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Humble’s You Can Pet The Dog bundle is exactly what it sounds like

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One of the most important questions in video games these days is Can You Pet The Dog? After all, even in the bleakest of virtual worlds, you want to show some affection to a good doggo. That’s why Humble has teamed up with the Twitter account of the same name to highlight eight games that feature dog petting. For $5, you’ll be able to get titles like Shenmue 1 & 2, Death’s Gambit and Scribblenauts Unlimited. Push that to $12, and you’ll also be able to bag Blair Witch, complete with the Good Boy Pack.

Humble’s bundles are for charity, and so you’re encouraged to offer more than the bare minimum to get these titles. As usual, you can decide where your money goes, and the three charities included this time are the Humane Society of the United States, Sweet Farm and the Best Friends Animal Society. Humble says that the total cost of the bundle, if bought full price, is $161, so don’t feel too stingy given the scale of the bargain you’re getting.



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A reality show wants to send its winning contestant to the ISS

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Deadline says that Space Hero is working with Axiom Space, a company working to build its own commercial space station in the future. It has secured a potential trip to the ISS at some point in 2021, riding a SpaceX Crew Dragon to the space station, and carrying three space tourists. Axiom confirmed to The Verge that it was working with Space Hero on making the show. 

It’s early days, and certainly we shouldn’t expect to see Space Hero until there’s some sort of firm commitment from a broadcaster. And it’s worth putting into perspective that this would be one of the most expensive reality TV series ever made. Even a glossy show like Survivor cost just $2 million an episode, while an episode of Modern Family cost ABC $3.5 million per 25 minutes in its seventh season.

The price of getting a single individual into space is likely to hit somewhere between $50 million to $60 million range. That’s according to Bigelow Space, the company working with NASA and SpaceX as part of its plan to get private individuals their own trip to the heavens. A CNBC report from 2019 quoted the company, saying that it has already put down hefty deposits in order to make those trips a reality. 

We’ve been here before, of course, with Mars One unsuccessfully looking to fund its own ambitious trip to Mars with reality TV money. Although the most successful sending-astronauts-to-space reality TV competition was Space Cadets, a show made by Britain’s Channel 4. In that show, the production crew just pretended to send people into space, all the while remaining on the ground.

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NVIDIA apologizes for RTX 3080 ordering fiasco

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NVIDIA did a great job getting gamers hyped up for the launch of its RTX 3080, which does offer a huge leap in performance over the last generation. When it came time to sell it yesterday morning, however, the train went a bit off the rails. NVIDIA apparently failed to account for the excitement it created, as the $699 RTX 3080 Founder’s Edition sold out nearly instantly. On top of that, the site went down almost immediately after sales opened, shutting out most buyers.

In a post on its forums (via Gamerant), NVIDIA said “we apologize to our customers for this morning’s experience,” explaining that “the NVIDIA store was inundated with traffic and encountered errors.” It said that managed to resolve the issue and resumed sales, adding that it was taking actions, including manually reviewing orders, to stop bots and scalpers.

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Apple’s online store is opening in India on September 23rd

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The Indian store will offer personalized engraving in English, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu for AirPods and in English for iPad and Apple Pencil. Like in other regions, the company will enforce contactless delivery in the country as a precautionary measure against COVID—19.

iPhones are a popular premium smartphone among Indian consumers, but Apple has a tiny marketshare as a whole and Android remains the dominant mobile platform. It remains to be seen whether establishing a retail presence in the South Asian nation can help the tech giant win over more potential customers.

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Xbox Series X, Series S pre-orders start September 22nd at 11AM ET

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If you’re in the UK, then pre-orders will also start on the 22nd, at 8AM BST, from the Microsoft Store, GAME, Amazon, Dixons, Currys PC World, Argos, John Lewis, Smyths Toys, VERY, AO, Tesco, Simply Game, Shopto and other retailers.

Details for the other countries and regions are available in the blog post, as well as lists of participating retailers for Microsoft’s All Access package that bundles the consoles with an Xbox Game Pass subscription for a monthly payment of either $25 per month or $35 per month.

We’ll have more information about how to get in line as the date draws closer, and hopefully things will go so smoothly that interested buyers don’t need an entire book of advice, a dowsing rod and 37 bots just to have a chance at getting one.



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Apple’s latest iOS 14.2 beta adds a built-in control for Shazam

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Two years after completing its $400 million acquisition of Shazam, Apple is showing developers what the technology can do when it’s integrated directly with iOS. A version of the iOS 14.2 beta that’s currently in testing includes the ability to add Shazam’s Music Recognition in the Control Center panel.

When enabled, it can recognize audio from both internal and external audio sources, so it’s ready whether something is just playing around you or if you need to identify a song that’s streaming to your AirPods (a feature the Android version added last year).

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‘Fortnite: Save the World’ will shut down on macOS September 23rd

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As a result, refunds are coming to “all players who purchased any Save the World Founder’s or Starter Packs (including Upgrades) and played Save the World on macOS between September 17, 2019 and September 17, 2020.” This announcement comes just after Apple said in a legal filing that Epic’s actions are a thinly-disguised attempt to reinvigorate Fortnite, citing Google Trends as evidence that interest had dropped some 70 percent in the last year.



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Someone turned Lego Mario into a controller for ‘Super Mario Bros.’

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The reason Rick was able to make the toy work with Super Mario Bros. is that the figure features an accelerometer, gyroscope and Bluetooth chip to allow it to communicate with the different physical and digital elements that make up the Lego Super Mario sets. All told, the project took @r1ckp approximately four hours. The most complicated part was figuring out the toy’s Bluetooth protocol. They say they plan to share their code once they’ve had a chance to clean it up.

We can’t wait to see if this inspires a new category of Super Mario Bros. speedruns. After all, if someone can beat Dark Souls 3 with a Guitar Hero controller, why shouldn’t the community try to take on a Mario game using an effigy of the mustachioed man himself?

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Spotify belatedly adds notifications for new podcast episodes

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Spotify has rolled out mobile push notifications for new podcast episodes starting today, the streaming app announced in a statement. It’s a relatively small development, but one that indicates Spotify is continuing to strengthen its podcast offerings — although it’s also playing catch-up to apps that have long had this feature.

To take advantage of the feature, go to a podcast’s show page on Spotify and click “follow.” You can then switch on the option to “get notified of new episodes.” From then on, you’ll receive a push notification on your phone when the podcast drops a new episode.

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Amazon Fresh grocery store in Los Angeles opens to the public

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If that’s not enough automation for you, there are also Echo Show stations throughout the store where you can ask Alexa to point you in the direction of a specific product. Besides groceries, you can also pick up your same-day Amazon Prime deliveries from the store, and there’s even the option to pre-order deli items through the Fresh app.    

Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the store still won’t operate at full capacity just yet. You’ll also need to have a face covering on to enter the store. If you don’t have one on you, the store will give you a free disposable one.  

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