bxparks

The ESP8266 has 5 sleep modes, as summarized by this README.md in the Arduino ESP8266 Core: https://github.com/esp8266/Arduino/tree/master/libraries/esp...

The `delay(1)` triggers the "Automatic Modem Sleep" mode, which keeps the WiFi connection alive. It should draw about 15-16 mA, which is pretty close to the 18-24 mA measured in the TFA.

The WiFi radio consumes a lot of power. During initialization, I believe it can consume 500 mA or more. In normal usage, WiFi apparently has a continuous drain of ~70 mA. If WiFi is not needed, the ESP8266 can be placed into "Forced Deep Sleep" mode, with an idle current of 0.02 mA. Using a ~2000 mAh battery (e.g. 3xAA NiMh, or 1x18650 Li-Ion), that means over 11 years on battery, if no other work is performed. The lowest current that I have measured personally is 0.04 mA on various ESP-01 modules. But that still means about 5.5 years on a single charge.

If the WiFi is needed only intermittently, the ESP8266 can be placed into "Forced Deep Sleep" mode, with the internal RTC configured to wake it up after a certain time, e.g. 15-30 minutes. It can then connect to WiFi, transmit the data payload, then go back to Deep Sleep again. Unfortunately, the ESP-01 module does not support this (without hardware hacking), because it does not expose the GPIO16/D0 pin necessary to trigger the RESET.

Other ESP8266 dev boards (e.g. D1 Mini, NodeMCU) do support waking up from Deep Sleep. But these dev boards often contain a voltage regulator which consumes a quiescent current. On my D1 Mini boards, I get about 0.22 mA in Forced Deep Sleep mode. In theory, that's enough for 1 year of life on a single charge of a 2000 mAh battery. But waking it up every 15 minutes, for 5-6 seconds of WiFi time, reduces the battery life to about 4-5 months. At this point, the active power usage during the 5-6 seconds of WiFi is already 2X the power consumption of the 15 minutes of Deep Sleep, so I have not attempted to reduce the idle consumption any further.

And it's used to disambiguate the same name in different sections, for example:

   $ man 1 printf # prints printf(1)
   $ man 3 printf # prints printf(3)
   $ man printf   # prints printf(1)

I've been using superglue (cyanoacrylate) to attach a small metal L-bracket to some IP65-rated ABS plastic boxes, then hanging them on a nail or screw using the metal bracket. The boxes contain battery-powered temperature sensors. This has worked great for several years for the attic and crawlspace. But the outside boxes fall off every winter. I think the metal and plastic expand and contract at different rates through the temperature swings (40C/104F summer, -10C/14F winter) causing the bond to break. Amusingly, superglue is NOT one of the recommendations given on this website (LePage's Metal Epoxy, J-B Weld, Faststeel Epoxy Putty) for Metal to Plastic.

Thanks, I didn't realize that there any links on that page until I read your post.

No it won't disappear. Because almost every useful technology seems to be turning into an ad delivery mechanism.

GIMP is the only software whose UI makes me feel completely stupid. Every 1-2 years, I install it, fire it up to crop an image. I stare at the screen, right click a few times, then I close the app after admitting total defeat. It's been like this for 20 years.

A few years ago, I found out that Irfanview runs under Wine. It's a great feeling to understand the UI of a program.

Thanks, your post seems more clear than the website: Bob is for people who build CI/CD, not for people who use CI/CD.

And because it's a fork of 'mirror/newlib-cygwin', searching for "picolibc" on GitHub does not find it, even though this project has 678 stars and the original newlib-cygwin has only 144 stars. Why is GitHub search so broken?

Agreed that CI/CD should be explained, or at least hyperlinked. However, in their minor defense, they are following the example of GitHub Actions (https://github.com/features/actions) which also does not explain those terms. But at least GitHub Actions does explain it in the docs (https://docs.github.com/en/actions).

