Friday, November 13
Author: Caitlin Rooney
Caitlin Rooney
Caitlin Rooney has been covering Greater Manchester for the best part of a decade. She started at a local paper in Salford, moved to digital, and spent three years on the housing and planning beat before going independent. She has sat through more council cabinet meetings than she cares to count and still reads the planning portal on her phone. She writes about transport, housing, devolution, policing, and the daily grind of how a city actually runs. She has a particular interest in who benefits from regeneration and who gets moved along by it. Caitlin lives in Chorlton. She thinks the Metrolink is both Manchester's best and worst infrastructure, and does not trust anyone who calls the city centre "town".
The Unicorn Frappuccino returns to Starbucks for the first time since 2017, and whatever you think of a drink made from mango syrup, sour blue flavouring, pink powder and cream, the numbers are hard to argue with. According to Yahoo Finance, Starbucks sold more than 2 million Unicorn Frappuccino Blended Beverages across its North America company-operated stores over the weekend, making Saturday its biggest North America company-operated sales day ever.So yes. The drink everyone claims to hate is back, viral again, and apparently shifting units at a historic clip. You have to respect the audacity of it, if nothing else.Why…
Getting your iPhone emergency features setup properly takes about ten minutes and could matter enormously if something goes wrong. Apple has built a surprisingly comprehensive emergency toolkit into iOS, but several parts of it require you to go in and configure things yourself, before a crisis, not during one.Start With Medical ID and Emergency ContactsThe Medical ID, found inside the Health app, is where first responders look first if you’re unconscious or unable to talk. Open the app, tap your profile picture, and go to Medical ID. Add your blood type, any medications you’re on, allergies, and any health conditions…
Your social media AI training opt-out options are, in most cases, either non-existent, buried three menus deep, or conditional on living in the right country. Twitch made waves recently by announcing it would let users opt out of having their streams, VODs, and chats used for AI training. Turns out, by the standards of the industry, that makes Twitch one of the more reasonable players in the room.Almost every major social media platform is training some form of AI on your data. Not one of them operates an opt-in model. If you logged on today, the default assumption, across the…
If you’re hunting for shows like The 100 to fill the void left by one of television’s most ambitious YA dystopias, you’ve got options, and some of them are genuinely excellent. The 100 ran from 19 March 2014 to 30 September 2020 across seven seasons on The CW, telling the story of the descendants of nuclear apocalypse survivors who return to Earth from a space station to find that life, in various frightening forms, has carried on without them. Based on the young adult novel series by Kass Morgan, it started a little rocky then grew into something genuinely layered,…
The Insta360 X3 deal price has dropped to $229.99 at Amazon, down from its usual $299.99, and price trackers show this is the lowest it has ever been. That is a $70 saving on a camera that PCMag rated as ‘excellent’, though as with any deal, the discount only matters if the product is still the right one for you.For a lot of people, it will be. The X3 shoots 360-degree footage across its two lenses at up to 5.7K resolution, meaning you capture everything around the camera and decide in the edit which direction you actually wanted to be…
The LG 65-inch OLED deal currently live on Amazon has brought the price of this 4K AI Smart TV down to $1,799.99, from an original $2,699.99, according to price-tracking tools. That is a $900 saving and, per those same tools, the lowest the set has ever been listed.Not a story with an obvious Manchester postcode, granted. But a telly this size at this price is the kind of thing worth knowing about, wherever you are parked on the sofa.What the LG 65-Inch OLED Deal Actually Gets YouLG’s OLED panel technology means the picture is built from over 8.3 million self-lit…
The Samsung Odyssey G5 G50F deal currently running on Amazon takes the 32-inch gaming monitor down to $199.99, from a usual price of $349.99, a saving of just over $150 and, according to the listing, a record low for the panel.For anyone who has been eyeing up a monitor that handles competitive gaming without demanding an OLED budget, the timing is decent. This is the 2025 flat-panel model, not a curved screen, and it comes with an adjustable stand, details that matter more than they might sound when you’re actually setting the thing up on a desk.What the Samsung Odyssey…
The GitHub outage Monday morning disrupted developers worldwide for more than three hours, with GeekWire reporting the Microsoft-owned code-sharing platform’s 225 million users found themselves locked out, slowed down, or otherwise stuck from shortly before 7 a.m. Pacific time.If your Monday morning felt unusually calm on the coding front, now you know why. Downdetector logged over 3,000 user reports flagging issues with the service, and the comments section was, let’s say, candid. ‘Cmon [GitHub] get your sh*t together… this is getting old,’ one user wrote. The asterisks were their own addition.GitHub Outage Monday Morning: What Actually BrokeAccording to GeekWire, the…
The Jordyn Woods Karl-Anthony Towns wedding took place on Saturday in Malibu, California, with a guest list that mixed NBA locker rooms with Hollywood front rows along a Pacific Ocean backdrop draped in white flowers.Woods wore a strapless white gown with a floor-length skirt and matching lace veil. Towns was in a classic black tuxedo and bow tie. By all accounts, a good time was had by all, and the hoodies alone were worth the trip.The Knicks Came Out in ForceAccording to Page Six, Towns’ New York Knicks teammates OG Anunoby, Jalen Brunson and Josh Hart were all in attendance.…
The Romy and Michele sequel got its most detailed outing yet at the 2026 D23: The Ultimate Disney Fan Event in Anaheim, California, where Lisa Kudrow and Mira Sorvino appeared onstage to tease the follow-up to their 1997 hit Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion. The two stars brought the looks with them, reviving the iconic fashion and style that made the original such a cult favourite.And it is not just the leads returning. According to Wikipedia’s production page for the film, original writer Robin Schiff is back on script duties, which should keep the sequel’s tone close to what…
The Ronaldo Rodríguez wedding Cascais took place on 11 August 2026, a civil ceremony attended only by the couple and their five children, marking ten years since the pair first met in Madrid. No fanfare, no guest list of hundreds. Just a white Gucci shirt-and-skirt combination, a Chopard Garden of Kalahari necklace, and a moment Georgina Rodríguez described as exactly what she had imagined.The ceremony, the outfit, and what Georgina said afterwardsIn a joint statement released to People, the couple confirmed the details: a private civil ceremony in Cascais, Portugal, attended by their five children. Ronaldo posted a photo of…
The new X-Men movie cast is taking shape, and it is a proper ensemble. Disney has confirmed a lineup that spans Sadie Sink as Jean Grey, Kit Connor as Scott Summers, Samara Weaving as Emma Frost, Christopher Abbott as Professor X, Maya Boyd as Storm, Adam Driver as Mister Sinister, and Inde Navarette as Rogue.That is quite a collection of names to spring on a single announcement. Disney made the bulk of these casting reveals at D23 on 14 August, generating the kind of online noise that tends to follow any Marvel drop of this scale.How Jean Grey arrived first,…
