"Drought conditions are worsening in the U.S.," reports CNBC, "and that is having an outsized impact on the real estate that houses the internet." Water is the cheapest and most common method used to cool the centers. In just one day, the average data center could use 300,000 gallons of water to cool itself — the same water consumption as 100,000 homes, according to researchers at Virginia Tech who also estimated that one in five data centers draws water from stressed watersheds mostly in the west. "There is, without a doubt, risk if you're dependent on water," said Kyle Myers, vice president of environmental health, safety & sustainability at CyrusOne, which owns and operates over 40 data centers in North America, Europe, and South America. "These data centers are set up to operate 20 years, so what is it going to look like in 2040 here, right...?"

Realizing the water risk in New Mexico, Meta, formerly known as Facebook, ran a pilot program on its Los Lunas data center to reduce relative humidity from 20% to 13%, lowering water consumption. It has since implemented this in all of its center. But Meta's overall water consumption is still rising steadily, with one fifth of that water last year coming from areas deemed to have "water stress," according to its website. It does actively restore water and set a goal last year to restore more water than it consumes by 2030, starting in the west.

Microsoft has also set a goal to be "water positive" by 2030. Â"The good news is we've been investing for years in ongoing innovation in this space so that fundamentally we can recycle almost all of the water we use in our data centers," said Brad Smith, president of Microsoft. "In places where it rains, like the Pacific Northwest where we're headquartered in Seattle, we collect rain from the roof. In places where it doesn't rain like Arizona, we develop condensation techniques."

Slashdot has been covering plans for the UK's largest chip plant to be acquired by Chinese-owned firm Nexperia.

But this week the U.K. government "has blocked the takeover of the country's largest microchip factory by a Chinese-owned firm," CNBC reported this week, "over concerns it may undermine national security." Grant Shapps, minister for business, energy and industrial strategy, on Wednesday ordered Dutch chipmaker Nexperia to sell its majority stake in Newport Wafer Fab, the Welsh semiconductor firm it acquired for £63 million ($75 million).

Nexperia is based in the Netherlands but owned by Wingtech, a partially Chinese state-backed company listed in Shanghai. Nexperia completed its acquisition of Newport Wafer Fab in 2021, and the firm subsequently changed its name to Nexperia Newport Limited, or NN.

"The order has the effect of requiring Nexperia BV to sell at least 86% of NNL within a specified period and by following a specified process," the United Kingdom's Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy said in a statement. Nexperia had initially owned 14% of Newport Wafer Fab, but in July 2021 it upped its stake to 100%.

"We welcome foreign trade & investment that supports growth and jobs," Shapps tweeted Wednesday. "But where we identify a risk to national security we will act decisively."
Nexperia plans to appeal the decision.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CleanTechnica: Ford CEO Jim Farley made a blockbuster of a statement this week. According to the somewhat jovial and optimistic cousin of late comedic actor Chris Farley, producing electric vehicles requires about 40% less labor than producing the same number of fossil-powered cars. The fact that electric vehicles are "simpler" than internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles has long been a talking point of electric vehicle fans and evangelists (aka EVangelists). This has mostly come into play when talking about lower maintenance costs. There aren't all the belts, tubes, hoses, etc. that you find in a gasmobile. That means fewer parts that can break and less maintenance over time. What is less discussed is what Jim Farley has highlighted this week -- that it also means simpler production and a smaller labor force manufacturing the world's cars and trucks.

Interestingly, Farley is also taking this difference to shift Ford back to more vertical integration. Rather than lay off workers, Farley aims to retrain them to produce more parts within the walls of Ford. As Farley says it, "we have to insource, so that everyone has a role in this growth." Nonetheless, that's not easy and certainly not going to be 100% smooth. Farley noted that the transition to EVs would involve "storm clouds." Recall that Ford aims to reach 50% EV sales by 2030, up from just a few percent in 2022. Making that massive transition provides the opportunity for a new approach and retraining, but also plenty of likely hurdles and challenges.

