Tech

I'm currently using an old charger like this:

It's great. Easy to carry with me, uses a two-pin cable so I can easily buy a cheap 2 dollar cable in the country I'm traveling. It's light, and I use a few short (30cm) cables to charge my laptop, phone and other stuff.

I would like to get another one, but it seems like they are no longer sold from the original manufacturer.

I'm searching around online, but the only alternatives I find seem to be very bulky and not easily carried with you. Or they are wall chargers, which is very inconvenient, needing 4 long cables to reach your devices, and often taking up multiple plugs because they are so bulky.

Anybody that knows if these are still sold anywhere? This one is 65W, but with GaN tech, I expected to see more of these compact chargers with the same weight and thickness outputting maybe 100W. But I can't find anything

TLDW:

Pros: backup for GPS with more resilience

Cons: patent, potential DRM uses

TLDW:

• pros: redundant alternative to GPS, which works in some contexts where GPS has trouble
• cons: patent, potential for DRM

For centuries, refrigeration tech has stayed the same — energy-hungry and reliant on harmful gases. Enter magnetocaloric cooling: a new solution claiming to be 30% more energy-efficient than current cooling systems. And it's scalable. From fridges to cooling buildings and server farms.

It's a widely known problem with roots in urban legend: Devices with motherboards failing in the early 2000s with a sudden pop, a gruesome spill, or sometimes a burst of flames. And it was allegedly all due to one guy who didn't copy a stolen formula correctly.

The "capacitor plague" of the early 2000s was real and fairly widespread among devices, even if the majority of those devices didn't go bad at the same time or even in the same year. The story of this widespread failure, passing between industry insider stories and media reports, had a specific culprit, but also a broad narrative about the shift from Japanese to Taiwanese manufacturers and about outsourcing generally.

The Asianometry channel on YouTube recently dug into the "capacitor plague" in a video that asks, "What happened to the capacitors in 2002?" and comes to some informed, broad, and layered answers. It explains the specifics of what's happening inside both a working capacitor and the faulty models, relays the reporting on the companies blamed and affected, and, crucially, puts the plague in the wider context of hotter chips, complex supply chains, counterfeits, and, sure, some industrial sabotage.

"We will never know what exactly happened, but let's try," the host says at the start. It is recommended you follow along.