PJH Studios

Category: Technology

Mostly related to issues surrounding technology and computers, main include current events or news.

  • A fully autonomous umbrella

  • Cryptocurrencies are dying

    Cryptocurrencies are dying as joke coins and pump and dump schemes burn out.

    With that in mind, a recent report from CoinGecko (via CoinDesk) says the crypto reaper has been unusually busy lately. Looking at its own records from as far back as 2021, CoinGecko found that 20.2 million tokens had been placed on the market, and that the majority—53.2%—have ceased active trading. They’re dead.

    What’s more, 11.6 million of the token failures recorded by CoinGecko—86.3%—happened last year. In other words, 2025 was a mass die-off.

  • Intrusive, needy software

    With the ubiquity of Internet connections and cheap storage and data costs, software applications have become intrusive, almost needy in how they interact with users.

    So the problem isn’t that software ever teaches, asks, or informs. The problem is that once a company builds the machinery to do it, that machinery becomes cheap to reuse, and the incentives gradually pull it away from “help the user succeed” toward “move the metric.”

    What starts as an occasional heads-up becomes a permanent layer of UI exhaust. What starts as support becomes a funnel. What starts as a reminder becomes a habit-forming system.

  • African solarpunk

    Africa is leading the way implementing solar energy based solutions for everyday life.

    This is the unlock. This is the thing that makes everything else possible.

    Here’s the model:

    1. A company (Sun King, SunCulture) installs a solar system in your home
    2. You pay ~$100 down
    3. Then $40-65/month over 24-30 months
    4. The system has a GSM chip that calls home
    5. No payment = remotely shut off
    6. Keep paying = keep power
    7. After 30 months = you own it, free power forever

    The magic is this: You’re not buying a $1,200 solar system. You’re replacing $3-5/week kerosene spending with a $0.21/day solar subscription (so with $1.5 per week half the price of kerosene) that’s cheaper AND gives you better light, phone charging, radio, and no respiratory disease.

    The default rate? 90%+ of customers repay on time.

  • 2026 breakthrough technologies

    MIT Technology Review published their annual list of breakthrough technologies. Lots of AI and clean energy related picks.

    Next-gen nuclear

    Nuclear power already provides steady electricity to grids around the world, without producing any greenhouse-gas emissions. New designs rely on alternative fuels and cooling systems or take up less space, which could get more reactors online faster.

  • SMS login attacks

    All those SMS login links may not be a good idea.

    A paper published last week has found more than 700 endpoints delivering such texts on behalf of more than 175 services that put user security and privacy at risk. One practice that jeopardizes users is the use of links that are easily enumerated, meaning scammers can guess them by simply modifying the security token, which usually appears at the right of a URL. By incrementing the token—for instance, by first changing 123 to 124 or ABC to ABD and so on—the researchers were able to access accounts belonging to other users. From there, the researchers could view personal details, such as partially completed insurance applications.

    In other cases, the researchers could have transacted sensitive business while masquerading as the other user. Other links used so few possible token combinations that they were easy to brute force. Other examples of shoddy practices were links that allowed attackers who gained unauthorized access to access or modify user data with no other authentication other than clicking on a link sent by SMS. Many of the links provide account access days or even months after they were sent, further raising the risk of unauthorized access.

  • Lego smart bricks

    Lego will be rolling out a new series of bricks that contain electronics and sensors that interact when connected. Pretty impressive.

  • The Moylan Arrow

    That little arrow on your dashboard that points either left or right, tells you which side of your gas tank is on. It’s such a simple design, and it even has a name, The Moylan Arrow, named after the engineer, Jim Moylan.

    “I would like to propose a small addition,” he wrote, “in all passenger car and truck lines.” 

    The proposal he had in mind was a symbol on the dashboard that would tell drivers which side of the car the gas tank was on.   

    “Based on personal experience,” he wrote, “I feel that this little indicator would remove the guesswork of which side I want to park.” He continued: “For the minor investment involved on the company’s part, I think it would be a worthwhile convenience.” 

    Very soon, everything became a standard design feature in nearly every car

  • Backing up Spotify

    Anna’s Archive backed up Spotify. The whole article is interesting about the process and the analysis that they did on the data set. They walked in the home process and including charts class, they even offer a truly random song selection.

  • Open Source Industrial Construction Equipment

    An interesting idea: 3D printed, open-source industrial construction equipment that could create a village or small town if necessary, called the Global Village Construction Set.