jakedata

I learned to solder electronics using my father's giant Weller soldering gun. 40 years later I was visiting and had to repair a tiny connection on an electronic candle. I felt like Captain Caveman wielding that giant humming pistol with the lightbulb illuminating the work but by cracky I could still do fine work with that monster tool.

This was the longest video I have watched on Youtube in ages. The lack of intrusive ads was refreshing.

I won't even bother to point out the other error, just dropping this here...

"That’s 28,160 watt-hours (or 28.1 kilowatt-hours) at a nominal voltage of 220V or 14,080 Wh (14 kWh) at a voltage of 110V."

1st gen Leaf batteries are NiMH, not lithium based. You'll be lucky to charge your GodzillaMax phone 3 times with one of those.

Why is that nonsensical? Airtags are very nice little bits of technology, a marvel really. But examples of abuse are not theoretical. Increasing the battery life by years and placing the airtag in a waterproof case are totally valid things a legitimate user might wish to do, but it also enhances their nefarious or unethical use potential. That is not nonsense.

Brilliant, I just ordered a couple. But I bet that case muffles the sound when the AirTag decides to sing you the song of its people. This might be a boon to AirTag stalkers who are too lazy or unskilled to disable the sound and upgrade the battery life.

or Asfastafarians

It only looks like a test. The DOD just activated all our sleeper agents in Asfasfastan.

He is a man who might be considered the musical godfather to perhaps millions of children throughout the years. He sure could set a mood.

I just finished re-reading Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. Ice-nine is probably the reason non-chemists (with a literary bent anyway) know anything about alternate forms of crystallization.

My error was allowing my son to turn 18 while I had college money invested in his name. As soon as he came of age the account locked us all out until we established his identity with signed and notarized documents sent via the mail. Once we re-established control over the account we were unable to transfer the funds out without another round of verification involving the bank. All in all it took nearly 6 months to liberate the tuition money we had parked in I-bonds. You have been warned.

I have a 1994 Jeep Wrangler. I have a fancy (for 1994) Sony cassette deck that was sitting in my basement for actual decades. My plan was to install the fab 90s tape deck in the fab 90s Jeep.

Unfortunately rubber doesn't do well sitting around for decades, Jeep or Sony. Lucky for me I was able to locate a new-old-stock tape transport on ebay and swap out the mechanical bits.

Result - all the $0.50 thrift store tapes I want to play stashed in the center console where nobody wants to steal them any more. Favorites are the Pulp Fiction soundtrack, Eiffel 95 and The Doors movie soundtrack.

I was a tape guy, I couldn't afford vinyl so taping records and the radio was my thing. The shortcomings of the Compact Cassette format are not particularly bothersome in an old Jeep, but I also strapped a Bluetooth receiver on the back so I can stream audio like a not-luddite.

</old>

about 50

There's a lot of that on YC.

The comment is referring back to "not compensating for anything". Choosing to keep a balding head and not caring what other people think is a power move when having a full head of hair becomes trivial.

The Grand Caravan (not the Pacifica) is an extremely sorted-out vehicle. I bought a 2019 which was supposed to be the last model year, but they had enough demand to continue manufacturing them in 2020. Ultimately it was uneconomical to bring them into compliance with current regs so that was the end of the line for them. It has exciting features such as physical buttons on the dash, remote start on the fob, a touchscreen only for the Garmin navigation system (no subscription needed) and seats that fold flat into the floor. The 3.6L Pentastar engine is a workhorse and it tows like crazy. Traction control and ABS perform as expected. City MPG is lackluster but on the highway it does very well.

My minivan is proof of virility and demonstrates that I am not compensating for anything. It also moves a hell of a lot of lumber when the seats are folded down.

Try that in some bubble shaped car-based SUV or a short-bed pickup.

Just curious. I bought the geiger counter to verify the authenticity of some fiestaware and discovered that my radium dial alarm clock is hot enough to trigger the alarm.

Be careful how you stack them.

