I recently watched a The Critical Drinker video where he bemoaned the state of TV these days, where a "season" is really a 6-8 episode mini-series, and then you have to wait two bloody years for the next season, by which time you've pretty much forgotten about the show, and any kind of momentum is lost. Back in the day when a season was 22-24 episodes, with a couple of shorter mid-season breaks, there was only a few months between the end of one season and the beginning of the next, and you could really stay invested in a show. This is something that affects even many of the good shows of today.

It's a very rare event but electric heating is much less dangerous.

You might think that. However, from this Home cooking fires report, Ranges or cooktops were involved in 53 percent of the reported home cooking fires, 88 percent of cooking fire deaths, and 74 percent of cooking fire injuries. Households with electric ranges had a higher risk of cooking fires and associated losses than those with gas ranges.

I just found that with a quick search, so I haven't read the report in detail to look into nuances or causal factors, so maybe it's not saying quite what it seems to be saying from that quote, I don't know.

It's premature for brands to phase out USB-A when peripheral brands are still making compatible products in 2025

Why would peripheral brands stop making USB-A peripherals though, if computer manufacturers keep including USB-A ports? And then, reductio ad absurdum, we never get rid of it, or at least not for many years. I say give it up already and let's move on, otherwise we'll still be using USB-A when USB-D or whatever comes along. Let's have a few years with a sort-of-standard port, before the next change comes along, hey?

The nuclear reactor on Kosmos 954 was not used for propulsion at all, it was purely for generating electrical power, the thrusters on the satellite were entirely conventional. In no way was that an example of nuclear thermal propulsion, much less the proposed centrifugal nuclear thermal design discussed in the article.

And boy is gemini 2.5 flash not good at all compared to the 'free' tier of other providers.

Nor is the free tier of Copilot. My theory is that MS and Google have such big user bases, that they have to be extra stingy with the amount of compute per user, otherwise the cost might just get out of control. Especially with Google doing the AI Overview thing even when people are just trying to do a regular search, and MS similarly inserting Copilot into workflows unasked..

I just pasted your question into DeepSeek, I suggest you try it out of curiosity. I don't know if the answer is right, but it certainly sounds like it knows what you are asking about, and gives an answer. I find DeepSeek somewhat better for this type of query.

I used Firefox from version 0.9 or something all the way up until a couple of years ago, when I finally had enough. I think the remaining userbase are fairly determined to keep an alternative to Google alive though, since pretty much everything else is Chromium-based, and that is a noble goal. So I hope Mozilla somehow avoids driving Firefox into the ground, although they also seem quite determined.

It doesn't even have to be in real-world conditions, but the usefulness of the results is largely dependant on being able to compare it to other vehicles. Since I'm not aware of anyone else who does range-testing of their EVs at 20-25 mph etc, it's not very useful in that regard - I'm sure most EVs could post impressive range figures if driven slowly enough. With nothing to compare to, it's just a marketing stunt, though apparently a successful one, since we're talking about it.

The main Lunar lander part of the IM-2 mission also failed due to power loss resulting from the lander being in the incorrect orientation, and thus not generating sufficient power from its solar arrays. Cursed mission?

Finally, does anyone still use tape backups and more? I'm curious, since I never had a successful restore from tape.

Funny enough, I just read And now for our annual ‘Tape is still not dead’ update about the continuing development of LTO tape systems, with LTO-10 coming out shortly with 36TB capacity, so someone's using them :D.

It's for applications that demand huge storage volume but speed is not critical.

Like my porn collection.

In the launch, just a few days ago, he called this "a personal experiment". Given that, it seems to be a bit churlish to be beating the guy up over a few rough edges. It's clearly a long way from finished, considering the not-yet-implemented features he talked about, and so yeah, there's some bugs too. Give the guy a break.

My favourite superheroes, such as Batman and Black Widow, have no superpowers, so there are at least a few exceptions to that. But yeah, that is generally the problem with the genre.

Ouch.

People have been experimenting with using wind power to reduce maritime fuel consumption, a recent example being the Canopeé, used to transport parts of the Ariane 6 rocket, whose sails can cut its fuel usage in half. Adding sails to reduce fuel consumption make a huge deal of sense. However these drones don't have to carry a large cargo, just a sensor suite that's presumably as lightweight as possible, and I doubt the practically of using wind or wind/solar alone to power large ships. I'd be happy to be proved wrong though.