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iSloth

685 karma · joined July 9, 2011

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iSloth··on Tidbyt hardware display device: a review
Looks great, would love to build one too
iSloth··on Show HN: I am building a free version of Strava
Have you tried wahoo’s GPS range, I love my bolt
iSloth··on Ask HN: How would you invest $1M for passive income/cash flow?
Vanguard Index funds if you want something truly passive, real estate if you don’t mind some effort
iSloth··on No, you can’t save £30 per year by switching off your “standby” devices
I’m using an Owl Intuition, however please don’t take that as a recommendation. I got it cheap on eBay with the network bridge included hence why, but the website UI is truly terrible.

I’m currently building one myself using the common SCT-013 sensor, and an ESP32 (arduino) which I plan to then store the data in either a little react app, or perhaps Grafana.

iSloth··on Ask HN: How much of your monthly net income goes towards rent or mortgage?
I was about to ask what country this is, because off the top of my head 5% in property tax sounds crazy - However just worked my own out at 4 to 5%... so that ruined my day a little :/
iSloth··on Ask HN: Open-source software authors – why do you do it?
Interesting take that you believe all software should be open source, any particular reason where this comes from?

I feel like in an ideal world developers are due a fair share of the revenue/profits that their software generates, even if they enjoyed the original works and profit wasn't their intention - However with open source I often see a large organisations making huge profits, with close to zero going back to the authors/maintainers.

iSloth··on No, you can’t save £30 per year by switching off your “standby” devices
Sure, I guess my definition of idle is everyone in the house asleep not using any appliances and having them all in the generally accepted idle state.

Network Equipment I actually swapped a decent amount of it - The testing showed the Netgear managed switches were using around 1W each, opposed to 20w for the DLink switch, and another 20w for a Unifi Switch.

The Hob/Microwave I manually just power off now as I don't need them on all day long, and devices which I put Alexa controller relays on were the aircon units, my PC & Monitors and the TV & Surround (other than Sky Box)

iSloth··on No, you can’t save £30 per year by switching off your “standby” devices
Sure - Completely agree with having the air conditioning or heat pump running, there would be a higher power consumption compared to the average UK property, however this is about idle consumption.

When these devices are in "sleep" the unit is doing nothing more than looking for an IR signal from the remote controller that it's been turned on, just like a TV does etc, so it's odd to pull such a large draw in this sleep state.

iSloth··on No, you can’t save £30 per year by switching off your “standby” devices
Sure, it'll be a while before I had something cleaned up nicely, however I've added some screenshots to my original post.
iSloth··on No, you can’t save £30 per year by switching off your “standby” devices
Very true - To be honest at the point I knew the house consumption and hadn't yet clamped individual devices I had expected to find a single culprit like that, or even a faulty device with earth leakage that was affectively dumping the current for no real purpose.

I should have also pointed out, I really do wish more devices would have more physical power switches where it makes sense - As an example the washing machine has a touch sensitive main power button, yet our tumble dryer (same manufacture & design) has a more physical on/off switch - The former uses a decent amount of standby power, the second uses none, the only real purpose I see is a slightly more "premium" feel to the washing machine.

iSloth··on No, you can’t save £30 per year by switching off your “standby” devices
Strange, I've had a very different experience to the author of this, I've actually got a similar spreadsheet I may clean-up and post to show another view point, however in summary.

A couple of months ago I went on a little mission around the house testing the power consumption of devices on standby, as I noticed through my energy monitor that idle power consumption was about 0.4-0.5kW while everyone was sleeping at night, which seemed high to my research of national averages.

To my surprise a number of fairly modern devices I found to have utterly terrible standby power consumption, the new buttonless electric hob in my kitchen, the two monitors for my PC on standby, the TV & Blu-ray player and an Aircon unit just to name a few.

Since then I used a few Sonoff relays around the house to add these to Alexa, the results were actually quite amazing really, about £10 per week of electricity saved, so £30-£40 per month...

