Hasta La Gadget!

The Democratic House speaker has been in Congress for over three decades.

Don’t expect the worldwide chip shortage to end any time soon. Bloomberg and The Washington Post note the US Commerce Department has published a semiconductor supply chain report estimating that the global shortage will last until at least the second half of 2022. “We aren’t even close to being out of the woods” with supply problems, Department Secretary Gina Raimondo said.

Many companies are particularly sensitive to problems, too. The median chip inventory for a client company plunged from 40 days in 2019 to under five days in 2021. Even a relatively short (weeks-long) disruption overseas could shut down an American factory, the Department said.

The shortage is particularly damaging to broadband companies, car makers and medical device producers, according to the report. Despite early claims, there wasn’t evidence hoarding contributed to the shortfalls. Demand was higher, too, with median interest about 17 percent higher in 2021 than it was two years earlier. The Commerce Department’s study was comprehensive, obtaining supply chain data from almost all major semiconductor firms and companies across a range of industries.

Officials concluded the government couldn’t directly end the shortage. Private companies were “best positioned” to overcome challenges by increasing production, optimizing their designs and limiting the impact on their supply chains. However, Raimondo used this as an opportunity to plug President Biden’s proposed $52 billion subsidy through the US Innovation and Competition Act (USICA). The investment could help “rebuild American manufacturing” and boost domestic supply chains for “years ahead,” she said.

Factories resulting from USICA money wouldn’t be ready for years, however, and the bill itself has been delayed. While it passed a crucial Senate vote, the House bill is only expected to surface by this week at the earliest. It could take longer to both clear the House and evolve into a final form Biden can sign into law. For now, the tech industry largely has to solve this dilemma on its own.

Battery life is something that many of us are concerned about when it comes to our smartphones, tablets, and laptops. This is because current battery tech doesn’t last forever in terms of the number of charges it holds, and also how much battery can be stored when it is at full charge.

This means that we usually find ourselves constantly having to charge our devices, like laptops, when we are working. Over time this will result in the battery degrading and maybe 1-2 years down the line, you’ll realize your laptop doesn’t last quite as long as it once did. That being said, there is some good news for Chromebook owners as Google is looking to bring Adaptive Charging to the devices.

This is according to code changes which hints that the feature could be coming to Chromebooks. On Pixel phones, how this works is that when your phone is plugged in overnight, it slow charges it which reduces things like heat and stress placed on the battery, thus preserving its lifespan.

For Chromebooks, it won’t work the exact same way and will use machine learning where it will try to learn your charging habits to decide its charging speed. So for example if you typically charge your Chromebook and do a lot of work on it during the day, it knows that’s when you need it to be fully charged.

However, at night when you don’t use it as much but still keep it plugged in, it might slow down the charge because it thinks you won’t really need it. The feature doesn’t appear to be live yet but it might be something that Chromebook users can look forward to in the future.

Google To Bring Adaptive Charging To Chromebooks

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Over the past year or so, we’ve seen an explosion in popularity in NFTs. For those unfamiliar, NFTs are essentially digital assets that can be bought and “owned” using blockchain technology that acts as a proof of ownership, like a digital receipt. This is versus current digital assets where anyone can save a photo or take a screenshot and creators will have a harder time trying to prove they own it.

While NFTs have grown in popularity, it does seem to be lacking mainstream support, but that could change soon as more companies are hopping on board the bandwagon. YouTube appears to be the next tech company interested in the tech, at least that’s what YouTube’s CEO Susan Wojicki is suggesting.

In a letter, Wojicki has revealed that YouTube is keen on exploring NFTs as a way to enhance the experience creators and fans have on the platform. “We’re always focused on expanding the YouTube ecosystem to help creators capitalize on emerging technologies, including things like NFTs, while continuing to strengthen and enhance the experiences creators and fans have on YouTube.”

She does not state how the company plans to actually implement NFTs, but having a company such as YouTube throwing their support behind it, it could help the tech take off in a bigger way. YouTube is not the first to express their interest as an earlier report suggested that Facebook and Instagram are exploring it as well, while Twitter is also looking into it by letting users use NFTs as their profile pictures.

YouTube Will Be The Next Tech Company To Explore NFTs

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On Facebook and Instagram, there are options that let you share posts with select users (or Stories, in the case of Instagram). This means that while you can have a private profile, you can create posts that can only be seen by people you choose, or hidden from specific people that you choose.

Now it looks like Twitter is working on something similar codenamed “Flock” according to Alessandro Paluzzi. Basically with this Flock feature, which apparently won’t be the final name, users can create groups of up to 150 people to include in their “flock”. This means that when you post a tweet, you can choose to only have people in that group to see it.

#Twitter continues to work on Twitter Flock by adding an explanation of how it works 👀

ℹ️ You can choose up to 150 people to include in your Twitter Flock 👥
ℹ️ People won’t be notified if you remove them from the list 🔕 pic.twitter.com/xtGcDiHgxS

— Alessandro Paluzzi (@alex193a) January 21, 2022

So similar to what Facebook and Instagram are doing, this allows Twitter users to have public profiles but still post more personal things that maybe a random stranger on the internet won’t be able to see. Based on the way the feature is currently setup, Twitter says that users can add or remove people from this list anytime and they will not be notified, so if you have a falling out with one of your friends in your flock, you can remove them and they won’t know about it.

Right now, the only way for Twitter users to keep their tweets from being seen by strangers is to make their accounts private so that they get to choose who can follow them and who gets to see their tweets, so this “Flock” feature could help give users a bit more flexibility.

Twitter Testing Out New Feature That Lets You Share Tweets With Select Users

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