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Chinese Regulators May Kill Retractable Car Door Handles That Never Should Have Existed

November 26, 2025 by 157 Comments

Headlights. Indicators. Trunk releases. Seatbelts. Airbags. Just about any part of a car you can think of is governed by a long and complicated government regulation. It’s all about safety, ensuring that the car-buying public can trust that their vehicles won’t unduly injure or maim them in regular operation, or in the event of accident.

However, one part of the modern automobile has largely escaped regulation—namely, the humble door handle. Automakers have been free to innovate with new and wacky designs, with Tesla in particular making waves with its electronic door handles. However, after a series of deadly incidents where doors wouldn’t open, regulators are now examining if these door handles are suitable for road-going automobiles. As always, regulations are written in blood, but it raises the question—was not the danger of these complicated electronic door handles easy to foresee?

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Why Samsung Phones Are Failing Emergency Calls In Australia

November 19, 2025 by 66 Comments

We’re taught how to call emergency numbers from a young age; whether it be 911 in the US, 999 in the UK, or 000 in Australia. The concept is simple—if you need aid from police, fire, or ambulance, you pick up a phone and dial and help will be sent in short order.

It’s a service many of us have come to rely on; indeed, it’s function can swing the very balance between life or death. Sadly, in Australia, that has come to pass, with a person dying when their Samsung phone failed to reach the Triple Zero (000) emergency line. It has laid bare an obscure technical issue that potentially leaves thousands of lives at risk. Continue reading “Why Samsung Phones Are Failing Emergency Calls In Australia” →

Expert Systems: The Dawn Of AI

October 29, 2025 by 18 Comments

We’ll be honest. If you had told us a few decades ago we’d teach computers to do what we want, it would work some of the time, and you wouldn’t really be able to explain or predict exactly what it was going to do, we’d have thought you were crazy. Why not just get a person? But the dream of AI goes back to the earliest days of computers or even further, if you count Samuel Butler’s letter from 1863 musing on machines evolving into life, a theme he would revisit in the 1872 book Erewhon.

Of course, early real-life AI was nothing like you wanted. Eliza seemed pretty conversational, but you could quickly confuse the program. Hexapawn learned how to play an extremely simplified version of chess, but you could just as easily teach it to lose.

But the real AI work that looked promising was the field of expert systems. Unlike our current AI friends, expert systems were highly predictable. Of course, like any computer program, they could be wrong, but if they were, you could figure out why.

Experts?

As the name implies, expert systems drew from human experts. In theory, a specialized person known as a “knowledge engineer” would work with a human expert to distill his or her knowledge down to an essential form that the computer could handle.

This could range from the simple to the fiendishly complex, and if you think it was hard to do well, you aren’t wrong. Before getting into details, an example will help you follow how it works.

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Built-In Batteries: A Daft Idea With An Uncertain Future

October 23, 2025 by 60 Comments

Having a gadget’s battery nestled snugly within the bowels of a device has certain advantages. It finally solves the ‘no batteries included’ problem, and there is no more juggling of AA or AAA cells, nor their respective chargers. Instead each device is paired to that one battery that is happily charged using a standardized USB connector, and suddenly everything is well in the world.

Everything, except for the devices that cannot be used while charging, wireless devices that are suddenly dragging along a wire while charging and which may have charging ports in irrational locations, as well as devices that would work quite well if it wasn’t for that snugly embedded battery that’s now dead, dying, or on fire.

Marrying devices with batteries in this manner effectively means tallying up all the disadvantages of the battery chemistries and their chargers, adding them to the device’s feature list, and limiting their effective lifespan in the process. It also prevents the rapid swapping with fresh batteries, which is why everyone is now lugging chunky powerbanks around instead of spare batteries, and hogging outlets with USB chargers. And the task of finding a replacement for non-standardized pouch cell batteries can prove to be hard or impossible.

Looking at the ‘convenience’ argument from this way makes one wonder whether it is all just marketing that we’re being sold. Especially in light of the looming 2027 EU regulation on internal batteries that is likely to wipe out the existence of built-in batteries with an orbital legal strike. Are we about to say ‘good riddance’ to a terrible idea?

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What Happened To Running What You Wanted On Your Own Machine?

October 22, 2025 by 137 Comments

When the microcomputer first landed in homes some forty years ago, it came with a simple freedom—you could run whatever software you could get your hands on. Floppy disk from a friend? Pop it in. Shareware demo downloaded from a BBS? Go ahead! Dodgy code you wrote yourself at 2 AM? Absolutely. The computer you bought was yours. It would run whatever you told it to run, and ask no questions.

Today, that freedom is dying. What’s worse, is it’s happening so gradually that most people haven’t noticed we’re already halfway into the coffin.

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Rubik’s WOWCube: What Really Makes A Toy?

October 15, 2025 by 24 Comments

If there ever was a toy that enjoys universal appeal and recognition, the humble Rubik’s Cube definitely is on the list. Invented in 1974 by sculptor and professor of architecture Ernő Rubik with originally the name of Magic Cube, it features a three-by-three grid of colored surfaces and an internal mechanism which allows for each of these individual sections of each cube face to be moved to any other face. This makes the goal of returning each face to its original single color into a challenge, one which has both intrigued and vexed many generations over the decades. Maybe you’ve seen one?

Although there have been some variations of the basic 3×3 grid cube design over the years, none have been as controversial as the recently introduced WOWCube. Not only does this feature a measly 2×2 grid on each face, each part of the grid is also a display that is intended to be used alongside an internal processor and motion sensors for digital games. After spending many years in development, the Rubik’s WOWCube recently went up for sale at $299, raising many questions about what market it’s really targeting.

Is the WOWCube a ‘real’ Rubik’s Cube, and what makes something into a memorable toy and what into a mere novelty gadget that is forgotten by the next year like a plague of fidget spinners?

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Smart Bulbs Are Turning Into Motion Sensors

October 7, 2025 by 33 Comments

If you’ve got an existing smart home rig, motion sensors can be a useful addition to your setup. You can use them for all kinds of things, from turning on lights when you enter a room, to shutting off HVAC systems when an area is unoccupied. Typically, you’d add dedicated motion sensors to your smart home to achieve this. But what if your existing smart light bulbs could act as the motion sensors instead?

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