Epson, the maker of my nightmare printer, has finally put an end to the horror of ink cartridges, at least for people willing to throw cash at the problem up front. The five new EcoTank series printers look like normal models, only they have containers on their sides that hold gobs and gobs of ink. How much? Years’ worth.

Epson’s not trying to make money on ink this time around, because it’s charging you up front for the printer. The ET-2550 costs $400; its big brother, the ET-4550, which has a fax, a sheet feeder and Ethernet, costs $500.

According to a recent presentation by Seagate's Alvin Cox, who is also chairman of the Joint Electron Device Engineering Council (JEDEC), the period of time that data will be retained on an SSD is halved for every 5 degrees Celsius (9 degrees Fahrenheit) rise in temperature in the area where the SSD is stored.

Consumer class SSDs can store data for up to two years before the standard drops, but when it comes to SSDs used by enterprises, the drives are only expected to retain data for a period of three months – a fact confirmed by Samsung, Seagate and Intel's own ratings on their products.

Dave Rauchwerk and a team of eight people are creating a $9 computer, designed to dovetail the success of their $249 Raspberry Pi-based camera. Their $1 million venture-backed startup, Next Thing Co., aims to put this crazy-cheap, hackable computer into the hands of as many people as possible.

"What we're doing is taking technology from tablets from a few years ago and making it palatable and smoothing over the rough parts so that [people] like us can use it for projects," he added. "The thing that's really exciting is that if we as a community can agree on a chip to support and a platform and some software we can make sure that a $9 computer is a thing."

The MacBook 2015 Repairability Score: 1 out of 10 (10 is easiest to repair)

Proprietary pentalobe screws continue to make opening the device unnecessarily difficult, and new cable routing makes the procedure even trickier.

The USB-C port is secured by tri-wing screws, and buried under the display brackets, complicating replacement. Also, being the only port, it will experience more use and wear than a typical single-purpose port.

The battery assembly is entirely, and very solidly, glued into the lower case.

The Retina display is still a fused unit with no separate, protective glass. If the display needs replacing, it'll cost a pretty penny.

The processor, RAM, and flash memory are soldered to the logic board.

The development comes just in time; the previous production method, known as planar NAND, has nearly maxed out its potential.

When you cut through the technical language, the net result is that 2.5-inch SSDs could come in 10TB capacities, compared to the 1TB drives most laptops max out at today.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation launched the latest iteration of its tiny Raspberry Pi computing boards. The Raspberry Pi 2 Model B was released Feb. 2, complete with a faster processor, more memory and support for Microsoft's upcoming Windows 10 operating system.

The added enhancements and wider OS support give Raspberry Pi 2 even more computing capabilities and will make it even more attractive in the commercial field.

As the prices of magnetic storage continue to decrease, the cost of replacing failed disks becomes increasingly dominated by the cost of the service call itself. We propose to eliminate these calls by building disk arrays that contain enough spare disks to operate without any human intervention during their whole lifetime.

"It Looks so Cool!" Linksys's public relations squad informed us in an e-mail, which also said the switch saves space by stacking beneath the $250 WRT1900AC router.

“This 8-Port Switch was designed and developed for our loyal WRT router fans," Linksys VP Mike Chen said in the company's announcement.

The photos were published by the Dutch-language website One More Thing, which reports that they were leaked from China – China gelekte – and presumably were shot by a component supplier.

One thing is certain, however: if Apple does introduce its next-generation iPad with a bonded display, that'll make it even more difficult to repair – not that iPad repairability has ever been among Apple's concerns.

North Korea’s first “home-grown” smartphone, revealed with much pride and hyperbole by state media last year, appears to be little more than a made-in-China piece of landfill Android.

It isn’t clear for certain whether the Arirang is actually just a rebranded version of the lowly Uniscope, although judging by the product numbers for each it appears as if the North Koreans haven’t done a very good job of covering their tracks.