2,428 karma · joined November 4, 2018
[1]Most people don't realise how much power ethernet consumes. Even 100Mbps ethernet consumes about 0.5W per port and it goes up with higher speeds.
While there are a lot of people riding more powerful bikes in Europe illegally, at least some countries are trying to crack down on them. In the US, it seems easier to buy class 2 and 3 e-bikes, and there seems to be a higher proportion of illegal bikes. It's an open secret which "class 1" bikes you can buy and then overclock easily.
So in Europe you mostly have class 1 e-bikes and obviously illegal (as in you can tell just by looking at them), but in the US you have these plus a lot of class 2 and 3 e-bikes, and overclocked class 1 e-bikes. The end result is most mountain bike trails in Europe allow class 1 e-bikes only, but in the US it's impossible to enforce class 1 only, so a lot of regions are trending towards banning all e-bikes from all trails. So be careful about wishing for a more powerful e-bike you can drive in traffic and mountain bike trails.
But that article confirms in several places that independent testing finds no fillers at all, and what is left is just "Plaintiffs allege that undisclosed processing steps or agents applied during production or cooking could alter the accuracy of the “100%” claim." It's not a very convincing argument and it would be quite hard for McDonalds to cover up a secret process to add another ingredient.
For devices I have a work laptop, work phone, personal laptop, personal phone, headphones, usually a couple other small devices, and a mobile battery. I usually only heavily use my work laptop and personal phone. For phones and smaller stuff, I can charge them from the laptop while the laptop charges overnight so I don't typically wish for a second charger. If your laptop has decent battery life, charging at less than max speed is no big deal (I have two 16 inch MacBook Pros).
Additionally, I've converted most of my old favourite micro-usb devices like mouses to usb-c. A search for "usb-c 4.7kohm 5v female" will give you some options for replacing micro-usb with usb-c, with hobbyist soldering skills.
For a beard trimmer, I got an Enchen boost usb-c model for $10 for travel. It works well and even has ceramic blades but I had to add 4.7k resistors to work with a c-c cable[1].
[1] Cheap devices often omit some 4.7k resistors that tell a usb-c charger to output 5V, so it outputs nothing. This is why some devices work only with usb a to c cables, as usb-a outputs 5V by default. If you can manage to add the resistors to the correct pins or replace the connector with one that has them built-in, you can fix this problem. The difficulty of doing this varies a lot by device.
Almost everyone who has the experience of etching a board, or even using a router to automate making one, and also has the experience of ordering a PCB, never makes one by hand again.
Makerbeam is also nice, they sell a 5x5mm, 10x10mm and 15x15mm version (normally the smallest cross section of t-slot is 20x20mm). The 5x5mm version is comically small when you hold it in your hand. When you order a set, it comes with tweezers to pick up the screws which are size M1.2.
I can't find it but one of the greatest show HN was a blog post about someone who was annoyed by his inconsistent shower temperature control. From memory, he spent a full weekend adjusting it, taking measurements, making graphs, and proposed "next steps" about prototyping better temperature control with microcontrollers and servo and pontificated about developing a product, of course controlled by software. He skipped the part where a bit of research leads you to the already common "thermostatic mixing valve".
Even if you can get an o-ring to seal a vacuum, it will likely only work in the context of applying a vacuum to a system to a desired level, not as a permanent seal.
On the other hand, it's a five-seater and an attempt to make it look more like Ferrari's iconic cars could also end badly.
The interior and interfaces look great. Even if the roundness of interior is not your cup of tea, figuring out the right balance between tactile buttons and touchscreen is really important and they might have nailed it.
When visiting you tend to visit some of the busiest areas and also spend a lot of time on the train. It's tiring and it seems so busy. But since almost every neighbourhood has all amenities and there is no single CBD, when you live there, you realise how much of Tokyo is an endless sea of small apartment buildings with small islands of restaurants and businesses around train stations, plus a handful of larger islands.
The article talks about the railways developing areas around Tokyo. This is actually very interesting and the way it sprawled[1] outwards towards places like Yokohama. Railways made commuter towns with amenities and commuter lines to those towns at the same time, and rented and sold real estate in those towns. Over time the areas in between the terminus of each of these lines (usually Shibuya or Shinjuku) and each town filled in until what you see today.
[1] I think the debate about whether or not Tokyo is/has urban sprawl depends on your definition. If you take it to mean expanding with lower density on the outskirts, it definitely "sprawled", although today it's more filled in. If you take it to mean unplanned low-density, car-centric expansion, it didn't "sprawl" that much. I've seen the terms car-centric sprawl and train-centric sprawl used to discuss the differences.
[1] The Earth does move in the moon's sky a bit. If you are on the near side but getting close to the far side, the Earth will be below the horizon sometimes.
MS Office collaboration features work well these days but when you are using Office 365 for work, it's almost inevitable that different files get saved locally, on MS teams, Sharepoint, and OneDrive. It's a version control nightmare.
I really like google's suite for work because it nudges everyone towards using only one location for all files, without a other places to save a copy. And it's good enough with Office files that you might only need a few roles to also need MS Office.
10 years ago I still had a 7GB mobile data plan (in Japan). After 7GB, it was throttled to 100kbps. If I tethered my PC and there was an update available, or browsed modern sites (especially while tethered), this could easily be wiped out in a minutes. After 7GB, sites like hackernews, google search/maps worked fine, although most search results failed to load.
5 years ago I still had a 7GB mobile data plan (in Japan). After 7GB, it was throttled to 1Mbps. If I tethered my PC and there was an update available, or browsed modern sites (especially while tethered), this could easily (and usually was) wiped out in a few minutes. Browsing reddit easily consumed 1GB in a day. After 7GB, sites like hackernews, google search/maps worked fine, although most search results failed to load.
I currently live in Europe, I am too old for dealing with the above shit or dealing with wifi in a town/restaurant/hotel so I pay for unlimited data throughout EU. But, it's fairly common while driving or training around that I end up on 3G. I understand 3G is degraded these days, but it should provide 300-2000 kbps. Almost nothing internet-related works at these speeds today. WhatsApp is the exception, it works eventually. I bet hackernews could load if you could somehow disable all the background things happening. I've had a few experiences where I reached a timeout for a login on Apple, google or MS services, and been locked out of my account for a few days because trying to login with low datarate means trying to login 30x in 10 minutes which must look suspicious.
Yesterday I was skiing at a resort and my phone was dying at an incredible rate, like 25% per hour. I don't know for certain but I suspect some app or website was retrying a download of something while in a dodgy service area. I'm sure it's happened that someone has been slightly injured going off into the trees at 2pm at a ski resort (or had a fall on parking lot ice, or fell down stairs in their home, or been run off the road), and not been able to call for help because some app has been loading ads and killed their phone battery.