My problem is that I know what CI/CD is, I have used a handful of popular implementations of CI/CD (e.g GitHub Actions, BitBucket Pipelines). But after clicking through most of the pages on the Bob CD website, I don't understand what exactly Bob CD does or how to use it. Is it local (like Jenkins), or is it cloud based (like GitHub Actions)? How does it integrate with my local git repo, or my GitHub or GitLab account? How do I trigger the pipeline? How do I specify the actions of the pipeline?

It feels like Bob CD website makes sense only if you already know how to use Bob CD.

(edit: fix typo)

It breaks Google Calendar badly, almost unusable due to missing icons and spacing problems.

It's double wide on Firefox as well, and I could select half of it as well. I had to use a single "Unicode Character 'NOT EQUAL TO' (U+2260)" in my post on HN to describe what it looked like on my browser.

Sheeet, I didn't even know that was possible. Why would they use that font for displaying C code? I looked at that ≠ and spent a few minutes trying to figure out what language it was. Maybe I should uncheck the "Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above" option in Firefox, though it woulld probably break other websites.

Total tangent: What is the magic on that page that renders:

    if (putenv (var) != 0)

as

    if (putenv (var) ≠ 0)

on my browser (Firefox)?

When I try to copy that text, it copies as '!=' into my copypaste buffer.

It looks like this is tracked as "Australia/Eucla" in the IANA TZ database: https://github.com/eggert/tz/blob/main/australasia#L30

You can type the following to see the current time there:

   $ TZ=Australia/Eucla date
   Thu Oct 27 10:36:45 +0845 2022

(fixed output)

According to https://www.bankruptcysoapbox.com/california-extends-protect..., you are correct for loans after Jan 1, 2013. The relevant statute SB-1069 is here: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...

Recourse versus non-recourse mortgages is an interesting difference that most people seem to be unaware of. I do not recall reading about it in any of the disclosures (running hundreds of pages) that I had to read. I only found out about it while researching on the internet.

Apparently, there are only 10 non-recourse states as of 2009: Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Washington, and Nevada. The tricky thing is that only the initial mortgage is non-recourse. A refinanced mortgage becomes recourse, but interestingly, they don't seem to be required to disclose that in the disclosures.

What does "Kayak on the internet" mean in this context (with the capital 'K')? Do you mean the canoe-like boat? Why does kayaking require a camera? Or do you mean the online travel site kayak.com, which doesn't make sense.

My problem is that I know what it's for, but I don't understand how it works. The referenced page contains a "How It Works" section, but it gives me no useful information:

   > Once asdf core is set up with your Shell configuration, plugins are installed to manage particular tools. When a tool is installed by a plugin, the executables that are installed have shims created for each of them. When you try and run one of these executables, the shim is run instead, allowing asdf to identify which version of the tool is set in .tool-versions and execute that version.

There is a hyperlink on word shims to the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shim_(computing) that explains the generic concept of shims. Not helpful.

It looks like Ventura drops support for the 2nd generation (Late 2010 to 2017) MacBook Airs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBook_Air). So let's figure one more year for Big Sur, then another year for (edit) Monterey, then I guess they will need to migrate to Linux.

Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu but does not use snap. Doing "a lot more work" to install an OS does not sound appealing.

Thanks for the info, that's good to know. I'll definitely consider going back to the MacBooks when Linux on the Apple Silicon chips becomes a reasonable option after Apple drops support for these new laptops.

I get almost all my laptops from eBay, so I often replace the batteries soon after purchase, then maybe every 3-5 years (?) after that. I replaced the battery on my 2014 MBA in 2020. I get the impression that I use my laptops longer than average. My Windows 10 laptop is a 2011 model with an Intel i7-2620M processor whose batteries have been replaced twice.

I agree that the iPads are the best of the breed out there, and Apple does support their hardware longer than most. But once the support stops, the hardware is locked and there's no alternative.

