Apple, which dumb fuck thought this would be good? ok new mouse, no more batteries it can be charged on a wire, cool you may think, until it actually needs charging and you discover that the charging port is on the bottom, making the mouse unusable whilst charging!!!

One time my co-worker put a tiny piece of tape inside the USB receiver of my mouse which apparently makes any USB device stop working. It took me a while to figure out why my damn mouse wasn't working even though everything was properly plugged in and it had new batteries.

When I found the tiny piece of tape I was instantly knew who it was and it was pretty funny.

Long rant ahead. Should take about 2-3 minutes to read. So feel free to refill your cup of coffee and take a seat :)

It turns out that the battery in my new Nexus 6P is almost dead. Well not that I didn't expect that, the seller even explicitly put that in the product page. But it got me thinking.. why? Lithium batteries are often good for some 10k charges, meaning that they could last almost 30 years when charged every day! They'd outlive an entire generation of people!

Then I took a look at the USB-C wall charger that Huawei delivered with this thing. A 5V 3A brick. When I saw that, I immediately realized.. aah, that's why this battery crapped out after a mere 2 years.

See, while batteries are often advertised as capable of several amps (like 7A with my LiitoKala 18650 batteries that I often use in projects), that's only the current that they can safely take or deliver without blowing up. The manufacturer doesn't make this current rating with longevity in mind. It's the absolute maximum in current that a given battery can safely handle.

The longevity on the other hand directly depends on the demand that's placed on the battery. 500mA which is standard USB 2.0 rating or 1A which is standard USB 3.0 rating, no sweat. The battery will live for at least a decade of daily charges and discharges like that no problem.

But when you start shoving 3A continuous into a battery, that's when it will suffer. Imagine that your current workload is 500mA and suddenly you get shoved 6 times that work upon you. How long would you last?

Oh and not only the current is a problem, I suspect that it also overvolts the battery to maintain a constant current all the way till the end. When I charged my lithium cells with my lab bench power supply, the battery would only take a few milliamps when it got close to the supply voltage. Quick bit of knowledge: lithium cells are charged at constant current first, then when the current drops below that, it continues at constant voltage - usually 4.2 or 4.35V depending on the battery. So you'd set your lab bench power supply at 4.2V 500mA. But in that constant voltage mode, as the battery's voltage and the supply's voltage equalize, the current drops because the voltage difference becomes lower. Remember, voltage is what causes current to flow. Overvolting at the supply to stay in constant current mode all the way till the end speeds this process up but can be dangerous and requires constant monitoring of the battery voltage.

So, why does Huawei and a bunch of other manufacturers make these 3A power chargers? Well first it's because consumer demands ever more, regardless of the fact that they can just charge at 500mA for the night (8h of sleep) and charge a 4000mAh battery from 0 to 100% no problem. Secondly it's because sometimes you need that little bit of extra juice fast, like when you forgot to plug the damn thing in and you've got only 30 minutes in the morning to pour some charge into it.

But people use those damn fucking things even when they go to bed, making that 3A torture a fucking standard process!! And then they complain that their batteries go to shit?!

Hopefully this now made you realize that the fast charger shouldn't be used as a regular charger ^^

Get the batteries!!!

Source : reddit

That moment when the resident IT guy/teacher at your school comes to you at lunch and you look sad.
Me: Hello.
Teacher: What happened?
Me: Batteries almsot dead :(
Teacher: Well, I've got good news for you. I was talking to the school director about you.
Me: Um ... shit
Teacher: We're looking to get you an intership at the company that does networking shit for us (Netcom, anybody?)
Me: FUCK YEAH ... thanks!
*Day brightened by angelic light*

Paypal Rant #3

One day I'll go to Paypal HQ and...
... change all the toilet rolls to face the wrong way
... remap all the semicolons to be the Greek equivalent character
... change all the door signs so they say "pull" instead of "push" and vice versa
... modify all the stairs to have variable heights
... programmatically shuffle the elevator buttons and randomly assign the alarm key to any of the most visited floors
... pour cocoa onto all the keyboards and wipe them off cleanly
... attach clear duct tape over their mouse sensors and insert really weak batteries or mess with their cables

I'll wait a day or two until they experience a sudden shortage of developers, then bombard them with thousands of fake applications from seemingly amazing candidates, then write an AI bot to continue argumentation with HR.

I'll wait another week or so until the company dissolves and with them, all my issues in life.

No need to be overly vulgar this time because you all know the deal. I hate this fucking company. Please Paypal do us all a favor and go fuck yourself.

Friend of mine killed his MacBook with some Softdrink.

Just poured it all over his poor a1502.

He let it dry for a few days, it starts to work again.
Except the battery.

Goes on Amazon and buys a new battery.

New battery doesn't work either and so he tells me about it and I as stupid as I am couldn't resist the temptation to finally work on a MacBook like my "hero" Lois Rossmann does.

So turns out the board is good.
Cleaned it up and basically nothing happened to it.

So what's the deal with "los batlerias"?

The first got hit by liquid, the second had a broken connection to a cell.
That could have happened through my friend, installing it without testing it first, or at the seller, so it being a DOA battery.

Now away from the stupidity of my friend and the situation to the actual source for this rant.

Once something happens to a modern Managed battery, the Battery Management System (BMS) disconnects the voltage from the system and goes into an error state, staying there and not powering anything ever again.
For noobs, it's dead. Buy a new one.

But It can be reset, depending you know how to, and which passwords were set at the factory.
Yes, the common Texas instruments BQ20Zxx chips have default passwords, and apple seems to leav them at default.

The Usb to SMBus adaptors arrived a few days ago and I went to prod the BMS.

There is a very nice available for Windows called BE2works, that I used the demo of to go in and figure out stuff. The full version supports password cracking, the demo not.

After some time figuring out how Smart Battery Systems (SBS) "API" works, I got to actually enter the passwords into the battery to try get into manufacturer and full access mode.

Just to realise, they don't unlock the BMS.

So, to conclude, my friend bought a "new" battery that was most likely cut out of a used / dead macbook, which reports 3000mah as fully charged instead of the 6xxx mah that it should have, with 0 cycles and 0hours used.
And non default access.

This screams after those motherfuckers scaming the shit out of people on Amazon, with refurb, reset, and locked fucken batteries.

I could kill those people right now.

Last but not least,
My friend theoretically can't send it back because I opened the battery to fix the broken connection.
Though maybe, it'll get send back anyway, with some suprise in the package.

I have this little hobby project going on for a while now, and I thought it's worth sharing. Now at first blush this might seem like just another screenshot with neofetch.. but this thing has quite the story to tell. This laptop is no less than 17 years old.

So, a Compaq nx7010, a business laptop from 2004. It has had plenty of software and hardware mods alike. Let's start with the software.

It's running run-off-the-mill Debian 9, with a custom kernel. The reason why it's running that version of Debian is because of bugs in the network driver (ipw2200) in Debian 10, causing it to disconnect after a day or so. Less of an issue in Debian 9, and seemingly fixed by upgrading the kernel to a custom one. And the kernel is actually one of the things where you can save heaps of space when you do it yourself. The kernel package itself is 8.4MB for this one. The headers are 7.4MB. The stock kernels on the other hand (4.19 at downstream revisions 9, 10 and 13) took up a whole GB of space combined. That is how much I've been able to remove, even from headless systems. The stock kernels are incredibly bloated for what they are.

Other than that, most of the data storage is done through NFS over WiFi, which is actually faster than what is inside this laptop (a CF card which I will get to later).

Now let's talk hardware. And at age 17, you can imagine that it has seen quite a bit of maintenance there. The easiest mod is probably the flash mod. These old laptops use IDE for storage rather than SATA. Now the nice thing about IDE is that it actually lives on to this very day, in CF cards. The pinout is exactly the same. So you can use passive IDE-CF adapters and plug in a CF card. Easy!

The next thing I want to talk about is the battery. And um.. why that one is a bad idea to mod. Finding replacements for such old hardware.. good luck with that. So your other option is something called recelling, where you disassemble the battery and, well, replace the cells. The problem is that those battery packs are built like tanks and the disassembly will likely result in a broken battery housing (which you'll still need). Also the controllers inside those battery packs are either too smart or too stupid to play nicely with new cells. On that laptop at least, the new cells still had a perceived capacity of the old ones, while obviously the voltage on the cells themselves didn't change at all. The laptop thought the batteries were done for, despite still being chock full of juice. Then I tried to recalibrate them in the BIOS and fried the battery controller. Do not try to recell the battery, unless you have a spare already. The controllers and battery housings are complete and utter dogshit.

Next up is the display backlight. Originally this laptop used to use a CCFL backlight, which is a tiny tube that is driven at around 2000 volts. To its controller go either 7, 6, 4 or 3 wires, which are all related and I will get to. Signs of it dying are redshift, and eventually it going out until you close the lid and open it up again. The reason for it is that the voltage required to keep that CCFL "excited" rises over time, beyond what the controller can do.

So, 7-pin configuration is 2x VCC (12V), 2x enable (on or off), 1x adjust (analog brightness), and 2x ground. 6-pin gets rid of 1 enable line. Those are the configurations you'll find in CCFL. Then came LED lighting which required much less power to run. So the 4-pin configuration gets rid of a VCC and a ground line. And finally you have the 3-pin configuration which gets rid of the adjust line, and you can just short it to the enable line.

