Power & Batteries
USB-C solved the connector and not the confusion
One port now carries a dozen incompatible capability sets. The shape is standard; almost nothing else is.
Junko Ishida
Contributing writer, Tech Behind Things
Junko covers batteries, charging and energy density, and is unimpressed by most battery claims.
Contact Junko through our contact page — mark your message for their attention and it will be passed on.
22 articles
Software
File formats decide whether your files outlive the software
Choosing a format is a preservation decision disguised as a save dialog.
Power & Batteries
Where the electricity goes when everything is switched off
Standby consumption is small per device and adds up because there are now dozens of them, and some of the largest offenders look…
Power & Batteries
The memory effect was real, and it has nothing to do with your phone
A genuine phenomenon in an older battery chemistry became folklore that is now applied, wrongly, to cells that behave in the…
Power & Batteries
Why an electric car battery outlives a phone battery
The same underlying chemistry lasts far longer in a vehicle because the pack is managed, buffered and cooled in ways a phone cannot…
Power & Batteries
What happens when a lithium cell fails, and what to do about it
Thermal runaway is a self-sustaining reaction rather than a fire in the ordinary sense, and that changes how it should be handled.
Software
Why your device stops getting updates long before it stops working
Support ends because a chain of suppliers stops publishing code, not because the hardware became incapable.
Software
Sync is not a backup, and the difference shows up on your worst day
A service that mirrors your files faithfully will mirror a deletion or an encryption just as faithfully.
Software
Why some machine learning runs on your device and some cannot
The split is decided by model size, memory bandwidth and power, and each of those constraints has a hard edge.
Software
Why text sometimes turns into question marks and boxes
Characters, encodings and fonts are three separate layers, and mangled text tells you which one broke.
Software
Why software ships with bugs the developers already know about
Shipping is a decision about which known defects are acceptable, and pretending otherwise would mean never releasing anything.
Software
What a browser does between your click and the page appearing
A sequence of lookups, handshakes, parses and layout passes runs in a fraction of a second, and slow pages are usually stuck in one…
Software
Computers cannot invent randomness, so they harvest it
Deterministic machines produce predictable sequences by definition, and security depends on collecting genuine unpredictability…
Power & Batteries
Cold does not drain a battery, it hides the charge until things warm up
A phone that dies at a bus stop in winter usually has plenty of energy left. The chemistry has simply become too sluggish to…
Software
Why a computer insists that a tenth plus two tenths is not three tenths
Some perfectly ordinary decimal fractions have no exact representation in binary, and the arithmetic that follows inherits that gap…
Software
A file is a promise the filesystem makes, not an object on the disk
The name, the contents and the location are three separate things held together by bookkeeping, and most storage mysteries live in…
Software
How one processor convincingly pretends to be a different one
Emulation is translation performed continuously, and the reason it feels fast is that the translation is done once and then reused.
Software
Adding cores stops helping at the point where the work refuses to divide
Every program contains a portion that must happen in order, and that portion sets a ceiling no amount of hardware can lift.
Software
How a letter shape becomes pixels, and why it looks different everywhere
A font stores outlines, not pictures. Turning a smooth curve into a grid of square pixels is a decision, and every system decides…
Software
Why your update arrives a week after somebody else's
Releases are handed out in widening circles while somebody watches the failure rate, and your device's position in that queue is…
Software
What a computer does in the seconds before anything appears
Before an operating system exists, something has to wake the hardware, prove the memory works and find code worth trusting.
Software
Modern software is assembled out of other people's software
A small program can pull in hundreds of components written by strangers, and the resolution rules that choose their versions are…