GoKawiil
Tech News
Google is rolling out version 1.0.0.94 of its Pixel Weather app for Wear OS, adding three new watch face complications: Air quality index, Pollen, and Precipitation. These join the existing Sunrise/sunset, UV Index, and Weather complications available to Pixel Watch owners. Users can add them through the Pixel Watch companion app or by long-pressing the watch face directly.
New polling shows roughly 75% of Americans, including many Republican voters, oppose having data centers built near their communities, comparing the intensity of that opposition to resistance against Social Security cuts. Despite this, President Trump is intensifying his support for data center growth just before the midterm elections, and some GOP officials have dismissed the backlash as an orchestrated psyop rather than genuine grassroots concern.
Unionized staff at The New York Times and The Athletic issued a unanimous statement opposing a potential deal linking The Athletic with prediction-market company Kalshi. They cite New York's attorney general, who found Kalshi operates as an illegal, unlicensed gambling platform posing financial risk to users, and argue that any deeper partnership would compromise journalistic independence and credibility.
A team led by Agustín Sánchez-Lavega of the University of the Basque Country has identified a giant ten-sided atmospheric wave encircling Saturn's south pole, mirroring the famous six-sided hexagon long observed at the planet's north pole. The feature was first glimpsed in amateur astronomer images from 2024 and confirmed through further analysis in 2025.
ANBERNIC revealed its RG DS Plus handheld in a YouTube video, showing dual 4.3-inch screens, a free-stop hinge, and a capacitive stylus that stores in an integrated slot like the original Nintendo DS. The device runs Linux rather than Android and will ship with a new custom DS emulator called NNDDSS, which supports screen swapping, touch input, save states, microphone use, and over 70 shader options.
A new open-source utility called balrogg recompresses existing Ogg Vorbis and Opus audio files without any loss of quality, typically shaving 8-12% off .ogg files and 3-8% off .opus files. The command-line tool, licensed under GPLv3 and hosted on GitHub, supports batch processing across multiple cores, adjustable compression effort levels from -1 to -9, and optional progress reporting during encoding and decoding.
Sequoia Capital chairman Doug Leone, worth an estimated $11.7 billion, told his dentist to perform a root canal without novocaine so he wouldn't miss a scheduled meeting. He described gritting through the drilling by comparing it to a soldier's battlefield injuries, then went straight to his meeting before changing his sweat-drenched shirt.
The Toronto Blue Jays posted an animated promotional clip for a Nestea brand partnership that showed telltale signs of AI generation, including garbled text and a character with three arms. When fans called out the flaws, the team's social media account insisted the video was made by a real animator, a claim a community note later disputed.
The LTO Consortium, backed by HPE, IBM, and Quantum, reports that shipped capacity of LTO-compatible tape media rose 57% year-over-year in the first quarter of 2026. The surge follows a 9% dip in 2025 and comes after 2024's record 176.5 exabytes shipped, with LTO-9 tapes driving much of the latest growth. Quantum's CEO attributes the rebound to enterprises needing durable, cost-effective long-term storage as AI-driven data volumes explode.
Yum! Brands has finished divesting Pizza Hut, selling its non-China operations to private equity firm LongRange Capital for $1.5 billion after already selling Pizza Hut China to Yum! China Holdings for $1.2 billion. Yum! could earn up to $75 million more by 2030 if Pizza Hut meets performance benchmarks, while CEO Chris Turner said the move frees the company to focus on KFC, Taco Bell and Habit Burger & Grill.
HTC is bringing its Vive Eagle smart glasses to the US market after debuting them last year, offering a screen-free, glasses-first design. The device includes a 12MP ultrawide camera, 32GB of encrypted storage, and support for either OpenAI or Gemini voice assistants, running on Qualcomm's Snapdragon AR1 chip. Pricing starts at $499 for standard or sunglass lenses, rising to $599 for photochromic versions.
XGIMI has introduced two new ultra-short-throw projectors, the Aura 3 Pro and Aura 3 Max, succeeding the Aura 2 series. The new models use a triple-laser RGB light source and dual-iris light path to hit up to 5700 ISO lumens and an 8000:1 contrast ratio, more than doubling the Aura 2's brightness and contrast figures. They also support 4K output at 120Hz with 1ms latency, targeting gamers as well as home theater users.