MrFoof

Ordered a $120 cable in which both vendors had recommended. It wasn’t what was required, so sent it back as an RMA, in all the original packaging.

Mouser refused to refund me, saying that there was a bag with my order number on it, and even though I sent back the original unopened product in its original packaging, that without the bag with my order number, no refund.

So they sent it back to me. I FISHED THE STUPID BAG WITH THE ORDER NUMBER ON IT OUT OF THE TRASH, and re sent it back in for an RMA. 5 weeks later, still nothing.

Ultimately it’s going to be 3+ months to get the money back from my card issuer. Mouser will never get my business again.

They kept it around for over 25 years. The reality is if anything went wrong with it, my father still had the instructions and could just refer to it to ultimately perform a repair.

To put things into perspective, I ordered a desk from a local company. I had a lot of customization options, but basically I wanted a 60 x 30" top. The legs I ordered actually have height adjustment ... with a CRANK. Because it'll never break. So you have 60-inch long boards, maybe about 4-inches wide each, pressed together into a single board. There's attempt to match up the pattern, so at a quick glance most people would think it's a solid piece. Also not much heavier, because there's less adhesives needed to produce the single board.

With the top you had choices not only in the type of wood, but how that wood was engineered (or if it was a single piece).

* If I went with a butcher block construction, which is heavier, that was $1200.

* I went with a face-grain engineered walnut top. That was $2000 for just the top. Looks great, too.

* If I went with a SINGLE solid board, there was not only a real lead time, but the top was $6500.

And that was just for American walnut. I could've picked far pricier woods. Could've picked some garbage pine or something too, but note the spread there. I think for a 60x30, the total spread of options was $500 to $11,000 depending on the construction and the wood chosen.

This is because nature is really bad at producing large perfect boards, especially for a total area past a few square feet. Turns out. A lot of stuff we use even in modern construction is not just engineered, but often uses petroleum products. Plywood uses a urea formaldehyde, but lo-and-behold we figured out how to produce that out of oil! OSB is no different. It's why when 5-over-1s under construction (before fire suppression equipment is installed) catch fire, they go up very fast, and usually burn hot enough where the radiant heat damages nearby buildings.

When you get into large single pieces, not only are they rare, but you want to let the moisture release, preferably naturally. So you have all these boards, being stored in large climate controlled warehouses for months if not years, before they are used in a piece of furniture. That massive opportunity cost of literally keeping boards around is part of why you pay.

I have some short "entertainment benches" I bought many years ago that were made by Ethnicraft in Vietnam, I believe for Crate & Barrel. Engineered face grain, walnut, on a nickel-plated steel parsons style base. Got them over a decade ago, still look perfect, and at a glance, people think they're one piece. They're not, but again at a quick glance they do. All in they were $4500 for the pair. I could've got some solid ones from a German company named E15. The pair would've been over $20,000 then, and over $30,000 today.

-- -----

Meanwhile, you can get a similarly sized desk from IKEA, with legs, for $370. It's particle board with a glued on outer surface to protect it.

Games get old, but the good ones hold up. Some of my favorite games from 35+ years ago still hold up extraordinarily well. It’s rare that you’ll watch a single movie hundreds of times, but there’s games where you easily can. Certainly not all, but a good chunk of them.

My folks put them down because of real life and because their son could demolish them in anything competitive (heck, I did speedrunning for a bit at some of the highest levels), but when you give them some top quality games and they have the time, they remembered the value pretty quick. As they’re moving into a very fixed income, they see the value for money they get from them.

Granted, they lucked out that one of their kids keeps a pulse on what’s good for all audiences. I don’t think my mom would’ve stumbled onto Baba Is You if I didn’t gift it to her. Dad would’ve never found his ideal digital train set (I now have my father’s trains) in OpenTTD if I didn’t point him in that direction.

The whole reason I play video games is because my parents did. Some of my earliest memories was being crammed on the couch with my parents and sister, trying to wrap my head around Missile Command on an Atari VCS (2600) before the age of three. When we got an NES, the common thing was after we were put to bed, we'd hear the screeching of tires in R.C. Pro-AM. Or the music from Ice Climber. Or the frantic quacking of Duck Hunt.

Many years ago I gave my folks a Nintendo DSi XL for the holidays, with a bunch of games. When I went back for Mother's Day, I noticed the DSi XL was blue instead of white... because they bought a second (blue) one so they could both be playing games at the same time.

