September 2024
Mets’ Kodai Senga hoping to make one-inning rehab appearance with Syracuse before Triple-A season ends
Kodai Senga said that he’s hoping to make a one-inning appearance with Triple-A Syracuse before their season ends on Sunday.
MLB playoffs 2024 tracker: Standings, clinch scenarios, postseason schedule and more
Follow along as the 2024 MLB postseason picture comes into focus over the final days of September.
Elon Musk Reacts After Mark Cuban Says He Would Buy X ‘In A Heartbeat’
Elon Musk Reacts After Mark Cuban Says He Would Buy X ‘In A Heartbeat’
You Can Now Renew Your US Passport Online
Travelers rejoice—the State Department has announced that online passport renewal is now available to all. I renewed my passport on the first day the system was open to the general public, and the process went smoothly—although I had some trouble taking my own photos at first. (I figured it out, and I’ll give you some tips below.)
If this sounds like it might not be entirely new, that’s because online passport renewal was originally announced in 2021, paused in 2023, and reopened in “beta” version earlier this summer. Now, the State Department says that passports are being processed in one-third the time that they took at this time last year, and are well under the six to eight weeks that renewals are typically expected to take.
How to renew your U.S. passport online
First, head to Travel.State.Gov/renewonline. There, you’ll see a list of steps:
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Confirm you meet the requirements
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Create your account
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Start your application
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Enter your most recent passport info
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Enter travel plans
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Upload digital photo
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Sign and pay
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Enroll in email updates
I recommend keeping that page open while you go through the process, since at first you’ll need to bounce between a few different websites. You’ll need to create an account at login.gov, then go back to travel.state.gov to begin renewing your passport. At the end of the process, it will send you to pay.gov to make a credit or debit card payment.
Who is eligible to renew their passport online?
There’s a long list of requirements, so make sure to read through them all. Among the important ones:
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You are aged 25 or older.
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Your passport either expires in the next year, or has not been expired for more than 5 years. (Another way of putting it: your old passport was issued between 9 and 15 years ago.)
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You are not changing your name, gender, date of birth, or place of birth.
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You have your old passport in front of you.
I also noticed, when renewing mine, that I was not able to add a passport card to my order, since I didn’t have a passport card to start with. I only had a book, so I was only able to renew the book.
How long does it take to renew your passport online?
It took me about 30 minutes to renew my passport, including about 10 to 15 minutes to take a photo and make sure it was cropped and adjusted correctly.
The processing time is officially the same as for a renewal by mail, six to eight weeks. (That said, the State Department says it’s processing them a lot quicker these days.) You can’t use the expedited service online.
How much does it cost to renew your passport online?
The fee is $130 for a regular or large passport book. I didn’t have a passport card to renew, but the fee for a passport card is $30 according to the State Department. (You can see the full fee schedule here.)
Can you apply for a passport for the first time online?
Nope, this service is for renewals only. It’s also worth noting that you won’t be able to use your old passport while you’re waiting for the new one. Your old passport is automatically canceled when you put in the request for the new one. So make sure you apply for renewal when you don’t have international travel coming up. (Or use the expedited service, which is not available online.)
What information will I need to renew my passport online?
Well, I just did it, and the website asked me for the following information (besides my name and address):
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My passport number
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My social security number
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My height, eye color, hair color, and occupation
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The ICN, or inventory control number, from the inside back cover of the passport
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Your credit or debit card information, for payment
Can you take your own digital photos to renew your passport online?
Yes! The system is very picky about the photos, as you may have guessed from how they are with traditional passport applications. The photo requirements are here, but the absolute safest way to be sure you’re doing it right is to go to a place that offers passport photo services. (I got my previous set done at a drugstore.)
It’ll ask you to take a photo in front of a plain, light-colored background, with no shadows on your face or behind you on the wall. Your eyes need to be open, you can’t be smiling, and you can’t wear anything on your face or head except religious headgear. The photo also needs to be taken from far enough away that it includes your shoulders and upper torso.
I had a harder time with this than I expected. A plain light background, with no objects visible behind me? I tried a few walls in my house before I found one that would work, in a bathroom. They say no selfies, but I put my phone on a tripod and took a video. (Then I replayed the video, paused it, and took a screenshot.) My finished photo looked exactly like the examples they gave—or so I thought.
When you upload your photo, the system automatically crops it. Even though the examples are all tall rectangular photos, the automatic crop is a tight square. You can adjust it, and I did, but no matter what I did the system rejected my photo, saying that the “overall image quality” was bad.
