissal is part of an overhaul to how Reddit will work with celebrities. Rather than occasionally helping celebrities conduct an hour-or-so question and answer session — which is what Taylor did in Reddit's AMA community — Ohanian says that Reddit now intends to help celebrities become "consistent posters ... rather than one off occurrences." Ohanian says that Reddit will still help bring big names to the AMA section, but it intends to let the section's moderators take it from there.

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Reddit's sound and fury

What would you imagine if someone asked you to picture the front page of the internet? It would, in all honesty, probably look a lot like Reddit — that is to say, it would look like popular content from everywhere else on the web. And yet, many have strained trying to figure out what the hell Reddit is. Is Reddit a forceful expression of democracy on the internet? Is it a weak feudal system run by warlords? Or is it merely "a global platform for online communities to connect and share?" Maybe. Or maybe it's just like every other media platform: an algorithm that's been endlessly gamed.

Yes, Reddit has an algorithm. It's seldom discussed, yet it fundamentally structures everything that happens there. And it's incredibly biased.

Reddit,...

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Amazon says 20th birthday celebration will be bigger than Black Friday

To celebrate its 20th birthday, Amazon is introducing Prime Day, a "global shopping event" that the retail giant says will offer more deals than Black Friday. The deals will become available at midnight ET on July 15th, but will only be available to Amazon Prime customers in the US, the UK, Spain, Japan, Italy, Germany, France, Canada, and Austria. Amazon says new deals will be introduced as fast as every ten minutes, and will come from every product category, from clothing to electronics.

The new promotion appears to be part of Amazon's ongoing attempt to drive regular shoppers toward Prime membership, having last month expanded its same-day rapid-delivery service Prime Now outside the US. According to Consumer Intelligence Research...

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PicoBrew’s Zymatic Beer Making Machine Made A Brewer Out Of A Noob Like Me

PicoBrew is a beer-centered startup in Seattle, founded by brothers Bill and Jim Mitchell and Avi Geiger. The machine at the heart of their operation is The Zymatic—an apparatus that simplifies beer-making by reducing the need to monitor the cooking process of creating Wort (unfermented beer). Did their device turn a beer drinker like me, with zero brewing experience, into a beer maker? Read More

How I solved a nagging laptop problem for just $5

A happy discovery at a certain furniture store gave my workstation a much-needed ergonomic fix.

Amazon expands into Mexico with biggest international launch yet

Amazon has officially launched in Mexico, offering more categories than any other international Amazon website has featured at launch, in what the American e-retailer says is its biggest international launch ever. The site's official launch comes two years after Amazon started selling ebooks via its Kindle store in the country, testing the Mexican market's willingness to buy items online. That market has grown over the past few years: Billboard cites a Comscore report that says e-commerce sales in Mexico rose from $9.2 billion in 2013 to $12.2 billion in 2014.

Amazon.com.mx stocks products ranging from cameras to clothes, Kindles to consoles, and books to basketballs, but unlike the US version of the store, doesn't sell MP3s through...

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Get an Acer Chromebook 11 for $109.99

What?! Best Chromebook deal ever! And it probably won't last long.

Mark Zuckerberg says we'll be able to send emotions to each other soon

Mark Zuckerberg believes that one day we'll be able to directly share emotions, thoughts, and sensory feedback with each other, just as we currently share text, photos, and videos through social networks. "You'll be able to think of something and your friends will immediately be able to experience it too," the Facebook CEO said, his comments coming as part of a lengthy question-and-answer session hosted on the wall of his own Facebook profile.

In addition to telepathy, Zuckerberg addressed a wide range of topics during the session, including Facebook's AI research efforts, the social network's real name policy, and the inspiration for poking. The Q&A drew questions from famous faces too, with questions on scientific study and the...

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Get a Ravpower mobile charger-router-media-hub for $34.99

Talk about a travel buddy: the Filehub offers just about everything the road warrior needs, all in a compact package.