GoKawiil
Tech News
External SSDs use flash storage that speeds up file transfers and editing directly from the drive, while offering greater durability, quieter operation, and lower power draw thanks to having no moving parts. External hard drives remain the cheaper option per gigabyte, with examples like a 2TB Seagate HDD costing less than a 1TB Samsung T9 SSD.
Inspired by a YouTube video explaining matrix operations using flags, a developer built a compact encoding system that stores country flags in as little as 11 bits by breaking them into stripes, colors, and simple shared elements like stars or crosses. The system deliberately excludes coats of arms, state or city flags, and Nepal's non-rectangular flag to keep the encoding tractable, accepting that decoded flags will be recognizable but not pixel-perfect.
Comparing a 256GB SSD to a 1TB hard drive isn't a simple capacity contest, since SSDs retrieve data electronically from flash memory while HDDs rely on spinning platters and moving read/write heads, making SSDs significantly faster for booting and running programs. Whether 256GB is enough depends heavily on usage: it suits light users who rely on cloud storage, while heavy local file storage, creative work or gaming may require 512GB, 1TB or more.
Furo, a startup building software for industrial battery storage systems, has raised $4 million from mostly U.S. investors including TQ Ventures, Neo, and Sheryl Sandberg's Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners. The three 28-year-old founders, originally from Germany, moved back home after studying and briefly operating in the Bay Area, and within a year landed enterprise clients like Deutsche Bahn. Co-founder Lena Sophia Voß says the company is scaling faster in Europe than it would have in the U.S.
Trump Mobile quietly updated its website to raise the price of the T1 Phone from its original $499 to $749, without issuing any public statement about the change. The device itself remains unchanged, still shipping with 512GB of storage, 12GB of RAM, and Android 15, which has received just one security update since launch.
Google's storage warnings push many users toward paid upgrades, but much of the used space in Gmail, Drive, and Photos can be reclaimed by clearing out large attachments, duplicate files, and unnecessary backups. A few targeted cleanup steps can free up meaningful space across the shared 15GB storage pool in minutes.
Apple is bundling a free three-month trial of Apple One with purchases of the iPhone 18 Pro, iPhone 18 Pro Max, and iPhone Duo. Apple One combines Apple Music, Apple TV, Apple Arcade, iCloud storage, Apple Fitness+, and Apple News+ into one subscription package, offered in Individual, Family, and Premier tiers. The promotion begins September 17 and reportedly extends to other eligible iPhone, iPad, and Mac purchases, though full details remain unclear.
US energy storage set another quarterly record, powered largely by seven new gigascale battery installations exceeding one gigawatt-hour each, according to a report from Benchmark Mineral Intelligence and the Solar Energy Industries Association. Behind-the-meter batteries also grew, with data centers accounting for roughly three-quarters of new commercial installations, even as residential battery installations are projected to fall 16% in 2026 after a supporting tax credit expired in 2025.
Ampbase's founder JP explained how the company replaced a traditional relational database with Tigris, an object storage system built on FoundationDB, using only two storage primitives. To make this work, Ampbase had to manually implement unique constraints, transactions, indices, and history tables, features a normal database engine provides automatically.
An Android Authority writer found their Gmail account eating up 5.27GB of Google's 15GB free storage tier, largely due to accumulated email attachments rather than message count. Using Gmail's built-in 'Clean up space' tool, they identified and deleted large attachments, then cleared out Spam and Trash folders to recover storage without paying for Google One.
The Internet Archive is asking supporters to start recurring monthly donations of $25 or more in September, with each new gift matched 2:1 during the campaign. The nonprofit says it relies on donor funding to maintain its own servers and infrastructure, which store 210 petabytes of freely accessible material without ads or paid subscriptions.
Apple's built-in Time Machine utility lets Mac users back up apps, photos, videos and documents to an external hard drive or SSD without paying for cloud storage subscriptions. The initial backup takes longer, but subsequent backups run faster and can be scheduled hourly, daily or weekly. This offers an alternative for users who don't need remote file access but want reliable backups.