The FT highlighted that back in the days of Henry Ford, vertical integration was the name of the game. "A shift in corporate strategy towards more vertical integration at Ford would hark back to the company's early days when founder Henry Ford owned forest, iron mines, limestone quarries and even a rubber plantation in Brazil to wholly control the company's supply chain," the media outlet stated. "If Henry Ford came back to life, he would have thought the last 60 years weren't that exciting, but he would love it right now because we're totally reinventing the company," Farley said.

Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer has revealed why the company delayed its plans to introduce an Xbox streaming console, speaking to Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel on The Verge's Decoder podcast this week. The Verge reports: "It was more expensive than we wanted it to be when we actually built it out with the hardware that we had inside," said Spencer, discussing the Keystone prototype device that recently appeared on his office shelves. "We decided to focus that team's effort on delivering the smart TV streaming app." Microsoft delivered an Xbox TV app in partnership with Samsung instead, but it doesn't mean the idea for a streaming-only Xbox console is fully over. "With Keystone, we're still focused on it and watching when we can get the right cost," reveals Spencer.

Microsoft wanted to aim for around $129 or $99 for this Xbox streaming device, says Spencer, and hints that bundling a controller with the streaming console, as well as Microsoft's silicon component choices, had pushed the price up closer to the $299 Xbox Series S. The choice to bundle a controller matches what Microsoft traditionally does with its Xbox consoles and was also Google's original approach to putting its discontinued Stadia cloud gaming service on TVs. But a cloud gaming TV stick or puck could support any controller you have if the hardware supports Bluetooth, so it's interesting Microsoft specifically wanted to bundle an Xbox controller, likely to make the user experience feel more seamless.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The powerful lithium ion batteries used in small electric vehicles are responsible for a growing epidemic of fires. This year, there have been about 200 fires and six deaths, according to the New York City fire department. This month, an e-bike fire inside a Manhattan high-rise apartment became an inferno that injured nearly 40 people and forced firefighters to evacuate residents using ropes. These fires can spread quickly and suddenly: "We have a fully formed fire within a matter of seconds," the chief fire marshal said at a news conference.

As the densest city in America, New York is a micro-mobility haven. Here, small electric vehicles aren't toys for weekend jaunts but vital tools for the estimated 65,000 delivery workers trying to scrape a living through low-paying apps. There are thousands of choices today if you want an e-bike, e-scooter or e-moped. Some of the high-end, name-brand machines are sold in beautiful downtown showrooms for well over $5,000. But many of the vehicles used by New York City's workers come from unknown manufacturers and are sold online or through small shops for between $1,000 and $2,000. Nearly all of these vehicles are powered by lithium ion battery packs, which contain tightly bundled cells that store energy as flammable chemicals. Typically, the cells are kept in sync by a piece of electronic circuitry called a battery management system, or BMS, which makes sure that the cells don't overcharge or release too much energy at once. But that careful balance can get disrupted due to damage, wear or faulty manufacturing, sometimes with dangerous results.

Lawmakers are worried too. The authority that manages New York's public housing proposed an e-bike ban on its property this year but backed down after an outcry from low-income residents. On Monday, the city council held a hearing where legislators touted bills to combat the battery fires, including a proposal to outlaw the sale of secondhand electric vehicle batteries, and another to ban all batteries that haven't been approved by a nationally recognized testing lab. If passed, that measure would force riders to use batteries such as those certified by the Illinois-based Underwriters Laboratory (UL), which subjects e-bikes and their batteries to rigorous testing on issues ranging from their performance under extreme temperatures to how easily fire spreads between cells. Manufacturers have to pay a "nominal" cost to undergo testing, said Robert Slone, UL's chief scientist, but "we see a lot of manufacturers showing interest in certifying the batteries". UL sent a statement to the city council supporting the proposed measures, though it said a total ban on used batteries could be overkill: "When done correctly, batteries can be safely repurposed." Something else that would make a big difference for workers is better intel. "Each fire happened, they say it's an e-bike, but we don't know which one it is," said Gustavo Ajche, the founder of Los Deliveristas Unidos, a prominent delivery worker labor group. "There's a lot of missing information."