There are some other mods but I'm running out of characters. Why am I telling you all this? The reason is that this laptop doesn't feel any different to use than the ThinkPad x220 and IdeaPad Y700 I have on my desk (with 6c12t, 32G of RAM, ~1TB of SSDs and 2TB HDDs). A hefty setup compared to a very dated one, yet they feel the same. It can do web browsing, I can chat on Telegram with it, and I can do programming on it. So, if you're looking for a hobby project, maybe some kind of restrictions on your hardware to spark that creativity that makes code better, I can highly recommend it. I think I'm almost done with this project, and it was heaps of fun :D

Not a rant, just my thoughts :)
At November and October of last year I was very frustrated with everything - everything was annoying me and I was bored even with coding. I needed a break and do something different - go somewhere.

So we decided with friends that we will go to Georgia to spent there New Year Eve. Right now I'm coming back from airport by bus to my city aftertrip but can't sleep because I'm energized as fuck! Whole week without internet (sometimes we got open wifi to check buses or maps), without local sim card, without roaming, just our group and good attitude. We visited almost whole north of Georgia riding in taxis, marshrutka, even autostop, and it was fucking awesome.

So, when you are exhausted, take a break and regenerate your baterries, work is not everything! Just wanted to share this with you :) Can't wait to go to work in monday to write some code :) Life is beautiful!

On photo - my friend takes photo of Kazbek Mountain :)

My sleep pattern is royally fucked. I searched around for alarm apps that can help me get back on track. I found one called Alarmy. The list of features was mindblowing. Fast forward a couple of weeks and I’m on vacation. I’m using my mobile data as a hotspot to browse and do research as there are no other internet options here.

My alarm goes off at 6 AM. Everyone besides me is sleeping. Here is where the first problem arises. The only way to turn the alarm off is by taking a picture of something I have at home (This is how I force myself out of bed). I start panicking. How the hell am I going to shut this damn thing off. I try to turn the phone off, and that’s when I realize I’ve made a huge error. The pro version of Alarmy has a setting that allows you to prevent yourself from turning it off at all. Genius me thought that was a good idea. I fumble with my phone as the 1 minute mute timer they give you is slowly ticking down, before all hell breaks loose. That’s when it hits me. I have an LG G3 with replaceable batteries. My violently pounding heart rate start to slow down as I take off the case and slamdunk the phone until the battery falls out. I did it. I’m saved. 5 minutes later I turn my phone on, start the hotspot and get back to my browsing.

BEEP F*CKING BEEP. Alarmy is not done with me yet. It turns out they’ve implemented a new feature that continues the damn alarm after a shutdown. At this point I have ran out of options. I take the battery back out, and now I’m sat here without no phone or internet for the rest of my vacation, and with no clue what to do.

Never do something​ technical for free. You end up being treated as the responsible person for batteries even if your actual profession is web development.

Have you considered that we might just have to stay at home because the batteries of the surveillance pigeons have to be changed? 🧐

EU have finally passed the law that requires all phones to have user-changeable batteries by 2027.

I've just disassembled this LED floodlight that I bought a while ago. It's some stupid little cheapie from a dollar store, so I figured that there'd be shit inside. But I wanted that LED cob.. a power LED :3

Well, shit wasn't too far off from the truth. The component choice is reasonable, but the design of the bloody thing.. batshit insane. The LED floodlight is powered by 4 AAA batteries, connected in series. So 6VDC. That then goes into this little tactile pushbutton, into the LED cob and then a 4.7 ohm resistor.

Well that's a pretty easy circuit.. let's remove the batteries and the casement, and put it on the lab bench power supply. Probes connected to the circuit with only the resistor and the LED cob in between (I didn't want to deal with the switch). Power supply set to 6V, current limiting to 500mA, contact!! And it works, amazing! So I let it run for a while to see that nothing gets too hot.. hah. After a minute or so, smoke would come out.. LED cob was a bit warm to the touch but nothing too bad. But the resistor.. I could cook water on it if I wanted to! 100 fucking °C, and rising. What the F yo?!

So I figured that I didn't want to put the resistor in between there. Just the LED cob now, which apparently has a forward voltage somewhere between 3.2V and 3.3V depending on how I set the current (500mA and 600mA respectively). Needed a bigger heatsink though, so I jammed one of my aluminium heatsinks on there. And it worked great! Very bright too, as it takes between 1.6 and 2W of power. Just for a comparison, the lighting in my living room is 4x5W and the ones on top of my dining table are 2x3W (along with some TL bar that my landlord put there.. fluorescent I think). So yeah, 2W is quite a lot for an LED, especially when it's all concentrated into one tiny spot.

That said, back to the original design with the resistor. 2 questions I have for that moron that designed this crap. First, why use a resistor for a power LED?! They needlessly waste power, and aren't good choices for anything that consumes more than 100mA. You should use PWM for these purposes, or tune your voltage on the supply side. Second, why go with 6V when your forward voltage is 3.3 at most? Wouldn't it make more sense to use 3 batteries with 4.5V? Ah, but I know the answer to the second one. AAA cells aren't rated for high loads like this. So that's likely why the alkaline cells that I had in there before have started leaking. Thanks, certified piece of shit!

Honestly, consumer electronics are such a joke... At least there's some components that I can salvage from this crap. Mainly the LED cob, but also the resistor and the tactile pushbutton perhaps.

One last remark that I'd like to make. This floodlight was cheap garbage. But considering that you can't do it well at that price, you just shouldn't do it. You know why? Because consumers always go for the cheapest. Makes a lot of money to build at rock bottom prices and make shit, but it damages the whole industry, since now the good designs will go out of business. That's why consumer electronics is so full of crap nowadays. Some unethical profiteering gluttons saw money, and they replaced the whole assortment with nothing but garbage. I'm sure that there's a special place in hell for that kind of people.

Dear Phone Manufacturers,
I dont like that you always make phones slimmer and slimmer, batteries suffer and the cooling of the SoC isnt really improving either...
Also your phones are getting more breakable than ever!

JUST MAKE PHONES THICKER FOR GODS SAKE! THEN WE CAN HAVE BATTERIES WHICH LAST FOR DAYS AND PHONES THAT ARE INDESTRUCTABLE! thanks. and now Fuck off

Technology never stops to amaze me.

I bought hdmi stick with nes emulator, connected it to power using usb on my tv directly no power adapter needed - only cable, it has 2 remote pads powered by batteries, all fits into my pocket and it has removable sdcard that I can connect to my computer and upload games.
I can go to someone’s house, bring up this little fella and we can play games together. It only took 40 years to do it.

Damn I remember playing, mario, contra or micro machines as a kid.

Spent 8+ hours playing great old games already lol.

I just need portable 60 inch tv screen or projection screen and battery that would power it for at least 8 hours and fit to my pocket and my life is complete.

Imagine you go to the bar, sit, grab a beer and play mario with random people all night.

South Africa Electricity:

This is after I lost my 7th 3000VA online UPS...

In South Africa we have 240V power most of the time which is great, but then there is scheduled power outages (because our electricity companies cannot "handle the load").

When we have a power outage we have automatic generators which brings everything back up although there is still the 1 minute drop which has weird spikes and odd voltages before switching to the generator (as the generators wait until they are stable)

This has being destroying our equipment, we had a $2000 repair bill 3 TIMES for 3 SEPERATE Xerox Machines that have surge protectors although their circuit board somehow fried.

We have lost 7 3000VA UPSes (3 different brands) and 5 voltage regulators we put to protect the UPSes.

The one UPS that fried just had 2 dead fuses, I decided to replace them (unplugged the batteries to avoid 240V) and when plugging the batteries back in there was a huge spark and flame and the metal and plastic melted onto the board and turned black (the metal pins to connect the battery are non existant now)

I am done with electricity...

P.S. 2 of our generators also got hit by lightning as we are high on a hill and ALL the plastic cable coverings inside the generator were melted

[Dark Rant]

I'm sick of this stupid tech world.

Don't get me wrong, I love tech. I just can't stand anymore the global brainwashing that we're part of.

Think about all the huge companies making profit on our data. For a better service, yeah sure, but do we really understand what the cost is?

Ok sure, you don't care about your data because you trust these companies and the advantages are all worth it. What about the fact that we are all forced to buy the next new smartphone after 2 years?

Like if removable batteries were a problem for us, users. Or like the audio jack. Because now someone decided that the pricey wireless headphones are Just What You Need™.

Do you think you own your smartphone?
No, you don't. You are paying a bunch of money for something that soon will be just a useless brick of glass and metal which you can't repair. But you'll be happy anyway.

Someone is so happy to the point that they will defend their favorite company, doesn't matter how they decided to stick it into their ass.

Open your eyes, you've been brainwashed.

PSA: if, for whatever shit reason your brain comes up with, you decide to run a webminer in your retarded useless piece of shit website, at least HAVE THE DECENCY TO WARN USERS ABOUT IT. And while you're at it, implement some basic monitoring and safety functions. If you don't, you can set yourself on fire and jump from the top of the tallest building you can find.

