rage

Practical Engineering explains pumped storage hydropower, which makes up most grid-scale electricity storage. It covers how it works and why it fits only certain geographies.

MIT's Donald Sadoway presents the liquid metal battery as a design for grid-scale stationary electricity storage, at an Imperial College London event in 2018. He covers the grid benefits of massive-scale storage.

Bryan Cantrill of Joyent presents Manta, an internet-facing object store that lets you run compute directly on the data. The talk is peppered with ZFS history and Cantrill's trademark commentary on the industry.

A 2019 Android Dev Summit session on the scoped storage model in Android 10. It gives a plan overview and best practices for apps adapting to the new restrictions.

An LGR Oddware episode looking at Sony's MDH-10 MD Data drive from 1995, which used MiniDisc for computer storage years before Hi-MD. The host tries out the drive with its original drivers and software.

Samy Kamkar demonstrates OpenSesame, a device that opens many fixed-code garage doors in seconds by exploiting a newly found attack, built around a Mattel toy. The video explains the attack and which brands are affected.

Jay Leno tours and drives a 1925 Doble E-20 steam car, once owned by Howard Hughes, covering how it starts up and runs. It includes a cutaway view of the engine.

Bill Hammack of Engineer Guy explains the engineering behind the aluminum beverage can: why it is cylindrical, how it is manufactured, why it narrows at the top, the double seam, and how the pull tab works.

A mini-documentary by a Canadian living in Japan explaining how an average family can afford a new detached house in Tokyo. It covers how houses are treated as depreciating assets and how Japanese zoning and building practices keep prices low.

FreeBSD developer Benno Rice traces the history of init and bootstrap systems at linux.conf.au 2019 to explain why systemd was seen as necessary and why it provokes such strong reactions. He also discusses why change is scary.

Benno Rice's BSDCan 2018 talk on why systemd exists and what it got right and wrong. It traces the history of Unix init and why Linux distributions adopted it, while asking what the BSDs should learn.

An RSA Animate adaptation of a Slavoj Zizek talk on charitable giving and ethical consumerism. It argues that buying products that bundle a charity donation can sustain the system that causes the problems.

The full 1973 BBC Lighthill debate on artificial intelligence, featuring James Lighthill, Donald Michie, Richard Gregory and John McCarthy. It documents the argument that preceded the 1970s AI winter and includes early robot demos.

A critique of the HD remaster of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, walking through cropping, color and effects problems that damaged the original look. It also advises which versions to buy.

Real Engineering looks at the numbers for running California on renewables, focusing on the large energy storage needed. It argues about the cost of batteries and the role of other sources.

MIT professor Donald Sadoway argues that grid-scale storage is the missing piece for renewable energy. He sketches at the blackboard how large, cheap liquid-metal batteries could store wind and solar power.

Tom Scott visits Dinorwig Power Station in Wales, a pumped-storage hydro plant often called Britain's largest battery. He explains how it works and how its role has shifted from TV pickup spikes to balancing wind and solar.

A Thunderf00t video debunking Energy Vault, a gravity-based energy storage scheme that stacks concrete blocks with cranes. He argues it is impractical and compares it to pseudoscience.

Bryan Cantrill's Uptime 2017 talk on the engineering challenges of the stateful data path, including storage, firmware and hardware bugs. It uses the 'zebras vs. horses' diagnostic heuristic to explain why rare failures keep appearing.

A short IBM behind-the-scenes documentary on how researchers moved individual atoms to make the world's smallest movie. It introduces the scientists and their work on atomic memory and data storage.

Bill Gates at Stanford's Global Energy Forum argues that cheaper solar, wind and storage are not nearly enough to stop climate change. He discusses natural gas, a carbon tax, nuclear, battery costs and the responsibilities of developing versus developed economies.

Real Engineering examines the efficiency of hydrogen as an energy carrier. It follows production, storage and fuel cell conversion losses and compares hydrogen cars with battery electric vehicles.

Stanford futurist Tony Seba argues that electric vehicles, battery storage, solar and autonomous vehicles form a 10x exponential disruption that will make fossil fuels obsolete within about a decade. It draws on his Clean Disruption book.

CGP Grey explains how ideas spread like germs, and why content that triggers outrage spreads fastest, using a study on what makes online content viral. He argues that opposing outrage-driven memes feed each other.

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.

Bryan Cantrill presents Manta, an object store with in-situ compute that lets tools like grep, awk, and sed run map-reduce style over huge data. He frames it as bringing the Unix philosophy to big data.

A Microsoft Research talk on BetrFS, a file system built on B-epsilon trees, a write-optimized data structure. It covers WODS such as LSM-trees, how to design a file system around them, and benchmark wins over ext4 and xfs.

Tom Caputi presents the design of native encryption for ZFS at the OpenZFS Developer Summit, including design decisions and how authentication uses checksum fields.

A Google Tech Talk by Raymond Blum on how Google backs up massive amounts of data such as Gmail and Picasa. It covers scaling challenges, failure types, and approaches that did not work, including tape.

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'.

Linus Tech Tips backs up their petabyte server to Google's unlimited G Suite Drive plan and runs into the daily upload cap. It shows how far the 'unlimited' offer can be pushed.

David MacKay's TEDxWarwick talk uses basic arithmetic to show how much land and energy renewables would need to power a country like the UK. It explains the limits of sustainable options and why they should still be pursued.

Lukas Eder's Devoxx talk on how modern cost-based SQL optimizers rewrite and plan queries in ways developers would not expect. It argues that declarative SQL, used well, can run complex queries very fast.

Professor Jeff Dahn lectures on why lithium-ion batteries die and how chemistry changes could make them last decades.

Linus Tech Tips documents a major RAID failure on its Whonnock server and the attempt to recover the lost data with a data recovery firm.

Andreas Antonopoulos answers a Bitcoin Q&A question about energy consumption in mining. He argues that mining is arbitrage for the cheapest electricity, drives investment in renewables, and that the traditional financial system has hidden externalities.

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 four-minute Velocity 2011 talk in which Artur Bergman, then at Wikia, argues bluntly and with profanity that SSDs should replace spinning disks in servers.

Will Wilson of FoundationDB explains how the team tested their distributed database using deterministic simulation. By running the whole system in a simulator with injected faults and reproducible seeds, they could find rare concurrency and network bugs.

Rich Hickey's JaxConf 2012 keynote examines what values are and why immutable values matter as information systems grow more complex and data gets bigger. It contrasts places with values and builds the case for immutability.