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Enlarge / Oh, Tyrion. I'm worried, too. (credit: HBO)

Spoiler alert: The below contains heavy spoilers for the Game of Thrones season six premiere and the entire series to date. If you haven’t watched and want to go in fresh, stop reading now.

Though Game of Thrones has earned a reputation for its top-billing-can’t-keep-you-safe unpredictability, the season six premiere last night did what every Game of Thrones premiere has done. It’s a sweeping check-in on the characters who are still standing and a chance to resolve most of the major cliffhangers from last year. Only once that's done do we begin the arduous table-setting process for what we hope are the more action-heavy episodes that typically hit around the middle and end of the season.

So let’s remember where everyone was at the end of last year:

That's a lot of hard disks. (credit: Backblaze)

For the last few years, we've looked at the hard disk reliability numbers from cloud backup and storage company Backblaze, but we've not looked at the systems it builds to hold its tens of thousands of hard disks. In common with some other cloud companies, Backblaze publishes the specs and designs of its Storage Pods, 4U systems packed with hard disks, and today it announced its sixth generation design, which bumps up the number of disks (from 45 to 60) while driving costs down even further.

The first design, in 2009, packed 45 1.5TB disks into a 4U rackable box for a cost of about 12¢ per gigabyte. In the different iterations that have followed, Backblaze has used a number of different internal designs—sometimes using port multipliers to get all the SATA ports necessary, other times using PCIe cards packed with SATA controllers—but it has stuck with the same 45 disk-per-box formula.

The new system marks the first break from that setup. It uses the same Ivy Bridge Xeon processor and 32GB RAM of the version 5, adding extra controllers and port multipliers to handle another 15 disks for 60 in total. The result is a little long—it overhangs the back of the rack by about four inches—but it's packed full of storage.

Pretty soon, there's going to be a Fallout 4 bobblehead for every month of the year. Then every week... then every day...

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I do a lot of traveling to various gaming conventions for this job, but PAX East is the show I look forward to more than any other on the calendar. The convention straddles the marketing-heavy vibe of a show like E3 and the geeky/wonky vibe of the Game Developers Conference with aplomb. It then mixes in the passion of actual gamers who don't work in the industry and who have paid hundreds or thousands of dollars for a chance to commune with their fellow fans for the weekend.

Indie games have never been a rare sight at PAX East through outfits like the Indie Megabooth, but this year's show floor showed a marked shift away from massive booths for big publishers toward the "little guy." Everywhere you looked was another practically unknown, two-person developer team with a booth barely bigger than a folding table and a pixel-art aesthetic. Simply spending 10 minutes with every game on offer could easily take an entire week, much less a weekend (and that's without the massive queues of show-goers).

Check out the above gallery to get a feel for some of the best costumes, booths, and random sightings at this year's show.

The first justified use of a selfie stick I'm aware of: Bertrand Piccard, high above the Pacific. (credit: Solar Impulse)

Last night, after over 60 hours in the air and months of work on the ground, Solar Impulse completed its crossing of the Pacific. The landing at Moffett Field completed the most challenging part of its round-the-world journey, one interrupted by a long layover in Hawaii that allowed the team to sort out issues with the craft's batteries.

Solar Impulse is attempting to complete the first fuel-free circumnavigation of the Earth. It started the journey last year, with pilots Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg completing legs that took the craft to Japan and then across the Pacific to Hawaii. Progress was slow, however, as the delicate aircraft has some very specific requirements in terms of wind and weather in order to take off and land safely. It also needs to complete the journey within the Northern Hemisphere's summer, or the on-board battery capacity would be insufficient to power it through the longer winter night.

Once in Hawaii, however, the team identified problems with overheating batteries that required a major overhaul. This put the completion of its journey on hold for the year. With the work completed and the longest day of the year about two months away, the team was ready to resume its journey.