deeesstoronto

Does anyone have any insights into the proprietary graphics buses that were being created leading up to the VESA Local Bus (as referred to in the article)? I was not aware of anything between 16-bit ISA and the addition of VLB.

Did any of these make it onto the market?

This is called outdoor air temperature reset. It's been commonly used in medium to large size buildings (ie multi residential buildings) back 100 plus years.

Originally there might have been an operator doing the adjustment daily, later mechanical automation, later electronic control.

The system in Toronto takes cold water from deep in Lake Ontario, runs it through heat exchangers that feeds the district cooling loop downtown.

The lake water continues out of the heat exchangers into the intake of the water treatment system, feeding drinking water to the city. The water eventually returns to the lake after being used by people and flowing through the sewers and wastewater treatment system (returned at a shallower level).

I really enjoy typing on the unicomp buckling spring keyboard; I've had an older model for a long time.

It seemed very well built on the outside, however eventually a number of keys stopped functioning. Taking it apart, I found that the plastic rivets holding the assembly together failed.

It was repairable by drilling and replacing the rivets with machine screws. Although original model M's were built in the same way, the design or manufacture of these rivets on my unit is completely insufficient. I'd expect better for a keyboard in this price range. This also seems to be a common problem based on scouring the forums. I'd hope this would be re-designed in newer models, however also don't hold out much hope.

The high temperature limit switch should never be tripping, even when the furnace runs continuously.

This indicates you have a problem with temperature rise across the heat exchanger, probably from inadequate airflow. Your ducts may be sized too small/furnace too large, fan speed set too low, plugged filter, etc. You may be able to mitigate the problem by increasing fan speed, limiting heat by using stage 1 only, putting in less restrictive filter, add additional cold air return, etc.

Usually a failed limit switch means cycling and a bigger problem with airflow. However I have seen a high temperature limit switch fail without cycling - fell apart with age (40 year old furnace).

A CV boot keeps dirt from getting into the CV joint and keeps grease from flying out. Dirt that gets in causes increased wear.

Unless the boot is majorly damaged, very limited dirt gets in, most of the grease stays in, and lifetime of the joint isn't severely impacted.

Perceptions of brand reliability at that.

I would hazard a guess that Toyota and Lexus have very similar real-world reliability - most of them share platforms. However this article shows that Lexus owners perceive their cars to be more reliable than Toyota owners.

Somehow Mini is near the top of the list too

I think it's also worth looking at mikrotik. I run a HAP ac2 for travel which is small, has dual Wi-Fi radios, and enough power for good speeds on IPsec VPN. It also supports wireguard.

They also have a tiny, less powerful unit (mAP) that may fit with some travel use cases.

How is this different from other manufacturers? Focal distances are pretty similar between all of these for SLR versus mirrorless.

Canon offers adapters for their mirrorless cameras, both EF-M and RF. https://www.canon.ca/en/products/Lenses/Mount-Adapters

Nikon has the f to z adapter: https://en.nikon.ca/nikon-products/product/lens-mount-adapte...

Sony has an A to E adapter https://electronics.sony.com/imaging/imaging-accessories/ima...

I played mp3s on a 486dx2... I think at 40MHz (but could be after 100MHz upgrade). The biggest issue was bitrate, I think it struggled with 128kps but was fine if they were encoded anywhere below. Certainly could not play 160kps. 96kps mp3s were common enough on the internet back then with dialup, although they sounded awful.

Brings back memories of the mp3car (PC parts) and mp3ar (MAS3507d) projects. Going back to 2000 on archive.org https://web.archive.org/web/20000408180856/http://www.mp3ar....

We do have a power crunch coming; take a look at the IESO annual planning outlook[1]. Page 78/79 of the 2022 APO show grid emissions dramatically increasing - due to the transition to gas generation. Also take a look at resource adequacy on page 42 - Ontario is coming into a deficit hence the recommendation to procure 4,000MW asap.

