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Matt Jancer

Matt Jancer

Vice

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OpenAI Updated ChatGPT to a New, Chattier Attitude. Again.

After getting itself in hot water earlier this year for imbuing ChatGPT with a fawning, sycophantic approach toward its users that was nudging some of...

yesterday 10

Vice

Matt Jancer

The Weird Apple Employee-Only Merch That Turned Into Collector Gold

Ok, ok. I gave Apple a hard time over its iPhone Pocket, a glorified sock cut down the belly for people who have so much money to spend on it ($150...

yesterday 10

Vice

Matt Jancer

Spotify Tweaked Shuffle So That You’ll Hear Fewer Repeats. Thank God.

Shuffle on Spotify has long driven me crazy. I’ve got 7,000 liked songs, and I swear it seems like Spotify wants me to hear only the same three...

yesterday 0

Vice

Matt Jancer

New York City Adopts 15 MPH Speed Limit for Ebikes

New York City became the first major US city to enact a speed limit for ebikes when, on October 24, 2025, it passed a 15 MPH limit. I’ve been...

yesterday 8

Vice

Matt Jancer

Stay Golden, Camera Boy

We’ve all heard of the gold-plated wristwatch as a reward for faithful years of company service, but solid gold… computer keyboard keycaps, those...

yesterday 1

Vice

Matt Jancer

Meta Overhauled Facebook Marketplace: Here’s Everything That’s New

Facebook Marketplace has always sat in an enormous gray area between the other two major online marketplaces. It was slicker than the...

yesterday 1

Vice

Matt Jancer

The Best VPNs to Protect Your Online Security

Nearly half of Americans are using a VPN. Are you one of them? You should be. The mechanics behind VPNs are murky to most people, but think of it like...

previous day 6

Vice

Matt Jancer

Apple’s iPhone Pocket Is Just Silly Enough to Take Off

Modern life was all about convenience, making a rush for everything to be as easy as possible. Post-modern life, then, is all about making it...

thursday 4

Vice

Matt Jancer

Like Wrapped? Spotify Now Lets You Review Your Week in Music Anytime.

For 10 years now, Spotify Wrapped’s end-of-year look back on each user’s streaming preferences has been a cultural touchstone. People compare with...

thursday 5

Vice

Matt Jancer

Mozilla Pocket Is Dead. Here Are 3 Free Alternatives.

The Mozilla Foundation’s dearly departed app, Pocket, is finally and truly dead. After two stays of execution ever since Mozilla announced in May...

thursday 5

Vice

Matt Jancer

Blast From the Past: Apple’s Silliest Products

News that Apple is charging between $150 and $230 for a shoulder sock (the iPhone Pocket) designed to hold your iPhone—insecurely, I might add,...

thursday 4

Vice

Matt Jancer

Verizon Is Just Handing Out $300 in Home Internet Discounts… If You Ask

It landed in my email inbox two days ago, the one I use for website accounts and newsletters, especially to catch the spammy messages, and I barely...

thursday 5

Vice

Matt Jancer

4 Alt-Rock Songs That Used Orchestra Sections Surprisingly Well

Rock music has been incorporating orchestral moments into songs for decades. From Led Zeppelin to Queen, there are some great examples, and the...

11.11.2025 3

Vice

Matt Jancer

Rad Power Could Be the Next Big Ebike Company to Collapse

Rad Power Bikes made a name for itself in two significant ways. One, it was one of the early ebike manufacturers when it retooled itself into a...

11.11.2025 20

Vice

Matt Jancer

Google Says That Free VPN You Downloaded Could Be Spying on You

Most VPNs are sketchy. There are a lot of them, since nearly half of Americans are now using them. They’ve blown up—from a niche item known only...

11.11.2025 10

Vice

Matt Jancer

What if the Answer To Bad Passwords Is More Websites That Won’t Let You Use Them?

You’ve been there. Staring at a password entry screen, wondering what your password for that website was. Heads up, though. If you can guess your...

11.11.2025 3

Vice

Matt Jancer

When Are the MacBook Pro M5 Pro and Max Coming?

As is Apple’s custom, from the strange land of Cupertino, California, there will undoubtedly be three versions of the MacBook Pro M5. The regular,...

