Software
Why software gets slower on the same hardware
Every layer added for developer productivity costs something at runtime. The costs are individually reasonable and cumulatively…
Alba Ferrer
Privacy writer, Tech Behind Things
Alba writes about telemetry, tracking and encryption in terms that do not require a threat model.
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16 articles
Home Tech
Smart home standards keep fighting, and your house is the battlefield
Devices that will not talk to each other are the visible result of an unresolved commercial dispute about who owns the home.
Home Tech
How a robot vacuum decides where it has already been
Navigation in a cheap consumer device is a genuinely hard problem, solved differently at different price points.
Software
What open source guarantees, and the three things it does not
Published source answers who may read and change the code. It says nothing about who is checking it or who is paying for it.
Software
Keeping accurate time is much harder than a clock suggests
Computers drift, timezones move by political decision, and getting both right is a surprisingly deep engineering problem.
Home Tech
A fridge does not make cold, it moves heat somewhere else
The whole appliance is a pump that carries heat out of an insulated box, which explains the warm back panel and the noise.
Home Tech
Why a microwave heats unevenly, and what the turntable is really for
Standing waves inside a metal box create fixed hot and cold regions, and every design feature is an attempt to work around them.
Home Tech
Why the eco cycle on a washing machine takes three hours
Most of the energy goes into heating water, so saving energy means using less heat and more time to compensate.
Home Tech
Why a smart bulb flickers, and what colour temperature actually means
Dimming an LED is not like dimming a filament, and the mismatch between old dimmers and new bulbs explains most complaints.
Home Tech
How a motion sensor decides that somebody is there
Most household sensors detect a change in infrared radiation, which is why they miss slow movement and trigger on warm air.
Home Tech
Why your television makes films look like a soap opera
Motion interpolation invents frames that were never filmed, and the resulting smoothness fights the frame rate cinema has used for…
Home Tech
A dishwasher does not scrub, it dissolves
The spray is only a delivery system. The actual cleaning is done by heat, alkalinity and enzymes working on food that has been left…
Home Tech
A dryer that runs cooler finishes cheaper
Evaporating water takes a fixed amount of energy. The only real question is whether the machine throws that energy away or uses it…
Home Tech
How a kettle knows the water boiled without measuring the water
Nothing inside is watching the temperature of the liquid. A strip of two metals is watching the steam, and that turns out to be…
Home Tech
An oven set to one temperature spends its time above and below it
The dial does not hold a temperature. It switches a heater on and off around one, and the swing is wider than most recipes assume.
Home Tech
How an infrared remote shouts a number at the whole room
It does not aim, it does not connect and it never receives an answer. It flashes an invisible code and hopes something is listening.