Smill sat down with a fresh idea and a kit that arrived in the mail. The British YouTuber had already beaten Minecraft on a receipt printer and on a vape, but this time he wanted something older and stranger. He picked a replica of John Logie Baird’s 1925 televisor, the kind of device that came before every modern screen. What followed turned into four attempts spread across hours of careful play, each one revealing just how far the limits could stretch before they snapped back.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-0OKkkqMc0
As it turned out, what he believed would be a fast job developed into four attempts over several hours, and it was a tremendous effort to get everything working together. The televisor kit arrived as a collection of dissimilar parts waiting to be slotted together, which is what Smill performed in the first segment of his movie. He carefully positioned the motor and balanced the circular bit that is meant to do all of the work. The Nipkow disk is a flat disk with 32 small holes arranged in a tight spiral design. When the motor spins it at the appropriate speed, those holes swoop across a single bright LED at the back of the disk, and as the brightness of that LED changes, so do the scan lines that comprise the image. Only one row at a time. The entire image is exhibited in magnificent black and white, with no color or extra features, and it all fits inside a tiny circular window about the size of a coaster.

Getting a modern game like Minecraft to function on that hardware, however, was a completely different challenge. It worked flawlessly on Smill’s computer, but the televisor lacks standard connectors such as HDMI, so it had to be done differently. He created a small program that takes the game’s images and chops them up into the exact pattern of brightness that the television expects. Then he sent that pattern, which I know seems strange, but just go with it, out as an ordinary audio signal via cable. The televisor simply treated it as if it were receiving a signal from an old radio. The LED lit up, the disk began spinning, and before you knew it, blocks and mobs were flying by on the whirling disk.

Even after he fixed the signal, the picture was still small and dark. You only have 32 lines, so everything becomes blurry and weird. The lag was also rather significant, with more than a second between when the action occurred and when it appeared on the screen. Quick reflexes were out of the question, and trying to comprehend any writing was nearly impossible. To make survival even remotely conceivable, he had to experiment with Minecraft itself, such as increasing the size of the cursor to make it stand out and creating a preview window that appears anytime you hover over something in your inventory. That allowed him to read labels and plan his next action without guessing.

The first run went quickly as Smill gathered wood, created tools, and began mining, but the delayed perspective caused him to walk directly into a creeper. The second attempt went well after Smill built a modest shelter and started knitting wool for some beds. He’d need them later, in case he needed a few extra hours of sleep after that exhausting conflict. The second attempt lasted longer after he built a small shelter and began farming wool for beds. He needed those beds later for the final fight. Each death forced a restart from the beginning because the world generated fresh each time. By the third try he had iron, flint, and enough arrows to feel ready for the Nether. He stepped through the portal, fought his way to the fortress, and collected the eyes of ender. The lag turned every blaze battle into a slow dance of careful clicks and patient waiting.

On the fourth run everything lined up. Smill farmed extra wool early, stocked arrows, and carried spare iron. He built the portal, entered the Nether, and reached the End without a single wasted step. In the dim circle of the televisor he located the dragon, destroyed the crystals one by one using the beds he had saved, and finally cornered the boss. When the dragon fell, the victory screen appeared in the same low-resolution glow.
[Source]

If you own a modern smartphone, there’s an excellent chance that its battery has run dangerously low on you at least a few times. Murphy’s Law dictates that this will naturally occur at the worst possible moment, say when you need to make an important phone call or when you’re lost and need to navigate home.

With this in mind, it’s not hard to see how a product like the ChargeTab would have a certain appeal. A small $10 USD device that you can keep in the car or pack in a bag that’s always available to charge your phone in an emergency.

Because it’s not meant to be used regularly — indeed it may never get used at all — it’s not completely unreasonable that such a device would only be good for one or two charges before its spent and must be replaced. It’s a bit like keeping a road flare in the car; it’s unlikely you’ll ever use the thing, but if you do, it only needs to work once.