What would be more useful, he said, would be if the fire department committed resources to testing and sharing details about which batteries were safe to use, so that workers could make more informed decisions.

Apple will buy some of its chips from a factory in Arizona, Apple CEO Tim Cook said last month at an internal company meeting in Germany, according to Bloomberg News. CNBC reports: Apple currently sources all of its processors from factories in Taiwan. It designs its own chips and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company manufactures the A-series and M-series processors that power iPhones and Mac computers. If Apple were to buy processors manufactured in the U.S., it would represent a significant diversification in Apple's supply chain away from Taiwan.

"We've already made a decision to be buying out of a plant in Arizona, and this plant in Arizona starts up in '24, so we've got about two years ahead of us on that one, maybe a little less," Cook said, according to Bloomberg. TSMC previously announced plans for a single factory in Arizona to open in 2024 focusing on chips that use the latest manufacturing technology. TSMC said earlier this month that it is planning a second chip factory in Arizona because of "strong customer demand."

In a blog post initially published Tuesday and since taken down, Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, its new marquee chipset offering. The new features of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, as described on the since altered blog, include:

1. Upgraded Hexagon DSP, with support for microtile inferencing and a bigger tensor accelerator (up to 4.35X increase in AI perf when compared to 8 Gen 1 in MobileBert)
2. Support for INT4 with a 60% perf/watt improvement
3. Sensing Hub with dual AI processors
4. Upgraded GPU (~25% faster perf YoY)
5. Upgraded CPU (~40% more power efficient YoY)
6. Snapdragon X70 modem-RF system, w/ support for 5G DSDA
7. FastConnect 7800 support, w/ WiFi 7 support

Devices powered with the new chipset are expected to come out starting end of the year, Qualcomm said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: A facility described as the world's largest floating wind farm produced its first power over the weekend, with more turbines set to come online before the year is out. In a statement Monday, Norwegian energy firm Equinor -- better known for its work in the oil and gas industry -- said power production from Hywind Tampen's first wind turbine took place on Sunday afternoon. While wind is a renewable energy source, Hywind Tampen will be used to help power operations at oil and gas fields in the North Sea. Equinor said Hywind Tampen's first power was sent to the Gullfaks oil and gas field.

Hywind Tampen is located around 140 kilometers (86.9 miles) off the coast of Norway, in depths ranging from 260 to 300 meters. Seven of the wind farm's turbines are slated to come on stream in 2022, with installation of the remaining four taking place in 2023. When complete, Equinor says it will have a system capacity of 88 megawatts. Equinor said Hywind Tampen was expected to meet around 35% of the Gullfaks and Snorre fields' electricity demand. "This will cut CO2 emissions from the fields by about 200,000 tonnes per year," the company added.

NPR reports that "two teams of scientists — one at Northeastern University in Boston; the other at the University of Cambridge in the UK — recently announced that they managed to manufacture, in a lab, a material that does not exist naturally on Earth."

"It — until now — has only been found in meteorites." We spoke to Laura Henderson Lewis, one of the professors on the Northeastern team, and she told us the material found in the meteorites is a combination of two base metals, nickel and iron, which were cooled over millions of years as meteoroids and asteroids tumbled through space. That process created a unique compound with a particular set of characteristics that make it ideal for use in the high-end permanent magnets that are an essential component of a vast range of advanced machines, from electric vehicles to space shuttle turbines.

The compound is called tetrataenite, and the fact that scientists have found a way to make it in a lab is a huge deal. If synthetic tetrataenite works in industrial applications, it could make green energy technologies significantly cheaper. It could also roil the market in rare earths, currently dominated by China, and create a seismic shift in the industrial balance between China and the West....

