Meanwhile, in Japan, train stations are being 3D-printed in an afternoon

https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/28/japan_3d_printing_railway/

With so many commercial tech news sites disappearing behind paywalls, becoming affiliate shills or just dying, I find I'm using the good old https://www.theregister.com more and more.  For over 20 some years the Reg has been delivering slightly snarky news with a tech edge.


I know back in the old days we sometimes rolled our eyes at The Register's Search coverage, but yeah they are still here, not perfect but not behind a paywall either and I've been realizing how much I actually use them.

VW Design Boss Confirms Buttons Coming Back: 'It's A Car, Not A Phone'

https://insideevs.com/news/752840/vw-brings-back-buttons-switches/

VW cut most of the physical controls out of its early EVs and learned a long, painful lesson.

Hydrogen Buses Keep Failing — De Lijn Is Just The Latest To Cut Losses

https://cleantechnica.com/2025/03/07/hydrogen-buses-keep-failing-de-lijn-is-just-the-latest-to-cut-losses/

City after city have tried, but can't make them work.

Of course he does...

https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-doge-post-office-amtrak-privatized-2025-3

But these won't get sold to builders.  They will get sold to corporate raiders who will sell off and gut them of anything of value and leave an empty shell laden with debt.

BYD Unveils Plug-In Hybrid With 1,305 Miles Of Total Range

https://cleantechnica.com/2024/05/28/byd-unveils-plug-in-hybrid-with-1305-miles-of-total-range/

80 mpg.

QuoteOkay, are you sitting down? If you happen to live in China, the base price for the BYD Qin L and Seal 06 is 99,800 yuan ($13,775). Holy EV disruption, Batman! If these cars ever came to the US, BYD would never be able to keep up with demand. Of course, they are not coming to the US, because there is now a 100 percent tariff on Chinese made cars, but even at double the price, American buyers would be breaking down the doors to get one.

Yeah, not coming to the US.

It's Official: the Cybertruck is More Explosive than the Ford Pinto

https://fuelarc.com/evs/its-official-the-cybertruck-is-more-explosive-than-the-ford-pinto/


Plus it's ugly.  You can overcome being a deathtrap but you can't overcome ugly.

Automakers finally got the memo

https://autos.yahoo.com/automakers-plan-build-more-cheap-152500975.html

Waffle House is placing a surcharge on every egg it sells

https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/04/food/waffle-house-egg-surcharge/index.html

EU regulations require a search engine choice screen on new Android phones to help break the Google monopoly.  So here is a breakdown of the choices in each EU country.

https://www.android.com/choicescreen/dma/searchengine/options/

PrivacyWall and Yep are kind of surprising to be on there, to me.


H/T to Mojeek forums.

Russia-linked cable-cutting tanker seized by Finland 'was loaded with spying equipment'

https://www.lloydslist.com/LL1151955/Russia-linked-cable-cutting-tanker-seized-by-Finland-was-loaded-with-spying-equipment

Other sources report one of the anchors for this ship is missing.

In Iowa.

https://cbs2iowa.com/amp/news/local/johnson-county-iowa-city-pop-up-metro-train-crandic-cedar-rapids

QuoteThe estimated startup cost of $5.7 million includes leasing battery-powered trains, remanufactured from London Underground cars, adding charging stations, and upgrading grade crossings.

Uses Lithium Iron batteries.

More details about the company Pop=up Metro:

https://www.trains.com/trn/news-reviews/news-wire/pop-up-metro-aims-to-provide-affordable-passenger-operation/

Seems like an interesting concept to provide train transit in lower population density areas. 

Both KDE and GNOME to offer official distros

Leading Linux desktops boldly address the "not enough distros" non-problem

https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/29/kde_and_gnome_distros/

It had to happen.  We used to call these blogrolls but in 2024 you have to dress it up and call in a social network.

Create lists of blogs you love, and follow lists created by others. You can even use lists to aggregate Mastodon feeds, newspapers, Reddit subreddits, podcasts - anything that has an RSS or Atom feed.

https://blogflock.com


I have not registered or tried this yet.   Points though to anyone doing things with RSS.   Maybe this will be the gateway drug for RSS for the youngsters.

Google is inserting search links into webpages in the Google App now

https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/25/24305922/google-app-ios-inserting-search-links-websites

You have to opt-out.


Apps are bad, Google apps are evil.

Ecosia and Qwant, two European search engines, join forces on an index to shrink reliance on Big Tech

https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/11/ecosia-and-qwant-two-european-search-engines-join-forces-on-building-an-index-to-shrink-reliance-on-big-tech/

1. I'll believe it when I see it.
2. Ecosia gets 20 million queries per mo.  Qwant gets 6 million.
3. MS/Bing raising price on Bing API is driving a lot of this.
4. Plan: first they will tackle French lang sites, then add German.  English will be the third lang they add - sometime.
5. Qwant was supposed to be building their own index over all these years but that seems to have stalled.
6. Lots of razzle dazzle about about AI LLM to obfuscate questions about actually doing the work of crawling.
7. Qwant sounds like the lead partner in this. Heh.
8. Lots of tap dancing about building new engine from ground up.  Okay. Heh.
9. Tech Crunch does interview Brave search, some interesting tidbits there.
10. Not one mention of Mojeek.

> improves across every skill set

Especially pre-banning RC's nick. 

Verizon's mobile services are down across the country

https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/30/24258362/verizon-mobile-services-down-sos-mode

Some interesting things on the website.

https://freewebsearch.org/en/

https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/22/ai_training_data_shrinks/