Dad plays a lot more on his iPad nowadays given his vision, but things like Chris Sawyer's top-notch iOS port of Roller Coaster Tycoon. He'll AirPlay it to the TV so him and mom can collaborate, or to show houseguests his parks. Or he plays Firaxis's great ports of the modern X-COMs. Mom likes Stardew Valley quite a bit, though still breaks out the Professor Layton series on the DS.

The reality is a game has increasingly more content nowadays. Remember, there's a lot of "games as a service". So you have many "seasons" of additional content. You may not play all the content, but someone is. And when people want 4K and 8K textures, different variations so effects don't look the same twice, on top of all the other sizes, plus all the other effects ... it adds up. Never mind huge open worlds, where the asset footprint for just the map might be 100GB.

Having been in a few AAA studios myself (doing database stuff) and sitting next to artists and even art directors, the sheer amount of effort, headcount, etc. put into the art pipeline is genuine madness. In a large studio, art is over HALF the production cost, sometimes more towards 60-65%. Heck, one of the things sometimes brought up about Red Dead Redemption II is that there were three full-time employees in which all they were responsible for was horses. 6000 man-hours a year, on just horses.

To sum up what Chris said towards the end, "The only thing keeping these numbers down is the compression algorithms. If we didn't have these newer compression algorithms, we'd probably legitimately be at a terabyte. I can actually tell you for a fact, that there are over a terabyte of assets in the COD engine."

The crazy thing he mentioned is that if there was zero compression, the latest COD games genuinely had over 1 terabyte of uncompressed assets.

Over 99.999% of traffic through my home network is IPv6 now. The tiny remainder that has to use IPv4 does, without issue. 5 months on, and nary a complaint. Just works.

The world is ready for IPv6 as your primary, with IPv4 as the fallback.

I appreciate my son being patient on that one, but he appreciated how seriously I dug into everything. Again, we have IPv4 enabled again as fallback, but the family agreed for an IPv6-only weekend as a test, and that was the only thing (outside of one website) that failed.

Everything else worked perfectly, including tons of legacy devices and software, some of which had no concept of IPv6.

For 464XLAT on clients, phones are actually the leaders here. It’s worked perfectly on at least iOS (and I assume Android) for a LONG time because of its built-in automatic tunneling. Mac OS had some recent improvements in Ventura to make things easier. Windows absolutely has some quirks, the biggest being IPv6 literals in UNC paths ending up using a domain Microsoft doesn’t actually own - a potential huge future attack vector.

I went down the rabbit hole recently, switching my network to IPv6 primary with IPv4 as the fallback. The ultimate test was disabling IPv4 for a weekend to see what, if anything, broke.

I had set up DNS64, NAT64 and 464XLAT. The only weirdness is how Windows clients handle IPv6 literals in UNC paths, which is super ugly, and how some applications (like Discord calls) will actually embed IPv4 literals. Discord apparently does that for the relay servers for calls.

Those things — and the rare website not supporting it - aside, I could actually be IPv6 only. I have IPv4 enabled as a fallback now, but it’s no longer primary on my network.

Here in Boston, my rate is $0.14479/Kwh for delivery with a $0.33891/kWh supply charge, or $0.4837 per kWh. Yep, higher than you're paying. That excludes a fixed standing charge of $7/mo. About 53% of our base load (IIRC) is natural gas, so when natural gas wholesale prices spiked, so did our rates by 80+ percent back in October 2022.

My electric bill nearly doubled over the course of 6 weeks. I'm fortunate that over the years I had always driven my power consumption into the ground. Certainly paid off. Back in 2017, the rate was legitimately under half what I paid now.

Again, I believe there might be some parts of CA where the delivery+supply rate might be approaching $0.60/kWh at some points in time, but it'll be location dependent.

HDDs are quickly Falling off in the consumer space because SSDs are getting cheap enough, power consumption matters (for laptops), form factor matters (again, for laptops), and mobile entirely changed peoples' expectations of system responsiveness.

Even 20 years ago, the number of people (consumers, not businesses) I knew with tape drives was almost none. Today I know of zero.

One of the main reasons is density. You can put 32 E1.S EDSFF SSDs in a single rack unit fairly commonly nowadays. It wouldn't surprise me if some 1U chassis did 40.