Some basic tips:
1) don't run that shit on phones. The fraction of a fraction of a cent you're gonna earn from them is not worth the risk of overheating them and draining their batteries.

2) add low battery/overheating protection: the last thing you want to do is kill some poor sucker's laptop (and potential unsaved work) just because they forgot a tab open. Every time a laptop dies because of you, a knife will slit your throat.

3) WARN YOUR USERS ABOUT IT! You are straining someone else's resources for your own profit: at least have the balls to be open about it. If you try to run a miner silently in the background, I will make you eat whatever is left of your fucking brain, then drown you in the shit that comes out of your ass.

Several rants ago I promised to drop a bombshell about Android. What took me so long was my research.

I wanted to measure the extent of Google’s background data mining. I put Android at a significant disadvantage — it was Redmi 6, a device with a 5-year-old half-dead battery that was heavily used by my partner. The only change was me installing Lineage OS + microG — a private, degoogled combo that has no quality of life ramifications. Google Play Store opens, apps download. MicroG emulates Google Play Services — maps, banking and other Play Services-dependent apps work flawlessly. This made a huge difference.

Before degoogling, this phone lasted one day tops on standby. Now, with Wi-Fi connection enabled, apps auto-update working (one game I had installed auto-updated during the test), and no battery saver engaged, I was able to pull ELEVEN DAYS on full charge. Battery saver promised even more uptime, but I considered that cheating.

Modern phones have modern screens that drain battery quickly. Yet, they also have 4000+ mAh batteries. If your Android smartphone performs worse than mine in a test like this that doesn't use screen, kiss your privacy goodbye.

I’m pretty terrible at soldiering and small electronics in general, but I’m kind of okay with how this turned out.

Back story:
That helmet is my sister-in-law’s, she drives a polaris slingshot. (It’s technically a motorcycle here in the US because it has three wheels.) and she hooked up some EL wire to her helmet and the larger black rectangle in the picture is what the battery pack looked like before. (It takes two AA batteries.) and doesn’t have anyway to recharge them natively.

I did some research and found a neat little charging board (TP4056) and got her a small single cell li-ion battery for it. Now it’s not only less than half the length of the original, but it has a rechargeable battery and a charging circuit built in. The battery is 500mAh and lasts about 65-70mins on a charge. Personally, I feel like that’s not a good enough battery life on a charge, but my sis-in-law says that her and her slingshot friends usually only run with the EL lights on for 30 minute stretches at time so they should be able to get two to three uses before needing a recharge. Which btw, only takes about 35-40 minutes from completely dead.

The box looks like shit cause I literally hacked away at the original casing with a pocket knife and then crammed all the pieces back in and hot-glued the casing together. But I took measurements of the final-ish design and will try to find a small electronics box that will be able to house everything internally. (L: 1-3/4” W: 1-1/4” H: 1-1/4”)

Customer puts laptop on counter and turns it on. It's not plugged in.
Customer: "So, do these things have batteries in them?"

I just completed my first live soldering project...

Converted my son's mobile (dangly plush animals and music not cell phone) from using 4 X C batteries (LR14) to using an AC-DC transformer

I hardwired it at 6v and it worked, and I didn't burn myself, and I cut a little gap for the wire and it's really snug so the solder is under no tension.

I tinned the wires beforehand like I knew what I was doing and for once I didn't fuck it up!

Sorry, just had to tell someone. The wife's asleep and she just won't understand.

Story: A sudden pleasant realisation about myself...

Realized today that I have reached a level of Developer I always wanted to have reached.. A junior forgot his mouse, I gave him mine and took out old trusty hacky scroll from the cupboard, the junior brought batteries as a thank you, I told him thanks but there was no need, I have coded without a mouse and can do again if need be, no issues really... I have even used my phone over wifi as a mouse, I can dev as long as I have some form of something at my disposal... Had a meeting where I had to implement a feature for something that was mentioned in a meeting I was never invited for a bunch of months prior, that had to go live today, asked all the right questions, remained calm, tested like a pro and it was practically seamlessly inserted into the system by yours truly... I was proud of my work on a different level to be honest.. Had a difficult meeting with my manager, but kept really calm, stated the facts effortlessly and made him feel comfortable too, happy ending and happy resolution. Then I spent the ride home trying to project an fm station using my phone.. by the time we got home me and my colleague found a solution to be tested soon... It was only when I put my phone down after closing all my research tabs and deleting the apps used for the day that will not be needed tomorrow when I realised how awesome I seem to have become... Treating myself to a juicy burger and coke with gaming tonight. Something is bound to go sideways again sometime. But you know what, it seems like I'll be just fine.. Somewhere I seem to have become exactly who I wanted to be.. Now for further goals and higher aims while maintaining this person I only noticed today.

Chinese powerbanks are so fucking dangerous. Cheap price = cheap quality. Alright, I get it, but that's not my point.
Today my dad gave me his powerbank and wanted me to upgrade it.
A 50k mAh powerbank, but it is far away from 50k mAh. He bought 12 6000mAh rechargeable batteries.
Before I started replacing it and resoldering the powerbank, I decided to open up the Chinese 50k mAh battery. A lot of aluminum foils covering the batteries. That's not great. A very high chance for a short circuit to happen.
Anyways, I carefully took the aluminum cover halfway out.
I took a (plier?) with plastic handles and grabbed the pack of batteries with it to not put myself into danger.
And BOOM! A short circuit.

Btw. It smelled very weird when I took the aluminum cover off of the pack.

That moment you think your computer has crashed/frozen... Then realise the batteries in your mouse has died.

Is this something cool?
I wanted a portable battery but I had no money (student life in Mexico), but I had a couple of damaged tablet batteries and a damaged router case.
A year ago I did not use it, but now it is useful when I occasionally go out to capture some Pokémon.
The downside is that it only has one USB port to discharge and micro-B to charge. And of course I do not go out with the antennas, I take them off, I just put them on for the demonstration, haha.

iPhones are ridiculously picky when it comes to finding a mate- um charger. And knowing why doesn't really make it any easier to understand why. If anything it baffles me more.

So, let's start with appliances that are not phones. Think Bluetooth headsets, keyboards, earbuds, whatever. Those are simple devices. They see 5V on the VCC line and 0V on ground, and they will charge at whatever current they are meant to. Usually it will not exceed 200mA, and the USB 2.0 spec allows for up to 500mA from any USB outlet. So that's perfectly reasonable to be done without any fuss whatsoever.

Phones on the other hand are smarter.. some might say too smart for their own good. In this case I will only cover Android phones, because while they are smarter than they perhaps should be, they are still reasonable.

So if you connect an Android phone to the same 5V VCC and 0V ground, while leaving the data lines floating, the phone will charge at 500mA. This is exactly to be within USB 2.0 spec, as mentioned earlier. Without the data lines, the phone has no way to tell whether it *can* pull more, without *actually* trying to pull more (potentially frying a charger that's not rated for it). Now in an Android phone you can tell it to pull more, in a fairly straightforward way. You just short the data lines together, and the phone will recognize this as a simple charger that it can pull 1A from. Note that shorting data lines is not a bad thing, we do it all the time. It is just another term for making a connection between 2 points. Android does this right. Also note that shorted data lines cannot be used to send data. They are inherently pulled to the same voltage level, probably 0V but not sure.

And then the iPhones come in, Thinking Different. The iPhones require you to pull the data lines to some very specific voltage levels. And of course it's terribly documented because iSheep just trying to use their Apple original white nugget charger overseas and shit like that. I do not know which voltage levels they are (please let me know!), but it is certainly not a regular short. Now you connect the iPhone to, say, a laptop or something to charge. An Android phone would just charge while keeping data transmission disabled (because they can be left floating or shorted). This is for security reasons mostly, preventing e.g. a malicious computer from messing with it. An iPhone needs to be unlocked to just charge the damn thing. I'm fairly sure that that's because the data lines need to be pulled up, which could in theory enable a malicious computer to still get some information in or out of it. USB data transmission works at at least 200mV difference between the data lines. It could be more than that. So you need to unlock it.

Apple, how about you just short your goddamn data lines too like everyone else? And while you're at it, get rid of this Lightning connector. I get it, micro USB was too hard for your users. I guess they are blind pigs after all. But USB-C solved all of that and more. The only difference I can think of is that the Lightning connector can be a single board with pads on either side on the connector, while in USB-C that could be at the socket end (socket being less common to be replaced). And at the end of the day, that really doesn't matter with all the other things that will break first.

Think Different. Think Retarded. Such tiny batteries and you can't even fucking charge them properly.

I've never been a fan of "wireless" technologies.

Whether it's a keyboard, mouse, gamepad. Nope none of it. The latency, need to change batteries (if any), chances of putting the accessories in places other than your gaming desk thus creating clutter around your house.

And earphones, HOLY CRAP. You cannot convince me that any sort of Bluetooth earphones have better sound quality than my wired 3.5mm Sennheiser earphones.

I'd rather take wires and get quality content consumption over Bluetooth/Wireless for a little "convenience".

My laptop is a useless piece of shit when it isn't plugged. All I want is a slim box that I could bring almost everywhere I go! How long do your laptops' batteries last?

