Tag: TechTips

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

It’s Wednesday, which means the time has come for another Dealmaster. Our latest roundup of the best deals from around the web includes a bundle at Best Buy that gives you a 128GB SanDisk microSD card at no extra cost when you buy a 12-month Nintendo Switch Online Family Membership at its usual price of $35. We’ve seen this offer a couple of times before, but if you want to top up your subscription and could use more storage space on your Switch anyway, this deal is a roughly $20 savings. You should see the bundle after adding the Switch Online membership to your cart.

As a refresher, Switch Online is Nintendo’s equivalent of Sony’s PlayStation Plus or Microsoft’s Xbox Live Gold. It’s generally not as essential as those services are on their respective consoles—nor is it as generous at doling out bonus perks like free monthly games—but it’s cheaper, it’s required to use the online multiplayer modes of games like Animal Crossing: New Horizons or Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, and it still nets you access to a bundle of mostly worthwhile SNES and NES games.

If you only need the service for yourself, you can just get an individual 12-month subscription for about $20, but the Family Membership here covers up to eight different Switch users in a designated “family group,” so it’s a better value for those buying in bulk. It’s also worth noting that this deal does not include the service’s “Expansion Pack” add-on, which starts at $50 a year and includes perks like DLC tracks for Mario Kart 8 and emulation apps for classic Nintendo 64 and Sega Genesis games.

Enlarge (credit: Google)

Google TV is taking another step in its takeover of Google Play Movies. The app is rolling out to iOS on Wednesday, where it is an in-place upgrade for Google Play Movies & TV. As announced in March, Play Movies & TV is also losing its spot in the Play Store on Android this week, where it was a top-level tab. There’s now not much left of Play Movies & TV or Google’s original ambitions for the Play brand.

The Google TV app for iOS. (credit: Google)

We can talk about the new thing first: The Google TV app is out on iOS. On Android, the app is part media store, part content-aggregation guide. You might have noticed that there are a lot of streaming services. Google TV is like a modern-day TV guide, letting you know what shows are playing on which apps, and that function is making the jump to iOS. Google says iOS users can “take your library on the go” but only for “movies and shows you have previously rented or purchased with your Google account.” So it sounds like the store part of Google TV is not making the cut. If you have to run the Android TV or Google TV operating systems on your TV, you can also now use your iOS device as a remote control.

Google also finally went ahead with its plan to strip video purchases from the Play Store this week, making Google TV (well, and YouTube, I guess) the primary way to buy video content from Google on Android. Google Play was originally envisioned as an all-encompassing media empire, covering Google Play Music, Google Play Magazines/Newsstand, Google Play Movies & TV, and Google Play Books, all sold inside the Google Play Store. The Play Store ships as the default app store on all of the world’s 3 billion Android devices (“Android” is a registered trademark of Google and does not include forks). Lining Google’s highly trafficked app store with a slew of media content stores seemed (and still seems) like a solid strategy.

Enlarge / Tesla CEO Elon Musk at the company’s manufacturing facility in Shanghai, China, on Monday, Jan. 7, 2019. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

Elon Musk has ordered Tesla and SpaceX employees to work in the office full-time or quit their jobs.

On Tuesday, Musk sent two memos telling Tesla employees they must be in the office at least 40 hours per week or leave the company. “Anyone who wishes to do remote work must be in the office for a minimum (and I mean *minimum*) of 40 hours per week or depart Tesla. This is less than we ask of factory workers,” Musk wrote in a new memo circulating on Twitter, apparently first shared by Tesla stockholder and Full Self-Driving beta tester Sam Nissim. The email’s subject line was “Remote work is no longer acceptble [sic].”

Musk seemed to confirm the emailed memo’s authenticity. When asked to provide “any additional comment to people who think coming into work is an antiquated concept,” Musk tweeted, “They should pretend to work somewhere else.”