The example photos were more brightly lit, so I went to Instagram, uploaded my photo to the Stories tool, and chose the Melbourne filter. (Same idea as this hack to smooth photos with the Paris filter; just keep swiping until you get Melbourne, or whatever filter makes your photo look the passport-est.) When I uploaded it to the passport site, I let the crop tool do whatever it did by default. That went through. Next, I entered my credit card information, and I am now awaiting my new passport in the mail in (hopefully sooner than) six to eight weeks.
Refurbished AirPods Max Are $340 Right Now
The AirPods Max are Apple’s most expensive headphones, with new models selling for over half a grand—that said, they’re also the best headphones Apple users can get. Not everyone can casually drop that kind of money on headphones, so any kind of discount is certainly welcome. Right now, Best Buy is selling refurbished AirPods Max for $339.99 (originally $549.99), which is cheaper than what Amazon sells them for.
Best Buy’s Geek Squad Certified Refurbished program offers a 90-day warranty, so if your refurbished headphones come with any defects, make sure you bring it up before those three months are up. Since you’re buying from Best Buy, you’ll also get three months of free Apple Music and three months of Free Apple Fitness+.
Apple’s event earlier this month revealed a newer version of the AirPods Max, with a few new colors plus USB-C charging, but it’s essentially the same otherwise. The older model, however, received an update with iOS 18, giving them personalized spatial audio support.
If you want to time your purchase, you can find them for $399 new on Amazon, like they did earlier this month, but there is no indication of how long that will take to happen again (but if it does, I’ll let you know).
The AirPods Max have active noise-cancelling (ANC), ambient awareness, and provide top-tier audio as well. They are one of the best ANC headphones you can buy and shouldn’t give you that weird pressure sensation when you turn them on. They have very good ambient awareness to hear your surroundings well (have adaptive EQ and spatial audio, which adjusts the audio automatically to you and your environment) and hands-free Siri, according to PCMag’s “excellent” review.
MLB playoffs 2024: Ranking all the postseason teams’ starting rotations, from the Guardians to the Phillies
With October around the corner, the Phillies, Astros and Padres appear locked in, while other teams have questions to answer.
This iOS 18 Bug Can Only Be Fixed by Deleting Your Messages
iOS 18 adds a lot of new features to the iPhone’s Messages app. You can now add text effects to iMessages, schedule messages to send later, and text Android friends with RCS instead of SMS. But despite months of beta testing, iOS 18 also comes with a baked-in Messages bug—one that might force you to delete part of your message history.
Here’s what’s going on: If you have an Apple Watch, there’s a feature that lets you share your current watch face with other users. The watch face shows up as an individual message in a conversation. If you reply to the watch face directly within the thread, either by swiping right on the watch face or long-pressing the message and hitting Reply, Messages will crash for both users in the conversation. Messages will continue to crash whenever you try to open this conversation again. Not only that, Messages may crash when texting other contacts, as well.
A 9to5Mac reader discovered the bug while running iOS 18, and shared their experience with the outlet. 9to5Mac was able to reproduce and confirm the bug on their end, too. And while there’s a way to stop the crashes from happening, you’re not going to like it.
How to fix the iOS 18 “watch face” Messages bug
At this time, the fix for this glitch is simple but not exactly fun: The only way to stop Messages from repeatedly crashing is to delete the conversation where the watch face was replied to. That could mean deleting a thread that’s years old, just because someone happened to reply directly to the watch face.
9to5Mac says bringing back the deleted conversation from Recently Deleted won’t work, either: If you do, you bring the bug—and the crashing—right back. One workaround to bring back these messages might be to erase your iPhone entirely, and restore your iPhone from a backup made prior to the watch face reply. If you use Messages in iCloud, however, you might be out of luck: With this feature enabled, your messages are synced over iCloud. That means the entire situation—including the buggy reply—might have already saved to the cloud.
Right now, the best thing you can do is to avoid sharing watch faces entirely. If you someone does share a watch face with you, do not directly reply to it, and tell the other person not to reply to it, either. Again, this applies only to replying to the watch face message directly; sending an individual message in response (i.e. not within a threaded reply) is fine.
Apple will likely issue a patch in the near future to fix this issue, and, once they do, it’ll be safe to reply to these messages. Until then, avoid doing so if you value your Messages history.
Judge dismisses sexual assault, trafficking lawsuit against Knicks chairman James Dolan
James Dolan was accused of sexually assaulting and pressuring a woman into unwanted sex while on tour with his band more than a decade ago.