But then what? According to ChargeTab, once the gadget has depleted its internal ~3,000 mAh battery it cannot be recharged and is no longer usable. Now to be fair, they specifically tell you to not throw it in the trash. They’ll send you a free return label to ship it back to them, at which point it will be refurbished and put back into circulation. The company argues that this recycling program, combined with the fact that the batteries inside the ChargeTabs were supposedly diverted from landfills in the first place, makes their entire operation eco-friendly.

Yet here we have a pair of ChargeTabs that were thrown in the regular garbage and would have taken a one-way trip to the local landfill if it wasn’t for the fact that I habitually dig through garbage cans like a raccoon. So let’s take a look at what’s inside one of these emergency phone chargers and if the idea is as green as the company claims.

Paper, Not Plastic

If nothing else, the enclosure of the ChargeTab is pretty unique. As part of the whole eco-friendly shtick they have going on, the device is encased in a biodegradable paper shell. Usually I wouldn’t approve of a device that’s sealed up rather than put together with fastners, but it’s hard to complain when you can cut the thing open with a pair of scissors. Of course reassembly would be tricky, but clearly that’s not something they were concerned with.

As for the internals, there’s really not much going on. Just a chunky LiPo pouch battery and a thin PCB with an SOIC8 IC, an inductor, a couple of capacitors, and a single LED.

The battery is marked YL 104058, has a capacity of 2,900 mAh, and a date code of 2017. Somewhat surprisingly a close inspection of the IC shows that its markings are intact, identifying it as a HotChip HT4928S.

Chips Ahoy

Being able to positively identify a chip when taking a consumer gadget apart is great, but actually being able to look it up and find a proper datasheet is a real treat. Turns out that the HT4928S is a very popular IC commonly used in USB power banks. It’s a highly integrated solution that offers battery management as well as 5 V boost with only a few support components.

At first, I found this somewhat surprising. Given the unusual single-use nature of the ChargeTab, I had expected a more bespoke solution. But of course it makes perfect sense to use one of these power bank ICs. They can be had for pennies, and functionally, the device is pretty much a USB power bank anyway, it just doesn’t recharge.

Truth be told, the HT4928S seems like a pretty slick part to have around. It’s unusually hacker-friendly: the SOIC8 package is easy to work with, and compared to the venerable TP4056 you get integrated battery protection, not to mention 5 V boost. All for about $1 USD a piece in quantities of ~10. I plan on ordering a few to go into the parts bin for sure.

But wait…if this chip has a charge controller, why is the ChargeTab single-use? What about the design prevents the user from simply charging it up like any other USB power bank that uses the HT4928S?

A look at the application diagram from the datasheet shows that the HT4928S uses the same pin for both power input and output. That is, the same pin that puts out the boosted 5 V from the battery will also charge said battery if you apply power to it. In the old days, the input would have been a female USB-A port, but in the era of USB-C you could simply have a female port that does double duty.

But the ChargeTab only has a male USB-C connector. Technically you could plug that into something that’s providing power, but the HT4928S doesn’t talk USB Power Delivery and the PCB doesn’t have the necessary resistors to enable legacy mode.

Security Through Obscurity

The only differences between the application circuit and the PCB in the ChargeTab is the missing LED and USB port. So unless they are using some custom modified version of the HT4928S, it stands to reason that injecting 5 V into the male USB-C connector should flip the chip over to charging mode.

As mentioned previously, it won’t work with proper USB-C devices and cables. But through the magic of Amazon Prime, you can have all manner of shady adapters delivered to your door in just a few hours. So if we combine a USB-A to USB-C cable with a female-female USB-C coupler, we can stick 5 V where the ChargeTab least expects it. According to the HT4928S datasheet, a blinking LED will indicate the charging process has started.

Well, so much for that whole single-use thing.