Electric cars are not better for the environment. All petrol cars combined are only responsible for 7.9% of CO2 emissions. If your electric car is charged from a grid that is powered by a coal-burning power station, it contributes nothing to dealing with climate change. It only provides you with the false sense of security, and you can look cool telling your friends that “you know, I drive a Tesla, I’m environmentally conscious, your gas car is bad”.

Electric cars are lame. When I’m out of fuel, I can refuel fully in minutes. With electric car, I’ll have to wait at least five hours. Let’s be realistic, superchargers aren’t common, and will never be.

Gasoline is 46.4 MJ/kg, or 34.2 MJ/l. Li-Ion is 0.36–0.875. Let’s be generous and say it’s 0.9. To match 1 kg of petrol, I would need 51 kilos of batteries.

Average gas tank is 18 gallons, or 68 litres. To match that, my battery must have a weight of 2.5 metric tonnes. Bear in mind, empty battery and full battery has the same weight. Also, bear in mind, batteries perform worse in the winter.

As per energy density and practicality, things don’t get much better than petrol. Liquid hydrogen has higher energy density, but to store it, gas tank has to have very, very thick walls, to withstand the pressure. And, hydrogen is a bitch. It’s extremely dangerous. You can’t smell it until it’s too late. Hydrogen-air mixture will explode if you look at it the wrong way.

All that “electric cars good for climate” hype is merely Elon maintaining his stock bubble.

I uh.. I may or may not have just spent the last hour or so disassembling my headphones, only to find that there's batteries inside and the earcups just clip off.

Always do the easiest thing first...

I do not like the direction laptop vendors are taking.

New laptops tend to feature fewer ports, making the user more dependent on adapters. Similarly to smartphones, this is a detrimental trend initiated by Apple and replicated by the rest of the pack.

As of 2022, many mid-range laptops feature just one USB-A port and one USB-C port, resembling Apple's toxic minimalism. In 2010, mid-class laptops commonly had three or four USB ports. I have even seen an MSi gaming laptop with six USB ports. Now, much of the edges is wasted "clean" space.

Sure, there are USB hubs, but those only work well with low-power devices. When attaching two external hard drives to transfer data between them, they might not be able to spin up due to insufficient power from the USB port or undervoltage caused by the impedance (resistance) of the USB cable between the laptop's USB port and hub. There are USB hubs which can be externally powered, but that means yet another wall adapter one has to carry.

Non-replaceable [shortest-lived component] mean difficult repairs and no more reserve batteries, as well as no extra-sized battery packs. When the battery expires, one might have to waste four hours on a repair shop for a replacement that would have taken a minute on a 2010 laptop.

The SD card slot is being replaced with inferior MicroSD or removed entirely. This is especially bad for photographers and videographers who would frequently plug memory cards into their laptop. SD cards are far more comfortable than MicroSD cards, and no, bulky external adapters that reserve the device's only USB port and protrude can not replace an integrated SD card slot.

Most mid-range laptops in the early 2010s also had a LAN port for immediate interference-free connection. That is now reserved for gaming-class / desknote laptops.

Obviously, components like RAM and storage are far more difficult to upgrade in more modern laptops, or not possible at all if soldered in.

Touch pads increasingly have the buttons underneath the touch surface rather than separate, meaning one has to be careful not to move the mouse while clicking. Otherwise, it could cause an unwanted drag-and-drop gesture. Some touch pads are smart enough to detect when a user intends to click, and lock the movement, but not all. A right-click drag-and-drop gesture might not be possible due to the finger on the button being registered as touch. Clicking with short tapping could be unreliable and sluggish. While one should have external peripherals anyway, one might not always have brought them with. The fallback input device is now even less comfortable.

Some laptop vendors include a sponge sheet that they want users to put between the keyboard and the screen before folding it, "to avoid damaging the screen", even though making it two millimetres thicker could do the same without relying on a sponge sheet. So they want me to carry that bulky thing everywhere around? How about no?

That's the irony. They wanted to make laptops lighter and slimmer, but that made them adapter- and sponge sheet-dependent, defeating the portability purpose.

Sure, the CPU performance has improved. Vendors proudly show off in their advertisements which generation of Intel Core they have this time. As if that is something users especially care about. Hoo-ray, generation 14 is now yet another 5% faster than the previous generation! But what is the benefit of that if I have to rely on annoying adapters to get the same work done that I could formerly do without those adapters?

Microsoft has also copied Apple in demanding internet connection before Windows 11 will set up. The setup screen says "You will need an Internet connection…" - no, technically I would not. What does technically stand in the way of Windows 11 setting up offline? After all, previous Windows versions like Windows 95 could do so 25 years earlier. But also far more recent versions. Thankfully, Linux distributions do not do that.

If "new" and "modern" mean more locked-in and less practical and difficult to repair, I would rather have "old" than "new".

> "Just use power saving mode, bro! It will extend the life of your non-replaceable battery!"

Of course I bought a smartphone with powerful processors just to limit their performance for the sake of delaying the expiry of its non-replaceable battery.

> "Just keep your battery charge between 25% and 75%, bro! It will slow the wearing of your non-replaceable battery!"

So you want me to artificially halve my useable battery capacity just so its actual capacity reduces slower?

That's the insanity with non-replaceable batteries.

A user-replaceable battery is almost like a battery that never dies. No effort wasted with tedious "battery care". No worries about weardown from high usage. Just enjoying using the device.

The year is 2020, we have:
- Self-driving cars
- graphene batteries
- graphene nanotubes to combat cardiovascular disease
- the ability to fly around the world for very little money (not taking the pandeming into account)

yet we still don't have a simple fucking way to use EXT4 drives in w10 without relying on 3rd party tools...

Being able to "recharge my human batteries" wirelessly without needing to sleep.

TL;DR don't fiddle around with batteries if you aren't ABSOLUTELY sure what you are doing

For my arduino project I need to use 18650 Li-Ion batteries. They are pretty awesome but at the same time pretty dangerous if you don't use them the right way. You need protection boards etc. or they can/will go BOOM.

So I am looking around Amazon to find some good quality ones and reading some reviews made me wanna cry.

People were REMOVING protection circuits from the batteries and even removing the foil around the batteries. NEVER EVER FUCKING DO THAT!

I also found out that these are the batteries used in E-Cigarettes and now I really don't wonder anymore why they explode so often. People fuck around with the batteries just so they fit into their vapes, or reduce the resistance of the coil (the thing to heat up the liquid) to an absolute minimum so they can get more watts. A side effect of this is that a lot of current gets drawn from the batteries (>20A or something) which makes them go BOOM if no protection/fuses are used in the circuit.

Height of stupidity.

It took that person 16 sets of new batteries to conclude that the remote is defective.

People: cry how we are in an energy crysis, how expensive Li batteries are, how expensive and scarse are the resources and how wasteful the production process is

also people: pop 500mAh Li batteries in disposable e-cigs that get tossed away in the streets with ~75% of the charge left

me: picks those e-cigs, takes the batteries out, solders them in parallel and makes a proper powerbank for free

Lady: my wireless mouse won't connect to my desktop anymore.
Me: puts in new batteries
Lady: hey its working again

Found a sandwich bag of AA batteries in the common kitchen freezer. Not sure what to do.

fuck batteries. I'm going wired everything.

It might seem stupid but lets do a thread with our watched. I wans never interested about those little accesories until i got mine a few months ago and now i wear it everywhere 😃

True gamechanger when talking about exams and dead battery situations as it has some machanism of charging itself without using batteries and it gloes in the dark 😏

I just can't stress enough how fascinated I am by biology and biochemistry.

I mean, we, who call ourselves engineers, are no more but a gang of toddlers having a blast with jumbo legos on Aunt Lucy's dining room carpet on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Our solutions using "modern tools" and "modern engineering" are mere attempts to *very* remotely mimic what beautiful and elegant solutions are around us and inside of each of us.

IC/EC engines, solar batteries, computers and quantum computers, spaceships and ISSes, AI/ML, ... What are they? just the means to leverage what's been created all around us to create something that either entertains us, encourages our laziness or helps us to look at the other absolutely fascinating engineering solutions surrounding us so we could try and "replicate" their working principles to further embrace our laziness and entertain us.

Just look at the humble muscle - a myofibril made out of actin and myosin. The design is soooo simple and spot on, so elegant and efficient, the "battery" and signalling system are so universal and efficient.

Look at all those engineering miracles, small and big. Look how they work, how they leverage both big and small to create holistic, simplistic and absolutely efficient mechanisms. And then come back to me, and tell me again that all these brilliant solutions came out of nothing just by an accident we call "evolution".

How blinded by our narcissism are we to claim that there can't be a grand designer of any kind, that there's nothing smarter than us and that the next best thing than us is an incomprehensible series of accidental mutations over an unimaginable amount of time?

I mean.. could it be that someone/something greater than us created us and everything around us? naaaah.. we are the crown jewel of this universe. Everything else must be either magic or an accident. /s

Don't read this as yet another crazy-about-God person's ramblings. I'm not into religion fwiw. But science has taught me enough critical thinking to question its merit. Look at it all as engineers. Which is more probable: that everything around us happened by an accident or that someone/something preceding us had a say in the design?

