Month: February 2022

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It’s the weekend, which means it’s time for another Dealmaster. Our latest roundup of the best tech deals from around the web includes a new low price on the 45mm version of the Apple Watch Series 7, which is currently down to $370 at various retailers. That’s about $40 off the average street price we’ve tracked in recent months and $60 off Apple’s MSRP. The discount only applies to certain colorways as of this writing, but it’s still decent savings for the top pick in our guide to the best smartwatches. If you’d prefer to pay a little bit less for a smaller version of the watch, note that the 41mm variant of the Series 7 is on sale for $349, which is $10 more than the lowest price we’ve tracked.

Elsewhere, our deals roundup also includes a new low price on LG’s near–universally well–reviewed C1 OLED TV, the 65-inch version of which is currently down to $1,650 at Amazon subsidiary Woot. That’s about $175 off its usual going rate over the past few months. While LG has already announced its OLED TV lineup for 2022 and promised improved peak brightness on the C1’s successor, we wouldn’t expect that model to reach this deal price until several months after launch. If you’re willing to buy last year’s models, now is typically a good time of year to snag a TV deal; this discount isn’t cheap by any means, but it’s a relatively good value for those interested in upgrading to the improved contrast of a quality OLED panel.

Beyond that, the Dealmaster has good prices on Fitbit’s Charge 5 activity tracker, SSDs from Samsung and WD, SanDisk microSD cards, several video games we like (including Hades, Psychonauts 2, and Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales), the iPad Air, and more. You can check out our full curated list below.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images | Trinity College)

On October 21, 1638, people were congregating at a church at Widecombe-in-the-Moor, in Devon, England, when a severe thunderstorm broke out. Witnesses described an 8-foot ball of fire hurtling through the church, tossing large stones from the walls to the ground, smashing pews and windows, and filling the church with smoke and the pungent odor of sulfur. Four people died and many more were injured in what has been widely recognized as the earliest known account of ball lightning in England—until now.

A British historian and a retired physicist have found an even earlier credible account of ball lightning in the writings of a 12th-century Benedictine monk, Gervase of Christ Church Cathedral Priory in Canterbury. According to a recent paper published in the journal Weather, Gervase of Canterbury recorded in his Chronicle a “marvelous sign” that “descended near London” on June 7, 1195. The sign was a “fiery globe” emerging from below a dark and dense cloud, and it predates the Widecombe-in-the-Moor account by nearly 450 years.

“Ball lightning is a rare weather event that is still not understood today,” said co-author Brian Tanner of Durham University (emeritus). “Gervase’s description of a white substance coming out of the dark cloud, falling as a spinning fiery sphere and then having some horizontal motion is very similar to historic and contemporary descriptions of ball lightning. If Gervase is describing ball lightning, as we believe, then this would be the earliest account of this happening in England that has so far been discovered.”

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Star Citizen developers Cloud Imperium Games’ new public development roadmap will no longer include target dates for coming features more than one calendar quarter away. The change, the company writes, is largely to avoid “distraction” and “continued noise every time we shift deliverables” from “a very loud contingent of Roadmap watchers who see projections as promises.”

It has now been just over nine years since Chris Roberts first raised $6.3 million in Kickstarter funds for Star Citizen, a haul that has grown to over $434 million in funding in the years since. Despite all that time and money, though, the game still only exists as a very rough Alpha version that’s still missing many of the promised features that have slowly crept into the project during that time. The single-player spinoff game Squadron 42, meanwhile, has seen a planned beta delayed multiple times, with CIG COO Carl Jones recently saying it still might be “one or two more years” before the game is playable.

To help provide “more transparency” on the state of both games, RSI promised to overhaul its public roadmap in a way that would “utilize our internal sprint-tracking process to visualize our progress.” When that new roadmap rolled out in late 2020, it came with a focus on a new, less time-sensitive “Progress Tracker” for each development team. That was alongside the traditional “Release View,” which offered a quarter-by-quarter estimate for when new features would be implemented over the next 12 months.

Enlarge (credit: Natalie Fobes | Getty Images)

Charles Darwin thought of evolution as an incremental process, like the patient creep of glaciers or the march of continental plates. “We see nothing of these slow changes in progress until the hand of time has marked the long lapse of ages,” he wrote in On the Origin of Species, his famous 1859 treatise on natural selection.

But by the 1970s, scientists were finding evidence that Darwin might be wrong—at least about the timescale. Peppered moths living in industrial areas of Britain were getting darker, better for blending in against the soot-blackened buildings and avoiding predation from the air. House sparrows—introduced to North America from Europe—were changing size and color according to the climate of their new homes. Tufted hairgrass growing around electricity pylons was developing a tolerance for zinc (which is used as a coating for pylons and can be toxic to plants).

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Chie Ferrelli loved her Subaru SUV, which she bought in 2020 because it made her feel safe. So when it was time for her husband, Marc, to purchase his own new car last summer, they returned to the Subaru dealer near their home in southeast Massachusetts. But there was a catch, one that made the couple mad: Marc’s sedan wouldn’t have access to the company’s telematics system and the app that went along with it. No remote engine start in the freezing New England winter; no emergency assistance; no automated messages when the tire pressure was low or the oil needed changing. The worst part was that if the Ferrellis lived just a mile away, in Rhode Island, they would have the features. They bought the car. But thinking back, Marc says, if he had known about the issue before stepping into the dealership he “probably would have gone with Toyota.”

Subaru disabled the telematics system and associated features on new cars registered in Massachusetts last year as part of a spat over a right-to-repair ballot measure approved, overwhelmingly, by the state’s voters in 2020. The measure, which has been held up in the courts, required automakers to give car owners and independent mechanics more access to data about the car’s internal systems.

But the “open data platform” envisioned by the law doesn’t exist yet, and automakers have filed suit to prevent the initiative from taking effect. So first Subaru and then Kia turned off their telematics systems on their newest cars in Massachusetts, irking drivers like the Ferrellis. “This was not to comply with the law—compliance with the law at this time is impossible—but rather to avoid violating it,” Dominick Infante, a spokesperson for Subaru, wrote in a statement. Kia did not respond to a request for comment.