A cross-country road trip prompted an examination of self-storage facilities as a defining fixture of American life, alongside churches. The industry, which began mostly as small mom-and-pop operations in the 1970s, has grown into a major institutional asset class, with the U.S. holding roughly 90 percent of global self-storage capacity. Texas leads all states in facility count, while Hawaii has the fewest, and New York City ranks third among metro areas.
newyorker.com
· 2026-09-17
Recent storm-driven waves fueled by Hurricane Marie eroded parts of the Southern California coastline near the decommissioned San Onofre nuclear plant, reigniting concerns about the safety of nearby spent fuel storage. The 3.6 million pounds of radioactive waste sit in concrete canisters about 100 feet from a seawall that protects the site, and Southern California Edison has pledged to relocate the waste to higher ground if erosion modeling warrants it. Experts say near-term risk is low, but note the waste will remain on-site indefinitely as no permanent disposal solution exists.
hardware.slashdot.org
· 2026-09-16
iOS 27.2 beta 1 contains references to a new erase feature that overwrites an iPhone's entire storage, including unused space, with blank data rather than just destroying encryption keys. 9to5Mac found the option is currently restricted to devices sold in China, and Apple warns it takes longer and may affect device lifespan. Code references suggest the same capability is being built for iPad, HomePod, and Apple Vision Pro as well.
9to5mac.com
· 2026-09-16
A developer building an open-source Git server on top of object storage (Tigris) found that standard Git packfiles, designed for local disk and memory-mapped access, performed poorly when objects had to be fetched via byte-range guesses from cloud buckets. After an initial filesystem-shim approach failed at production scale, they created a new columnar packfile format built specifically for object storage, which required no changes to Git clients and performed well on real-world repositories.
tigrisdata.com
· 2026-09-16
Amazon has discounted UGREEN's DXP480T Plus network-attached storage unit by $150, bringing its price down to $849.99. The device uses all-flash storage rather than spinning hard drives, positioning it for faster data transfers and quieter operation.
androidauthority.com
· 2026-09-16
An engineering explainer examines why the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve does not rely on the commercial standard of external floating roof tanks to hold its 714 million barrels of crude. It shows that scaling up conventional tank farms would require roughly 1,130 tanks spread across about 45,000 acres, an area comparable to Washington, D.C., while leaving the oil highly exposed to fire and attack.
johnjwang.com
· 2026-09-15
A storage guide outlines how heat, humidity, and magnetic fields can damage hard drives over time, and notes that even undisturbed drives can fail due to seized mechanical parts or degraded capacitors. It recommends backing up all important data before archiving a drive, verifying the transfer, and following the 3-2-1 backup rule: three copies of data on two different mediums with one stored offsite.
engadget.com
· 2026-09-15
A developer released Capsule, a tool for building self-contained web apps that embed their own SQLite database within a single file. The apps run without requiring cloud servers, user accounts, or an internet connection, keeping all data stored locally on the user's device.
withcapsule.app
· 2026-09-15
Valve has released its new Steam Frame virtual reality headset, a lightweight, technically advanced device that can stream games from a PC or run them independently. It comes in two versions: 256GB storage for £889 and 1TB storage for £1,089.
bbc.co.uk
· 2026-09-14
California avoided rolling power outages through the hottest August on record, a streak dating back to 2020. The state's grid operator has grown battery storage capacity from under 100 megawatts in 2020 to over 17,000 megawatts today, allowing solar energy captured during the day to be dispatched during peak evening demand.
yro.slashdot.org
· 2026-09-14
Google has opened a formal beta program for its Drive app, letting users opt in to test upcoming features before they roll out broadly. The program follows similar early-access schemes Google runs for other apps like Gmail and Photos.
androidauthority.com
· 2026-09-14
A YouTube ad disguised as an iPhone low-storage system alert has been repeatedly reported by users but cleared by Google, which says it doesn't violate ad policy. When the author ran the same ad through Google's own Gemini AI, it flagged the ad as deceptive for imitating system UI and making unreliable claims, contradicting the human review team's verdict.
atomic14.com
· 2026-09-13
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