Emissions factor is on track to almost triple between now and 2040. Plus, emissions scope doesn't include out of jurisdiction - the planned Lake Erie connector will bring in electricity from Pennsylvania which is significantly higher emissions due to coal. The Ministry of Energy requested the IESO review emissions impacts of this project however results have not been made public (...because it's high emissions).

[1] https://www.ieso.ca/en/Sector-Participants/Planning-and-Fore...

Have you looked at the Sonoff nspanel?

What about installing Windows 98 in dosbox? I haven't tried this but have done it with Windows 3.11.

This was the first result when I searched: https://dosbox-x.com/wiki/Guide%3AInstalling-Windows-98

Although I do remember the ATi drivers on the later Rage Pro could get pretty buggy. I remember the most problems with OpenGL games....

I played a ton of Mechwarrior 2 (ATI 3D Rage Edition) - the Aptiva bundle version - and didn't notice it being buggy.... Maybe this is a later version and earlier versions were more buggy?

I'm part owner of a company (Halterix) that used pose detection (alternately via smartwatch accelerometer) and machine learning to quantify how well exercises are performed.

We built a demo app for use in physiotherapy to improve outcomes and ran a few clinical studies. The detection accuracy was excellent and patient reception was warm.

There are a number of competitors, some with multi-sensor systems targetted to pros, some with vision systems, etc.

We met with all the big fitness app makers and found generally while they weree somewhat interested in pose detection/accuracy assessment and feedback, it's not at the top of their list of priorities to implement (even to incorporate our 3rd party service).

Sounds more like an issue with your browser.

Nowadays it really depends on how the immobilizer works to figure out how to/if you can override it easily.

I'm familiar with a couple designs - and on my vehicle I found it trivial to temporarily override (with the wiring diagram in the service manual).

My vehicles are on the older end of having immobilizers, but on them automakers certainly didn't integrate it tightly with other systems. It is controlled by one of the main ECUs - but the lockout method is subpar.

Better integration of the immobilizer goes along with the development of new engine management systems - so there may be more integration on vehicles with the newest engine designs (but not necessarily if the engine descended from a previous design and they kept the engine management system mostly intact....).

Some immobilizers disable starting, some disable fuel pump, some disable ignition, and some disable injectors. The how these are electrically disabled also matters a lot.

It's still trivial to override the first two methods, and sometimes the second two, but at least the last two have the potential to require more than a wire to disable if they are better integrated with the ECU.

Also ensure your client does not have access to the backup server share so that ransomware can't encrypt backups on a network drive etc.

My backup solution (backuppc/other syncs + zfs + sanoid/syncoid plus offsite server with zfs) means the backup server pulls files from the clients using backuppc/rsync. The backup server volume is zfs snapshoted regularly using sanoid. The offsite server pulls these from the backup server via syncoid/zfs send.

I'm not using rsync.net since I have my own infrastructure, but would definitely choose it as the offsite server if needed.

Also still using a X220 (X230 motherboard swapped) with Debian and a T430s (with 1080p swap) with Windows.

Agreed that the X220 form and function is excellent. The 7-row keyboard is amazing. The IPS screen is serviceable. The swappable 9-cell batteries give around 10 hours of battery life each. The i7-3520M is noticeably faster than the i5-8250U in my surface pro 6, even though benchmarks suggest it shouldn't be.

Just tried a new T14. The keyboard is decent. I haven't found any laptops with a keyboard as good as the 7-row.

I've had a bunch of APC SmartUPS 1500 in both tower and rack formats.

I found the batteries in the rack version, where batteries lay on their sides, reach end of life much sooner than the tower version, where batteries are upright.

It's likely poorer heat dissipation/ventilation in the rack version, but may have to do with battery orientation. The rack version also seems to suffer corrosion damage from battery off-gasing if batteries reach critical failure and overheat. I haven't seen the same damage on the tower units. Again some combination of orientation and ventilation.

Definitely brings back memories.

I used to build small networks including supplying 386 boxes that booted LRP from a floppy to share a dialup internet connection for small businesses or university student houses. A lot were 10b2 internal networks since they didn't need to spend extra on a hub.