Charging as a Service

So in the end, the only thing that’s keeping you from reusing the ChargeTab is a cheap USB-C coupler and an old cable. No return label, no sending it off to the mothership to get “refurbished.” It’s quite simply a USB power bank in a paper enclosure and with intentionally obtuse connectivity.

A devil’s advocate might argue that the recycling program makes it more likely the batteries inside the ChargeTabs will actually stay out of the waste stream compared to normal power banks. Rather than dropping them off in some random battery recycling box and having them go who knows where, the returned ChargeTabs are guaranteed to be put back into use properly. (On the other hand, I fished these out of the trash.)

But let’s be clear, this isn’t some benevolent initiative — the company ends up selling the recycled ChargeTabs again at full price. So if you really think about it, they are essentially just renting them out to the consumer. Is that a service worth $10? Regardless of how we might feel about it personally, the fact that these things are being sold would seem to indicate a not insignificant number of people feel it is.

All I know is that if you end up seeing one of these in the trash, you should definitely take it home and charge it up yourself.

Imported competition is causing local pressure

Walk through any Singapore mall today, and something about the atmosphere has quietly changed. The bubble tea shop is from Chengdu. The hotpot place is backed by a 700-outlet chain you’ve never heard of. The coffee queue is for Luckin, not Starbucks.

Chinese F&B brands are suddenly everywhere, and they are expanding rapidly. Molly Tea, for instance, arrived less than two months ago and has already opened its second store.

This isn’t a coincidence, but part of a larger phenomenon—and understanding why requires looking at what’s happening inside China first.

The price wars back in mainland China

In 2024, three million food businesses closed in China.

The cause wasn’t a single recession or policy shock, but something more structural: a market so competitive that it began consuming itself.

Economists call it involution (neijuan), a cycle of excessive internal competition where companies fight harder for the same or shrinking demand. Instead of expanding the market, everyone competes on price, driving margins down until survival, not growth, becomes the goal.

In F&B, this dynamic shows up most clearly in price undercutting. When Luckin already pushed coffee to RMB¥9.9 (S$2) lattes, newer entrants like Lucky Cup went even lower, selling RMB¥6.6 (S$0.90) coffees. The logic wasn’t to build premium positioning, but to win attention and volume in an overcrowded market where differentiation had collapsed into price.

Lucky Cup, backed by tea and ice cream giant Mixue, scaled rapidly on this model, becoming China’s fourth-largest coffee chain with over 10,000 stores across 300+ cities, despite not even entering first-tier markets like Beijing or Shanghai.

The same dynamic shows up in electric vehicles. In China’s increasingly crowded EV market, BYD has been actively cutting prices to defend its share against intensifying competition. The result is a sector-wide squeeze on profitability: despite record sales volumes, BYD has faced sustained downward pressure on margins, culminating in its first annual profit decline in four years by March 2026.

Even BYD’s chairman Wang Chuanfu has acknowledged that the industry has reached a “boiling point,” where competition is no longer translating into proportional gains. In this environment, sales growth alone no longer guarantees sustainable profits—companies are effectively trading margin for volume just to maintain position in an oversupplied market.

China’s F&B market saw over 1 million businesses shut in just the first half of 2024, and that’s a 70% increase from 2023. With the home market saturated, the obvious move was outward beyond one of the most (if not the most) competitive domestic markets.

And increasingly, Singapore emerged as a consistent destination.

Why Singapore?

Singapore is not just a market for Chinese brands but a legitimacy stamp for these businesses. If they can make their businesses work in Singapore, they can succeed anywhere in Asia.

The city-state has the highest per-capita GDP in the world in terms of purchasing power parity (PPP) and a food culture that is both demanding and well-documented, as seen from being the first Southeast Asian city to receive a Michelin Guide. Reviews travel, queues get photographed, and openings make regional news.

A brand that earns its place here is perceived as having cleared a meaningful bar.

Traditionally a bridge between Eastern and Western cultures, Singapore has also become an attractive gateway for expansion, with its 6.1 million predominantly Chinese population.

