Hasta La Gadget!

The lawsuit by the civil liberties group is the fourth challenge to the president’s latest effort to fund a border wall.

The clean energy boffins in their labs are always upping the theoretical limit on how much power you can get out of sunshine, but us plebes actually installing solar cells are stuck with years-old tech that’s not half as good as what they’re seeing. This new design from Insolight could be the one that changes all that.

Insolight is a spinoff from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, where they’ve been working on this new approach for a few years — and it’s almost ready to hit your roof.

Usually solar cells collect sunlight on their entire surface, converting it to electricity at perhaps 15-19 percent efficiency — meaning about 85 percent of the energy is lost in the process. There are more efficient cells out there, but they’re generally expensive and special-purpose, or use some exotic material.

One place people tend to spare no expense, however, is in space. Solar cells on many satellites are more efficient but, predictably, not cheap. But that’s not a problem if you only use just a tiny amount of them and concentrate the sunlight on those; that’s the Insolight insight.

Small but very high-efficiency cells are laid down on a grid, and above that is placed a honeycomb-like lens array that takes light and bends it into a narrow beam concentrated only on the tiny cells. As the sun moves, the cell layer moves ever so slightly, keeping the beams on target. They’ve achieved as high as 37 percent efficiency in tests, and 30 percent in consumer-oriented designs. That means half again or twice the power from the same area as ordinary panels.

Certainly this adds a layer or two of complexity to the current mass-manufactured arrays that are “good enough” but far from state of the art. But the resulting panels aren’t much different in size or shape, and don’t require special placement or hardware, such as a concentrator or special platform. And a recently completed pilot test on an EPFL roof was passed with flying colors.

“Our panels were hooked up to the grid and monitored continually. They kept working without a hitch through heat waves, storms and winter weather,” said Mathiu Ackermann, the company’s CTO, in an EPFL news release. “This hybrid approach is particularly effective when it’s cloudy and the sunlight is less concentrated, since it can keep generating power even under diffuse light rays.”

The company is now in talks with solar panel manufacturers, whom they are no doubt trying to convince that it’s not that hard to integrate this tech with their existing manufacturing lines — “a few additional steps during the assembly stage,” said Ackermann. Expect Insolight panels to hit the market in 2022 — yeah, it’s still a ways off, but maybe by then we’ll all have electric cars too and this will seem like an even better deal.

A loophole in Google’s popular Chrome browser which enables websites to not only detect but block users who access their sites through the browser’s Incognito mode is going to be fixed. Many users rely on the mode to not store local records of their browsing history. Websites are also prevented from tracking the user with cookies when they’re in Incognito mode.

9to5Google reports that future versions of the Chrome browser are going to address the issue which enables websites to block users that may be accessing their sites with Chrome in Incognito mode.

Websites require the tracking data for ad revenue and that’s one major reason why some sites prevent users from accessing their content if they’re using Incognito mode, this includes websites like the MIT Technology Review. Sites try to identify such users with the “FileSystem” API which is disabled when Incognito mode is being used as it allows permanent files to be created.

Recent commits to Chromium’s source code suggest that the browser may soon begin tricking websites that the FireSystem API is always operational. It would thus close the loophole that allows them to identify visitors using Incognito mode. It would do that by creating a virtual file system in RAM which will get deleted at the end of the Incognito session. It’s expected that this functionality might be rolled out to the public with the stable version of Chrome 76 that’s due in a couple of months.

Chrome Loophole Which Enables Incognito Mode Blocking To Be Fixed

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If you think you’ve collected all of the Transformers toys, think again. There’s one Transformers toy that’s missing from your collection. That’s because the Transformers Generations Collaborative: Ghostbusters Mash-Up, Ecto-1 Ectotron Figure is not available yet.

But you can pre-order it now from GameStop – with shipping starting this July. This is the Transformers/ Ghostbusters mashup you never knew you needed until now. The iconic Ecto-1 Cadillac from the 1984 Ghostbusters movie is now a Transformers robot called “Ectotron.” The 7-inch long figure comes with his own Proton Pack accessory and a Slimer accessory. It converts between Ecto-1 and robot modes in 22 steps. This piece has some great detail and is going to look amazing in your collection whether you display it in Ecto-1 mode or as a robot. I prefer the car to the robot myself.

Who ya gonna call? Hasbro apparently. Now if we could only transform the Ghostbusters reboot into something decent, life would be perfect. Can you help with that Hasbro? I wish you could. But this is a start to helping me forget about it.

[via Geekologie]

Beloved sitcom Arrested Development will return to Netflix on March 15, bringing the second half of Season 5. Referred to as Part Two, this new batch will include eight episodes that’ll be available to all Netflix subscribers globally. The new episodes join the first batch of Season 5 that was released by Netflix nearly one year ago. This is the … Continue reading