RetroTechie

https://www.batteryuniversity.com/article/bu-302-series-and-...

Also, physical safety could do with more discussion. How to prevent random falling objects from short-circuiting terminals (battery boxes & co!), what happens when wires are pulled on, where to locate batteries in/next to a building, etc.

Also: article focusses on the energy-independence aspect. But starts with the emergency-backup aspect. These are 2 different scenarios with very different requirements! (although the described setup would surely cover their emergency case)

Still: imho a decent read on considerations for a DIY solar setup.

RTC ICs are for use in bigger systems where main CPUs have other things to do. If you design a clock around a microcontroller dedicated to the task, that microcontroller can do the timekeeping all by itself. No extra IC needed.

Also quartz oscillators (ones built from discrete parts) can be trimmed. If you'd take the trouble, a cheapo quartz oscillator can go from 20..50 ppm to perhaps a few ppm worst case. Which as you point out is in the order of a minute per year. If that's not good enough AND power budget is available, an oven-controlled quartz oscillator improves on that.

All that online / GPS / radio controlled stuff is for convenience only (daylight saving!). Not needed just to have an accurate clock.

Oh and there's using AC mains frequency as timebase.

When I was young, in lunch breaks you'd head over to the school's cafeteria. And what they had there? "Gevulde koek", stroopwafel, snack-sized bags of crisps, various (sweetened) dairy products, and iirc bananas & apples too. No veggies or fibre-rich food in sight. So of course kids would go for the sugar-laden & salty snacks. For drinks, there were vending machines. My favorite was hot chocolate. Again: high in sugar (no "more or less sugar" option).

Sometimes there were longer breaks due to a teacher falling ill or whatever. Then we'd head over to a supermarket nearby, and buy similar junkfood.

Of course we'd bring sandwiches from home. But not everyone, and not always. Some kids would throw their sandwiches in a trash can, and proceed to buy the junkfood mentioned above.

That school was 6 years of us kids' lives. Plenty of time to pick up unhealthy habits & bring those into adulthood.

Wouldn't surprise me at all if most schools worldwide are still like that. Healthy diet choices for pupils is far from #1 priority for school management given all the other things they have to deal with.

The fix would be to make healthier options the easy pick, and remove all junkfood offerings from schools' cafeterias. But good luck doing that nationwide under the watchful eye of junkfood multi-nationals.

Iirc an important caveat was that it was a one-time programmable (OTP) part. So you buy a bunch of them, programming failure or firmware-under-test doesn't work? -> toss the part. Of course that isn't an issue for a $0.03 part. But it can be an issue in terms of a board you want it on. Either that means discarding (breakout) boards too, or for development you'd need some kind of adapter to put bare ICs in.

Such annoyances only make sense for high-volume, low cost applications. Which is eactly where parts like that go in.

Certainly applies more general imho. Constrained by some resource -> invest resources elsewhere, and/or invest in reducing the constraint(s) encountered.

Minor nitpick: BASIC in early homecomputers (~1980) was usually interpreted. I'd certainly call those machines mainstream at the time (and as article notes, interpreters go back way further).

Does seem like a problem worth worrying about.

And then you'd be equally wrong as the commenter you replied to. Without data it's just speculation.

The tech itself is neutral in this respect. It's those externalities that need to be addressed. Don't want to depend on a subscription service? Then run open models under your own control (if you 'have to' use AI). Don't want that new datacenter disturbing a town's water supply? Make 'em pay extra such that existing users can keep being served @ the same price.

Do such things across the board, and responsible AI companies will be forced to be more community-friendly.

But didn't you read the article? It used to be that brand names had meaning, providing a reliable indicator for the quality to expect.

That doesn't hold anymore. As brands are bought & sold by private equity, the relation between brand & what to expect is lost. And in many cases, reputation brands are gutted, $$ extracted, and the sucked-dry corpse discarded. In that environment, how can a consumer tell what's what? Brand X used to be quality, and now it's not. With brand as (often) an unreliable indicator, consumers look at price instead.

What I personally find most amazing, is that quality stuff that used to be household names (and affordable!), are seemingly impossible to produce these days even though technology advanced for 50y+. Example: Arcoroc Sierra (from Arc France, which still exists today). Tableware in tempered, coloured glass, with a nice surface texture. Comes in amber-brown, red & green. Pour in boiling water no problem, lasts a lifetime (and keeps looking like day 1 as long as you keep it out of dishwashers).

Look around in shops today: soup bowls are nice-looking but cheap earthenware, or non-coloured, cheap soda-lime glass. Colour you say? Often it's a thin layer on the glass (sometimes even plastic!). Not a coloured solid material. Scratch it & the non-coloured base material shows underneath.

Something with comparable looks & quality from that 50y old stuff? Not available (at any price), not produced anywhere today. And it's not that people don't want it.

This is just 1 of many examples. Imho the article does a good job of explaining some of the causes.

So.. back to how things were done in the old days.

