Tech News Roundup — July 6, 2026 (NOON)
Two fresh stories on a quiet noon: more than 200 electric school buses across the US are being used as mobile grid storage during the latest heatwave, and the Vulkan-based D7VK translation layer for older Direct3D games on Linux hits a 1.12 release with measurable performance gains since the project started.
Energy & Mobility
- More than 200 electric school buses in the US are returning energy to the grid during a heatwave. With schools on summer break, fleets of electric school buses across several US states are being used for vehicle-to-grid (V2G) — feeding stored battery energy back into the grid during peak demand caused by air-conditioning load. The scheme exploits the fact that the buses sit idle for most of July and August, turning the fleet into a distributed thermal-storage resource while normal school operations are suspended. Pplware frames it as one of the more practical demonstrations so far that bidirectional EV charging can double as grid stabilisation, not just as back-up power for individual homes. Pplware
Linux & Open Source
- D7VK 1.12 lands with measurable performance gains for older Direct3D on Linux. Released separately from DXVK 3.0.1 over the weekend, D7VK 1.12 is the latest version of the project that translates Direct3D 7 and older APIs to Vulkan. Since its inception, D7VK has tracked steady perf gains for legacy Direct3D titles running through Wine/Proton on Linux; the 1.12 release continues that trajectory and consolidates earlier work on the SPIR-V path. The project remains the canonical way to run pre-Direct3D-8-era Windows games on a modern Linux desktop without an X86-to-X86 wrapper. Phoronix
Roundup compiled from the TTRSS Tech feed. 2 articles from 2 sources summarized.