efficiency

Bjorn Nyland compares wireless and wired DC fast charging for an electric car, measuring end-to-end efficiency. The test shows the wireless system holding up well against a plug.

Casey Muratori shows how fast a terminal renderer can run, building a simple reference renderer that handles Unicode and colored text far quicker than Windows Terminal. He argues that common excuses for slow terminals do not hold up.

Matthias Wandel uses anemometer measurements to find where to place a fan to move the most air through a house at night. He finds that placing the fan some distance back from the window works better.

Casey Muratori follows up his refterm proof-of-concept, a GPU-based terminal renderer, with a second part covering memory usage, glyph sizing and correct Unicode and VT handling. It is built to show that a terminal can be fast and correct without heroic effort.

A two-minute 2008 clip from Sun's Fishworks team in which Brendan Gregg uses DTrace to show disk latency spiking while he shouts at a rack of drives. Bryan Cantrill narrates the demonstration.

Afrotechmods plays with 2600F ultracapacitors that can dump hundreds of amps, shorting them to vaporize bits of metal. Along the way he explains the three most important capacitor equations. The uploader warns that the capacitors are not designed to be shorted.

A hobbyist compares vertical bifacial solar panels against south-facing angled panels using winter production results. It tests whether the usual mounting approach is actually best.

MattKC fits a playable Snake game into a QR code by writing tiny x86 machine code and patching the ZBar scanner so it can run the decoded data.

Tech Ingredients builds a larger solar-powered desiccant air conditioner that uses a calcium chloride liquid desiccant with evaporative cooling to cool their lab. The video includes the engineering calculations.

Casey Muratori captures CygnusEd Professional running on an Amiga 2000, showing how smoothly it scrolled text. He notes the real effect is better on a period CRT.

Nick Caston compares Unity's sample ECS/DOTS project (AngryBots) with his own from-scratch C++ and OpenGL clone. He benchmarks performance and discusses the effort involved in each approach.

Big Clive does a complete teardown of a lithium phone battery, taking apart the protection circuit, case and the cell itself. He notes it was risky because the cell was not discharged first.

A live-coded demo by Jonathan Blow showing how to get object-system-style expressiveness in a data-oriented way, covering structure-of-arrays layouts and composition. It shows features of his Jai language that make programs fast.

The winning demo from Revision 2015's oldskool competition, running on a real 1981 IBM PC with CGA at 4.77MHz. It uses extreme tricks to produce effects, graphics and sound far beyond what the hardware was thought capable of.

Quint BUILDs tests a rooftop water storage setup in which solar power pumps water up to the roof and a turbine generates power later. He works through the numbers to show how much energy it actually stores.

Big Clive tears down a smart meter with a wireless modem found among fly-tipped materials. He examines its internals and checks conspiracy claims about microphones, cameras and 5G.

A 2001 University of Miami experiment ignites a leak from a gasoline fuel line in one car and a leak from a hydrogen connector in another. The hydrogen fire burns out quickly while the gasoline fire consumes its car.

A short look at CoeLux, an artificial skylight that recreates the scattering process that makes the sky look blue, producing a convincing illusion of distant sun and depth.

A short demo showing slow 2D drawing in the Windows 7 GUI compared with XP. It attributes the slowdown to the display driver model lacking hardware accelerated GDI.

BigClive tears down a heated electric shower head of the type common in some countries, often called a suicide shower. He examines the construction and the dangerous fault conditions, such as poor insulation and missing earthing.

Fully Charged episode where Elliot drives the NIO ES8 SUV and visits a battery swap station that replaces the pack in about three minutes. It covers the ownership model of swapping and what it could mean for EV charging.

GreatScott! tests ProLogium lithium ceramic batteries, a solid-state design. He measures their volumetric and gravimetric energy density, compares them to Li-ion and LiPo, and runs durability tests at the end.

Chris Boden shows how an operator starts a large hydroelectric turbine generator and manually synchronizes it to the grid using a needle phase meter.

A short Microsoft promo comparing classic Teams with the rewritten new Teams side by side, claiming faster startup and better performance. The new version is shown taking around nine seconds to launch.

Helmet-camera footage of linemen installing a spacer on an energized 765,000 volt transmission line, working from a helicopter. The crew bonds on and off the live wire as part of the job.

A Fully Charged episode where Robert Llewellyn visits an Oxford street trialling Urban Electric's pop-up chargers. These are retractable 7kW charging points built into street furniture for homes without off-street parking.

Short HD closeup of a Tesla Model S battery swap, showing the pack lowered out and another pushed into place.

Footage of the 2007 Aurora test, in which a cyberattack was used to destroy a large generator at a test facility in Idaho.

Footage of Richard Box's art installation in which fluorescent tubes light up in the ground under high voltage power lines, showing the electric fields they produce.

Tom Scott borrows a Nio electric car in China and shows its automated battery swap station replacing the whole battery in minutes. He explains how swapping serves as an alternative to charging.

Toyota's short promo clip showing a Mirai carbon-fiber hydrogen tank shot with a .50 caliber round at point blank range. The bullet pierces the tank, which does not burst, and the gas simply escapes and disperses.

A short NOVA excerpt in which David Pogue abuses a Tufts-developed battery by cutting and damaging it, and it keeps working without catching fire. It comes from the documentary 'Search for the Super Battery'.

Markus Kayser's Solar Sinter project video shows a machine in the desert using sunlight and sand to 3D print glass objects. It is a short demonstration of desert manufacturing from renewable energy and local material.

A Fully Charged episode on Ubitricity, a German company that turns ordinary street lamp posts into roughly 5 kW overnight EV charge points, with a locking cable and managed billing.

A short side-by-side recording by Jake Archibald of the same animation demo running in Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Servo WebRender nightlies on a 60Hz display. It shows the smoothness difference of GPU-based rendering.

Styropyro wires 100 car batteries in parallel to produce more current than a lightning bolt and tests what happens when it is shorted. The experiments, done with other YouTubers, show spectacular effects of extreme current.