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Amazon’s Fire TV Cube is rolling out a couple new software updates today that’ll fine-tune the experience of using Alexa. The updates enable Alexa multi-room music and follow-up mode, and come at the heels of last week’s news of Alexa Announcements coming to the Fire TV Cube.

To use multi-room music, you can add the Fire TV Cube to the appropriate speaker group in the Alexa App, which includes your HDMI-connected TV, soundbar, or AV system alongside your other compatible devices like your Echo Show and Echo Dot. You can then ask Alexa to play music in that group with commands like, “Alexa, play my dinner party playlist downstairs”, and it’ll play music through supported platforms like Amazon Music, Pandora, iHeartRadio.

Follow-up mode is…

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One of the more underrated perks of the “peak TV” era is that because there’s so much worth watching, no two television devotees will forge the same path through the mountains of programming. Below is a list of 20 outstanding series and miniseries that aired in 2018. These are well-crafted and entertaining shows, highly recommended and worthy of just about anyone’s time. Some of the names will be familiar; some may be surprising. Taken as a whole, this list is intended to present just one way of looking at what makes TV great. But that perspective is, inevitably, limited.

Here, for example, is just a partial list of shows and specials that could’ve easily landed in this Top 20: America to Me, Barry, Bob’s Burgers, Brockmire, Brooklyn…

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LG has announced new 17-inch and 14-inch laptops as the latest additions to its lightweight Gram lineup. The 17-inch was first spotted as an FCC listing and then later on Best Buy on a since-deleted page. In the past, these computers have been easy on the shoulders for carrying, but what they provide in convenience, they sometimes lack in performance.

The 17-inch model weighs in at just under three pounds despite its significantly larger size. Like the smaller Gram, it’s powered by an 8th Gen Core i7 processor (the 8565U) and has 512GB of storage and 16GB RAM. Its display runs at a higher native resolution of 2560 x 1600 than the 14-inch Gram. There’s also a fingerprint sensor for convenient sign-ins. LG is claiming that it can achieve…

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Algoriddim has announced the next generation of its DJ software for iOS called Djay. The company has made some big changes to the program, including how you pay for it. The old version cost $20 on the iPad and $10 on the iPhone; the new version is free across both devices with an optional pro subscription. That subscription unlocks features like access to sample and loop libraries and support for loads of MIDI controllers from popular brands.

The program is meant for both amateur and professional DJs, and it allows users to mix music entirely within the app or through connected external hardware controllers. For an app, it was pricey, but it came with loads of features that elevated it into professional software territory. Not only did…

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Russian accessory maker Caviar is known for strapping impractical gold-plated objects onto the backs of iPhones, like a gold-trimmed solar charging panel. But the company may have outdone itself this year with its latest variant of Apple’s phone: the iPhone XS Max “Swiss Dreams Watchphone” attaches a gold-plated Apple Watch onto the back of the phone for the low, low price of $21,050.

Questionable aesthetics aside, I have some serious concerns about how this could even functionally work. Let’s start with the obvious: how do you charge the Apple Watch? No, seriously: looking at the pictures on Caviar’s website, I can’t see any way that you’d be able to jam the…

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In its first season, every match in the Overwatch League took place at Blizzard Arena in Los Angeles. But the big-picture promise for the league is that of home and away matches, where each team plays games out of arenas in their respective cities, much like in professional sports leagues like the NBA or NFL. That ambitious goal likely won’t be fully implemented until 2020 or later, but next year we’ll get a preview of what it’ll look like.

For season 2, Blizzard is introducing something called “homestand weekends,” where select teams will play a handful of matches in their home cities. The first clubs to participate are the Dallas Fuel and Los Angeles Valiant, along with expansion side Atlanta Reign. The Fuel will host matches at the…

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How do you choose which emoji skin tone to use? This week on Why’d You Push That Button, Vox’s Kaitlyn Tiffany and I discuss the five emoji skin tones (not counting the default gold option) and how people decide which color best represents them. The tones debuted in 2015, and now, three years later, people have studied how they’re used and how commonly people opt to change the default option. The choice isn’t as simple as you might think.

We also change the show up this week. Instead of relying on just two users, we wanted to hear about as many experiences with the emoji as possible, so we have lots of guests. Thank you to all of them for coming on the show, including Ben, J., Jordan, Joshua, Rosie, Soco, and Malachi. We also received…

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