As executives at several Chinese firms noted in interviews, the city-state is seen as “wealthy and fashionable”—a place where simply having a presence carries branding value, even beyond immediate sales potential.

The executives are not shy about revealing the larger ambitions Singapore has for their brands. ChaPanda’s Singapore manager told Inside Retail Asia:  “If we can build up our brand in Singapore, the brand awareness can go to Malaysia and Vietnam, even Indonesia.”

This sentiment is echoed by Luckin’s CEO Guo Jinyi, who shared that Singapore serves as a “critical testing ground” for building the brand, refining operational systems, and understanding overseas business models. The city-state serves as Luckin’s launchpad into other Southeast Asian countries.

There are also precedents of Chinese brands using Singapore as a stepping stone toward more global expansion. Tea brand Tai Er, for instance, leveraged its Singapore operations as part of its regional push before eventually entering the US market by 2023.

The pattern is consistent across many Chinese brands that went global. Singapore is not the destination. It’s the launchpad, a stamp of legitimacy that makes the next ten markets easier to enter.

Losses that don’t matter

This reframes everything about how these brands operate here, including the rents they’re willing to pay.

Consider the scale some of these chains are operating at. Pang Pang, the claypot crab restaurant at Bugis, has over 600 outlets in China and sells 50 million pots a year. Xiao Yu Hao at Raffles Place—known for its suan cai yu—runs 800 outlets back home. Xita Lao Tai Tai at Bugis+, a charcoal clay stove BBQ chain, operates 600 outlets and is named China’s number one BBQ chain. Yeah Gelato in Tampines has 168 outlets in China.

These brands draw on lean business models honed in China’s intensely competitive market and apply them to operations in Singapore to withstand high costs. Many rely on vertically integrated supply chains, where companies control multiple stages of production in-house—a sharp contrast to many Western rivals, which tend to depend on outsourced suppliers.

Since 2021, Luckin has been building more of its production capabilities. Its low-value consumables, such as packaging materials and straws, cost the company just RMB¥210 million (S$39 million) across its entire 30,000-store network. This translates to roughly S$1,307.64 per store per year, or about S$3.58 per store per day.

When a brand of this scale opens in Singapore, the individual outlet’s profit-and-loss is almost beside the point. If you view the 81 stores here in proportion to the over 30,000 stores that Luckin Coffee has in China, the Singapore stores are a marketing expense—a flagship that generates press coverage, attracts franchise interest from regional partners, and signals to investors that the brand is global.

This is why they can outbid local tenants on rent without flinching.

Andy Hoon, chairman of Bosses Network, a local business networking group representing SME and retail operators, described the dynamic: if a Singaporean tenant offers S$36 to S$38 per square foot when the market expectation is S$30 to S$40, a Chinese brand might offer S$45—above what even the landlord anticipated.

Industry observers echo this shift. Ethan Hsu, head of retail at Knight Frank, noted that large-scale Chinese investment has contributed to rising rents in high-traffic locations, while TungLok Group CEO Andrew Tjioe added that some brands are less driven by immediate profitability than by securing overseas presence and building global brand visibility.

Luckin’s financials are a great example of this business strategy. In financial year 2024, Luckin’s Singapore operations reported losses of RMB¥47 million (S$8.8 million). But in the same year, Luckin generated over RMB¥34.5 billion (S$6.4 billion) in total revenue, with an operating profit of approximately RMB¥3.5 to 3.9 billion driven overwhelmingly by its China business.

Yet, it has been expanding by around 30 stores every year here since 2023. 

Against that scale, Singapore’s losses are effectively marginal and absorbed without much consequence by China’s much bigger operations. Singapore is not treated like a profit centre but a line item in a longer-term international expansion strategy.

So what happens when the strategy stops working?

The model has a vulnerability that doesn’t show up until later: it assumes the China business stays strong enough to keep subsidising overseas losses.