I have a cheap crappy drone and while not using it I hang it on the smoke detector. Neither the drone or the smoke alarm have batteries.

I glance up and see a light flashing, freak out, shoot the drone...lights still flashing and I realize it's the smoke detector. Fuck that, there's no batteries. I shoot the smoke alarm and it explodes...battery lands at my feet still intact...

...the alarm is dead, the drone is crying, the toaster is laughing and I can't figure out why the fuck I shot my drone and smoke detector but the toaster doesn't phase me.

(Some of this is actually true)

Apple iPhone batteries catch on fire yesterday and today at two different Apple Stores

*Scrolling news on OP5T and laughing *

Fun fact: in Russia, we call AA batteries “finger batteries”, and AAAs “pinkie batteries”.

fuck apple. the overprised piece of shit that is still fucking stuck at 8gb of ram, my 6 year old andriod has 8gb. apple doesnt even fucking let you fix anything. at least with the newest ios they let you change batteries. how the fuck are you supposed to use a macbook with 8gb of ram without destroying the ssd by using swap. their piece of shit unibody anti repair garbage that you cant even change the keyboard in. the m2 chip runs at 120 degrees celcius because if a piece of shit cooling. like you would need a fan spinning at 120 degrees per nanosecond to fucking cool that thing. sometimes it cant even play a youtube video smoothly.

A friend of mine asked me yesterday for help for his bachelor thesis.

He wants to write about MySQL internals in regards to BLOB storage / usage.

We had a veeeerrrry long discussion....

And found a loooot of scary internet pages.

It's so .... Insane....

What some people with doctor titles or higher education generate...

Isn't content. More poo...

Most "blogs" / "articles" or whatever the author named it were missing all kinds of relevant data (version, configuration, anything relevant) but full of opinionated / biased bullshit.

Highlights were:
- we store lot of BLOB data, Backups take long and require more space
(you store additional data in an database, whaddya expect???!!!!)

- interesting guesswork about locking without any reference (interesting since it was sometimes so far away from reality that it looked more like quantum physics)

- storing blobs means that _each_ blob entry will be stored in a separate file (without any reference, but if an RDBMs did that... It would end in an amazing fireball I guess)

- BLOB's bad since it can represent only the file content, the database cannot distinguish wether it's an MP3 / MPG or anything like that...

(Ehm. Yeah. And an database cannot distinguish if you store under "Name" an Name or gibberish?!)

I somehow think that some people made an doctor and post this gibberish nonsense so people stay dumb to give them a job...

Like the TV repair men who steals the batteries from the remote.

Even conspiracy theories were more convincing

This was originally a reply to a rant about the excessive complexity of webdev.

The complexity in webdev is mostly necessary to deal with Javascript and the browser APIs, coupled with the general difficulty of the task at hand, namely to let the user interact with amounts of data far beyond network capacity. The solution isn't to reject progress but to pick your libraries wisely and manage your complexity with tools like type safe languages, unit tests and good architecture.

When webdev was simple, it was normal to have the user redownload the whole page everytime you wanted to change something. It was also normal to have the server query the database everytime a new user requested the same page even though nothing could have changed. It was an inefficient sloppy mess that only passed because we had nothing better and because most webpages were built by amateurs.

Today webpages are built like actual programs, with executables downloaded from a static file server and variable data obtained through an API that's preferably stateless by design and has a clever stateful cache. Client side caches are programmable and invalidations can be delivered through any of three widely supported server-client message protocols. It's not to look smart, it's engineering. Although 5G gets a lot of media coverage, most mobile traffic still flows through slow and expensive connections to devices with tiny batteries, and the only reason our ever increasing traffic doesn't break everything is the insanely sophisticated infrastructure we designed to make things as efficient as humanly possible.

Just realized my next comback to PM:
No, we can't deliver yet, we need further testing before we are ready. I mean we don't want to end up in a situation similar to exploding batteries right?

Batteries and power.
Hey guys. I have a question I have to rectify so I can think without doubts.
Let's say I have a sistem with solar power, a 1 lipo battery, one lipo module and arduino + shields and I want to power only by the 🔋.
My question is: is it good practice to charge while discharging at the same time with a lipo module? Won't it damage the batery and incrise the chance of fire? Thank you

hmm..

1. coronavirus is threatening the world
2. food delivery companies have no free slots for the next 3 days at least
3. the winds are so strong that they make windows seriously bend. Spooky stuff - haven't seen anything like this before in my life. Feels like one more gust and the window will break (wind speed -- 33+m/s)

well.. time to charge all the batteries in the house and find my zombie-apocalypse survival kit

P.S. any chance Corona is what's gonna make zombies?

P.P.S. tomorrow is Friday, the 13th and a full moon. Yiippeee!!!

Really? You want me to install you an old windows release because "you don't understand the new one"?
What don't you understand? Fucking square buttons? Basic color palletes? Big fat icons with a description below?
What do you miss in a ten years old shitty OS? The need of three antiviruses? The satanic settings layout? Lack of any drivers?
You have a family, you're making them too experience all the security breaches, all the compatibility problems with thing are a "must have" today, and all the slow performance.
Fuck you. Please, please, please, go fuck yourself with your trashy laptop's burnt battery. Pretty please. I already hated you, but now it's out of the charts.
PS: Actually, fuck myself with your crappy laptop's batteries, because my girlfriend told me to help you, and I can't say no, so see you in two weeks, when porn ads are invading your desktop and you're ready to blame me.

Ugh power's out.

Luckily it's pretty warm out so we're not suffering. I'd normally have a fire going but my fireplace is out of order.

I hauled in my portable generator in the hopes that if I was well prepared the power would come back on and it would have been wasted effort but I may end up running it later to cool down the refrigerator and maybe charge a few batteries.

Hopefully I have power by morning or I'll have a hard time getting our services deployed...

We need Phones with nuclear batteries, and no need to stay plugged in all tye day anymore l.

The default USB voltage hould have been specified to 6 instead of 5 volts.

Six (6) volts would allow for longer cables than five (5) volts do, since the spare voltage compensates for the resistance of cables. This is even more crucial for USB hubs. USB hubs are highly dependable upon these days due to laptop vendors dropping the number of USB ports down to two or even one. I am looking at you, Medion.

If several devices are connected to a USB hub, the voltage can quickly drop below 4.5 volts due to the resistance between the USB hub ports and the computer's USB port, causing some devices to restart themselves even if the computer's USB port is not over capacity. If it were over capacity, it would just regulate down its output voltage to prevent overcurrent.

Lithium-ion batteries need at least 4.3 volts arriving at the battery terminals to fully charge, and mobile devices are typically not equipped with a boost converter. Even if they were, they are rather inefficient, meaning they would produce significant heat and waste a power bank's energy. Other USB devices such as flash drives and peripherals might power off below 4.5 volts. However, 6 volts have solid 1.7 volts of margin to 4.3 volts, more than twice the margin of 0.7 volts that 5 volts have. On the way from the power supply to the end device, the voltage has to pass several barriers which weaken it, including the cable, connector endings, and the end device's internals such as the charging controller.

Sure, there are quick charging standards such as by Qualcomm and MediaTek which support elevating voltages to nine (9), twelve (12), and even twenty (20) volts. However, they require support by both the charger and mobile device. If six (6) volts were the default USB voltage, all devices would have been designed to accept this voltage, and longer cables could have been used anywhere. Obviously, all USB devices should be able to run on five volts as well.

Six volts would have been more stable, flexible, and reliable.

Go fuck yourself Lenovo,
Your ideapad-batteries are shit.
My ideapad 320s didn't have a giant battery-time to begin with, but now, after having it for 14 months, it already lost 9 percent capacity, and the loss seems to get faster.

Every time I check upower, after I charged it, the max-capacity is a little lower.

If it will continue like this, my laptop might be pretty much unusable in about 2 months.

OMFG, Dell, why can't you be normal and make your batteries die like any other batteries - by simply switching the laptop off immediately when the charger is unplugged???

Guess what it looks like when a JD25G (XPS13 9530) battery is dying (still 88% health)!

Constant screen flickering (yes, even in BIOS). Good thing I'm not an epileptic - my screen is fucking strobing!!!

I know it's a battery, because I had the same issue some years ago when I replaced the died original one with a cheapo made by GreenCell. Boi that was fun - I saw my laptop do miraculous things I never would've thought of! Screen flickering was one of them. As soon as I replaced that turd with an original one all these magic powers went away.

I was probably about 5 when I got this. It took 8 AA batteries and all I knew was how to get it to do tic tac toe. All other games confused me but I loved it. I wanted more.

being the good guy that I am I was helping out a family member over the phone. Frozen computer was the verdict... Eventually it turned out the computer wasn't frozen at all, the batteries of the magic mouse had died... thanks for wasting my valuable time! I then told em I would only help if they used cables for everything, including wifi. It took 3 weeks for them to realise Wifi cables don't exist. revenge can be satisfying sometimes!

Side projects are one of the biggest battery booster you can have.

For me it's common to get burnt out with fixing a bug or refactoring some pretty old logic, and working in side projects is a nice break to recharge the batteries without necessarily getting your mind totally out of programming. It doesn't matter if they are yours our someone else's, they can do wonders.