But it will be a long time before tetrataenite is in a position to disrupt any existing markets, Laura Lewis says. She says there is still a lot of testing to be done to find out whether lab tetrataenite is as hardy and as useful as the outer space material. And even if it turns out to be as good, it will be five to eight years "pedal to the metal" before anyone could make permanent magnets out of it. In the meantime, China's competitors are working hard to source rare earths of their own. The US is investing in mines in Australia; there's exploration ongoing in Malaysia, and the Japanese are researching ways to extract elements from mud mined from the sea bed.

America's Department of Energy awarded $3 million to Oregon State University "to explore the development of a new rechargeable battery technology that would accelerate the clean energy transition," reports the Associated Press, "without relying on rare finite minerals such as lithium, cobalt and nickel." OSU chemistry professor Xiulei "David" Ji, who will lead a battery research team, said it could be a game-changer. "It's a new paradigm," he told Oregon Public Broadcasting. "We are very excited and very grateful to have this opportunity to work on this project...." His plan is to explore anion batteries that provide the necessary components without using limited minerals like the ones lithium batteries use and that could potentially increase how much energy a battery can hold. "The new battery chemistry does not have to rely on these elements," Ji said. "That's the benefit of the new chemistry. It's a game changer."

Ji said the primary market for these batteries would be electric vehicles, but he doesn't rule out the possibility of anion batteries being used by large-scale utilities, like Portland General Electric's solar, wind and battery facility. He also said they could be commercialized soon and be used in homes.
The article points out that the price of lithium tripled in 2021, and according to the International Energy Agency, the world could face lithium shortages by 2025.

An anonymous reader writes that Seagate Technology has launched its second generation dual actuator MACH.2 series hard drives. "Computing power, storage capacities, and storage performance: all must continue moving forward in order for technology innovators to solve humanity's greatest challenges," boasts Seagate's page for the drives: MACH.2 is the world's first multi-actuator hard drive technology, containing two independent actuators that transfer data concurrently. MACH.2 solves the need for increased performance by enabling parallelism of data flows in and out of a single hard drive. By allowing the data center host computer to request and receive data from two areas of the drive simultaneously, MACH.2 doubles the IOPS performance of each individual hard drive.... MACH.2 provides up to 2x performance — with two independent actuators and data paths, it enables concurrent I/O streams to and from the host.
Seagate claims it offers "optimal latency" by improving sequential peformance to double data transfer rates over single-actuator drives.

And in other news, Seagate is selling hard drives with commemorative Star Wars themes, including the Mandalorian drive, the Grogu drive, and the Boba Fett drive. (It's in addition to Seagate's officially licensed external drive for God of War Ragnarök — optimised for PS4 and PS5, delivering "the ability to play PS4 games directly from the drive.") Seagate also made drives commemorating Marvel's Avengers and Spider-Man, and now has new drives for Marvel's Black Panther: Wakanda Forever .

Microsoft has done a lot to make their flagship tablet-laptop more repairable. Following iFixit's recent teardown, the Surface Pro 9 was the "most repairable we've seen from the product line yet." Ars Technica shares the major findings: iFixit has consulted with Microsoft's hardware teams for a while now, providing advice on making devices more repairable. As evidence of this, Microsoft claims in a statement that it will:

- Make repair guides available for the Surface Pro 9's components by the end of the year
- Work with "a major US retailer" to build out an authorized (in-store) repair network by early 2023
- Offer parts to individuals and repair shops by the first half of 2023

All these factors improve repairability, both in practice and in iFixit's (and French, European, and potentially other nations') repair scores.