Haidilao is a key example. The hotpot chain opened its first Singapore outlet at Clarke Quay in 2012, making it its first international outlet outside mainland China. Following its success, Haidilao expanded to more than 20 outlets across Singapore at its peak.

Then the rationalisation began. The Clarke Quay flagship closed in August 2025, following earlier shutdowns at Downtown East and Bedok Mall.

A Haidilao spokesperson cited labour costs, outlet locations, and rental pressures as reasons for closing underperforming stores, as the chain moved to optimise operational efficiency. The closures highlight a familiar constraint: when overseas expansion is no longer easily justified to public markets, consolidation tends to follow.

Unlike Haidilao, most of the newer brands entering Singapore aren’t publicly listed—meaning they don’t yet have shareholders demanding quarterly results. Many are venture capital or private equity-backed, operating on deep pockets with capital that is explicitly patient. But patient capital still has expectations.

If a brand cannot demonstrate a credible path to profitability in Singapore within two to three years, investor expectations begin to shift. Sustaining prime locations while keeping prices low ultimately depends on continued financial backing—either from a strong parent company or successive funding rounds—that can support the broader supply chain and scale these brands rely

The broader Singapore F&B picture adds pressure. Some 3,047 businesses shut in 2024—the highest figure in nearly two decades. The casualties so far are mostly local: Ka-Soh, an 85-year-old heritage restaurant, and the Privé Group, after 18 years of operation. 

Knight Frank has described the environment as “a very Darwinian retail landscape,” noting that rising competition from Chinese entrants has intensified pressure on incumbents. Unlike many local players, these new entrants have largely been insulated from closures, underpinned by scale advantages that domestic operators struggle to match.

But insulation is not immunity.

The question is not whether Chinese brands will keep entering Singapore. As of Aug 2025, some 85 Chinese F&B brands were operating around 405 outlets in Singapore, more than double the 32 brands and 184 outlets recorded just a year earlier. 

There’s no doubt that they will keep coming. The more pressing question is what happens when these brands have been in Singapore long enough to be judged on standalone performance, and whether the China-based ecosystems quietly subsidising their expansion can continue absorbing pressure of their own.

• Read other articles we’ve written on Singaporean businesses here.

The world of open source — and in particular open source licenses — is something we cover regularly here at Hackaday with respect to hardware and software, but it’s not so often we find open source data stories. Today’s case of the open British address data then is a bit of an outlier, but it may have implications for open source data further than British counties.

UK government data is released under the Open Government Licence, which is why we Brits can peer into all sorts of datasets our taxes paid for. This includes data from local government, so English counties release data sets of local addresses as part of their auditing of council taxes under the licence.

[Owen Boswarva] has been collating these databases in order to produce a national open source address database, but has found himself at the receiving end of a legal threat from the Ordnance Survey, the UK mapping agency. They claim the data is theirs, not open.

British address data is in a sense open to all, in that there’s nothing to stop anyone walking down Acacia Avenue and noting the position of Number 1, Number 2, Number 3, and so on. This is what happened with OpenStreetMap worldwide, as people with GPS devices contributed their data and mapped the UK and everywhere else. The Ordnance Survey used to have a nice little earner charging top dollar for UK geospatial data which has been slashed by the arrival of OpenStreetMap, and we’re guessing that the prospect of losing another income stream to an open source equivalent has them worried.

The question of whether the councils should have released the data is one which will no doubt be settled at some point by the courts, and [Owen] goes into some detail on the subject in his analysis. There’s a good case to be made that the mapping agency are pushing it a little, but whatever the outcome it could set a dangerous precedent for open source data. We’ll keep you posted if there’s more on this story.

