pungent oder of RTV gasket maker

Just if you're interested: there are a tonne of different silicone chemistries.

Single part curing (no mixing needed, cure when exposed to air):

• Acetoxy (emit acetic acid)
• Alkoxy (emit methanol)
• Acetone
• Ketoxime (don't know if this one smells)

Two-part curing (you have to mix the two components, then it starts setting):

• Condensation cure (tin catalyst) cheaper
• Addition cure (platinum catalyst) basically better in every way but more expensive

Yes it looks like it's adjusting the port length. (In plain english: some speaker boxes have an intentional hole in them, if you adjust the length of the pathway that sound takes to exit the box through this hole then you adjust how bassy it sounds).

To add a hollow cavity into the plastic part would immensely complicate the design of the moulds (assuming you try and implement the cavity in the same style & orientation of what gluing that bit of wood in achieves). The plastic shells of this speaker look like they've been designed for two-part moulds, which is the cheapest and simplest way of designing a mould. Any internal cavities of the part would require bits of steel mould to be in the cavity during injection, those pieces then have to be removed somehow and that would be a nightmare. Two part moulds can just be clamped & separated over and over again without snagging on anything.

For the walls of a speaker to reflect sound they need to have a density that is very different to the air inside the chamber. As it turns out basically anything fulfills this criteria, even cardboard makes fine speakers (just don't get it wet or poke holes in it). Plastic vs MDF wouldn't matter here acoustically, both are fine.

Bits of particle board can easily be cut and glued by unskilled workers. For business reasons the injection moulding might be getting done at a different place to the final assembly, and the product manager who wants the speakers properly ported might only be in charge of the latter. IDK.

glue applied likely by a machine

I suspect this would be all human assembly. They'll probably have motorised torque-limited screwdrivers and jigs to hold the parts on during assembly, but still human arms doing the work.

In particular: stuffing the white polyester wadding in would be a PITA for an automated assembly machine. Humans are tolerant of variation and bits of wadding blowing away, pre-programmed movement robots are not.

Title of PCGamer's article is misleading, they want a court order to do it. Proof of death is not enough.

"In general, your GOG account and GOG content is not transferable. However, if you can obtain a copy of a court order that specifically entitles someone to your GOG personal account, the digital content attached to it taking into account the EULAs of specific games within it, and that specifically refers to your GOG username or at least email address used to create such an account, we'd do our best to make it happen. We're willing to handle such a situation and preserve your GOG library—but currently we can only do it with the help of the justice system."

They have to do that anyway. Court orders overrule a company's policies in most (all?) legal systems.

This would have been even more troll with a 0% answer, because that would add another layer of paradox.

"Eat now, ..." is terribly depressing. It sounds like you're trading financial autonomy in exchange for another basic human right.

There have been constant news articles coming out over the past few years claiming the next big thing in supercapacitor and battery technologies. Very few actually turn out to work practically.

The most exciting things to happen in the last few years (from an average citizen's perspective) are the wider availability of sodium ion batteries (I believe some power tools ship with them now?), the continued testing of liquid flow batteries (endless trials starting with the claim that they might be more economic) and the reduction in costs of lithium-ion solid state batteries (probably due to the economics of electric car demand).

FWIW the distinction between capacitors and batteries gets blurred in the supercapacitor realm. Many of the items sold or researched are blends of chemical ("battery") and electrostatic ("capacitor") energy storage. The headline of this particular pushes the misconception that these concepts can't mix.

My university login no longer works so I can't get a copy of the paper itself :( But from the abstract it looks first stage, far from getting excited about:

This precise control over relaxation time holds promise for a wide array of applications and has the potential to accelerate the development of highly efficient energy storage systems.

"holds promise" and "has the potential" are not miscible with "May Be the Beginning of the End for Batteries".

I had to look this up, so I'll leave it here for others:

youth group = religious organisation trying to sign people up

(In my country if you look this term up on the web you get https://youth.gov.au . They probably wear thongs too)

"Thou has missed daily prayers for two whole weeks"

Workaround for fingers having the wrong count.

I've been encountering this! I thought it was the topics I was using as prompts somehow being bad -- it was making some of my podcast sketches look stupidly racist, admittedly though some of them it seemed to style after some not-so-savoury podcasters, which made things worse.

Other manufacturers of all manner of stainless products seem to have figured out a solution to the problem.

Two design choices together probably make the problem multiplicatively worse:

1. Flat panels are not anywhere as stiff as curved panels.
2. Mechanical parameters of the stainless alloy they're using (eg it might retain the coiled shape more than some other plain steel alloys).

I can't get over the flatness... those panels surely rattle too? Or do they void-fill the doors and body with something?

Very misleading title. This is not an energy efficient process (what we need for energy storage), instead it has a high chemical yield.