At £165 million to build the mine that is... expensive coal.

I can buy coal retail at £600 per ton.

The big use case for this is developers who like to work on Linux but who game with their kids in the evenings. Dual boot is a faff and too many games still don't run well on Linux (though Lutris and Proton are making heavy inroads here I'm pleased to say).

I'm one of the oddballs who things GNOME is the right desktop environment. When I can replace the Windows shell with GNOME running on WSL, I'll probably jump ship to Windows just so the few things I use that still run better on Windows do their thing.

Have had a car with it for four months, it's saved me once. Driving along a quiet country road, distracted by kids and someone failed to give way in front of me. The automatic braking avoided a nasty T-bone accident. The collision warning system is much more annoying - it really doesn't get that our local authority often forces us to drive on the wrong side of the road, toward a car facing us, as a "traffic calming measure" and warns that you're about to hit another car. But it's never close enough that the automatic braking kicks in.

Well, it's better than powering their oil and gas operations with oil and gas. But maybe not a lot better.

It's all very well to label companies producing oil and gas "climate criminals" but they're not the ones who burn it and release the CO2 into the atmosphere.

You send betamax by fax? That would be.... expensive.

It's difficult to see the consultation getting off the ground, given how much of the National Health Service still relies on faxing documents around. It's being digitalised.... slowly...

This is not obviously the case, though. The price dip was in the hour-ahead price and came about because storage is full and tankers are waiting offshore to unload; month-ahead and season-ahead prices are down from their peaks in August but still considerably above where they were this time last year. Europe has been filling its gas storage in anticipation of winter and October has been unusually mild; Europe's gas storage facilities are still woefully inadequate to see it through anything like an average winter without Russian supplies and you should expect prices to stay high for the foreseeable future, with likely extreme spikes in January-March if the continent sees sustained cold spells.

There's a much simpler explanation. The amount you spend on food is almost infinitely variable while the amount you spend on Netflix is fixed. So if you're going to be $5 short this month and you normally spend $10 on Netflix and $20 on beef, you can probably substitute something else for the beef that will save you $5, while saving anything at all on Netflix means cancelling the service entirely.

I don't know why this result is a surprise to anyone.

Laptop vendors have no excuse for including a USB-C port today but not allowing charging from it. HP, I'm looking at you (though to be fair, my laptop is pushing the definition of "today" a bit).

It beggars belief that Apple are still clinging to Lightning, really. 12W, USB2 and 500-ish Mbps, compared to USB-C's 240W, USB4 and 40Gbps. If you want fast charging (by which they still only mean 20W) you have to buy a lightning cable... and a USB-C to lightning converter. FFS.

Considerable gains in waterproofing though - either in making it waterproof where it wasn't or in reducing the cost of waterproofed ports.

"The 1,006 megawatt-hours capacitated reactor"

Anyone got any idea what the hell this means?

<blockquote>The finding, which was condemned by the Catholic Church, helped prove the theory of a sun-centered solar system.</blockquote>

I know this is the popular narrative but it's wildly misleading. The vast majority of academics of the time, who had all built careers on the Ptolemaic system, also condemned the discovery; the church merely went along with them. His trial was instigated by academics who disagreed with him. The popular idea is that priests refused to put their eye to Galileo's telescope; but when Galileo wrote to Kepler with this complaint, it was the "principal philosophers [ie scientists] of this academy" who he complained of.

I'm sure it was. Money makes people do all sorts of dodgy things, and the library has just taken a large write-down in the value of its collection.

The problem here isn't efficiency. As with every other storage mechanism, it's capacity and duration.

This is fine for smoothing out variable supply from wind in winter. The wind blows for a few days, you heat the sand up. The wind stops for a few days, you use the heat. A 100t silo can store about 36 GJ or 10 MWhr.

This is useless for smoothing out variable supply from solar. Solar has a peak generation in summer, when no-one has a use for excess heat. It has a minimum generation in winter, when everyone has a use for excess heat. This thing only stores energy efficiently for hours to days before losses to the surrounding environment become excessive. The 10 MWhr it can store is about what I use heating my home over winter. So for it to be a viable way of smoothing out seasonal variation in solar, it needs to become about two orders of magnitude less lossy and you need one 100t silo for every house.

I look forward to the patent on your infinite sand battery.