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Alex Cranz

Alex Cranz

Deputy Editor

Alex Cranz is the Deputy Editor at The Verge. Before that she spent five years overseeing the consumer tech coverage at Gizmodo and whacking gadgets with a machete. Her work has also appeared in Wall Street Journal, Wired, and Laptop Mag and she has trained at least two dogs to do fist bumps.

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The NYPD tried to use a warrantless subpoena for a watchdog’s X account.

According to Hellgate the organization sent the subpoena to X in an effort to gather as much information about the X user and his account as possible and asked the company not to tell the guy about the subpoena.

X told him anyways and also suggested he get a lawyer, which he promptly did. Now the NYPD has withdrawn the administrative subpoena rather than try and justify it in a court. It’s unclear how frequently the NYPD has gone after watchdogs and reporters using these subpoenas but this is at least the second time in four years.

Yikes.


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Royals, just like us.

Kate Middleton is now claiming she likes to dabble in photo editing, just like those of us who don’t have a large professional staff employed just to maintain one’s image.

I guess we’re supposed to infer she edited yesterday’s badly ‘shopped photo herself, and if that’s the case, there’s a few Photoshop tutorials I can point her towards.


Living with the ghost of a smart home’s past

People are increasingly installing smart devices into their homes, but when someone new moves in, technological poltergeists persist.

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It’s fiscal irresponsibility time.

Criterion has a 24-hour flash sale. That means everything in stock is 50 percent off.

Having spent more money than I want to publicly admit on these sales in the past I can confirm they’re great. And given the state of digital media it's always nice to have pristine physical copies of movies you love.

Personally, I’m grabbing the double feature of The Heroic Trio and Executioners starring a baby Michelle Yeoh, Maggie Cheung ,and Anita Mui. It’s a goofy and delightfully good time.


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It won’t surprise you to learn the origins of the word racebending.

Duh, it’s related to the Avatar: The Last Airbender franchise!

But over at Polygon Matt Patches spoke to the people who crafted the Racebending campaign that called out the original film’s too white casting and created a word that is now a permanent fixture in fandom lexicon.

It’s a captivating piece that highlights just how much things have improved in ten years, how much further we have to go, and how much fans can actually make a difference.


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When people mention Lenovo’s transparent laptop I keep thinking of something like this.

I was not thinking of cool laptops that look like props from the next season of For All Mankind. I was thinking of a laptop where you could see straight through to the guts of the thing like this laptop intended for use in prisons.

The thread itself is a wild ride about the quest make the laptop actually usable outside. The BIOS resets the password when the power is reset, there’s a white list for hard drives, and getting it connected to USB involves significantly more than just plugging and playing.


Amazon Prime Video has many skills,

because Xena: Warrior Princess is now included if you have Prime. The show, like many syndicated television shows from the pre-streaming age, has had an inconsistent appearance on streaming service. Generally if you’ve wanted to binge the show properly you’ve either needed to plan your Tubi viewing meticulously or had to spend a lot of money on digital copies.

But some eagle-eyed fans noticed it was streaming this week. Now anyone with a Prime subscription can watch the still deeply entertaining (if extremely goofy) show.


If you’ve got a Vision Pro you can now play a giant Game Boy.

To celebrate the anniversary of GBA4iOS its developer, Riley Testut, has released a new Game Boy emulator for the Vision Pro, GBA4vOS. It currently supports emulation for the Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance.

The emulator lets you control WarioWare mini games by just rotating the window. And if you always thought the buttons on the Game Boy Advance SP were too small? There’s a giant solution for that too.


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Apple might be making it easier to import playlists.

Which is good! It’s currently super annoying to move to a new music streaming service because none of them have any business reason to make it easier to import and export that decade of carefully crafted playlists a lot of us have.

Generally, to move playlists around you either need to track down third-party services that only half work or do it all by hand. But redditors noticed a new Apple Music on Android beta includes the ability to use SongShift natively. If that feature leaves beta it would make it a lot easier to move your Spotify playlists over to Apple Music.