Tech Talk

An improperly coded image can somehow crash the Android System UI. WARNING！！！ Never set this picture as wallpaper, especially for Samsung mobile phone users! It will cause your phone to crash! Don't try it! If someone sends you this picture, please ignore it. pic.twitter.com/rVbozJdhkL — Ice universe (@UniverseIce) May 31, 2020 What you need to know There's a photo of a sunset making the rounds because when set as a wallpaper, it will brick some Android phones. The image has an improperly coded Google color profile, which causes the Android System UI to crash from an out of bounds error. For some phones, you can reboot into safe mode and reset the wallpaper to something else, but for others, you'll have to go into the bootloader and completely factory reset the phone. Today in "2020 is just the weirdest timeline", there's a cursed wallpaper making the rounds and crashing the Android phones of fools idiotic enough to not heed the warnings that

If you're shopping for someone who is a huge PlayStation 4 fan and you're not entirely sure what that means, know that you are not alone. Shopping for a gamer isn't always the easiest thing in the world. It's doubly hard if they're the type to go out and buy the latest game the first day it's available. If your PlayStation 4 fan has switched to shopping digital, you may not even be able to see what games they have without tipping them off. So what do you do for gifts? Custom comfort Staff Pick ASTRO Gaming C40 TR Controller This controller is expensive, there is no denying that, but the Astro C40 TR is pretty amazing too. With the number of customizable parts on this controller, the c40 TR can be just about anything you want it to be. This flexibility is a massive boon considering how much personal preference comes into play on controller layouts. PlayStation opted for a symmetrical design on the DualShock, but most find asymmetrical to be more ergonomi

I have this vivid memory from the early days of 2020 that won't subside. It was January 6, before CES officially began, and I was at the Cosmopolitan hotel looking at Fossil's new smartwatch offerings. The demo was finished and I was standing on this expansive balcony overlooking the city, a fake Eiffel Tower looming to my right. I was claiming a minute just for me, while inside my coworkers were chatting away contently. It was one of those really nice moments that you have to intercede on your own behalf to remember, to crystallize it so that, whatever happens in the future, you can draw upon it for reinforcement. I've been drawing on it a lot lately, as the world seemingly crumbles around me. I'm safe and healthy and in no immediate danger, and for that I'm incredibly thankful. And I'm also angry. The slow burn of this year , the shelter-in-place of it all, spilled out into the streets in recent days, first as a trickle and then, over the past couple nig

The world's reliance on PDF files knows no bounds. Ideal for sharing and sending everything from business reports and term papers to images and screenshots, PDFs remain one of the most  widely-used  and reliable ways to share valuable information regardless of your specific operating system. The only problem is that these files are also incredibly difficult to work with and edit, and attempting to do even simple things like add text or adjust an image can be a headache-inducing nightmare. Enter  Cisdem PDF Manager Ultimate , an incredibly powerful and easy-to-use app that allows you to edit, merge, split, convert and sign PDFs without all the hassle. With Cisdem in your digital toolbox, you'll be able to sidestep the usual madness that comes from working with PDF files, all thanks to an intuitive and streamlined interface that makes it easy to edit PDFs the way you would on a regular word processor. You'll be able to batch-convert PDFs to Word, RTFD, Keynote and oth

Right now Amazon has a great deal featuring a Ring Video Doorbell Pro and the Amazon Echo Show 5 on sale for $179. Both items are certified refurbished and work like new. If you were to buy these individually refurbished, the Ring video doorbell would cost you $180 by itself. The Echo Show 5 goes for around $60 as a refurb, so you're saving $60 just compared to that. Brand new versions of the Ring device and the Echo Show 5 would run you almost $320. These two devices make a great pairing. The Echo Show 5 has a 5.5-inch compact display and Alexa built right in. You can use it to control your entire smart home, but you can also use Alexa to check in on your Ring device and see who's at the door. Thanks to the Video Doorbell Pro's built-in speakers and mic, you can talk to visitors without leaving your kitchen. You can also get alerts sent straight to your device any time the Ring Video Doorbell Pro detects motion or someone rings the doorbell. Outside of checking o

Best Buy has a whole new set of deals of the day, and the Anker Soundcore Liberty 2 Pro true wireless earbuds are part of the savings. Get a pair for $129.99, which is down from the usual price of $150 and a match for one of the lowest we've seen this year. The last time we saw them go any lower than this was back in February when they dropped to $120. You can also find today's drop on Amazon , and that sale includes the white versions . These earbuds have eight hours of playtime per earbud, and you can use the earbuds independently to extend that use. The charging case they come with adds another three full recharges before you ever need to plug into a wire to juice back up. With a quick charge of just 10 minutes inside the case you can get an extra two hours of playtime. Plus, the charging case can be recharged via USB-C or a Qi-compatible wireless charging pad, giving you plenty of options for keeping these batteries topped off. RAVPower has a wireless charging pad on

