The USB Promoter Group announced USB4 Version2.0 on Thursday, a specification that will allow for up to 80Gbps to be transferred over the USB-C connector that is commonly in use on PCs and smartphones. The standard will be backwards compatible with USB4 Version 1.0, USB 3.2, USB 2.0, and Thunderbolt 3 — but not USB 1.0 or Thunderbolt 4. Until now, USB and Thunderbolt have basically co-existed in parallel worlds. Because of somewhat murky licensing issues, Intel-based laptops have used a Thunderbolt 3 or Thunderbolt 4 port and laptops powered by AMD’s Ryzen have used USB4. As we discussed in our USB4…
September 1, 2022
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The European Union (EU) and the State of California has some of the toughest consumer and privacy rights rules and regulations. The legislative arm of the European Union has proposed new rules for mobile phone and tablet reparability. It says manufacturers should make at least 15 components available for at least five years after they release a new phone in the EU. Within that timespan, consumers would be able to replace parts such as batteries, displays, chargers, back covers and SIM and memory card trays, as The Verge notes. The European Commission is also eyeing improvements to battery durability. It says that phone…
In January 2023 Google Chrome is going to block extensions still using the old Manifest V2 rules. An extension manifest outlines the permissions and abilities a developer includes in an extension for Chrome browser. From Google’s perspective, Manifest V3 comes to enhance user privacy and security by: Limiting extension access to user network requests. Forcing authors to include all functionality within the extension, ending the practice of hosting code remotely. Moving network request modifications from the extensions to the browser. Replacing background pages with dedicated service workers to improve browser performance. The unintended consequences of the new manifest is most of…
Over the past few days I been making a lot of updates to this blog both visual and behind the scenes. Here are a few of the changes with further details below: New Theme with new images and color pallet. Changed the order of the side bar widgets. Corrected a coding error with the Collapsing Categories widget which was causing the site to display a PHP error. Purged 95% of the ‘Categories’. New social posting, follow and notifications. Receive notifications via email, Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. Most noticeable is the new theme images for the background and header. Updated the…