A fire broke out at the Moss Landing Energy Storage Facility in Central California Thursday. The battery power plant is the largest in the world according to the company, Vistra, that owns it.

The Monterey County Sheriff’s Office issued evacuation orders for nearby residents and closed parts of Highway 1 in response. County Health officials have asked other residents to shelter indoors with windows and doors closed and to switch off ventilation systems.

“There’s no way to sugarcoat it. This is a disaster, is what it is,” Monterey County Supervisor Glen Church told KSBW-TV.

The company will investigate the cause of the fire once it’s out, Vistra spokesperson Jenny Lyon told The Mercury News. Vistra did not immediately respond to an email from The Verge. It completed an expansion of the facility in 2023, adding more than 110,000 battery modules needed to store renewable energy. Energy storage facilities like this one are essential for power grids to be able to keep enough excess solar and wind energy so it’s available when the sun goes down and winds wane.

This isn’t the first battery fire in the area. A nearby Pacific Gas & Electric battery plant stocked with Tesla batteries caught fire back in 2022. The year prior, Vistra had to temporarily shut down its battery plant at Moss Landing after a malfunctioning smoke detector and heat-suppression system sprayed water on its batteries, Canary Media reported.

The current blaze is unrelated to fires burning further south that have devastated Los Angeles County.

 It's frustrating when useful tools refuse to work together nicely. In the past I've experienced conflicts between black and flake8 that made it impossible to commit via my default commit hooks. Now I'm seeing the same behaviour with black and reorder-python-imports.

In short, almost a year ago now github user maxwell-k reported that black release 24.1.0 had introduced an incompatibility with reorder-python-imports by starting to require a blank line after a module docstring. In the discussion on the bug report the black crew make the reasonable-seeming point that it's black's job to determine the disposition of whitespace, and that reorder-python-imports should do what its name implies and nothing more. This would respect the long-standing Unix tradition that each tool should as far as possible perform a single function.

Unfortunately, when elagil raised the same issue with the reorder-python-imports developers, with a request to make their project usable with black (ably supported by maxwell-k), they received a response which I can only (avoiding the use of expletives) describe as disappointing:

anything is possible. will it happen here: no

In my opinion this uncompromising attitude displays the worst kind of arrogance from a developer, and I frankly fail to see who benefits from this refusal to bend (except perhaps a developer unwilling to work further on a project or set it free). The net consequence from my own point of view is that I'll no longer be using reorder-python-imports, nor recommending it.

The situation remains unchanged. Life's too short to persuade donkeys to move. On the plus side, research into solving this irritation led me to start working with ruff, which provides the functionality of both utilities in a single rather faster tool. It's an ill wind that blows nobody any good. Goodbye, donkeys!

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I'm not saying you should do this, only that it'd be awesome.

[eigma] had a difficult problem. After pulling a TV out of the trash and bringing it home, it turned out it was suffering from a troubling boot loop issue that basically made it useless. As so many of us do, they decided to fix it…which ended up being a far bigger task than initially expected.

The TV in question was a Samsung UN40H5003AF. Powering it up would net a red standby light which would stay on for about eight seconds. Then it would flicker off, come back on, and repeat the cycle. So far, so bad. Investigation began with the usual—checking the power supplies and investigating the basics. No easy wins were found. A debug UART provided precious little information, and schematics proved hard to come by.

Eventually, though, investigation dialed in on a 4 MB SPI flash chip on the board. Dumping the chip revealed the firmware onboard was damaged and corrupt. Upon further tinkering, [eigma] figured that most of the dump looked valid. On a hunch, suspecting that maybe just a single bit was wrong, they came up with a crazy plan: use a script to brute-force flipping every single bit until the firmware’s CRC check came back valid. It took eighteen hours, but the script found a valid solution. Lo and behold, burning the fixed firmware to the TV brought it back to life.

It feels weird for a single bit flip to kill an entire TV, but this kind of failure isn’t unheard of. We’ve seen other dedicated hackers perform similar restorations previously. If you’re out there valiantly rescuing e-waste with these techniques, do tell us your story, won’t you?

It’s been 41 years since Casio debuted the very first G-Shock digital watch, and its latest timepiece is the brand’s most faithful recreation to date. The new G-Shock DW-5000R is visually near-identical to the original DW-5000C launched in 1983 — right down to the length, and dimple positioning on the watch strap.

The rugged appeal of the original DW-5000C carries plenty of nostalgic charm, but it was a novel concept when it first launched. Its creator, Casio engineer Kikuo Ibe, was inspired to make a damage-resistant timepiece after his mechanical watch shattered on the ground when it fell off his wrist. The resulting G-Shock design was intended to have “triple 10” resistance — meaning a battery life of ten years, water resistance of 10...

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