Chromebooks can do a lot right out of the box. However, if you want just a little more, you can install Linux apps to most newer models (see the full list here ) and have access to a complete catalog of desktop-class applications. Products used in this guide Google's newest: Google Pixelbook Go (From $850 at Amazon) How to enable Linux Your Chromebook already runs Linux because Chrome is its own Linux distribution, but it's a very locked-down version without access to most Linux tools and programs by default. Luckily, turning everything on is easy. At the bottom right of your system tray, click on the clock . Select the gear icon to open the settings. Scroll down until you see "Linux (Beta)" and choose Turn On . Read and follow the simple on-screen prompts and wait for things to finish. This could take 10-15 minutes. Once the terminal window opens, you are ready to type Linux commands. You can always find the Linux terminal in your app drawer i

The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation.  Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive it every Saturday in your inbox . Hi and welcome back to The Station, a newsletter dedicated to all the present and future ways people and packages move from Point A to Point B. I’m your host Kirsten Korosec, senior transportation reporter at TechCrunch. The mobility world got busy this week. Really. busy. This is gonna be a long one, buckle up. Take a look at the most recent survey we conducted with a bunch of venture capitalists about mobility and what areas interest them most. We talked to Ernestine Fu with Alsop Louie Partners, Stonly Baptiste and Shaun Abrahamson with Urban Us, Shahin Farshchi with Lux Capital, Kate Schox with Trucks VC and Jeff Peters of Autotech Ventures. Reach out and email me at kirsten.korosec@techcrunch.com to share thoughts, criticisms, offer up opinions or tips. You can also send a direct message to me at Twitter — @kirstenk

As tech companies like Twitter and Facebook gear up for longer-term remote work solutions, the future of work is becoming one of the more exciting opportunities in venture capital, Charles River Ventures general partner Saar Gur told TechCrunch. And as loneliness mounts with shelter-in-place orders implemented in various forms across the world, investors are looking for products and services that foster true connection among a distributed workforce, as well as a distributed society. But the future of work doesn’t just entail spinning up home offices. It also involves gig workers, freelancers, hiring tools, tools for workplace organizing and automation. The last couple of years have particularly brought tech organizing to the forefront. Whether it was the Google walkout in 2018 or gig workers’ ongoing actions against companies like Uber, Lyft and Instacart for better pay and protections, there are many opportunities to help workers better organize and achieve their goals. Below, we

SpaceX’s Crew Dragon ‘Endeavor’ successfully docked with the International Space Station as planned on Sunday morning, marking another key milestone during this historic Commercial Crew demonstration mission it’s conducting with NASA. On board Crew Dragon were NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken, the test pilots selected to be the first ever humans to fly on board SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, and the first people ever to make the trip to orbit aboard a spacecraft built by a private company. The docking process was handled completely autonomously by Crew Dragon itself, which is designed by SpaceX to operate on autopilot from the moment of launch throughout the course of the entire mission. The spacecraft is able to dock with a newer automated international docking adapter installed on the ISS, unlike the original cargo version of Dragon, which required manual capture by the robotic Canadarm 2 controlled by astronauts on the station. The updated cargo Dragon and Crew Dragon are desig

Today at around 10:30 AM EDT (7:30 AM PDT), SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule will dock with the International Space Station, with NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley on board. The two have been in flight on orbit since launching from Kennedy Space Center in Florida yesterday at 3:22 PM EDT, a historic launch that made SpaceX the first private space company to fly people to orbit . You can watch the livestream above to see the approach and docking maneuver, as well as the transfer process once the hatch opens and Hurley and Behnken make the short trip over from their spacecraft to the ISS. The astronauts will then serve on board the orbital lab for a shortened tour of duty, but taking part in all the activities a regular ISS rotation astronaut would do, before eventually heading home to Earth back aboard Crew Dragon in a few weeks. This milestone mission is the first crewed flight for NASA’s Commercial Crew program, which will certify SpaceX’s Crew Dragon for regular operatio

Jon Evans Contributor Jon Evans is the CTO of the engineering consultancy HappyFunCorp; the award-winning author of six novels, one graphic novel, and a book of travel writing; and TechCrunch's weekend columnist since 2010. More posts by this contributor Living and working in a worsening world Why are people who cite videos always wrong? Ten years ago, the joke was: “It’s weird how, once everyone started carrying phones with cameras all the time, UFOs stopped visiting, and the cops started beating everyone up.” It was darkly funny, then. Now it feels something more like despairing. Imagine pitching today as a setting for science fiction, back then: “ The year is 2020. A pandemic that will kill millions ravages the planet. America is masked : some because of the new virus, others as a ward against police surveillance . A global wave of implicit & explicit xenophobia and white supremacy has carried the UK out of Europe, and a narcissistic reality TV star to the p

Woot today is discounting a new pair of AirPods Pro to $219.99 for Amazon Prime members, down from an original price of $249.00. Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with Woot. When you click a link and make a purchase, we may receive a small payment, which helps us keep the site running. If you don't have an Amazon Prime account, the AirPods Pro will be priced at $224.99 during today's sale, but if you do connect a Prime account to Woot you can take an additional $5 off during the checkout process. If you're a Prime member, you can also get free two-day shipping. $29 OFF AirPods Pro for $219.99 Woot's discount today matches the previous low price on the AirPods Pro seen at Verizon. This sale won't last long at Woot, so be sure to head to the retailer soon if you're interested in the high-end wireless headphones. Additionally, we track sales for every model of the AirPods in our Best AirPods Deals guide, so be sure to bookmark that page whil