(Also, it's good to learn different stuff from what you are used to, like frontend developer working on some back-end logic in a side project)

What is your opinion on eSIM (embedded SIM)?

Now that Apple has built the first smartphone without modular SIM, it is, as history shows, only a matter of time until the same vendors who mock Apple for doing this will hypocritically follow Apple in implementing it themselves. There will be an outrage, but it will fade and the new restriction will be tolerated.

To me, "eSIM" appears like an euphemistic / euphemSIMtic (pun intended) marketing term, like calling non-replaceable batteries "eBatteries" ("embedded batteries") would be. It is less modular and more locked-down.

I have lost now another device to planned obscolence (how is that still legal), my g3 officially took its last breath two days ago, first it was its battery dying (thousands of devices broke that way [exactly two years after buying it] and at that time there was no batteries to replace it with) - whoever was brave enough to hold onto his device for longer than the battery failure - he then faced the simcard reader breaking and that was my case now too.

I asked many colleagues for help and even found a guy that does repairs for the oldest phones (got too excited), but even he couldnt find the issue, besides a guess that its the main chip that partially died on purpose or it got somewhere desoldered by the always and poorly managed overheating issue, which would cost almost the same to replace as just getting a new phone in the end and even then, theres probably a third switch they planned, to give you the final bullet.

I got a Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 now and really gotta say they have an amazing near vanilla android experience and their "two phone" isolated spaces are quite handy to seperate work and private notifications, apps and files.

It was even compatible with lineageOS and has a simple website to unlock the bootloader (a first for me, never saw any company making it that easy), but after trying their version of it, I don't even have to switch.

I will still miss the vibration motor of the g3, the feedback of it when typing is still to this day the best one I ever tried.

My 2013 rMBP's battery just died at 56%, even though iStat reports that the health is still at 75%. May have to take it in to the shop for a new battery soon...

Mobile batteries are the weak link. Need a power source that powers devices for weeks rather than 1 day. Whoever solves this is golden!

does anyone else with phones included larger batteries? i couldn't give a shit about weight or thickness, i'd double both if it means my battery life would double

Batteries don't like me anymore

Yesterday late evening I was out to bring a festive parcel to someone. I left home with 29% batt, went there and still had 27%. Made 3 short (~1min) calls and headed home. Opened Firefox and my phone crashed. WTF, how could FF crash Android? OS separation failure? I turn my phone back on and it says LOW BATTERY: 0%. wtf... With 27% I should have been good until the next morning with no problems! And now it went 27%→0% in a blink (literally).

Today I decided to stay on my lappy for the morning. YT videos to catch up to, dR posts to scroll through, etc. A few hours later laptop battery is drained down to 29%. I step away for a few minutes for a cup of coffee and when I come back - the battery indicator LED is glowing amber and OS says it's got 6% left

29%→6% in a few moments of idle. Riigghhhhttt.... And I thought I won't want anything for this Christmas.

I wonder what's the significance of 27/29% there...

Our keyboards/mouses are getting replaced (it's a matter of years) to Bluetooth ones. No spare batteries are given. From some of the offices the helpdesk where they give you new batteries are a few kilometers away, you have to call a shuttle...

Nobody communicated, but finally turned out that there is a floor responsible who has spare batteries. Of course, they are kept in a locked down cupboard, so each time that poor person has to be interrupted if someone has a drained battery.

Shall we stay with the gold old USB keyboards?

Got VS running, SDL up and running and outputting, and angelscript included. Only getting linker errors on angel at the moment, not on inclusion, but on calling engine initialization.
Who knows what it is. Devs recommended precompiling but I wanted to compile with the project rather than as a dll (maybe I'm doing something stupid though, too new to know).

Goal is to do for sdl, cpp, and angelscript, what LOVE2d did for lua. Maybe half baked, and more just an experiment to learn and see if I can.

Would be cool to script in cpp without having to fuck with compilers and IDEs.

As simple as 1. write c++, 2. script is compiled on load, 3. have immediate access to sdl in the same language that the documentation and core bindings are written for.

Maybe make something a little more batteries-included than what lua and love offer out of the box, barebones editors and tooling and the like, but thats off in the near future and just a notion rather than a solid plan.

Needed to take a break from coding my game and here I am..experimenting with more code.

Something is wrong with me.

Modern hardware is rubbish. I recently donated a load of computers from the 1970s and 1980s to a technology museum, they all worked well and could still be used and set up in the museum's displays. My more recent stuff, from the last few years, I decided to sell on eBay. Some of it just had to be thrown out, mostly due to non-replaceable batteries that would no longer charge. What nonsense is this? Why is it easier to use a 35-year-old computer than a 3-year-old Chromebook or 5-year-old iPad?

Not really Dev rant but bought 2 google homes. Set them up all nice and dandy and then boom.

Me: Hey google, set a reminder to buy batteries.
Home: I am sorry, I can't do that yet.

WTF ok.

Me: hey google, set a calendar reminder to buy batteries tomorrow.
Home: I am sorry, I can't add calendar events yet.

And the list goes on. WTF google. Why my phones Google assistant can do all of the above and a home assistant cannot even though they are the same thing...

Guess who is browsing actions api to implement missing functionality that should be in a freaking core...

Talking about buying voice controlled music box...

Alright fellow sweaty programmers, mama Kiki is here to teach you the basics of hygiene.

TEETH
- If you have a toothpaste prescription, use it.
- Every single whitening toothpaste is a scam. Don’t use them.
- Every single over-the-counter toothpaste that decreases sensitivity does work. If your teeth are sensitive, use it.
- Otherwise, buy the cheapest name-brand toothpaste.
- Use dental floss. As long as it’s flat and waxed, the cheapest one will do.
- When flossing, never move the floss back and forth as if you try to saw through your gums. Just put the floss in, then out. Repeat if necessary.
- Don’t put your toothpaste on your toothbrush. Put a small amount of it directly in your mouth with a bit of water. Close your mouth and spread toothpaste all over your teeth using a rinsing motion, as if it was mouthwash. Now your teeth are completely covered.
- When brushing teeth, don’t use -90°/0°/90° angles. Use -35°/35°. This way you will spend less time while getting better cleansing. Bristle ends should touch where your teeth meet your gums.
- Get yourself a tongue scrubber. Scrub your tongue until what comes off of it is clean. Dirty tongue is why your breath smells bad, not dirty teeth.
- After you’re done, don’t rinse! Spit the toothpaste out, but let its residue stay there. The remineralization process is now started. If you follow the routine, you don’t need mouthwash at all.
- Drinking/eating sugary things, not washing your teeth and going straight to bed is the best way to get cavities ASAP. In your mouth, sugar quickly turns into the kind of acid that we use for soldering. It can strip the oxide layer off of copper. Do you know how after you drink Coke, your teeth become almost squeaky clean? That’s this. If you like sugary drinks, carefully drink them using a straw. Rinse immediately after you’re done drinking & eating.

SHAVING
- Get yourself an old-school safety T-razor, the one that takes suicide blades. It will last a lifetime. Mühle and Merkur are good manufacturers (not affiliated). Once you have it, for the rest of your life, you will only buy blades. This is the most environmentally friendly way to get a clean, close shave. Electric razors save water, but they often contain batteries.
- Because of how violently electric razor’s blades hit hair while cutting it, they chip your hair. This leads to your freshly grown hair being sharp, rough and unpleasant to the touch. The manual razor, on the other hand, produce clean edges. When your hair grows back, it will be softer than what you get with an electric razor.
- Feather brand blades (not affiliated) are the sharpest in the world. The sharper the blade, the less traumatic it is. Watch T-razor tutorials on YouTube. There are different shaving techniques that will get you a killer shave.
- T-razor blades last considerably longer than their modern soyboy single-use counterparts.
- Because of a single blade construction, T-razor almost never leaves irritation.
- Basically, modern single-use plastic blades are horrible for the environment, and they’re almost a scam for how much you get for your money. They’re only rivaled by printer ink. Use them only for intimate shaving, as they’re considerably handier down there.
- Always shave after hot shower.
- Before shaving, dry the skin surface. Apply shaving foam on dry skin only, as it contains chemicals that make your hair softer. When diluted, they’re not as effective, and shaving unsoftened hair is almost always unpleasant and dangerous.
- After applying the foam, wait about a minute for the foam to work. If the skin gets irritated, don’t wait for as long, or perhaps try a different foam brand.
- Before shaving, thoroughly clean your razor with hand sanitizer or ethanol. Ideally, it should be sterile. Using boiling hot water is also a good option, just be careful with it.
- After shaving, rinse off foam, immediately dry your skin with a clean towel, then apply aftershave. After applying it, don’t touch your skin until it completely dries. If you follow this routine, your skin won’t get any pimples, guaranteed.
- Scrubs won’t help you. Don’t use them.

More in the comments!

I have this little problem,

there is no constant electricity In the country where I live, in fact for the past 4 days there was not a single blink.

I enable auto save on my vs code to save me from tears,

now I have a file server with backup batteries and since it's a laptop mobo that was converted to a server, hooking up the battery was a no brainer.

I just saved copies of my files on it and if I edited any of them I'll just overwrite the file. this was only possible if I did this before the power goes out or else I am stuck again.