Later, I remember choosing a Cisco Aironet 350? PCMCIA 802.11b card over the ORiNOCO (probably on price as I think both had wide compatibility and good power output) to use both in my NEC mobilepro and with a few improvised long-range wifi links. I built cantennas and biquads to get remote access to free and fast university internet....

Also remember trying to get my hands on a Senao 200mW PCMCIA card to squeeze out more range.

The x220 battery definitely works with the x230 but requires the DRM patch. I'm running an x230 mainboard in what is otherwise an x220. It's an EC not BIOS path so should work with coreboot. Files at https://github.com/hamishcoleman/thinkpad-ec

While swapping cells, just be careful to match voltage and severely limit current to avoid any danger/excitement. Sure you can find some forum posts on this. Also, the new and old cells must be brought very close in voltage as discrepancies are flagged disabling the battery. This also goes for between cells but allowable differences are larger. I think this battery has 3s3p configuration.

I've bought quality 18650 cells online 10 for about $100CAD for a x220 battery rebuild. More recently got 2x 2Ah 18v Ryobi packs which yeilded 10x cells total for $29CAD on clearance at Home Depot....

The big disadvantage of the T420s/430s is the s batteries do not use standard cells. The T420/430, X220/230 (and I assume w series) battery packs use standard 18650 cells.

In the x220 battery packs the controllers are not locked down hard (the later x230 batteries appear locked down and cannot be reset the same way... likely need either special software or may be able to connect directly to flash). The controller (bq8030 or bq2090 or similar) nvram can be dumped and written using the laptops built-in battery management smbus.

I recently re-celled mine; dump the calibration nvram before starting (not the end of the world if you didn't). Buy whatever power tool battery is on clearance. Swap the 18650 li-ion cells. For a cheap and cheerful spot welder, you can buy a board with some FETs to switch power from a car battery. Restore the firmware. Run Lenovo battery calibration.

Lots of info at http://www.karosium.com/2016/08/hacking-bq8030-with-sanyo-fi... (no affiliation, but found it a great resource!). If you didn't save your firmware or starting from a toasted battery, compare and contrast to calibration dumps found online. TI also has general specs available on a similar controller.

The battery controller will set a bit to disable the battery when the cell voltages get out of sync when removing/adding cells (other ways of dealing with this too.... holding controller in reset, voltage in parallel). Restoring the nvram calibration data resets this. Finding most data in the dump was relatively easy by comparing to battery statistics available through ThinkPad tools. I have detailed notes and posted to comments at above site.

There's some debate on different cell charging profiles as the original cells were 4.1v versus modern chemistry being 4.2v and so potentially will end up undercharged... but I've had great success just dropping in and don't feel the need to squeeze out more capacity.

Took an afternoon to do....not necessarily worth it, but was a fun project to figure out. My 9-cell is back to 10 hours of runtime/way better than any aftermarket I've tried.

I've been very happy with their esp32 boards. Easy, cheap, well integrated.

The only issue I've had is the battery charger circuit on some boards has a fuse instead of a diode making it a hazard (realized pretty quickly while testing). This is supposedly fixed on newer revisions but there's always a chance of getting an old one through some sources....

Western Digital got most of HGST - however HGST's 3.5in drive business was sold to Toshiba. The HGST branding went to WD.

I believe hese new HGST drives are WDs.

The HGST drives in the older backblaze stats (which showed good reliability) continue to be manufactured by/evolved into Toshibas. There are several HGST model numbers that remained in Toshiba's lineup.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/5635/western-digital-to-sell-...

I've only found only one good option to unify messaging on android. Blackberry Hub will bring together SMS, WhatsApp, Signal, multiple emails, Instagram, etc.

Anyone have any resources for building one of these singled-transistor tin can radios? I can imagine an article in an old popular science.

Related filings on outage with CRTC: https://crtc.gc.ca/otf/eng/2022/8000/c12-202203868.htm

Does anyone have experience with mailcheap.co? I also have an eye on it - mailcheap.co, migadu, and mxroute let you use the dovecot superuser (I.e. dsync to backup/replicate etc)