Am I the only one? I'd prefer people stop posting links to such crappy sites.

Is that online somewhere?

Those nights are the safest in my experience. Simply because no thief or mugger would bother to venture out into the middle of nowhere, in the off-chance there's something to be had there. That's assuming they'd even know someone/something to be there! And even if they would, chances are I'd be quickly aware of their presence, or some geese/other birds would announce their presence.

TLDR; Be careful in areas with lots of people, or on the edge of such areas. Places that lack people tend to be safe.

Where I live, it usually impossible due to nights being too cold (okay, you can use sleeping bags/extra blankets etc), clouds, or... mosquitos.

But when/where it's not: highly recommended! "Spaceship Earth" in progress.

Please have a look at how Android is developed, and how each new version is released. It's far from the only example of "open source but closed development process".

Never mind "shared source" like QNX where people can pass through hoops to view source, but code is not open in the libre sense.

A good start would be to cut use of this OOXML Transitional format entirely. Default to LibreOffice's default formats, and (perhaps) support OOXML Strict where it helps transition.

That way any government employee saving their work in OOXML Transitional or other proprietary format, would automatically stick out as a dumbass who failed to do their job. Pass documents that are published through some validators / allowed-format checkers, and the public only gets stuff that's viewable with software of their choosing.

None of this is hard. It's mostly about changing defaults & a bit of employee training.

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

11..15% Is not the bulk of the energy. But it's significantly more than "negligible".

Note that this trailer could be expected to be on the road most of the time. Which may not even be the common case: demand for goods varies a lot, so I'd expect that a lot of logistics companies aren't fully booked all the time. Maybe have a few drivers/trucks on the road, and a bunch of trailers on a parking lot doing nothing. In that scenario: need a trailer? Use whichever one is charged up furthest, while at a loading dock top it up (grid power/in-building storage) to whatever is needed to complete the trip, off it goes.

Also for US-based naysayers: Europe is a very different environment than the US. Most long hauls aren't that long, and there's a lot of [industrial zone local distribution center] <-> inner city traffic. Read: lots of start-stop, low speed cornering & wait time.

Don't remember agreeing to any ToS before (or after) factory reset, put SIM card in a phone, and start using it. Granted, it's been a while since I last bought one.

And no, "by using you agree to ToS" is much like a shrink-wrap EULA for boxed software: doesn't fly in many jurisdictions. Explicit consent to do anything that violates users' expectations, is important here.

If such terms of use were to become subject of a legal case, then in EU "reasonable user expectation" weighs heavily, and courts tend to err on protect-consumer side.

For example vendor analyzing usage patterns to optimize users' experience with the appliance, would probably be okay.

But eg. do 24/7 voice recording & share with vendor's partners to let them send targeted advertising, would absolutely not match user expectations (given intended use of these appliance features), and therefore be illegal.

3-5 & 9 Seem sort-of-expected for internet connected, AI 'enhanced' appliances.

TLDR; it's just LG attempting to cover their legal ?ss. Wouldn't help them much in court.

Participants in Ikea speed-assembly competitions would like to know more.

You meant rechargeable? You seem to know more about Zigbee than about rechargeable batteries.

On a scale of probable -> less probable, you have:

Self-organizing chemicals -> replication -> evolution -> multi-cellular life -> creatures that move around -> intelligent life -> use of tools -> basic technology like wheels, steam engine -> industrialization -> advanced tech -> automation -> space faring -> capable of interstellar travel -> capable of intergalactic travel. Powered by energy sources of increasing complexity/sophistication & scale.

This whole evolution requires a stable environment. Dinosaur-killing asteroid & it's back to square 1. Also (for example) how would intelligent life on a waterworld (which basically excludes electronics as we know it) become space-faring?

So it's not unlogical to expect that microbial life could be 'everywhere', tool-using intelligent creatures are rare, and interstellar-capable civilizations are so few & far between that (on average) they're just too distant in space or time.

Doesn't matter who visits who if neither party can cross the ocean in between.

I'm aware of: proprietary ones like GEN80 (my fav way back), M80/L80, at least one open source assembler written in plain C, and probably some table-driven assemblers targeting multiple architectures.

Windows has worked like spyware since what, the late Windows 7 days or thereabout?

End users should not regard this as inevitable. Or get caught up in the how-it-works-how-to-disable swamp. Instead, cut through to the essence. It's about respect:

# Microsoft does not respect Windows users (or users of any of their offerings?).

# LG does not respect people who buy their monitors (and perhaps other products?).

Knowing that, why would you use such a sleazy company's product for daily driving? Or give them your money? Would you buy bread from a baker who pisses on your lawn every time you're not looking?

User rights or consumer protection laws aren't even part of this equation. Although they do help (sometimes a lot!) to keep companies honest.

Wouldn't surprise me if there'd be a viable market for such devices brandnew. Not just for nostalgic greybeards, also younger folks unfamiliar with yesteryear's tech & curious about it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Online