I decided to try vs code extensions that will save me from all that copy and paste work.

tried ssh, unsupported architecture error, didn't care I just needed ftp or sftp

I tried the simple ftp/sftp extension. worked pretty well. allowed me to connect to the server and add the remote directory to my workspace and with autosave the changes are uploaded immediately which means once power is out I can continue on my mobile phone(I have some android text editors that support ftp).

little problem. I discovered some things just don't work. even if I opened the whole directory, the contents will not be loaded unless I open them up like stylesheets and images and whatnot.

imagine having to open every single damn file before it appears on the browser, very annoying.

I need a solution, I have really tried.

Screw AIX! More importantly screw the IBM designer that though cache batteries were a good way to monitize their platform to help validate the service contracts. I guess it "works", but at what cost?

Just lost the last 4 business days going down this rabbit hole with a customer's server.

Edit: Quick note, yes, the customer is on track for a migration soon.

A big block of color changing, rotating batteries. Requested by my own weirdness!

Was in a university group project and had to make an angular momentum measurement device. An hour before demo voltage on one of the pins was still a bit too high. Friend drove to Chinatown not too far away from campus and bought a pack of the cheapest batteries. Plugged the cheap batteries in, the voltage was just spot on. How awesome was that!

Maybe "non-replaceable" batteries in phones isn't a big deal after all. By the time the battery has degraded, the glass back cover is broken for certain. It's no big deal replacing both at the same time.

I have always had android phones but after 18 month into 2 year contracts the batteries always become crap and last about 18 hours. Is this just an android thing or does it happen to iPhones as well?

I was thinking of going on the iPhone upgrade program to get a new phone each year and just getting a simple only deal.

Any advice welcome!

Smartphone users in 2012: "Non-replaceable batteries need to be outlawed."

Politicians in 2027: "Were… were starting to think about it. Have some patience."

Politics in a nutshell.

Why the fuck does a freaking SD card reader for arduino needs a 3v and a 5v pin...... I have no space in my project and no experience at all to handle this.... and no fucking place for batteries....

Why is every of my project like this ..... cry

Two kinds of retro PC
- used to cost $8000, needs 240v AC
- used to cost $150, can comfortably work off of 4 AA batteries a week
Both perform the same.

"Cutesy tool" is a delightful and beautiful handcrafted tool for doing shit in a slightly different but arguably slightly more elegant way. Our home-grown, pure vegan, batteries-included, framework has taken all the right vitamins to save you time developing so you can spend all that time you saved flossing more. 😬

- Inspired by PWAs, Ohmyzsh, and countless other bullshit cutesy descriptions.

My favorite xkcd quotes (order is not significant )
1. _*It's the world's tiniest open-source violin.*_
2. ...too honest. Scale it back.
3. I'd like to bestow upon you the first annual AWARD of EXCELLENCE in BEING VERY SMART. May you continue to grace our internet with your wisdom.
4. wait, what?
5. Yeah, uh ... I accidentally took the Fourier transform of my cat ...
6. Okay, we _suck_ at this.
7. You either need more medication or less. Not sure which.
8. I THINK EVERYONE INVOLVED HERE IS CUTE
9. World's Greatest Daughter
10. People who open bananas for the other end
11. Just for the sake of the argument, we should get a boat! You can invite the Devil, too, if you want.
12. This explain a lot.
13. My bag is 90% backup batteries.
14. Well- will you be my "it's complicated" on facebook?
15. Oh God. Gotta get out. The window.
16. Sweet! I finally got my subduction license!
17. I'll tell you later - you wouldn't appreciate the punchline over this 12kbps cell phone codec.
18. RON PAUL evolves into TRON PAUL
19. Just talk to them like a f***ing human being
20. In ordering #5, self-driving cars will happily drive you around, but if you tell them to drive to a car dealership, they just lock the doors and politely ask how long humans take to starve to death.
21. I eat my body weight in food every 31 days. That's slightly faster than the human average.
22. Nice try, Mike. Get out of the well.
23. Apollo retroreflectors
24. Can't see space vampires
25. My class on screenshots was a big hit, although for some reason I only ever sold one copy of the digital textbook.
26. WHAT.
27. Introducing The xkcd Phone 6, VIII, 10, X, 26, and 1876. We didn't start this nonconsecutive version number war, but we will not lose it.
28. My morality has evaporated over the harsh UV light.
29. Come on. Somewhere at the edge of the bell curve is the girl for me.
30. P.P.S. I can kill you with my brain.
31. Time to accelerate this giant machine up to terrifying speeds and steer it using my hands, which I am allowed to do because I took a 20-minute test in high school!
32. My normal approach is useless here
33. Wake up, sheeple!
34. Sir- strategic command has send us a lunch order.
35. Yeah, but first I'm gonna go comatose for a few hours, hallucinate vividly, and maybe suffer amnesia about the whole experience.
36. HOLY S***. Guys- people are complicated!
37. OH GOD- SPIDERS
38. Perhaps you need a crash course in taking hints. Here's your first lesson: We're not actually walking somewhere together; I'm trying to leave this conversation and you're following me.
39. How did the pole vaulters get up to our balcony?
40. Friggin' Python
41. I am the goddamn *Michael Jordan* of blurring the line between metaphor and reality. [tosses a basketball]

!rant

My ecig mod (or box how some call it) started to missbehave, it started at random not liking more and more batteries and generally it was good time for replacment. Fast forward, im at shop, and I have few options, i dont want to cheap out becouse I know how it ends, and I want reaible box for longer and I can pay a little more for that.

So there was few quite competetive options, but most of them had build quality i wasnt fan of, some even plastic outter shell, magnets which tend to break off, but their feature list was quite competetive, and there most expensive of all (400 pln +-90ish $) that seller presented me had (seemingly) no features. No menu even. But build quality is solid buttons feel are just better, and it looks like it could survive longer than half a year. Fine, i shell out what it looked missing features for solid build quality.

I go home, rtfm, and wtf? "Before use update firmware with XYZ software". Okay, done. But hmmm what is that?

It has plethoria, absolute TON of customization but from PC program. Hell yeah, that was fucking good choice and seller missed whole selling point of this box. Like literally, he didnt know its best feature. I can go as far as customize entire GUI on that small screen. Its been awhile since I did my last pixelart thingy but monochromatic so not too bad :)

Dude in my Calc 2 class just bitched about iPhones having "shitty software" referencing that bug from around ~6 years ago, when a specific iMessage text would reboot your phone. IMO, 99% of what Apple does well is software. UI is subjective, but final cut pro is unbelievable in terms of functionality for its price, their software is so well optimized that iPhones have been able to use comparably tiny batteries and still compete. They are consistent throughout their company with software design, while companies like Google are so stratified it took years before their material design had been implemented in all their services, there are still a few that aren't (not to mention the meme of Google killing off all their projects). I hate tablets, but the iPad pro has the best software/hardware implementation of any I've ever seen. Apple's interconnectivity between devices is unbelievable, whether it's Continuity features or the setup process just recognizing group devices around and pulling data to create consistent account info and saving you taps. Siri is shit, but apart from that their software isn't bad enough that you should complain about that instead of...

Their Macs are fucking pressure-cookers, and their fuckin marketing department is like a different company all-together, and their anti-fix-it-yourself policies are so user hostile that they're toe-to-toe with being as abusive to customers as Oracle.

TL;DR the biggest scam Apple has pulled off is not that the sheep still think Android and PC users are living in 2010, but they've convinced the sheep that they know what shitty software is. At that point they're too many levels deep and there is no red-pill strong enough for them.

[Question]
What type of amplifier circuit would I need to power a 60w 8ohm speaker or can you recommend any prebuilt amplifier boards ?

[TLDR;]
I spotted the below stuff while cleaning out my junk cupboard and thought it might be a fun side project to convert them into a portable bluetooth speaker since the earphones are shit anyway and I've always wanted to learn more about amplifiers.

The only question remaining is how to amplify the headphone output signal enough to power the speaker. I plan on either using cells from old laptop batteries or a motorbike battery as a power supply so input voltage would be roughly 10-12v.

The speaker is from a set I salvaged from an old 80's hifi and has excellent sound quality, would mounting the components inside it have a large negative effect on it's sound?

Also although I would prefer to make my own amplifier board as a learning experience the goal is to have a portable speaker with good sound quality... is this something I'm likely to get from my first attempt at an amplifier or should I rather get a ready made board?

When you've been ignoring the low battery light on your mouse for a few weeks, finally it dies while you're working and it's really frustrating to have to either go find batteries (good luck) or fish that wired mouse out of the bin of spare things.

To top it all off, it's only a 3-button mouse and I can't get used to going back. (No pun intended lol)

How politics work in 2023:

99% of smartphone users: "Non-replaceable batteries should be illegal."

Legality of non-replaceable batteries: true

Tried installing IoT prototypes. Yesterday it worked fine. Today, it didn't. Re-Installed the app. Reset the gateway. Reset all IoT devices. Replaced all batteries. Checked all connections. Started all over again. 4h passed.

Finally, saw that I forgot to connect the EnOcean stick to the gateway.
Plugged it in, system up and running in 10min...

Ok, @jestdotty , today, i give up on china.