(this is a joke, I realize that criticality would be completely impossible for a zillion reasons)

About 20 years ago I kitted out our office with furniture and supplies from a business liquidation auction. Several tape dispensers of that general shape came along with the lot. I guess I had better bring my geiger counter to the office. Probably the wrong vintage, but who knows?

The previous owner of my home was gifted a cutting of Franklinia alatamaha by the Arnold Arboretum in Boston. I am now the custodian of an amazing and extremely rare tree.

https://arboretum.harvard.edu/stories/against-all-odds-growi...

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

The owner and arboretum both must have known what they were doing when they planted it in my yard because it is thriving and in full flower right now.

It is worth noting that this motor uses an "organic liquid dielectric" rather than air between the rotating discs. This motor may not have a long service life if it is unstable. Old electrolytic capacitors are notoriously unreliable. You might need to change the "oil" once in a while.

ScaleFlux https://scaleflux.com computational storage might offer some of what you are imagining. Their NVMe drives have onboard ARM cores and perform hardware compression and advanced flash management with no drivers beyond standard NVMe. I believe you can tap into the computational capabilities with additional code.

"We all know long periods of not eating (if you have excess fat) are positive in a ton of dramatic ways"

Sure, and also negative in several significant ways (I am not going to say ton). Some people are able to simply ignore food and get on with their life as thin people. Others can eat whatever they want and remain skinny. Some self medicate with things like nicotine which can induce thinness through appetite suppression and cancer. Many or most in my experience find that they are unable to deal long-term with the noisy, distracting, miserable nature of food cravings and ultimately fall back into their old patterns just to get some relief even if they hate themselves for it.

My favorite metaphor is "how long can you hold your breath?". Sure, you can probably hold your breath for 30 seconds without too much discomfort. Now do it twice. Now hold your breath for 15 seconds every minute. Now 30 seconds for every minute. Uncomfortable? Keep it up. What's the matter, no willpower?

So yes, food and society have been engineered to be profitable at the expense of us consumers but it is exploiting a weakness that not all of us have. Let's just think of these chemicals as eyeglasses for your metabolism and take back some control.

Perhaps 35 years ago I thought to replace an alkaline battery pack for a PC's CMOS memory and RTC with a 3v coin cell. The first step was to solder leads onto it. The second step was to leave the room in a hurry. The cell blew its end cap off and smoked vigorously for a while but no real damage was done.

I tried to post an homage to reading text that had LF without CR but the input filter helpfully corrected it. You will just have to imagine text moving down like a set of stairs descending from left to right.

Kermit was the file transfer protocol of last resort for sorting out weird translation issues. It was slow but super effective.

HN is +10 proof against ascii art.

Radian makes ultracapacitor backed RAM cards with flash backup that appear to be NVMe devices. They do a nice job for things like Write Ahead Logs and ZFS ARC/ZIL. They offer effectively unlimited write endurance with a tradeoff of cost and capacity.

Write barriers aren't just for durability - they also can even out major latency spikes when bloated buffers ultimately must be flushed. Database, filesystem, RAID, device, flash management and individual chips all become saturated at some point. Managing performance at the database engine layer gives you visibility into the issue at a high level as opposed to rolling merrily along until commits start taking 2000 ms. As an example, ZFS is terrifyingly unpredictable at high loads.

In Postgres, synchronous_commits = off can seem like magic during benchmarks but in real-life applications the anticipated benefits can be underwhelming. Ultimately, a reliable non-volatile write cache, sized for your workload is the answer. It evens out all the peaks and valleys of flash writes and hands control back to the database engine so it can get on with its work.

He had me up until the backside view with the velcro monstrosity. Better (IMHO) to put everything but the ipad in a messenger bag so you can uncouple and wield the tablet without causing joint injury.

As a balding middle-aged technology professional with disposable income and no experience driving performance vehicles I offer myself as a test subject for both vehicles. Clearly I am in the target demographic.

Hopefully the crawlers don't spend too much time looking at the results of The Underhanded C Contest. An AI might start disgorging code that contains some extremely subtle kinks it can use in the future when it is time to start project Paperclip Apocalypse.