10.11.2025 2

Vice

Matt Jancer

The MacBook Air M4 Is Going for a Stupidly Good Price Right Now

Oh, Apple, what’s your game plan? Or maybe I should direct that toward Amazon, because that’s the only place I’ve seen this deal. The MacBook...

10.11.2025 2

Vice

Matt Jancer

JBL Is Dropping Earbuds Made Specifically for Kids—Here’s What to Know

JBL has launched a new pair of earbuds designed to expand as kids grow, with safeguards to protect their hearing and ensure they can still hear...

09.11.2025 20

Vice

Matt Jancer

Mozilla Is Shutting Down Pocket on November 12—Here’s What You Need to Know

Mozilla has extended the deadline for downloading saved Pocket articles yet again to November 12, 2025. If you’ve saved articles on Pocket and want...

09.11.2025 10

Vice

Matt Jancer

This Is the Ultimate 4K Webcam, But It’ll Cost You

Not all that easy to find at a retailer, and not all that easy to afford at $400, the Razer Kiyo Pro Ultra is top dog when it comes to choosing a...

06.11.2025 2

Vice

Matt Jancer

LEGO’s Star Wars Advent Calendar Is Already in Stores

It was the Star Wars set, with a C-3PO chasing a mouse droid across the room in front of a Christmas tree, that had been the calendar to stop me in my...

06.11.2025 20

Vice

Matt Jancer

Google Maps’ Gemini Upgrades Actually Look Pretty Good

My eyes glossed over when I saw AI mentioned, but I read Google’s November 5 announcement anyway: “We’re introducing the first hands-free,...

06.11.2025 2

Vice

Matt Jancer

Australia, Just What Are You Doing Banning Kids From Reddit?

In just over a month, kids under the age of 16 will be banned from accessing Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Threads, TikTok, X, YouTube, and...

06.11.2025 3

Vice

Matt Jancer

I’m Learning Morse Code With an App, and It’s Fun?

Morse code was one of those things they taught us about in the Cub Scouts, the predecessor to the Boy Scouts, but they didn’t actually teach us how...

05.11.2025 20

Vice

Matt Jancer

The 3 Best 4K Webcams (So You Can Stop Looking Like a Ghoul on Zoom)

We all spend way too much time on Zoom and Google Meet. Or at least that’s what I say when companies aren’t sniffing around on whether they should...

05.11.2025 8

Vice

Matt Jancer

High Resolution at a Mid-Range Price: The Logitech Brio 4k Webcam

Odds are, your Zoom calls look like crap. It’s not your fault. Hey, don’t feel down in the dumps. You’re a vibrant person with a lovely face....

05.11.2025 20

Vice

Matt Jancer

Gaze Into the Dark Web Through Proton’s New Data Breach Observatory

When it comes to VPNs, I’m picky. And why shouldn’t I be? You only need one, so it doesn’t much matter if there are only a handful I’d...

05.11.2025 5

Vice

Matt Jancer

Go Encrypt Your WhatsApp Backups. It Just Got Easier.

Losing my WhatsApp chat histories would suck. It’d have no discernible impact on my day-to-day life going forward, but I look at my WhatsApp group...

05.11.2025 3

Vice

Matt Jancer

A Boston Fine Arts Museum and Samsung Just Teamed Up for the Love of Art

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, just put a new exhibit up for show in its halls: Of Light and Air: Winslow Homer in Watercolor. These watercolor...

05.11.2025 10

Vice

Matt Jancer

WhatsApp Is Now Available on Apple Watch

It’s easy to forget how much of the world relies upon WhatsApp as its primary messaging app. Texts aren’t free in much of the world. Sure, we use...

04.11.2025 1

Vice

Matt Jancer

Now’s the Time of Year to Start Running a Humidifier

Ready for that dry winter air? You know the telltale signs. Your hands start cracking, your elbows get ashy, and most parts of your body feel...

30.10.2025 3

Vice

Matt Jancer

Well, They’ve Gone and Done It. They Made a Home Servant Robot.

Humans are profoundly lazy beings. Think of all the marvelous, modern inventions we’ve created just to keep us from expending more calories than we...

30.10.2025 2

Vice

Matt Jancer

Samsung Galaxy Watch8 vs. Galaxy Watch7: Which One Is Right for You?