British street: Bill Harrison, CC BY-SA 2.0

Barbra Streisand: Unknown author, Public domain

Sony just dropped its newest top-tier phone, the Xperia 1 VIII, and it arrives at a moment when most people have forgotten the company even competes in this space. Announced today, the device brings a complete visual refresh after years of the same tall, narrow shape. At first glance the changes feel subtle, yet they add up to something that finally stands apart from the sea of glass slabs everyone else sells.

Start with the body, which Sony refers to as the ORE appearance, which is unsurprising given that it is inspired by the rough textures of raw gemstones and natural stone right from the ground. The rear of the phone has a frosted glass finish with a fine grain that makes it a pleasure to handle, as opposed to the typical slick sheen found on other phones. There are four new colors to pick from: graphite black, iolite silver, garnet red, and a gorgeous Native Gold that is exclusively available on the higher-capacity models. The rear features a redesigned elevated camera block wrapped in metal and housing the lenses in a flush layout along the left edge. We no longer see the former vertical strip. The phone appears to have undergone a growth spurt, as it now boldly displays its camera system for all to see.

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Flip it around, and the 6.5-inch screen is a stunning piece of OLED with a 120 hertz refresh rate and the same 1080 by 2340 quality we’ve come to expect. The thick borders above and below the display are a good touch, keeping the front of the phone looking clean and clutter-free, with no notch or hole-punch cutouts visible. Even with the larger screen, the phone fits neatly into a pocket and provides plenty viewing space. Qualcomm’s latest and best Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chip powers everything, and it comes with either 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage or a more significant 16GB with a whole terabyte to play with. Both variants will accept a microSD card if you run out of space, which is a function that most other phones have long abandoned.

The real magic happens with the cameras, which includes three 48-megapixel sensors on the back: a regular lens, an ultrawide that can capture a vast 104-degree view, and a telephoto that can now extend to a useful 70 millimeters. The telephoto sensor is four times larger than the one in last year’s model, which makes a huge impact in low light circumstances, as detail is no longer compromised even when the sun drops below the horizon. Sony has also incorporated RAW multi-frame processing to all rear lenses, which discreetly but significantly increases dynamic range, reduces noise, and protects highlights and shadows without requiring users to actively switch settings.

Here’s the real kicker: an AI assistant named Xperia Intelligence monitors what you’re shooting and makes suggestions in real time. It’s also not some unpleasant automated feature, since you can aim the phone at a subject and it will offer a different lens, a touch of bokeh, or a color tone from Sony’s professional photographic pedigree, all with a simple tap. If none of that appeals to you, there is still a real shutter button on the side, just where committed camera enthusiasts want it to be. Selfies, meanwhile, are courtesy of a 12 megapixel front camera, which, let’s be honest, handles everyday photos with ease.

Sony claims that the battery capacity (5,000mAh) is enough for two full days of mixed use, including browsing, streaming, gaming, and the occasional phone call on a single charge. Of course, your mileage may vary, but the business has also implemented some intelligent power management, which should prevent things like high-drain apps from draining the battery when they are not needed. You get quick charging at 30 watts and wireless charging for good measure, as well as a projected battery life of 4 years with repeated use.

Sound, meantime, has received the same level of attention. A true old-fashioned 3.5mm headphone jack returns, which is fantastic news for people who still prefer to listen to music with wired headphones and recall Sony’s Walkman legacy. Stereo speakers now have matched drivers on each side, which should result in tighter bass, crisper highs, and a lot more immersive sound, as this is the type of thing that truly brings music and film to life. The phone ships with Android 16 out of the box and will receive four major updates and six years of security patches.

The pricing is a touch surprising, with the base 256GB model costing about £1,399 in the UK and €1,499 almost everywhere else in Europe. If you want the 1TB model, it will cost £1,849 or €1,999. Pre-orders are currently open, and if you place one, you will receive a free set of Sony’s good WH-1000XM6 headphones. They will begin shipping in the middle of June. Sorry, Xperia 1 VIII fans in the United States, but your region has been missed yet again, which must be disappointing for those who are expecting to get their hands on this phone.