jhenkens's comments

Or, if we are getting fancy, 240V/20A, which can be run with just a single 12/2 Romex, provides around 3x the "range" per hour, since there is some fixed overhead losses to heat the battery pack, turn electronics on, etc.

In new-ish (but not new enough to have EV charger prewiring) construction, garages sometimes have a dedicated 20A receptacle circuit for a garage freezer. If its a dedicated circuit with one outlet, you can rewire the 120V/20A to 240V/20A to get 3.8kW vs 1.4kW on a 120V/15A. The cost to do this (to code) would be about $150, or $50 if you don't care about GFCI. Could also buy a used, cheap, hardwired EVSE rather than making it an outlet.

I agree on modern Mac's being difficult to repair. I also will say that back a decade or two ago, it was likely you'd need to repair your computer after four years. Now, a four year old Macbook Air still feels brand new to me.

Thanks! Yeah, we have a local ISP that has laid fiber in other communities where they could get grants (namely native communities), but they are only doing WISP in our community right now, and it won't service about half the homes here.

Any more context on this? We've got copper AT&T DSL as our only option, besides Starlink. Have been trying to work with the county, look for grants, etc to present to a local ISP who's mentioned interest.

I would love a semi-automated way to generate a power-profile for ESP-Home. Find a smart room heater with 3 levels perhaps, and use home assistant to gather values at "Off", "1/3", "2/3", "3/3", with a downstream power plug as reference (and a known consumption of the downstream plug as well).

So I can just take my EspHome plug and very quickly generate a standard set of mapping values for voltage and wattage.

I'd guess same as across states in the US, registration?

Would be great if the US could have something like the Multimac https://www.multimac.com/home

Thanks, I never knew why. All I knew is whenever I need a buck converter in my DIY, novice PCBs, I just toss in an off-the-shelf preassembled one, with a small LDO on my actual PCB to drop the last bit and smooth it out.

The heat has to come from the input power though. If I'm pumping 5W at 12V, or 5W at 20V into the device, with it idling, presumably the output from the devices voltage regulator circuit is the same voltage, and the downstream components are consuming the same wattage (let's call it 1A at 3.3V downstream, so 3.3W), the both the 12V and the 20V input would have 1.7W of heat-loss. The article shows that as voltage goes up, power actually drops, which would imply that it is producing less heat.

If the total power consumption at the supply is the same or lower, how is the voltage regulation circuitry generating more heat?

Yeah - I think that is one of the critical pieces in his setup. He can have a (relatively) modest amount of batteries, and cycle through them as he's using all his tools one by one. In a big crew, where each stop every tool is being used non-stop for 30 minutes, then 10 minutes drive to the next home to repeat, batteries won't be able to charge enough. You'd probably need 3x the batteries in that case (which, per-person, is roughly the same I guess).

I grew up in California, where rain was less of an issue and most landscapers I saw used open-bed pickups with all their tools. I'm currently in Oregon, most landscapers use box trailers to house everything here, which I think might be key to this.

I saw an entertaining Youtuber with a "Solar powered" landscaping business in Florida, using a box truck with a hybrid inverter/solar charge controller/battery system, to recharge his lawn powertools while driving between jobs. I see this as a much more practical solution that just having enough of "proprietary company X" battery. Keep your batteries charging 24/7 while working, essentially. Toss some solar if the climate affords it on top to charge the larger batteries used for your inverter up. Plug in the entire trailer when you get home.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93F08kdiOfE

Last I checked my mother's bill in the SF-Bay, her price for each, transmission and generation, was higher than my total delivered price in Oregon.

I don't think I've relied on the app store search for anything except exact matches in half a decade. The greatest feature of the app store is that it handles app links. I just use search engines to discover apps then click the links to open in the app store.

I still do wish they weren't quite so abusive in other ways of their monopoly - their pricing, and dev tooling fees, are pretty outrageous.

Different generation - my first build was an Athlon 64, and my only AMD build to date (of maybe 5 or 6 machines over 20 years). Loved the struggle of being x64 when it was still so new to consumers.

With every USB-C and/or TB hub/dock that I've ever used (including a Kensington SD5200T), I'd have periodic drop outs of my Plantronics wireless headset's connection. Directly connected to the laptop, never a problem.

Most recently, I've been using a Belkin 11-in-1 USB-C dock. I just checked, and I had it plugged into the USB 2.0 port on the dock before I moved it back to directly connected to my laptop. I've just plugged the headset back into one of the 3.0 ports, since this article says external 3.0 ports may not share like this article states.

I wonder if every other dock I've used, I've also been plugging into USB 2.0 ports that are sharing 3.0 ports...

This reminds me of my number one response when "friends" come to me with startup ideas.

Your company is another company's feature. As in, you are trying to build a business, on something that is an afterthought, tiny feature for an existing company to add.

Their pronouns are they/their, however it's a long time friend, and a new change to me. I'm trying, but make mistakes.

I've been lazier - I've just been buying ~$120 "Minisforum" PC's (4 now, for various people I've set them up for). They work great, but their CPU performance compared to the i5-6500T leaves a lot to be desired (1000/1400 vs 1800/4800 single/multi). They still kick a Pi's butt, and they are x86 which makes lots of things easier.

My main hesitation with buying the used USFF has been the Intel Graphics generations - I don't know enough about it, but I do use my mini PC for Plex, and have a hard time comparing the integrated graphics, which is critical. These N4000 destroy the i5-3450 I have in my NAS. It was cheaper to buy an N4000 and put Plex on it over network access, than it was to completely upgrade my NAS to a new generation of hardware, and the newer QuickSync version can actually encode with Plex.

I'm sure at a certain stage it is prototype, in secured buildings. But I have a friend who works at Apple full time remote (for a dozen years now) who routinely gets unreleased hardware at home to work on the software changes for. They is very intentional about only revealing stuff after it is public, which I think is still technically a breach of his NDA (revealing that they'd been working on it).