iFixit's editorial teardowns, however, are conducted independently. When the team dug in, they found that the glass display has some flex built into it now, making it harder to shatter when you pry on the (now softer) glue underneath. With the screen off, you have access to all the modular components: motherboard, thermal module, the Surface Connect Port, speakers, Wi-Fi module, front and rear cameras, and side buttons. Most notably, the battery is now screwed down instead of held in place with glue. That makes the most common and predictable repair to the device "just plain simple," iFixit claims. The RAM is soldered to the motherboard, something that iFixit would typically penalize in the past. But iFixit says that given the power savings and performance boost from proximity to the CPU, it can't punish the decision. "Adding it all up, iFixit gives the Surface Pro 9 a 7 out of 10," concludes Ars' report. "That's a notable leap from prior Surface models, like the Pro 7, which received a 1 out of 10. But the Surface Pro 9's score will likely move up a notch or two if Microsoft keeps its promises to release manuals and spare parts to anyone who wants them next year."

MachineShedFred writes: Tesla has opened their charging connector and equipment standards as the "North American Charging Standard" (NACS), including links to technical specifications and connector data sheets and CAD files. The formerly proprietary connector, now called NACS, is the most common charging standard in North America: "NACS vehicles outnumber CCS two-to-one, and Tesla's Supercharging network has 60% more NACS posts than all the CCS-equipped networks combined." Tesla noted that charging network operators "already have plans in motion to incorporate NACS at their chargers."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: For a second time in less than a year, regulators in California moved on Thursday to roll back the compensation that homeowners receive from utilities for the excess electricity their rooftop solar panels send to the electric grid -- payments that power companies and some consumer groups have argued hurt poor and low-income households. The new proposal from the California Public Utilities Commission would cut the benefit for almost all new rooftop solar customers by about 75 percent starting in April. Under current rules, households that send excess power to the grid receive credits on their utility bills that are equivalent to retail electricity rates. The system of credits is known as net energy metering. The measure, which will be subject to public comment before the commission's five members vote on it, would also limit solar systems to 150 percent of a building's electricity load.

Regulators in other states are closely watching how California changes its net metering program. Utilities and solar energy companies have been fighting over energy credits in numerous states. Billions of dollars in investment and revenue are potentially at stake. More generous credits typically encourage people to buy solar panels but can cut into the profits of utilities. California leads the nation by far in the use of rooftop solar, with about 1.5 million such installations. The utilities commission estimates that those systems have the collective capacity to generate 12 gigawatts of electricity, or the equivalent of 12 nuclear power plants.

In a statement, the commission said the new proposal would make net metering more equitable. Average residential customers of Pacific Gas and Electric, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric who install solar panels would save $100 a month on their electricity bill, and average residential customers installing solar paired with battery storage would save at least $136 a month, the commission stated. As a result of those savings, it said, the average household that installs a new solar or solar and battery system would be able to fully pay off the system in nine years or less. Compensation would not change for homeowners who already had rooftop solar panels, for at least 20 years from when their system was installed. "As rooftop solar systems have spread over the last decade, the utility industry has criticized use of the technology and called net metering an unjust subsidy," adds the report. "Utilities argue that rooftop solar homes that greatly reduce or zero out their monthly electric bills are effectively forcing households without panels to bear more of the cost of maintaining the electric grid. But the solar industry has argued that net metering is needed to encourage use of rooftop solar and reduce the emissions responsible for climate change."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Amazon on Thursday showed off a new robot that could one day assist warehouse workers with some of the more tedious aspects of the job. The company unveiled "Sparrow," a robotic arm that can pluck millions of items of varying shapes and sizes, on stage at the Delivering the Future conference near Boston, where it showcased new robotics, transportation and last-mile delivery technologies. Amazon says Sparrow uses computer vision and artificial intelligence to move products before they're packaged. A video of Sparrow shows the robotic arm picking up a board game, a bottle of vitamins and a set of sheets -- all the kinds of items that might flow through one of the company's warehouses -- and deftly placing them in crates.

