solrize

solrize , 5 months ago to Mildly Infuriating in CNN blocks Firefox with uBo

No one has mentioned the good version of that site, https://lite.cnn.com -- no ads, no bloat, works fine with UBO.

solrize , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago) to Technology in USB-PD is a de-facto low-power DC voltage standard, with USB-C being the universal plug. Hurray!

Phones or laptops should probably accomodate wired charging (though count on Apple to eliminate it anyway), but most of the time, wireless could be the norm. Convenient, avoids wear on connectors, etc. I think there are some Samsung phones with two-way wireless charging, so you can stack one phone on top of the other and transfer charge. That seemed crazy to me given the non-removable batteries but whatever.

That reminds me of another USB PD idiocy that I forgot to mention earlier. There are many devices like power banks and even some phones, that can both send and receive charging current. E.g. you'd charge your power bank from a wall cube, and later use the power bank to charge your phone. In the pre-USB-C era, power banks had separate connectors for input and output. Now the two functions share a single connector and the cable is the same at both ends.

So if you plug one power bank into another, how does the setup know which one is to be the "charger" and which the "chargee"? The spec says they are suppsed to choose at random! I guess you are supposed to look at the activity lights and if the current is going the wrong way, unplug and replug the devices until it goes the way you want. This can lead to a situation where you plug your phone into a power bank, but the phone ends up charging the power bank instead of the other way around.

I imagine that if you are attentive enough, you can prevent this somehow, or at least intervene and reverse it when it happens. But it still seems like crackhead engineering to me.

solrize , 5 months ago to Technology in Raspberry Pi is now manufacturing 70,000 Pi 5s per week, will surge to 90,000 in February

Adafruit had pi 5's in stock a couple weeks ago and they didn't sell out instantly. I could have ordered but decided I didn't have an immediate use for it, so it could wait.

Pi Zero 2's as of the same time were fairly easy to find. I don't know about now. Those had been extremely scarce for a while.

Pi 4's are now plentiful. But, Pi 400's (4 with a keyboard more or less) have been fairly easy to get all along.

solrize , 5 months ago to Technology in USB-PD is a de-facto low-power DC voltage standard, with USB-C being the universal plug. Hurray!

Yeah probably true about 60 hz transformers, even for higher powered devices like desktop PC's. They still have pretty big internal inductors though. Maybe we need to bring more 208V 3 phase into homes and offices.

For permanent installations like most solar setups, I don't think uniformity of connectors is that important, as long as it's non-proprietary and you can order it from a catalog.

For phones and laptops, wireless charging is probably the way forward. More than additional standardized chargers, I want standardized and swappable batteries, for phones, laptops, power tools, etc. The chargers will follow.

solrize , 5 months ago to Technology in USB-PD is a de-facto low-power DC voltage standard, with USB-C being the universal plug. Hurray!

I thought solar panels used Anderson connectors pretty standardly. I wouldn't call it low power but in electronics I wouldn't call 100W low power either. We basically need 5v 15w for phones, 12v for bigger stuff (laptops) up to say 150W. After that, AC might be better since you can use transformers. I guess we need super high power DC for charging cars. Tesla seems to be the de facto standard. There is no reason to use that connector in a phone.

solrize , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago) to Technology in USB-PD is a de-facto low-power DC voltage standard, with USB-C being the universal plug. Hurray!

I wouldn't say usb pd is one standard. There is a combinatorial explosion of devices and cables with different voltage support, current capacity, presence or absence of E-mark and of Thunderbird, the famous incident where a bad cable blew up Benson Huang's laptop, etc. If you intersect down to the universal standard in the middle, it's just plain 5 volts like before.

And are really going to push 240W through that teeny connector and not have any melt?

solrize , 5 months ago to Technology in Samsung is no longer the world’s biggest smartphone maker

Spoiler: Apple.

solrize , 5 months ago to Technology in USB-PD is a de-facto low-power DC voltage standard, with USB-C being the universal plug. Hurray!

What hurray? USB-C and PD are both monstrosities (though of course the mini and micro USB connectors were even worse). We already had a perfectly good low power standard, regular 5 volt USB. It's just that higher power was wanted. But we have that already too, automotive 12 volt DC, and various options after that. It's just the mobile phone industry's obsession with thin, tiny connectors that are causing this.

solrize , 6 months ago to Technology in Alaska flight incident reveals another feature Boeing didn’t inform pilots about - Federal investigators said that Boeing didn’t make pilots aware that when a plane rapidly depressurizes, the cockp...

I had thought that since the 2001 hijackings it has been basically impossible to open the cockpit doors during flight, except from the inside. On El Al planes I'd heard it was impossible period, so hijackers couldn't threaten their way in, but US carriers didn't want to do that because it means the cockpit needs its own lavatory, displacing a few passenger seats.