Short answer: It depends. Doing full flash reads of your USB sticks and SD cards (dd if=/dev/XXX of=/dev/null bs=4k status=progress) may help for a lot of them. But not all. The only solution I can actually recommend (for any storage media) is backup them up and regularly testing/moving the backups.

If the read of the disk is particularly slow then that indicates the flash cells are degraded. If a second read of the disk is much faster then that indicates some action may have been taken by the flash controller IC to fix this.

Long answer:

NAND flash cells slowly leak charge, making their state indistinguishable. A flash controller IC (usually separate to the NAND flash IC or ICs) has the job of noticing and fixing this (by rewriting the data to another or the same cell) before it gets too bad. That doesn't necessarily mean it does it particularly well.

Some (few?) flash controllers periodically scan for weak cells and rewrite to fix them. Some (most?) flash controllers notice weak cells only when you read them. Some (many?) flash controllers are shit and don't do any of this.

Flash controllers also have a bunch of other features and jobs, like maintaining a spare pool of cells (over-provisioning) to swap out for bad ones and even forcing the USB stick into read-only mode if they think things have gone particularly bad. Again this varies a lot depending on implem, some do it, some don't, and for different reasons (out of over-provis cells, corrupt mapping metadata, arbitrary thresholds, etc).

Thankyou! Yes this is exactly what I'm after.

I guess it depends on what you mean by bike lanes.

Good bike lanes = independent, spaced from a road, or barricaded if near either parking or roads.

Bad bike lanes = minimal repainting on a street, often ignored because they're so unsafe, worse than sharing the roads.

I have a mix of all types in my area. Some of them let me go places cars cannot, others follow the car roads safely, others are designed by people who have never cycled and want to murder me (so I ride in the traffic lane instead).

"Thou has missed daily prayers for two whole weeks"

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?

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".

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.

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)

Workaround for fingers having the wrong count.

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

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.

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.

As far as I understand, wireguard is designed so that it can't be portscanned. Replies are never sent to packets unless they pass full auth.

This is both a blessing and a curse. It unfortunately means that if you misconfigure a key then your packets get silently ignored by the other party, no error messages or the likes, it's as if the other party doesn't exist.

EDIT: Yep, as per https://www.wireguard.com/protocol/

In fact, the server does not even respond at all to an unauthorized client; it is silent and invisible.

File I'm printing: A4 PDF
Default printer setting in Windows: A4
Default setting on printer itself: A4
Setting that gets chosen automatically in the print dialog: Letter

4.5PB holy shit. You need to stop using UTF2e32 for your text files.

I'd be paranoid about file integrity. Even a 0.000000000022% (sic) chance of a single bitflip somewhere along the chain, like a gentle muon tickling the server's drive bus during the read, could affect you. Did you have a way of checking integrity? Or were tiny errors tolerable (eg video files)?

It's completely off screen :(

Bogus CVE. Spam.

From the PoC:

Replace the original DLL (such as Notepad++\plugins\NppExport\NppExport.dll) with a DLL file with the same name containing malicious code

If you replace parts of a program with malware then you can get malware to run. This is true of all software.

Gah English.

"My sketches" as in "me using the AI software to draw pictures". It's not my podcast, I was trying to guess at what the presenters looked like based off the topics they discuss.

PSA: Perfect dark (original n64) has a community-made PC port that's beyond excellent.

https://github.com/fgsfdsfgs/perfect_dark

I hated the original because the low framerate gave me bad motion sickness. The PC port is like magic by comparison.