So in short, if your similar to me you can actually save £300 a year, I think the key take away here is clamp/monitor your own devices and take a judgement from there, no one house/setup is the same.

---

Edit, here's a very quick screenshot of the spreadsheet and data I've got to hand at the moment, in time I'll get something better cleaned up and together.

https://imgur.com/a/l4xMwbo

iSloth··on Ask HN: Alternatives to Twilio for SMS?
MessgeBird might be worth a go, however I’d also look at tyntec, personally had great results with them before.
iSloth··on Show HN: I gamified a habit tracker to fight procrastination
Why “should” it be a one time payment…?
iSloth··on Ask HN: How do you sell DIY hardware to non-DIY audience?
Exactly what I’ve done before, if components are all on one side then this is the easiest route
iSloth··on OneWeb will resume satellite launches with SpaceX as the launch provider
It does seem a little odd when SpaceX have Starlink, surely these two are each other’s main competition.
iSloth··on Ask HN: What on-call benefits do you get in your company?
Software Co | UK | around £30 a night, £70 a Saturday, Sunday or Bank Holiday On call engineers get Mobile Phone, Mobile Contract and Broadband paid for
iSloth··on Open source 5G core network base on 3GPP R15
Why would GC drop calls? I know a few high volume networks using .Net based platforms without any issues, Go would run circles around them performance wise.
iSloth··on Ask HN: Do you hike prices often as a freelancer?
If you've had them as a client for more than 12 months, and are only looking to increase as a match to inflation, then I would be shocked if you have any negative feedback at all from your clients, or any of them leaving.

Personally I increase my rates when I notice that my schedule is getting full, and I'm struggling to find space for new work within it - To me pricing your time is just a simple calculation of Supply/Value vs Demand, clients seem to be Ok from my experience.

iSloth··on Ask HN: Great tools for solo SaaS founders?
Yeh it got enabled to limit the never ending spam battle
iSloth··on Show HN: Simple CDN backed static website in AWS
Price?... Cloudflare is completely Free, so surely it beats AWS on cost?
iSloth··on Show HN: Simple CDN backed static website in AWS
Is there any advantage to this over something like cloudflare pages?
iSloth··on Ask HN: Secure/Private Phone Network?
As someone who’s spent a lot of time working in the world of telco, it’s depressing how inherently unsecure the networks are in their design – Some networks attempt to improve on this which is good, however I simply wouldn’t call them secure.

My suggestion to anyone seriously worried about security – Consider the Internet access on your device no more secure than open WiFi at a coffee shop, and assume Calls/SMS are no more secure than a public conversation.

In short, use data/internet based over the top applications with encryption that you trust, obviously also trusting your endpoint/device too.

However remember that even that does nothing if your worried of location/device tracking.

iSloth··on Ask HN: How do you handle SMS and MMS?
Twilio or MessageBird are worth a look at.
iSloth··on Show HN: Botwars.io – Battle robots with your favourite programming language
It's now added, enjoy :)
iSloth··on Show HN: Botwars.io – Battle robots with your favourite programming language
Sure - I'll need to do some testing, but it should be added within the next day or two :)
iSloth··on Show HN: Botwars.io – Battle robots with your favourite programming language
Which would you like?
iSloth··on Show HN: Botwars.io – Battle robots with your favourite programming language
Great idea, I’ll get that added in!
iSloth··on Show HN: Botwars.io – Battle robots with your favourite programming language
It seems to be working on my iPhone/iPad however I’ll do some more tests, that’s for the feedback!
iSloth··on Show HN: Botwars.io – Battle robots with your favourite programming language
This is a little side project of mine, very much inspired by “robotgame.org” that I played many years ago, which unfortunately no longer exists.

In essence it is a remarkably similar game, however the sandboxing allows for players to use several programming languages, and not just Python.

It is still basic, only a hobby and under development, however happy to hear any feedback and thoughts.

iSloth··on The rise of crypto laundries: how criminals cash out of Bitcoin
And shortly after all countries would collapse...
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