There's also reliability. They're not infallible, but it's looking like AFRs for SSDs might be half that of HDDs. That's a big deal.

Of course there's also cost. Prosumer SSDs are about $70-75/TB now, and common PCIe 4.0 U.2/U.3 enterprise and datacenter SSDs are in the $90/TB range. PCIe 5.0 enterprise and datacenter SSDs? "Yikes", is what I'll say. Have fun negotiating with your rep on those. ;) Meanwhile, 7200rpm SATA HDDs can be had for $15/TB. These are retail end-user prices. If you're doing huge volumes as a cloud provider or a huge SAAS business, pricing goes quite a bit lower.

-- -----

Where do HDDs still make sense? Sustained transfer operations, nearline storage, and as part of a storage tier where you can intelligently hide the HDDs behind SSDs (lots of solutions for this) and get SSD performance most of the time, and guarantee it where it matters. There's many use cases where they just dominate because of their low cost, and the ability to get the performance required for a lot cheaper.

Though compared to high-end enterprise SSDs, 7200rpm SATA HDDs are actually still fine for power, typically pulling 6-7W per HDD instead of 11-15W for fairly common enterprise SSDs. Some enterprise SSDs (mostly PCIe 5, mostly E3-based form factors) can pull 25W, if not 40W. Remember, enterprise SSDs don't do things like SLC cache much -- they just have a MOUNTAIN of NAND (plus PLP capacitors) you can read/write from in massive parallelization. There's no ingest drop-off as a result, but you do have to power all that NAND.

We’re very much in a situation where the software is catching up to the hardware. For example, look at the proposed NEST Scheduler for Linux where they were seeing 10-100% (yes, as much as double!) performance improvement with a 10-15% reduction in power consumption, mostly by focusing on keeping, “hot cores hot.”

IO scheduler and process scheduler improvements will offer truly material gains in coming years, even if you still use the same high-end hardware you have today.

There were consecutive months this summer where I could get a Spicy McCrispy (Big Mac pricing), a large fry, and any size soft drink for $2.14 with tax, across two transactions 15 minutes apart... every. Single. Day. Or I could get exactly what I might’ve wanted - including a shake - for about $13 and change.

If you want a good deal, you, “play the game.” You can order from a Domino’s and pay $50-60 for two pizzas delivered. Or you use the in-app coupons, pick it up yourself and pay $16.

For $13+ I’d rather cook real food at home for that money. For $2.14? Yeah, I’m up for that.

Instead I believe it was the proportion of CO2 emissions for the area he's in, relative to other parts of England. Harry is in "South East" England, around Oxfordshire, which from what I can find for around that timeframe.(https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...), is the highest CO2 emissions for any region of England, of around 12%. Continuing to Google, this seems to be fairly consistent in that aside from Scotland, at least around the timeframe of the video (2020-2021), South East England had very high CO2 emissions in general, and I believe the government supplied pamphlet he had in one video also showed how much higher it was relative to the rest of England.

It has since fallen substantially, but even though I linked to the wrong source (and can't be damned to go find the video where he does nothing but crunch the numbers), the point was more that at the time he made the consideration, his decision was swayed because at the time the emissions for where he lived was high enough that it swayed his purchasing decision at the moment. The rationale being that the tailpipe emissions when it had to run the ICE was lower enough than the grid source emissions to where it was slightly cleaner. In fact, it was part of a decision quite some time ago (well before 2020, I believe) to install a 15kW wind turbine on his farm to not just save money, but to ensure it was cleaner power than what was being supplied.

A great example of this exercise was Harry Metcalfe actually doing the digging and the math to attempt to objectively measure his impact, and whether an EV or PHEV made sense as a daily given where he specifically lives in the UK is primarily powered by coal: https://youtu.be/k15n6QAe8cE

For him, right now, PHEV was lower impact, but he makes it clear that that will very likely change over time, and that if he lived elsewhere, he likely would’ve went EV.

- - - - -

This is a classic example of, “it depends.” If you live in an era with lots of sustainable energy, it’s likely a no brainer, but the math changes if you lived in an area powered by a lot of natural gas, or around Appalachia which is still predominantly coal. To answer the question, you have to get the information and do the math to understand what decision you want to make, given your requirements and goals.

