It’s only been a year since Spotify bumped up prices for Spotify Premium in the US…and oops…they’re doing it again! Theverge.com reports that Premium is being increased a buck to $11.99 a month. Spotify Duo is going up two bucks from $14.99 to $16.99 a month. Family will go from $16.99 a month to socking you for $19.99 a month. In an email, Spotify says this is needed “So that we can continue to invest in and innovate on our product features and bring users the best experience.” Also so they can make more money. 

In an amazing study which just appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers at University of Colorado Boulder have discovered a new cutting-edge technique that could make it possible to charge devices almost instantaneously. This would make charging phones, laptops, and even electric cars much more efficient and convenient. The foundation of the new technique is based on new insights into how ions move through supercapacitors. According to bgr.com, the key is to make moving ions more efficient. This allows charging a phone battery from dead to 100% in a minute or less! The scientists made a discovery that modifies the Kirchoff circuit law, which has been the rule for 175 years. It’s a bit dense to get into, but they say that the discovery may be the ‘missing link’ they have been looking for. With phones and electric vehicles that could be charged in a minute or less, it would be a whole new world! Let’s hope this gets from lab to general use soon!

When Elon Musk renamed Twitter ‘X,’ there was a certain amount of ribbing about that making it sound like a porn site. Well now, it is moving a little bit in that direction. Arstechnica.com notes that there have been some not safe for work communities on the platform for some time, and now X has added clauses to its rules, formally allowing users to post adult and graphic content on the platform — with a few caveats. Users can now post consensually-produced NSFW content as long as it is prominently labeled as such. The new rules also cover AI-generated videos and images. About 13% of posts on the platform in 2022 contained adult content, according to a Reuters report in 2022 that cited internal company documents. Adult content on X has seemingly gone up since then, especially as porn bots have proliferated on the platform.

Instagram has confirmed that it is testing out unskippable ads. Techcrunch.com reports that the new ad breaks will show a countdown timer that stops your browsing on the app until you have viewed the ad. This will be something of a copycat function to YouTube’s….where you have and ad roll before your video with the little timer in the corner and ‘skip’ appears when you can finally view the video you wanted to watch. Instagram declined to say where in the Instagram app the ad breaks show and whether the company was testing the feature globally. The screenshots, however, show the ad breaks appearing in the app’s Feed while watching video posts. It’s not clear at this time if Instagram creators will have any control over these ads’ appearance. So far, it is just a test…but you might as well brace for it…it will be coming.

I’m Clark Reid and you’re ‘Technified’ for now.