Cool New Tech Inventions I Learnt This Week

Hello guys,

I’m gonna go over a bunch of tech that I think you guys are going to find pretty interesting if you haven't heard about them before. Let's just jump right in and get started.

1: Intel’s Optane Storage: 1000 times faster than an ordinary SSD

Intel has released a new type of memory that they're saying is going to change everything and you know what? I think I believe them. This new storage technology is called “3D XPoint” which is part of a larger Optane technology framework or actually it's 3D crosspoint technically.

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[Intel Optane Technology -Intel.com]}

Basically, the whole idea is that this type of memory is going to be literally a thousand times faster than an SSD and almost as fast as RAM potentially but the interesting thing about it is that you could use this type of card as either, so if you wanted to use it just as super-fast storage, you could do that or if you wanted the operating system to use it as kind of maybe a slower version of extra RAM if it needs it, it could be that as well.

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[Intel Optane storage drive -Computerworld.com]}

Right now, this technology is pretty new, they just released one of the first cards for it and it's mostly going to be used for data centers until further notice so don't expect it for consumer PCs but they will come out eventually. If you want to do like 4k video editing where it reads it pretty much instantly and you don't have any juddering in the timeline or if you're gaming because if the developers know that these people that are going to be playing the games have way faster storage, they don't have to try to accommodate super slow storage with small graphics, they could have maybe a super amazing high setting for the people that have this super amazing high-speed storage.

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One of the funniest thing is that this type of memory is so fast that it's pretty much limited by current computer technology, the bus speeds on your motherboard or even the operating system itself might not be expecting to have a hard drive this fast, it might not be able to deal with it especially since the read and write technology is a little bit different. It reads and write at the single bit level and that's not really how current hard drives work, so we might have to wait until the operating systems and the motherboards and all that, catch to this new type of technology.

Intel has said that they are going to keep a close guard on this, they're not going to license it out to anyone and make sure that they're the only ones that are selling it, this must be pretty good if they're doing that. This is definitely something to keep an eye on if you start hearing more about it, don't be surprised because I think this could be a big deal, I mean it's a completely new type of storage that we might be seeing and who knows maybe in the future, it will completely replace ordinary SSDs.

2: Kickstarter Lindland Ruler

This is another cool tech that I thought you guys might find pretty interesting, some of you are going to be like What is the point of it? It's a special new ruler that they made, the designers of the Kickstarter called a Lindland Ruler.

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[Kickstarter Lindlund ruler -Kickstarter.com]}

The idea is that this ruler has four different measurements on it, two of them are like digital and the remaining two are real-world. It does centimeters, inches, pixels and pikas. If you don't know what those are, or you probably have no interest in centimeters, the idea is it will measure the number of pixels something has, if it's assuming 150 pixels per inch and Pikas is a unit of measurement for fonts and typefaces.

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[It comes with 4 measurements: centimeters, inches, picas, and pixels -Kickstarter.com]}

It's pretty easy to understand, if you ever seen a 12-point font, that is 1 pika in size. This is good for designers or something like that, if you do a lot of design work or you want to measure a photo and want to see how many pixels it has, this might be kind of cool.

3: Hydrogen Powered Train

Those of you who ride the train might be interested to hear that there's a new train type tested in Germany that is powered by a hydrogen fuel cell, a hydrogen powered train. They did the first test and there's going to be a few more tests later and apparently, it's going to be used for commercials.

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[World’s first zero-emissions hydrogen train -Inhabitat.com]}

If you don't already know, the best thing about hydrogen-powered fuel cells is that when you burn hydrogen to create energy, the only thing it releases is water, there's no greenhouse gases or anything like that, it's just water so it's possibly one of the best environmentally-friendly fuels out there maybe not exactly when you go to actually make the fuel but at least when you're burning it, it doesn't release anything except water.

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[Interior parts of the train -Inhabitat.com]}

This can be pretty useful although it might not be the most efficient method of powering a train. Apparently, this is supposed to go up to about 87 miles per hour at top speed but the first test only went up to about 50 miles an hour, so I don't know if they just weren't pushing it hard enough or maybe they need to really work on their efficiency but either way, it's still pretty cool and I think this could pave the way to a lot more energy friendly things in the future if it's successful.

If you enjoyed reading this article, don't forget to give it an upvote and share your thoughts as well.

Have a great weekend.

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References: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5

Image sources: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7

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_{GIF made by @foundation}

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Thanks to @camzy for this amazing toon.