Suction cups attached to the surface of the robot allow it to firmly grasp items. Previous iterations of robotic arms have been able to pick up boxes, which are generally uniform in their shape but might vary in size. But Sparrow is capable of handling items with varying curvature and size, said Jason Messinger, principal technical product manager of robotic manipulation at Amazon Robotics, in a demonstration. "This is not just picking the same things up and moving it with high precision, which we've seen in previous robots," Messinger said. The robotic arm can identify around 65% of Amazon's product inventory, the company said.

While the introduction of robots to the warehouse often raises questions about whether human jobs will be replaced, Amazon says Sparrow will "take on repetitive tasks," freeing employees up to focus on other things. The company also said the technology can improve safety in the workplace, although that prospect has been debated. An investigation by Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting found the company's warehouses with robots have higher injury rates than facilities without automation. Further reading: Amazon Unveils Smaller Delivery Drone That Can Fly in Rain

While Apple is still expected to release its first VR/AR headset next year, the bigger step to mainstream adoption -- the Google Glass-style AR glasses -- may have slipped two years according to one analyst. Tom's Guide reports: In an email to MarketWatch, Haitong International Tech Research's Jeff Pu wrote that Apple Glasses could now be up to four years from making their first appearance. "We now expect the AR Glass to be postponed to 2025-2026, due to design issues," Pu wrote. This is significant as just five months ago Pu stated that the AR glasses could be announced as soon as 2024.

The term "design difficulties" is, of course, a bit of a catch-all. It could cover anything from making the glasses aesthetically pleasing and light enough for extended wear, to ensuring they have enough battery life to be useful and don't overheat. But it's striking that nearly a decade after Google Glass became available to 'Explorers' in the US, companies are still struggling to make the form factor work, despite the considerable technological improvements we've seen in the intervening years.

Scientists say tht measured over a 20-year period, methane "packs about 80 times the climate-warming power of carbon dioxide," according to the Associated Press. "And according to the International Energy Agency, methane is to blame for roughly 30% of the global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution."

And yet... Aerial surveys have documented huge amounts of methane wafting from oil and gas fields in the United States and beyond. It's a problem the Biden administration has sought to attack in its recently enacted Inflation Reduction Act. One of the law's provisions threatens fines of up to $1,500 per ton of methane released, to be imposed against the worst polluters. Perhaps most crucially, the law provides $1.55 billion in funding for companies to upgrade equipment to more effectively contain emissions — equipment that could, in theory, help the operators avoid fines.

Yet some of the best equipment for reducing emissions is already installed on oil and gas infrastructure.... And critics say such equipment is failing to capture much of the methane and casting doubt on whether the Biden plan would go far to correct the problem.... "Energy companies have made pledges, but I've got to tell you, I haven't seen anything from a practical standpoint that makes me believe there's any reality to reductions on the ground," said Tim Doty, an environmental scientist and former air quality inspector for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. "Maybe they're making progress, but are they making enough progress to slow down climate change? I don't think so...."

Sometimes, methane escapes because the equipment designed to contain it hasn't been properly calibrated or maintained. Emissions aren't immediately stopped once new equipment is installed. Companies must still invest in properly designing the system and continuously monitoring and maintaining the equipment. This requires money and staff, which experts say many companies neglect.... And hydrocarbons like methane, because they are corrosive, inevitably degrade the tanks, pipes and equipment that are supposed to contain them. "All this stuff is going to be prone to leak — that's just the way it is," said Coyne Gibson, who spent about two decades as an engineer inspecting oil and gas equipment. "That's mechanics. And there's there's not really any way to avoid it...."

The staffing it would take to continuously survey the nation's 3 million miles of natural gas pipelines would likely be prohibitively expensive.
"Emissions keep going up. We're moving in the wrong direction..." Antoine Halff, chief analyst at energy analytics company Kayrros, tells the Associated Press. But he adds that "the potential, the conditions, to change course seem to be here."