So to answer some of the other questions that my post generated, I basically stopped using tablets. The kitchen tablet was replaced with a cheap Chromebook. My travel tablet was replaced with a MacBook Air 11 2015 that I got on eBay, and installed Linux Mint on it. I believe the 2015 MacBook Air model is one of the last MacBooks with a replaceable battery, and it is still one of the best 11" laptops ever made.

My other laptops are a bunch of Dell Latitude 7000 series and Dell Precision series laptops, running Ubuntu MATE or Linux Mint. All of those have replaceable battery, upgradable RAM slots, and replaceable SSD or NVMe slots. I cannot bring myself to buy a laptop with a glued-in battery.

I have 2 perfectly working iPads except that they stopped getting OS updates, so are now basically electronic trash. I find myself becoming reluctant to support an ecosystem that generates such waste. I stopped purchasing MacBooks when they started gluing the battery.

I often encounter this problem in command line programs that seem to assume a dark background (e.g. ls, tmux, vim, git log, silver-searcher, grep). Their yellow fonts are impossible to read on my light background. Every time I reinstall Linux or MacOS on one of my laptops, I have to reconfigure the "yellow" palette in the terminal programs to something resembling dark-orange or brown. Then the problem is navigating the rat's nest of options in the various terminal programs to find the color palette configuration.

When I lived in Northern California, I used to volunteer for beach cleanup every few weekends. Over a couple of hours, I would personally pick up 5-20 pounds of trash along the beach. The most numerous types of trash were: hundreds of candy wrappers, dozens of cigarette butts, and dozens and dozens of plastic straws. Most of the straws were from fast food restaurants, but a lot were from people eating food at the beach then throwing away the straws. It's kinda disgusting.

The next time you visit a beach in Northern California and gaze at the powerful waves of the Pacific crashing into the clean, sandy beach, realize that it's an illusion. The beach is basically a garage dump. It only looks pristine because dozens of volunteers pick up hundreds of plastic straws from the beach, every weekend.

The granularity of the map seems to be at the county level, so I will guess that the EPA did not gather this data by itself, but rather, rely on self-reported data from each county from each state. A county is a political boundary, so the state of Missouri probably had different testing regulations and methodologies than its neighbors like Iowa and Illinois.

I read somewhere that Linux hibernation requires swap (1-1.5X RAM?). So I have been configuring my laptops with a 1.5X swap partition. Unfortunately Linux hibernation has not worked for me since the early 2000's, across 10-15 different laptops. Apparently hibernation can use swapfiles, but I've never been able to verify that.

If I understand this, if I use SMS, I can send to everyone. If I use Signal, I can send to Signal users only. But I don't remember who's on Signal, and who's not. So I guess I will stop using Signal.

Installed latest Mint MATE (based on Ubuntu 22.04) on a MacBook Air 11 2015. Linux has a lot of rough edges on the MacBook Air, definitely not boring, it but works well enough for my needs:

* No fan control out of the box, so CPU overheats after a new minutes. Fixed by installing a 3rd party fan control package.

* Broken sleep. Always wakes up 2-3 seconds after putting to sleep. Fixed by a series of hacks to disable the keyboard and lid while sleeping. Only the Power button is able to wake it up now.

* Display brightness setting lost after sleep. Always wakes up at 100%.

* Webcam does not work. There is no compatible driver from what I understand.

* Two-finger scroll is awful on Linux, compared to the buttery smooth scroll of MacOS.

* Poor battery life compared to MacOS, I estimate about 25% less.

* It can be tricky to figure out how the Mac keys are mapped to normal Linux keys: Alt, Option, Command. Also tricky to figure out how to remap them so that they are more usable on Linux.

I find your post and the TFA difficult to read quickly. When I read, I don't consciously read every single word. I depend on recognizing the shapes of words, and the organization of those shapes with respect to each other. Without the normal capitalization, the pattern recognition becomes broken, so it takes longer to read, and causes more stress. I'm sure with enough time and practice, the brain can be trained to read without capitalization. But it is not the norm right now so it's harder.