news.buyenne.com

Enlarge (credit: McDonald's)

McDonald’s food isn't exactly the healthiest choice for kids—and apparently the same can be said of the restaurant’s fitness trackers.

The wristband toys given away in the fast food chain’s signature Happy Meals were intended to help get kids moving. Instead, the toys have gotten company officials racing to issue a recall after the devices were found to burn and irritate kids’ skin. So far, there have been 70 reports of injuries from the colorful gadgets, including seven reports of blistering burns.

On Tuesday, McDonald’s issued a voluntary recall of millions of its “Step It” fitness trackers.

Enlarge / Wanna get more in-game currency, weapons, and experience-point boosts in the new Deus Ex game? Pay up, suckers. (credit: Square Enix)

My review of the stellar cyberpunk stealth-adventure game Deus Ex: Mankind Divided was based on a retail version, which means it had received a "day-one" patch and contained all of the game's content... with one exception. The microtransaction system hadn't yet gone live.

At the time, this shop was limited to DX:MD's "Breach" mode, which combines arcade-style challenges and a "card-unlock" system for beefing your character up. This system works similarly to games like Hearthstone, in that you earn new cards and perks through normal gameplay, but since their rewards are random, you may feel compelled to pay money for more random-card unlocks. Also, because you can only equip so many perks at a time, and normal gameplay unlocks a ton of content, you don't really need to pay into this system to get the full game experience.

It's not ideal, but I ruled that this kind of microtransaction system was all in all tolerable for what was essentially a free bonus mode on top of an already-huge campaign in the retail package. Looks like Eidos Montreal had other ideas, however.

Today Google Fiber began taking signups in Salt Lake City, Utah, the gigabit ISP's seventh metro area.

Hello, Salt Lake City. #googlefiber has arrived. Sign-ups start today. Check your address: https://t.co/PgHKNIJ72Y pic.twitter.com/XfXmpwsYmm

— Google Fiber (@googlefiber) August 24, 2016

Gigabit Internet will be available for $70 a month and 100Mbps will cost $50 a month. Gigabit Internet with TV service is $140 a month. There are no data caps on any of the tiers. Phone service can be added for $10.

The initial deployment "will cover roughly 112 blocks from 100 South to 800 South between 400 West and 1300 East," The Salt Lake Tribune reported today. Assuming demand is high, installations "could take a week or more after customers apply." Google Fiber said that other parts of the city will get the service within months but offered no more specific timeline.

We came away from last weekend's early Titanfall 2 "tech test" impressed and reminiscing about what we liked about the original mech-and-wallrun-heavy first-person shooter. Not everyone was so enamored with some of the changes on display, though, leading multiplayer game designer Steven DeRose to promise further tweaks to the game before its final launch.

Chief among the coming changes is the game's sense of speed. DeRose says the team toned down "pilot mobility" in Titanfall 2 in an attempt to make flanking feel more "skillful" and close-range firefights less "overly chaotic due to erratic player movement." That said, a few glitches that limited air and wall-running speed are being fixed, and normal traversal will no longer be accidentally impacted by some anti-bunnyhop speed restrictions.

The giant, map-dominating Titans will soon be easier for players to call down, as well. DeRose says that, in addition to gaining points toward a Titan for completing game objectives, players will soon also gain "a small passive amount" of credit toward a new Titan "every few seconds," as they did in the first Titanfall. The goal is to let "every player be... guaranteed a Titan per match."

(credit: Phillip Bradshaw)

When someone like Martin Shkreli fingers your company as greedy “vultures,” you know you’ve got problems.

For pharmaceutical company Mylan, which hiked the price of life-saving EpiPens by 400 percent since it bought the product in 2007, Shkreli’s is just one of the voices in a chorus of scorn now facing the company.

On Wednesday, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and the American Medical Association (AMA) separately called on Mylan to lower the cost of the auto-injecting pens, which reverse deadly allergic reactions. Also Wednesday, Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) took to Facebook to declare “Mylan’s greed is apparently limitless.” The rebukes follow a steady stream of other Congress members who have questioned and expressed concern over the price increase.

We picked the CyberPower CP685AVR as our winner. (credit: Michael Hession)

This post was done in partnership with The Wirecutter, a buyer’s guide to the best things for your home. Read the full article with more details and background information here.

After researching more than two dozen models, interviewing experts, and having an electrical engineer test our top candidates, we found that the CyberPower CP685AVR is the best uninterruptible power supply (UPS) for people who want to keep a home network running during a blackout of an hour or less. It’s easy to set up, it has some of the most positive user reviews in its class, and it’s the most affordable unit we found. We also like the APC BE650G1 Back-UPS, if it’s available for less. But if you need to power more than a modem and a Wi-Fi router or if you need to stay online longer, the APC BR1000G Back-UPS Pro is a better choice, with more than twice the power for less than twice the price.

The CyberPower CP685AVR will cover the basics for most people during short blackouts. In our tests it provided enough power to keep the average cable or DSL modem and Wi-Fi router running for an hour, which means you can stay online to pass the time while the lights are off—or, in a real emergency, keep your digital phone service powered so you can reach the outside world. The size of an overgrown surge protector, the CP685AVR is small enough to hide in the same corner as your networking gear, and because it has surge protection built in, you’ll have one less thing to buy. Although you could easily spend more on a UPS, you really have no reason to if you need only basic, non-critical protection and a limited amount of power.