Hasta La Gadget!

Between a dwindling list of distractions to keep me busy in the outside world and my work days ending hours before anyone else I know, I spend roughly two-thirds of most days with a mouse in my hand. Whether I’m toiling away here on The Inventory or putting Superman to shame in Spellbreak, it’s by far my most used…

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When it was first announced that TikTok would have to sell itself off to US companies, it was revealed that Microsoft was the frontrunner to acquire the company. However, in a short statement put out by the company today, Microsoft has announced that they would no longer be acquiring the company.

According to the statement, it was revealed that ByteDance was the one who cancelled the deal, and not Microsoft. “ByteDance let us know today they would not be selling TikTok’s US operations to Microsoft. We are confident our proposal would have been good for TikTok’s users, while protecting national security interests.”

The company adds, “To do this, we would have made significant changes to ensure the service met the highest standards for security, privacy, online safety, and combatting disinformation, and we made these principles clear in our August statement. We look forward to seeing how the service evolves in these important areas.”

It will be interesting to see how this plays out due to the new restrictions that China had put on the exporting of Chinese technology, where the government would need to give their express approval before that happens, which could complicate the sale of the company, as well as future sales of other Chinese-related technology or companies.

Microsoft Is Not Buying TikTok Anymore

, original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

The pandemic has led to N95 masks quickly becoming one of the world’s most sought-after resources as essential workers burned through billions of them. New research could lead to an N95 that you can recharge rather than throw away — or even one that continuously tops itself up for maximum effectiveness.

The proposed system, from researchers at Technion-IIT in Israel and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in India, is not one of decontamination, as you might expect. Instead, it focuses on another aspect of N95 masks that renders them less effective over time.

N95s use both mechanical filtering, in which particles are caught in a matrix of microscopic fibers, and electrostatic filtering, in which particles are attracted to surfaces that carry a static charge. It’s like the old trick where you rub a balloon on your head and it sticks — but at the scale of microns.

The combination of these two methods makes N95 masks very effective, but the electrostatic charge, like any charge, dissipates after time as air and moisture pass over it. While decontamination via UV or high temperature may help keep the mechanical filter from becoming a tiny petri dish, they do nothing to restore the electrostatic charge that acted as a second barrier to entry.

In a paper published in the journal Physics of Fluids, Dov Levine and Shankar Ghosh (from Technion and Tata, respectively) show that it’s possible to recharge an N95’s filter to the point where it was close to off-the-shelf levels of efficacy. All that’s needed is to place the filter between two plate electrodes and apply a strong electric field.

“We find that the total charge deposited on the masks depends strongly on the charging time… with the pristine value almost reattained after a 60 min charge at 1000 V,” write the researchers in their paper.

A self-charging N95 mask prototype

It’s unlikely that healthcare workers are going to be disassembling their masks after every shift, though. While a service and special mask type could (and if it’s effective, should) be established to do this, the team also explored the possibility of a mask with a built-in battery that recharges itself constantly:

A solution that can help replenish the lost charge on the masks in real time would be desirable. In this section, we provide a proof-of-concept method of keeping the masks charged, which comes as a logical extension of our recharging method.

We tested a technique by which the filter material maintains its charge and thus its filtration efficiency… Since the currents required are extremely small, a large battery is not required, and it is possible that a small compact and practical solution may be feasible.

The image above shows a prototype, which the team found to work quite well.

Of course it’s not quite ready for deployment; IEEE Spectrum asked Peter Tsai, the creator of the N95 mask, for his opinion on it. He suggested that the team’s method for testing filtration efficacy is “likely questionable” but didn’t take issue with the rest of the study.

Though it won’t be in hospitals tomorrow or next week, the team notes that “crucially, our method can be performed using readily available equipment and materials and so can be employed both in urban and rural settings.” So once it’s thoroughly tested it’s possible these rechargeable masks could start showing up everywhere. Let’s hope so.

While I think we can all agree that every app on our phone is probably an invasive little shit, I’d argue that weather apps deserve their own little corner in hell. We’ve seen weather apps sign folks up for services without their say-so, sneakily get location data from users who deliberately turned that function off,…

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Whenever we delete something on Windows, it is typically sent to the recycle bin. This usually gives users a chance to recover those files in case they were deleted by accident. But did you know that until you actually empty the recycle bin, the files you “deleted” actually still take up storage space on your computer?

This is why it’s important to empty the recycle bin every now and then, but we get it, sometimes you don’t think about it or forget to do it, but the good news is that if you have a few minutes to spare, you can actually set it up in such a way that you can set it so that you can automatically empty your recycle bin on a schedule, and here’s how.

How to empty your recycle bin on a schedule

1. Go to Settings > System > Storage
2. Under Storage sense, make sure the toggle is turned to On
3. Click Configure Storage sense or run it now
4. Under Temporary Files, look for “Delete files in my recycle bin if they have been there for over”
5. From the drop-down menu, you can choose “Never”, 1 day, 14 days, 30 days, or 60 days

Assuming you didn’t choose “Never”, this means that depending on your duration, your recycle bin will actually automatically empty itself based on the number of days you’ve chosen. Unless you’re hard up on storage space, 30 days is a good duration as it will at the very least give you some time to recover files that you might have deleted by accident or if you have had a change of heart about a deleted file.

Do take note that once you’ve emptied out the recycle bin, they are essentially gone for “good”. We put “good” in quotes because there are actually ways to recover deleted files using third-party software, but your mileage may vary depending on the software and how long ago it’s been deleted.

The best thing you can do to avoid any hassle or headaches is to make sure that you really want those files deleted first. Also if you’re deleting to free up space on your computer, you might want to consider backing up to an external hard drive or cloning your existing drive so that you will still have a copy if you ever need it.

How To Automatically Empty The Windows Recycle Bin (On A Schedule)

, original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.