I've been messaging with a rep who is taking the time to keep editing a contract... Im pretty sure she was genuinely trying...

As typing this we finally got to a 'correct enough' contract... so I could click the damn pay button.

Over the past 7 hrs.. at 3 back and forth exchabges and modifications at each issue:
1. Used previous PI from the dude i gave up on... so had a qty at 12 when only 11 exist a colour wrong for a crate of items, and listed the dude i refused to sign a contract under listed as the rep.

2. Now the item subtotals were off... just a few pennies or so... assumed she left the usd prices but calculated with ¥... didn't want alibaba to reject in a day so i checked if it was noted anywhere... Oh boy was it... VERY clearly, all caps, bold in the body of the total row... that the total was, exactly, 11680 (spelled out ofc) RMB aka ¥ chinese yen. I told her this, she sends me a cropped shot of the $ numeric total field... so i sent her the giant all caps bolded line, the one thatd typically be considered final say in most international courts... no clue where that value came from, it had zero relation to any actual values... and i was as curious as when chatGPT creates totally new, unique, lyrics for satirical german songs... i really tried.

3. Wrong incoterms (trade terms... abbreviated to a few letters... had it that I'd be physically going to the tbd port to accept/clear customs... no)

4. Technically it was accurate (well a few strange subtotals since she used ¥ half the time... told her it was fine as long as it had the company name on the label (gave 3 full examples to use whichever)
I get the contract ...shipping...
"To: Sara"
Then the right address (seriously wtf)

5. I point this out and carefully explain in mostly just examples and "the us government doesn't like anything being sent to just a first name, there's no legal way to sign for acceptance"

6. She gets stressed enough to tell me she doesn't have time to keep editing (since this horrid pile of poor formatting was just thrown at her a day ago... i dont point out the ridiculous irony)

7. Imo, the highlight of my night/morning... in her stress she promises me it'll ship right... sooo many issues there...
Even if it was delivered/allowed a signature for "sara" for 7ish large boxes just off a sea freight from china to a residence in the middle of a corn field (which tbh would be hysterical)...the IRS would have a valid reason to audit me... theyve done it w/o valid reasons several times, since I was 18 doing international trade and a contractual employee of a large gambling company, quarterly reporting, and ofc declaring more than my taxes in donating melted glass and crane game prizes...yea, they hate me and always do all that work to find the same thing... i underdeclare charity by 10%.

The entire concept of getting USA mail, even when pristine and you know logistics agents in every major company and port or distribution center, to properly deliver anything... ROFLOL ... and im already on some 'open and check everything' list with customs for a hysterical misconception they made years ago... cant/shouldn't get into detail publicly... but it was caused because 2 packages from different cities in China were both going to my address/through customs at the same time... package 1, 75 of those cheap af ball-pit hollow plastic balls for a 2yr old's bday(very delayed) package 2. 75 rechargeable batteries (the kind in power banks) 9600mah.

8. Told her to change "sara" to company name... glad it's registered to this address still.

It took me under 5min to type this... had to get the WTF out.

Dear AliBaba, please give an option to allow buyers to create the supply side contract for review, not just req modification... please?

Daaaaaaaayyummmmm...

nix is cool

Hell of a pain to learn its syntax and all
But it's damn cool!!!

The moment I turn off my laptop in anticipation of an hour or two of recreational YouTube binging and then rest

- my Bluetooth headphones run out of juice, courtesy of over 12 hours of semi-constant usage and the fact that I didn't think to charge them overnight

- In a moment of perspective change I instantly realize how to solve the problem I've been struggling with for the past 3 hours, ensuring that I'll keep thinking of work for the following 5 too.

Is any of it real? I mean, look at this. Look at it! A world built on fantasy. Synthetic emotions in the form of pills. Psychological warfare in the form of advertising. Mind-altering chemicals in the form of... food! Brainwashing seminars in the form of media. Controlled isolated bubbles in the form of social networks. Real? You want to talk about reality? We haven't lived in anything remotely close to it since the turn of the century. We turned it off, took out the batteries, snacked on a bag of GMOs while we tossed the remnants in the ever-expanding Dumpster of the human condition. We live in branded houses trademarked by corporations built on bipolar numbers jumping up and down on digital displays, hypnotizing us into the biggest slumber mankind has ever seen. You have to dig pretty deep, kiddo, before you can find anything real. We live in a kingdom of bullshit. A kingdom you've lived in for far too long. So don't tell me about not being real. I'm no less real than the fucking beef patty in your Big Mac.

!comforting
TL;DR - I’ve done some thinking about operating systems and sticking to one

Mk
so I, like many of you, have seen far more than my fair share of “X operating system is perfect for it all, so don’t use Y operating system because it’s just awful” posts.
Over this week i’ve really done some thinking and experimenting with multiple devices and OSes and programs for various tasks. People coming from windows over to linux (like myself) tend to diss windows (rightfully so for the most part, but still). I’ve also noticed that the android vs. apple debate can get heated among users.
Listen guys,
iOS has its shortcomings obviously, UI being kinda a big one; but no one can deny that apple shoves some of the nicest hardware into their devices. Yes, this stuff is pricey as hell obviously, but the new macs come with an i9 and quite a bit of memory as well. Apple devices tend to have longer lasting batteries too - i cant count the times where i’ve just turned on my mobile hotspot, and stuck my android in my pocket to use my iphone (its a wifi-only 5s). the applications run nicely on apple hardware.
i couldnt learn even half as much programming as i do on my android though; Termux is a godsend, and im able to run and test scripts right there in the palm of my hand. can’t get that on an iphone.
Some of my favorite game developers only develop for windows; I’m dual booting for that sole reason (warframe and the epic games launcher don’t properly run through wine).

Just boil it down inside for a second; You might have come from a more “user friendly” operating system, to learn on one that is less so - wether you wanted the freedom and wiggle room for customization, or just a more developer friendly working environment (God bless conky and its devs) - so you didn’t have to be locked down into one way of seeing things. Putting a previously used OS down directly violates that thougjt process, and at that point you’re just another windows hater, or arch junkie, or whatever. I think we need to be open to appreciating the pros of every system, even if we almost never use some of them, and we should try not to put down other devs-to-be or csci/sec enthusiasts down because of that either.

My dell's battery is dying and refuses to charge unless I fuck with the damn wire (charger works perfectly on my brother's dell). I know how to and have replaced dell batteries for similar models before on multiple occasions when I was a tech assistant in high school only 3 years ago but my dell warrenty won't mail me a battery for me to replace myself. Instead requiring I send them my laptop (can't since it my laptop I use for college work and can't go without it for a week or two unless I want to fail out). So guess I have to fucking find a battery on Amazon and spend money doing what my warrenty should cover

I understand why they don't allow users to do their own repairs. I'm just annoyed at having to find the battery online and spend money

Please support old web browser versions for all eternity.

I hate it when I open a site like SoundCloud one day and am greeted with a "we no longer support your browser" notice. Now I am forced to update my browser to a new version with removed features. On Android, Chrome sometimes crashes due to an apparent memory leak, so I have to go back to Samsung Internet, which does not work with some sites. Also, the Samsung clipboard manager (which can hold up to 20 items) is only available on Samsung Internet, not Chrome or Firefox.
I also have to update the browser on my live USB bootable stick because sites stop supporting it. Any browser starting in 2015 (ECMA script 6) should be supported until at least 2050 so that I never have to fear that a site one day spontaneously stops working on my browser.

I would like to browse the Internet forever without having to ever worry about pages to stop working one day. Browser vendors might also deprecate support for devices and operating systems. Old devices also have replaceable batteries and are easier to repair. I don't want be forced to buy new devices that are difficult and expensive to repair.

Websites that use a snow effect in Winter, with many little snowflakes moving on screen, needlessly drain the battery of mobile devices. Since batteries in portable electronics are usually not replaceable as of 2022, it also shortens the overall useful life of mobile devices.

If web designers feel the need to appear creative, which the snowflake effect isn't since it apparently existed since the 2000s, they should at least give users an option to turn it off. And that option should be available without logging in. Perhaps this useless effect should be turned off by default for mobile users.

When you buy a voice recorder it comes with batteries but only a quarter percent left... now I have to go out and buy new batteries before my new meeting.

The amount of meetings i had today is insane. We are discussing which text should be a label and which should be a header.

The good news is that i didn’t have competely empty batteries in my headset!

I hate how I have battery issues with every smartphone/tablet I buy. They do well for 1 week and then I have to buy an additional charger for work because after 5 hours of only lying there it only has 50% which wouldnt be sufficient for 30 minutes car drive (Maps, Spotify, Bluetooth, GPS and mobile data)... Fml. I am tired of batteries. My next phone is going to be a huawei mate 10. Maybe I habe more luck with this one. I dont believe im Samsung anymore.

And anyway why the fuck do they introduce better CPUs more sensors etc whilst Keeping the battery capacity the same.. Instead they introduce fast charge etc. Another reason for me to go away from samsung is the fact they bloat each firmware up, my battery got worst after each system update (even the security ones) and also doing 14 factory resets didnt work. Support is shit. They also integrated Clean Master into the system and an "Antivirus Protection"... Can't get worst.

samsungrant@devrant.com # > submit && exit