Month: April 2023

Enlarge / No, not Radiator Springs, but a rendering of Greenlane's electric truck stop. (credit: Greenlane)

There's a new fast-charging network coming to North America. It's called Greenlane, and it's a $650 million joint venture between Daimler, NextEra Energy Resources, and a BlackRock investment fund. But it's unlikely you'll recharge your passenger EV at a Greenlane site any time soon—this new network is being designed specifically for medium- and heavy-duty commercial EVs.

You'd be forgiven for not noticing the expansion of the nation's public charging infrastructure. Unlike gas stations, charging sites don't announce their presence with a 50-foot illuminated sign—you often need an app to know exactly where they all are—but they're building out to the point where much more long-distance driving is possible on electric power than the EV-curious might think (or worse, than the EV skeptic might claim).

But this public infrastructure is almost entirely designed for light-duty vehicles—sedans, crossovers, SUVs, minivans, and pickup trucks. The charging spaces are light-vehicle-sized, and the sites are designed to work with vehicles of that size, not several classes higher.

Enlarge (credit: Ron Amadeo)

David Hamp-Gonsalves had two things quite a few people have these days: old phones lying around and a slowly building desire to get another Raspberry Pi for a quirky personal project.

The project this time was a personal music streaming server (detailed in full on GitHub). While Pi inventories are slowly improving, they're still not quite what they were, as a glance at rpilocator shows. What is far more readily available is the old Samsung Galaxy S7 phone in your drawer. Hamp-Gonsalves had one with a broken charging port, and a friend had another one with a bad battery, and one transplant later, he had a test model.

You can read David's full post for the details (which we first saw at Hackaday). The gist is that he tried three solutions, with varying degrees of fiddling and success, to get the Navidrome personal music service running:

Enlarge / Intel's flagship desktop CPU, the Core i9-13900K. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Intel has released its financial results for the first quarter of 2023, and the numbers aren't good: The company brought in $11.7 billion, a drop of 36 percent from Q1 of 2022. Because of the decline in revenue, Intel lost $2.8 billion, the biggest loss in the company's history. Intel's two biggest divisions—its client computing group that sells products made for end users and its data center group that sells server products—were down 38 and 39 percent, respectively.

If there's any kind of silver lining for Intel in the earnings report, it's that the company did slightly better than it expected to do this quarter; three months ago, Intel predicted revenues of 10.5 to 11.5 billion for Q1.

The company has instituted layoffs and has cut pay for managers and executives to help stem losses. It has also canceled some product lineups recently, like its Blockscale series of Bitcoin-mining ASICs.

Enlarge / Intel's flagship desktop CPU, the Core i9-13900K. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Intel has released its financial results for the first quarter of 2023, and the numbers aren't good: The company brought in $11.7 billion, a drop of 36 percent from Q1 of 2022. Because of the decline in revenue, Intel lost $2.8 billion, the biggest loss in the company's history. Intel's two biggest divisions—its client computing group that sells products made for end users and its data center group that sells server products—were down 38 and 39 percent, respectively.

If there's any kind of silver lining for Intel in the earnings report, it's that the company did slightly better than it expected to do this quarter; three months ago, Intel predicted revenues of 10.5 to 11.5 billion for Q1.

The company has instituted layoffs and has cut pay for managers and executives to help stem losses. It has also canceled some product lineups recently, like its Blockscale series of Bitcoin-mining ASICs.

Enlarge / The next generation of reactors may be small and modular and use different coolants. (credit: Getty Images)

"The race against climate change is both a marathon and a sprint," declares a new report from the US National Academies of Science. While we have to start decarbonizing immediately with the tech we have now—the sprint—the process will go on for decades, during which technology that's still in development could potentially play a critical role.

The technology at issue in the report is a new generation of nuclear reactors based on different technology; they're smaller and easier to build, and they could potentially use different coolants. The next generation of designs is intended to avoid the delays and cost overruns that are crippling attempts to build additional reactors both here and overseas. But their performance in the real world will remain an unknown until next decade at the earliest, placing them squarely in the "marathon" portion of the race.

The new report focuses on what the US should do to ensure that the new generation of designs has a chance to be evaluated on its merits.