GoKawiil
Tech News
A technology feature argues that spare or outdated computers and laptops can be converted into home servers for media streaming or personal cloud storage, rather than discarded. It describes the build process as simple and inexpensive, framing it as a way to reuse hardware people already own.
Users seeing low-storage warnings may find Spotify high on their device's storage list, often due to downloaded music and cached data rather than the app itself. Both iOS and Android offer built-in menus to check per-app storage use, and Android allows clearing an app's cache separately from its stored data.
A team led by Dirk Witthaut at Forschungszentrum Jülich, working with the University of Cologne and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, has identified the cause of a recurring 60-second dip in European power grid frequency first noticed by grid operator Tennet Germany. The researchers found the pattern stems from large-scale battery storage systems that check their state of charge every minute, a behavior they confirmed occurs globally, not just in Europe. The findings are published in Nature Energy.
Fujifilm announced a 10 billion yen ($64 million) investment to expand magnetic tape manufacturing at its Kanagawa Factory in Odawara, Japan, running from fiscal 2026 through 2028. The company aims to boost output roughly fivefold to meet rising demand from cloud providers and data center operators, and plans to add new jobs at the site, which will focus on producing LTO-10 tapes.
A small company is developing a concentrated solar power system in which a fossil-fueled backup shares most of the generating equipment, such as the turbine, with the solar thermal side. The approach uses heliostat mirrors to focus sunlight onto a tower that heats a working fluid, which can drive a steam turbine directly or be stored for overnight power generation. The design aims to avoid building a completely separate backup facility for times when sunlight is insufficient.
A directive from President Trump restricting the use of Chinese-made batteries in U.S. energy storage systems is reshaping the market for grid batteries. With Chinese suppliers sidelined, battery manufacturers from South Korea and Japan are positioned to fill the gap in U.S. power-grid storage projects.
Fujifilm will invest 10 billion yen ($63.3 million) to expand capacity at its Odawara plant, aiming to boost magnetic tape production by up to five times by fiscal year 2028. The upgrade will let it manufacture tapes with capacities up to 100TB, marking its largest investment in tape storage in roughly two decades, according to Nikkei Asia.
The US battery storage market installed a record 20.2 gigawatt-hours in the second quarter of 2026, bringing first-half installations to 30.8 GWh, up 23% from a year earlier, according to a SEIA and Benchmark Mineral Intelligence report. Utility-scale projects drove most of the growth, led by Arizona's record 6.2 GWh quarter, with Texas and California also adding significant capacity.
Memory-chip suppliers that once gave Apple steep price discounts are now charging more as AI hyperscalers bid aggressively for flash storage and gobble up available supply. The shift reportedly weakens Apple's longstanding negotiating power over component pricing, built up over years of high-volume purchasing.
Android Authority reports that Google is developing an automatic local backup feature in Quick Share settings that saves phone files directly to a PC. New code strings indicate the tool will not support Samsung-branded computers, extending an earlier exclusion that already ruled out Samsung phones.
A technical write-up describes a telemetry pipeline that uses two alternating Cloudflare Queues, switched via modulo arithmetic on UTC timestamps, to continuously capture events without interrupting ingestion. An hourly consumer task drains the inactive queue, compresses the batched events, and writes them to Cloudflare R2 using a partitioning scheme based on time.
Memory and data storage stocks, including Micron, SanDisk and SK Hynix, rose today after pulling back from record highs reached this summer. The gains follow a stretch of declines for memory chip makers in recent weeks.