Technology

SAFELY REMOVING USB - for decades we have been taught never to pull out a USB stick before clicking „Safely Remove Hardware“. According to Microsoft's documentation, since Windows 10 version 1809 the default policy is „Quick removal“, under which Windows does not cache disk writes, so the device can be removed without that step, at the cost of somewhat slower performance. Anyone who has switched to the „Better performance“ policy still has to use safe removal, or risks losing data.

1 Oct 2026

RICE AND A WET PHONE - when a phone falls into water, the first advice you hear is to bury it in a bag of uncooked rice. In its iPhone instructions Apple says explicitly not to put the phone in rice, because small particles of rice can damage it. Instead it advises tapping the phone gently against your hand with the connector facing down to let excess liquid drain, then leaving it in a dry place with some airflow for at least 30 minutes before charging, and up to 24 hours if needed. It also advises against hair dryers, compressed air and pushing cotton swabs into the connector.

25 Sep 2026

WIRELESS CHARGING - it is often said that charging on a pad wears out a phone battery faster than charging by cable. In 2019 researchers at the University of Warwick measured an iPhone 8 Plus: on a cable its average temperature stayed below 27 °C over three hours of charging, while on a wireless pad it reached 30.5 °C and stayed there longer when the phone was misaligned. The authors note that even a slightly higher temperature speeds up the processes that reduce a battery's capacity. So the problem is not induction as such but the heat that comes with it.

24 Sep 2026

WI-FI OVERNIGHT - the advice to switch the router off at night rests on the idea that the radiation spoils sleep. The most extensive measurement of its kind covered 356 readings at 55 sites in four countries, among them homes, hospitals and schools, and was published in Health Physics. The readings were taken deliberately where the signal is strongest, right beside the access points. In every case the levels were far below the international limits, and in almost every case weaker than the other radio signals already present in the same room.

21 Sep 2026

FIREFOX - on 29 September 2026 Mozilla unveiled a new look for Firefox 157, with refreshed colours, icons and themes that are now the same on desktop and mobile. Compact mode, with smaller tabs and toolbar, is back, and the New Tab page gets a place for pinned shortcuts. Mozilla says the changes do not slow the browser down.

1 Oct 2026

MOZILLA - on 17 September 2026 Mozilla and the Canadian AI institute Mila launched a joint project to build an open foundation for artificial intelligence, so that companies and institutions can run advanced AI systems on their own premises and keep control of their data. Mozilla has put in an initial five million dollars, the company Hypertec adds one million in the first year, and the Canadian government has publicly backed the project. The partners expect the first working reference implementations within six months, and their motto is to make owning your AI as easy as renting it.

25 Sep 2026

IPHONE 18 PRO - on 18 September 2026 the DXOMARK lab published its camera test of the new iPhone and gave it 172 points, second place in its ranking. The main camera's variable aperture, from f/1.48 to f/4.0, earns the most praise, as it keeps sharpness better in complex scenes and when there are several subjects in the frame. The weak point is long-range zoom, where it trails some rivals, along with occasional colour casts and visible flare.

24 Sep 2026

NEEDLE 2 - on 22 September 2026 Raspberry Pi presented Needle 2, a language model from Cactus Compute only 14 megabytes in size that turns a written instruction into an action on the computer. It runs on the Raspberry Pi 5 processor alone, with no dedicated AI chip and, once downloaded, no internet connection. In their test an instruction switched on the LED on the board in 78 milliseconds, and a question unrelated to any action makes the model trigger nothing.

23 Sep 2026