Samsung’s Galaxy Watch8 launched back in July 2025, but the Galaxy Watch7 has continued on sale for cheaper than its successor. There’s no...

30.10.2025 3

Vice

Matt Jancer

RIP Ring Lights. Gone but Not Forgotten.

Let me set the scenery for you. The year is 2020, and there’s a raging pandemic that’s somehow simultaneously shut down the entire world and half...

30.10.2025 3

Vice

Matt Jancer

Thanks for Nothing? The Nothing Phone (3a) Lite Launches With No US Availability.

Good news, bad news. The good news is that the Nothing Phone (3a) Lite, the briefly anticipated budget budget Android phone, launched today,...

29.10.2025 3

Vice

Matt Jancer

The Nothing Phone (3a) and Phone (3a) Lite Compared. Which One Is Right for You?

When we learned today that Nothing’s launch of the new Nothing Phone (3a) Lite didn’t include the US, it was a bit of a shock. Granted, it’s the...

29.10.2025 4

Vice

Matt Jancer

How To Find a Lost Android Phone: A Helpful Guide

So it happened. You’ve lost your Android phone, and it’s roaming around out there alone in the world. Whether it walked off in the pocket of some...

29.10.2025 2

Vice

Matt Jancer

The Elusive Topre Mechanical Keyboard

Those who dip into the completely unnecessary but brutally delightful world of mechanical keyboards get used to a lot of arcane terminology. There’s...

28.10.2025 3

Vice

Matt Jancer

I Took the Lectric Xpedition2 Cargo Ebike for a Spin—Here’s How It Rides

Carrying 450 pounds of combined cargo, passengers, and rider—however you divide it up—at 28 miles per hour is no small task for an ebike. I’ve...

28.10.2025 2

Vice

Matt Jancer

Would You Ghost Post on Threads?

Threads, Instagram’s stab at TikTok, introduced a new feature today with the curious name of ghost posts. No, it’s not that thing people do to...

28.10.2025 2

Vice

Matt Jancer

Surfshark VPN Just Got Email Scam Protection for Gmail

Email scams have gotten a lot more sophisticated and convincing since the days of far-fetched stories about deposed royalty seeking out your help in...

28.10.2025 4

Vice

Matt Jancer

Lighter Than Nothing. The New Budget Nothing Phone Coming This Week.

Leave it to Nothing to make a whole lot of something from a little bit of anything. Having been rumored for a while and even leaked a few weeks back,...

27.10.2025 4

Vice

Matt Jancer

YouTube TV’s Reign as a Sports Streaming Powerhouse Might Be Crumbling

It’s that part of the season at which all of human achievement comes into laser focus. That time of the year when everything else is just a...

27.10.2025 5

Vice

Matt Jancer

Aventon’s Early Black Friday Ebike Sales Are Already Here

I suppose it’s only fair that, as Christmas creeps in on Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving begins to muscle in on Halloween. As of my writing this, we’re...

27.10.2025 9

Vice

Matt Jancer

Surfshark Nearly Doubled Its Number of VPN Servers

Virtual private networks (VPNs) are a boon for online privacy because they keep online scammers, lurkers, and data thieves from following your digital...

25.10.2025 3

Vice

Matt Jancer

Matty Matheson Just Got a Pizza Oven Collab

Gozney calls it a pizza oven, decorated in a way that feels straight out of summer camp. They also call Matty Matheson, who designed the laser-etched...

25.10.2025 2

Vice

Matt Jancer

Ulysses vs. Scrivener: The Ultimate Writing App

Writing is a trade that doesn’t require many tools at all. One of the greatest decisions in my writing when it came to putting together longer...

25.10.2025 2

Vice

Matt Jancer

How to Buy an Ebike With Your Government Benefits

Love the idea of an electric bike but not up for spending $1,000 or more on a half-decent model? Ebikes have come down in price as they’ve risen in...

25.10.2025 2

Vice

Matt Jancer

YouTube Has a New Button to Report Deepfakes

Almost since it was unleashed upon the world, YouTube has had a way to detect people stealing audio and video. Now it’s got a new tool that scans to...

25.10.2025 4

Vice

Matt Jancer