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Thursday, January 23rd, 2025
| Time | Event |
| 5:24p | Solar-Charging Backpacks Are Helping Children To Read After Dark A Tanzanian entrepreneur is transforming cement bags into solar-powered backpacks, helping students study after dark in areas without electricity. Innocent James's company, Soma Bags, sold 36,000 solar backpacks across Africa last year, with prices ranging from 12,000 to 22,500 Tanzanian shillings ($4-8), according to CNN. The innovation comes as 600 million Africans lack electricity access. In Tanzania, fewer than half of mainland households have power, forcing families to rely on expensive kerosene lamps. The backpacks, manufactured in James's Bulale factory employing 65 staff, feature flexible solar panels that charge during students' walks to school. One day of sunlight provides six to eight hours of reading light, making them more cost-effective than kerosene lamps commonly used in Tanzania, where fewer than half of mainland households have electricity access. 
Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
| 11:00p | Intel Pitches Modular PC Designs To Make Repairs Less Painful Intel is advocating for modular PC designs to improve repairability, reduce e-waste, and align with the right-to-repair movement. A trio of executives makes their case for such designs in a recent blog post. The Register reports: Intel's approach to the problem is to draft three proposals targeting different market segments, saying that a one-size-fits-all approach would not be able to address the nuanced demands of these varied segments. Those three segments comprise "Premium Modular PC" (actually a laptop design); "Entry/Mainstream Modular PC" (another laptop); and "Desktop Modular PC." The first envisages a three-board system, comprising a core motherboard plus universal left and right I/O boards, the latter engineered to be common across fan-less Thin & Light designs with a 10W power envelope, and premium fanned designs for up to 20W or 30W. The Entry/Mainstream Modular PC is similar, with a core motherboard and left and right I/O boards, although in this segment, Intel says these can be redesigned to allow multiple SKUs of the design. The circuit boards are also cost-optimized here to cater to the mainstream segment, it says. The Desktop Modular PC design appears from Intel's diagram to use a midplane that has the Platform Controller Hub (PCH) silicon, with other modules connecting to this. These include CPU, memory, and GPU modules, removable using slide rails, along with hot-swappable storage, all designed to fit inside a 5 liter desktop chassis. Intel also said it is introducing subsystem-level replaceable modules. In practice, this means something like a Type-C connector on a flexible printed circuit (FPC) or an M.2 circuit board. The idea is that the module can easily be swapped out if the port or connector is damaged.
Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
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