The article points out that America's Environmental Protection Agency "is writing rules on methane reduction that will further detail what would be required of companies starting in 2024."

Slashdot reader thedarklaser writes: A chemical engineering professor at Utah's BYU has created a nuclear reactor design that could produce enough energy for 1000 homes in the space of 4 feet by 7 feet. And there's a bonus: potentially no nuclear waste or risk of melt down.

They use molten salt that bonds with the dissolved fuel. Then, very valuable Molybdenum-99 (as in $30 million per gram) can be extracted from that salt and sold for use in medical imaging.

Additionally, this system is very inexpensive, at a cost of around 3 cents per kilowatt hour.
The professor (who led a larger team on the project) tells a local TV station it's important because nuclear energy is "the only baseload or controllable, 100% on-power that has no emissions at all."

And since all the radioactive byproducts are dissolved into molten salt with this technique, he believes it's "a system that's impossible to melt down. There's nothing to melt, and it's not likely to cause any release problems because there's no pressure and there's nothing to push it out."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In late October, a Swedish software engineer named Linus Akesson unveiled a playable accordion -- called "The Commodordion" -- he crafted out of two vintage Commodore 64 computers connected with a bellows made of floppy disks taped together. A demo of the hack debuted in an 11-minute YouTube video where Akesson plays a Scott Joplin ragtime song and details the instrument's creation.

A fair amount of custom software engineering and hardware hackery went into making the Commodordion possible, as Akesson lays out in a post on his website. It builds off of earlier projects (that he says were intentionally leading up to this one), such as the Sixtyforgan (a C64 with spring reverb and a chromatic accordion key layout) and Qwertuoso, a program that allows live playing of the C64's famous SID sound chip.

So how does the Commodordion work? Akesson wired up a custom power supply, and when he flips the unit on, both Commodore 64 machines boot (no display necessary). Next, he loads custom music software he wrote from a Commodore Datasette emulator board into each machine. A custom mixer circuit board brings together the audio signals from the two units and measures input from the bellows to control the volume level of the sound output. The bellows, composed of many 5.25-inch floppy disks cut and taped into shape, emit air through a hole when squeezed. A microphone mounted just outside that hole translates the noise it hears into an audio envelope that manipulates the sound output to match. The Commodordion itself does not have speakers but instead outputs its electronic audio through a jack.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Yesterday, a company called Rewind AI announced a self-titled software product for Macs with Apple Silicon that reportedly keeps a highly compressed, searchable record of everything you do locally on your Mac and lets you "rewind" time to see it later. If you forget something you've "seen, said, or heard," Rewind wants to help you find it easily. Rewind AI claims its product stores all recording data locally on your machine and does not require cloud integration. Among its promises, Rewind will reportedly let you rewind Zoom meetings and pull information from them in a searchable form. In a video demo on Rewind.AI's site, the app opens when a user presses Command+Shift+Space. The search bar suggests typing "anything you've seen, said, or heard." It also shows a timeline at the bottom of the screen that represents previous actions in apps.

After searching for "tps reports," the video depicts a grid view of every time Rewind has encountered the phrase "tps reports" as audio or text in any app, including Zoom chats, text messages, emails, Slack conversations, and Word documents. It describes filtering the results by app -- and the ability to copy and paste from these past instances if necessary. Founded by Dan Siroker and Brett Bejcek, Rewind AI is composed of a small remote team located in various cities around the US. Portions of the company previously created Scribe, a precursor to Rewind that received some press attention in 2021. In an introductory blog post, Rewind AI co-founder Dan Siroker writes, "What if we could use technology to augment our memory the same way a hearing aid can augment our hearing?" Rewind AI provides few details about the app's back-end technology but describes "mind-boggling compression" that can reportedly compress recording data up to 3,750 times "without a major loss of quality," giving an example of 10.5GB of data squeezed down to just 2.8MB.