Technology
Discover facts about technology. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
Technology
Push notifications route through centralized servers
Your favorite apps do not text you directly. Every single alert you receive is awkwardly funneled through giant intermediary servers maintained by the major…
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The video game crash that nearly killed the industry
In 1983, the video game market was flooded with so much absolute garbage (looking at you, E.T. for the Atari 2600) that consumers just completely stopped…
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How your authenticator knows the right six digits
Your security app doesn't actually communicate with anything to give you those six digits. Time-based one-time passwords are generated independently on your…
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Supermarkets once put GPS trackers in shopping carts
Retailers have been trying to gamify your misery for decades. Before smart cameras tracked your every move in Amazon Go stores, early 2000s supermarkets…
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Why editing a PDF feels almost impossible
The universally despised document format is literally just an inescapable prison for text. The entire purpose of a PDF is to freeze a document exactly as it…
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Entire residential houses can now be 3D printed in less than twenty-four hours using raw concrete
The housing crisis might actually be solved by a giant nozzle. Construction tech companies have developed massive 3D printers that squeeze out layers of…
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Vintage DVI monitor cables featured highly bendable pins
Nothing induced more anxiety than trying to blindly plug a DVI cord into the back of a dusty tower. The connector was packed with dozens of incredibly thin,…
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Media buffering preemptively hoards data for playback
Your media player is just incredibly anxious about running out of content. Buffering works by greedily downloading chunks of a file before playback even…
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Why quitting Vim is so confusing
Opening a specific terminal editor is easy, but escaping it is a legendary test of endurance. Because the environment does not use normal visual buttons,…
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How people doubled floppy-disk storage for free
Because why buy a second disk when you can just turn it over? Early home computer users routinely utilized a hole puncher to clip a notch into the side of…
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UTF-8 encoding supports over one million unique symbols
Gone are the days when computers could only understand basic English letters. This massive encoding standard accommodates nearly every language ever spoken,…
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What an SMS delivery receipt really confirms
Your phone's delivery notification is lying about your friend actually seeing your text. A standard SMS delivery receipt solely verifies that the message…
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MySpace sold for $580 million—and later just $35 million
Let this be a masterclass in how traditional media completely misunderstands the internet. Rupert Murdoch's News Corp bought MySpace at the absolute peak of…
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Basic input output systems initialize hardware on boot
Before your operating system can even stretch its legs, the BIOS has to wake up every piece of hardware and take attendance. It sits on a tiny chip and runs a…
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Why charging cables fray near the plug
Manufacturers could reinforce the ends of your wires, but where is the fun in that? The transition point between the rigid connector and the flexible cord…
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The 2038 bug that could reset computer clocks
The apocalypse wasn't cancelled; it was just delayed. On January 19, 2038, standard 32-bit integer clocks will simply run out of space and roll completely…
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Supercapacitors charge fast—and lose power fast
They are the frantic sprinters of the electronics world. All that power rushing in means they buffer power spikes wonderfully, but their internal…
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Why fusion power is always 30 years away
Scientists have successfully been promising limitless, clean energy by smashing atomic nuclei together for over half a century. It is the ultimate scientific…
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Your dimmer switch rapidly flickers the lights
Instead of foolishly burning off the excess electrical energy as useless heat, modern wall switches just brutally chop up the sine wave, rapidly strobing the…
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Laptop rubber feet leave sticky glue residue
The only thing keeping your expensive machine from sliding off the table is a dab of incredibly cheap adhesive. As the chassis heats up during normal use, the…
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Wireless peripheral connections artificially restrict range
Ever wonder why your smart ring drops its connection the second you walk to the kitchen? Short-range wireless communication is intentionally crippled by…
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How anti-reflective glass makes glare disappear
Museum cases and high-end watches achieve perfect clarity by weaponizing destructive physics. The glass is coated with microscopic layers of specific…
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First commercial graphical web browser was called Mosaic and it fundamentally popularized surfing the internet in 1993
It is hard to fathom the internet as a completely text-based nightmare, but that was the reality until Mosaic showed up. It was the very first browser that…
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The Soviet Union's .su domain remains active today
The internet rarely cleans up its historical ghosts. Assigned to the Soviet Union just before its total collapse, the domain remains highly active today,…
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