- - - - -

For the record, Harry’s Garage (and Harry’s Farm) is a gem of YouTube’s car community. He doesn’t need it to make money, so he just does what he wants and goes down a lot of very nerdy rabbit holes (including sustainable energy, gov’t farm and energy policies), and actually USES his cars for REAL trips — like taking his Testarossa through the Sahara, etc. Harry was basically an “eccentric super car owner” in the 80s/90s (and ghost wrote articles in UK car mags for a while as an “anonymous/eccentric super car owner”) that ultimately founded EVO Magazine, helped influence a lot of the cinematic direction for the Top Gear reboot in the early 2000s, and was the inspiration for “Clarkson’s Farm.”

He’s a nerd’s nerd, and an absolute treasure.

Nowadays I rent a floor in an old Victorian home converted into a duplex, still running a boiler (single loop for both floors) going to radiators and convectors. Real noise from the basement from the pump, banging of pipes, and the air quality monitors clearly show VOCs rising — sometimes to really crazy levels (250+, sometimes 400-600!) if upstairs cranked the heat to hell and back.

Where I live now has mediocre insulation at best, and an uninsulated three-seasons room on the 2nd floor that might as well just be open to the outside air. In 2017 when I left, my electric bill was only about $45/mo (1BR, all electric appliances, though elec was half the price back then), and that included in-line water heating (with 3gal tanks for the bath and kitchen). Meanwhile, my landlord currently pays about $7000/year in fuel oil to heat this duplex and its water.

Granted, it’s far from an apples-to-apples comparison as where I lived for ~9 years was ultra-modern construction with no corners cut, and I didn’t share heat/hot water with neighbors that have a far more demanding “standard of comfort”. If only I lived here, might only be $2000/year since my standard of comfort is a lot lower than upstairs, but it really shows the difference that construction, insulation, maintenance, HVAC system choices, and just lowering your standards a bit makes.

House across the street just sold. Had vents and forced air, but still a boiler. New residents haven’t moved in yet, but they IMMEDIATELY removed a fairly new boiler, plus the 375 gallon fuel tank. Putting in a heat pumps and a hybrid water heater. Don’t blame them for both the long-term savings, plus reclaiming floor space in the basement.

Definitely looks like there’s efforts to long-term support a lot of popular SBCs out there: https://dietpi.com/#download

I've been a fan of ultra-SFF computers since the original Mac Mini, and SBCs are just an extension of that. If you're shrewd and smart about how you use the hardware, it's a tremendous amount of real computing power that can work done cheaply and for little power.

For certain, even if I don't have own an Orange Pi, I feel I owe at least a hat tip to software maintainers for putting in the effort to ensure some other ecosystem has a future.

Though the reality is Boston has a lot of industries. It's not just some computer tech and biotech, but the metro is still a top global education destination, still has a huge medical footprint, still has several massive financial institutions (notably Fidelity and State Street) and a decent banking footprint, as well as insurance. Boston has a lot of industry tentpoles, so it's very resilient to one industry going elsewhere, like when tech heavily shifted to the Valley long ago.

Though the MBTA's shortcomings in the past 5-7 years is starting to take its toll. I feel the T being taken over by the fed to right the ship a la DC is inevitable, and it's likely necessary for Boston and Cambridge to not significantly lose appeal. Though at least it's one of the most walkable metros (particularly Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, Brookline and Quincy) in the country.

That’s an insane amount of compute on something that can be sub-2W over POE, or 1.3W on WiFi.

Though for all the homelabbers out there, you probably have a NAS. Use Log2RAM, and present some ISCSI volumes to the Pi, and you’d be staggered with the very real work a Pi can do when not saddled by the SD card - without having to directly attach storage.

- -

I’d argue that for “IoT” stuff even Arduinos are overkill in terms of computing power. Granted, I realize this is the case functionally because of BOM optimization and making it forgiving (more power than needed) for beginners.

- -

Granted, going back to the original article: Yes, 1L form factors are nuts. Mac Minis are insane (but not cheap), and if you look at 35W Zen 3 Ryzen 7 PROs you can get similarly insane power cheaper if you need x86. But all the much older former office 1Ls are everywhere and offer ludicrous performance to hobbyists for pennies on the dollar, with (as mentioned by the article) sub-10W idle.

- -

Honestly, it’s just a great time to be a tinkerer. We’re drowning in ubiquitous, cheap compute.

* Four Kingston 32GB DDR4-3200 CL22 2Rx8 ECC Unubffered Memory (KSM32ED8/32ME )